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A MUSICAL TOUR THROUGH THE LAND OF THE PAST
* Lin
A MUSICAL TOUR
THROUGH THE LAND OF THE PAST
BY
ROMAIN ROLLAND
TRANSLATED BY
BERNARD MIALL
LONDON :
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD. BROADWAY HOUSE : 68-74 CARTER LANE, E.G.
1922
ML
310
PREFACE
THIS collection of essays is a sequel to my first series of Musicians of the Past* The greater number of these papers are devoted to an age of transition, in which the feeling, the aesthetic and the forms of our modern music were taking shape. In accordance with a phenomenon common enough in history, they are not, as a rule, the greatest artistic personalities who become the pioneers of the future. The Johann Sebastian Bachs tower too high above their time to influence it directly ; they stand outside their age ; they shed their beams only at a distance. It is the Telemanns, the Hasses, the Mannheim symphonists who launch new movements. I have tried to make Telemann live again in these pages. I shall speak later on of my love and admiration for Hasse.
The world has been extremely unjust to these masters. In their life-time their fame was perhaps excessive ; but the oblivion into which they have since fallen is surely much more so. Those who originate ideas, the Telemanns, for instance, and the " Mannheimers," have rarely the leisure to be profound. They sow to the four winds ; let us be grateful to them for the fruits which we gather
* The majority of these papers appeared in the Revue de Paris (ist July, 1900, I3th August, 190$, i$th February, 1906, i5th April, 1910). The article on " Pepys's Diary " was included in a volume of Melanges Hugo Riemann, published 1909. The study of " Tele- mann " is published for the first time.
VI.
Preface
to-day. Do not demand of them the perfect pleni- tude of autumn, for these were the capricious and fertile spring. To each his reward ! That of the musicians who were the innovators of the first half of the eighteenth century was ample enough, since they prepared the way for Mozart and Beethoven.
R.R.
NOTE BY TRANSLATOR
THE numerous quotations from Pepys's Diary in the essay upon the genial Carolean amateur are taken from Mr. H. B. Wheatley's admirable edition (in eight volumes, 1913), published by Messrs. G. Bell & Sons. For various reasons, including the absence of references, the far more numerous quotations from the works of Dr. Burney have been re-translated from the French of the version employed by the author. B.M.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE V.
I. A HUMOROUS NOVEL BY AN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY MUSICIAN I
II. AN ENGLISH AMATEUR (PEPYS'S DIARY) 21
III. A PORTRAIT OF HANDEL 45
IV. THE ORIGINS OF THE " CLASSIC " STYLE
IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC 69
V. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FORGOTTEN MASTER : TELEMANN,THE SUCCESSFUL RIVAL OF J. S. BACH 97
VI. METASTASIO I THE FORERUNNER OF
GLUCK - 145
VII. A MUSICAL TOUR ACROSS EUROPE IN
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY - 163
I. ITALY II. GERMANY
A HUMOROUS NOVEL BY AN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY MUSICIAN
Two centuries ago the Germans were already filling Naples, Rome and Venice with their princes, their merchants, their pilgrims, their artists and their tourists. But Italy was not then passive, as she afterwards became. She exported fourfold what was imported across her frontiers ; and she did not fail to repay to Germany the visits which she received. She profited by the exhaustion caused by the Thirty Years' War to flood Bavaria, Hesse, Saxony, Thuringia and Austria with her works of art and her artists. Music, above all, and the theatre were left to her. Cavalli, Bernabei, Steffani and Torri reigned in Munich ; Bontempi and Pallavicino in Dresden ; Cesti, Draghi, Ziani, Bononcini, Caldara and G. Porta in Vienna ; Vivaldi was Kappelmeister in Hesse- Darmstadt and Torelli in Brandenburg-Anspach. Multitudes of libretto-writers and scene-painters, of sopranos, contraltos and castrati, of violinists and harpsichord players, of players on the lute, the flute, the guitar and instruments of every kind, followed these leaders. Their great engine of war was the Opera, the supreme creation of the Renaissance in its decline ; and their centre of propaganda was
2 A Musical Tour
Dresden, whose Italian theatre, founded in 1662, enjoyed a European celebrity for a whole century, until the departure of Hasse. Leipzig, the old Saxon city, by no means escaped the plague. In 1693, the Opera proceeded to plant itself in the town, in the very stronghold of German art ; its founders made no secret of the fact that they meant to make it a branch of the Dresden Opera, and in a few years they had carried their point. Opera music was no longer content with the theatre ; it made its way into the Church, the last refuge of German thought. Its brilliant pathos soon superseded the seriousness of the old masters ; the crowd thronged to these dramatic recitals ; the singers and pupils of the Thomaskirche, deserting their posts, went over to the other camp, and a void proceeded to form about the last defenders of the national tradition.
There was in the Thomaskirche in those days a Cantor (Kappelmeister) whose name was Johann Kuhnau. This man, a most attractive type of a broadly developed genius, such as that heroic age of art produced, was, says Mattheson, " very learned in theology, jurisprudence, rhetoric, poetry, mathe- matics, foreign languages and music." He had defended theses in law, one of which was in Greek ; he was an advocate ; he cultivated Greek and Hebraic philosophy, translated works from the French and Italian, and himself wrote original works, both scientific and imaginative. Jacob Adlung says " that he did not know whether Kuhnau did greater honour to music or to science." As a musician he is quite incontestably one of the pillars of the old German art. Scheibe regarded him, with
A Humorous Novel 3
Reiser, Telemann and Handel, as one of the four greatest German composers of the century. He did indeed possess a depth of feeling, and at the same time a beauty of form, a grace compounded of strength and lucidity, which even to-day would make his name a household word — if society were capable of taking a genuine interest in music without being urged to do so by fashion. Kuhnau was one of the creators of the modern sonata ; he wrote " suites " for the clavier which are models of spirited grace, occasionally tinged with reverie. He com- posed some descriptive poems — " programme music " — under the title of Biblical Sonatas ; cantatas, sacred and profane ; and a Passion, which makes him, if we are to tell the truth, not only the immediate predecessor of Bach at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, but also, in a great many respects, his indisputable model.
Here are the terms in which he presents to the public one of his principal musical works. They will give some idea of his quiet, benign graciousness and his generous nature. He begs indulgence for the fantastic spirit in which his charming sonatas were written (Clavier-Fruchte aus 7 Sonaten) ; he says that he has employed "the same liberty as that employed by Nature, when, hanging the fruits on the trees, she gives one branch less or more than another ... It did not take me long to produce them : it was with me just as it is in certain coun- tries where, thanks to the unusual heat, everything grows with such rapidity that the harvest may be reaped a month after sowing. While writing these seven sonatas I experienced such eagerness that without neglecting my other occupations I wrote one every day, so that this work, which I began on
4 A Musical Tour
a Monday, was completed by the Monday of the following week. I mention this circumstance merely so that no one shall expect to find in them rare and exceptional qualities. It is true that we are not always craving for extraordinary things ; we often eat the simplest fruits of our fields with as much pleasure as the rarest and most exquisite foreign fruits, although the latter may be very costly and come from a great distance. I know there are gourmets among the amateurs of music who will accept nothing save that which comes from France or Italy — above all when fortune has permitted them to breathe the air of those countries. My fruits are at the disposal of all ; those who do not find them to their taste have only to seek elsewhere. As for the critics, they will not spare them ; but the venom of the ignorant is powerless to injure them more than a cool dew will harm ripened fruit."
That same year (1700) Kuhnau published his noble and expressive Biblische Historien, and a novel which we shall consider at greater length. He was thirty-three years of age. He stood alone in the midst of Italians and " Italianisers." His friends and pupils had deserted him. He witnessed the decline of German music and made unavailing efforts to check its fall. In vain did he appeal to the City Council to protect public education, jeopard- ised not only by the spell of foreign art but also by the bait of cheap pleasures and easy profits, which debauched the youth of the Leipzig schools, drawing them in flocks to the Opera. The Council decided against Kuhnau and in favour of success. On Kuhnau's death in 1722 Italian opera was supreme in Germany. It would seem that such injustice on the part of Fate must have filled the old master's
A Humorous Novel 5
heart with bitterness. But the artists of those days did not cultivate their melancholy ; and Kuhnau seems never to have lost his bantering geniality in respect of hostile men and things. He knew the world, and was not in the least surprised that charlatans should have precedence over honest men. " People behave, as regards the artists who have newly arrived in a town, as they do in respect of fresh herring ; everybody wants to eat them, and spends on them much more money than on the better and choicer dishes which he is accustomed to see on his table." But as he was a believer, not only in religion, but in art, he had no misgivings as to the eventual triumph of his cause ; and in the meantime he cheerfully avenged himself upon stupidity and ignorance by exhibiting them in a satirical novel entitled Der Musicalische Quack-Salber (The Musical Charlatan).*
This curious book, published in Dresden in the year 1700, and very well known in the eighteenth century, was preserved for us by only two examples, one in the Royal Library of Berlin and the other in the City Library of Leipzig, when Herr Kurt Benn- dorf conceived the idea of republishing it in Herr Sauer's collections of Deutsche Liter aturdenkmaeler."\
Written before its time, in lively, lucid German, under French influence, full of short, vigorous phrases, intermingled with French and Italian words, this little volume can still be read with pleasure. It is full of good nature and sparkling with
* Der Musicalische Quack-Salber, nicht alleine denen vorstaendi- gen Liebhabern der Music, sondern auch alien andern welche in dieser Kunst keine sonderbahre Wissenschaft haben, in einen kurtzweiligen und angenehmen Historie zur Lust und Ergetzligkeit beschrieben, von Johann Kuhnau. — Dresden, Anno 1700.
f Berlin, Behr, 1900.
6 A Musical Tour
intelligence. Only a few touches of pedantry, the malady of the period, now and again slightly mar this endearing countenance. There is much to be learned from these many-coloured pictures of seventeenth century life in Saxony. They shed a light on one of the most interesting periods of German history — the rapid convalescence of the country after the Thirty Years' War, and the forma- tion of the great classic century of music.
The hero of the novel is a Suabian adventurer, from the neighbourhood of Ulm, who, profiting by Germany's infatuation for Italy, passed himself off as an Italian in his own country. He had spent scarcely a year in Italy, and had filled a very humble situation there, as copyist or famulus to a few celebrated musicians ; but no more than this was needed to persuade him that the genius of his masters had descended upon him. He was very careful, however, to avoid putting the matter to the test in Italy, knowing that he would find it difficult to get his pretensions accepted in Rome or Venice ; he crossed the Alps, relying upon the ingenuous simplicity of his compatriots and their servile respect for all that was foreign.
He makes straight for Dresden, the centre of Italian- ism, the home of the Opera. He begins by travesty- ing his name ; from an insulting nickname applied to his father (Theuer Affe — precious monkey) he evolves the name of a respectable Neapolitan family : Caraffa. One of the eccentricities of the age was to give German names a French or Latin disguise. Kuhnau castigates this absurdity with the sturdy commonsense of a Moli£re. "We may
A Humorous Novel 7
excuse those on whose backs these foreign appella- tions have been fastened by ridiculous parents ; they may be forgiven for retaining them. But those who of their own initiative falsify their names and create a new race for themselves deserve the fate which befell the gentleman whose name was Riebener but who called himself Rapparius : when he sought as heir to claim his brother's estate, the judge rejected his claim, saying that in the petition which he had addressed to him he had admitted himself to be 'incontinent* (Rapparius), and therefore could not lay claim to the inheritance. Many other madmen have disguised themselves in French names. I used to know one whose name was Hans Jelme. As his clothes and his manners and so forth were all in the French fashion, he wished to ensure that his name should match them. As a matter of fact his knowledge of French was confined to these words : ' Monsieur, je suis votre tres humble servi- teur.' But it was absolutely essential that his name should become French. And farther, as he had a great desire to be a gentleman, he thought that while he was changing his name there would be no additional difficulty in adorning it a little by the addition of the particle. He therefore called himself Jean de Jelme. But he had not reflected that the German pronounciation would turn this into Schand-Schelm (infamous scoundrel, dirty rascal) so that he was despised and derided by all. I wish it were so with all those who blush at their German names and commit forgeries to change them ; they deserve that Germany should blush for them in return and hurl them across her frontiers with other forgers/'*
* Der Musicalische Quack-Salber, Ch. vii.
8 A Musical Tour
Kuhnau was as one crying in the wilderness. It was enough for a Theuer Affe to baptize himself Caraffa and to murder a few words of Italian, and the musical world of Dresden hastened to welcome him. " They were all of that absurd species which believes that a composer is a simpleton if he has not been to Italy, and that the air of foreign countries endows an artist with every perfection, after the fashion of the Lusitanian winds, which, according to Pliny, fecundate mares/' * Caraffa, moreover, employs ingenious expedients to arouse and stimulate the curiosity of the public. He has letters posted to him from various quarters of Europe with sonorous addresses : All' Illustrissimo Signore, il Signor Pietro Caraffa, maestro incomparabile di musica ; or in German : Dem WoM-Edlen, Besten und Sinn- reichen Herrn Pietro Caraffa, Hochberuhmten Italiaen- ischen Musico, und unvergleichlichen Virtuosen. The address of his lodging is almost always for- gotten, as though by an oversight ; so that the postman has to run from house to house, inquiring whether anyone knows " the Orpheus of this age," " the incomparable virtuoso.1' Thus in a few days no one is ignorant of his name and he is popular before he has appeared.* The Collegium Musicum of Dresden sends him a deputation, invites him to attend its sessions, addresses him in speeches of emphatic welcome, such as are made on the entry of a prince. Concerts are given in his honour. Those responsible for them beg him to take part in them. Caraffa allows them to entreat him ; despite some technical skill on the theorbo and the guitar his talent is more than indifferent. But he is care- ful not to squander it and discovers pretexts to
* Op. cit., Ch. viii.
A Humorous Novel 9
postpone the moment of performing in public. He has, he says, a marvellous voice, but he can sing only Italian words ; and the Collegium has only German scores. His powers as a violinist are unique, but a jealous rival, attempting to assassinate him, has crippled his hand by the stab of a dagger ; and he must wait some months before he can use it. He agrees, however, to accompany a concerto on the harpsichord, having remarked that the score was of the simplest. But in order to do him honour he is given a difficult piece. Immediately he begins to criticise the harpsichord ; it is to the incomparable art of composition that he has applied all his genius. If he amuses himself on occasion by strumming on the clavier it is only because he is obliged to accom- pany himself when he sings one of his compositions. But this is one of his minor pastimes. Besides, Italian music for the clavier is simple and has none of those fantastic complications in which German taste delights. After all this ado he sits at the harpsi- chord, plays a few insipidly correct chords as a prelude, and on the pretext that he has a cold he sets out a couple of snuff-boxes, one on either hand. " When he saw difficult passages for the right hand ahead of of him he quietly took snuff from the right-hand snuff-box. When the rapid passages were in the bass he took snuff from the left-hand box ; In this way the difficulties were always evaded ! " *
Kuhnau has given us a very good description of the Saxon character, its admixture of candour and shrewdness, its heavy, bantering geniality. These worthy folk who go to hear Caraffa with a touching and absurd desire to respect and admire him are too good musicians not to be aware of the harpsichord-
* Op. cit.t Ch. ii.
io A Musical Tour
player's lack of talent ; but their indulgence endeav- ours to find excuses for it. It is difficult to shake their confidence ; but as soon as a suspicion finds its way into their worthy minds nothing can get it out again. They inspect the bogus Italian, all unknown to him, with conscientious deliberation ; and then, when they are at last convinced, instead of becoming indignant with the charlatan and expelling him from their midst, they enact a little comedy at his expense.
They encourage him to lie, to boast, to exhibit his foolish pretensions, and laugh in their sleeves while feigning to admire him, until the moment when Caraffa, in consternation, realises that they have been laughing at him for weeks. In this way they induce him, despite his prudence, to betray his in- significance, by showing them some of his works ; and to ensure that he shall not have recourse to his usual method of composition, which is one of shame- less copying, they succeed in shutting him into a dressing-room and watching him from outside. " Caraffa is working with all his might. He hums, he drums with his hands, he raps on the table, he sings, he beats time with his head and feet. No working-man occupied in the most laborious trade toils as he does. After an hour and a half of this the sweat is pouring over his face and back, and he has not yet thought of a melody. Now he tries to set pen to paper ; he dips it in the ink ; he writes, but always erases what he has written ; he spoils paper, tears it up and begins again. He tries another method ; he rises and marches furiously across the room as though he intended to break down the doors and the walls ; this continues for a good quarter of an hour. Finally he resorts to the
A Humorous Novel n
superstition of unlucky gamblers, who believe that in order to recapture their luck they must change their place and take another chair. He leaves the table and the benches and sits on the plank floor. He had brought to his labours all the energies of his body, and never noticed that it was nearly mid-day and that his lamp was still burning. At last the melodies of four well-known songs occurred to him : Bonsoir jardinier, Damon vint en profonde pense'e, Une belle dame habite en ce pays, Elle repose. Having once suffered from his poverty he now suffers from abundance ; he does not know which of these beautiful airs will best adapt itself to the given text, and, above all, which would be the least recognis- able. He is on the point of settling the matter by casting dice ; then he decides to blend them together, or rather to juxtapose them/' * — We can imagine how the musicians of Dresden delighted in this absurdity. At Leipzig, whither Caraffa goes next, the citizens and students make sport of him in a crueller fashion ; they set him and another ridiculous musician by the ears, exciting them to burlesque fury, and finally subjecting both to the judgment of a grotesque tribunal, a mythological and facetious masquerade, by which the two simpletons are duped, and which recalls the "Ceremony" scene in the Bourgeois gentilhomme.\
Defeated, derided, scoffed at, Caraffa is not greatly perturbed. " Any other man in his position would have had a thousand reasons for being miserable on reflecting upon his precarious situation and his shame. Caraffa, forced to escape hurriedly from Dresden, is as little concerned as a charlatan who, being unmasked in one country, reflects : " Bah !
* Op. cit., Ch. xvii. f Op. cit.t Ch. xlv.-xlviii.
12 A Musical Tour
there are other countries in the world ; if one is lost there are ten to discover ! You have only to push on, and it will be some little while before other towns discover your ignorance ! Thus one is sure of never going to bed supperless and of always having a coat to one's back/'* Everywhere, as he journeys on, he makes free with the table, the cellar and the bed of the Cantors, organists and musicians of the petty States, whom he dazzles by his boasting. He exploits in wholesale fashion the absurd amateurs, the ignorant tradesmen who entertain artists in their desire to pass for connoisseurs. He instals himself in the country houses of rustic squires who, suffering from tedium, are anything but exacting as regards the quality of his music and his jests ; he fills his purse and his belly until the moment when he becomes aware that he is beginning to weary his hosts ; then he decamps, promptly, without demanding his wages, but not without occasionally carrying off a a few silver spoons and forks. He despoils the poor village schoolmasters of their savings, with the promise of enabling them, in a year's time, to become kapellmeister at some princely Court ; and he laughs in the faces of his dupes when they come to him afterwards, weeping and cursing, to demand the return of their money. If one of them takes the jest ill and lodges a complaint, that is his affair : Caraffa is acquainted with the delays of the German law-courts.
Lastly, the rascal has one support which never fails him and consoles him for his mortifications : the women. They are not always seductive, but they are always seduced. Long before the Kreutzer Sonata, Kuhnau had noted the ravages which
* Op. cit.t Ch. xxv.
A Humorous Novel 13
music, and above all the performer, commits in the feminine heart ; and he gives some amusing instances. The most mirth-provoking and the completest of these is that of the chatelaine of Riemelin (Hornitz), which I should like to relate, if this story, more Gallic than Teutonic, were not a little too undraped. Its hero, moreover, is not Caraffa but another lute- picker, the former playing but a secondary part in it.* But Caraffa is himself a Don Juan. He conquers the hearts of the Roman ladies with a sonata of his own composition. " They raved over it ; it rained kisses and meaning glances. Never was my phiz thus feted. "f Hardly has he arrived in Leipzig but he turns the head of the prettiest girl in the town — beautiful, impressionable, wealthy and a good musician ; she loses all judgment and all discretion so soon as Caraffa begins to strum on the clavier and sing with his raucous voice. When the father, a substantial merchant, by name Pluto, learns of the intrigue, he is ready to burst with rage ; he reviles his daughter and turns the rascal out of his house. None the less, the lovers continue to meet, by night, in his garden ; there Caraffa sings scenes from Orfeo,% comparing himself with its hero ; the girl is quite ready to play Eurydice and to escape from the house of Pluto ; but at the last moment there appears, most seasonably, a strapping wench of a jailor's daughter whom Caraffa got with child during a certain sojourn of his in a Zittau prison to which he was sentenced for swindling. She takes the seducer by the throat, shouting at the top of her voice that he must marry her. In the midst of
* Op. cit., p. 28. f Op. cit., p. ii.
J Op. cit., Ch. xxxix., xlv., 1.
14 A Musical Tour
the uproar the young " Plutonian " makes her escape, never to return.
* * *
These extravaganzas are enacted against a real background, accurately observed ; there are scenes from the law-courts and the fair, with quacks in the market place, peasants in the tavern, squires in their country houses, burgesses at table or engaged in business ; and the language and manners of each class are always humorously recorded. In the foreground is the crowd of musicians and students. In each of these Saxon cities a Collegium Musicum is established. This is a society of all the musicians in the town, who meet regularly once or twice a week in a special hall. Thither each repairs with his instrument ; and two of the members, by turns, make it their business to provide the Collegium with musical compositions : concertos, sonatas, madrigals and arias. At these meetings there are long discussions on the art of music. They set given words to music ; they indulge in friendly conversation. Sometimes the Collegium gives banquets, at the close of which various compositions are played, serious or humorous. It is the exception if these musicians are unable both to play an instru- ment and to sing. They are, however, by no means professional performers ; they are burgesses who have other occupations. He in whose house they meet in Dresden is the collector of taxes.*
Music has likewise its place in the Universities and the Collegia oratoria. At that of Leipzig we hear of an Actus oratorius upon music, which is concluded by an instrumental concert. Two students deliver
* Op. cit.t Ch. xix.
A Humorous Novel 15
orations, one in celebration and the other in con- demnation of music.* It is not astonishing to hear music worthily praised by a great musician, but it is remarkable to find him making accusations which strike home and give evidence of a penetrating purview of his age. — " Music," he says, " diverts us from serious studies ; it deprives the country of many minds which have might been busied in its service. It is not without reason that the politicians favour music ; they do so for reasons of State. It diverts the people's thoughts ; it prevents them from examining the government's cards. Italy is an example of this : her princes and ministers have allowed her to become infected by quacks and musicians so that they may carry on their business without being disturbed." f — And the example of Italy is assuredly well chosen ; for if it is true that by music she prolonged her glory and extended her influence over Europe, it was also by music and in music that she finally destroyed her moral and political abilities. Of the Italy of the eighteenth century we might say, with a little modification, what Ammienus Marcellinus said as long ago as the period of the great invasions : " It is a pleasure resort. One hears there nothing but music, and in every corner is the tinkling of strings. Instead of thinkers one meets only singers, and virtue has made way for the virtuosi."
As to what an Italian virtuoso might be about the year 1700, and the mental vacuity of which he was capable, Caraffa provides us with a striking example, even though a trifle exaggerated. Nothing interests him apart from music, and all that interests him in music is virtuosity. He is not acquainted with * Op. cit., p.p 43-44. t Op. cit., Ch. xliii.
16 A Musical Tour
the famous composers of this time ; he takes Rosen- miiller for an Italian. He is an ignoramus in respect of harmony ; he does not know what a contrapunto semplice o doppio is.* He can talk only of his lute, his violin, his guitar, and above all of himself, himself, always himself. Whatever the subject of discussion, whether war, or trade, or a fine sermon, or a cold in the head, he always finds a means of leading the conversation to himself, and always refers to himself in the third person : " What does my Caraffa do ? " "Poor Caraffa l"f- Apart from his concerts the rest of the world is a void. " He scarcely knew whether London and Stockholm were in Holland or in France, whether the north were ruled by the Turks and the Sublime Porte were Spanish. His brain was like a cupboard, one shelf of which contains a few articles and the others none at all." } In him music had produced a monster. They abounded in the Italy of the eighteenth century. They are not unknown even to-day ; and no country is without them.
In the Germany of those days music had not quite the same disadvantages. It found a counterweight in the philosophical or literary studies to which it was often a supplement. It was by no means practised as an empty amusement. The greater composers of the eighteenth century — Schutz, Kuhnau, Handel — received a solid education ; they seriously studied jurisprudence, and it is a note- worthy fact that they seem to have hesitated for some time before becoming musicians by profession. An Italian virtuoso of the eighteenth century is
* Op. cit., Ch. xix. f Op. cit., Ch. xxvi.
J Op. cit.t Ch. xlii.
A Humorous Novel 17
merely a tinkling cymbal. In a German musician reason retains its rights, even over music. But this virile intelligence was beginning to allow itself to be impaired by the seductions of Italy.
In Dresden and Leipzig, as in Florence and Rome, Kuhnau saw princes becoming the patrons of the sensuous and demoralising art which was the natural ally of despotism. His novel affords us a proof of the irresistible attraction which the Italian virtuoso exercised upon all classes of society. When Caraffa puts up at a country inn he is confident of meeting with the same welcome as in the homes of the wealthy city merchants.* The public taste was sick.
But Kuhnau was too conscious of his strength to be seriously alarmed. He sees the evil but laughs at it, confident that it will run its course. His unembittered optimism goes so far as to foresee the conversion of the offenders. Caraffa, at the end of the novel, is touched by the remonstrances of a worthy priest, and amends his life ; and if this repentance is not very probable in such a character we owe to it, at all events, some noble pages in which the author writes of the true virtuoso and the happy musician : " Der wahre Virtuose tmd gluckselige Musicus.""\
Of him he requires much. With regard to music, he expects the composer to familiarise himself with all instruments and the singer or the instrumentalist (and above all the harpsichord-player) to be a trained composer. But this professional education is not enough. Kuhnau expects the composer to have some general scientific knowledge, above all of
* Op. cit.y Ch. xxxviii. | Op. cit.t Ch. liii., Ixiv.
i8 A Musical Tour
mathematics and physics, which are the basis of music, " welche gleichwohl der Music fundament ist; " * and he requires that he shall have meditated upon his art, and shall be acquainted with the theorists of music, not only of his own time but of the past and especially of antiquity ; he will not hear of his following Caraffa's example, and taking no interest in history and politics and the life of his own time. But these intellectual qualities would be nothing without moral qualities. A virtuoso will not fully deserve the noble name of Virtu unless the virtue of his art is embellished by the virtue of his life. As St. Augustin says : " Cantet vox, cantet vita, cantent facta." Let his work be consecrated, not to success, but to the glory of God. He must not think of the public, the public taste and public applause. " If you sing in such wise that you please the people rather than God, or if you seek the commendation of another human being rather than that of God, you are selling your voice, and you make it no longer yours but his."f Let the artist, then, be modest before the face of God ; but let him at the same time be conscious of his worth. A skilled musician who is conscious of his skill should not be too humble or live in a state of eclipse. It is not permissible for him to seek obscurity and retirement if he has something to say to the world. A man who has gifts and keeps them concealed gives proof of a poor character which does not trust the mighty wings that God has given him wherewith to soar aloft. It is the action of a craven, who dreads
* Op. cit., Ch. xlii.
t " Si sic cantas, ut placeas Populo, magis quam Deo, vel ut ab alio laudem quaeras, vocem tuam vendis, et facis earn non tuam, sed suam."
A Humorous Novel 19
effort ; and perhaps there is in it likewise a certain amount of ill-feeling, an unconfessed jealousy which is not willing to share its treasures with others, " as dying stags/' according to Pliny, " conceal and bury their antlers that they may not serve as medicine for human beings." Musical folk are only too often constituted thus. Some of them, when they possess a fine composition, will part with the very shirts on their backs rather than divulge a note of it. Let the artist beware of this sordid economy in respect of his goods, his ideas, his energies ! Let him scatter them generously about him, without being vain because of them, referring all glory to its Divine source. Let him do all the good of which he is capable. If he receives no thanks (which is the rule in this world) his clear conscience will be his reward ; it will give him a foretaste of the celestial pleasure which awaits him after this life, when he will be summoned to the chapel of the Almighty's castle (Schlosscapelle) lt where the angels and the seraphim play music of a perfect sweetness."*
There is in these ideas, as in the whole book, a balanced judgment, a self-confidence, a hidden strength which explain the tranquillity with which the old German masters of the eighteenth century — such men as Schiitz, Johann Christian Bach, Johann Michael Bach, Pachelbel and Buxtehude regarded the future. They had measured the rest of the world, and their own powers. They awaited their time.
For Germany the hour has struck ; it is already a thing of the past. What a contrast between the feverish excitement displayed by the German
* Op. cit., Ch. liii.
20 A Musical Tour
artists of the close of the nineteenth century and the calm plenitude of bygone ages ! Victories that are too complete consume the spirit of the victors ; when their first intoxication has abated they break the mainspring of the will, depriving it of its motive power. The triumphant genius of a Wagner laid waste the future of German music. The quiet strength of a Kuhnau embraced the idea of the future destinies of German art, and the presentiment, as it were, of his great successor : Johann Sebastian Bach.
II
AN ENGLISH AMATEUR (PEPYS' DIARY).
NOTHING gives us a pleasanter idea of musical life in the English society of the Restoration than Pepys' Diary. In this we perceive the place which music held in the home of an intelligent citizen of London.
