The music of the period we have been considering is well described by Browning in “A Toccata of Galuppi's”:
Yes you, like a ghostly cricket,
Creaking where a house was burned:
Dust and ashes, dead and done with,
Venice spent what Venice earned.
XV
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PIANOFORTE MUSIC
Up to the time of Beethoven, music for the pianoforte consisted mainly of programme music of the purely descriptive order, that is to say, it was generally imitative of natural or artificial externals. To be sure, if we go back to the old clavecinists, and examine the sonatas of Kuhnau, sundry pieces by Couperin, Rameau, and the Germans, Froberger, C.P.E. Bach and others, we find the beginnings of that higher order of programme music which deals directly with the emotions; and not only that, but which aims at causing the hearer to go beyond the actual sounds heard, in pursuance of a train of thought primarily suggested by this music.
To find this art of programme music, as we may call it, brought to a full flower, we must seek in the mystic utterances of Robert Schumann. It is wise to keep in mind, however, that although Schumann's piano music certainly answers to our definition of the higher programme music, it also marks the dividing line between emotional programme music without a well-defined object and that dramatically emotional art which we have every reason to believe was aimed at by Beethoven in many of his sonatas, and which, in its logical development and broadened out by orchestral colours and other resources, is championed by Richard Strauss at the present day.
We have already learned that C.P.E. Bach had entirely broken with the contrapuntal style of his father and his age in order to gain freer utterance, and that the word “colour” began to be used in his time in connection with music for even one instrument. It is, perhaps, needless to say that the vastly enlarged possibilities, both technical and tonal, of the newly invented forte-piano were largely the outcome of this seeking for colour in music. In addition to this, the new art of harmonic dissonances was already beginning to stretch out in the direction of new and strange tonal combinations, thus giving to the music written for the instrument many new possibilities in the way of causing and depicting emotions. That the first experiments were puerile, we know, as, for example, Haydn's attempts, in one of his pianoforte sonatas, to suggest the conversion of an obdurate sinner.
When we consider Mozart, it is impossible to forget the fact that in his piano works he was first and foremost a piano virtuoso, a child prodigy, of whom filigree work was expected by the public for which he wrote his sonatas. (We cannot call this orientalism, for it was more or less of German pattern, traced from the fioriture of the Italian opera singer.) Therefore, emotional utterance or even new or poetic colouring was not to be expected of him.
As has been said before, it remained for Beethoven to weld these new words and strange colours into poems, which, notwithstanding the many barnacles hanging to them (remnants of a past of timid adhesion to forms and fashions), are, in truth, the first lofty and dignified musical utterances with an object which we possess. I mean by this statement that his art was the first to cast aside the iron fetters of what then formed the canons of art. The latter may be described (even in reference to modern days) as constituting the shadow of a great man. And, although this is a digression, I may add that all students of piano music no doubt realize the weighty shadow that Beethoven cast over the first half of the nineteenth century, just as Wagner is doing at the present time.
Our purists are unable to realize that the shadows are the least vital part of the great men who cast them. We remember that the only wish expressed by Diogenes when Alexander came to see him was that the king should stand aside so that he could enjoy the light of the sun.
To return: We find that Beethoven was the first exponent of our modern art. Every revolution is bound to bring with it a reaction which seeks to consolidate and put in safe keeping, as it were, results attained by it. Certainly Beethoven alone can hardly be said to have furthered this end; for his revolt led him into still more remote and involved trains of thought, as in his later sonatas and quartets. Even the Ninth Symphony, hampered as it is by actual words for which declamation and a more or less well-defined form of musical speech are necessary, suffers from the same involved utterance that characterizes his last period.