All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music, harpsichord music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music is essentially organ music, and the development it marks as accomplished, and that toward which it points, are proper to the organ and not to the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and power are fitting, to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as the same distinction exists between the organ and the pianoforte at the present day, with some allowances made for improvements in the mechanism of the organ and for the great sonority of the pianoforte, which allowances affect only the degree but not the kind of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to have influenced the development of pianoforte music only by what he contributed toward the solution of very general problems of form and structure.
The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of later days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm, Pachelbel, and others. It may be noted that after the death of Frescobaldi the art of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its birth and first considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of virtuosi added more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ music, perfecting and embellishing style, inventing new forms and making them firm. They remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly because this is almost essentially proper to the organ with its unlimited power to sustain tone; partly because it is the impressive and noble style of music most in keeping with the spirit of the church, from which the organ will apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]
It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long as organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance—and they were well in command of the problems of their special art while other instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering about—so long did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.
How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all keyboard instruments. They helped to give music a form made of its own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which is the result of such form perfected. In their workshops two of such forms were rough-hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte music—the harmonic prelude and the fugue.
We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less perfect perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte music. Such are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be mentioned here because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it was originally a dance song, really a song with a burden and varying couplets. No form could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly gives an impression of unity, which, only in case of too many recurrences, has the fault of monotony. The varying couplets, constituting the episodes between the reiterations of the burden or main theme, offer variety and contrast. Yet, in spite of the merits of this scheme of musical structure, the form was little used by composers down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo form could be used, were generally written in the style of fugues. Furthermore, until the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of keys appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws to the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without the virtue of contrast.
The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used, conspicuously so by a number of writers for the virginal in England, whose works, surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique and practically isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music. These collections have often been described in detail and carefully analyzed. The most comprehensive is that long known as the Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book, now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection, a beautifully worked manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Others are Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will Foster’s, both of which are at Buckingham Palace; a smaller book, known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the Parthenia, famous as the first collection of virginal music printed in England.
The Parthenia was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection, the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.
Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians.
The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping figures.
Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music.