Samuel Pepys is a well-known figure : I will con- fine myself to recounting the principal events of his life. The son of a tailor, he was born in London in 1633, and attached himself, to begin with, to the fortunes of Lord Montagu,* Earl of Sandwich. A Liberal, and in touch with the Republicans, after Cromweirs death, under the Restoration, he became clerk to the Exchequer, f and subsequently clerk of the Acts to the Admiralty. He retained this post until 1673, and while holding it rendered great services to the English Navy ; with energetic probity he restored order, economy and discipline therein during the critical period of the Plague, the Fire of London and the war with Holland. He was highly esteemed by the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of York, later James II. Nevertheless, he was calumniated
* Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich. His mother married Pepys' grandfather (Translator).
f In the Army Pay Office, under Sir George Downing (Trans- lator).
22 A Musical Tour
at the time of the Papist conspiracy, accused of Catholicism and sent to the Tower. He succeeded in clearing himself and was re-appointed to the Navy Council. He remained Secretary to the Admiralty, and high in James' favour, until 1688. After the expulsion of the Stuarts he retired from the Government, but his activity was unabated until his death in 1703. He did not cease to interest himself in letters, the arts and the sciences. In 1684 he was appointed President of the Royal Society. He collaborated in various learned volumes. Magdalen College, Cambridge, possesses his collection of manuscripts : memoirs, engravings, documents relating to the Navy, and five volumes of old English ballads collected by himself; lastly, his Diary, in which he noted, in a shorthand of his own inven- tion, all that he did, day by day, from January, 1659 (1660) to May, 1669. This Diary, with that of his friend, Evelyn, is the most lifelike collection existing of contemporary data relating to the England of his period. In these pages I shall consider the entries relating to music. * * *
This Secretary to the Navy, this conscientious statesman, was a passionate lover of music ; to music he devoted a part of his days. He played the lute, the viol, the theorbo, the flageolet and the recorder,* and to some extent the spinet. It was the custom, among distinguished citizens, to have in their homes a collection of musical instruments,
* A flute with a mouth-piece, having eight holes, one of which is covered with a thin membrane : — " To Drumbleby's, and there did talk a great deal about pipes, and did buy a recorder, which I do intend to learn to play on, the sound of it being, of all sounds in the world, most pleasing to me." — Pepys* Diary, 2nd April, 1668.
An English Amateur 23
notably a case of six viols, in order to give concerts. Pepys had his little museum of instruments ; he flattered himself that they were the best in England ; and he played nearly all of them. His greatest pleasure was to sing and to play the flageolet. He carried this flageolet about with him everywhere, on his walks and in the eating-houses.
Then Swan and I to a drinking-house near Temple-Bar, where while he wrote I played on my flageolet till a dish of poached eggs was got ready for us.*
I came back by water playing on my flageolet, f
At night into the garden to play on my flageolet, it being moonshine, where I staid a good while. J
He even ventured upon composition :
Was all day in my chamber, composing some ayres, God forgive me ! §
And his compositions — thanks to the composer's high position — enjoyed a great social success, which Pepys was " not a little proud of."**
Eventually he persuaded himself that his works were excellent :
Captain Downing (who loves and understands musique) would by all means have my song of " Beauty retire," which Knipp has spread abroad, and he extols it above anything he ever heard ; and without flattery I know it is good in its kind, ft
* 9th February, 1660. f 3oth January, 1660.
J 3rd April, 1661. — See also lyth February, 1659, and 2oth July, 1664.
§ 9th February, 1662. ** 22nd August, 1666.
ft 9th November, 1666. cf. gth December, 1666. — "And without flattery I think it is a very good song."
24 A Musical Tour
He would solemnly induce actresses to practice his songs :
After dinner I to teach Knipp my new recitative, of " It is decreed," of which she learnt a good part, and I do well like it and believe shall be well pleased when she hath it all, and that it will be found an agreeable thing.*
For the rest, as a person of importance, he did not take the trouble to write his accompaniments himself ; he had them written for him :
Thence going away met Mr. Kingston the organist (my old acquaintance) in the Court, and I took him to the Dog Tavern, and got him to set me a bass to my " It is decreed," which I think will go well. He commends the song (says Pepys ingenuously) not knowing the words, but says the ayre is good, and believes the words are plainly expressed, f
By and by comes Dr. Childe by appointment, and sat with me all the morning making me basses and inward parts to several songs that I desired of him. J
He was also interested in the theory of music :
To my chamber with a good fire, and there spent one hour on Morley's Introduction to Musique, a very good but un- methodical book.§
Walked to Woolwich, all the way reading Playford's " Introduction to Musique," wherein are some things very pretty.**
To Duck Lane to look out for Marsanne, in French, a man that has wrote well of musique, but it is not to be had, but I have given order for its being sent for over, and I did here buy Des Cartes, his little treatise on Musique. ff
Making the boy read to me Des Cartes' book of Musick — which I understand not, nor think he did well that writ it, though a most learned man.J$
* 1 4th November, 1666. ** 22nd March, 1666.
•f igih December, 1666. ff 3rd April, 1668.
J i5th April, 1667. JJ 25th December, 1668. § loth March, 1666.
An English Amateur 25
He took a notion to write down his own ideas upon music. These, if we may believe him, were something extraordinary ; he was inclined to think that he held the key to the mystery of sounds :
Banister played on his flageolet, and I had a very good discourse with him about musique, so confirming some of my new notions about musique that it puts me upon a resolution to go on and make a scheme and theory of musique not yet ever made in the world.*
Made Tom to prick down some little conceits and notions of mine, in musique, which do mightily encourage me to spend some more thoughts about it ; for I fancy, upon good reason, that I am in the right way of unfolding the mystery of this matter, better than ever yet.f
Do not take the man for an empty egoist. What is so delightful in him is the sincerity and the child- like enthusiasm of his love of music. He loves it only too well. He is afraid of it :
We sent for his sister's viall ... I played also, which I have not done this long time before upon any instrument, and at last broke up, and I to my office a little while, being fearful of being too much taken with musique, for fear of returning to my old dotage thereon, and so neglect my business as I used to do.J
But he could not help himself : music was the stronger.
God forgive me ! I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things, though yet in the middle of it, it has reluctance after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However, musique and women I cannot but give way to, what- ever my business is.§
He feels music so acutely that it makes him ill at times :
* 2Qth March, 1668. J iyth February, 1663.
f nth January, 1669. § gth March, 1666.
26 A Musical Tour
With my wife and Deb. to the King's House, to see " The Virgin Martyr."* . . . But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind-musique when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife ; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of anything, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any musick hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me. f . . .
But when he is dejected, music is his consolation :
At night home and to my flageolet. Played with pleasure, but with a heavy heart, only it pleased me to think how it may please God I may live to spend my time in the country with plainness and pleasure, though but with little glory. So to supper and to bed.J
Though my heart is still heavy to think of my poor brother, yet I could give way to my fancy to hear Mrs. T. M. play upon the Harpsicon."§
It must be admitted that Pepys had not very often occasion to repair to this consolation, for he was not often melancholy ; he regards music rather as an unmixed delight, the most perfect in life :
I do consider that musick is all the pleasure that I live for in the world, and the greatest I can ever expect in the best of my life.**
* * *
All those about him must share his mania for music ; and, above all, his wife.
He had married her about the year 1655, when she was only fifteen, and he was twenty-three. He took it into his head to teach her singing, and he was so much in love with her that he found his " apt
* Massinger's. t 27th February, 1668. J i5th June, 1667.
§ i6th March, 1664. ** I2th February, 1667.
An English Amateur 27
beyond imagination/'* The first lessons were highly successful ; both master and pupil were full of enthusiasm.
Sat up late setting my papers in order, and my money also, and teaching my wife her music lesson, in which I take great pleasure, f
So home to my musique, and my wife and I sat singing in my chamber a good while together, and then to bed.$
So far they had sung only unpretentious airs. But Mistress Pepys, when she saw her husband engaging a singing-master for Italian music, felt her self-love wounded and wished to do the same :
This morning my wife and I lay long in bed, and among other things fell into talk of musique, and desired that I would let her learn to sing, which I did consider, and promised her she should. So before I rose, word was brought me that my singing master, Mr. Goodgroome, was come to teach me ; and so she rose and this morning began to learn also.§
Here, then, we have her learning difficult French and Italian airs ! What imprudence ! . . . Pepys does his best to delude himself, but in vain ; he is forced to admit to himself that his wife has but little musical talent.
Singing with my wife, who hath lately** begun to learn, and I think will come to do something, though her eare is not good, nor I, I confess, have patience enough to teach her, or hear her sing now and then a note out of tune, and am to blame that I cannot bear with that in her which is fit I should do with her as a learner, and one that I desire much could sing, and so should encourage her. This I was troubled at, for I do find that I do put her out of heart, and make her fearfull to sing before me. ft
* 28th August, 1660. J 1 7th May, 1661.
f 9th September, 1660. § ist October, 1661.
** The good Pepys was indulgent ; his wife had been taking lessons for five years !
tf soth October, 1666.
28 A Musical Tour
Pepys had the more reason to discover that his wife sang out of tune in that he was able, in his own house, to make comparisons which were not to her advantage. It was the custom to keep servants who had some pleasant accomplishment ; in the households of Pepys' friends we find musical servants who were true artists. Evans, who was butler to Lady Wright, was a master of the lute and used to give Pepys lessons.* Button, wife to the footman of one of his friends, was a magnifi- cent singer, f It was a point of honour with Pepys that his servants likewise should be skilled per- formers, and as a good husband — not wholly dis- interested— he insisted that his wife should have maidservants who were as agreeable to look at as to hear.
First of all came the pretty chambermaid, Ashwell, who played the harpsichord. Pepys used to buy musical scores for her and taught her the principles of her art :
Up to teach Ashwell the rounds of time and other things on the tryangle, and made her take out a Psalm very well, she having a good earj and hand.§
He makes the little servant dance :
After dinner all the afternoon fiddling upon my viallin (which I have not done many a day) while Ashwell danced above in my upper best chamber, which is a rare room for musique.**
But Ashwell is not enough. We find him writing ingenuously :
* 25th January, 1659. f 1 5th October, 1665. J See above for what Pepys says of his wife. § 3rd May, 1663. ** 24th April, 1663.
An English Amateur 29
I am endeavouring to find a woman for her to my mind, and above all one that understands musique, especially singing. *
He finds the rare bird eventually. Her name is Mercer. At the same time he engages a little page, a musician, sent him by his friend Captain Cooke, master of the Chapel Royal, who had given him four years' training. Pepys' delight is complete.
So back again home, and there my wife and Mercer and Tom and I sat till eleven at night, singing and fiddling, and a great joy it is to see me master of so much pleasure in my house, that it is and will be still, I hope, a constant pleasure to me to be at home. The girl plays pretty well upon the harpsicon, but only ordinary tunes, but hath a good hand ; sings a little, but hath a good voyce and eare. My boy, a brave boy, sings finely, and is the most pleasant boy at present, while his ignorant boy's tricks last, that ever I saw.f
He soon wearies of the page. But Mercer grows more delightful every day.
At home I found Mercer playing upon herVyall, which is a pretty instrument, and so I to the Vyall and singing till late, and so to bed.J
About ill home, it being a fine moonshine, and so my wife and Mercer come into the garden, and my business being done, we sang till about twelve at night, with mighty pleasure to ourselves and neighbours, by their casements opening, and so home to supper and to bed. §
And after supper falling to singing with Mercer did however sit up with her, she pleasing me with her singing of " Helpe, helpe,"** till past midnight, ff
Poor Mistress Pepys is jealous :
Coming in I find my wife plainly dissatisfied with me, that I can spend so much time with Mercer, teaching her to sing,
* 28th July, 1664.
f 2yth August, 1664
| 9th September, 1664; 22nd April, 1665 ; 28th September, 1667.
§ 5th May, 1666. ** By Lawes. ft i2th July, 1666. See also igth June, 1666.
30 A Musical Tour
and could never take the pains with her. Which I acknowledge ; but it is because the girl do take musique mighty readily, and she do not, and musique is the thing of the world that I love most.*
Mercer, it seems, is sent away for a time ; but Mistress Pepys does not gain much thereby.
Pepys is melancholy, f He finds that his wife really sings very badly. Mercer returns, and the singing parties begin again ; and Mistress Pepys' jealousy likewise.
Walked home . .- . it being a little moonshine and fair weather, and so into the garden, and, with Mercer, sang till my wife put me in mind of its being a fast day, J and so I was sorry for it, and stopped. §
Mistress Pepys makes desperate efforts to become a musician ; she succeeds — very nearly — in singing trills. Her husband loyally gives her credit for her goodwill.
After dinner my wife and Barker** fell to singing, which pleased me pretty well, my wife taking mighty pains and proud that she shall come to trill and indeed I think she will, ft
But virtue, alas, is not rewarded in this world ; and the "poor wretch," as Pepys tells us, cannot contrive to sing in tune :
Home to dinner, and before dinner making my wife to sing. Poor wretch ! her ear is so bad that it made me angry, till the poor wretch cried to see me so vexed at her, that I think I shall not discourage her so much again. . . . for she hath a great mind to learn, only to please me, and therefore I am mighty unjust in discouraging her so much.JJ
* soth July, 1666.
f 23rd September, 1666.
I For the anniversary of the King's death.
§ 3oth January, 1667.
** Barker was a third servant. She too was a musician, •ft yth February, 1667. $t ist March, 1667.
An English Amateur 31
For some time Pepys constrains himself to patience.
I do think she will come to sing pretty well, and to trill in time.*
Had her sing, which she begins to do with some pleasure to me, more than I expected, f
To bed after hearing my wife sing, who is manifestly come to be more musical in her eare than ever I thought she could have been made, which rejoices me to the heart. J
But these appreciations are better evidence of Pepys' kindliness than of his wife's talent. One day, when he hears a bad singer (" what a beast she is as to singing, not knowing how to sing one note in tune ") this confession escapes him :
Worse than my wife a thousand times, so that it do a little reconcile me to her.§
The plucky little woman, in her distress, despairing of success, falls back on the flageolet.
In this Pepys encourages her. Perhaps she will produce fewer false notes on the instrument. He makes arrangements with a teacher, Greeting, and, to encourage her, takes lessons himself.**
So to my house . . . and with my wife to practice on the flageolet a little, and with great pleasure I see she can readily hit her notes. ff
Walk an hour in the garden with my wife, whose growth in musique do begin to please me mightily.JJ ,
Mightily pleases with my wife's playing on the flageolet, she taking out any tune almost at first sight, and keeping time to it, which pleased me mightily. §§
I to bed, being mightily pleased with my wife's playing so well upon the flageolet, and I am resolved she shall learn to
* 1 2th March, 1667. ** 8th May, 1667.
f igth March and 6th May, 1667. ft I7th MaY» l667-
{ 7th May, 1667. jj i8th May, 1667.
§ 22nd January, 1668. §§ i2th September, 1667
32 A Musical Tour
play upon some instrument, for though her eare be bad yet I see she will attain any thing to be done by her hand. *
Henceforth Pepys has a happy household. He records how one August evening he made his wife play the flageolet,
till I slept with great pleasure in bed.f
Do not imagine, however, that he has forgotten his dear Mercer ! He continues to arrange singing parties to include her — above all when his wife is not present :
And by and by, it being now about nine o'clock at night, I heard Mercer's voice, and my boy Tom's singing in the garden, which pleased me mightily, I longing to see the girl, having not seen her since my wife went ; and so into the garden to her and sang, and then home to supper, and mightily pleased with her company, in talking and singing, and so parted, and to bed.J
Took a coach and called Mercer, and she and I to the Duke of York's play-house, and there saw " The Tempest." "... After the play done, I took Mercer by water to Spring Garden, and there with great pleasure walked, and eat, and drank, and sang, making people come about us, to hear us. §
Up by water and to Foxhall (Vauxhall), where we walked a great while, . . . and it beginning to be dark, we to a corner and sang, that everybody got about to hear us."**
Got Mercer, and she and I in the garden singing till ten at night, ft
W. Howe, and a younger brother of his, come to dine with me, and there comes Mercer, . . . and mighty merry, and after dinner to sing psalms.Jt
* nth September, 1607.
f 1 3th August, 1668.
J 2gth April, 1668. See also loth May, 1668.
§ nth May, 1668. ** 1 4th May, 1668. ft I5th May, 1668. it 1 7th May, 1668.
An English Amateur 33
And I have said nothing of the other maid, Barker, of whom Pepys says : " and I do clearly find that as to manner of singing the latter do much the better."*
All those who visit this musical household are themselves performers : — Pepys' relatives, his brother and sister-in-law, who play excellently on the bass viol ;f and his friends, who are all musi- cians, good or bad. The ladies play the lute, the viol or the harpsichord ; sometimes they display so much perseverance that they eventually tire their hearers.
Went to hear Mrs. Turner's daughter . . . play upon the harpsicon ; but, Lord ! it was enough to make any man sick to hear her ; yet I was forced to commend her highly. $
Mr. Temple's wife fell to play on the harpsicon till she tired everybody, that I left the house without taking leave, and no creature left standing by to hear her. §
All the great personages of the day are able to play and sing.** Pepys' patron, Lord Sandwich, takes part with him in little concerts of chamber musicff an(i composes anthems for three voices. JJ Wherever one goes one hears music.
For example, at the eating-houses :
Carried my wife and Miss Pierce to Clothworkers' Hall, to dinner, . . . Our entertainment very good, a brave
* 1 2th April, 1667.
f 1 8th December, 1662 and and February, 1667.
{ ist May, 1663.
§ xoth November, 1666.
** Scarcely an exception is to be met with. Lord Lauderdale is one, but he is regarded as an eccentric, and possibly wishes to pass for one (28th June, 1666).
ft 23rd April, 1660.
H i4th December, 1663.
4
34 A Musical Tour
hall, good company, and very good music. ... I was pleased that I could find out a man by his voice, whom I had never seen before, to be one that sang behind the curtaine formerly at Sir W. Davenant's opera.*
And out of doors :
Walked in Spring Garden. . . . A great deal of company, and the weather and garden pleasant. . . . But to hear the nightingale and other birds, and here fiddles, and there a harp.f . . .
In the country :
There was at a distance, under one of the trees on the common, a company got together that sang. I, at the distance, and so all the rest being a quarter of a mile off, took them for Waytes, so I rode up to them, and found them only voices, some citizens met by chance, that sung four or five parts excellently. I have not been more pleased with a snapp of musique, considering the circumstances of the time and place, in all my life.J
At Bath (when the music is apparently part of the treatment) he is
carried away, wrapped in a sheet, and in a chair, home ; and there one after another thus carried, I staying above two hours in the water, home to bed, sweating for an hour ; and by and by comes musick to play to me, extraordinarily good as ever I heard at London almost, or anywhere : 55. §
On board ship — on the vessel in which he crossed the Channel with the fleet that brought Charles II. back to England :
the Captain . . . did give us such musick upon the harp by a fellow that he keeps on board, that I never expect to hear the like again.**
And, in London, among the people. To Pepys' house there comes
* 28th June, 1660. f 29*h May, 1667. J 2yth July, 1663. § 13 th June, 1668. ** soth April, 1660.
An English Amateur 35
a very little fellow, did sing a most excellent bass, and yet a poor fellow, a working goldsmith, that goes without gloves to his hands.
He acquits himself impeccably in a vocal quartet, with Pepys and his friends.*
The theatre naturally fills a great place in the life of this melomaniac. As a matter of fact Pepys constrains himself for a time to go thither only once a month, so that it shall not unduly distract him from his business, and as a measure of economy. f But he cannot wait for the second day in the month !
Took my wife out immediately to the King's Theatre, it being a new month, and once a month I may go. J
And if we run through his entries we see that the rule is soon infringed.
In any case, moreover, even if he takes a vow not to visit the theatre oftener than once a month, he does not forbid himself to summon the theatre to his own house — that is, the folk of the theatre, especially when they are young and pretty singers, such as Mrs. Knipp, of the King's Theatre : —
this baggage§ . . . Knipp, who is pretty enough ; but the most excellent, mad-humoured thing, and sings the noblest that ever I heard in my life.** . . .
He passes the night in making her sing his airs, which to him seem admirable, ff She rehearses her
* I5th September, 1667.
f And because of a lingering touch of Puritanism. But a perusal of the Diary will show how quickly this feeling evaporated when the ex-Commonwealth man had become the courtier of the Stuarts.
J ist February, 1669.
§ 23rd February, 1666. ** 6th December, 1665. ft 23rd February, 1666.
36 A Musical Tour
parts for him. She comes to speak to him in the pit of the theatre, after her song in the clouds.*
He goes with her by coach to Kensington, to the Grotto. She sings :
and fine ladies listening to us ; with infinite pleasure, I enjoyed myself ; so to the Tavern there . . . mighty merry, and sang all the way to town, a most pleasant evening, moonshine, and set them at her house in Covent Garden, and I home, and to bed.f .
Ah, the pleasant evenings which Pepys enjoyed in the company of these charming musicians : his wife, his wife's friends, her servants, and the pretty actresses ! Sometimes Knipp makes one of them in her stage costume, as a countrywoman with a straw hat.
Now my house is full, and four fiddlers that play well. . . . So away with all my company down to the office, and there fell to dancing . . . and then sang and then danced, and then sang many things of three voices. . . . Harris sung his Irish song — the strangest in itself, and the prettiest sung by him, that ever I heard. . . . Our Mercer unexpectedly did sing an Italian song I know not . . . that did almost ravish me, and made me in love with her more than ever with her singing. . . 4
Here the best company for musique I ever was in, in my life, and wish I could live and die in it, both for musique and the face of Mrs. Pierce, and my wife and Knipp. § ...
Pepys relishes his happiness ; at night, on his pillow, he recounts to himself the details of these delightful evenings :
thinking it to be one of the merriest enjoyments I must look for in the world. ** . . .
* 1 7th April, 1668. t *7th April, 1668. { 24th January, 1667. § 6th December, 1665. ** 24th January, 1667.
An English Amateur 37
There is only one shadow on his felicity : music is costly. Completing the description of one of these enchanted evenings, he says :
Only the musique did not please me, they not being contented with less than 303.*
Pepys does not like paying out money ; in which particular he resembles many wealthy music-lovers of his time and our own. Nothing distresses him so much as giving money to an artist, as he ingen- uously confesses :
Long with Mr. Berkenshaw in the morning at my musique practice, finishing my song of " Gaze not on Swans," in two parts, which pleases me well, and I did give him £5 for this month or five weeks that he hath taught me, which is a great deal of money and troubled me to part with it.f
So he contrives to quarrel with his teacher (in such a fashion that the quarrel seems to be the other's fault) so soon as he thinks that he has obtained from him all that he wanted. J And when Mr. Berkenshaw has fallen into the snare and broken off his relations with Pepys the latter delights in playing the airs which he has gently wormed out of Mr. Berkenshaw during his lessons :
I find them most incomparable songs as he has set them, of which I am not a little proud, because I am sure none in the world has them but myself, not so much as he himself that set them.§
When there is a question of defending his purse against an artist he has all the wisdom of the serpent. A performer on the viol comes to his house and plays for him " some very fine thing of his own/' Pepys is careful not to compliment him too warmly :
* 24th January, 1667. J 27th February, 1662. f 24th February, 1662. § i4th March, 1662.
38 A Musical Tour
for fear he should offer to copy them for me out, and so I be forced to give or lend him something. *
It is not surprising that under these circumstances music seems, to Pepys, the least costly of pleasures.! Nor is it surprising that musicians should die of starvation in this England, where all declare them- selves to be passionate lovers of music. They are in the position of those itinerant players who give their performance before a country crowd. The yokels look on and laugh — and turn away when the collection is made.
Mr. Kingston the organist . . . says many of the musique are ready to starve, they being five years behind-hand for their wages ; nay, Evens, the famous man upon the Harp, having not his equal in the world, did the other day die for mere want, and was fain to be buried at the alms of the parish, and carried to his grave in the dark at night without one linke, but that Mr. Kingston met it by chance, and did give iad. to buy two or three links. J
* * *
This is enough already to enlighten us as to the superficiality of the English passion for music. We shall be still further enlightened when we have done our best to understand Pepys' musical judg- ments and to ascertain the limits of his taste. How narrow the man is !
Pepys does not care for the old style of singing. § Nor does he care for part-singing :
I am more and more confirmed that singing with many voices is not singing, but a sort of instrumental musique, the sense of the words being lost by not being heard, and especially as they set them with Fuges of words, one after another, whereas singing proper, I think, should be but with one or two voices at most and the counterpart.**
* 23rd January, 1664. J igth December, 1666.
f 8th January, 1663. § i6th January, 1660.
** i5th September, 1667. See also 2Qth June, 1668.
An English Amateur 39
He does not like the Italian masters :
They spent the whole evening singing the best piece of musique counted on all hands in the world, made by Seignor Charissimi, the famous master in Rome. Fine it was, indeed, and too fine for me to judge of.*
I was not taken with this at all. . . . The composition as to the musique part was exceedingly good, and this justness in keeping time much before any that we have. . . . Yet I do from my heart believe that I could set words in English and make musique of them more agreeable . . . than any Italian musique set for the voice, f . . .
Nor has he any love for Italian singers ; above all, he detests the voices of the castrati. He ack- nowledges only the excellent time and the con- summate experience of these artists ; but in the matter of taste they remain alien to him and he does not attempt to understand them.J
Still less does he care for the contemporary English school, the school of Cooke, which will at a later date produce Pelham Humphrey, Wise, Blow, and Purcell :
It was indeed both in performance and composition most plainly below what I heard last night, § which I could not have believed.**
Nor is he any fonder of French music :
Impartially I do not find any goodnesse in their ayres (though very good) beyond ours when played by the same hand, I observed in several of Baptiste's (the present great composer) and our Bannister's. f|
* 22nd July, 1664.
f i6th February, 1667.
I He regards them with greater favour a little later, when he hears them in the Queen's Chapel (2ist March, 1668). See p. 42.
§ He is referring to some Italian songs by Draghi. ** 1 3th February, 1667. ft 1 8th June, 1666.
40 A Musical Tour
He detests the music of Charles II. 's French master, Grebus (Grabu) :
God forgive me I I never was so little pleased with a concert of musick in my life. *
And, generally speaking, all instrumental music wearies him :
I must confess, whether it be that I hear it but seldom, or that really voice is better, but so it is that I found no pleasure at all in it, and methought two voyces were worth twenty of itf
What a list of qualities eliminated ! What is left him ? He has just told us ; one voice, or two at most, accompanied or not with the lute, the theorbo or the viol. And what are these voices to sing ?
Simple melodies, intelligently declaimed : such as those of Lawes, the fashionable idol of the moment, the composer whose name occurs most frequently in the Diary. J As regards the theatre, Pepys appears to have a special liking for the music of Lock, with whom he was personally acquainted, § and that of the composer who wrote the musical score for Massinger's Virgin Martyr in 1668 — the music that made him sick for pleasure. In church he is still an admirer of Lock,** and he approves of Ravenscroft's Psalms for four voices, although he finds them very monotonous, ff
But at heart he prefers above everything the good old English melodies :
* ist October, 1667.
f loth August, 1664.
J Pepys sings them constantly (March, April, May, June, Nov- ember, 1660, iQth December, 1662, igth November, 1665, etc).
§ nth and i2th February, 1660. Pepys was acquainted also with the elder Purcell.
** 2ist February, 1660.
ff November, December, 1664. But on this ground the Italians get the better of him later.
An English Amateur 41
Mrs. Manuel . . . sings mightily well, and just after the Italian manner, but yet do not please me like one of Mrs. Knipp's songs, to a good English tune.*
Here I did hear Mrs. Manuel and one of the Italians . . . sing well. But yet I confess I am not delighted so much with it, as to admire it. ... and was more pleased to hear Knipp sing two or three little English things that I understood, though the composition of the other, and performance, was very fine.f
But these airs must be strictly, purely English. He does not approve even of the Scottish airs :
At supper there played one of their servants upon the viallin some Scotch tunes only ; several, and the best of their country, as they seemed to esteem them, by their praising and admiring them ; but, Lord ! the strangest ayre that ever I heard in my life, and all of one cast. $
We see that for Pepys music is restricted to a narrow province. It is curious to find such a passion for music combined with this poverty of task ! His taste has but one great quality ; its frankness. Pepys is at least unassuming ; he does not seek to be otherwise ; he says sincerely what he feels ; his is the British commonsense which mistrusts unreasonable infatuations. The reader will take especial note of the instinctive distrust which he displays in respect of Italian music, which was then beginning its invasion of England. When he hears it at the house of Lord Brouncker, one of the patrons of the Italian musicians then in London, he observes, amid the general enthusiasm :
The women sang well, but that which distinguishes all is this, that in singing, the words are to be considered, and how they are fitted with notes, and then the common accent of the
* 12th August, 1667. f soth December, 1667.
I 28th July, 1666. See also his disdain of bagpipe music. (24th March, 1668).
42 A Musical Tour
country is to be known and understood by the hearer, or he will never be a good judge of the vocal musique of another country, so that I was not taken with this at all, neither under- standing the first, nor by practice reconciled to the latter, so that their motions, and risings and fallings, though it may be pleasing to an Italian, or one that understands the tongue, yet to me it did not. . . .*
I am convinced more and more, that, as every nation has a particular accent and tone in discourse, so as the tone of one not to agree with or please the other, no more can the fashion of singing to words, for that the better the words are set, the more they take in of the ordinary tone of the country whose language the song speaks, so that a song well composed by an Englishman must be better to an Englishman than it can be to a stranger, or than if set by a stranger in foreign words, f
This is full of good sense, and reminds us of what Addison was to write some fifty years later. This wholesome mistrust should have put the English dilettanti and musicians on their guard against foreign imitations, above all against Italian imita- tions, which were about to prove so deadly to English music. But Italian art was extremely vigorous, and we have just seen within what narrow limits English taste was restricted. It abandoned the greater part of the field to foreign art, to shut itself up in its little house ; a course of extreme imprud- ence. Foreign music, once it had a foothold in England, sought to complete its conquest. A few of Pepys' remarks show that he himself was beginning to give ground :
To the Queen's chapel, and there did hear the Italians sing ; and indeed their musick did appear most admirable to me, beyond anything of ours.J
* i6th February, 1667. See also nth February.
f yth April, 1667.
