The Masters and their Music Part 1

The Masters and their Music.

by W. S. B. Mathews.

PREFACE.

When a musical student begins to think of music as a literature and to inquire about individualities of style and musical expression, it is necessary for him to come as soon as possible to the fountainheads of this literature in the works of a few great masters who have set the pace and established the limits for all the rest. In the line of purely instrumental music this has been done by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The latter, who exercised a vast influence upon the manner of developing a musical thought and in the selection of the orchestral colors in which it can be expressed advantageously, powerfully stimulated all composers later than himself, nevertheless exerted this influence at second-hand, so to say, never having written purely instrumental movements, but merely dramatic accompaniments of one intensity or another. Hence, for our present purposes we may leave Wagner out altogether. Practically, down to about the year 1875, everything in instrumental music is original with the masters already mentioned, or was derived from them or suggested by them. Hence, in order to understand instrumental music we have, first of all, to make a beginning with the peculiarities, individualities, beauty, and mastership of these great writers. Such is the design of the following programs and explanatory matter.

My first intention has been to provide for the regular study of a musical club, in which the playing is to be contributed by active members designated in advance, the accessory explanations to be read from these pages. I have thought that the playing might be divided between several members, through which means the labor for each would be reduced, and, on the whole, an intimate familiarity with the music be more widely extended in the club. This method will have the disadvantage of leaving a part of every program less well interpreted than the others, whereby it will sometimes happen that valuable parts will not be properly appreciated. The advantages of this method, however, will outweigh the defects, since the awakening influence of a course of study of this character will greatly depend upon having as many members as possible practically interested in it.

While designed primarily for the use of a club, this course is equally well adapted to serve as a manual for individual study, in which case the individual himself will necessarily study every composition upon the list, and advance to a new program only after having completely mastered each and understood its relation to the remainder of the course. The only exception to this rule will be in the case where several programs of increasing difficulty are given. In this case the player should take the easiest; after mastering this, let him go on to the next most difficult, and, having succeeded with this, if possible let him attack the most difficult given. In case the latter should be impracticable for his technical resources, let him at least familiarize himself with the general features of all of the pieces mentioned, and get into their meaning and beauty as much as he can.

The course is also well adapted for use as a text-book in female seminaries and the like. In this case the forms of a musical club or definite musical organization had better be observed, and the meetings conducted weekly or bi-weekly. The teacher should remember that all the most important works, in which the maturity and mastership of the composer come to their fullest expression, should be studied by the most advanced members of the cla.s.s, according to their ability, and afterward played by the teacher himself, should he happen to possess the necessary technical qualifications. When the maturity of the teacher comes in to supplement the immaturity of the pupil, after the latter has done his best, the best results will be produced.

It will be noticed, and with disappointment to some, that the a.n.a.lyses and comments are free from so-called "poetry," and gush of every kind.

Particularly are they free from attempts to connect each piece with a story or poetic idea. In the opinion of the writer, the first step toward musical growth lies in learning to appreciate music, as music.

In instrumental music the development of a musical idea, the creation of musical symmetries, figures, and arabesques, and the legitimate building up of musical climaxes upon purely harmonic and rhythmic grounds are the phases of thought which interested the composer and gave rise to the composition. And while we may not attempt to a.s.sign limits to the inspiration and uplifting effects of great tone-poetry, it is quite certain that effects and influences of this kind are arrived at in the consciousness of the listener only when purely musical appreciation is active and deep. Without the background of living musical appreciation of this kind, the highest flights of the composer will pa.s.s as mere noise and fury, the hearer being in no whit uplifted or inspired. The uplifting which comes from the supposed a.s.sistance of a "story" or a poetic idea attached to the composition by some outside person is quite likely to fail of being the same in quality as that intended by the composer. Music is one thing, poetry another. While aiming at like ends,--the expression of spiritual beauty,--they move in different planes, which in the more highly organized minds are not proximate. The hearer specially gifted in music does not need the story or the poem; he finds it a hindrance.

The hearer specially gifted in poetic sensibility does not care very much for the music; to him it is merely a foreign speech, trying to say vaguely and imperfectly what the poetry has said definitely and well.

