CHAPTER XXII.
GENERAL VIEW OF MUSIC IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY.
T is not easy to characterize simply and clearly the nature of the musical development which took place during the eighteenth century. The blossoming of music was so manifold, so diversified, so irrepressible in every direction, that there was not one single province of it, wherein new and masterly creations were not brought out. The central figures of this period were those of the two Colossi, Bach and Händel; after them Haydn, the master of genial proportion and taste; Mozart, the melodist of ineffable sweetness, and finally at the end of the century, the great master, Beethoven. In opera we have the entire work of that great reformer, the Chevalier Gluck, and a succession of Italian composers who enlarged the boundaries of the Italian music-drama in every direction, but especially in the direction of the impassioned and sensational. Add to these influences, already sufficiently diversified, that of a succession of brilliant virtuosi upon the leading instruments, whereby the resources of all the effective musical apparatuses were more fully explored and illustrated, with the final result of affording the poetic composer additional means of bringing his ideas to a more effective expression—and we have the general features of a period in music so luxuriant that in it we might easily lose ourselves; nor can we easily form a clear idea of the entire movement as the expression of a single underlying spiritual impulse. Yet such in its inner apprehension it most assuredly was.
Upon the whole, all the improvements of the time arrange themselves into two categories, namely: The better proportion, contrast, and more agreeable succession of moments in art works; and, second, the more ample means for intense expression. In the department of form, indeed, there was a very important transition made between the first half of the century and the last. The typical form of the first part of this division was the fugue, which came to a perfection under the hands of Bach and Händel, far beyond anything to be found in the form previously. The fugue was the creation of this epoch, and while based upon the general idea of canonic imitation, after the Netherlandish ideal, it differed from their productions in several highly significant respects. While all of a fugue is contained within the original subject, and the counter-subject, which accompanies it at every repetition, it has an element of tonality in it which places it upon an immensely higher plane of musical art than any form known, or possible, before the obsolescence of the ecclesiastical modes. Moreover, the fugue has opportunities for episode, which enable it to acquire variety to a degree impossible for any form developed earlier; and which, when these opportunities were fresh, afforded composers a field for the display of fancy which was practically free. This, one may still realize by comparing the different fugues in Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier" with each other, and with those of any other collection. It is impossible to detect anywhere the point where the inspiration of the composer felt itself bound by the restrictions of this form. It was for Bach and Händel practically a free form. And the few other contemporaneous geniuses of a high order either experienced the same freedom in it, or found ways of evading its strictness by the production of various styles of fancy pieces, which, while conforming to the fugue form in their main features, were nevertheless free enough to be received by the musical public of that day with substantially the same satisfaction as a fantasia would have been received a century later. Roughly speaking, Bach and Händel exhausted the fugue. While Bach displayed his mental activity in almost every province of music, and like some one since, of whom it has been much less truthfully said, "touched nothing which he did not adorn," he was all his life a writer of fugues. His preludes are not fugues, and their number almost equals that of the fugues; but the operative principles were not essentially different—merely the applications of thematic development were different. Yet strange as it may seem, within thirty years from his death it became impossible to write fugues, and at the same time be free. Why was this?
A new element came into music, incompatible with fugue, requiring a different form of expression, and incapable of combination with fugue. That element was the people's song, with its symmetrical cadences and its universal intelligibility. Let the reader take any one of the Mozart sonatas, and play the first melody he finds—he will immediately see that here is something for which no place could have been found in a fugue, nor yet in its complement, the prelude of Bach's days. The same is true of many similar passages in the sonatas of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody, into which no thought of developing an idea enters. The melody flows or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the free expression, not of musical fantasy, as such (the unconscious play of tonal fancy), but the flow of melody, song, the soaring of spirit in some one particular direction, floating upon buoyant pinions, and in directions well conceived and sure. The symmetry of the people's song follows as a natural part of the progress. The spontaneous element of the music of the northern harpers now found its way into the musical productions of the highest geniuses. Henceforth the fugue subsides from its pre-eminence, and remains possible only as a highly specialized department of the general art of musical composition, useful and necessary at times, but nevermore the expression of the unfettered fancy of the musical mind.
The discovery of the secret of musical contrast, in the types of development, the thematic and the lyric, led to the creation of a new form, in which they mutually contrast with and help each other. That form was the Sonata, which having been begun earlier, was developed further by the sons of Bach, but which received its characteristic touches from the hands of Haydn and Mozart. This was the crowning glory of the eighteenth century—the sonata. A form had been created, into which the greatest of masters was even then beginning to breathe his mighty soul, producing thereby a succession of master works, which stand without parallel in the realm of music.