$ 2ist March, 1668. See also Pepys' opinions of Draghi, whom he met at Lord Brouncker's, with Killigrew, who was striving to establish Italian music in London, and sent to Italy for singers, instrumentalists, and scene-painters (iath February, 1667).
An English Amateur 43
This is a confession of the approaching defeat at the hands of the Italians, when English music was to abdicate its position.
I have dwelt at some length on this Diary of an English amateur at the Court of Charles II. I have done so not merely for the amusement of reviv- ing a few agreeable types which have not undergone overmuch variation in a couple of centuries : — the distinguished English gentleman, statesman and artist, thoroughly sane and well-balanced, with the quiet activity, the serenity of mind, the good humour and the rather childlike optimism which one often meets with north of the Channel ; pleasantly gifted, as a musician, but superficial, and seeking in music rather a wholesome pleasure, as Milton advised * rather than a passion beyond his control. And around him are other familiar types : Mistress Pepys, the Englishwoman who is determined to be a musician ; who perseveringly labours at the keyboard, never becomes discouraged " and has good fingers/' And there are others too . . .
But it is not for this reason that I have under- taken to ransack this Diary. It possesses a real historical interest in that it is a barometer of English musical taste about the year 1660 ; that is, at the beginning of the golden age of English music.
* We know that Milton, in his famous treatise On Education, speaking of scholars and athletic exercises, suggests that " the interim of unsweating themselves regularly, and convenient rest before meat, may, both with profit and delight, be taken up in recreating and composing their travailed spirits with the solemn and divine harmonies of music." He adds that music would be still more appropriate after eating, " to assist and cherish nature in her first concoction, and send their minds back to study in good tune and satisfaction."
44 A Musical Tour
It enables us to understand why this golden age did not last. Whatever the brilliance, and even, at moments, the genius of the music of Purcell's age, it had no roots ; above all, it had no soil wherein to strike its roots. The most intelligent and most highly educated public to be found in England, and that which had the greatest love of art, was sincerely interested only in an excessively restricted class of music, which was based on and really derived from poetry : a vocal chamber music for one or two voices, consisting of dialogues, ballads, dances, and poetic songs. Herein lay the essence and the intimate savour of the musical soul of England.* All British music that sought to be national had perforce to find its inspiration herein ; and the best that it has produced is perhaps in reality that which, like certain pages of the delightful Purcell, has best preserved its fragrance of tender poetry and rustic grace. But this was a somewhat shallow foundation, a very scanty soil for the art ; the form of such music did not lend itself to extensive development ; and the musical culture of the country, though fairly widespread, yet always skin-deep, would not have permitted of such development.
And beyond this small province of English songs and ballads — which has remained almost intact until our own days, — we see the dawn, in Pepys' Diary, of the Italian invasion which was to submerge the whole.
* I am not speaking here of English religious and choral music, which, under the Restoration, produced works of great breadth, and always retained a noble dignity of style, without possessing a truly national character.
Ill
A PORTRAIT OF HANDEL
THEY used to call him the Great Bear. He was gigantic : broad, corpulent, with big hands and enormous feet ; his arms and thighs were stupend- ous. His hands were so fat that the bones dis- appeared in the flesh, forming dimples.* He walked bow-legged, with a heavy, rolling gait, very erect, with his head thrown back under its huge white wig, whose curls rippled heavily over his shoulders. He had a long horse-like face, which with age became bovine and swamped in fat ; with pendant cheeks and triple chin, the nose large, thick and straight, the ears red and long. His gaze was very direct ; there was a quizzical gleam in his bold eye, a mocking twist at the corner of his large, finely- cut mouth, f His air was impressive and jovial.
* When he played the harpsichord, says Burney, his fingers were so bent and clubbed together that one could not detect any movement ; it was as much as one could do to distinguish his fingers.
f See the portrait engraved by W. Bromley after the painting by Hudson. He is seated, with his legs wide apart and one fist on his thigh ; he is holding a sheet of music ; the head is held high, the eye ardent, the eye-brows very black under the white periwig, all but bursting out of his tightly-fastened pourpoint, overflowing with health, pride and energy.
No less interesting but much less known is the fine portrait engraved by J. Houbraken, of Amsterdam, after the painting by F. Kyte, in 1742. In this we see Handel under an exceptional aspect, after the serious illness which proved nearly fatal, traces of which are to be seen in his face. It is heavier, and fatigued, and the eye is dull ; the figure is massive ; his energies seem asleep ; he is like a great cat slumbering with open eyes ; but the old quizzical gleam still twinkles in his drowsy gaze.
45
46 A Musical Tour
When he smiled — says Burney — " his heavy, stern countenance was radiant with a flash of intelligence and wit ; like the sun emerging from a cloud/'
He was full of humour. He had a "sly pseudo- simplicity " which made the most solemn individuals laugh though he himself showed an unsmiling face. No one ever told a story better. " His happy way of saying the simplest things differently from anyone else gave them an amusing complexion. If his English had been as good as Swift's, his bons mots would have been equally abundant and of the same kind." But " really to enjoy what he said one had almost to know four languages : English, French, Italian and German, all of which he mixed up together."*
This medley of tongues was as much due to the fashion in which his vagabond youth was moulded, while he wandered through the countries of Western Europe, as to his natural impetuosity, which; when he sought a rejoinder, seized upon all the words at his disposal. He was like Berlioz : musical notation was too slow for him ; he would have needed a shorthand to follow his thought ; at the beginning of his great choral compositions he wrote the motifs in full for all the parts ; as he proceeded he would drop first one part, then another ; finally he would retain only one voice, or he would even end up with the bass alone ; he would pass at a stroke to the end of the composition which he had begun, postponing until later the completion of the whole, and on the morrow of finishing one piece he
* This portrait is drawn from the paintings by Thornhill, Hudson, Denner and Kyte, Roubillac's monument at West- minster, and the descriptions of contemporaries, such as Matthe- son, Burney, Hawkins and Coxe. See also the biographies of Handel by Schoelcher and Chrysander.
A Portrait of Handel 47
would begin another, sometimes working on two, if not three, simultaneously.*
He would never have had the patience of Gluck, who began, before writing, by " going through each of his acts, and then the whole piece ; which com- monly cost him " — so he told Corancez — " a year, and oftener than not a serious illness." — Handel used to compose an act before he had learned how the piece continued, and sometimes before the librettist had time to write it.t
* As an example of this fever of creation, I shall take the two years 1736-8, when Handel was ill and came near to dying. Here is a summary of these years :
In January, 1736, he wrote Alexander's Feast. In February- March, he conducted a season of oratorio. In April he wrote Atalanta and the Wedding A nthem. In April and jMay he direccted an opera season. Between the I4th August and the 7th Sep- tember he wrote Giustino, and between the i5th September and the 1 4th of October, Arminio. In November he directed an opera season. Between the i8th November and the i8th January, 1737, he wrote Berenice. In February and March he directed a double season of opera and oratorio.
In April he was stricken with paralysis ; during the whole of the summer he seemed on the point of death. The baths of Aix- la-Chapelle cured him. He returned to London early in November,
I737-
On the 1 5th of November he began Faramondo ; on the I7th December he commenced the Funeral Anthem, which he had performed at Westminster on the i7th ; by the 24th he had completed Faramondo ; on the 25th he began Serse, which he finished on the i4th February, 1738. On the 25th February he gave the first performance of a new pasticcio : Alessandro Severo. — And a few months later we find him writing Saul, which occupies him from the 23rd July to the 27th September, 1738, and beginning Israel in Egypt on the ist October, and completing it on the 28th. During the same month of October he publishes his first collection of Concertos for the Organ and delivers to the publishers the collection of Seven Trios or Sonatas with Two Parts and Accompaniments, op. 5.
Once more, the example that I have chosen is that of the two years when Handel was most seriously ill, indeed sick almost unto death ; and I defy the reader to find the least trace of his illness in these compositions.
f The poet Rossi states, in his preface to Rinaldo, that Handel barely gave him time to write the poem, and that the whole work, words and music, was composed in a fortnight (1711). —
48 A Musical Tour
The urge to create was so tyrannical that it ended by isolating him from the rest of the world. " He never allowed himself to be interrupted by any futile visit " says Hawkins, " and his impatience to be delivered of the ideas which continually flooded his mind kept him almost always shut up." His brain was never idle ; and whatever he might be doing, he was no longer conscious of his surround- ings. He had a habit of speaking so loudly that everybody learned what he was thinking. And what exaltation, what tears, as he wrote ! He sobbed aloud when he was composing the aria He was despised. — " I have heard it said " reports Shield, " that when his servant took him his choco- late in the morning he was often surprised to see him weeping and wetting with his tears the paper on which he was writing." — With regard to the Hallelujah chorus of the Messiah he himself cited the words of St. Paul: "Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows."
This huge mass of flesh was shaken by fits of fury. He swore almost with every phrase. In the orchestra, " when his great white periwig was seen to quiver the musicians trembled." When his choirs were inattentive he had a way of shouting Chorus ! at them in a terrible voice that made the public jump. Even at the rehearsals of his oratorios at Carlton House, before the Prince of Wales, if the Prince and Princess did not appear punctually he took no trouble to conceal his anger ;
Belshazzar was composed as Ch. Jennius sent Handel the acts of the poem, too slowly to suit the musician, who never ceased to spur him on, and who, in despair of obtaining the libretto, wrote that same summer, that he might have something to do, his magnificent Herakles.
A Portrait of Handel 49
and if the ladies of the Court had the misfortune to talk during the performance he was not satisfied with cursing and swearing, but addressed them furiously by name. " Chut, chut ! " the Princess would say on these occasions, with her usual indul- gence : " Handel is spiteful ! "
Spiteful he was not. " He was rough and peremptory/' says Burney, " but entirely without malevolence. There was, in his most violent fits of anger, a touch of originality which, together with his bad English, made them absolutely comical. Like Lully and Gluck, he had the gift of command ; and like them he combined an irascible violence that overcame all opposition with a witty good- nature which, though wounding to vanity, had the power of healing the wounds which it had caused. " At his rehearsals he was an arbitrary person ; but his remarks and even his reprimands were full of an extremely droll humour." At the time when the opera in London was a field of battle between the supporters of the Faustina and those of the Cuzzoni, and when the two prime donne seized one another by the hair in the middle of a performance, patronised by the Princess of Wales, to the roars of the house, a farce by Colley Gibber, who drama- tised this historic bout of fisticuffs, represented Handel as the only person who remained cool in the midst of the uproar. "To my thinking "he said "one should leave them to fight it out in peace. If you want to make an end of it throw oil on the fire. When they are tired their fury will abate of itself. ' ' And in order that the battle should end the sooner he expedited it with great blows on the kettledrum.*
* The Contre-Temps, or The Rival Queens, performed on the 27th July, 1727, at Drury Lane.
50 A Musical Tour
Even when he flew into a rage people felt that he was laughing in his sleeve. Thus, when he seized the irascible Cuzzoni, who refused to sing one of his airs, by the waist, and, carrying her to the window, threatened to throw her into the street, he said, with a bantering air : " Now, madame, I know very well that you are a regular she-devil ; but I'll make you realise that I am Beelzebub the prince of devils ! "*
* * *
All his life he enjoyed a wonderful amount of freedom. He hated all restrictions and avoided all official appointments ; for we cannot so describe his position of teacher to the princesses ; the import- ant musical posts about the Court and the fat pensions were never bestowed upon him, even after his naturalisation as an English citizen ; they were conferred upon indifferent composers. f He took no pains to humour these ; he spoke of his English colleagues with contemptuous sarcasm. Indifferently educated, apart from music, J he despised academics and academic musicians. He was not
* In the text cited by Mainwaring this is in French. — Handel was fond of speaking French, of which he had a very good know- ledge, and employed almost exclusively in his correspondence, even with his family.
f He was professor of music to the royal princesses, with a salary of ^200 — a salary lower, as Chrysander points out, than that of the dancing-master, Anthony FAbbe", who received ^240, and whose name always headed the list. Morice Green, organist at Westminster and doctor of music, for whose benefit two important musical posts were united in 1735 — the directorship of the Court orchestra and that of the Chapel Royal, until then exer- cised by John Eccles and Dr. Croft — drew a salary of ^400.
J But according to Hawkins he had been a diligent student. His father had intended him for the law, and in 1703 Handel was still inscribed on the rolls of the faculty of law at Halle, where the famous Thomasius was his teacher. It was not until he had passed his eighteenth year that he finally devoted himself to music.
A Portrait of Handel 51
a doctor of Oxford University, although the degree was offered to him. It is recorded that he com- plained : " What the devil ! should I have had to spend my money in order to be like those idiots ? * Never in this world ! "
And later, in Dublin, where he was entitled Dr. Handel on a placard, he was annoyed by the mistake and promptly had it corrected on the programmes, which announced him as Mr. Handel.
Although he was far from turning up his nose at fame — speaking at some length in his last will and testament of his burial at Westminster, and care- fully settling the amount to which he wished to limit the cost of his own monument — he had no respect whatever for the opinions of the critics. Mattheson was unable to obtain from him the data which he needed to write his biography. His Rousseau- like manners filled the courtiers with indignation. The fashionable folk who had always been given to inflicting boredom upon artists without any protest from the latter resented the supercilious and un- sociable fashion in which he kept them at a distance. In 1719 the field-marshal Count Flemming wrote to Mile, de Schulenburg, one of Handel's pupils :
Mademoiselle I — I had hoped to speak to M. Handel and should have liked to offer him a few polite attentions on your behalf, but there has been no opportunity ; I made use of your name to induce him to come to my house, but on some occasions he was not at home, while on others he was ill ; it seems to me that he is rather crazy, which he ought not to be as far as I am concerned, considering that I am a musician . . . and that I am proud to be one of your most faithful servants, Mademoiselle, who are the most agreeable of his pupils ; I should have liked to tell you all this, so that you in your turn might give lessons to your master, f
* His confreres, Pepusch and Greene.
t 6th October, 1719, Dresden. The original letter is in French.
52 A Musical Tour
In 1741, an anonymous letter to the London Daily Post* speaks of " the declared displeasure of so many gentlemen of rank and influence " in respect of Handel's attitude toward them.
Excepting the single opera Radamisto, which he dedicated to George I. — and this he did with dignity — he set his face against the humiliating and profitable custom of placing his compositions under the patronage of some wealthy person ; and only when he was in the last extremity, when poverty and sickness had overwhelmed him, did he resolve to give a " benefit " concert : " that fashion of begging alms " as he called it.
From 1720 until his death in 1759 he was engaged in an unending conflict with the public. Like Lully, he managed a theatre, directed an Academy of Music and sought to reform — or to form — the musical taste of a nation. But he never had Lully 's powers of control ; for Lully was an absolute monarch of French music ; and if Handel relied, as he did, on the king's favour, that favour was a long way from being as important to him as it was to Lully. He was in a country which did not obey the orders of those in high places with docility ; a country which was not enslaved to the State ; a free country, of a critical, unruly temper ; and, apart from a select few, anything but hospitable, and inimical to foreigners. And he was a foreigner, and so was his Hanoverian king, whose patronage compromised him more than it benefited him.
He was surrounded by a crowd of bull-dogs with terrible fangs, by unmusical men of letters, who were likewise able to bite, by jealous colleagues, arrogant virtuosi, cannibalistic theatrical companies,
* 4th April, 1741. — See Chrysander.
A Portrait of Handel 53
fashionable cliques, feminine plots and nationalistic leagues. He was a prey to financial embarrass- ments which grew daily more inextricable ; and he was constantly compelled to write new composi- tions to satisfy the curiosity of a public that nothing ever did satisfy, that was really interested in nothing, and to strive against the competition of harlequi- nades and bearfights ; to write, and write, and write : not an opera each year, as Lully did so peacefully, but often two or three each winter, without counting the compositions of other musicians which he was forced to rehearse and conduct. What other genius ever drove such a trade for twenty years ?
In this perpetual conflict he never made use of concessions, compromises or discreet expedients ; neither with his actresses nor their protectors, the great nobles, nor the pamphleteers, nor all that clique which makes the fortune of the theatres and the fame or ruin of the artists. He held his own against the aristocracy of London. The war was bitter and merciless, and, on the part of his enemies, ignobly fought ; there was no device, however petty, that was not employed to drive him into bankruptcy.
In 1733, after a long campaign in the Press and the drawing-rooms of London, his enemies managed to contrive that the concerts at which Handel produced his first oratorios were given to empty chairs ; they succeeded in killing them, and people were already repeating, exultingly, that the dis- couraged German was about to return to his own country. In 1741, the fashionable cabal went so far as to hire little street-arabs to tear down the advertisements of Handel's concerts which were posted up out of doors, and " made use of a thousand
54 A Musical Tour
expedients, equally pitiable, to cause him injury."* Handel would very probably have left the United Kingdom, but for the unexpected sympathy which he found in Ireland, where he proceeded to spend a year. — In 1745, after all his masterpieces, after the Messiah, Samson, Belshazzar, and Herakles, the cabal was reconstituted, and was even more violent than before. Bolingbroke and Smollet mention the tenacity with which certain ladies gave tea-parties, entertainments and theatrical per- formances— which were not usually given in Lent — on the days when Handel's concerts were to take place, in order to rob him of his audience. Horace Walpole was greatly entertained by the fashion of going to the Italian opera when Handel was giving his oratorios. f
In short, Handel was ruined ; and although he was victorious in the end the causes of his victory were quite unconnected with art. To him there happened in 1746 what happened to Beethoven in 1813, after he had written the Battle of Vittoria and his patriotic songs for a Germany that had risen against Napoleon : Handel suddenly became, after the Battle of Culloden and his two patriotic oratorios, the Occasional Oratorio and Judas Mace- abacus, a national bard. From that moment his cause was gained, and the cabal had to keep silence ; he was a part of England's patrimony, and the British lion walked beside him. But if after this period England no longer grudged his fame she nevertheless made him purchase it dearly ; and it was no fault of the London public that he
* Letter of the gth April, 1741 to the London Daily Post. See Schoelcher.
A Portrait of Handel 55
did not die, in the midst of his career, of poverty and mortification. Twice he was bankrupt ;* and once he was stricken down by apoplexy, amid the ruins of his company. f But he always found his feet again ; he never gave in. "To re-establish his fortunes he need only have made certain concessions ; but his character rebelled against such a course. { He had a hatred of all that might restrict his liberty, and was intractable in matters affecting the honour of his art. He was not willing that he should owe his fortune to any but himself." § An English caricaturist represented him under the title of " The Bewitching Brute," trampling underfoot a banner on which was written : Pension, Privi- lege, Nobility, Favours ; and in the face of disaster he laughed with a laugh of a Cornelian Pantagruel. Finding himself, on the evening of a concert, con- fronted by an empty hall, he said : " My music will sound the better so ! "
This masterful character, with its violence and its transports of anger and of genius, was gov- erned by a supreme self-control. In Handel that tranquillity prevailed which is sometimes met with in the offspring of certain sound, but late marriages.** All his life he preserved this profound serenity in his art. While his mother, whom he
* In 1735 and 1745.
t In 1737-
I Gentleman's Magazine, 1760. § Coxe. ** Handel's father was 63 years of age at the time of his son's
56 A Musical Tour
worshipped, lay dying he wrote Poro, that delight- fully care-free opera.* The terrible year 1717, when he lay at the point of death, in the depths of a gulf of calamity, was preceded and followed by two oratorios overflowing with joy and material energy : Alexander's Feast (1736) and Saul (1738), and also by the two sparkling operas, Giustino (1736) with its pastoral fragrance, and Serse (1738), in which a comic vein appears.
. La calma del cor, del sen, dell' alma, says a song at the close of the serene Giustino. And this was the time when Handel's mind was strained to breaking-point by its load of anxieties !
Herein the anti-psychologists, who claim that the knowledge of an artist's life is of no value in the understanding of his work, will find cause for triumph, but they will do well to avoid a hasty judgment ; for the very fact that Handel's art was independent of his life is of capital importance in the comprehension of his art. That a Beethoven should find solace for his sufferings and his passions in works of suffering and passion is easily under- stood. But that Handel, a sick man, assailed by anxieties, should find distraction in works expressing joy and serenity presupposes an almost super- human mental equilibrium. How natural it is that Beethoven, endeavouring to write his Sym- phony of Joy, should have been fascinated by
* The date of his mother's death was the 2yth of December, 1730 ; that of her burial, the 2nd of January, 1731. Compare these dates with those inscribed by Handel on the manuscript of Poro :
" Finished writing the first act of Poro : 23rd December, 1730.
Finished writing the second act: 3oth December, 1730.
Finished writing the third act: i6th January, 1731."
A Portrait of Handel 57
Handel !* He must have looked with envious eyes upon the man who had attained that mastery over things and self to which he himself was aspiring, and which he was to achieve by an effort of impas- sioned heroism. It is this effort that we admire : it is indeed sublime. But is not the serenity with which Handel retained his footing on these heights equally sublime ? People are too much accustomed to regard his serenity as the phlegmatic indifference of an English athlete :
Gorge jusques aux dents de rouges aloyaux Handel eclate en chants robustes et loyaux.f
No one had any suspicion of the nervous tension or the superhuman determination which he must have needed in order to sustain this tranquillity. At times the machine broke down, and his magni- ficent health of body and mind was shaken to the roots. In 1737 Handel's friends believed that he had permanently lost his reason. But this crisis was not exceptional in his life. In 1745, when the hostility of London society, implacable in its attacks upon his Belshazzar and Herakles, ruined him for the second time, his reason was again very near
* His perpetual expenditure of energy and his unremitting labours explain Handel's morbid voracity. Contemporaries jested in the most offensive manner concerning the ogre who was accustomed to order dinners for three, and, when asked where the party was, used to reply: "I am the party! " But this terrific worker had of course to repair his exhausted energies ; and after all this diet does not seem to have done him any harm : we may therefore conclude that it was necessary to him. As Mattheson told him, " it would be as irrelevant to measure Handel's eating and drinking by those of ordinary men as to demand that the table of a London merchant should be the same as that of a Swiss peasant."
f " Gorged to the teeth with underdone sirloins, Hand el bursts into vigorous and loyal song." — Maurice Boucher.
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to giving way. The hazard of a correspondence which has recently been published has afforded us this information.* The Countess of Shaftesbury wrote on the I3th of March, 1745 :
I went to , Alexander's Feast with a melancholy pleasure. I wept tears of mortification at the sight of the great and unfortunate Handel, crestfallen, gloomy, with fallen cheeks, seated beside the harpsichord which he could not play ; it made me sad to reflect that his light has burned itself out in the service of music.
On the 29th of August of the same year the Rev. William Harris wrote to his wife :
Met Handel in the street. Stopped him and reminded him who I was, upon which I am sure it would have entertained you to see his fantastic gestures. He spoke a great deal of the precarious condition of his health.
This condition continued for seven or eight months. On the 24th of October, Shaftesbury wrote to Harris :
Poor Handel looks a little better. I hope he will recover completely, though his mind has been entirely deranged.
He did recover completely, since in November he wrote his Occasional Oratorio, and soon afterwards his Judas Maccabaeus. But we see what a gulf perpetually yawned beneath him. It was only by the skin of his teeth that he, the sanest of geniuses, kept himself going, a hand's-breadth from insanity, and I repeat that these sudden organic lesions have been revealed only by the hazards of a correspond- ence. There must have been many others of which we know nothing. Let us remember this, and also the fact that Handel's tranquillity concealed a prodigious expenditure of emotion. The indifferent, phlegmatic Handel is only the outer shell.
* W. B. Squire : Handel in 1745 (in the H. Riemann Festschrift, 1909, Leipzig.)
A Portrait of Handel 59
Those who conceive of him thus have never understood him, never penetrated his mind, which was exalted by transports of enthusiasm, pride, fury and joy ; which was, at times, almost halluci- nated. But music, for him, was a serene region which he would not allow the disorders of his life to enter ; when he surrendered to it wholly he was, despite himself, carried away by the delirium of a visionary, as when the God of Moses and the Prophets appeared to him in his Psalms and his oratorios — or betrayed by his heart, in moments of pity and compassion, that were yet without a trace of sentimentality.*
He was, in his art, one of those men who, like Goethe, regard their lives from a great distance, a great height. Our modern sentimentality, which displays itself with complacent indiscretion, is disconcerted by this haughty reserve. In this kingdom of art, inaccesible to the capricious chances of life, it seems to us that the prevailing light is sometimes too uniform. Here are the Elysian Fields ; hither one retreats from the life of the world ; here, often enough, one regrets it. But is there not something affecting in the spectacle of this master, serene amidst all his afflictions, his brow unlined and his heart without a care ?
* * *
Such a man, who lived entirely for his art, was not calculated to please women ; and he troubled his head very little about them. None the less, they were his warmest partisans and his most venemous adver- saries. The English pamphleteers made merry over one of his worshippers, who, under the pseudonym
* In the Funeral Anthem, the Foundling Anthem, and in certain pages of his later works, Theodora and Jephthah.
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of Ophelia, sent him, when his Julius Casar was produced, a crown of laurel, with an enthusi- astic poem in which she represented him as the greatest of musicians, and also of the English poets of his time. I have already alluded to those fashionable dames who endeavoured, with hateful animosity, to ruin him. Handel went his own way, indifferent to worshippers and adversaries alike.
In Italy, when he was twenty years of age, he had a few temporary love affairs, traces of which survive in several of the Italian Cantatas.* There is a rumour too of an affair which he is supposed to have had at Hamburg when he was second violin in the orchestra of the Opera. He was attracted by one of his pupils, a girl of good family, and wanted to marry her ; but the girl's mother declared that she would never consent to her daughter's marriage with a cat-gut scraper. Later, when the mother was dead and Handel famous, it was suggested to him that the obstacles were now removed ; but he replied that the time had gone by ; and according to his friend, Schmidt, who, like a good romantic German, delights to embellish history, " the young lady fell into a decline that ended her days/' In London a little later there was a fresh project of marriage with a lady in fashionable society ; once more, she was one of his pupils ; but this aristocratic person wanted him to abandon his profession. Handel, indignant, " broke off the relations which would have fettered his genius. "f Hawkins tells
* For example, in the cantata entitled, Partenza di G. F. H&ndel, 1708.
f Above all he had a profound love for a sister who died in 1718, and for his mother, who died in 1730. Later his affection was given to his sister's daughter, Johanna-Fridericka, ne'e Mich- aelsen, to whom he left all his property.
A Portrait of Handel 61
us : " His sociable instincts were not very strong ; whence it comes, no doubt, that he was a celibate all his life ; it is asserted that he never had any dealings with women." Schmidt, who knew Handel very much better than Hawkins, protests . that Handel was not unsociable, but that his frantic craving for independence " made him afraid of belittling himself, and that he had a dread of indis- soluble ties."
In default of love he knew and faithfully practised friendship. He inspired the most touching affec- tion, such as that of Schmidt, who left his country and his kin to follow him, in 1726, and never left him again until his death. Some of his friends were among the noblest intellects of the age : such was the witty Dr. Arbuthnot, whose apparent Epicurianism concealed a stoical disdain of man- kind, and who, in his last letter to Swift, made this admirable remark : "As for leaving, for the world's sake, the path of virtue and honour, the world is not worth it." Handel had moreover a profound and pious feeling for the family, which was never extinguished, and to which he gave expression in some touching characters, such as Joseph, and the good mother in Solomon.
But the finest, purest feeling of which he was capable was his ardent charity. In a country which witnessed, in the eighteenth century, a magnificent impulse of human solidarity,* he was one of those who were most sincerely devoted to the cause of the unfortunate. His generosity was not
* It found expression in the foundation of hospitals and bene- volent societies. This movement, which about the middle of the eighteenth century had attained remarkable proportions all over England, made itself felt with peculiar enthusiasm in Ireland.
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extended merely to this or that individual whom he had personally known, such as the widow of his old master, Lachow ; it was lavished continually and abundantly in the interest of all charitable undertakings, more especially in that of two such organisations which made especial appeal to him : the Society of Musicians and the Foundling Hospital.
The Society of Musicians was founded in 1738 by a group of the principal artists in London, — artists of all descriptions, for the assistance of indigent musicians and their families. An aged musician received a weekly allowance of ten shillings ; a musician's widow, seven shillings. The Society also undertook to give them decent burial. Handel, embarrassed though he was, showed himself more generous than his colleagues. On the 2oth March, 1739, he produced, for the benefit of the Society, defraying all expenses, his Alexander's Feast, with a new organ concerto especially written for the occasion. On the 28th March, 1740, in the midst of his worst difficulties, he produced Ads and Galatea and the little Ode to St. Cecilia. On the i8th March, 1741, he gave a gala performance — for him a most onerous task — of Parnasso in Festa, with scenery and costumes, and five concerti soli executed by the most famous instrumentalists. He left the Society the largest legacy which it received — one of a thousand pounds.