To put the immature and unspecialized hearer upon the poetic track as an aid to understanding a piece of music is, therefore, to place him at a disadvantage, leading him to expect phenomena which he will find only in literature; just the same as it would be a mistake to intrude pieces of music as explanations in a course in poetry or imaginative literature.

There is a time in both cases when these accessory or related provinces of mind can be called into friendly activity to the advantage of each other. In a poetic training this might be at the point where the motive of the poem is of that vague, mystical character--a mere soul-mood--which words express so imperfectly; or, in a course of music, when it is a question of a piece in which the composer has definitely attempted to express a poetical idea--as happens often in dramatic music, occasionally in symphonic poems and elsewhere. Here the outside help is needed not so much in order to explain the music as to supplement its shortcomings. But in the earlier stages of musical training in this higher sense, purely musical observation (not so much technical as esthetic) comes first, since without this all our rhapsodies upon the greater works signify nothing.

In the course of the book there are two essays embodied which are very important to the true mastery of the material. They are the essay upon "Moving Forces in Music," the first chapter, and that upon "The Typical Forms of Music," at the end of Part I. The first should be taken up where it occurs. The other may be left to the end or introduced at any stage of the discussion preferred by the student or by the conductor of the cla.s.s or club.

PART I.

THE MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC.

CHAPTER I.

MOVING FORCES IN MUSIC

The art of music shows the operation of several moving forces, or motives, which have presented themselves to the composer with sufficient force to inspire the creation of the works we have. The most important of these motives is the Musical Sense itself, since it is to this we owe the creation of the folk-song, with its pleasing symmetries, and the greater part of the vast literature of instrumental music.

Aside from the expression of the musical consciousness as such, the composer has been moved at times by the motive of Dramatic Expression.

In opera, for example, a great deal of the music has for its object to intensify the feeling of the scene. Accordingly, the composer carefully selects those combinations and sequences of tones which in his opinion best correspond with the dramatic moment they are intended to accompany. And since many of these moments are of extreme intensity, even tragic in character, very strong and intense combinations of tones are sometimes employed, such as could not be justified in an instrumental composition to be played independently of any ill.u.s.trative scenery or story.

There is a third motive of composition which also has had a large place in the development of instrumental music--viz., the Expression of the Individual Mood of the Composer; and the further we come down in the history of music, the more unrestricted we find the operation of this motive.

In the order of development, the purely musical is ent.i.tled to the first place; and it has also been the princ.i.p.al moving cause in the development of the art of music, from its universality--its power to act upon all grades of musical consciousness according to the ability of the individual musician. For example, the desire to realize in tones agreeable symmetries of rhythm and strong ant.i.theses of melodic sequence has given rise to the folk songs, all of which operate upon what are now very elementary lines, since they never exceed very simple and obvious rhythmic proportions and the most common chords of the key.

Recent investigations of the music of barbarous and half-civilized tribes show that the attainment of symmetry in the folk-song is a somewhat late experience. In many of the songs of the American Indians, for example, the first phrase moves practically along the track of the common chord; the second phrase frequently repeats the first, and in some instances the repet.i.tion goes on indefinitely without any answer or conclusion. In other cases a second phrase follows along the track of a closely related chord, but I have never noticed a case in which a third phrase appeared, corresponding to the first, after a digression of the second phrase into another chord.

Generally the rhythm runs out with a series of what might be called inarticulate drum-beats, as if an impulse existed still unsatisfied, blindly making itself felt in these insignificant pulsations; an impulse which a finer melodic sense would have satisfied by the proper ant.i.thesis in relation to the first phrase, thus leaving the melody and the rhythm to complete themselves together, as always takes place in civilized music.

The art of music seems to be an evolution from the sense of number and the feeling for the common chord, combined with a certain fondness for reverie, which in the earlier stages of the art was perhaps semi-religious in character, and in the later stages is more nearly related to the dance, until finally, in the highest stage, it is a reverie of the beautiful or the pathetic, pure and simple. The existence of the harmonic sense in rude natures, where music has not been heard, seems very difficult to account for, since, while it is true that any resonant tone contains the partial tones const.i.tuting the common chord, a resonant tone is very seldom heard among rude surroundings; and the discovery of the instinct of barbarous melodies to work themselves along the track of the chord is one of those unexpected finds of modern investigation which, while at first seeming to explain many things, are themselves excessively difficult to account for.

