Studies in Modern Music, Second Series / Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms

by W. H. Hadow

Now, the primary fact in music is the simple melodic phrase: the spontaneous, almost unconscious, utterance of an emotional state that is too vivid for ordinary speech. At first, this music is entirely artless, for art only begins when the medium is recognised as possessing an intrinsic interest; then there gradually arises an attempt to make the phrases more coherent, and so more expressive, until the first landmark is reached in the establishment of a definite scale-system like that of Greece. Thus Greek music may be taken as the lowest stage of organisation in the European history of the art. It was not unscientific, for it had the modes, with their elaborate subtleties of diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic, but we may search its records in vain for any distinctive recognition of musical form. Its effect, to judge from the allusions in Plato and Aristotle, seems to have been wholly emotional, and its intellectual basis was not artistic but mathematical in character.

The Greek modes were revised by Claudius Ptolemy, and on the basis of his revisions was established the system of the mediæval church. In it the claims of the medium began to receive further attention, and the next step was the gradual elaboration of counterpoint, that is, the combination of simultaneous voice parts, each independent, but all conducing to a result of uniform and coherent texture. Starting from the crude origins of descant and faux-bourdon, the new method steadily grew and developed, through Dunstable, Dufay, Josquin, and a host of other great writers, until it reached the second universal landmark in the magnificent climax of Palestrina. If the ecclesiastical modes had been final, music would never have advanced beyond the 'Missa Papæ Marcelli,' and the 'Æterna Christi Munera.'

But the modes were not final. For certain scientific reasons, into which it is here needless to enter, they were incapable either of a common tonality or of a coherent system of modulation. Hence, while the organisation of harmony could be carried by the ecclesiastical composers to a high degree of perfection, the organisation of key lay outside their horizon altogether. And while they were busy, like the schoolmen, in 'applying a method received on authority to a matter received on authority,' the unrecognised popular musicians, who had never heard of Ptolemy, and cared nothing about counterpoint, were writing tunes in which our modern scale-system begins to make a tentative and hesitating appearance. It is not too much to say that the dances collected in Arbeau's Orchesographie come nearer to our sense of tonality than all the masses and madrigals that contemporary learning could produce. In a word, the growth of harmony belongs to the Church, the growth of key to the people.

Then came the most important dynamic change in all musical history: the Florentine revolution of 1600. Its ostensible object was frankly dramatic—the revival of Greek tragedy under such altered conditions as were implied by the change of language and civilisation: its real importance was that it destroyed the convention of the modes, and called tonality from the country fair to the theatre and the concert-room. For a while, no doubt, the dramatic ideal overpowered everything else, and even the Church left off writing masses and took to oratorios instead; but when pure music reasserted itself, it found an entirely new set of problems waiting for solution. Harmony had to be organised, not on the basis of the mode, but on the basis of the modern scale, and thus had to take into account a question of key-relationship which had never fallen within the scope of the ecclesiastical period. And hence followed a line of development beginning about the time of the younger Gabrieli, and passing through the great choral composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the third landmark of our musical history was attained in the person of John Sebastian Bach. His polyphony, as applied to the emotional expression of his time, is simply the best of which the art of music is capable. Given the phrases which he employed as subjects, the human mind cannot conceive their being treated with a more complete harmonic perfection.

Meantime, ever since the floodgates had been opened by the audacious hand of Florentine amateurs, another and more copious stream of tendency had been flowing along a separate channel. The new tonality had not only made a great difference in the harmonic aspect of music, it had virtually opened a new field by suggesting the first possibilities of form and structure. Composers began gradually to see that the equalisation of the scales afforded the material for a more perfect and coherent system of design: modulation became a reality, and with it the recognition of different tonics in successive paragraphs or cantos of the composition. They therefore took the simplest effects of contrast, as presented by the dances and Volkslieder of the people, and proceeded to develop them into a fuller diversity of organisation. At first, no doubt, they went on something of a wrong tack: the structural problem received a divided attention, for polyphony was still regarded as paramount, but yet in the chamber music of Corelli and Vivaldi, and in the harpsichord pieces of Scarlatti, Couperin and Rameau may be traced a continuous effort not only to make the form distinct, but to make it in some degree progressive. And on the death of Bach, when polyphony had reached a point from which it seemed impossible to advance, music turned almost entirely to questions of structure, and for the next two generations set itself deliberately to perfect the outline of the sonata, the quartett, and the symphony. This helps to explain the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that Bach's influence on the latter half of the eighteenth century was practically non-existent. Partly, of course, we may account for it by remembering that musical art passed, for a time, into another country, but it is a still stronger reason that composition was occupied with another set of problems. The organisation of harmony is that of simultaneous strains; the organisation of key is that of successive passages; and it is obvious that the perfection of the one will afford but little assistance to the development of the other. And so the line of structural evolution passed through Haydn and Mozart, until, in the work of Beethoven, it also attained a temporary climax and culmination. With him, then, the treatment of the musical medium may be held to have reached its fourth principal landmark.