As for the Foundling Hospital, founded in 1739 by an old sailor, Thomas Coram, " for the relief and education of deserted children," " one may say," writes Main waring, "that it owed its establish- ment and its prosperity to Handel." In 1749, Handel wrote for it his beautiful Anthem for the
A Portrait of Handel 63
Foundling Hospital.* In 1750, after the gift of an organ to the Hospital, he was elected Governor. We know that his Messiah was first performed, and afterwards almost entirely reserved, for the benefit of charitable undertakings. The first performance in Dublin, on the I2th April, 1742, was given for the benefit of the poor. The profits of the concert were entirely divided between the Society for the Relief of Debtor Prisoners, the Infirmary for the Poorf and the Mercers' Hospital. When the success of the Messiah was established in London, — not without difficulty — in 1750, Handel decided to give annual performances for the benefit of the Foundling Hospital. Even after he was blind he continued to direct these perform- ances. Between 1750 and 1759, the date of Handel's death, the Messiah earned for the Hospital a sum of £6,955. Handel had forbidden his publisher, Walsh, to publish any part of this work, the first edition of which did not appear until 1763 ; and he bequeathed to the Hospital a copy of the full score. He had given another copy to the Dublin Society for the Relief of Debtor Prisoners, with permission to make use of it as often as the Society pleased in the interest of their beneficiaries.
This love of the poor inspired Handel in some of his most characteristic passages, such as certain pages of the Foundling anthem, full of a touching benevolence, or the pathetic evocation of the orphans and foundlings, whose pure shrill voices rise alone and without accompaniment in the midst
* In the Musical Times, ist May, 1902, a great deal of informa- tion will be found relating to the Foundling Hospital and the part which Handel took in its management.
f Founded in 1726, "by Six Surgeons."
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of the triumphant chorus of the Funeral Anthem, attesting to the beneficence of the dead Queen.
One year, almost to the day, before Handel's death, there stands on the register of the Foundling Hospital the name of a little Maria Augusta Handel, born on the I5th April, 1758. She was a foundling to whom he had given his name.
* * *
For him, charity was the true religion. He loved God in the poor.
For the rest, he was by no means religious in the strict sense of the word, — except at the close of his life, after the loss of his sight had cut him off from the society of his kind and isolated him almost completely. Hawkins used to see him then, in the last three years of his life, diligently attending the services of his parish church. — St. George's, Hanover Square — kneeling " and manifesting, by his gestures and his attitude, the most fervent devotion." During his last illness he said : "I wish I might die on Good Friday, in the hope of joining my God, my sweet Lord and Saviour, on the day of his Resurrection."*
But during the greater part of his lifetime, when he was in the fullness of his strength, he rarely attended a place of worship. A Lutheran by birth, replying ironically in Rome, where an attempt was made to convert him, " that he was determined to die in the communion in which he had been brought up, whether it was true or false, "f he nevertheless found no difficulty in conforming to the Anglican form of worship, and was regarded as very much of an unbeliever.
* He died on the following day, on Saturday morning, f Mainwaring.
A Portrait of Handel 65
Whatever his faith, he was religious at heart. He had a lofty conception of the moral obligations of art. After the first performance in London of the Messiah he said to a noble amateur : "I should be sorry, my lord, if I gave pleasure to men ; my aim is to make them better."*
During his lifetime " his moral character was publicly acknowledged," as Beethovenf arrogantly wrote of himself. Even at the period when he was most discussed discerning admirers had realised the moral and social value of his art. Some verses which were published in the English newspapers in 1745 praised the miraculous power which the music of Saul possessed of alleviating suffering by exalting it. A letter in the London Daily Post for the I3th April, 1739, says that " a people which appreciates the music of Israel in Egypt should have nothing to fear on whatever occasion, though all the might of an invasion were gathered against it."}
No music in the world gives forth so mighty a faith. It is the faith that removes mountains, and, like the rod of Moses, makes the eternal waters gush forth from the rock of hardened souls. Certain passages from his oratorios, certain cries of resurrec- tion are living miracles, as of Lazarus rising from the tomb. Thus, in the second act of Theodora, §
* Schoelcher.
t Letter to the Municipality of Vienna, ist February, 1819.
t The literal text is : " Though all the might of papistry were gathered against us." — It seems that Handel himself was struck by these words. Seven years later, when England was invaded by Papist troops, and the army of the Pretender Charles Edward was advancing to the gates of London, Handel, writing the Occa- sional Oratorio, that grand epic hymn to the menaced mother- country, and the God who defended her, reproduced, in the third part of this composition, the finest pages of Israel.
§ " He beheld the young man who was sleeping."
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God's thunderous command breaks through the mournful slumber of death :
" Arise ! " cried His voice. And the young man arose.
Or again, in the Funeral Anthem, the intoxicated cry, almost painful in its joy, of the immortal soul that puts off the husk of the body and holds out its arms to its God.*
But nothing approaches in moral grandeur the chorus that closes the second act of Jephthah. Nothing enables us better than the story of this composition to gain an insight into Handel's heroic faith.
When he began to write it, on the 2ist January, 1751, he was in perfect health, despite his sixty-six years. He composed the first act in twelve days, working without intermission. There is no trace of care to be found in it. Never had his mind been freer ; it was almost indifferent as to the subject under treatment.! In the course of the second act his sight became suddenly clouded. The writing, so clear at the beginning, is now confused and tremulous. { The music too assumes a mournful
* The chorus " But His glory endureth for ever" alternates with the funeral chorus : " His body has gone to rest in the tomb." The motive was borrowed by Handel from a motet by an old German master of the sixteenth century, — his namesake Handel (Jakobus- Gallus) : Ecce quomodo moritur Justus. But a single change of rhythm suffices to give wings to the old chorale ; an ecstatic impulse which suddenly breaks off, breathless with emotion, unable to find further utterance. Eight times this cry rises in the course of this composition.
f Several of Iphis' airs are built upon dance rhythms : in the first act The Smiling Dawn, on the rhythm of a bourrte (an Auverg- nian dance), and in the second act, Welcome as the Cheerful Light, on a gavotte rhythm.
I The progress of the malady may be followed exactly on the autograph manuscript, the facsimile of which was published by Chrysander in the great Breitkopf collection in 1885.
A Portrait of Handel 67
character.* He had just begun the final chorus of Act II. : How mysterious, 0 Lord, are Thy ways I Hardly had he written the initial movement, a largo with pathetic modulations, when he was forced to stop. He has noted at the foot of the page :
" Have got so far, Wednesday, I3th February. Prevented from continuing because of my left eye/'
He breaks off for ten days. On the eleventh he writes on his manuscript :
" The 23rd February, am a little better. Resumed work."
And he sets to music these words, which contain a tragic allusion to his own misfortune :
Our joy is lost in grief ... as day is lost in night.
Laboriously, in five days' time — five days ! — and formerly he could have written a whole act in the time — he struggles on to the end of this sombre chorus, which illumines, in the darkness that envelops him, one of the grandest affirmations of faith in time of suffering. On emerging from these gloomy and tormented passages, a few voices (tenor and bass) in unison murmur very softly
All that is . . .
* The change of tone begins in the second act, with the cry of horror emitted by Jephthah when he sees his daughter coming to meet him. There is to begin with a series of mournful airs sung by Jephthah and the mother and betrothed of Iphis, and then a quartette, in which Iphis' parents mingle their lamentations. To their tears replies the pure voice of Iphis, who consoles them, in a recitative which seems to open the gates of heaven ; then follows an aria of great simplicity, full of a courageous resignation which conceals the fear and the anguish that lie beneath it. The emotion waxes more intense ; Jephthah sings a recitative which reminds one of those of Agamemnon in Iphigenia in Aulis ; at the close the recitative is interrupted, continuing in slower time, growing faint with grief and horror ; certain phrases seem written by Beethoven. At last bursts forth the chorus in the midst of which Handel was stricken with blindness.
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For a moment they hesitate, seeming to take breath, and then all the voices together affirm with unshakable conviction that all that is
. . . is good.
The heroism of Handel and his fearless music, which breathes of courage and faith, is summed up in this cry of the dying Hercules.
IV
THE ORIGINS OF THE " CLASSIC " STYLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC.
EVERY musician will at once perceive the profound differences which divide the so-called " classic " style of the close of the eighteenth century from the grand " pre-classic " style of J. S. Bach and Handel; the one with its ample rhetoric, its strict deductions, its scholarly polyphonic writing, its objective and comprehensive spirit ; the other lucid, spontaneous, melodious, reflecting the changing moods of individ- ual minds which throw themselves wholly into their work, presently arriving at the Rousseau-like confessions of Beethoven and the Romantics. It seems as though a longer period must have elapsed between these two styles than the length of a man's life.
Now let us note the dates : J. S. Bach died in 1750, Handel in 1759. C. H. Graun also died in 1759. And in 1759 Haydn performed his first symphony. The date of Gluck's Orfeo is 1762 ; that of P. E. Bach's earliest sonatas, 1742. The ingenious protagonist of the new symphony, Johann Stamitz, died before Handel — in 1757. Thus the leaders of the two great artistic movements were living at the same time. The style of Reiser, Telemann, Hasse and the Mannheim symphonists,
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which is the source of the great Viennese classics, is contemporary with the works of J. S. Bach and Handel. More, even in their lifetime it enjoyed precedence over them. As early as 1737 (the year following Handel's Alexander's Feast, and preceding Saul and the whole series of the magni- ficent oratorios), Frederic II. of Prussia, then Crown Prince, wrote to the Prince of Orange :
"Handel's best days are over; his mind is exhausted and his taste out of fashion."
And Frederic II. contrasted with this art, which was now " out of fashion/' that of " his composer," as he describes C. H. Graun.
In 1722-3, when J. S. Bach applied for the post of Cantor of St. Thomas's in Leipzig, in succession to Kuhnau, Telemann was greatly preferred to him, and it was only because the latter did not want the post that it was given to Bach. This same Tele- mann, in 1704, at the beginning of his career, when he was as yet hardly known, outstripped the glorious Kuhnau, so powerful already was the influence of the new fashion. Subsequently the movement only gained in strength. A poem by Zacharia, which reflects with sufficient accuracy the opinion of the most cultivated circles in Germany, The Temple of Eternity, written in 1754, places Handel, Hasse and Graun on the same level, celebrates Telemann in terms which one might employ to-day in speaking of J. S. Bach*, and when it comes to Bach
* " . . . But who is this old man, who with his nimble pen,' full of a pious enthusiasm, enchants the Eternal Temple ? Listen I How the waves of the sea are roaring ! How the mountains cry aloud with joy and sing hymns unto the Lord I How harmonious an "Amen " fills the devout heart with a sacred awe ! How the temples tremble with the pious shout of Alleluia! Telemann, it is thou, thou, the father of sacred music. ."
Eighteenth-Century Music 7*
and " his melodious sons," it finds nothing to glorify in them but their skill as performers, as kings of the organ and the clavier. This judgment is also that of the historian Burney (1772). And assuredly it is calculated to surprise us. But we must be on our guard against facile indignation. There is little merit in outpouring, from the height of the two centuries which divide us from them, a crushing disdain upon the contemporaries of Bach and Handel who judged them so incorrectly. It is more instructive to seek to understand them.
And in the first place let us note the attitude of Bach and Handel in respect of their age. Neither one nor the other affects the fatal pose of the mis- understood genius, as so many of our great or little great men of to-day have done. They did not wax indignant ; they were even on excellent terms with their luckier rivals. Bach and Hasse were very good friends, full of mutual esteem. Tele- mann, in his childhood, had formed a warm friend- ship with Handel ; he was also on the best of terms with Bach, who chose him as god-father to his son, Philipp Emanuel. Bach entrusted the musical training of another of his sons, his favourite, Wil- helm Friedemann, to J. Gottlieb Graun. Here was no trace of party spirit. On either side there were gifted men who esteemed and liked one another.
Let us try to bring to our consideration of them the same generous spirit of equity and sympathy. J. S. Bach and Handel will lose nothing of their colossal stature thereby. But we may well be surprised to find them surrounded by an abundance of fine works, and of artists full of intelligence and genius ; and it should not be impossible to
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understand the reasons which their contempories had for their preferences. Without speaking of the individual value of these artists, which is often very great, it is their spirit which leads the way to the classic masterpieces of the close of the eighteenth century. J. S. Bach and Handel are two mountains which dominate but close a period. Telemann, Hasse, Jommelli and the Mannheim symphonists are the rivers which have made for themselves a way towards the future. As these rivers have poured themselves into greater rivers — Mozart, Beethoven, — which have absorbed them, we have forgotten them while still beholding the lofty summits in the distance. But we must be grateful to the innovators. They were full of vitality once and they have handed it down to us.
The reader will remember the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, inaugurated in France towards the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault and Fontenelle, who opposed to the imitation of antiquity the Cartesian ideal of progress, revived, twenty years later, by Houdar de la Motte, in the name of reason and of modern taste.
This quarrel extended beyond the personality of those who began it. It corresponded with a universal movement of European thought ; and we find similar symptoms in all the greater western countries and in all the arts. They are strikingly apparent in German music. The generation of Reiser, Tele- mann and Mattheson felt from childhood an instinctive aversion from those who represented antiquity in music, for the contrapuntists and
Eighteenth-Century Music 73
canonists. At the source of the movement is Reiser, whose artistic influence over Hasse, Graun and Mattheson* (as well as Handel, for that matter) was profound and decisive. But the first to express these feelings definitely, emphatically and repeatedly, was Telemann.
As early as 1704, confronting the old musicologist Printz, he assumed the attitude of Democritus opposing Heraclitus :
He bitterly lamented the extravagances of the melodists of to-day. As for me, I laughed at the unmelodious works of the old writers.
In 1718 he quoted this French couplet in support of his attitude :
Ne les &&ve pas (les anciens] dans un ouvrage saint, Au rang oa dans ce temps les auteurs ont atteint.
This is a frank declaration for the moderns against the ancients. And what do the moderns mean to him ? The moderns are the melodists.
Singen is das Fundament ZUY Music in alien Dingen, Wer die Composition ergreifft, muss in seinen Sdtzen singen. (Song is the foundation of music in all things. Who composes must sing in all that he writes.)
Telemann adds that a young artist must turn to the school of the Italian and young German melodists, not to that " of the old writers, who write counterpoint till all is blue, but are devoid of invention, and write for fifteen and twenty voices obbligati, in which Diogenes himself with his lantern would not find a drop of melody."
The greatest musical theorist of the age, Mattheson, was of the same opinion. In his Critica Musica
* Graun, at Dresden, devoured the scores of Keiser. Hasse, in 1772, still professed his unbounded admiration for this musician, " one of the greatest the world has ever possessed." As for Matthe- son, he was, in many respects, Reiser's mouthpiece.
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(1772) he boasted " of having been, vanity apart,* the first to insist emphatically and expressly upon the importance of melody." . . . Before him, he says, there was no musical composer " who did not leap over this first, most excellent and most beautiful element of music as a cock leaps over burning coals."
If he was not the first, as he professed, he at least made most noise about the matter. In 1713 he entered upon a violent battle in honour of melody as against the Kontrapuntisten, who were represented by an organist of Wolfenbiittel, Bokemeyer, as learned and pugnacious as himself. Mattheson saw nothing in canon and counterpoint but an intellectual exercise, without power to touch the heart. To move his adversary to repentence he chose as arbi- trators Keiser, Heinichen and Telemann, who pronounced in his favour. Bokemeyer declared himself defeated and thanked Mattheson for having converted him to melody, " as the sole and true source of pure music. "f
Telemann said :
" Wer auf Instrumenten spielt muss des Singens kiindig seyn. (Who plays on instruments must be versed in song.)"
And Mattheson :
" Whatever music one is writing, vocal or instru- mental, all should be cantabile."
This predominant importance given to cantabile melody, to song, overthrew the barrier between the different classes of music, by upholding as the
* There was, on the contrary, a good deal of vanity in his claim, for it is evident from the foregoing quotations from Telemann, and the example of Keiser, that he had no lack of forerunners.
| Bokemeyer was so convinced that he wrote a little treatise on melody and sent it to Mattheson for the latter to correct.
Eighteenth-Century Music 75
model for all the class in which vocal melody and the art of singing had blossomed into perfection : the Italian opera. The oratorios of Telemann, Hasse and Graun and the masses of the period are in the style of opera.* In his Musikalische Patriot (1728), Mattheson breaks a lance against the con- trapuntal style of church music : here as elsewhere he wishes to establish " the theatrical style," because this style, according to him, enables the composer to attain better than any other the aim of religious music, which is " to excite virtuous emotions." All is, or should be, he says, theatrical, in the widest sense of the word theatralisch, which denotes the artistic imitation of nature. " All that produces an effect upon men is theatrical. . . . Music is theatrical. . . . The whole world is a gigantic theatre." This theatrical style will permeate the whole art of music, even in those of its departments that seem most remote from it, the Lied and instru- mental music.
* Handel and J. S. Bach themselves were not immune from the contagion. Not only did Handel write forty operas, but his oratorios, his Psalms, his Te Deums abound in dramatic elements. As for J. S. Bach, it is characteristic that he chose as the librettist of his first cantatas Erdmann Neuminster, who wrote that a cantata *' is nothing more than a fragment of an opera," and introduced the religious cantata in operatic style into Germany. In upholding religious cantatas of this kind, with lecitatives and arias, Bach shocked a great many people. The pietists of Muhlhausen, when he was Kapellmeister in 1708, forced him to resign, being offended by his unduly frivolous cantatas, and because his church music savoured of the concert-hall and the opera. We find reminiscences of Keiser's operas in his most famous cantatas. Need we also recall his profane cantatas, some mythological, others realistic and comic, and the use which he made of considerable fragments of these com- positions in his religious works ? He did not always perceive a definite boundary between the profane and the religious style. Bach and Handel were protected from the excesses of the operatic style by theii choral and contrapuntal ingenuity, which harmonised but ill with the opera of that period.
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But this change of style would not have marked a living progress if the opera itself, which was the common model, had not been transformed, at the same period, by the introduction of a new element which was to develop with unexpected rapidity : the symphonic element. What is lost as regards vocal polyphony is regained in instrumental sym- phony. The great conquest of Telemann, Hasse, Graun and Jommelli in opera was the recitative accompagnato, the recitative scene with dramatic orchestration.* It was in this respect that they were revolutionists in the musical world. Once the orchestra was introduced into the drama it gained and kept the upper hand. In vain did people lament that the fine art of singing would be ruined. Those who supported it as against the old contrapuntal art did not fear to sacrifice it, at need, to the orchestra. Jommelli, so respectful of Metastasio in all other matters, opposed him with regard to this one point with immovable resolution. f One must read the complaints of the old musicians : " One no longer hears the voice ; the orchestra is deafening."
* I \vill not say that they invented it. The accompagnato goes back to the earliest period of the Venetian opera and was used by Lully in his later works. But from the time of Leonardo Vinci and Hasse (about 1725-30) these great dramatic monologues, recited with oichestra, underwent a magnificent development.
f Not that Metastasio was inimical to the recitativo stromentale. He was too complete a poet-musician not to be conscious of its dramatic effect. He plainly acknowledged, in certain of his writings, the orchestra's power of interpreting the inward tragedy.
But this very power made him uneasy. The inward tragedy threatened to overflow and swamp the action ; the poetry was in danger of being drowned by the music ; and Metastasio, who had so fine a feeling for the equilibrium of all the theatrical elements, was bound to see that the proportion of the recitativo con strumenti must be strictly limited in each act.
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As early as 1740, at the performances of opera, the audience could no longer understand the words of the singers unless it followed them in the libretto : the accompaniment smothered the voices.* And the dramatic orchestra continued to develop throughout the century. " The immoderate use of the instrumental accompaniment " says Gerber, " has become a general fashion." The orchestra swamped the theatre to such an extent that at a very early period it freed itself from it, and claimed in itself to be theatre and drama. As early as 1738, Scheibe, who with Mattheson was the most intelligent of the German musicologists, was writing symphony-overtures, which expressed " the content of the pieces/' after the fashion of Beethoven's overtures for Coriolanus and Leonora.} I will not speak of the descriptions in music which abounded in Germany about 1720, as we see from Mattheson's bantering remarks in his Critica Musica. The movement came from Italy, where Vivaldi and Locatelli, under the influence of the opera, were writing programme concertos which were spreading all over Europe %
* Lorenz Mizler : Musical Bibl., 1740, Leipzig, vol. ii., see p. 13, quoted by W. Krefeld : Das Orchester der Oper, 1898. See also Mattheson : Die neueste Untersuching der Singspiele, 1744, Hamburg.
f Scheibe's overtures to Polyeuctes ein Martyrer and Mithridates. C. H. Schmid, in his Chronologie des deutschen Theaters, 1755, Leipzig, calls this attempt "one of the great memorable events of the year." See Karl Mennicke : Hasse und die Briider Graun als Symphoniker, 1906, Leipzig.
J Such as the four concertos of Vivaldi devoted to the four seasons, or the concertos La Tempesta, La Notte, etc. Each of the concertos of the seasons illustrates a programme which is set forth in a sonnet. I will refer the reader to the analysis of the charming concerto of Autumn, by Herr Arnold Schering (Geschichte des instrumental Konzerts, 1905, Breitkopf.) Herr Schering has traced the influence of these works upon Graupner, at Darmstadt, and J. G. Werner, Haydn's predecessor as Prince Esterhazy's Kapellmeister.
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Then the influence of French music, " the subtle imitator of nature "* became preponderant over the development of Tonmalerei (painting by music) in German musicf — but what I wish to point out is that even the opponents of programme music, those who like Mattheson scoffed at the extravag- ance of the descriptions of battles and tempests, of musical calendars, % of the puerile symbolism which represented in counterpoint the first chapter of St. Matthew, or the genealogical tree of the Saviour, or which, to represent Christ's Twelve Apostles, wrote as many parts, — even these attri- buted to instrumental music the power of represent- ing the life of the soul.
" One can very well represent merely with instru- ments/1 says Mattheson, " greatness of soul, love, jealousy, etc. One can represent all the passions of the heart by simple harmonies and their concaten- ation, without words, so that the hearer grasps and understands the development, the meaning and the ideas of the musical utterance as though it were an actual spoken utterance " §
* Telemann, 1742.
For the French theorists of " imitation " in music, see the essay by J. Ecorcheville : De Lulli d Rameau, I'Esthttique musicale de 1690 A 1730.
| None of the German critics, who mention, whether to praise or blame, Telemann's passion for musical " paintings," fail to attribute it to the influence of French music. And Telemann himself boasted that he was in this the disciple of France.
J Example : an Instrumental-Kalendar in twelve months by J. G. Werner. Everything is translated into music, even to the length of the days and nights, which, being in February ten and fourteen hours respectively, are expressed by the repetition of minuets of ten and fourteen bars. — A. Schering suggests that Haydn has been influenced by his predecessor in his earlier symphonies : Evening, Morning, etc.
§ Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiels, 1744. — Mattheson here follows Keiser's traditions.
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A little later, about 1767, in a letter to Philipp Emmanuel Bach, the poet Gerstenberg, of Copen- hagen, expressed with perfect lucidity the idea that true instrumental music, and especially clavier music, ought to give utterance to precise feelings and subjects ; and he hoped that Philipp Emmanuel, whom he described as " a musical Raphael " (ein Raffael durch Tone) would realise this art.*
Musicians, then, had become plainly aware of the expression and descriptive power of pure music ; and we may say that certain German composers of this period were intoxicated by the idea. Of these was Telemann, for example, for whom Tonmalerei or music-painting takes the foremost place.
But what we must plainly realise is that it was not merely a literary movement that was in question, seeking to introduce extra-musical elements into music, making it a sort of painting or poetry. A profound revelation was occurring in the heart of music. The individual soul was becoming emancipated from the impersonality of form. The subjective element, the artist's personality, was invading the art with an audacity that was absolutely unprecedented. — It is true that we recognize the personality of J. S. Bach and Handel in their powerful works. But we know how rigorously these works are unfolded, in accordance with the strictest laws, which not only are not the laws of emotion, but which evidently evade or contradict them of inten- tion— for whether in the case of a fugue or an aria da capo, they inevitably bring back the motives at moments and in places determined upon beforehand, whereas emotion requires the composer to continue
* O. Fischer : Zum muzikalischen Standpunkte des Nordischen Dichterkreises (Sammelbande der I.M.G., January-March, 1904).
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upon his path, and not to retrace his steps ; — and which, on the other hand, dread fluctuations of feeling, consenting to them only on condition that they present themselves under symmetrical aspects, contrasts of a somewhat stiff and mechanical nature between the piano and the forte, the tutti and con- certino ; in the form of " echoes," as they were called in those days. It seemed inartistic to express one's individual feeling in an immediate fashion ; one had perforce to interpose between oneself and the public a veil of beautiful and impersonal forms. Doubtless the works of this period gained thereby their superb appearance of lofty serenity, which hides the little joys and little sorrows. But how much humanity they lose thereby ! — This humanity gives musical utterance to its cry of emancipation with the artists of the new period. Obviously we cannot expect that it will at the first step attain the palpitating freedom of a Beethoven. Yet the roots of Beethoven's art exist already, as has been shown,* in the Mann- heim symphonies, in the work of that astonishing Johann Stamitz, whose orchestral trios, written in 1750, mark a new period. Through him instru- mental music became the supple garment of the living soul, always in movement, perpetually chang- ing, with its unexpected fluctuations and contrasts. I do not wish to exaggerate. One can never express in art an emotion in all its purity, but only a more or less approximate image of it ; and the progress of a language such as music is can only approach the emotion more and more closely without
* See above all the works of the great musicologist, to whom belongs the honour of having restored to the light of day Stamitz and his school : Hugo Riemann, in his editions of the Sinfonien der Pfalzbayerischen Schule, and his articles on Beethoven und die Mannheimer (Die Musik, 1907-8),
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ever attaining it. I shall not pretend, therefore (for that would be absurd), that the new symphonists broke the old framework and liberated thought from the slavery of form ; on the contrary, they estab- lished new forms ; and it was at this period that the classic types of the sonata and the symphony, as defined to-day in the schools of music, definitely imposed themselves. But although to us these types may have become superannuated, although our modern emotions are inconvenienced and to some extent hampered by them, although they have at last assumed an appearance of scholastic con- ventionality, we must reflect how free and vital they appeared then, by comparison with the accus- tomed forms and style. Moreover, we may affirm that to the inventors of these new forms, or to those who first made use of them, they seemed much freer than to those who followed. They had not yet become general ; they were still personal to their creators, fashioned according to the laws of their own thought, modelled on the very rhythm of their breathing. I have no hesitation in saying that the symphony of a Stamitz, though less rich, less beautiful, less exuberant, is much more spontaneous than that of a Haydn or a Mozart. It is made to its own measure ; it creates its forms ; it does not submit to them.
What impulsive creatures are these first symp- honists of Mannheim ! To the indignation of the old musicians, and above all the pontiffs of northern Germany, they dare to shatter the aesthetic unity of their work, to mix one style with another, and to put into their compositions, as a critic observes, " halting, unmelodious, base, burlesque and dis- membered elements, and all the feverish paroxysms
7
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of the continual alternation of the piano and the forte."* They profit by all the recent conquests, by the progress of the orchestra, by the audacious harmonic researches of a Telemann, replying to the scandalised old masters who tell him that one must not go too far, that one must go " down to the very depths if one wishes to deserve the name of Master, f" They profit also by the new styles of music, by the Singspiel which has just taken shape. They boldly introduce the comic style into the symphony, side by side with the serious style, at the risk of scandalising Philipp Emmanuel Bach, who sees in the eruption of the comic style (Sty I so beliebte Komische) an element of decadence in music J — a decadence which was to lead to Mozart. — In short, their law is that of life and nature — the same law which is about to permeate the whole art of music, resuscitating the Lied, giving birth to the Singspiel, and leading to those experiments in the utmost freedom in theatrical music which are known as Melodrama : free music united to free speech.
For this great breath of liberation of the individual soul we should be grateful ; it stirred the thought of all Europe about the middle of the eighteenth century, before expressing itself in action by the French Revolution and in art by romanticism. If the German music of that time is still far removed from the rom antic spirit (although we already find in it certain precursory signs) it is because it was
* Allg. deutsche Bibliothek, 1791 (quoted by Herr Mennicke in Hasse und die Bmder Graun).
•f Letter from Telemann to C. H. Graun, i5th December, 1751.
J Autobiography, quoted by Nohl : Musiker Briefe, 1 867 ; and by C. Mennicke.
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secured from the excesses of artistic individualism by two profound emotions : the consciousness of the social obligations of art and a passionate patriotism.
We know how Germanic sentiment decayed in German music at the close of the seventeenth century. Abroad the most disdainful idea was entertained of it. We may remember that in 1709 Lecerf de la Vi^ville, speaking of the Germans, remarked that " their reputation in music is not great," and that the Abbe de Chateauneuf admired a German performer all the more because he came from " a country that is not addicted to producing men of fire and genius." The Germans subscribed to this judgment ; and while their princes and wealthy burgesses passed their time in travelling through Italy and France and aping the manners of Paris or Venice, Germany was full of French and Italian musicians, who laid down the law, imposed their style, and were " all the rage." I have already given a summary of a novel by J. Kuhnau : The Musical Charlatan, published in 1700, whose comic hero is a German adventurer who passes himself off as an Italian in order to exploit the snobbery of his compatriots. He is the type of those Germans of the period who denied their nationality in order to share in the glory of the foreigners.
In the first twenty years of the Eighteenth century an intellectual change was already making itself felt. The musical generation which surrounded Handel at Hamburg — Reiser, Telemann, Mattheson — did not go to Italy ; it prided itself in not doing so and was beginning to realise its own strength. Handel himself at first refused to make the Italian
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pilgrimage ; at the period when he was writing his Almira at Hamburg he affected a great contempt for Italian music. The failure of the Hamburg opera compelled him, however, to make the classic journey ; and once he was in Italy he surrendered to the charm of the Latin Circe, like all those who have once known her. Still, he took from her the best part of her genius without impairing his own ; and his victory in Italy, the triumph of his Agrippina at Venice, in 1708, was of considerable effect in restoring Germany's pride ; for the echo of this success was immediately heard in his own country. These remarks apply even more forcibly to the success of his Rinaldo in London, in 1711. Think of it : here was a North German who, as all Europe agreed, had beaten the Italians on their own ground ! The Italians themselves admitted it. The Italian scores which he wrote in London were at once performed in Italy. The poet, Barthold Feind, in 1715, told his compatriots at Hamburg that the Italians called Handel " I'Orfeo del nostro secolo " — " the Orpheus of our age." " A rare honour," he adds, " for no German is spoken of thus by an Italian or a Frenchman, these gentry being accustomed to scoffing at us."