In a sense, there is no difference in kind between the folk-song and the most complete and highly organized art-music; that is to say, both alike are primarily due to the operation of simple musical instincts working off along the track of rhythmic proportion and harmonic relation. The vast difference in the grade of the results attained is due to the capacity of the composers. The simple man giving himself up to reverie and being gifted with a certain amount of musical feeling, produces a commonplace melody of serious import or of lively rhythm according to the nature of the reverie in which he indulges. This is to him a complete expression of his mood, and it is received as such by others in like state.

A Bach, a Beethoven, or a Schumann, giving himself up to tonal reverie, will also arrive at more or less symmetrical melodic forms proportionate to the mood of the composer and the idea which he is seeking to bring to expression; but instead of his reverie terminating at the end of one or two periods, as is invariably the case with the simple man (an additional idea having to be sought with much diligence and imperfect success), he goes on for a series of periods, and perhaps develops a quite long discourse, all having relation to the simple conception with which he started and to a fundamental mood. It is evident that, owing to the time consumed in writing out a musical discourse, the high composer will not have been able to complete his composition, or at least the written expression of it, at a single sitting; and upon examining it we do, in fact, find it to consist of successive chapters or paragraphs, each one of which might be taken as the expression of a mood, and all having reference to the central mood underlying the beginning, which by the arrangement of material necessarily becomes the characteristic mood of the entire work.

Moreover, Bach, Beethoven, or Schumann, in bringing their tonal mood to expression, will permit themselves all sorts of freedom in bringing together unexpected motives, rhythms, or chords, and the result, consequently, will be of a very different character from that attained by the composer of simple pieces, and will, therefore, be intelligible to those only who have the musical capacity to realize these more remote and less obvious relations.

Our composer also will have embraced in his tonal reverie, or at least in the extreme moments of it, all those extraordinary means of intense musical expression which the dramatic composer may have found out in his effort to represent the tragic and extreme moments of dramatic complication. And thus the tendency of the musical art is constantly toward the complex, and toward the bringing together of relations so subtle as to have been unintelligible to earlier musicians, and unintelligible now, at first hearing, to common ears, lacking in these finer perceptions of advanced musical endowment. It is to be noticed, however, that these extraordinary combinations and relations of the advanced composer occur only at remote intervals in the works of any of the great masters. The extremely intense or dramatic or tragic is not the staple of human life. They are incidents in a checkered and tempest-tossed existence, and the music representing these moods is also a little outside the range of the purely beautiful.

In one department of the higher art of music--viz., that of symphony--there has been a working-out of the taste for the symmetric, the well proportioned, and the agreeable sounding; in other words, the beautiful as to proportion, charm of melody, and the satisfactory in harmony. In symphony the tragic and the extremely dramatic have had but a limited realization, while the purely beautiful in tonal relation has been the main creative motive. This we find in Mozart and Beethoven to a remarkable degree.

The general color of instrumental music, or its increasing complexity and high flavor, has been very much influenced by the writers of songs, as well as by the dramatic composers writing for the stage. There have been a few great geniuses in the art of music who, while gifted with a wide musical fantasy of their own, have taken pleasure in deriving their inspiration from poetry, and have occupied a large part of their time as creative composers in setting to music such lyric texts as interested them. In this way Schubert, for example, wrote something like 700 songs, Schumann a considerable number, and there have been various other composers who have written extensively in this line. The experience of the song-writer has, on the whole, been of great use to instrumental music, since it has tended not alone to diversify the music by encouraging a freer and more graphic employment of tonal forms, but also to retain the melody within the compa.s.s suitable to the voice and to preserve the agreeable proportions of phrases, such as we already find in poetic meters. Still, the fact remains that for intensification and for the extravagant element in the higher art of music, the dramatic composer is the influence mainly to be thanked, since in opera all these things are done upon so much larger a scale and with so much greater intensity.