After Beethoven came the Romantic School, the historical importance of which can roughly be epitomised under two heads. First, it widened the range of emotional expression, and so affected music from the standpoint of the idea. Secondly, it returned to Bach, and adapted his polyphonic system to the requirements of the new musical language. But as its artistic strength was its reverence for Bach, so its artistic weakness was its neglect of Beethoven. On the polyphonic side it maintained the old traditions, and even, in some respects, advanced upon them, since the more 'romantic' the idea to be expressed, the more difficult is pure polyphony in its expression. But, on the structural side, it was distinctly retrograde, and either confined itself to the smaller and more rudimentary forms, or, when it attempted those of a larger scope, treated them with something of negligence and preoccupation. Berlioz no doubt took Beethoven for his master, but it was as a poet, not as a musician. And the other great masters of the school, for all their genius and their earnestness and their love of beauty, are yet, in questions of form, but the minor Socratics of our nineteenth century music, carrying on, each from his own standpoint, some one part of the previous tradition, but neither interpreting nor advancing its full and entire content.

A special word may be said on the relation of Wagner to this general course of musical development. As a dramatist, he stands in some degree aloof: his art is a different art, his methods are different methods, his ancestry may be traced to Shakespear and Æschylus as readily as to Bach and Palestrina. The explanation of his work is always the dramatic explanation: his structure is determined not by principles of pure music, but by the exigencies of the scene. Hence, apart from such a secondary point as orchestration, it is only in his splendid, reckless, audacious polyphony that he has really enlarged the treatment of musical technique. His most enthusiastic followers claim for him that he has 'killed the symphony,' a statement which, though it is radically untrue, is enough to dissociate him from an art that recognises the symphony as its crowning achievement. The drama of the future will accept him as one of its greatest potentates: the music of the future will see in him the lord of a single province, whose government has in one respect assisted the consolidation of the others.

What, then, is required to sum up the tendencies of the present age, and to bring Music to the fifth landmark in its history. Surely a composer, who, while he maintains and develops the harmonic traditions of the Romantic School, shall even more devote himself to the restoration and evolution of musical structure: who shall take up the classical form where Beethoven left it; who shall aid to free it from the conventions which that greatest of all masters did not wholly succeed in loosening; who shall carry it to a further stage and raise it to a fuller organisation. And such a composer has appeared. So far as concerns the technical problem of composition—and it must be remembered that this is at present the only topic under discussion—the work of Brahms is the actual crown and climax of our present Musical art. He is in exact and literal truth 'der der kommen musste:' the man for whom Music has been waiting. In him converge all previous streams of tendency, not as into a pool, stagnant, passive, and motionless, but as into a noble river that receives its tributary waters and bears them onward in larger and statelier volume.

Tintoret claimed 'the drawing of Michael Angelo and the colouring of Titian': Brahms, in like manner, may claim the counterpoint of Bach and the structure of Beethoven. And not only has he entered into the inheritance of these two composers; he has put their legacies to interest, and has enriched the world with an augmentation of their wealth. He is no mere Alexandrine, no grammarian poet, content to accumulate with a patient and laborious industry the gifts that have been lavished by a previous age; the artistic heritage is not won by right of labour, and its dynasty only falls to these who are born in the purple. Erudition, in short, may copy the work of Genius; but Genius alone can develop it.

Are we to say, then, that Brahms is a more consummate master of his medium than Bach or Beethoven? By no means; but, in consequence of their work, his medium is more plastic than theirs. For certain historical reasons, with which the question of personal capacity has nothing to do, the key-system of Bach is rudimentary beside that of Beethoven, and the polyphony of Beethoven less perfect, perhaps, than that of Bach. To Brahms we may apply Dryden's famous epigram, in which the force of Nature 'to make a third has joined the other two.' By his education he learned to assimilate their separate methods; by his position, in the later days of Romance, he found a new emotional language in established use; by his own genius he has made the forms wider and more flexible, and has shown once more that they are not artificial devices, but the organic embodiment of artistic life.