With what rapidity and vehemence did the national sentiment revive in German music during the following years ! In 1728 Mattheson's Musikalische Patriot exclaimed : " Fuori Barbari ! " " Out, barbarians ! "
" Let the calling be forbidden to the aliens who encompass us from east to west, and let them be sent back across their savage Alps to purify them- selves in the furnace of Etna ! "
In 1729 Martin Heinrich Fuhrmann published
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some frantic pamphlets attacking the Italian Opern- Quark.
Above all, Johann Adolf Scheibe was indefatig- able in restoring the national pride: from 1737-40 by his Critischer Musicus, while in 1745 he states that Bach, Handel, Telemann, Hasse and Graun, " to the glory of our country, are putting all the foreign composers, whoever they are, to shame . . . We are no longer imitators of the Italians ; we may with much better reason boast that the Italians have at last become the imitators of the Germans. Yes, we have at last discovered that good taste in music of which Italy has never as yet offered us the perfect model. . . . Good taste in music (the taste of a Hasse or a Graun) is the peculiar characteristic of the German intellect ; no other nation can pride itself on this superiority. Morever, the Germans have for a long time been the chief masters of instrumental music, and they have retained this supremacy."
Mizler and Marpurg express themselves to the same effect. And the Italians accept these verdicts. Antonio Lotti writes to Mizler, in 1738 :
" Miei compatrioti sono genii e non compositori, ma la vera composizione si trova in Germania."* " My countrymen are talented, but not composers ; the true art of composition is found in Germany."
We see the change of front that has come about in music. First we have the period of the great Italians who triumphed in Germany ; then that of the great Italianate Germans : Handel and Hasse. And then the time of the Germanized Italians, of whom Jommelli was one.
* Carl Mennicke inscribes this phrase of Lotti's at the beginning of his Hasse und die Briider Graun.
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Even in France, where people were much more stay-at-home, not caring greatly what was happening in Germany, it was realised that a revolution was taking place. As early as 1734, Sere de Rieux recorded Handel's victory over Germany.
Flavius, Tamerlan, Othon, Renaud, Cesar, Admete, Siroe, Rodelinde et Richard, Eternel monuments dress6s a sa memoire. Des Opera Remains surpass e" rent la gloire, Venise lui peut-elle opposer un rival ?*
Grimm, who was a snob, and would have taken good care not to advertise a kinship that would have injured him in the eyes of the public, con- gratulates himself, in a letter to the Abbe Raynal in 1752, on being the compatriot of Hasse and Handel. Telemann was feted in Paris in 1737 ; Hasse was no less warmly welcomed in 1750, and the Dauphin requested him to write the Te Deum for the accouchement of the Dauphiness. J. Stamitz obtained a triumphant reception for his first sym- phonies in Paris, about 1754-5. And soon after this the French newspapers made a crushing reference to Rameau, contrasting him with the German symphonists ; or, to be exact, they said : " We shall not commit the injustice of comparing Rameau's overtures with the symphonies which Germany has given us during the last twelve or fifteen years. "f
German music, then, had regained its position at the summit of European art ; and the Germans realised it. In this national feeling all other differ- ences were effaced ; all German artists, to whatever group they belonged, set aside their causes of dispute ; Germany united them without distinction of schools.
* Epitre sur la Musique, 3d canto, f Mercure de France, April, 1772.
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Zacharia's verses which I quoted but now show us, about the middle of the century, the leaders of the new school and those of the old grouped together, for the glory of Germany, in what he calls the " Temple of Eternity:'
" . . . With joyous rapture the muse of Germany beholds the artist hosts, and she blesses their names, too numerous all to be contained within the confines of this narrow poem, but which Fame inscribes in immortal letters upon the columns of the Temple of Eternity. . . . O Muse of Germany, lay claim to the honour of having bound thy brows with the laurel of music ! A multitude of masters are thine, greater and more numerous than those of France and alien lands. . .
These artists are classed by Zacharia in a very different order to that which we should give them to-day. But they are almost all there : and from the sum total of their fame proceeds a pride intoxi- cated by the musical empire of Germany.
It was not only the pride of the musicians that was exalted, but also their patriotism. Patriotic operas* were written. Even in the courts where Italianate music prevailed, as in that of Frederick II. at Berlin, we see C. H. Graun singing Frederick's battles — Hochkirchen, Rossbach, Zorndorf — either in sonatas or dramatic scenes, f Gluck wrote his
* The most famous of these is Gunther von Schwarzburg, by Ignaz Holzbauer, one of the most melodious of German operas before Mozart, who was himself inspired by it (1770, Mannheim.) — As early as 1689, Steffani had written a Henrico Leone which was played at the inauguration of the Hanover Opera, and on the fifth centenary of the siege of Bardewick by Henry the Lion. — We may also mention among compositions of this class a number of works by Schurmann, Scheibe, etc.
f It is said that Graun died of mortification on learning of Frederick's defeat at Ziillichau (1759).
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Vaterlandslied (1700) and his Hermannschlacht to words by Klopstock. Presently the young Mozart, in his palpitating letters, written from Paris in 1778, is moved to fury against the French and Italians :
" My hands and feet are trembling with the ardent desire to teach the French to acknowledge, esteem and fear the Germans more and ever more."*
This exacerbated patriotism, which displeases us in great artists like Mozart, because it makes them grossly unjust to the genius of other races, had at least the result of compelling them to emerge from their atmosphere of arrogant individualism or debilitated dilettantism. To German art, which breathed a rarified atmosphere, and would have perished of asphyxia had it not inhaled for two hundred years the oxygen of religious faith, it brought a rush of fresh air. These new musicians did not write for themselves alone ; they wrote for all their fellow-countrymen ; they wrote for all men.
And here German patriotism found itself in har- mony with the theories of the " philosophers " of those days : Art was no longer to be the appanage of a select few ; it was the property of all. Such was the Credo of the new period ; and we find it repeated in every key :
" He who can benefit many" says Telemann,
* To his father, 315! July, 1778. See Schubart : preface to the Musicalische Rhapsodien, 1786, Stuttgart :.." The German ear, however accustomed to the cooing of foreign song, cannot but hear the beauty in a popular song that issues from the heart. And thou, song of the Fatherland ! how dost thou uplift the soul when poet and composer are patriots, and their emotions mingle like drops of dew in the calyx of a flower! I myself, twenty years ago, worked miracles with the Kriegsliedern of Gleim set to music by Bach. Hundreds of people before whom I played these songs can testify to this."
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" does better than he who writes only for a small number."
. . . Wev vielen nutzen kan, Thut besser als wer nur fur wenige was schreibet. . . .
Now, to be beneficial, Telemann continues, one must be readily understood by all. Consequently the first law is to be simple, easy, lucid :
" I have always thought highly of facility," he says. " Music should not be a labour, an occult science, a sort of black magic. . .
Mattheson, writing his Vollkommene Kapell- meister (1739), which is the Code of the new style, the musical manual of the new school, requires the composer to put great art on one side, or at least that he shall conceal it ; the problem is to write difficult music in an easy manner. He even says that the musician, if he wishes to write a good melody, should endeavour to ensure that the theme shall have "an indefinite quality with which everybody is already familiar." (Of course, he is not speaking of expressions already employed which seem so natural that everybody thinks he is familiar with them). — As models of this melodic Leichtigkeit he recommends the study of the French.
The same ideas are expressed by the men at the head of the Berlin school of the Lied, whose Boileau was the poet Ramler. In his preface to his Oden mil Melodien (1753-5) Ramler recommends the example of France to his fellow-countrymen. In France, he says, everyone sings, in all classes of society :
' We Germans study music everywhere ; but our melodies are not like these songs that pass without difficulty from mouth to mouth. . . . One should write for all. We live in society. Let
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us make songs that are neither so poetical that the fair singers cannot understand them nor so common- place and empty that intelligent folk cannot read them."
The principles which he then sets forth are exorbitant.* They led, none the less, to a crop of songs in the popular style, im Volkston ; and the absolute master of this style, the Mozart of the popular Lied, Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, tells us, in the preface to one of his charming collections of songs im Volkston (1784) :
" I have endeavoured to be as simple and intelli- gible as possible. Yes, I have even sought to give all my inventions the appearance of things already known — on the condition, of course, that this appear- ance must not be a reality."
These are precisely Mattheson's ideas. Side by side with these melodies in the popular style there was an incredible outgrowth of " social " music — Lieder geselliger Freude, Deutsche Gesdnge for all ages, for the two sexes, " for German men," for children, for the fair sex (fur's schone Geschlecht),^ etc. Music had become eminently sociable.
Moreover, the leaders of the new school did wonders in the matter of diffusing the knowledge and love of it on every hand. Consider the great periodical concerts which were then established. About 1715, Telemann began to give public per- formances at the Collegium Musicum which he had founded in Hamburg. It was more particularly
* That the melodies should be accessible to all and should offer no difficulties to the learner, such as vocal ornaments, fioritori passages, and other cumbersome trifles, the legacy of the operatic style ; that the melodies should retain their full meaning and all their charm even without accompaniment, without any bass, etc.
f See Reichardt's Lieder.
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after 1722 that he organised regular public concerts at Hamburg. These were held twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, at four o'clock. The price of admission was one florin eight groschen. At these concerts, Telemann conducted all sorts of compositions — instrumental music, cantatas and oratorios. These concerts, attended by the most distinguished persons of the city, closely followed by the critics, directed with care and punctuality, became so flourishing that in 1761 a fine hall was inaugurated, comfortable and well warmed, where music found a home of its own. This was more than Paris had had the generosity to offer her musicians until quite recently. Johann Adam Hiller, who taught Mefe, who in turn taught Beethoven — Hiller, one of the champions of the popular style in the Lied and the theatre, in which he founded the German comic opera, contributed greatly, as did Telemann, to diffuse a knowledge of music throughout the nation, by conducting, from 1763 onwards, the Liebhaber-konzerte (Concerts for Music-lovers), at Leipzig, where the famous Gewand- hauskonzerte were given at a later date. * * *
Here, then, we have a great musical movement, which is at once national and democratic.
But it has another characteristic which is quite unexpected : this national movement includes a number of foreign elements. The new style, which took shape in Germany in the course of the eighteenth century, and subsequently blossomed forth into the Viennese classics, is in reality far less purely German than the style of J. S. Bach. Yet Bach's style was less purely German than is com- monly admitted, for Bach had assimilated something
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of French and Italian art ; but in him the basis had remained echt deutsche — genuinely German. — It was otherwise with the new musicians. The musical revolution which was fully accomplished from about 1750 onwards, and which ended in the supremacy of German music, was — however strange it seems — the product of foreign movements. The more perspicacious historians of music, such as Hugo Riemann, have clearly perceived this but have not dwelt upon it. Yet it should be emphasised. It is no insignificant fact that the leaders of the new instrumental music of Germany, the first symp- honists of Mannheim, Johann Stamitz, Filtz and Zarth, should be natives of Bohemia, as were the reformer of German opera, Gluck, and the creator of the melodrama and the tragic German Singspiel, George Benda. The impetuosity, the spontaneous impulse and the naturalness of the new symphony were a contribution of the Czechs and Italians to German music. Nor was it a matter of indifference that this new music should have found its focus and its centre in Paris, where the first editions of the Mannheim symphonies appeared ; whither J. Stamitz went to conduct his works and found in Gossec an immediate disciple : in France, where other of the Mannheim masters had established them- selves, Richter at Strasbourg, and Bech at Bord- eaux. The critics of northern Germany who were hostile to the movement were completely conscious of the importance of these facts. They qualified these symphonies as " symphonies in the recent outlandish manner "* and their authors as " musi- cians in the Parisian fashion/'f
* Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, quoted by Mennicke. f Hiller, 1766.
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These affinities with the peoples of the West and South are manifested not only in the symphony. Jommelli's operas at Stuttgart (and at a later date Gluck's) were transformed and revivified by the influence of the French opera, which his master, Duke Karl Eugen, imposed upon him as a model. The Singspiel, the German comic opera, had its cradle in Paris, where Weiss saw and heard Favart's little works, and was by him transplanted into Germany. The new German Lied was inspired by French examples, as was expressly stated by Ramler and Schulz, the latter of whom continued to write Lieder with French words. Telemann's training was more French than German. He had made the acquaintance of French music firstly in Hanover, about 1698 or 1699, when he was at the Hildesheim gymnasium ; secondly in 1705 at Soran, when he fed, he tells us, " on the works of Tully, Campra and other good masters " and " devoted himself almost entirely to their style, so that in two years he wrote as many as 200 French overtures " ; and thirdly at Eisenach, the home of J. S. Bach, which (let us remember) was, about 1708-9, a centre of French music : Pantaleone Hebenstreit having " arranged the chapel of the Duke in the French manner/' succeeding so well that, if we are to believe Telemann, " it surpassed the famous orchestra of the Paris Opera." A journey to Paris in 1737 finally turned the German Telemann into a French musician ; and while his works remained on the repertoire of the oratorio singers of Paris, he himself, at Hamburg, was carry- ing on an enthusiastic propaganda in favour of French music. We see a characteristic peculiarity of the period in the tranquillity with which the
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pioneer of the new style declares, in his Auto- biography (1729) :
" As for my styles in music (he does not say my style), these are well-known. First there was the Polish style, then the French style, and above all the Italian style, in which I have written most profusely."
I cannot, in these hasty notes, which are merely the outlines of a series of lectures, lay especial stress upon certain influences, more particularly on that of Polish music, which has been taken too little into account, though its style furnished many inspirations to the German masters of that period.* But what I wish to make clear just now is that the leaders of the new German school, though imbued with a very profound sense of nationality, were steeped in foreign influences which had crossed all parts of the German frontier — Czech, Polish, French, and Italian. This was not an accident ; it was a necessity. German music, despite its power, had always had a sluggish circulation. The music of other countries — ours, for example — has chiefly
* Telemann, who became acquainted with Polish music, at Soran and at Pleise, " in all its true barbaric beauty," does not forget, with his customary frankness, which renders him so sympathetic, to tell us what he owes to it. " No one could ever conceive what an extra- ordinary imagination this music reveals. . . Anyone who took notes could obtain, in a week, a store of ideas which would last him for the rest of his life. In short, there is a great deal that is good in this music, if one knows how to profit by it. . . It was of great service to me subsequently, even in many a serious composition. . At a later period I wrote in this style long concertos and trios which I then gave an Italian dress."
Herr Max Schneider has pointed out traces of this Polish music in Telemann's Methodical Sonatas and his Kleine Kammer-Music. It was more particularly by way of Saxony, whose Elector was King of Poland, that this music spread through Germany. Even an Italianate German like Hasse was affected by it ; he speaks, in a conversation with Burney, of " this Polish music, genuinely natural, and often very tender and delicate."
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need of nourishment, of fuel to feed the machine. It was not fuel that was lacking in German music, but air. It certainly was not poor in the eighteenth century ; it was rather too rich, embarrassed by its wealth ; the chimney was choked, and the fire might well have died out, but for the great current of air which Telemann, Hasse, Stamitz and their like, let in through the door — or all the doors open upon France, Poland, Italy and Bohemia. South Germany and the Rhineland, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Vienna were the centres in which the new art was elaborated ; we see this plainly enough from the jealousy of North Germany, which was for a long time hostile to the new movement.* It is not with the paltry idea of belittling the great- ness of the classic German art of the close of the eighteenth century that I am pointing out what it owes to foreign influences and elements. It was necessary that this should be so, in order that this art should quickly become universal, as it did. A narrow and self-regarding sense of nationalism has never brought an art to supremacy. Quite on the contrary, it would very soon result in its dying of consumption. If an art is to be strong and vital it must not timorously take refuge in a sect ; it must not seek shelter in a hothouse, like those wretched trees which are grown in tubs ; it must grow in a free soil and extend its roots unhindered wherever they can drink in life. The soul must absorb all the substance of the world. It will never- theless retain its racial characteristics ; but its race will not waste away and become exhausted,
* Owing to the hostility and the persistent silence which the northern critics observed in respect of the Mannheim productions, we knew nothing of these latter until quite recently, although we owe to them Haydn and Mozart, and probably Beethoven.
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as it would if it fed only upon itself ; a new life is transfused into it, and by the addition of the alien elements which it has assimilated it will give this new life a power of universal irradiation. Urbis — Orbis. The other races recognise themselves in it, and not not only do they bow to its victory : they love it and enter into fellowship with it. This victory becomes the greatest victory to which an art or a nation can lay claim : a victory of humanity. Of such victories, which are always rare, one of the noblest examples is, in music, the classic German art of the close of the eighteenth century. This art has become the property, the food of all; of all Europeans, because all races have collaborated in it, all have put something of themselves into it. The reason why Gluck and Mozart are so dear to us is that they belong to us, to all of us. Germany, France and Italy have all contributed to create their spirit and their race.*
* The first lecture of a series dealing with the history of music given in the Faculty of Letters of Paris, 1909-10. — Revue musicalc S.I.M., February, 1910.
V.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FORGOTTEN MASTER
TELEMANN, THE SUCCESSFUL RIVAL OF J. S BACH.
HISTORY is the most partial of the sciences. When it becomes enamoured of a man it loves him jealously ; it will not even hear of others. Since the day when the greatness of Johann Sebastian Bach was admit- ted all that was great in his lifetime has become less than nothing. The world has hardly been able to forgive Handel for the impertinence of having had as great a genius as Bach's and a much greater success. The rest have fallen into dust ; and there is no dust so dry as that of Telemann, whom posterity has forced to pay for the insolent victory which he won over Bach in his lifetime. This man, whose music was admired in every country in Europe, from France to Russia, and whom Schubart called " the peerless master," whom the austere Mattheson declared to be the only musician who was above all praise,* is to-day forgotten and despised. No one attempts to make his acquaintance. He is judged by hearsay, by sayings which are attributed to him but whose meaning no one takes the trouble
* Ein Lulli wird geriihmt ; Corelli l&sst sich loben ;
Nur Telemann allein ist ubers Lob erhoben. *' A Lulli fame has won ; Corelli may be praised ; But Telemann alone above all praise is raised.'*
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to understand. He has been immolated by the pious zeal of the Bach enthusiasts, such as Bitter, Wolfram, or our friend A. Schweitzer, who does not realise that Bach transcribed whole cantatas by Telemann with his own hand. It is possible not to realise this ; but if one admires Bach the mere fact that his opinion of Telemann was so high should give us food for reflection. Winterfeld alone, in the past, has made a careful study of Telemann's religious compositions and perceived his historical importance in the development of the religious cantata. — Some years ago the musicologists began to revise the irresponsible decree of history. In 1907 Herr Max Schneider published in the Denkmaler du Tonkunst in Deutschland two of Telemann's -last works : Der Tag des Gerichts (The Day of Judgment) and Ino, accompanying them by an excellent his- torical notice. Herr Curt Ottzenn, for his part, has written a short and slightly superficial study entitled Telemann als Opern komponist : ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Hamburger Oper (1902, Berlin), and added to it a musical album of fragments from Telemann's operas, comic and otherwise.*
There is no lack of data as to Telemann's life. He himself took the trouble to write three narra- tives of his career, in 1718, in 1729 and in 1739.
This taste for autobiography is a sign of the times : it is to be found in other German musicians of the period, and it coincides with the publication of
* Herr Hugo Riemann has published an instrumental trio of Telemann's in his fine collection : Collegium Musicum. The preface to Herr Max Schneider's volume of Denkmaler contains a small bibliography of this subject. — I have profited largely by his labours.
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the first Lexicons, Dictionaries and Histories of Musicians by Walther and Mattheson. Compare, with the delight which the artists of the new period derive from describing themselves, the indifference of a Bach or a Handel, who does not even reply to the series of biographical queries sent him by Mattheson. It was not that Bach and Handel were less proud than Telemann, Holzbauer and their like. They were very much prouder. But their pride was to display their art and conceal their personality. The new period no longer distinguishes one from the other. Art becomes the reflection of personality. Telemann, anticipating his critics, excuses himself, at the close of his 1718 narrative, for having said too much about himself. He would not have it thought, he says, that he was seeking to praise himself :
" I can bear witness before the whole world that apart from the legitimate self-respect which every- one should possess I have no foolish pride. All those who know me will bear me out in this. If I speak a great deal about my work it is not to aggrandize myself ; for it is a law to which all are subject that nothing can be attained without toil. . . .
. . . Nil sine magno Vita labor e dedit mortalibus.
But my intention has been to show those who wish to study music that one cannot go far in this inexhaustible science without a mighty effort. . ."
He therefore believes, as people in his time did believe, that his life may be as interesting and as useful to the student as his work. But apart from all these motives he takes infinite pleasure in writing of himself. His ingenuous confessions are full of
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good humour, drollery and exuberance ; he stuffs them with quotations in every language, verses of his own concoction, and moral anecdotes ; he conceals nothing; after the death of his first wife he writes in verse the story of his love, his betrothal, his marriage ; of his wife's illness and her death ; he spares us no details ; he insists on taking the world into his confidence as regards his joys and sorrows. How far is all this from Handel and the silence in which he wrapped his grieving heart while he wrote the serene music of Poro in the days when he had just lost his mother ! The personality of the artist demands its place in the sun ; it displays itself with indiscreet satisfac- tion. We shall not complain of this ; it is to this change of mind, to this disappearance of the moral constraint that weighed upon the expression of personal emotion that we owe the free and living music of the close of the century, and the passionate utterances of Beethoven.
Georg Philipp Telemann was born at Madgeburg, on the I4th of March, 1681. He was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors. He was not yet four years old when he lost his father. At an early age he displayed a remarkable facility in all subjects : Greek, Latin, music. The neighbours diverted themselves by listening to the little fellow, who played on the violin, the zither and the flute. He had a great love of German poetry — a very excep- tional characteristic in the German musicians of his time. While still quite young — one of the youngest students in the college — he was chosen by the Cantor as his assistant in the teaching of singing.
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He took some lessons on the clavier, but was lacking in patience ; his master was an organist with a somewhat archaic style. Little Telemann had no respect for the past. "The most joyful music" he says, " was already running in my head. After a fortnight's martyrdom I left my master, and since then I have learned nothing as regards music." (He means, of course, that he learned nothing from a teacher, for he learned a great deal by himself, from books).
He was not yet twelve years of age when he began to compose. The Cantor, whom he assisted, wrote music. The child did not fail to read his scores in secret ; and he used to think how glorious it was to make up such beautiful things. He too began to write music, without confiding the fact to anyone ; he had his compositions submitted to the Cantor under a pseudonym, and had the joy of hearing them praised — and better still, sung — in church, and even in the streets. He grew bolder. An operatic libretto came his way ; he set it to music. O, happiness ! The opera was performed in a theatre and the young author even filled one of the parts !
" Ah ! but what a storm I drew upon my head with my opera ! " he writes. " The enemies of music came in a host to see my mother and repre- sented to her that I should become a charlatan, a tight-rope walker, a mummer, a trainer of monkeys, etc. ... if music were not prohibited ! No sooner said than done ; they took from me my notes, my instruments, and with them half my life."
To punish him farther he was sent to a distant school in the Harz mountains, at Zellerfeld. There he did extremely well in geometry. But the devil did not abandon his rights over him. It happened
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that the master who was to have written a cantata for a popular fete in the mountains fell ill. The child profited by the opportunity. He wrote the composition and conducted the orchestra. He was thirteen years of age, and he was so small that a little bench had to be made for him, to lift him up, so that the members of the orchestra could see him. ' The worthy mountaineers/' says Telemann, " touched by my appearance rather than my har- monies, carried me in triumph on their shoulders." The head-master of the school, flattered by his success, authorised Telemann to cultivate his music, declaring that after all this study was not inconsis- tent with that of geometry, and even that there was a relationship between the two sciences. The boy profited by this permission to neglect his geometry ; he returned to the clavier and studied thorough- bass, whose rules he himself formulated and wrote down ; " for/' he says, " I did not as yet know that there were books on the subject."
When about seventeen years of age he proceeded to the gymnasium at Hildesheim, where he studied logic ; and although he could not endure the Barbara Celarent he acquitted himself brilliantly. But above all he made great progress in his musical education. He was always composing. Not a day went by sine linea. He wrote church and instrumental music principally. His models were Steffani, Rosenmiiller, Corelli and Caldara. He acquired a taste for the style of the new German and Italian masters, " for their manner, full of invention, cantabile, and at the same time closely wrought/'
Their works confirmed his instinctive preference for expressive melody and his antipathy for the old contrapuntal style. A lucky chance favoured him.
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He was not far distant from Hanover and Wolfen- biittel, whose famous chapels were centres of the new style. He went thither often. In Hanover he learned the French manner ; at Wolfenbiittel the theatrical style of Venice. The two courts had excellent orchestras, and Telemann zealously in- vestigated the character of the various instruments. — " I should perhaps have become a more skilful instrumentalist/' he says, " if I had not felt such a burning eagerness to learn, in addition to the clavier, violin and flute, the oboe, the German flute, the reed-pipe, the viol de gamba, etc . . . down to the bass viol and the Quint-Posaune (bass trom- bone)."— This is a very modern characteristic ; the composer does not seek to become a skilled performer on one instrument, as Bach and Handel on the organ and the clavier, but to learn the resources of all the instruments. And Telemann insists on the necessity of this study for the composer.
At Hildesheim he wrote cantatas for the Catholic Church, although he was a convinced Lutheran. He also set to music some dramatic essays by one of his professors, a species of comic-opera, in which the recitatives were spoken and the arias sung.
However, he was twenty years of age ; and his mother (like Handel's father) would not hear of his becoming a musician. Telemann (like Handel) did not rebel against the will of the family. In 1701 he went to Leipzig with the firm intention of study- ing law there. Why should it have befallen that he had to pass through Halle, where he very fittingly made the acquaintance of Handel, aged sixteen, who, although he was supposed to be following the lectures in the Faculty of Law, had contrived to get himself appointed organist, and had acquired in the
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city a musical reputation astonishing in one of his age? The two boys struck up a friendship. But they had to part. Telemann's heart was heavy as he continued his journey. However, he adhered to his purpose and arrived in Leipzig. But the poor boy fell into temptation after temptation. He had hired a room in common with another student. The first thing he saw on entering was that musical instruments were hanging on all the walls, in every corner of the room. His companion was a melo- maniac ; and every day he inflicted upon Telemann the torture of playing to him ; and Telemann heroically concealed the fact that he was a musician. The end was inevitable. One day Telemann could not refrain from showing one of his compositions, a psalm, to his room-mate. (To tell the truth, he protests that his friend found the composition in his trunk). The friend found nothing better to do than to divulge the secret. The psalm was played in St. Thomas's Church. The burgomaster, enraptured, sent for Telemann, gave him a present of money, and commissioned him to write a compo- sition for the church every fortnight. This was too much. Telemann wrote to his mother that he could no longer hold out ; he could do no more, he must write music. His mother sent him her blessing, and at last Telemann had the right to be a musician.
We see with what repugnance the German families of those days regarded the idea of allowing their sons to embrace the musical career ; and it is curious that so many great musicians — Schutz, Handel, Kuhnau, Telemann — should have been obliged to begin by studying philosophy or law. However, this training does not seem to have done the composers
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any harm, and those of to-day, whose culture (even in the case of the best educated) is so indifferent, would do well to consider these examples, which prove that a general education may very well be reconciled with musical knowledge and may even enrich it. Telemann, for his part, certainly owed to his literary cultivation one of the highest musical qualities — his modern feeling for poetry in music, whether interpreted by lyrical declamation or trans- posed into symphonic description.
During his stay at Leipzig Telemann found himself competing with Kuhnau, and although he professed — or so he tells us — the greatest respect for " the magnificent qualities " of " this extraordinary man/' he caused him a great deal of mortification. Kuhnau, who was in the prime of life, was indignant that a little law-student should have been commis- sioned to write a fortnightly composition for St. Thomas's, of wlrch church he was Cantor. It was indeed somewhat uncivil to him ; and this fact shows how far the new style responded to the general taste, since at the mere sight of a single short com- position the preference was given to an unqualified student over a celebrated master. And this was not all. In 1704 Telemann was selected as organist and Kappelmeister to the Neue Kirche (since then the Matthaiikirche) with the proviso " that he might at need conduct the choir of St. Thomas's Church also, and thus there would be available a capable person when a change was made." For this read " when Herr Kuhnau died ; " for he was weakly and in indifferent health ; the authorities were anticipating his death — which, however, he con- trived to postpone until 1722. It will be understood that Kuhnau found the whole proceeding in bad
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taste. To exasperate him more completely, Tele- mann succeeded in obtaining the directorship of the opera, although this was, as a general rule, irreconcilable with the post of organist. And all the students flocked to him, attracted at once by his youthful fame, by the lure of the theatre, and by gain. They deserted Kuhnau, who com- plained bitterly. In a letter of the gth December, 1704, he protested that " in consequence of the appointment of a new organist who is to produce the operas henceforth, the students, who have hitherto joined the church choir gratuitously, and have been partly trained by me, now that they can be sure of earning something in the opera are leaving the choir to assist the ' operiste.' " — But his protest was in vain and Telemann won the day.
Thus at the very beginning of his career Tele- mann defeated the glorious Kuhnau, before out- shining Bach. So powerful was the tide of the new musical fashion !
