Critical and Historical Essays
and this is why, when the same instrument was provided with
hammers instead of quills, the name was changed to _pianoforte_,
to indicate its power to modify the tone from soft to loud.
Naturally Haendel, who was a man of despotic tendencies,
could not long submit to the caprices of opera singers.
After innumerable conflicts with them, we find him turning
back to one of the older forms of opera, the oratorio.
Bach never troubled himself about an art from which he was so
widely separated both by training and inclination. Thus the
reformation of opera (I mean the old opera of which I have been
speaking) devolved upon Gluck. His early operas were entirely
on the lines of those of Hasse and Porpora. He wrote operas for
archduchesses ("Il Parnasso" was played by four archduchesses
and accompanied on harpsichord by the Archduke Leopold), and
was music master to Marie Antoinette at Vienna. It was owing
to these powerful influences that his art principles had an
opportunity to be so widely exploited. For these principles
were not new; they formed the basis of Peri's first attempt
at opera in 1600, and had been recalled in vain by Marcello in
1720. They were so simple that it seems almost childish to quote
them. They demanded merely that the music should always assist,
but never interfere with either the declamation or dramatic
action of the story. Thus by Gluck's powerful influence with
what may be termed the fashion of his day, he did much to
relegate to a place of minor importance the singer, who until
then had held undisputed sway. This being the case, the great
art of singing, which had allowed the artist the full control
and responsibility of opera, thus centering all upon the one
individuality, degenerated into the more subordinate role of
following the composer's directions.
It now became the duty of the composer to foresee every
contingency of his work, and it lay with him to give directions
for every detail of it. As a result, the singers, having
no longer absolute control but still anxious to display
their technical acquirements, gradually changed into that
now almost obsolete abomination, the "Italian opera singer,"
an artist, who, shirking all responsibility for the music and
dramatic action, neglected the composer so far as possible,
and introduced vocal pyrotechnics wherever he or she dared--and
their daring was great.
In the meantime, as Gluck was bringing in his reforms, songs
were gradually introduced into the _Schauspiel_ or drama, the
ill-fated brother of opera in Germany; and just as the grand
opera reached its highest point with Gluck, so this species of
melodrama grew apace, until we see its culmination in Weber's
"Freischuetz."
The good results of Gluck's innovations and also, to a certain
degree, its discrepancies, may be plainly seen in Mozart's
operas; for only too often in his operas Mozart was obliged to
introduce _fioriture_ of the poorest possible description in
situations where they were utterly out of place. This, however,
may not be entirely laid at the door of the exacting singer, for
we find these same _fioriture_ throughout his harpsichord music.
We may almost say that the union of drama and music was first
definitely given status by Mozart; for a number of his operas,
such as the "Schauspieldirektor," etc., were merely a form of
the German _Singspiel_, which, as I have said, culminated in
"Freischuetz."
Thus, at the beginning of our century we find two art forms:
First, grand opera of a strange nationality, and second, the
small but rapidly developing form of comedy or drama with music.
In order to show how Wagner evolved his art theories from
this material, we must consider to some degree the general
conditions of this period.
As late as 1853, Riehl wrote that Mendelssohn was the only
composer who had the German public, whereas others had only
a small section of it. For example, Schumann, whose music he
did not like, was accepted as a new Messiah in the Elbe River
district; "but who," he asks, "knows anything about him in the
south or west of Germany?" And as for Richard Wagner, who, he
says, is a man of extravagant ideas and a kind of phenomenon
of no consequence artistically, he asks, "who really knows
anything about him outside of the little party of fanatics
who profess to like his music (so-called)?" Its only chance of
becoming known, he says, is in the public's curiosity to hear
works which are rarely given. This curiosity, he continues,
will be a much more potent factor in his chance of becoming
known than all his newspaper articles and the propaganda of
his friend, Franz Liszt.
For the German opera there were half a dozen
_Boersenplaetze_--Berlin for the northwest, Hamburg for
the northeast, Frankfort for the southwest, Munich for the
southeast. As Riehl says, a success in Frankfort meant a
success in all the Frankfort clay deposit and sandstone systems,
but in the chalk formation of Munich it stood no chance. Thus
Germany had no musical centre. But after Meyerbeer found such
a centre in Paris, all other Germans, including Wagner, looked
to Paris for fame.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Vienna was the art centre;
nevertheless Gluck had to go to Paris for recognition.
Mendelssohn only succeeded by his _Salonfaehigkeit_. Always
respectable in his forms, no one else could have made music
popular among the cultured classes as could Mendelssohn. This
also had its danger; for if Mendelssohn had written an opera
(the lack of which was so bewailed by the Philistines),
it would have taken root all over Germany, and put Wagner
back many years. At the death of Mendelssohn, the Philistines
heralded the coming of a new German national school, founded on
his principles (formalism), one that would clarify the artistic
atmosphere of the turgid and anarchistic excesses of Wagner and
Berlioz and their followers. These critics found already that
Beethoven's melodies were too long and his instrumentation too
involved. They declared that the further music departed from
its natural simplicity the more involved its utterance became,
the less clear, and consequently the poorer it was. Music was
compared to architecture, and thus the more Greek it was, the
better; forgetting that architecture was tied to utilitarianism
and poetry to word-symbols, and that painting is primarily an
art of externals.