It is not easy in words to point out how extremely large a factor in art-music is the operation of the unconscious. Instinct governed the operation of Bach and Beethoven almost as much as it does the swimming of the swan or the flying of the pigeon. For although the instinct of tonal relations is not one of those universal endowments shared by every individual to the same degree, there have appeared in the art of music a series of remarkable geniuses who seem to have had within themselves the power to turn all kinds of moods and experiences into musical expression. What part of this was due to fortunate heredity, and what to environment, and how much to original genius, pure and simple, it is impossible to say. The nature of genius always remains a mystery. At the same time, the currency which the music of these masters has gained in the world, and still maintains, goes to show that the instinct which governed them in putting together tonal forms for expressing delight, and for operating upon the feelings of the hearer, is not different in essence from that of the common listener; since experience shows that all this music affords gratification to the great majority of individuals who can be brought to listen to it a few times.

Of course, it is not to be expected that a casual hearer, inattentive, it may be, and unaccustomed to remembering what he has heard, will be impressed by a long instrumental composition to the same degree as a practised hearer, and especially a hearer who has already followed the composition through several times before; but the longest symphony or sonata always contains a variety of moments which are intensely pleasing to the ordinary hearer listening seriously to them for the first time. The difference between the casual hearer and the more cultivated one is that with practice will come a perception of a larger number of these attractive moments, and finally, at last, the realization of the entire discourse as a one, having a central idea; in the same way as in a sermon a casual hearer notices here and there an idea which strikes him; then he goes off into reverie, and is only recalled by some other striking idea which attracts his attention, while the trained hearer may have followed the discourse entirely, and found it interesting from first to last.

Moreover, the repeated experience of hearing brings out in ordinary listeners a capacity which they had not previously realized--viz., the experience of feeling in connection with the music. We are still very far from understanding the relation between music and feeling. The most that is known about it as yet is that to a listener of even a very slight amount of experience the minor chord suggests unhappiness, while the major chord sounds brighter and more agreeable; a pleasant rhythm, somewhat lively, betokens cheerfulness; a slow and heavy rhythm betokens seriousness, perhaps sadness; but beyond this elementary beginning of musical feeling, which is common to the most insignificantly endowed individuality, there is a vast world of finer sensibilities connected with music. A certain chord, or succession of chords, or especially a certain melo-harmonic phrase, touches the sensitive ear with a peculiar thrill, and this happens over and over again, and continually in the more fortunate works of all the great masters, when followed by sympathetic hearers. The point in this connection which we have to notice is that the capacity of feeling to be touched and awakened by tonal incitations is practically universal as regards civilized man. The extent of the influence which music will exert varies enormously in individual cases, but from the fact that every normal hearer will be touched more and more by music with a little practice in hearing it; that the number of those who are extremely sensitive to this form of spiritual suggestion is much larger than is ordinarily supposed; and from the fact of this capacity in the average individual, and the universality of the admiration awakened by the works of the great geniuses in music, it is a fair conclusion that the future is destined to throw more light upon this obscure part of the psycho-musical capacity of mankind; and it is obvious, as said before, that the great geniuses whose works are demonstrated to contain this power to touch hearers had this endowment in an extraordinary degree, but not to such a degree as need place any bar upon the popular appreciation of their music, if a comparatively small amount of education has been given in hearing.

To sum up, then, the results arrived at in this discussion. The programs and discussions now about to be undertaken have been arranged for the purpose of a.s.sisting the listener to a recognition of the peculiarities and individual charms of the works of the masters represented, and also, incidentally, to afford the listener a certain education in the art of hearing, and, by bringing together strongly contrasted musical moments, to afford the musical feeling a strong incitation, in the hope of awakening in every listener this capacity of musical delight, when the sense of the beautiful and of the expressive is appealed to through exquisite tonal incitation.

All the music in these chapters, without exception, has been created upon musical grounds, since it is the instinctive following out of musical ideas which has operated through the greater part of them, while the pursuit of the highly dramatic and strongly marked has had but a small influence.

The higher musical fancy has many ways of expressing itself or of elaborating musical ideas, but there are two of its characteristic modes which the student will do well to observe at the start. These are what I call the "thematic" and the "lyric." The ordinary folk-song, which starts off with a melodic phrase, this phrase being partly answered, followed by a third phrase like the first, and then a final answer, is the general type of the lyric moment. The thematic is generally based upon a short phrase or melodic figure, and this figure is repeated over and over in a variety of ways and different chords and the like until a complete idea is formed from it. These two modes of construction are traced at greater length in the concluding essay in this work on "The Typical Musical Forms," and the student will do well to fortify himself from time to time by reference to that chapter.

