When Bach died, the musical centre of gravity tended to Germany; but it was doubtful what precise line would be followed. On Bach anything could be built. A great period of counterpoint might rise in which voices might go through a new series of harmonic complexities, similar to, and yet so different from those of the Middle Ages. Or there might come a period of great suites in which the simple dance-forms might grow in many-sided development. A high pathetic style might be introduced, or the details of expression might attract the attention of the amateur. The forms of the various compositions might alter in either direction, of new freedom or new restraint. Counterpoint might be deserted, concerted playing might be improved in the direction of increased grace.
For all or any of these possibilities Bach laid a foundation, and it only remained for the taste of the time to decide on the choice that should be made.
The taste of the time, leaving on one side both the pathetic and the scholarly, went off into the domain of the graceful. The experience of music was similar to that of architecture, which had already gone through the epoch of the “baroque” and “rococo,”[96] by which designers had sought to give variety to the lines of their work. Compared with the energy and manly swing of the Italian Concerto, a sonata of Philip Emanuel Bach is fairly characterised as “rococo.” In place of the sober delight in bold outline appears the “galant” appreciation of eccentricities and wayward curvings. Passion is ashamed of confessing itself openly, and offers the amusing spectacle of a natural emotion wilfully covering itself with an incongruous vesture of conventional form.
The newly formed tendency towards simple sensuousness does not obtrude itself; it merely smiles in the graceful oscillations of subtle harmonies.
Caprice is the true ruler, and in improvised outpourings, speaking pauses, piquant leaps, stupefying enharmonic changes, purposed perverseness of motive, she places the same material under the hands of the fair performers, which, a short time before, had taken such a scholarly form.
Where strict canons of the voices used to be carried honestly through, we now observe a pleasant trifling with imitation which becomes coquettish, and the pedantic old Dux and Comes[97] put up very well with the change in their conditions of service. Counterpoint turns into mere accompaniment, and daintiness with humorous ornament is the object of the composer.
The new auditor is the delicate dilettante who listens no longer so much to the inner parts, the ancient severity of which vanishes and is replaced by chord music. Now we listen to the melody, to the over-part, and we unfold its whole charm, revealing a hundred secrets of melodic pleasure, and disentangling them at ease. And in all this capricious enlivening of music there remains the same delightful contradiction as in the paintings and buildings of the time—the contradiction between inner freedom and the aim at a fixed form. The external form is to replace what was offered by the inner; and yet, from these new free figures, the intention is primarily to gain this form. The aim is not at collections of suites, but at the type of the free movement, of the piece, of the sonata. It is the same spectacle as when we see Hogarth and Greuze expressing a definite moral lesson in their pictures, or architectural principles conveyed in the play of childhood. In music, however, that exclusive predominance of form, which the French Revolution caused to prevail in the representative art, has never been quite attained. It is important to notice that this was only possible since music had emancipated itself from French influence. It was only in Germany that a Beethoven could arise.
The distinction between “professional” and “amateur” is one to which our attention is always more and more drawn. “Tablatures” and apparatus for the scholar vanish gradually, and titles meant to attract the amateur become more frequent. Bach’s inscription—“for the delight of amateurs”—over suites and concertos, appears on more than one title-page. We read “Cecilia playing on the clavier and satisfying the hearing,” or “Manipulus musices, a Handful of Pastime at the Clavier,” or again, “the Busy Muse Clio,” or even “Clavier-practice for the delight of mind and ear, in six easy galanterie parties adapted to modern taste, composed chiefly for young ladies.” A certain Tischer has put it very shortly on some suites—“The Contented Ear and the Quickened Soul.” As the most complete refiner of this taste, relying on the public at large, appears Philip Emanuel Bach, who inscribes his sonatas “easy” or “for ladies,” and thus openly confessed, much as he was censured therefor by the pedants, that he had systematically introduced the light genre as a music for the future.
