The Figured Bass is significant, not only of the way composers came to an appreciation of the value of an harmonic foundation in music, and of how counterpoint came to the aid of the new music when it was leaden and uninteresting; it points also to the slow development of the orchestra, of the skill to write for groups of instruments in such a way that they could stand independently without the bolstering of the harpsichord or the organ. The orchestral style proper is the most complex style in music and was the slowest to develop. The employment of the Figured Bass is evidence of the inability of composers to master it during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
II
Yet though the composers of the seventeenth century were unable to master the problem of the orchestra, their accomplishments in the development of instrumental music, especially of music for small groups of string instruments, were most important. The achievements of the organists may be considered first, because in them the tradition of the polyphonic style most evidently perseveres, and because they were the first to develop a suitable instrumental style. The organ had been used in the churches from very early times and had been little by little improved until by the middle of the sixteenth century it was capable of great power of tone and of some beauty and delicacy as well. During the sixteenth century music for the organ had been cultivated by three great Venetian organists, Andrea Gabrieli (1510-1586), Claudio Merulo (1533-1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612), nephew and pupil of Andrea. All three were world famous in their day, and men came from Germany, France, and England to hear them play and to study with them. The organs in St. Mark’s cathedral were among the finest in Europe. Venice was brilliantly to the fore in music, and these three great organists were in the very front ranks of innovators. If their music sounds to us antiquated now it is because it was hardly in the power of three men in the span of half a century to develop a style of music for the organ which would be suited to its special qualities. It must not be forgotten that serious musicians had given relatively little thought to instrumental music, and had spent their lives in the perfecting of a style in vocal music. These three pioneers in organ music, therefore, had first to discover what sort of music sounded well on the organ. The problems were difficult, for not only was there the question of instrumental style, but likewise the question of form, since instrumental music, deprived of the continuity of a text to hold it in some measure together, must be wrought into definite form or else remain an inartistic chaos of sound. It can hardly be said that these early organists invented any clear self-sufficient forms. In fact, all form had to wait until the harmonic idea was clear in men’s minds, until the middle of the next century. In the collections of their works are to be found ricercari, canzone da sonar and toccatas; but none of these has definite form. The ricercar was a piece in polyphonic imitative style, of serious character, ancestor of the instrumental fugue but very strongly bound to the vocal style of the day. It differed from the fugue in that it presented no clear so-called second subject as foil or play-fellow to the main subject; and, moreover, in that there was even no consistent main subject throughout the piece, but a rambling from one to another suggested by it, and so on. Rhythm was indeterminate and frequently changing and there was little suggestion of a definite metrical structure of formal significance.
The canzona was originally no more than an arrangement for the organ of a secular song in polyphonic style, of the kind made popular in France in the period of the ars nova. (See Chap. IX.) The characteristic feature of these songs or chansons was a division of the music, following the stanzas of the poem, into several sections or strophes, some of which were in polyphonic style, others in simple ‘note for note’ harmony; and in working them over for the organ composers maintained the division. We shall see how composers for other instruments worked upon the same plan, and how in this plan lies the germ from which was to spring one of the so-called cyclic forms of music—a piece in several distinct movements, called sonata da chiesa, which was one of the direct ancestors of the symphony. However, in the early canzona there was no actual splitting up into movements, but only a series of rather distinct sections within the one movement differing from each other in style and rhythm. The organists used the canzona with rather more lightness than they ever displayed in the treatment of the ricercar, and in an attempt to animate and vary the simple song parts they hit upon not a few of those devices of ornamentation which came to play a great part in instrumental music of the eighteenth century. Andrea Gabrieli’s canzona, Un gai berger, is an excellent example of the type, while the connection with its prototype is still distinct. Though there is a canzona for organ by Bach, the form never developed in organ music to any very great importance. It was assimilated on the one hand by the ricercar and on the other by the more brilliant toccata.
The toccata was from the first a piece for display, and more than any other called the suitable organ style into being. The early toccatas might be called ventures in virtuosity. In them composers broke free little by little from the slow moving vocal style. They discovered how much more rapidly their fingers could move than voices could sing, and they learned to leap and run, so to speak, and gave over once for all the slow pace of the vocal style, which, admirably suited to voices, is intolerably heavy and dull upon instruments. The first attempts amounted to little more than rapid running of scales over a foundation of uninteresting chords; but by the end of the sixteenth century the chords had become more interesting and other runs than simple scales had been developed.