In all the programs of this course there is one caution which the student will do well to observe: All kinds of technical a.n.a.lysis of art-works put the hearer in a mood essentially different from that necessary for properly enjoying the works as art. Every art work is intended to awaken an artistic delight after its kind. In painting, a delight in form and color, and in some a kind of suggestion or story by means of them. In music, a delight in tone and tonal relations and rhythm, and always a sense of tonal beauty, with a strong flavor of feeling awakened by means of them. This entire expression of musical masterworks belongs to the unconscious operation of mind, and the hearer who occupies himself with the effort to recognize all the various devices and artifices of the composer, and to follow the form as such, or who occupies himself mainly with the idea of the story which the composer is trying to tell, puts himself in a wrong att.i.tude for deriving the most complete gratification from the work. In a cultivated realization of the beauty of a great musical masterwork, these perceptions of technical skill on the part of the composer no doubt enter to some degree, but they are always more or less in the background, and form a part of the actual pleasure of hearing the symphony or the sonata scarcely more than the capital initials and punctuation marks enter into the enjoyment of a poem. All the incidents of punctuation and typography we take instinctively, and are conscious of them only when some one of them is missing and an error exists in the work. This is the case with music. Symmetry and flow of imagination are presupposed. Hence, whatever a.n.a.lyses may be made in the cla.s.s as a part of the operation of studying these different master-works, the end to be sought by the student is the enjoyment of the work as music; to take an active and lively pleasure in the melody; to feel the harmony and the rhythm; to enjoy the contrast of the different moods, and so on. Every piece in the entire list is a voice in which the composer speaks to us, and the question is not the How, but the What.

CHAPTER II.

BACH AND HaNDEL.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH.

Born March 21, 1685, at Eisenach.

Died July 28, 1750, in Leipsic.

Johann Sebastian Bach was the son of the city musician of Eisenach, and a descendant of about ten generations of musical Bachs. His father having died when the boy was young, the latter's brother, Johann Christoph, gave him lessons for some time, after which he studied with other masters of considerable celebrity, and at the age of seventeen he was engaged as violinist in the private orchestra of Prince John Ernst, of Saxe-Weimar. He held this place, however, for but a few months, leaving it to accept a more desirable one as organist in the new church at Arnstadt. During the time he held this position he made several journeys on foot to Lubeck to hear the famous Buxtehude play, and later paid the same compliment to another eminent organist. The most important of the early positions which Bach held was that of director of chamber music, and organist to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and here, after seven years' service, he was made chief concertmeister. In 1717 he left Weimar to accept a position as musical director at Kothen, where he had a better opportunity to express himself with orchestra.

In 1723 be became cantor of the St. Thomas School at Leipsic and music director of the university, as the successor of Johannes Kuhnau. In this position he had the direction of the music in the St. Thomas Church, where he had at his disposal an orchestra, organ, and two choirs, besides which he trained the school-children. He here wrote an enormous amount of church music, consisting of a very large number of cantatas for church service, of which first and last he seems to have produced five entire series for every festival Sunday in the year.

These cantatas were short oratorios consisting of choruses, solos, recitatives, instrumental movements, and were frequently of considerable elaboration. Many of them are now lost, but a very considerable number remain. He also composed five oratorios for the Good Friday season--Pa.s.sion music--of which three yet remain, the most famous one being the "St. Matthew's Pa.s.sion."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Joh. Sebastian Bach, Geo. Fred. Handel]

Bach was married twice, and had, in all, eleven sons and nine daughters, of whom six sons and four daughters survived him. As a practical musician Bach excelled upon the violin, the organ, and the clavier, and he left a very large number of works in all three of these departments, works which still remain the admiration of musicians the world over. His genius was unquestioned in his own lifetime, and the memory of it remained lively even during the fifty years following his death when very few of his works were accessible.

The most complete biography of Bach is the large work by Spitta, in three volumes, in which the entire life-history of this great master, and all the circ.u.mstances amid which he worked, his discouragements, and what he accomplished, have been traced with most patient and loving care.

The list of Bach's compositions includes three sonatas and three part.i.tas (generally cla.s.sed as six sonatas) for violin alone; six sonatas for violin and piano, a large quant.i.ty of chamber music of one sort and another, a few orchestral suites, and about ten large volumes of music for the clavier and for the organ.