[106] The word “couplet” is here used as in Couperin, and other old French composers. It means the subsidiary themes or sections which alternate with the main subject in these ancient rondos. Call the main theme A, the subsidiary ones B, C, D, etc. Then the course of the movement is—A, B, A, C, A, D, A, etc., and B, C, D, etc., are called “couplets.”
[107] See, for instance, Haydn’s earliest string quartets, where he commonly has two minuets, one on each side of the “slow” movement.
[108] Does not “allemande” here simply mean “German” waltz?
[109] It is a great pity, and a great loss in every way, that the careful artistic playing of duets on one pianoforte has largely ceased. What Moscheles and Mendelssohn were not ashamed to do in public, surely is not an unworthy employment. It should be revived, if only to popularise Schubert’s beautiful works for four hands, the widespread ignorance of which is a simple disgrace to us all.
Beethoven at age of 31.
Beethoven
When a great scheme was started in Berlin for a common monument to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, it was plain to see that the artists felt themselves in the presence of a very mixed task; but it was not so clear where the incongruity lay. They stood under the influence of the popular opinion, which binds these three heroes under a single yoke, and they were the victims of this influence. Nations have an instinct of symmetry in the classification of their great men. The ancients had their seven sages; to-day we are content with two or three; but even so the combinations are none the less strained. The false ideas due to the pairing of Bach and Handel, or of Goethe and Schiller, are hardly to be numbered. The triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, is the very acme of perversity. Haydn and Mozart, though two fundamentally different natures, have yet in common the similar features of the age. But Beethoven is as little like them as Goethe is like Racine. We have only to glance round a salon in the Vienna of the last century. The old Haydn and the old Salieri sit smiling and friendly on a sofa; they move in the stilted fashion of the eighteenth century; they retain in their carriage all the features of the “Zopf und Schopf”[110] period; and in every judgment, in every gesture, they show their antagonism to unrestrained emotion. Over against them a young man is leaning on the piano. His demeanour is modish though untidy, and smacks of the Rhine; his movements natural but wooden; his hair is loose and disordered; his compliments are few; he accepts strangers only on compulsion; his playing is perhaps too vigorous, too full of feeling; and the ideas which he incorporates in his works are in their originality half revolutionary, half romantic. This new-comer is Beethoven, a man so different from the settled type, from the old “composers of the Empire,” as he himself calls them, that it is easy to anticipate the future which he himself is conjuring up. He is the first of the Titans, the first of the great fragmentary natures, the first tone-artist who breaks the forms of music to pieces on the iron of his emotions. A strange Providence closes his outward ears, and thus gaining a clearer vision, he receives from Nature herself unheard-of inspirations. How this strange new man, this romantic raver, could be coupled with Haydn and Mozart is a wonder; but popular opinion accounts for it. Beethoven came to Vienna just as Mozart began to be missed. The world gave him the honour of attaching him to the classic school. But it is a mere blunder to treat him as the end of an epoch—he is the beginning of a new one.
It must be observed at this point that the world had meanwhile become really musical—or perhaps less truly musical than music-loving. Nay, more; political events, as formerly church ceremonies, could now be celebrated in music. The famous concerto which Beethoven gave in honour of the Vienna Congress was perhaps the first great occasion on which music lent itself in festal manner to the adornment of public events. It was now no longer a mere incident in a commemorative display, but to a great extent pure music; and the rapid and vigorous education of men to instrumental music by the classical masters was the necessary precedent condition of the attainment of this point. In these matters the clavier played its important part as an intermediary and a teacher; it made the innovations into current coin, scattered them among people in their homes, and accustomed their ears to understand better and better the absolute language of music, as it dealt in wider and wider abstractions. The publishers were more active, the issues more frequent, the popular settings more numerous and artistic. Even the great men themselves take a share in the work. A frequent phenomenon in the music-trade is that composers like Clementi, Dussek, and Pleyel, themselves open publishing houses—and secure the advertisement of their wares, oftener perhaps than was really necessary.