For that matter, Telemann knew how to profit by his luck and how to enable others to profit by it. There was nothing of the intriguer about him ; and we cannot even say that it was ambition that urged him to accept all the posts which he secured during his long career ; it was an extraordinary activity and a feverish need of exercising it. At Leipzig he worked assiduously, taking Kuhnau for his model in the matter of fugues* and perfecting himself in melody by working in collaboration with Handel. f At the same time he founded at Leipzig,
* As he says, " the excellent Herr Kuhnau's pen assisted me in fugues and counterpoints."
f They wrote to one another and exchanged compositions, mutually criticising them.
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in conjunction with the students, a Collegium Musicum, which gave concerts that were a prelude, as it were, to the great periodical public concerts in which he was to take the initiative later in Hamburg.
In 1705 he was called to Sorau, between Frankfort- on-Oder and Breslau, as Kapellmeister to a wealthy nobleman, Graf Erdmann von Promnitz. The little princely court was extremely brilliant. The Graf had recently returned from France and was a lover of French music. Telemann proceeded to write French overtures ; he read, pen in hand, the works of " Lully, Campra and other good artists." — " I applied myself almost entirely to this style, so that in two years I wrote as many as two hundred overtures."
With the French style, Telemann learned the Polish style while at Sorau. The Court sometimes repaired for a few months to a residence of the Count's in Upper Silesia : at Plesse, or in Cracow. There Telemann became acquainted " with the Polish and Hanak* music in all its true and barbaric beauty. It was played in certain hostelries by four instruments : a very shrill violin, a Polish bagpipe, a Quint-Posaune (bass trombone) and a Regal (small organ). In larger assemblies there was no Regal, but the other instruments were reinforced. I have heard as many as thirty-six bagpipes and eight violins together. No one could conceive what extraordinary fantasies the pipers or the violinists invent when they are improvising while the dancers are resting. Anyone who took notes might in a week obtain a store of ideas that would last him for the rest of his life. In short, there is a great deal that is
* The Hanaks are the Moravian Czechs.
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good in this music if one knows how to profit by it. ... I found this of service to me later on, even in the case of many serious compositions. . . . I have written long concertos and trios in this style, which I then gave an Italian dress, making Adagio alternate with Allegro."
Here, then, we see popular music beginning frankly to permeate the scholarly style. German music recruits itself by steeping itself in the music of the races which surround the German frontier ; it is about to borrow from them something of their natural spontaneity, their freshness of inven- tion, and to them it will in time owe a renewed youth.
From Sorau Telemann proceeded to the Court at Eisenach, where he again found himself in a musical environment permeated by French influences. The Kapellmeister was a virtuoso of European celebrity, Pantaleon Hebenstreit, the inventor of an instrument called by his name of Pantaleon or Pantalon — a sort of improved dulcimer,* a fore- runner of our modern piano. Pantaleon, who had won the applause of Louis XIV., had an unusual skill in composition and in the French style ; and the Eisenach orchestra was " installed as far as possible in the French manner/' Telemann even claims " that it surpassed the orchestra of the Paris Opera.'' Here he completed his French education. — As a matter of fact, there was, in Telemann's life, a great deal more of French musical training — and Polish, and Italian — but above all French — than of German. Telemann wrote, at Eisenach, a quantity of concertos in the French style and a
* Hebenstreit's instrument had gut and metal strings, which were struck with small mallets. (Trans.)
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considerable number of sonatas (with from two to nine parts), trios, serenades, and cantatas with Italian or German words, in which he gave a great deal of importance to the accompanying music. Above all he valued his religious music.
It was at Eisenach, where Johann Bernhard Bach was organist, that Telemann entered into relations with Johann Sebastian Bach, and in 1714 he was godfather to one of his sons, Philipp Emmanuel. He was also on friendly terms with the pastor-poet Neumeister, protagonist of the religious cantata in operatic style, and one of J. S. Bach's favourite librettists. — Eventually that happened at Eisenach which profoundly influenced his char- acter. He lost, early in 1711, his young wife, whom he had married at Sorau, at the end of 1709. He has related the story of these events in a long poem entitled : " Poetic Thoughts, by which her desolate husband, Georg Philipp Telemann, seeks to honour the ashes of his wife, Louisa, whom he loved with all his heart, 1711."*
This poem, although much too diffuse and some- what indiscreetly sentimental, is full of a tender emotion that is like a strain of beautiful music.
" Thus I have seen thee dead, my well-beloved ! Can it be that I still draw breath ? "
He tells us how they met, how he had loved her :
" We met first in a foreign land. I was not think- ing of her ; she knew nothing of me. . . I
* Telemann's first wife, Amalia Luisa Juliana, was the daughter of the Kapellmeister, Daniel Eberlin — a very curious person, to judge by the curriculum vitae traced by his son-in-law. He had been a captain of the pontifical troops in Morea, then librarian at Nuremberg, then Kapellmeister at Cassel ; subsequently he was Hofmeister of the pages, private secretary, controller of the mint, banker (at Hamburg), etc., and finally captain of militia at Cassel. He was a learned contrapuntist, a good violinist, and published some trios.
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do not know where I saw her for the first time. What I do know is that instantly I loved her . I told myself : She must be mine. . . . But God said to me : Thou must first be another Jacob (that is : thou must win her by toil and by tears)."
For years he sighed for her. She seemed unfeeling. How he suffered, once, when she was seriously ill ! . And at another time when they were seeking to marry her ! He thought " that his heart was going to break ! " She seemed as indifferent as ever. It was only at the last moment, when he was leaving Sorau, flying before the Swedish invasion, that she allowed him to read her heart. . . .
" I bade her Good night ! for the last time. But what was that farewell about to teach me ? I saw that her eyes were weeping, and I heard . . . (ah, what joy ! ) : ' Farewell, my Telemann, do not forget me ! ' — I departed in an ecstasy of joy, despite the perils of a journey . . ."
Then follow love-letters. Then the return, the asking in marriage, the betrothal. . . .
" How all this happened I myself know not. . ."
Now they are married. It is a life of unclouded happiness, despite the difficulties of life and a meagre diet.
" . . . . In our eyes it was a royal table — the table on which there was rarely more than one dish."
It was a faithful love, with no dissensions. And now they have a dear little child :
" . . . . I am trembling in every limb. I pass through hours of unendurable suffering. . . ."
Six days after the birth of the child she was in excellent health, gay and jesting as usual. But he
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had strange presentiments. He had to conceal himself, to weep.
" When the night fell she began to complain/' She asked for a priest. " It was as though I was dreaming. I could not believe it, I did not wish to go in search of him. But as she insisted I went at last." She said : " My beloved, my dear Telemann, I pray thee, from the bottom of my heart, to forgive me if ever I have made thee suffer." She protested her love with a touching tenderness. " Instead of replying, I wept bitterly. . . . The priest came Then I learned what it was to pray. Her dear mouth was a door to heaven. Jesus alone was her consolation . Jesus alone was her life . Jesus alone was her salvation." She never ceased to call upon Him. " His Name never left her lips until death was upon her tongue. . . . She was holding my hand and said to me : 'I thank thee a thousand times for thy faithful love. Thy heart is mine. I take it with me to Heaven. . . / They wished her to sleep. She refused, singing, in her beautiful voice : ' I will not forsake Jesus, He loves me and I love Him. I will not forsake Jesus/ She sang, joyously, with arms outstretched and smiling face. . . . " Fatigue overcame her. She fell into a sleep, in which she remained for two hours. My grief had partly disappeared ; consoled, I awaited a happy day. Her sweet repose was broken ; she began, in a faint voice : ' My Jesus has spoken to me in a dream/ . . then she complained that the lights were no longer as bright as before. She bowed her head and fell asleep happily in Christ. . . ."
And now what can he say ? " If I say : ' the sky crushed me, the air stifled me, there was a
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roaring in my ears as of a tempest, a black cloud was before my eyes, my hands and my heart were trembling like leaves, my feet refused to bear me. . . . When I have told all this in full, shall I have even touched my grief ? — Enough ! No one can know what this suffering is but he who has experi- enced it."
And he ends with these words : " Mein Engel, gute nacht \ " (My angel, good-night). . . .
This touching narrative, which is permeated by a sorrowful faith, makes us feel that Telemann, too, as he tells us, " became, at Eisenach, another man, in Christ." But, however deep the wound, his temperament was too active and too versatile to allow him to shut himself up with his regrets ; three years later the inconsolable husband was married again to a wife who was to prove in every respect a contrast to his first.
He had left Eisenach. Despite his excellent situation at Court, his longing for change impelled him to accept, in 1712, the proposals which reached him from Frankfort-on- Maine.
" How," he says, " did I come to the land of these Republicans, among whom, by all one hears, learning is of so little value —
Oti le docte savoir ne leur semble plus rien, Ou Ton hasarde tout pour acquerir du bien ?*
" How is that I was able to leave a Court so select as that of Eisenach ? There is a proverb which says : He who wishes to live in all security should live in a Republic. And although I had nothing to fear at the moment I did not wish to find that at Court —
* Telemann had a mania for quoting French verses, and, like many foreigners, he preferred them bad.
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" An matin 1'air pour nous est tranquille et serein, Mais sombre vers le soir et de nuages plein."*
He had no cause to regret his decision. He was appointed Kapellmeister of several churches in Frankfort. He also accepted the curious post of intendant to a society of Frankfort noblemen which assembled in the palace of Frauenstein ; here he had to busy himself with matters quite other than musical ; he superintended the finances, provided for banquets, maintained a Tabakskolleg- ium, etc. This was quite in accordance with the customs of the age : Telemann was not lowering himself in accepting the position ; far from that, he thereby became a member of the most distin- guished circle in the city, and he founded there, in 1713, a great Collegium Musicum, which met in the Frauenstein Palace every Thursday, from Michael- mas to Easter, for purposes of amusement and to contribute to the improvement of music. These concerts were not private ; strangers were invited to them. Telemann undertook to provide the music for them : sonatas for solo violin with harpsichord ; chamber music ; trios for violin, oboe or flute and bassoon or bass viol ; five oratorios on the life of David ; several Passions, one of which, based on Brocke's famous poem, and performed in April 1716, in the Hauptkirche at Frankfort, was a great musical event ; an incalculable number of occasional pieces; twenty "nuptial serenades/' "all the verses of which were mine/' says Telemann ; " but I should not re-write them, owing to their licence and their wit, which was not unduly Attic." These nuptial serenades had arias in honour of each
* " In the morning the skies above us are peaceful and serene, But at night gloomy and full of clouds."
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toast proposed. The order of the toasts was the following : —
1. To his Catholic Majesty, the Roman Emperor.
2. To the Roman Empress.
3. To Prince Eugene.
4. To the Duke of Marlborough.
5. To the Magistrates.
6. To a sound and early peace and a flourishing commerce.
7. To the young bride.
8. To the husband.
9. To the happy pair.
(And the married pair must indeed have been happy, I should think, after this ninth bumper !)
This was, then, the period of the wars against Louis XIV., and peace was very near. Telemann wrote a cantata for the peace (3rd March, 1715). He also wrote one for the Emperor's victories at Semlin and Peterwardein, and one for the peace of Passarowitz (1718), to say nothing of princely birthdays.
In 1721 he left Frankfort for Hamburg, where he was appointed Kappellmeister and Cantor at the Johanneum. The nomadic musician was at length to form a lasting connection, a post which he retained until his death, nearly half a century later. Then, in 1723, he was on the point of migrating again, to act as successor to Kuhnau, who had at last died at Leipzig. He had been chosen unanimously, but Hamburg, rather than lose him, accepted all the conditions that Telemann imposed. A little later, in 1729, he had some idea of going to Russia, where it had been proposed he should found a German " chapel." " But the amenities of Hamburg and
A Forgotten Master 115
my intentions of settling down quietly at last," he says, " triumphed over my curiosity."
" Settling down quietly ..." But for Telemann quietness was quite a relative term. He was entrusted with the direction of the musical education given at the Gymnasium and the Johann- eum (singing and history of music, lectures being given almost daily). — He had to provide music for the five principal churches in Hamburg, not counting the cathedral, the Dom, where Mattheson ruled.* He was musical director of the Hamburg Opera, which had greatly declined, but was put on its feet again in 1722. The post was no sinecure. The cliques which favoured the various singers were almost as violent as at the London Opera-house under Handel ; and the battles of the pen were no less scurrilous. They did not spare Telemann, who saw his conjugal misfortunes unveiled, and his wife's inclination for Swedish officers. His musical inven- tion does not seem to have suffered thereby, for a whole series of operas, comic and otherwise, dates from this period, and all are sparkling with invention and good humour.
But this was by no means enough for him ; as soon as he arrived in Hamburg he had founded a Collegium Musicum and public concerts. Despite the city elders, who wanted to forbid the Cantor to allow his music to be played in a public tavern and to produce therein operas and comedies and other " entertainments inciting to luxury," he persisted and had his way. The concerts which he founded
* For the jubilee rejoicings of June, 1730, in honour of the second centenary of the Confession of Augsburg, a hundred performers made music in the five churches. All the compositions executed were by Telemann, who, although he was ill, directed everything himself. He wrote ten cantatas for these celebrations alone.
n6 A Musical Tour
continued until our own days. At first they were held in the barracks of the town guard, twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, at four o'clock. The price of admission was one florin eight groschen. At these concerts Telemann produced all those works of his, sacred or profane, public or private, which had already been performed elsewhere, not to speak of works especially written for the concerts : psalms, oratorios, cantatas and instrumental pieces. He rarely conducted other music than his own.* These concerts, attended by the elite of the city, and closely followed by the critics, were conducted with care and punctuality, and flourished exceed- ingly. In 1761 a fine hall was opened for them, comfortable and well warmed.
Nor was this all : in 1728 he founded the first musical journal published in Germany, f He retained his title of Kapellmeister of Saxony ; he provided Eisenach with the usual Tafelmusik and with compositions for the Court festivals. He had undertaken, on leaving Frankfort, to send certain sacred compositions thither every three years in exchange for the freedom of the city which had been conferred upon him. He had been Kapell- meister of Bayreuth since 1726, and sent thither a yearly opera and instrumental music. Lastly, music being insufficient to appease his thirst for activity, he accepted the post of correspondent to the Eisenach Court ; writing letters containing
* He made no exception, it seems, but for Handel, whose Passion he conducted in 1722, and some of his Vocal and Instrumental Pieces, in 1755 ; and for Graun, whose Death of Jesus he produced in 1756.
f Der Getreue Music-Meister. In this he published pieces by contemporary masters : among others, by Pisendel, Zelenka, Corner and J. S. Bach (a canon for four voices). He himself published in it a series of arias from his operas.
A Forgotten Master 117
news of all that happened in the North. When he was ill he dictated to his son.
Who will reckon up the total sum of his work ? In twenty years alone of his life (roughly from 1720 to 1740) he produced — it is his own rough estimate — twelve complete cycles of sacred music for all the Sundays and feast-days of the year ;* nineteen Passions, whose poems too were often from his pen ; twenty operas and comic operas ; twenty oratorios, forty serenades, six hundred overtures, trios, concertos, clavier pieces, etc. ; seven hundred airs, etc., etc.
This fabulous activity was interrupted by only one journey, which was the dream of his whole life. It was to Paris. More than once he had been invited thither by the Parisian virtuosi, who admired his works. He arrived in Paris at Michaelmas, 1737, and remained there for eight months. Blavet, Guignon, the younger Forcroy and Edouardf played his quartets "in an admirable manner/' he tells us. " These performances impressed the Court and the city and quickly won for me an almost universal favour, which was enhanced by a perfect courtesy." He profited by it to have these quartets and six sonatas engraved. J On the 25th of March, 1738, the Concert Spirituel gave his seventy-first Psalm with five voices and orchestra. He wrote in Paris a French cantata, Polypheme, and a comic symphony based on a popular song — Pere Barnabas. " And I departed," he says, " fully satisfied, in the hope of returning."
* Thirty-nine were found at his death.
f Blavet played the flute, Guignon the violin, Forcroy the viol da gamba and Edouard the 'cello.
J Compositions of Telemann's had been produced in Paris as early as 1736. (See Michel Brenet.)
us A Musical Tour
He remained faithful to Paris, and Paris remained faithful to him. His music continued to be engraved in France and to be performed at the Concert Spirituel. Telemann, on his side, spoke with enthusiasm of his visit, and fought the cause of French music in Germany. The Hamburgische Berichte von gelehrten Sachen says in 1737 : " Herr Telemann will greatly oblige the connoisseurs of music if, as he promises, he will describe the present condition of music in Paris, as he came to know it by his own experience, and if he will in this way seek to make French music, which he has done so much to make the fashion, even more highly valued in Germany than it is." — Telemann began to carry out this design. In a preface dated 1742 he announces that he has already put on paper " a good part " of the account of his visit, and that only the lack of time has hitherto prevented him from completing it. It is all the more desirable to publish it, he says, in that he hopes to dispose " to some extent of the prejudices which are here and there entertained against French music." Un- fortunately it is not known what has become of these notes.
In his old age this excellent man divided his heart between two passions : music and flowers. Letters of his are extant dating from 1742 in which he asks for flowers ; he is, he says, " insatiable where hyacinths and tulips are concerned ; and greedy for ranunculi, and especially for anemones." — He suffered in his old age : from weakness of the legs and failing sight. But his musical activity and his good humour were never impaired. On the score of some airs written in 1762 he wrote some verses :
" With an ink too thick, with foul pens, with bad
A Forgotten Master 119
sight, in gloomy weather, under a dim lamp I have composed these pages. Do not scold me for it ! "
His ablest musical compositions date from the last years of his life, when he was more than eighty years of age.* In 1767, the year of his death, he published yet another theoretical work and wrote a Passion. He died in Hamburg on the 25th June, 1767, overburdened with years and with glory.
He was more than eighty-six years of age. * * *
Let us sum up this long career and seek to deter- mine its principal outlines. Whatever our opinion of the quality of his work, it is impossible not to be struck by its phenomenal quantity, f and the prodi- gious vitality of a man who, from his tenth to his eighty-sixth year, wrote music with indefatigable joy and enthusiasm without prejudice to a hundred other occupations.
From first to last this vitality remained fresh and enthusiastic. What is so unusual in Telemann is that at no moment of his life did he begin to grow old and conservative ; he was always advancing, with youth. We have seen that at the very beginning of his career he was attracted by the new art — the art of melody — and did not conceal his antipathy for " fossils."
* Such are the two cantatas published by Herr Schneider : Der Tag des Gerichts (1761 or 1762) and Ino (1765).
f EvenTelemann's admirers made certain reservations, during his lifetime, as regards his abnormal productivity, which was without limits and without respite. Handel used to say, jestingly, that Telemann would write a piece of church music as quickly as one writes a letter. Graun wrote to Telemann in 1752 : " I cannot agree with your saying : ' There is nothing new to be discovered in melody.' In the majority of French composers I certainly believe that melody is indeed exhausted, but not in a Telemann, if only he would not wear himself out by writing too much ! " And Ebeh'ng said, in 1778 : " He would have been greater if he had not written with such facility, and with such incredible immoderation."
120 A Musical Tour
In 1718, he quotes, as expressing his own ideas, these sorry French verses :
" Ne les el eve pas (les anciens) dans un ouvrage saint, AU rang od dans ce temps les auteurs ont atteint. Plus feconde aujourd'hui, la musique divine D'un art laborieux etale la doctrine, Dont on voit chaque jour s'accroltre les progress."
These lines express his attitude. He is a modern, in the great quarrel between the ancients and the moderns ; and he believes in progress. " One must never say to art : Thou shaft go no farther. One is always going farther, and one should always go farther." — " If there is no longer anything new to be found in melody," he writes to the timorous Graun, " it must be sought in harmony."*
Graun, the arch-conservative, is alarmed :
" To seek fresh combinations in harmony is, to my mind, to seek new letters in a language. Our modern professors are rather abolishing a few."f
" Yes," writes Telemann, " they tell me that
one must not go too far. And I reply that one must go to the very depths if one would deserve the name of a true master. This what I wished to justify in in my system of Intervals, and for this I expect not reproaches, but rather a gratias, at least in the future."
This audacious innovator amazed even his fellow- innovators, such as Scheibe. Scheibe, in the preface to his Treatise on Intervals (1739) says that his acquaintance with Telemann at Hamburg convinced him still more completely of the truth of his system : " for," he writes, " I found in this great man's composition very frequent intervals of an unaccustomed character which I had for a
* i5th December, 1751. f i4th January, 1752.
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long time included in my series of intervals, but which I myself did not yet believe to be practicable, never having met with them in the work of other composers. ... All the intervals which occur in my system were employed by Telemann in the most graceful manner, and in a fashion so expressive, so moving, so exactly appropriate to the degree of emotion, that it is impossible to find any fault with them short of finding fault with Nature herself."
Another department of music in which he was an enthusiastic innovator was Tonmalerei, or musical description. In this he acquired a wo rid- wide reputation, even while he offended the prejudices of his countrymen ; for the Germans had little liking for this descriptive music, the taste for which came from France ; but the most austere critics could not resist the power of certain of these pictures. Herr Max Schneider has discovered in a work of Lessing's* the following opinion of Philipp Emmanuel Bach :
" Herr Bach, who has succeeded Telemann at Hamburg, was his intimate friend ; however, I have heard him criticise him very impartially. . . . ' Telemann/ he used to say, ' is a great painter ; he has given striking proofs of this above all in one of his Jahrg&nge (cycles of sacred music for all the feast days of the year), which is known here under the name of Der Zellische (The Zelle cycle). Among other things he played for me an air in which he expressed the amazement and terror caused by the apparition of a spirit ; even without the words, which were wretched, one immediately understood what it was that the music sought to express. But Telemann often exceeded his aims. He was guilty of bad taste in depicting subjects which music should * Kollektaneen zur Liter atur, Vienna, 1804.
122 A Musical Tour
not describe. Graun, on the contrary, had far too delicate a taste to fall into this error ; as a result of the reserve with which he treated this subject he rarely or never wrote descriptive music, but as a rule contented himself with an agreeable melody/'
He is convinced that Graun has indeed a much more refined sense of beauty. But Telemann has a much greater sense of life.
A distinguished critic of this period, Christ-Daniel Ebeling, professor in the Hamburg Johanneum, wrote shortly after Telemann's death :*
11 . . . His capital defect — a defect which he acquired from the French — is his passion for musical descriptions. He employed them some- times in quite a wrong way ; adhering to the expres- sion of a word and forgetting the general feeling; . . . he also attempted to describe things that no music can express. . . . But no one can paint with a more powerful touch and is better able to delight the imagination when these beauties are in their proper place. . . ."
It must not be forgotten that Handel, in his time, encountered the same criticism from the Germans. Peter Schulz wrote in 1772 :
" I cannot understand how a man of Handel's talents could so far lower himself and his art as to endeavour to depict, by means of musical notes, in an oratorio on the Plagues of Egypt, the locusts hopping, the swarming of the lice and other equally disgusting things. One could not imagine a more absurd abuse of art."
The worthy Peter Schulz is a delightful musician, and he may be right, in theory, but of what use are theories ? All the aestheticians in the world may
* Hamburge Unterhaltungen, 1770.
A Forgotten Master 123
prove by A + B that any musical descrip- tion is absurd and that Handel, like Berlioz and Richard Strauss at a later date, sinned against good taste and against music itself ; nothing can alter the fact that the " hailstorm chorus " in Israel in Egypt is a masterpiece, and that one could no more resist its whirlwind of sound than that of the March of Rakokczy or that of the battle in Heldenleben. But without entering upon a useless discussion (for music ignores these discussions, and the public follows suit, disregarding the disputants) what should be remarked here is that in Telemann's case the influence of France was noted in his life-time.
As we have learned from his biography, he had by no means lacked opportunities of becoming acquainted with French music. On the whole, his musical education was more French than German. First at Hanover, at the Hildesheim gymnasium, when he was about seventeen years of age, a second time at Sorau in 1705, and a third at Eisenach, in 1709, with Pantaleon Hebenstreit, he had found himself in an environment of French art, and had applied himself to writing in the French style. His journey to Paris in 1737 finally made of him a Frenchman in Germany, devoted to the cause of French music, and a passionate propagandist. " He made it the fashion in Germany."*
And if he thought of publishing his impressions of this visit to Paris this was, by his own confession, in order that he might " attack the current prejudices in respect of French music," and exhibit it " in its true beauty, as a subtle imitator of nature."
A very curious document shows us how remark- able was Telemann's knowledge of the French style.
* Hamburgische Benchte von gelehrien Sachen, 1737.
124 A Musical Tour
This is a correspondence with Graun, in 1751-2, on the subject of Rameau.* Graun had sent Telemann a long letter in which he severely criticised the recitatives in Castor and Pollux. He blamed the lack of naturalness, the false intonations, the arioso introduced inappropriately in the recitative, the changes of time made with insufficient motive, which, he says, " cause difficulties for the singer and the accompanist ; for they are not natural. And I hold it to be a capital rule that one should not introduce any unnatural difficulty without an urgent reason/' In short, he declares that " French recitative singing sounds to him like the howling of a dog ;f that French recitative pleases nowhere, save merely in France, as he has found by experience, all his life long ; " and he derides Rameau. " Ram- eau, whom the Parisians call the great Rameau, the honour of France. ... He must have ended by believing it himself : for according to Hasse he says that he cannot write anything bad. . . . I should much like to know where one is to find his rhetorical, philosophical and mathematical science ; in melody or in polyphony ? . . . I confess that I have made little or no study of mathematics ; I had no opportunity of doing so in my youth ; but my experience has shown me that the mathe- matical composers accomplish nothing of any value. Witness Euler, who used to write false harmonies . . ."
Telemann replies : f
" Most nobly born, most honourable Sir and my
* Published by Herr Max Schneider.
f . . . " French singing is nothing but a continual barking, insupportable to any unprejudiced ear" (J. J. Rousseau, Lettre sur la musiquefrancaise).
J 1 5th December, 1751.
A Forgotten Master 125
very worthy friend . . . so we are to measure swords ! You claim that the recitative of the Welches* is more reasonable than that of the French. I say that both alike are worthless, if we seek in them a resemblance to speech ; and if you insist upon it, I will willingly and peaceably subscribe to the mandate that in future all the nations shall sing recitative in the Italian fashion. . . But as for the musical examples which you give me, you are com- pletely mistaken. For the greater number of these passages of Rameau which you criticise bear witness to no little discernment in the art of diction."
Whereupon he takes the passage from Rameau cited by Graun :f
tc*i»«t r r
//7/brfo.
Cf/?e/nf, /a/vffcA free/ fan.
i
Jj.J. .J-N.3 I
H H
*=*
|
TT — ^? — «? — f — r — r r r — |
\ — ! — f~t — HT — ; 1 |
|
_yfc/-r. e/ej j/e/u e./re /a/>.. |
Jqk k V' E£f= ^fcy, /e /Te/x/re 0uj0t/r. a ce ou'// |
m
* That is, the Italians. f Cos/oy «/ Pollux, Act II., Scene 5.
126
A Musical Tour
" In this example," he says, " the dominant emotion is imperious, arising from the words : Digne de Jupiter meme I The composer has not only expressed this passion, but has also rendered the accessory emotions, as he progresses. The word ' Infortund ' is rendered with tenderness. ' Ressus- citer,' by a rolling trill. ' L'arracher au tombeau ' is stately. ' M'empecher,' a retardation. ' Triom- pher' is given proudly; *d ce qu'il aime ' tenderly. ' Meme ' is exalted. ' Digne ' is expressive of release, etc. ... As for the accompaniment, without being insipid, it could not be other than it is. — How does ' our Italian ' comport himself ? " — The ' Italian ' was Graun, who had aspired to correct and re-write the passage from Rameau ; and here is his version :
/tes/t/rer
/am. _
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Telemann, mischievously, amuses himself by riddling this version.
" The harmony " he says " is, until half way through, harsh and depressing ; the words, despite their diversity, are rendered in the same fashion, which is fatiguing to the ear. . . There is, in the second bar, a pause which interrupts the mean- ing ; in the seventh, a fault of prosody ; ' rendre au jour ' in four syllables. . ." Then follow very accurate observations as to the manner in which a Frenchman " recites " a question — quite differently from an Italian — and the pronounciation of various French words, which Graun had not properly grasped — the " privileged words " which should, in French, be vocalised in a particular fashion : " Triompher, voler, chanter, lire, gloire, victoire." (Here Tele- mann smiles a little ironical smile.) " As for the changes of time, they offer no difficulty whatever to a Frenchman. All this flows and effervesces and sparkles like champagne. . . . French recita- tives, you say, are not liked in any part of the world. I know nothing about that, because the histories say nothing about it. But what I do know is that I have been acquainted with German, English, Russian and Polish singers, and even a couple of Jews, who used to sing to me by heart whole scenes of Atys, Belldrophon, etc. I imagine that this was because it pleased them. On the other hand, I have never met anyone who has said anything of the Welches but : " It is beautiful, it is excellent, it is incomparable, but I have not found it possible to remember any of it. . . ." He adds that if he himself commonly wrote his recitatives " in the Welche fashion, it was to follow the movement," but that he has composed whole cycles of sacred
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music and Passions in the French style. Lastly, he ends with a profession of faith in favour of audacious harmonies, justifying himself by the example of the French, who applauded them.
Graun, somewhat piqued,* replies. He protests that Telemann has been just a little spiteful in defend- ing Rameau's recitative. . . " for/' he says, " you attribute to him a very frivolous intention in claiming that the expression of the word infortune should be tender. I think if the word were bien- heureux, the expression would be equally proper. . . . To express resurrection by a ' rolling trill ' is to me something quite novel. . . In all the resurrections of which there is mention in the Scriptures one does not find anywhere that anything has been ' rolled ' . . . You think the musical phrase for ' Varr acker au tombeau ' magnificent. If the phrase said : ' mettre dans le tombeau ' it would be still better. . . . You find tenderness in ' a ce qu'il aime.' If it were ' d ce qu'il hail ' it would be equally suitable. As for the supposed sublimity of the word meme, I imagine a plaintive French howl, because it is necessary to utter two syllables on a high note, which is always shrill, even with the best singer. . . ."
