Even before his death Bach knew that the forms and style of music which he had given his life to perfect and ennoble were already of the past. That he invented a simple system of temperament in order to afford himself the harmonic freedom necessary to his expression, or that he devised a system of fingering which considerably facilitated the playing of his difficult music, does not constitute him the progenitor of the new style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The composers who followed him knew little or nothing of his music. They were far less likely to appropriate what they might have found useful in his old-fashioned art, than to meet the problems inherent in the new, which they served, with their own ingenuity. Accept, if you like, Scarlatti as the founder of the modern pianoforte style; Couperin as the creator of the salon piece. The fugue had had its great day, and so had the suite. The flawless counterpoint of Bach, with its involutions and its smoothness, was of too compact a substance to serve the adolescent, transparent sonata. His harmonies were too rich and fluent. And Bach had been but once the Bach of the Goldberg Variations.
No; Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,—of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. And by virtue of this standard which he fixed, he has exercised over the development of music down to the present day a greater spiritual influence than that of any other single composer.
The harpsichord works of his great contemporary Handel are far less significant. Several sets of suites were published in London between 1720 and 1735, also six fugues for organ or harpsichord. In the third suite of the first set (1720) there is an air and variations. In the fifth of the same series is the so-called ‘Harmonious Blacksmith,’ the best known of his works for the harpsichord. It is a theme and variations. The air and variations in B-flat major which has served as the groundwork of a great cycle of variations by Brahms constitutes the first number of the second series (1733). There are in other suites a Passacaglia and two Chaconnes, all of which are monotonous series of variations. One Chaconne has no less than sixty-two varied repeats. In these works Handel shows little ingenuity. His technical formulas are conventional and in general uninteresting. The dance movements of the suites are worthier of a great composer.
Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach are the great names of harpsichord music; great because each stands for a supreme achievement in the history of the art. It may be questioned whether, if the pianoforte had not come to supplant the harpsichord, composers would have been able to progress beyond the high marks of these three men, either in style or in expressiveness. New forms had made their appearance, it is true, before the death of Bach. These would have run their course upon the harpsichord without doubt; but it is not so certain that they could have brought to light any new resources of the instrument. These had been not only fully appreciated by the three great men, Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach, but had been developed to their fullest extent. And, indeed, it may be asked whether any music has more faithfully expressed the emotions and the aspirations of humanity than the harpsichord music of Bach.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] An Englishman, organist at St. George’s, Hanover Square, from 1725 to 1737, when he became insane. He died about 1750. He had made the acquaintance of both Scarlattis during a stay in Italy, and was instrumental in bringing D. Scarlatti’s operas and harpsichord pieces before the British public.
[12] A learned Roman collector, born in 1778, died in 1862. Mendelssohn had the free use of his library and wrote that as regards old Italian music it was most complete.
[13] This collection is available to students in America. The sonatas contained in it are representative of Scarlatti’s style, though, of course, they represent but a small portion of his work. The collection can be far more easily used for reference than the cumbersome Czerny. Unfortunately the complete Italian edition is still rare in this country.
[14] J. S. Shedlock writes in ‘The Pianoforte Sonata’: ‘The return to the opening theme in the second section, which divides binary from sonata form, is, in Scarlatti, non-existent.’ Out of some two hundred sonatas which I have examined, I have found but one to disprove the statement. This one exception, No. 11 in the Breitkopf and Härtel edition of twenty, is so perfectly in sonata form that one cannot but wonder Scarlatti did not employ the form oftener. [Editor.]
[15] See articles by Edward J. Dent in Monthly Musical Record for September and October, 1906.