Les Nymphes sautent comme vous,
Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”
The victories of the dance were universal. Even public ceremonies were taken up in its advance. The “Messe des Révérences” was altered into the “Ballet des Écrevisses.” In their first delight of dominion, love and the pleasure of life revel in the light and magical rhythms of the dance. The great and flourishing masked balls of the opera, acquiring a new rapture, lead on to new dances—the Calotins, the Farandoule, the Rats, Jeanne qui saute, Liron Lirette, le Poivre, la Fürstemberg, le Cotillon qui va toujours, la Monaco—old songs of universal popular origin; or, like wines and laws, named after towns and races, and now, as dances, naturalised on the parquet. How ancient is this connection between song and dance, in which the name of the song remains attached to the dance! This is a process which is of daily occurrence in our music-halls.
Famous danseuses received characteristic nicknames. The elder Duval du Tillet was called “La Constitution,” because her father was an eminent clerical constitutionalist; the younger was affectionately dubbed “Church Calendar.” La Mariette was called “the Princess,” on more private grounds. It was the same with their male companions. The three brothers Malter were called “the Bird,” “the Devil,” and “Knickerbockers.” I stay to refer to this as this French nickname-mania explains the bizarre inscriptions of so many clavier-pieces. An amusing story is told of a certain Cléron, who, in the demi-mondaine circles from which her beauty and seductive arts had brought her to the opera, was known as “Frisky” (Frétillon). In the opera she greeted her new friends very affectionately, but added, “I shall do my best to be agreeable to you; but if any one calls me Frisky, let him know I will give him the best box on the ear he ever had in his life.” Mademoiselle Cléron was no boaster, adds the narrator, and was pretty likely to keep her word.
The due understanding of old French clavier-music then, must start from the knowledge of the dance. Almost all its pieces are dances, whether they declare themselves as such or not. They take up the numerous existing dance-forms and develop them in the ways already described. But in addition to this formal principle we must notice a second, the symbolic. The pieces mean something, and mean more and more the further the century advances. As if to console themselves for the want of content which belongs to the dance in itself, composers are fond of indicating in their titles and dedications all kinds of relations which give to their pieces a more marked physiognomy or a more comprehensible expressiveness. For this purpose they had not only at their disposal the old song-names which clung to the dances, but a hundred other associations. They loved the dance, but they loved associations also. Nicknames and allusions flew from the smiling lips, and men had the fairest inducements to take the abstract in a concrete sense. The chief inducement was the stage with its representative music, the stage, so passionately loved by the French in the middle ages that even from the thirteenth century we have dramatic lyrical plays with the most delicate songs by the trouvère Adam de la Hale. These stand like flowers in the midst of their time, and penetrated so deeply into the life of the people that the little song of Marion “Robin m’aime” is still, they say, sung in the Hennegau. The fairies, which had already played their part in the works of this mediæval opera-composer and writer, had in the later French opera their rich harvest of beings of symbolic meaning. In Lully’s works there is quite a swarm of abstract figures, gods, demi-gods, personifications, which in small scenes or great airs bring out this characterising function of music to the utmost degree possible. But what such things as the good and bad Dreams, or the nymphs and Corybantes in the “Atys,” entering as chorus, performed in characteristic music was as nothing to what was done by the great ballets which drew heaven and hell into the circle of their representations. “Le Triomphe des Sens,” “Les Voyages d’Amour,” “Les Génies,” “Le Triomphe de l’Harmonie,” “L’Ecole des Amants”—all these are titles of operas and ballets of those times which had as their aim to represent musical things as symbols of sensuous incidents. From the lists of ballets and operas performed from Lully’s time right into the eighteenth century the application of fêtes, rococo-amusements, love-pictures by Watteau, or idyllic porcelain-ornamentation, to stage purposes, speaks with no uncertain sound. In such an environment, recollecting the renowned fantastic art of the contemporary Callot, we are led to understand the unusual preference for the direct association of clavier-pieces with particular persons or things.
But here we must speak specially of programme-music.
A Pavan called “La Bataille,” full of vigorous trumpet-signals and horn-echoes, was inserted by Tielman Sufato in his collection of 1551. Shortly before that date a Zürich lute book included dance-songs, “mitsampt dem Vogelgesang und einer Feldschlacht.” The song of birds, the imitation of animals, and all kinds of confused shrieking—a comic counterpoint—offers rich material to the programme-music of the sixteenth century. Even before an Italian had written the famous fugal chorus, in which the scholars, with a comical employment of the dismembered canonic voice-exercise, declined qui, quæ, quod, in the ears of the raging schoolmaster—even before this, contrapuntal janglings were well known. Jannequin, the Frenchman, depicted in chansons with many parts the battle of Marignano, the capture of Boulogne, war, jealousy, women’s gossip, the hare and hounds; or, on the other hand, the song of birds, the lark or the nightingale. We hear in the music of this time the thirds of the cuckoo, the clucking dactyls of the hen, the chromatic mewings of the cat, the trills of song-birds. The boldest of these pieces—an earlier Howleglass—was perhaps Eckard’s representation of the turmoil in St Mark’s Place at Venice (1589), in which noblemen, beggars, hawkers, soldiers, appear with all the artistic counterpoint appropriate to their respective classes. Thus programme-music, in the sixteenth century, enjoyed an international repute. It must not, however, be regarded as an achievement of modern music, but rather as something as old as music itself. The tempest which the Greek Timotheus represented on the kithara, and the fight of Apollo with the Python, which Timosthenes depicted on the flute and kithara, in all its stages—the challenge, the struggle, the hissing, the victory—had a renown in very ancient times. Programme-music belongs to all ages of musical development, and appears always as a natural phenomenon, never as a revolutionary movement. It marks the ne plus ultra of the need of musical expression, which cannot find satisfaction in pure musical forms, and seeks to justify itself by extra-musical titles. Thus on the extreme limit of ancient hymn-music stood a Timosthenes, on that of mediæval choral-music a Jannequin, on that of modern instrumental music a Berlioz.