And having noted certain defects of Rameau's : " My dear friend, it seems to me that you are a little too partial to this nation ; otherwise you would not so readily overlook such capital defects, or that false rhetoric of which the music of ' the honour of France ' is full."
Then, passing on to the criticisms addressed to himself :
" As for ' our Italian,' my dear friend, as a good
January, 1752.
A Forgotten Master 129
German, which I am, as you yourself are, I seek to express the general meaning of the words, and I avoid the utterance of isolated words when it does not come about in a natural manner. ... I prefer to adhere to routine, which is wise. The crescendo gradation of musical recitative seems to me a true imitation of a man speaking, who raises his voice in speaking/ '
He admits, not without difficulty, that he went astray in counting the syllables of the French verse, and he has this curious excuse :
" French actors recite their poetry as if it were prose, without exactly counting the syllables."*
We have not Telemann's reply : but a letter from Graun, of the I5th of May, 1756, shows us that fours years later they were still discussing Rameau's recitative, and that neither of them had surrendered his opinion.
This aesthetic duel between two of the most famous German musicians of the eighteenth century bears witness in both of them to a painstaking acquaint- ance with French music and the French language. Telemann reveals himself — as he was all his life — the champion of French art in Germany. The phrase which he employs to characterise " French music, that subtle imitator of nature," is also a fitting term to describe his own music. He did much to introduce the French qualities of intelligence and exact expression into German music, which, without these elements, would have been in danger, with
* Graun's observations referred to the school of Baron, who broke the rhythm of verse until one could no longer distinguish whether it were verse or prose — and even more to Dumesnil, then famous, who recited poetical tirades with a volubility that scandalised the purists.
10
i3° A Musical Tour
such artists as Graun, of adopting an insipid ideal of vague and abstract beauty.
At the same time, he imported into German music the qualities of impulsive animation, of clear, lively, nimble expression found in Polish music and the new Italian music. This was not a work of supererogation : German music, despite its power, was beginning to smell rather musty. It would have been in danger of asphyxiation but for the great draughts of fresh air which men like Telemann let into it through the open doors of France, Poland and Italy — until Johann Stamitz opened what was perhaps the most important — the door of Bohemia. If we wish to understand the extraordinary blaze of music that illumined Germany from the time of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, we must have some acquaintance with those who prepared this magnificent beacon; we must watch the lighting of the fire. Without this the great classics would seem a miracle, whereas they are, on the contrary, the logical conclusion of a whole century of genius.
I am about to show the reader some of the paths which Telemann opened to German music.
In the theatre, to begin with, even those who were most unjust to him recognised his gifts as a humorist. He seems to have been the principal initiator of German comic opera. No doubt we find comic touches here and there in Reiser ; it was a theatrical custom in Hamburg that a clown, a comic servant, should figure in all the productions, even in the musical tragedies ; and to this character were given comic Lieder with a simple accompani- ment (often in unison) or none. Handel himself
A Forgotten Master 13*
obeyed this tradition in his Almira, performed at Hamburg. There is also a rumour of a Singspiel by Reiser, dating back to 1710, entitled Leipzig Fair, and other performances of the same nature were given at that time. But the comic style was not really sanctioned in German music until Tele- mann's works were written ; the only opera bouffe of Reiser's which has come down to us — Jodelet (1726), is subsequent to Telemann's works and is certainly inspired by them. Telemann had the comic spirit. He began by writing, in accordance with the taste of the time, little comic Lieder for the clown in opera.* But this was not enough for him. He had a waggish tendency, as Herr Ottzenn has noted, to show the comic side of a figure or a situation in which the librettist had seen nothing that was not serious. And he was extremely skilful in delineating comic characters. His first opera, performed in Hamburg : The Patient Socrates (Der geduldige Sokrates) contains some capital scenes. The subject is the story of Socrates' domestic misfortunes. Considering that one bad wife was not enough, the librettist has generously allowed him two, who quarrel on the stage, while Socrates has to appease them. The duet of the scolds in the second actf is amusing, and would still please an audience to-day. The comic movement took definite shape more especially after 1724, as far as Hamburg is concerned. The opera was beginning to grow tedious ; and attempts were made to import from Italy the comic
* For example, for Turpino in Der Sieg der Schonheit (1722), which represents the invasion of Rome by the Vandals. Herr Ottzenn has published a comic aria from this opera in the Supplement of his monograph : Telemann als Opernkomponist.
t Op. cit., Supplement, p. 5.
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intermezzi wihch were then in their first novelty. Comic French ballets were mingled with these. At the carnival of 1724 some passages from Campra's L' Europe galante were performed in Hamburg, and some from Lully's Pourceaugnac. Telemann wrote some comic dances in the French manner,* and in the following year he produced an inter- mezzo in the Italian manner: Pimpinone oder die ungleiche Heirat (Pimpinone, or the Ill-assorted Marriage), whose subject is precisely the same as that of La Serva padrona, which was written four years later. The style of the music also is closely akin to that of Pergolesi. Who is the common model ? Surely an Italian ; perhaps Leonardo Vinci, whose first comic operas date from 1720. In any case, we have here a curious example of the rapidity with which subjects and styles migrated from one end of Europe to the other, and of Tele- mann's skill in assimulating foreign genius.
The German text of this prophetic counterpart of La Serva padrona is by Praetorius. There are two characters : Pimpinone and Vespetta. There are three scenes. There is no orchestral prelude. At the rise of the curtain Vespetta sings a delightful little aria in which she enumerates her qualities as chambermaid. f The music, full of humour, is of a purely Neapolitan style ; Pergolesian before Pergolesi. It has all the nervous vivacity of Neapol- itan music, the little broken movements, the sudden halts, the fits and starts, the bantering responses of the orchestra, which emphasises or contradicts the list of Vespetta's virtues :
* A comic Chaconne and a Niais, in his Damon (1724). See p. 41 of Ottzenn's work.
| See Ottzenn, Supplement, p. 31.
A Forgotten Master 133
" Son da bene, son sincera, non ambisco, non pretendo "...
Pimpinone appears. Vespetta, in a German aria, begins to wheedle the old man ; in the middle of her song three breves a parte express his satisfaction. A duet, in which the two characters employ the same motive, ends the first scene or intermezzo. In the second, Vespetta begs forgiveness for a trifling fault, and she sets about it in such a way that she is praised.
Finally she brings Pimpinone to the point of pro- posing that she shall become Pimpinona. But she needs a great deal of persuasion. In the third intermezzo she has become the mistress. Pergolesi did not go as far as this, in which he showed his tact ; for the story becomes less amusing. But the Hamburg public would not have been contented without a vigorous use of the stick. So Vespetta rules, leaving Pimpinone not the least vestige of liberty. He appears alone, lamenting his misfortune. He describes a conversation between his wife and a gossip of hers — imitating the two voices — and then a dispute between himself and his wife, in which he has not the last word. Vespetta appears, and there is a fresh dispute. In a final duet Pimpinone, beaten by his wife, whimpers while Vespetta bursts into shouts of laughter.* This is one of the first examples of the duet in which the two characters are delineated in an individual manner, which is comic by reason of their very unlikeness. Handel, great though he was as a theatrical composer, never really attempted this new form of art.
Telemann's comic style is still, of course, too Italian ; he has yet to assimilate it more closely
* See Ottzenn, Supplement, p. 35.
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to German thought and speech, to combine it with the little Lieder, full of good-natured buffoonery, which he sometimes employs. But, after all, the first step has been taken. And the nimble, sparkling style of Vinci or Pergolesi will never be forgotten by German music ; its animation will stimulate the too solemn gaiety of the great Bach's fellow-country- men. Not only will it contribute to the formation of the German Singspiel ; it will even brighten with its laughter the new symphonic style of Mannheim and Vienna.
I must pass over Telemann's other comic inter- mezzi : La Capricciosa, Les Amours de Vespetti (the second part of Pimpinone), etc. I will merely mention, in passing, a Don Quixote (1735) which contains some charming airs and well-drawn characters.*
But we have here only one aspect of Telemann's theatrical talents ; the other mask — that of tragedy — has been unduly overlooked. Even the one historian who has made a study of his operas — Herr Curt Ottzenn — does not sufficiently insist upon this aspect of his art. When his feverish craving to write allows him to reflect upon what he is doing, Telemann is capable of anything, even of being profound. Not only do his operas contain beautiful serious arias, but — which is more unusual — beautiful choruses. One, in the third act of Sokrates (1721) f, representing the feast of Adonis, is amazingly
* See on p. 44 of Ottzenn's Supplement, the first aria from Don Quixote, quietly stubborn and infatuated, with flourishes on the violins which celebrate the hero's future exploits. The libretto is Schiebler's ; later on he was one of the librettists of J. A. Hiller, the great writer of German Singspiele.
f Note also the quintets in Sokrates : (the disciples and Aristo- phanes, or the disciples and the servant Pitho).
A Forgotten Master 135
modern in style.* The orchestra includes three clarini sordinati (deep-toned muffled trumpets), two oboes, which play a plaintive melody in long- drawn notes, two violins, a viol and the saxhorn senza cembalo. Its sonority is extremely fine. " Telemann really obtained the fusion of the various sonorous groups," which until then had hardly been attempted. The piece is full of serene emotion, which has already the neo-antique purity of Gluck. It might be a chorus from Alceste, and the harmony is full of expression.
We find also in Telemann a romantic note, a poetical feeling for Nature, which is not unknown in Handel, but which is perhaps more refined in Telemann — when he really does his best — for his sensitiveness is of a more modern type. Thus, the " nightingale aria " sung by Mirtilla in Damon (1729)1 stands out, amid the innumerable " nighting- gale arias " of the period, by reason of its subtle impressionism.
Telemann's operas are not sufficient to judge him by. Those which have been preserved until our day, which are eight in number — together with La Serenata and Don Quichott der Lowenritter — were all written at Hamburg, within a period of no great length — between 1721 and 17294 In the fifty years that followed Telemann greatly developed his powers ; and we should be unjust to him if we did not estimate his capacity by the works of the
* See pp. 7-10 of Ottzenn's Supplement.
f p. 27-28 of Ottzenn's Supplement.
J With the exception of Don Quichott, the date of which is 1738.
i36 A Musical Tour
latter half or even the close of his life, for only in these does he give his full measure.
In default of operas we have, as far as this period is concerned, oratorios and dramatic cantatas. Those published by Herr Max Schneider in the Denkmaler der Tonkunst — Der Tag des Gerichts (The Day of Judgment) and Ino — are almost as interesting to study, with regard to the history of the musical drama, as the operas of Rameau and Gluck.
The poem of the Day of Judgment* — " ein Sing- gedicht voll starker Bewegungen " (a libretto full of strenuous action) — was written by an ex-pupil of Telemann's at the Hamburg Gymnasium, Pastor Abler. He was a free pastor, by no means a pietist. At the opening of this work the faithful are awaiting the arrival of the Christ ; the unbelievers are derid- ing them, like good eighteenth-century philosophers, in the name of science and reason. After a prefatory Meditation, rather weak and abstract, the cata- clysm commences. The waves rise : the stars shine ; the planets falter and fall ; the angel appears and the trumpet sounds. Behold the Christ ! He calls His faithful to Him, and their chorus sings His praises ; and He hurls into the abyss the sinners, who howl aloud. The fourth part describes the joys of the blessed. — From the second part to the fourth the work consists of a mighty crescendo, and we may say that the third and fourth parts are really one whole, closely bound together, without interruption. " After the second Meditation there is no longer a pause between the sections ; the music flows on, a single current, to the end. Even the airs da capo, frequently employed at the outset,
* First performed on the lyth of March, 1762.
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disappear, or are no longer employed, except in a very sober fashion, at moments when the drama is not opposed to them."*
Recitatives, airs, chorales and choruses are con- founded, interpenetrating one another,! so that their values are made apparent by contrast, doubling their dramatic effect. J Telemann applied himself with a joyful heart to a subject that afforded him opportunity for such sumptuous descriptions : the crepitations and tumultuous surgings of the violins in the chorus which opens the second part : Es rauscht, so rasseln stark rollende Wagen, with its dramatic, almost Beethovian climax ; the recital of the prodigious events foretelling the end of the world, the flames bursting from the earth, the impet- uous cohorts of the clouds, the shattering of the harmony of the spheres, the moon forsaking her orbit, the rising ocean, and lastly the trumpet of the Judgment. The most impressive of all these choruses is that of the sinners hurled into hell, with its syncopation of terror and the rumbling of the orchestra§. — There is no lack of charming airs, above all in the last portion,** but they are less original than the accompanied recitatives with descriptive passages on the orchestra. This is the style of Handel or J. S. Bach, liberated from the strictness of contrapuntal writing. The new art of melody is
* Max. Schneider.
t See Jesus' song, which is linked up with that of the faithful.
* For example, the dramatic chorus : A ch Hulfe, which is empha- sised by the juxtaposition of a Gregorian chorale, calm and monotonous.
§ Denkmdler, p. 77.
** For example, the aria with viol de gamba: Ein ew'ger Palm (p. 92), the aria with two violins : Heil I wenn urn des Erwurgten (p. 96) ; or the aria with the large oboe and bassoon : Ich bin Erwacht (p. 105).
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sometimes found combined with a severity of form which to Telemann's thinking was already archaic.* For him the importance of the composition did not reside in its form, but in the descriptive scenes and dramatic choruses.
The cantata Ino constitutes a much greater advance upon the path of musical drama. The poem by Ramler, who contributed to the resurrec- tion of the German Lied, is a masterpiece. It was published in 1765. Several composers set it to music : among others, J. C. F. Bach of Biickeburg, Kirnberger, and the Abbe* Vogler. Even a modern musician would find it an excellent subject for a cantata — the reader may remember the legend of Ino, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, sister of Semele, and Dionysos' foster-mother. She wedded the hero Athamas, who, when Juno destroyed his reason, killed one of his sons, and sought to kill the other. Ino fled with the child, and, still pursued, threw herself into the sea, which welcomed her ; and there she became Leucothea, " the White," white as the foam of the waves. — Ramler's poem shows Ino only, from the beginning to the end ; it is an over- whelming part, for a continual expenditure of emo- tion is required. In the beginning she arrives running over the rocks overlooking the sea ; she no longer has strength to fly, but invokes the gods. She perceives Athamas and hears his shouts, and flings herself into the waves. A soft and peaceful sym- phony welcomes her thither. Ino expresses her astonishment ; but her child has escaped from her arms ; she believes him lost, calls him, and invokes death. She sees the chorus of the Tritons and the
* See the two arias of Christ (pp. 73 and 82) which are both beautiful and dignified without any inward profundity.
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Nereids, who are upholding him ; she describes her fantastic journey at the bottom of the sea ; corals and pearls attach themselves to her tresses ; the Tritons dance around her, saluting her goddess under the name of Leucothea. Suddenly Ino sees the ocean gods returning, running and raising their arms ; Neptune arrives in his car, the golden trident in his hand, his horses snorting in terror. A hymn to the glory of God closes the cantata.
These magnificent Hellenic visions lent themselves to the plastic and poetical imagination of a musician. Telemann's music is worthy of the poem. It is a marvellous thing that a man more than eighty years of age should have written a composition full of such freshness and passion. It belongs plainly to the category of musical dramas. While it is very likely that Gluck influenced Telemann's Ino* it may well be that Ino, in its turn, taught Gluck many valuable lessons. Many of its pages will compare with the most famous dramatic recitatives of Alcestis or Iphigenia in Aulis. With the very first bass one is flung into the thick of the action. A majestic, rather heavy energy, like that of Gluck, animates the first aria.\ The orchestral passages describing Ino's terror, the arrival of Athamas, and Ino's leap into the sea, possess a picturesque power astonishing in that period. At the close we seem to see the waves opening to receive Ino, who sinks to the depths, while the sea closes up once more. The serene symphony which depicts the untroubled kingdom of the ocean possesses a Handel- ian beauty. But nothing in this cantata, and, to
* The date of Gluck's Orjeois 1764, and that of the fast Alcestis, 1769.
f Above all the second part of the aria. See p. 129 of the Denktnaler.
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my mind, nothing in the whole of Telemann's work excels the scene of Ino's despair when she believes that she has lost her son.* These pages are worthy of Beethoven, while in the orchestral accompani- ment there are some touches that remind one of Berlioz. The intensity and freedom of the emotional passages are unique. The man capable of writing such pages was a great musician and deserving of fame rather than the oblivion into which he has fallen to-day.
The rest of the composition contains nothing that rises to these heights, although it is by no means lacking in beauty. As in The Day of Judgment, the beautiful passages mutually enhance one another, either by concatenation or by contrast, f The passionate lamentations of Ino are followed by an air in 9/8 time, which describes the dance of the Nereids round the child. Then follows the voyage across the waters, the buoyant waves that bear up " the divine travellers," and some little dancers in " a pleasing style " introduce a brief period of repose in the midst of the song Meint ihr mich — a delightful aria with two flutes and muted violins, rather in the vocal and instrumental style of Hasse. A powerful instrumental recitative evokes the appearance of Neptune. Finally the composition ends with an aria in bravura, which anticipates the Germanised style of Rossini as we find it, during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, in Weber, and even, to some extent, in Beethoven. — During the entire course of this work there is not a single interruption of the music, not a single
* pp. 138-140.
f All the component parts form an unbroken chain from beginning to end.
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recitativo secco. The music flows steadily onward and follows the movement of the poem. There are only two airs da capo, at the beginning and at the end.
When we read such compositions we are abashed at having so long been ignorant of Telemann, and at the same time we are annoyed with him for not employing his talent as he might have done — as he should have done. It makes us indignant to find platitudes and trivial nonsense side by side with passages of perfect beauty. If Telemann had been more careful of his genius, if he had not written so much, accepted so many tasks, his name would perhaps have left a deeper mark on history than that of Gluck ; in any case he would have shared the latter 's fame. But here we perceive the moral justice of certain of the decrees of history ; it is not enough to be a talented artist ; it is not enough even to add application to talent — (for who worked harder than Telemann ?) — there must be character. Gluck, with much less music than half a score of other German composers of the eighteenth century — than Hasse, Graun, or Telemann, for example — achieved where the others amassed material (and he did not utilise even a tenth part of it). The fact is that he imposed a sovereign discipline upon his art and his genius. He was a man. The others were merely musicians. And this, even in music, is not enough.
NOTE.
There should be room for a study of Telemann's place in the history of instrumental music. — He was one of the champions in Germany of the " French overture." — (This is the name given to the sym- phony in three movements as written by Lully,
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the first part being lento, the second vivamente and the third lento, the vivamente movement having a freely fugued character, while the slow movement of the beginning is usually reproduced at the end). The " French overture " was introduced into Germany in 1679 (Steffani) and 1680 (Cousser) ; it reached its apogee in Telemann's days, during the first twenty years of the eighteenth century. We have seen that Telemann cultivated this instrumental form with predilection about 1704-5, when he became acquainted, in the house of the Graf von Promnitz, at Sorau, with the works of Lully and Campra. He then wrote 200 " French overtures " in two years. Again, he employed this form of composition for certain of his Hamburg operas.*
This does not deter him from the occasional employment of the "Italian overture" (first viva- mente, second lento, third vivamente). — He called this form of composition a concerto, because he employed in it a first violin concertant. We have a rather delightful example in the overture to Damen (1729) f, whose style is analogous to that of Handel's concerti grossi, which date from 1738-9. It will be noted that the third part (vivace 3/8) is a da capo, of which the middle portion is in the minor key.
Telemann also wrote, for his operas, instrumental pieces in which French influences are perceptible — above all in the dances, { which are sometimes sung.
Among the other orchestral forms which he attempted is the instrumental trio, the Trio-Sonata,
* The rather indifferent overture to Socrates (1721) is of this type, f See Ottzenn's Supplement, p. 18 et. seq.
I A certain number will be found in Ottzenn's collection : a Sarabande and a Gigue (p. 29) a Gavotte (p. 30), Le Niais (p. 41), a Bourree, a Chaconne, a Passacaille, etc.
A Forgotten Master ?43
as the Germans call it. It held a very important place in music from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, and con- tributed very largely to the development of the sonata form. Telemann devoted himself to this form of composition more especially at Eisenach, in 1708 ; and he says that nothing of all that he wrote was as much appreciated as these sonatas. " I so contrived/1 he says, " that the second part seemed to be the first, while the bass was a natural melody, forming, with the other parts, an appro- priate harmony, which developed with each note in such a way that it seemed as though it could not be otherwise. Many sought to persuade me that I had displayed the best of my powers in these compositions." — Herr Hugo Riemann has published one of these trios in his Collegium Musicum collec- tion. This trio, in mi B major, extracted from Telemann 's Tafelmusik, is in four movements : first, affettuoso, second, vivace 3/8 ; third, grave ; fourth, allegro 2/4. The second and fourth mo vements are in two parts, with repetition. The first and second movements tend to link themselves together after the fashion of the grave and fugue of the French overture. The form is still that of the sonata with a single theme, beside which a secondary design is faintly beginning to show itself. We are still close to the point where the sonata type emerges from the suite ; but the themes are already modern in character ; many of them, above all the themes of the grave movement, are definitely Italian: one might say Pergolesian. By his tendency to indivi- dual expression in instrumental music, Telemann influenced Johann Friedrich Fasch of Zabst, but here the disciple greatly surpassed the master.
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Fasch, to whom Herr Riemann, greatly to his credit, has of late years drawn the attention of music- lovers, was one of the ablest masters of the Trio- Sonata* and one of the initiators of the modern sjnnphonic style. It will be seen, therefore, that in every province of music — theatrical, ecclesiastical, and instrumental — Telemann stands at the source of the great modern movements.
* This was a trio for strings with continuous bass — that is, there were in all four instruments.
VI
METASTASIO :
THE FORERUNNER OF GLUCK.
NOT one of the great musicians or poet-musicians of the eighteenth century was indifferent to the problems of the lyric drama. All laboured to perfect it, or to establish it on new foundations. It would be an injustice to attribute the reform of opera to Gluck alone. Handel, Hasse, Vinci, Rameau, Telemann, Graun, Jommelli, and many others gave time and thought to the matter. Metastasio himself, who is often represented as the chief obstacle to the establishment of the modern lyric drama, because he was opposed to Gluck, was no less anxious than Gluck (although in another fashion) to introduce into opera all the physiological and dramatic truth that was compatible with beauty of expression.
It may perhaps be profitable to recall how the talent of this poet was formed — the most musical writer ever known : " the man," Burney ventures to say, " whose writings have probably contributed more to the perfection of vocal melody and music in general than the united efforts of all the great European composers."
From the time of his first beginnings as a child prodigy, the study of music had given him the idea
145 11
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of the poetical reformation which was to make him famous. The hazards of his emotional life, skillfully exploited, were of no little service in the completion of his poetico-musical education. It was a singer who had the merit of discovering him. Signer E. Celani has told the story in an article entitled: // primo amore di P. Metastasio.* Met- astasio's first love was the daughter of the com- poser, Francesco Gasparini, the pupil of Corelli and Pasquini, the man who had mastered better than any other the science of il bel canto and who formed the most famous singers ; the teacher of La Faustina and Benedetto Marcello. They met in Rome in 1718-19. Gasparini wished to marry Metastasio to his daughter, Rosalia, whom Metas- tasio has sung under the name of Nice ; and Signor Celani has discovered the draft of the marriage contract, which was drawn up in April 1719. But an unforeseen obstacle supervened. Metastasio left for Naples in May, and Rosalia married another.
At Naples, Metastasio met the woman whose influence upon his artistic career was to be decisive : La Romanina (Marianna Benti) a famous singer, the wife of a certain Bulgarelli. Metastasio was at that time clerk to an advocate. His employer hated poetry, which did not prevent Metastasio from writing poems, cantatas, and serenades which appeared under another name. In 1721 he wrote, for the birthday of a member of the Imperial family, a cantata : Gli orte Esperiei, which was set to music by Porpora : La Romanina, who was passing through Naples, sang the part of Venus in this cantata. The performance was extremely successful ; La Romanina insisted on making the young poet's
* Rivista musicale Italiana, 1904.
Metastasio 147
acquaintance, and fell in love with him. She was thirty-five years of age, and he was twenty-three. She was not beautiful;* her features were strongly marked and rather masculine, but she was extremely kind in a sensual sort of way, and highly intelligent. She gathered together in her house at Naples all the most distinguished artists : Hasse, Leo, Vinci, Palma, Scarlatti, Porpora, Pergolesi, Farinelli. In this circle Metastasio completed his poetico-musical education, thanks to the conversation of these men, the lessons which he received from Porpora, and above all the advice, intuition and artistic experience of La Romanina. For her he wrote his first melo- drama, Didone abbandonata (1724), which, by its Racine-like charm and emotion, marks a date in the history of Italian opera. La Romanina was the triumphant interpreter of his earliest poems, among others of Siroe, which almost all the great European composers were to set to music.
After 1727 they went to Rome. There the three led a singular family life : Metastasio, La Romanina and the husband, Bulgarelli. La Romanina despised her husband, but lavished a jealous^ and passionate love on Metastasio. The old story, so often repeated, had its inevitable climax. Metastasio turned his back upon Italy. In 1730 he was summoned to Vienna as poeta Cesareo. He left Rome, conferring upon his cara Marianna full powers to administer, alienate, sell, exchange or convert his property and his income, without rendering him any account. La Romanina could not endure his departure ; three months later she set out for Vienna. She did not succeed in getting farther than Venice.
* Celani's article contains reproductions of two small portraits, which incline to verge upon caricature (pp. 250 and 252.).
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A contemporary writes :* "It is said that the Didone abbandonata is largely the story of Metastasio and La Romanina. Metastasio feared that she might cause him annoyance in Vienna, and that his reputation would suffer thereby. He obtained an order of the Court which forbade La Romanina to enter the Imperial domains. La Romanina was furious, and, in her rage, attempted to kill herself by stabbing herself in the breast. The wound was not mortal, but she died shortly afterwards of misery and despair."
Some letters written by her to the Abbe* Riva, who served as intermediary, display the unfortunate woman's passion. Here is a peculiarly moving passage, written at Venice on the I2th of August, 1730, doubtless after her attempted suicide, when she had given her promise to behave sensibly :
" Since you still retain so much friendship for my Friend, f keep him safe for me, stand by him, make him as happy as you can, and believe that I have no other thought in the world ; and if I am sometimes disconsolate it is because I am only too conscious of his merit, and because to be forced to live apart from him is the greatest grief than I can suffer. But I am so determined not to forfeit his esteem that I will patiently endure the tyranny of him who permits such cruelty ; I assure you that I will do everything that I am allowed to do to please my dearest friend and to keep him ; I will do all that I can to keep myself in good health, simply in order that I may not grieve him. . . ."
She lived a life of misery for four years longer. Metastasio replied to her impassioned letters with
* Lessing, librarian at Wolfenbuttel (see Celani). f " . . . pour VAmi. . ." (Trans.)
Metastasio H9
serene politeness. La Romanina's reproaches seemed to him " punctual and inevitable, like a quartan fever." She died on the 26th February, 1734, in Rome, at the age of forty-eight, her love offering Metastasio the supreme affront of naming him residuary legatee. — " This," she said, " I do not merely in token of my gratitude for his advice and his help in my misfortunes and my long illness, but also in order that he may more conveniently devote himself to those studies which have won so much fame for him." — Metastasio, blushing at this generosity, renounced his inheritance in favour of Bulgarelli, and suffered bitter remorse on thinking of " la povera e generosa Marianna " . . . "I have no longer any hope that I shall succeed in con- soling myself ; and I believe the rest of my life will be savourless and sorrowful." (i3th March, 1734.)
Such was this love-story, which is closely bound up with the destinies of music, since it was owing to the influence of this woman that Metastasio became the Racine of Italian opera. The echo of La Roman- ina's voice is still heard in his verses, " which are so liquid and musical," says Andres/' that it seems as though one could read them only by singing them." * * *
This quality of his poetry, as of vocal melody set to words, impressed his contemporaries. Mar- montel remarked that " Metastasio arranged the phrases, the rests, the harmonies and all the parts of his airs as though he sang them himself."
And he did indeed sing them. When composing his dramas he used to sit at the harpsichord, and he often wrote the music for his own verses. We are reminded of Lully singing at the harpsichord the poems of Quinault, and remodelling them. Here
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the parts are reversed. It is the Italian Quinault who composes poems at the harpsichord, already tracing the outline of the melody which is to clothe them. — In a letter of the I5th of April, 1750, Metas- tasio, sending to the Principessa di Belmonte Caff- arello's setting of a poem of his, Partenza di Nice, adds : " Caffarello realised the defects of my com- position " — (which gives us to understand that he had written one) ; — " he has had compassion on the words and has clad them in better stuff."* — In another letter of the same year (2ist February, 1750) to the same lady, he says :
" Your Excellency knows that I can write nothing that is to be sung without imagining the music for it (good or bad). The poem that I am sending you was written to the music that accompanies it. It is, in truth, a very simple composition ; but if the singer will sing it with the expression that I have imagined it will be found that it contains all that is needed to second the words. All that can be added to it, though it be of the choicest, may assuredly win more applause for the musician, but will cer- tainly give less pleasure to loving hearts."!
Never did Metastasio give his poems to a friend without adding the musical setting. Consequently we have not the right to judge his verses separately, deprived of the melody intended for them, of which he had, as Marmontel says, "the presentiment. "$ — Music seemed to him all the more indispensable to poetry
* Unpublished letters which appeared in the Nuova Autologia, vol. 77, and are quoted by Jole-Maria Baroni, in his essay on the Lirica musicale di Metastasio (Rivista musicals Italiana, 1905).
f Ibid.
