But even these significant facts do not exhaust the aspects in which Beethoven anticipated later artistic developments. It is a very strange fact that after his deafness was quite established his sense of tone color continued to expand. Even in comparatively early works he had shown gravitation toward romantically characteristic effects of instrumentation, as, for instance, in the familiar and supremely wonderful color scheme of the scherzo of the C minor symphony. But after he had quite lost his hearing his color sense grew in richness and depth and variety to a bewildering extent. His mind seemed to be specially occupied with finding tone colors which intensified the expression in quite a new way, as, for instance, in the huge slow movement of the sonata in B flat, opus 106, in the last movement of the sonata in C minor, opus 111, and in the slow movement of the Choral Symphony. Prior to his time there had been a great deal of inert matter in orchestral scoring. The functions of wind instruments were indeed defined, in so far as they were used either as actual solo instruments or more often to supply a pleasant continuity of tone in agreeable colors, while the strings did most of the actual talking. But the standard of execution of the players, as well as the technique of orchestration, was not advanced enough to bring the wind instruments fairly into the operation on an equality with the strings, and they were made to play what was definitely serviceable to the scheme, but had in itself no musical definition and purpose. The greater part of the advance that has since taken place in orchestration consists in making every member of the orchestra contribute to the complex of polyphony by playing actual and apt musical passages. It implied the growth of texture toward vitality in every part of the artistic scheme, and a development of organization of the very subtlest description. For it must be kept in mind that the employment of instruments of diverse tone color in the modern manner does not imply their constant employment, but their apt employment only; which is so contrived by the genius of composers who can really think in orchestras that the tone qualities affect the sensibilities of the hearers to the utmost by their relations to one another. Even the feeblest intelligence would be capable of discerning the fact that great effects of color are made through juxtaposition. A very vivid piece of coloring is not vivid because the individual colors are vivid, but because various colors are disposed so as to give particular colors their utmost effect upon the sensibilities. A glowing red does not glow of itself but because the sensibilities have been so affected by other colors that they have become highly susceptible to red. Groups of nerves are affected in various ways by tone colors, and the secret of art is so to use the various tone colors that each shall minister in full measure to the effect of others. And the secret of expression in art in this particular department is that the composer who has that very highly organized faculty of perception of relations of colors uses just those relations in their various degrees which intensify the susceptibility of the human auditor to the quality of the ideas he wants to express.
In this field there is a very wide and interesting opportunity for special study, as the average of color tendencies is a very striking means of gauging the disposition and personality of composers. Thus the stern, almost ascetic, colors of Brahms, varied by touching gleams of tenderness and beauty, express his personality most exactly. Beethoven undoubtedly changed his average of color as he developed his personality. In his earlier works he was genial and bright, after the manner of the sonata composers, and made use of the cheerful coloring that suited a cultured and prosperous aristocracy. In his middle period he became warmer and more serious; in his latest period he was sometimes grim and fierce, sometimes deep and solemn, but often tender with the depth of longing and the earnestness of his aspiration. But who cannot read the character of a composer through his average color scheme? The flighty, empty-headed trickster with his sparkling piccolo and his gas-jet noises on violins, and the bombastic vulgarian posing as a man of great feeling with his roars of blatant brass; the oversensitized hedonist with his delicate subtleties, mainly in transparent pearl-grays; and so on. We are almost inclined to forget that it is all, or nearly all, a matter of relations; it is only not a matter of relations when the music is false. When the composer does try to make his effects by violence and what he supposes to be the intrinsic power of tone-quality nobody is permanently taken in. That the basis of color effect is relation is a thing man is learning every day in the infinite variety of a gorgeous sunset and in the luxuriant blaze of his own flowerbeds. Indeed, the principle of relativity in art is nowhere likely to be more readily felt than in the matter of color.
It is more difficult to apprehend in matters of form and organization. Yet it ought to be easy to perceive that the whole object of organization is to put things in their right places. It is just as in the color scheme: the effect of a work of art, as has been said before, does not depend upon intrinsic interest of individual moments, but on the relation of every moment to every other moment. If the relations are false the impression is marred and the idea fails to carry conviction.
