Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 47

147.

PAINTED SKELETONS.-Painted skeletons are those authors who try to make up for their want of flesh by artistic colourings.

148.

THE GRAND STYLE AND SOMETHING BETTER.-It is easier to learn how to write the grand style than how to write easily and simply. The reasons for this are inextricably bound up with morality.

149.

SEBASTIAN BACH.-In so far as we do not hear Bach's music as perfect and experienced connoisseurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of the fugal style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic enjoyment), we shall feel in listening to his music-in Goethe's magnificent phrase-as if "we were present at G.o.d's creation of the world." In other words, we feel here that something great is in the making but not yet made-our mighty modern music, which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and counterpoint has conquered the world. In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on the threshold of modern European music, but turns from thence to look at the Middle Ages.

150.

HaNDEL.-Handel, who in the invention of his music was bold, original, truthful, powerful, inclined to and akin to all the heroism of which a _nation_ is capable, often proved stiff, cold, nay even weary of himself in composition. He applied a few well-tried methods of execution, wrote copiously and quickly, and was glad when he had finished-but that joy was not the joy of G.o.d and other creators in the eventide of their working day.

151.

HAYDN.-So far as genius can exist in a man who is merely _good_, Haydn had genius. He went just as far as the limit which morality sets to intellect, and only wrote music that has "no past."

152.

BEETHOVEN AND MOZART.-Beethoven's music often appears like a deeply emotional meditation on unexpectedly hearing once more a piece long thought to be forgotten, "Tonal Innocence": it is music about music. In the song of the beggar and child in the street, in the monotonous airs of vagrant Italians, in the dance of the village inn or in carnival nights he discovers his melodies. He stores them together like a bee, s.n.a.t.c.hing here and there some notes or a short phrase. To him these are hallowed memories of "the better world," like the ideas of Plato.-Mozart stands in quite a different relation to his melodies. He finds his inspiration not in hearing music but in gazing at life, at the most stirring life of southern lands. He was always dreaming of Italy, when he was not there.

153.

RECITATIVE.-Formerly recitative was dry, but now we live in the age of moist recitative. It has fallen into the water, and the waves carry it whithersoever they list.

154.

"CHEERFUL" MUSIC.-If for a long time we have heard no music, it then goes like a heavy southern wine all too quickly into the blood and leaves behind it a soul dazed with narcotics, half-awake, longing for sleep. This is particularly the case with cheerful music, which inspires in us bitterness and pain, satiety and home-sickness together, and forces us to sip again and again as at a sweetened draught of poison. The hall of gay, noisy merriment then seems to grow narrow, the light to lose its brightness and become browner. At last we feel as if this music were penetrating to a prison where a poor wretch cannot sleep for home-sickness.

155.

FRANZ SCHUBERT.-Franz Schubert, inferior as an artist to the other great musicians, had nevertheless the largest share of inherited musical wealth.

He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so that for a few centuries musicians will continue to _nibble_ at his ideas and inspirations. In his works we find a store of _unused_ inventions; the greatness of others will lie in making use of those inventions. If Beethoven may be called the ideal listener for a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the ideal troubadour.

156.

MODERN MUSICAL EXECUTION.-Great tragic or dramatic execution of music acquires its character by imitating the gesture of the great sinner, such as Christianity conceives and desires him: the slow-stepping, pa.s.sionately brooding man, distracted by the agonies of conscience, now flying in terror, now clutching with delight, now standing still in despair-and all the other marks of great sinfulness. Only on the Christian a.s.sumption that all men are great sinners and do nothing but sin could we justify the application of this style of execution to _all_ music. So far, music would be the reflection of all the actions and impulses of man, and would continually have to express by gestures the language of the great sinner.

At such a performance, a listener who was not enough of a Christian to understand this logic might indeed cry out in horror, "For the love of Heaven, how did sin find its way into music?"

157.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN.-Felix Mendelssohn's music is the music of the good taste that enjoys all the good things that have ever existed. It always points behind. How could it have much "in front," much of a future?-But did he want it to have a future? He possessed a virtue rare among artists, that of grat.i.tude without _arriere-pensee_. This virtue, too, always points behind.

158.

A MOTHER OF ARTS.-In our sceptical age, real devotion requires almost a brutal heroism of ambition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending of the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be possible for ambition-in its eagerness to be the last devotee of all the ages-to become the begetter of a final church music, as it has been the begetter of the final church architecture? (They call it the Jesuit style.)