We can trace the psychology of this programme-music with great ease in the French instrumental art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first definite orchestral programme-piece—the storm in Marais’ opera Alcyone—to the volume of François Dandrieu, “contenant plusieurs Divertissements dont les principaux sont les caractères de la guerre, ceux de la chasse, et la fête de Village”; from the lute-dances of Gaultier to the clavier-pieces of Rameau, we see nothing but an endeavour of the developed dance-form to enter into relations with actual life—an endeavour which leads to the manifold names of the pieces. Formerly the dances had taken their names from the songs. Now, as definite pieces, they are so full of special significance, so rich in all kinds of characteristic figures and harmonies, that the composer feels his mind insensibly drawn to incidents of life, of persons, of characters, humours, landscapes, and calls upon all his fertility in association to fashion decorative titles out of them. Music, which has arrived at the limits of the traditional dance-forms, passes over from the formal to the characteristic. As Berlioz’ Queen Mab is nothing but a further development of Beethoven’s Scherzos, and not a heaven-descended music, discovered in Shakespeare, so the pieces of the great clavierist Couperin, whether they have descriptions of humours or personal names for titles, are merely the developments of dances, which, so fertile were they, reminded the composer of life itself. Couperin himself declares that he gives in his pieces portraits, which appear to give to others also, before whom they are performed, the actual features of the models. But it is obvious that he could hold himself as a portrait-painter, only so far as his music was rich enough, by its definite relations to actual life, to give clearer definition and a distinct picture to its stream as it flowed in a thousand forms. Like all programme-musicians, he is such, not from poverty in musical invention, but from wealth. The French are a people that revel in the fulness of forms, and find their very life in the special magic of the formal presentation of all things, whether social or artistic. Thus in their hands all musical forms, melodious, harmonic, rhythmic, grew so luxuriantly, that at all times, from Jannequin to St Saens, in order to live they have necessarily turned to programme-music.
Yet the titles of the clavier-pieces are not fully explained by this reference to the value of programme-music for the French mind. We must take into consideration also an old decorative tradition. Let us open the magnificent volume of lute-pieces by the famous Denis Gaultier,[39] which came into the Berlin Museum of Engravings along with the Hamilton collection. It is fantastically called “La Rhetorique des Dieux,” because only gods could speak so movingly by music, and equally fantastically he introduces all kinds of titles for the pieces, such as “Phaethon struck by lightning,” “le Panégyrique,” Minerva, Ulysses, Andromeda, Diana, “la Coquette virtuosa,” and the like, besides several “Tombeaux,” by which term dedications to deceased persons were generally indicated.[40] If we compared these sixteenth century pieces with their names, a certain nimble fancy is required to find actual programme-music in them. Of a genuine representation of the content there is no pretence. Minerva, Echo, and the Coquette would seem to have more in common than they ever suspected. The titles are nothing but decorative stamps, resembling those medallions of Aphrodite which are so often engraved over a love-poem. The interpretation is always in the widest spirit possible. It is amusing to see how the editor of the collection labours to explain the names while confining himself exclusively to the vaguest generalities. On “l’Homicide,” or The Fair Murderess, as it is also named, he writes: “This fair creature deals death to every one who sees and hears her; but this death is so unlike the usual death that it is the beginning of a life, not its end.” It could not easily be more plainly indicated that there is no clear representation of anything to be seen in the piece, and that the title is a piece of self-flattery in the dress of the fantastic. Already had the elder Gaultier, the founder of this lute-school, recognised, or perhaps even invented, these decorative titles, such as “le canon,” “la conquérante,” “les larmes du Boset,” or “la volte,” “l’immortelle,” “le loup.” This last, it is certain, is no ordinary wolf, but howls so musically that it is really a man.
The custom of adding decorative titles was made universal by the lute-players, but the tone-painting must always have been of the slightest. Otherwise the old historian of the lute, Baron, could not have been so irritated at them as to write, some decades later, “Gallot has given such strange names to his pieces that we have need of close study to see their relation with the subject. For example, when he wishes to express thunder and lightning on the lute, it is a pity he has never added a note to tell us when it lightens and when it thunders.” (We are reminded of the old English clavier-piece on the same theme.) “We shall seldom,” he adds, “light on a French piece but the name of some noble dame is attached to it, after whom, if she so pleases, the piece is named.”