But it follows from this that there had to be a sweeping change in the generally accepted views of the universal applicability of the sonata forms. They were no doubt admirable as types of abstract design; they were examples of approximate perfection in musical organization; but, when the time came again after the sonata period to make music express ideas, it became evident, with the assistance of Beethoven’s insight, that special ideas required types of organization which were specially adapted to the ideas. Men humbly ventured on compositions which did not represent the august dignity of the sonata order. They tried in small ways to represent their feelings and ideas. They found the sonata forms much too big; the prescriptive rights of so aristocratic an organization entailing such a lot of formalities; and they had of sheer necessity to find some forms more apt and compact. The unique genius of Chopin led the way. Surrounded by an atmosphere of romanticism, and entirely free, as far as we can see, from the influence of the sonata spirit, his strange and subtle mind sought types of form which were quite independent of tradition. Very often the form seems to grow out of the musical ideas; at any rate it is easy to feel that form and utterance progressed simultaneously in his processes of inspiration. This attitude toward original methods of organization is perceptible in a very large range of his compositions—the ballads, the impromptus, the mazurkas, but in the finest and subtlest shape in the best of the preludes. There, indeed, can always be felt the underlying impulse to express some feeling or idea which is not purely and only musical, and also the exact aptness of the form in which it is expressed. Hardly any modern composers have excelled Chopin in this respect; it is his greatest contribution to the evolution of musical art. But even classical composers, composers essentially built up on the great traditions, tacitly admitted the gravitation of art back to its rightful position; Mendelssohn in his songs without words and symphonies, Schumann in vast numbers of movements of all calibres for pianoforte and even in movements of symphonies, such as the slow movement of the Rhenish and the whole of the D major; Brahms in his compact and well-considered piano pieces, and movements in his chamber music; and later on the host of experimentalizing composers in every branch of art, all bent on expressing something that stirs them, and all bent on finding special ways of organizing what they have to say. The most conclusive illustrations are naturally in the branch of song as cultivated by modern composers. Here the theories of the few faithful defenders of the old strongholds are obviously void; for it is impossible to imagine anyone being so preposterously idiotic as to try and write a song in sonata form. The scheme of organization must inevitably, in such a form of art, follow absolutely the meaning of the words and the course of the dramatic development. As a matter of fact, the same connection with words rules the situation as far as regards the artistic organization in all directions from anthems and church music up to the colossal scores of music dramas. The composer has now not only to provide diction, method, artistic texture, color, but also new types of form. It may, indeed, be said that the highest aim of the composer, after the discovery of something worth expressing, is to find some new scheme—some new distribution of the architectural elements of his musical work—which will present his ideas in forms which will attract the attention and keep the interest of the highest class of minds.
The situation may be said to round off the story of music’s development so far. For the colossal accumulation of resources and means of beautifying and vitalizing ideas serves not only for utterance but also to widen the scope and variety of schemes of artistic organization—and the individual composer becomes personally responsible in that respect as well as for the feeling and the artistic details.
But the indebtedness of latter-day composers to the devotion of those who went before is not exhausted by these accomplishments. For there are many features of art to which successive generations of composers have contributed in the fashioning, and which ought not to be overlooked, though they cannot be dealt with in detail in a summary. One of the subtlest and most interesting is the differentiation of various styles. The instinct which impelled composers in this connection was always to find the most perfect adjustment of resources to environment. In other words, to express what they had to say in the ways which were most convenient and effective for the instruments which had to play it, and most suitable to the audience to which it was to be addressed in the place where it had to be performed.
At first composers’ ingenuity was exercised in one style only, that of choral music, limited also mainly to sacred music. When that was more or less perfected in the space of some five centuries, instrumental secular style began to emerge; at first leaning on the methods and devices which composers had found out in choral music, and then by degrees, as instrumental music learned to stand alone, making it more completely apt for performance by instruments; which process has gone on till the present day and is still going on. Then, soon after instrumental style began to branch off from the parent stem of choral music, operatic style began to be laboriously devised, and is by degrees still being perfected in the sphere of music drama; then followed the distinct style for various solo instruments, as the style of organ music, the style for various kinds of orchestral music, for chamber music, for domestic music, songs, concert-platform music, various types of modern church music—an ever-increasing variety, each style being the most perfect adaptation to the conditions of presentment and the qualities of instruments as time goes on.
Another development of great interest is that of thematic material. Such things as subjects were hardly thought of at first in artistic conditions, as choral music was not adapted to clear definition. That quality began to manifest itself when rhythm began to play its part in instrumental music. Then melodious passages, which were clearly recognizable in themselves, began to make their appearance in operatic arias, but they were for a long time defined more by the conventional periods indicated by cadences of various degrees of finality than by their individual character. This peculiarity of defining subjects persisted almost till the end of the sonata period in the latter part of Beethoven’s life, when he began to divine the possibility of subjects being identifiable for themselves without artificial conventions for marking their boundaries, and gave the impulse to that practice of concentrating interest in short phrases and figures which have intrinsic definition by reason of their characteristic intervals and rhythms, which has become the most universal trait of all later music, gathering force in the romantic period and being developed further by the latest representative composers, who use color, chord positions, even modulation, as well as melodic features, as factors in making their thematic nuclei stand out from their context, and serve the purpose of texts to their discourses—the said texts serving also to suggest as clearly as possible what the composer has in his mind, which he desires to convey to his audience in the most vivid and permanent forms.