The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key—indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum. We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naïve, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is indeed a jump a dorio ad phrygium.
What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a jump a dorio ad phrygium—namely, the contrast between D-minor and E-minor—is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key—which for Aristotle bore the stamp of dignity and constancy—as D-minor, not only "grave" but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality," which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P. Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the selfsame key which for a former age was the tonus primus, the one particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the Freischütz hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century, Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was formerly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian key was formerly called the Phrygian, and vice versa. The fact is, however, that the names have not changed—it is the ear which has changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson, indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of tones"—an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.
Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-, F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily bread of our composers.
One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided concerning the characters of the keys; in practice, however, the composer is sure to feel that everything does not sound equally well in all keys and therefore must decide each individual case separately, in conformity with his artistic ear and instinct; I will merely add—also in conformity with the ear of his time. For Quantz, by declining to make a theoretical decision, shows that his ear had fallen captive to the Italian musical school which strove not so much to hear the characteristic in music as the simply beautiful, and, indifferent to the prevailing lively controversy over the keys, composed its melodies as was most convenient for the voice of the singer and the fingers of the accompanist.
In the first half of the eighteenth century people still possessed a very keen ear for dance music. The great majority of the dance melodies of that time are moderately animated. To our modern ear and pulse-beat, on the contrary, slow dance music seems to be a contradiction in itself; a melody which in those days inspired people and started their feet to dancing would now lull us to sleep. We desire stormily exciting dance music; our ancestors gave the preference to the gayly stimulating kind. How entirely differently constituted, how differently qualified historically, politically, and socially, was that generation in whose ears sounded the dance rhythm of the majestic sarabande, the solemnly animated entrée, loure, and chaconne, the delicate pastoral musette, the staid gliding siciliano, and the measured, graceful minuet, compared to a generation who dance the whirling waltz, the stormy skipping galop, and the furious cancan! In the opera the tragic hero could dance a sarabande, and even in choral songs of the church the ear of the eighteenth century could distinguish dance music. Matheson made (1739) out of the choral song "When we are in dire distress" a very danceable minuet; out of "How beautifully upon us shines the morning star" a gavotte; out of "Lord Jesus Christ, thou greatest gift" a sarabande; out of "Be joyful, my soul" a burrée; and finally out of "I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ" a polonaise, by preserving the choral melodies note for note and only changing the rhythm, just exactly in the same way as we now make marches, waltzes, and polkas out of operatic arias. What colossal contrasts of the musical ear in the course of a single century! In them is marked not only a revolution of artistic development, but a much greater revolution of the entire system of social ethics.
In several musical authors of the first decade of the last century we find the remark that the fashionable taste in music had at that time suddenly veered around; a short time before, the greatest effects had been produced with the fastest possible tempo, the most animated rhythm and figures; now slow, solemn music was the order of the day. In the seventeenth century the twelve-eighths time was mainly employed for dance music and, in general, for quick movements; in the beginning of the eighteenth century, on the contrary, this species of time conveyed to people's ears something quite different; it then became the conventional measure for the soft, yearning adagio. Händel, in his lively gigs and in his lingering pastoral love arias, gives us side by side both conceptions of twelve-eighths time. In the second half of the century this species of time, so much in vogue formerly, disappears almost entirely. Generally speaking, in the period of Haydn the sense of rhythm undergoes a simplifying process, and many species of time are done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he simplified all conceivable rhythmic forms in such a manner that it was possible to express them in one of these four rhythms. Bach employs at least three times as many species of time and is so hair-splitting in his selections that it is more often a question of a refinement of designation, of professional coquetting with the master secrets of technique, than of any real difference in the matter. Only it must be said that this, with him, springs from a feeling for the most delicate shades of rhythm, such as has never existed since. The ear of the whole Bach age had a much keener appreciation than ours, of the subtleties of rhythm. At that time, in order to distinguish in the ball-room whether a courante or a minuet, whether a gavotte or a bourrée, were being played, a keenness of rhythmic instinct was necessary, of which in truth very little has survived in our young dancing people of today, who often have to bethink themselves whether it is a waltz or a polka which the music is beating in their ears with the rhythmic flail.
In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic nuances of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing. Never were people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the twenties. The ear for the fine shades of "danceableness" in musical rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep; now it is perceptibly awakening once more. Our polkas, mazurkas, etc., based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this. But is there not an important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly awakening delight in the rococo the modern ear is again becoming perceptibly keener as regards the nuances of dance rhythms.
We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going andante, in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists. Comodo, comodamente, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the furioso than to remain quietly behind with the Comodo. The old masters also had a species of composition with the superscription "Furia," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the furia was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow trill to be especially beautiful. This kind of trill sounds to us amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called "false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.
A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an adagio before the public in a concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no adagio. If one did attempt an adagio in a gallant style of composition the player first had to render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, gruppettos, pincements, battements, flattements, doublés, etc. "In the adagio," says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, "each note must be, as it were, caressed." In the execution of our heroic adagios it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated. From the viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the sentimental, feminine adagio. The adagios of Bach and Händel are all of the masculine gender. And then what a remarkable alteration of the musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century, the soft-as-butter adagios of the composers of the day all at once caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion! At the same time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman acquired an ear for the adagio. How very slightly as yet has the intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of literature been investigated. The entire Siegwart is indeed nothing but a melting Pleyel adagio, translated into windy words. A priceless passage in Siegwart treats of the adagio. Siegwart and his school friend are playing one evening an adagio of Schwindl on the violin: "And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax. They laid down their violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing but 'excellent'—and went to bed." The ear of the sentimental period, which had so suddenly become sensitive to the adagio, has never been so tersely branded! From that time on there was a regular debauch of adagio beatitude. In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in autograph albums that a bad man could not play an adagio, not to mention other florid trash of this sort. Nevertheless, the moment when we acquired an ear for the adagio remains epoch-making in the history of culture.
It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us. [Illustration: A VILLAGE FUNERAL From the Painting by Benjamin Vautier]