Modern French writers exhibit a revulsion; their feeling is a reflexive chastity, or perhaps rather a restrained sensualism; the upstriving mountain-paths of Wagner are succeeded by monotonous plains of twilight uniformity.
Thus “style” forms itself out of feeling, when led by taste.
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The “Apostles of the Ninth Symphony” have devised the notion of “depth” in music. It is still current at face-value, especially in Germanic lands.
There is a depth of feeling, and a depth of thought; the latter is literary, and can have no application to tones. Depth of feeling, by contrast, is psychical, and thoroughly germane to the nature of music. The Apostles of the Ninth Symphony have a peculiar and not quite clearly defined estimate of “depth” in music. Depth becomes breadth, and the attempt is made to attain it through weight; it then discovers itself (through an association of ideas) by a preference for a deep register, and (as I have had opportunity to observe) by the insinuation of a second, mysterious notion, usually of a literary sort. If these are not the sole specific signs, they are the most important ones.
To every disciple of philosophy, however, depth of feeling would seem to imply exhaustiveness in feeling, a complete absorption in the given mood.
Whoever, surrounded by the full tide of a genuine carnival crowd, slinks about morosely or even indifferently, neither affected nor carried away by the tremendous self-satire of mask and motley, by the might of misrule over law, by the vengeful feeling of wit running riot, shows himself incapable of sounding the depths of feeling. This gives further confirmation of the fact, that depth of feeling roots in a complete absorption in the given mood, however frivolous, and blossoms in the interpretation of that mood; whereas the current conception of deep feeling singles out only one aspect of feeling in man, and specializes that.
In the so-called “Champagne Aria” in Don Giovanni there lies more “depth” than in many a funeral march or nocturne:—Depth of feeling also shows in not wasting it on subordinate or unimportant matters.
ROUTINE