Riehl says that art is always in danger of ruin when its simple
foundation forms are too much elaborated, overlooking the fact
that music is not an art, but psychological utterance.
It needed all Wagner's gigantic personality to rise above this
wave of formalism that looked to the past for its salvation,
a past which was one of childish experimenting rather than of
aesthetic accomplishment. The tendency was to return to the
dark cave where tangible walls were to be touched by the hands,
rather than to emerge into a sunlight that seemed blinding.
XIX
ON THE LIVES AND ART PRINCIPLES OF SOME SEVENTEENTH AND
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY COMPOSERS
There is much of value to the student to be derived from a
study of the lives and art principles of the composers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To go back to an earlier
period would hardly be worth while, as the music composed in
those days is too much obscured by the uncertainty of tradition
and the inevitable awkwardness of expression that goes with
all primitiveness in art.
The first whom I would mention are Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince
of Venosa, and Ludovico Viadana.
The former was a nephew of the Archbishop of Naples, was born
in 1550, and died in 1613. His name is important from the fact
that he went boldly beyond Monteverde, his contemporary, in the
use of the new dissonant chords (sevenths and ninths) which
were just beginning to be employed, and adopted a chromatic
style of writing which strangely foreshadowed the chromatic
polyphonic style of the present century. He wrote innumerable
madrigals for a number of voices, but his innovations remained
sterile so far as the development of music is concerned, for
the reason that while his music often acquired a wonderful
poignancy for his time by the use of chromatics, just as often
it led him into the merest bramble bush of sound, real music
being entirely absent.
Viadana (1566-1645) has been placed by many historians of
music in the same category as Guido d'Arezzo (who is credited
with having invented solmization, musical notation, etc.),
Palestrina, Monteverde and Peri, who are famed, the one for
having discovered the dominant ninth chord, and the other
for the invention of opera. Viadana is said to have been the
first to use what is called a _basso continuo_, and even the
figured bass. The former was the uninterrupted repetition of
a short melody or phrase in the bass through the entire course
of a piece of music. This was done very often to give a sense
of unity that nowadays would be obtained by a repetition of
the first thought at certain intervals through the piece. The
figured (or better, ciphered) bass was an entirely different
thing. This device, which is still employed, consisted of
the use of figures to indicate the different chords in music.
These figures or ciphers were written over or under the bass
note on which the chord represented by the figures was to be
played or sung. A 5 over or under a bass note meant that with
that note a perfect major triad was to be sounded, considering
the note written as the root of the chord; a 3 was taken to
stand for a perfect minor triad; a 6 for the chord of the sixth
(first inversion of a triad), and 6/4 for the second inversion;
a line through a 5 or 7 meant that the triad was a diminished
fifth or a diminished seventh chord; a cross indicated a leading
tone; a 4 stood for the third inversion of the dominant seventh
chord. This system of shorthand, as it may be called, was and
is still of tremendous value to composers. In the olden days,
particularly, when many of the composers engraved their own
music for publication, it saved a great deal of labour. It is
probably not generally known that the engraving of music by
the composer was so common; but such was the case with Bach,
Rameau, and Couperin.
And this reminds me that the embellishments, as they were
called, which are so common in all harpsichord and clavichord
music, were also noted in a kind of shorthand, and for precisely
the same reason. The embellishments themselves originated
from the necessity for sustaining in some way the tone of
the instrument, which gave out little, dry, clicklike sounds;
if the melody were played in simple notes, these sounds would
mingle with the accompaniment and be lost in it. Therefore,
the embellishments served to sustain the tones of the melody,
and thus cause them to stand out from the accompaniment. Their
notation by means of symbols copied from the primitive _neumes_
vastly facilitated the work of engraving. Much confusion arose
in the notation of embellishments, owing to the fact that each
composer had his own system of symbols.
Alessandro Scarlatti and his son Domenico, both celebrated in
their day, are the next to demand attention. The former was
born about 1650 and died about 1725. He wrote many operas of
which we know practically nothing. His son was born about 1685
and died in 1757. He was the most celebrated harpsichord player
of his time; and although his style, which was essentially one
of virtuosity, was not productive of direct results, it did
nevertheless foreshadow the wonderful technical achievements
of Liszt in our own times. It is indeed a great pity that
Domenico Scarlatti's work did not bear more direct fruit in his
day, for it would have turned Mozart, as well as many others,
from the loose, clumsy mannerisms of the later virtuoso style,