Two men especially are important in the history of organ music of the first half of the seventeenth century, Peter Sweelinck in Amsterdam and Girolamo Frescobaldi in Rome, the one commonly accepted as the first of the school of great organists of northern Europe, the other strongly influential in forming the style of the organists of southern Germany. The best of the northern and southern schools came to be united in John Sebastian Bach, the greatest of all organists, for whose music, therefore, Sweelinck and Frescobaldi may be said to have laid foundations. Both were daring, brilliant performers and equally bold and venturesome composers. Sweelinck was organist at the old church in Amsterdam from about 1581 to the year of his death, 1621; and Frescobaldi, considerably younger, organist at St. Peter’s in Rome from 1608 to 1628, and again later in life. In both cities crowds flocked to the churches whenever these great men played.
Of Sweelinck’s music that has been preserved a great part shows strongly the influence of the early Venetian organists, but as might be expected he goes beyond them in instrumental effects; and in serious works, not calculated merely to display the skill of the virtuoso, he really creates a definite fugue form, independent of vocal style, animated and impressive. As a performer he was excited to experiment in effects which often led him into meaningless passage work, striking perhaps in his day, but to our ears childish and quite lacking in musical worth. But his influence was long felt and was the incentive to ever bolder and bolder efforts to expand the range of organ technique.
The younger Italian was no less daring, but seems to have been gifted with more sensitive instinct. He never offends by empty display; his style is consistently higher than that of any other organist of his day. His advance over his predecessors is most marked in his use of animated rhythmical subjects which he developed more often in genuine fugal style with answering counter subject and logical balanced form than in the aimless style of the older ricercar. Moreover, the passage work in his toccatas is built upon chord progressions which are very nearly free of the old modal restrictions and which are impressive in themselves and of genuine musical worth. Among works published in his lifetime are a set of fantasias (1608), all but three of which are in ricercar style, a set of toccatas (1614), a set of ricercari (1615), which show a marked improvement in construction over earlier works, a second book of toccatas in 1627, and in 1635 the most famous of all his works, the Fiori musicali, which contained pieces in all styles known at that time.
Among his pupils was the brilliant Saxon wanderer, John Jacob Froberger, who was for many years organist at the court of Vienna, for four years in Rome, two in Paris, later in London under romantic circumstances of which he has himself left an account, and still again in the Netherlands, in Halle, in Vienna, and in France, where he died in 1657. In the work of such a man many influences are of course evident, but in his organ compositions that of Frescobaldi is most consistent, and thus the style of the Italian passes over into German usage.
After the death of Frescobaldi the importance of organ music in Italy steadily declined, but in Germany, both north and south, it grew steadily greater. It was built up on the foundations laid by the Italians themselves and by Sweelinck, who was strongly under the influence of the Italians; but there entered into it an element of purely German nature, the Protestant Chorale. These noble, expressive old melodies, though of varied origin—some sprung from the old plain-song melodies of the Roman ritual, others from the folk songs of the people—had become the religious folk song of the German Protestant. Upon them organists constructed a singularly lofty and expressive form of music known as the Chorale Prelude, which combined with the polyphonic skill—the remodelled heritage of the old masters—the genuine serious feeling of the chorale. As the name implies, the chorale prelude was played by the organist before the congregation sang the chorale, and might be regarded as the organist’s prologue inspired by a musical text. Two kinds of the prelude were developed to a high state of musical excellence at the end of the seventeenth century. In one the chorale melody was treated in flowing contrapuntal style, appearing now in long notes, now in short, woven into a smooth texture of sound; in the other the melody was often brilliantly adorned with trills and turns and was made to stand boldly forth over an accompaniment which often presented a vigorous counter subject and which was filled with the most striking and daring devices of the virtuoso. The former was more in keeping with the spirit of the south German organists; one of whom, Johann Pachelbel,[135] a Nuremberger, developed it richly. The other was fostered by the vigorous daring organists of the north, among whom the Dane, Dietrich Buxtehude,[136] stands out most conspicuously. We shall see later how much Sebastian Bach was influenced by these two great organists.