% " A talent without which it is impossible for a poet to write an aria properly is the presentiment of the song, that is, of the character which the melody should possess, the compass demanded and the appropriate mood." (Marmontel.)
Metastasio
because he was living in a Teutonic country where his Italian tongue possessed its full power only when the charm of music made it penetrate the alien mind. He wrote in 1760 to Count Florio : " From the earliest years of my transplantation into this country I have been convinced that our poetry can take root here only in so far as music and acting are combined with it."
Thus his poetry was written for music and theat- rical representation. We may imagine how it must have charmed all the Italian and Italianate musicians of the century. According to Marmontel, " all the musicians had surrendered to him."* To begin with, they were delighted by the music of his verse. Then they found in him a very pleasant, polite, f but quite inflexible guide. Hasse constituted himself his pupil. Jommelli used to say that he had learned more from Metastasio than from Durante, Leo, Feo and Father Martini — that is, from all his masters. Not only did his verses, in which he would allow no alteration, lend themselves marvellously to melody, inspiring and even evoking it, so to speak : they very often suggested the motive of the air to the composer. J
* Signer Francesco Piovano, who is preparing a bibliography of Metastasio, estimates that as many as 1,200 compositions were written for the poet's verses.
f Burney has drawn a delightful portrait of Metastasio, whom he saw in Vienna. His conversation is described as lucid, fluent and vivacious. He was gay and agreeable, full of charm and had extremely good manners. He never disagreed with anybody, partly out of indolence and partly out of politeness. He never replied to an erroneous statement. He did not care for discussion. " He displayed the same tranquillity, the same gentle harmony that we find in his writings, in which reason controls everything; never frenzy, even in the passions."
I Burney records a conversation between Metastasio and an Eng- lish visitor. The Englishman asked whether Metastasio had ever set one of his operas to music. Metastasio replied that he had not, but that he had often given the composer the motives of his melodies.
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Jole-Maria Baroni, in an essay on the Lirica musicale di Metastasio,* makes a brief analysis of the various poetico-musical forms of which he writes : canzonette, cantate and arie. Here I will confine myself to indicating the musical reforms which Metastasio accomplished.
To him we owe the restoration of the chorus in Italian opera. In this respect he was guided by the musical traditions which had been preserved in Vienna. While the chorus had become obsolete as far as the Italian operas were concerned, the Viennese masters, J. J. Fux and Carlo Agostino Babia, had obstinately retained its employment. Metastasio took advantage of this survival, and handled the chorus with an art unknown before his time. He was careful only to introduce the chorus at such moments when it was natural and necessary to the action of the drama. We feel that in writing his choruses he often took as his model the solemn simplicity of the ancient tragedies. f It was in the same spirit that those composers who were friends of Metastasio's, and influenced by him, as was Hasse, treated the chorus in music. Who- soever will turn to the magnificent chorus of the priests in Hasse's Olimpiade (1756) will marvel at the full development of the neo-antique style — simple, tragic, and religious — the monopoly or inven- tion of which has been only too often attributed to Gluck.
But it was in the recitative that Metastasio and his composers introduced the greatest improvements.
The Italian opera at that time was an ill-balanced
* Rivista musicale Italiana, 1905.
f For example, in the Olimpiade, La Clemenza di Tito, Achilla in Scirq : that is to say in the works of his maturity.
Metastasio 153
assemblage of recitativo secco and arie. The rccita- tivo secco was a monotonous and very rapid chant, not very greatly diverging from ordinary speech, and unrolling its interminable length to the accom- paniment of the harpsichord solo, supported a few bass notes. The musician paid very little heed to it, reserving his powers for the ana, in which his technical skill and that of the interpreter were given free scope. The poet, on the other hand, retained an affection for the recitative, as it enabled the audience to hear his verses fairly distinctly. This rough and ready compromise satisfied no one. The poet and the composer were sacrificed in turn, and there was seldom or never a true partnership between them. However, since the second half of the seventeenth century an intermediate form had found its way into opera : a form which was gradually to assume the most prominent position, and which has retained that position (shall I say unfortunately ? ) in the modern lyrical drama : this was the recitative accompanied by the orchestra, the recitativo stromentale, or to give it a shorter and more popular title, the accom- pagnato. Lully employed it to excellent effect in his later operas.* But in Italian opera the accom- pagnato did not become permanently established until the days of Handel f and Leonardo da Vinci (1690-1732). The latter, whom President de Brossesf called the Italian Lully, had already conceived the idea of employing the accompagnato at the climax of the dramatic action, in order to depict the passions excited to the state of frenzy. However, in his case
* Triomphe de r Amour (1680), Per see (1682), and Phatthon (1683).
f Julio Cesare (1724), Tamerlano (1724), Admeto (1727).
I First President of the Parliament of Burgundy ; a geographer and writer upon various languages, fetish worship, archaeological subjects, etc. (Trans.)
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this idea was rather an intuition of genius whose fruits he never troubled to pluck.
The merit of having grasped the importance of this invention and of having utilised it in a logical and reasonable manner seems to belong to Hasse, working under Metastasio's influence, as Herr Hermann Abert has demonstrated.* Beginning with Cleofide (1731),! in which the second act closes with a great scene in recitative* accompagnato, a bold piece of work, Hasse employs accompagnati for curtains and the crises of the action : visions, apparitions, laments, invocations and tumultuous emotions. In the Clemenza di Tito (1738) Herr Abert calls attention to six accompagnati, five of which are reserved for the two principal male char- acters, depicting their inward anguish ; the sixth, which is apportioned to a secondary character, describes the burning of the Capitol. Two of these great orchestral recitatives are not followed by an aria. — In the Didone abbandonata of 1743 especial note should be taken of the tragic denouement, which (like so many other instances!) gives the lie to the inaccurate tradition that all operas before Gluck's days were compelled by the fashion to end happily. The whole drama is gathered up into this final scene, which is full of a sober violence and a tense emotion.
What part did Metastasio play in the erection of this poetico-musical architecture which reserves the orchestral recitative for the great moments of the action ? We shall discover this from a memorable letter which he wrote to Hasse on the
* Nicollo lomelli als Opernkomponist, 1908, Halle, f Performed in Dresden, in the presence of J. S. Bach. See Handel's Tamerlano and Hasse's Piramo e Tisbe.
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2oth of October, 1749, in connection with his Attilio Regolo ; a letter to which we may usefully refer the reader.* Never did poet supervise more closely the work of the composer — or determine, beforehand, with greater definiteness the musical form adapted to each scene.
After a somewhat lengthy preamble, exquisite in its courtesy, in which Metastasio apologises for offering advice to Hasse, he begins by explaining the characters of his drama : — Regulus, the Roman hero, superior to human passions, equable and serene. . . . "I should find it displeasing/' he says, " if his singing, and the music that accompanies it, were ever hurried, save in two or three passages of the work. . . ." " The Consul Manlius, a great man, too inclined to emulation ; Hamilcar, an African who understands nothing of the Roman maxims of honesty and justice, but who finally comes to envy those who believe in them ; Barce*, a beauti- ful and passionate African woman, of an amorous nature, solely pre-occupied with Hamilcar." . . . etc. " Such are, generally speaking, the portraits which I have endeavoured to draw. But you know that the brush does not always follow the outline conceived by the mind. It is for you, no less excel- lent as an artist than perfect as a friend, to clothe my characters with such masterly skill that they shall possess a marked individuality ; if not by reason of the outlines of their features, at least by reason of their garments and adornments."
Then, having laid stress on the importance of the recitatives " enlivened by the instruments/'
* This letter, which is included in the Opere postutne del sig. Ab. Pietro Metastasio (1793, Vienna, vol. I.), was reproduced by Herr Carl Mennicke in his work on Hasse und die Briider Graun als Symphoniker, 1906, Leipzig.
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that is, the accompagnati, he indicates where and how they should be employed in his drama.
" In the first act I perceive two places where the instruments may assist me. The first is Attilio's harangue to Manlius, in the second scene, from the line :
A che vengo ! Ah sino a quando . . .
" After the words a che vengo the instruments may begin to make themselves heard, and, some- times silent, sometimes accompanying the voice, and sometime rinforzando, give warmth to a speech which is already in itself impassioned. I should be glad if they did not desert Attilio until the line : La barbara or qual £ ? Cartago, o Roma ?
" I think, moreover, that it is well to be on one's guard against the mistake of making the singer wait longer than the accompaniment itself demands. All the passion of the speech would be chilled ; and the instruments, instead of animating, would weaken the recitative, which would be like a picture cut into sections and thrust into the background ; in which case it would be better that there should be no accom- paniment."
The same recommendation is made in respect of the seventh scene of Act I. : "I insist once again that the actor should not be compelled to wait for the music, and that the dramatic passion of the play should not be chilled in this way ; I wish to see it increase from scene to scene."
A little farther on, after Manlius' words :
T'accheta : si viene. . . .
"... a brief symphony seems to me necessary to give the Consul and the Senators time to take their seats, and in order that Regulus may arrive without haste and take time to reflect. The character of this
Metastasio ?57
symphony should be majestic, slow, and, if possible, it should be interrupted, to express Regulus' state of mind when he reflects that he is returning as a slave to the place where he was lately consul. In one of these interruptions of the symphony I should like Hamilcar to speak the two lines :
Regolo, a che t'arresti e forse nuovo Per te questo soggiorno ?
and the symphony should not end before Regulus' reply :
Penso qual ne parlii, qual vi ritorno.
In the second act two instrumental recitatives are required. In one of these scenes, " Regulus should remain seated as far as the words : Ah no. De'vili questo 6 il linguaggio.
" He will speak the rest standing. ... If, as a result of the arrangement of the scene, Regulus cannot immediately seat himself, he should move slowly towards his seat, halting from time to time and apparently immersed in serious meditation ; it would then be necessary that the orchestra should precede and support him until he is seated.
" All his speeches — reflections, doubts, hesitations — will give an opportunity for a few bars of instru- mental music with unexpected modulations. Directly he rises the music should express resolution and energy. And tedium must always be avoided ..."
For the third act : "I should like no instruments to be employed in the recitatives before the last scene — although they might suitably be employed in two other scenes ; but it seems to me that one should be sparing of such an effect."
This last scene is preceded by a violent tumult on the part of the people, who shout : Resti, Regolo, resti . . .
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" This outcry should be extremely loud, firstly because truth requires that it should be so, and further, in order to give value to the silence which is then imposed upon the tumultuous populace by the mere presence of Regulus. . . . The instruments should be silent when the other char- acters are speaking ; on the other hand, they accom- pany Regulus continually in this scene ; the modulations and movements should be made to vary, not in accordance with the mere words, as is done by other writers of music, but in accordance with the inner emotion, as is done by the great musicians, your peers. For you know as well as I that the same words may, according to the cir- cumstances, express (or conceal) joy or sorrow, wrath or compassion. I am fully convinced that an artist such as yourself will be able to contrive a large number of instrumental recitatives without fatiguing the hearers : in the first place, because you will carefully avoid allowing things to drag, as I have so insistently advised you ; and more especially because you possess in perfection the art of varying and alternating the piano, the forte, the rinforzi, the staccati or congiunti concatenations, the ritardi, the pauses, the arpeggios, the tremolos, and above all those unexpected modulations whose secret resources you alone understand. . . ."
" Do you think I have done with annoying you ? Not yet ... I should like the final chorus to be one of those which, thanks to you, have given the public the desire, hitherto unknown, to listen to them. I should like you to make it obvious that this chorus is not an accessory but a very necessary part of the tragedy and the catastrophe with which it closes."
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And Metastasio brings his minute recommenda- tion to an end only, he says, because he is tired ; by no means because he has said everything. Doubt- less subsequent conversations commented upon and
completed this letter.
» * «
Let us sum up the advice here given. We shall note :
1. The supremacy of poetry over music. ' The outlines of their features " refers to poetry. ' Their garments and adornments " are represented by music. Gluck did not express himself very differ- ently.
2. The importance given to the drama, the advice of the craftsman not to delay the actor's delivery so that there may not be gaps in the dialogue. This is the condemnation of the useless aria. The music is subordinated to the scenic effect.
3. The psychological character attributed to the orchestra. " The symphony which expresses the reflections, doubts and perplexities of Regulus " . . . The admitted power of good music to inter- pret not only the words, but the hidden soul, whose emotions often differ completely from the expression of them — in a word, the inner tragedy.
All this, I repeat, is in accordance with Gluck's ideas. Why then are Metastasio and his composers always represented as opposed to Gluck's reform of the opera ? This letter was written in 1749, at a date when Gluck had not as yet the least presenti- ment of his reform.* We perceive from it that all
* Gluck began his career in 1742 ; he returned from England in 1746; and in 1749 he had not yet written — I will cot say his dedicatory epistle to Alceste, which is dated twenty-years later (1769), but even his really significant Italian operas ; the date of Ezio is 1750, and that of La Clemenza di Tito, 1752.
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artists of all the camps were moved by the same preoccupations and were working at the same task. Only the formula adopted was not in all cases the same. Metastasio, a lover of il bel canto, and one of the last to preserve its true tradition,* was un- willing to sacrifice it. And what musician would reproach him for this ? He wished the voice — poetry and music — always to be the centre of the picture ; he distrusted the excessive development of the orchestra of those days ; he found it all the more dangerous in that he was conscious of its strength and endeavoured to harness it in the service of his ideal of musical tragedy, harmoniously propor- tioned, f We must be truthful ; under Gluck the drama gained much, but poetry nothing. You will no longer find in him, or in Jommelli, the Racin- ian declamation, which was yet further softened and refined during the course of the eighteenth century, but a heavy, emphatic, paraded, shouted utterance : and it needed to be shouted, to dominate the din of the orchestra ! Compare a scene from Gluck's Armida with the corresponding scene in Lully's Armida ; \ in these two lyric tragedies what a difference of declamation ! In Gluck the declamation is slower ; there is repetition ; the orchestra roars and mutters ; the voice is that of a Greek tragic mask : it bellows.
In Lully, and even more in Metastasio 's musical
* Burney, in Vienna, heard an excellent singer, Mile. Martinetz, to whom Metastasio had taught singing. He adds that Metastasio was one of the last who understood the tradition of the old Italian bel canto, of Pistocchi's and Bernacchi's school. We might add, of Francesco Gasparini's.
f " La esatta proporzione dello stile drammatico proporio dell' Opera in musica," as Arteaga says, who refers to this quality as Metastasio's chief characteristic, that which made him superior to all other artists.
J In the scene in which Armida invokes Hatred.
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collaborators, the voice was that of a great actor of the period ; it obeyed certain conventions of good taste, moderation and natural delivery, in the sense in which the word natural was in those days understood by society (for naturalness varies according to the period ; different societies and different ages set different limits to it). — The misunderstanding between these two schools was based far less upon fundamentals than upon the manner of expressing them. Everybody was agreed in admitting that opera was tragedy expressed in music. But everybody was not agreed as to what tragedy ought to be. On the one hand were the disciples of Racine ; on the other the romantics, born before their time.
Let us add that what matters most in art is not theory but the man who applies it. Gluck sought to reform the musical drama. So did Metastasio ; so, in Berlin, did Algarotti, Graun and Frederick II. himself. But there are various ways of seeking to do this, and there is such a thing as temperament. Gluck's temperament was that of a revolutionist, intelligent and audacious, who could at need be brutal ; who cared nothing for " what people would say " and turned the conventions topsy-turvy. Metastasio's was that of a man of the world who respected the established usages. He stuffed his operatic libretti with frigid sentences and finical comparisons ; and to justify them he referred to the example of the Greeks and Romans ; he in- formed Calsabigi that such methods " had always constituted the chief attraction of eloquence, sacred and profane/'*
* ** Han fatto sempre una gran partefinora della sacra e della prof ana eloquenza."
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The critics of his day justified them likewise by the example of the ancients and the French classics. They did not tell themselves that in order to decide if a thing is good one must not ask oneself whether it was good and full of vitality at some previous period, but whether if it is so to-day. Herein lies the radical defect of such art as Metas- tasio's. It is full of taste and intelligence, perfectly balanced, but scholarly and sophisticated ; it lacks audacity and vigour.
No matter ! Though it was doomed to perish, it bore within it many ideas of the future. And who knows whether its worst misfortune was not the defeat suffered by Jommelli, who, of all the musicians subjected to its influence, was the most audacious and travelled farthest on the paths which Metastasio had opened up ? Jommelli, who has sometimes been called the Italian Gluck, marks Italy's supreme effort to retain her primacy in opera. He sought to accomplish the reformation of musical tragedy without breaking with the Italian tradition, revivifying it by novel elements and above all by the dramatic power of the orchestra. He was not supported in his own country ; and in Germany he was a foreigner, as was Metastasio. They were defeated ; and their defeat was Italy's. The Italian Gluck founded no school. It was the German Gluck who assured the victory not merely of a form of art, but of a race.
VII
A MUSICAL TOUR ACROSS EUROPE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
ITALY
DURING the whole of the eighteenth century as during the seventeenth, Italy was the land of music. Her musicians enjoyed, throughout Europe, a superi- ority comparable to that of the French writers and " philosophers." Italy was the great market for singers, instrumentalists, virtuosi, composers and operas. She exported them by the hundred to England, Germany and Spain. She herself con- sumed prodigious quantities of them, for her appetite for music was insatiable, and she was always asking for more. The most famous masters of Germany — Handel, Hasse, Gluck, Mozart — came to put themselves to school with her ; and some of them left the country more uncompromisingly Italian than the Italians. The English melo- maniacs invaded Italy ; one saw them travelling from city to city, following the singers and operatic companies, passing the Carnival in Naples, Holy Week in Rome, the Ascension in Venice, the summer months in Padua and Vicenza, the autumn in Milan and the winter in Florence ; for years on end they made the same tour, without ever tiring of it. Yet
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they need hardly have disturbed themselves in order to hear Italian opera, for they had Italy in London. England was so thoroughly conquered by the Italian taste from the beginning of the century that the historian Burney made this strange reflection — which, in his mouth, was praise of his own country :
" The young English composers, without having been in Italy, lapse less frequently into the English style than the young French composers, who have spent years in Italy, lapse, in spite of all, into the French style."
In other words, he congratulates the English musicians for succeeding in denationalising them- selves better than the French. This was due to the excellent Italian companies then in London performing opera and opera buffa, directed by such masters as Handel, Buononcini, Porpora and Gal- uppi. Burney, in his infatuation for Italy, concluded that " England was consequently a fitter school than France for the formation of a young composer. "
This observation was, unknown to Burney, some- what flattering to France, which was, in fact, of all the nations, that which opposed the most obstinate resistance to Italian influence. This influence was brought to bear no less upon Parisian society and Parisian artists ; and Italianism, which found a vigorous support among the " philosophers " of the Encyclopaedia — Diderot, Grimm, and above all Rousseau — gave rise to a positive warfare in the musical world, and in the end it was partly victorious ; for in the second half of the century we may say that French music was a prey which was divided up like a conquered territory, between three great foreign artists : an Italian, Piccinni;
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an Italianate German, Gluck ; and an Italianate Belgian, Gr^try.
The other nations had not held out so long before succumbing. Spain had been an Italian colony, as far as music is concerned, since an Italian operatic company had been established there in 1703, and especially since the arrival, in 1737, of the famous virtuoso, Farinelli, who was all-powerful with Philip V., whose fits of insanity he calmed by his singing. The best Spanish composers, having taken Italian names, became, like Terradellas, Kapell- meisters in Rome, or, like Avossa (Abos), professors in the conservatoires of Naples ; unless, like Martini (Martin y Soler) they went forth to carry Italianism into the other European countries.
Even the northern countries of Europe were affected by the Italian invasion ; and in Russia we find Galuppi, Sarli, Paisiello and Cimarosa establish- ing themselves and founding schools, conservatoires and opera-houses.
It will readily be understood that a country which thus radiated art all over Europe was regarded by Europe as a musical Holy Land. So Italy was, in the eighteenth century, a land of pilgrimage for the musicians of all nations. Many of them have recorded their impressions ; and some of these descriptions of journeys, signed by such names as Montesquieu, President de Brosses, Pierre- Jean Grosley de Troyes, the scientist Lalande, Goethe, the Spanish poet, Don Leandro de Moratin, etc., are full of witty and profound observations. The most curious of these works is perhaps that of the Englishman, Charles Burney, who, with unwearying patience, crossed Europe by short stages to collect the necessary materials for his great History of
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Music. Strongly Italianate in matters of taste, but honest and impartial, he had the good fortune to be personally acquainted with the leading musicians of his day ; in Italy, with Jommelli, Galuppi, Piccinni, Father Martini and Sammartini ; in Germany, with Gluck, Hasse, Kirnberger, and Philipp- Emmanuel Bach ; in France, with Gretry, Rousseau and the philosophers. Certain of the portraits which he has drawn of these men are the most life- like pictures of them extant.
In the following pages we follow the steps of Burney and many another illustrious traveller who made the pilgrimage to Italy about the middle of the eighteenth century.*
Scarcely had they entered Italy when they became possessed of the musical passion which was devour- ing a whole nation. This passion was no less ardent among the populace than amidst the elect.
" The violins, the instrumental performers, and the singing stop us in the streets," writes the Abbe Coyer, in 1763. " One
* Montesquieu travelled in Italy in 1728-29 (Voyages, Bordeaux, 1894) ; the President de Brasses in 1739-40 (Lettr es familieres forties d'ltalie) ; Grosley, in 1758 (Observations sur Italic) ; Lalande in 1765-66 (Voyages en Italie, VIII. Vol.: in i2-mo, Venice, 1769); Goethe, in 1786-87 (Italianische Reise) ; Moratin, in 1793-96 (Obras postumas, Madrid, 1867).
Burney's famous Tour dated from 1770-72, and has been des- cribed by him in his two works : The present state of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The present state of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773), almost immediately translated into French.
The reader may also consult the letters of Mozart, who made three journeys through Italy (1769-71, 1771, 1772-73), The M&moives of Gr6try, who spent eight years in Rome, from 1759-1767, the Auto- biography of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who accompanied Gluck into Italy — to say nothing of the numerous studies of those German musicians who travelled in Italy, such as Ruet, Johann Christian Bach, etc.
I obtained much valuable information from an interesting work by Signer Giuseppe Robert! : La Musica in Italia nel secolo XVIII. secondo le impressioni di viaggiatori stranieri (Rivista musicale I tali an a, 1901).
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hears, in the public places, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, a cabinet-maker singing an aria in several parts with a correct- ness and taste which they owe to nature and the habit of listening to harmonists formed by art."
In Florence and Genoa the merchants and artisans combined, on Sundays and fete-days, to form various societies of Laudisti or psalm-singers. They used to walk about the country together, singing music in three parts.
In Venice " if two persons are walking together arm in arm," says Burney, " it seems as though they converse only in song. All the songs there are sung as duets." — " In the Piazza di San Marco " says Grosley " a man from the dregs of the people, a shoemaker, a blacksmith, in the clothes proper to his calling, strikes up an air ; other people of his sort, joining him, sing this air in several parts with an accuracy, a precision and a taste which one hardly encounters in the best society of our Northern countries."
From the fifteenth century onwards popular musical performances were given yearly in the Tuscan countryside ; and the popular genius of Naples and Calabria expressed itself in songs which were not disdained by the musicians : Piccinni and Paisiello exploited them to their advantage.
But the wonderful thing was the ardent delight which the people displayed in listening to music.
" When the Italians admire a thing " writes Burney, " they seem on the point of dying of a pleasure too great for their senses." At a symphony concert given in the open air, in Rome, in 1758, the Abbe* Morellet states that the people " were swooning. One heard groans of : 0 benedetto, o che gusto, piacer di morir ! (O blessed ! O what
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delight ! One could die of the rapture ! ")— A little later, in 1781, the Englishman, Moore, who was present at a " musical spectacle " in Rome, notes that " the public remained with folded hands and eyes half-closed, holding its breath. A young girl began to cry out, from the middle of the parterra : 0 Dio ! dove sono ? II placer e mi fa morire ! " (O God, where am I ? I am dying of delight !) Some performances were interrupted by the sobs of the audience.
Music held such a position in Italy that the melomaniac Burney himself saw a danger to the nation in the passion which it aroused. " To judge by the number of musical establishments and public performances one might accuse Italy of cultivating music to excess/'
The musical superiority of Italy was due not merely to her natural taste for music, but to the excellence of the musical training given throughout the peninsula.
The most brilliant centre of this artistic culture was Naples. It was the current opinion in Burney 's days that the farther south one went the more refined was the musical taste encountered. " Italy " says Grosley, " may be compared with a tuning- fork of which Naples sounds the octave." President de Brosses, the Abbe Coyer, and above all Lalande, express the same opinion. " Music," writes Lalande " is the triumph of the Neapolitans. It seems that in this country the fibres of the ear are more sensitive, more harmonic, more sonorous than in the rest of Europe ; the whole nation sings ; gestures, the inflexion of the voice, the cadence of the syllables,
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conversation— everything there expresses and exhales music. Naples is the principal source of music."
Burney reacts against this opinion, which in his day was no longer quite accurate, and must always have been a little exaggerated. " More confidence is reposed in the art of the Neapolitans than they deserve to-day," he says, " notwithstanding the right they may have had to this celebrity in times past." And he claims the first place for Venice. Without going into the question of the pre-eminence of either city, we may say that Venice and Naples were, in the eighteenth century, the great semin- aries of vocal music, not only for Italy but for Europe. Each was the seat of a famous school of opera ; that of Venice, the earliest in point of date, which had sprung from Monteverdi, counted such names as Cavalli and Segrenzi in the seventeenth century, Marcello and Galuppi in the eighteenth ; while that of Naples, which had come into being a little later (at the end of the seventeenth century) with Francesco Provenzale, had, by the eighteenth century, what with the school of Alessandro Scar- latti and its innumerable adherents, and that of Pergolesi, established its incontestable superiority in respect of dramatic music. Venice and Naples also contained the most clebrated conservatoires in Italy.
In addition to these two metropolitan centres of opera, Lombardy was a centre of instrumental music ; Bologna was famous for its theorists ; and Rome, in the complex of this artistic organisation, played her part of capital, less by reason of the superiority of individual production than by the sovereign judgment which Rome arrogated to herself in respect of works of art. " Rome " says
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Burney, " is the post of honour for composers, the Romans being regarded as the severest judges of music in Italy. It is considered that an artist who has had a success in Rome has nothing to fear from the severity of the critics in other cities."
The first emotion produced by Neapolitan music on foreign travellers was rather surprise than pleasure. Those who were more sincere, or finer judges, were even disappointed at the outset. They found, as Burney did, that the execution was careless, or the time and the pitch were equally at fault, or the voices were harsh, or there was a natural brutality, something immoderate, " a taste," according to Grosley, " for the capricious and extravagant." The records of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are agreed upon this point. A French traveller, J. J. Bouchard, states, in 1632 :
The Neapolitan music is especially striking by reason of its cheerful and fantastic movements. Its style of song, quite different from the Roman, is dazzling and as it were hard ; not indeed really too gay, but fantastic and harebrained, pleasing only by its quick, giddy and fantastic movement ; it is a mixture of French and Sicilian melody* ; for the rest, most extravagant in respect of continuity and uniformity, which it does not respect in the least ; running, then stopping short, jumping from low to high and high to low, forcing the voice to the utmost, then suddenly restraining it ; and it is really by these alternations of high and low, piano and forte, that Neapolitan singing is recognised.
And Burney, in 1770, writes :
" The Neapolitan singing in the streets is much less agreeable, although more original than elsewhere. It is a
* That is, according to Bouchard, of the galant style and the dramatic style.
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singular kind of music, as barbarous in its modulations, and as different from that of all the rest of Europe, as Scottish music . . . The artistic singing has an energy, a fire, which one does not perhaps meet with in any other part of the world, and which compensates for the lack of taste and delicacy. This manner of execution is so passionate that it is almost frenzied. It is owing to this impetuosity of temper that it is an ordinary thing to see a Neapolitan composer, starting with a gentle and sober movement, set the orchestra on fire before he has finished. . . . The Neapolitans, like thoroughbred horses, are im- patient of the bit. In their conservatoires they find it difficult to obtain pathetic and graceful effects ; and in general the composers of the Neapolitan school endeavour less than those of other parts of Italy to obtain the delicate and studied graces."
But if the characteristics of Neapolitan singing had remained almost the same from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, its value had altered greatly. In Bouchard's day Neapolitan music was behind that of the rest of Italy. In Burney's time the Neapolitan composers were renowned not only for their natural genius, but for their science. And here we see what artistic institutions may do, not indeed to transform a race, but to make it produce what it has in reserve, and what, but for them, would probably never have sprung from the soil.
These institutions, in the case of Naples, were its famous conservatoires for the musical training of poor children. An admirable idea, which our modern democracies have neither conceived nor revived.
Of these conservatoires, or Collegii di musica, there were four of the highest standing :
I. The Collegia de* poveri di Gesu Cristo (college of the poor of Jesus Christ), founded in 1589, by a Calabrian of the third order of St. Francis, Marcello Fossataro di Nicotera, who gave harbour to poor
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little children dying of cold and hunger. Children of all nations were admitted, from seven to eleven years of age. There were a hundred of them. They wore a red cassock and sky-blue cymar. In this college — and we need say no more — Per- golesi was trained.
2. The Collegio di San Onofrio a Capuana, founded about 1600, by the friars of San Onofrio for orphans of Capua and the country round about. The number of scholars varied from ninety to a hundred and fifty. They wore a white cassock and grey cymar.
3. The Collegio de Santa Maria di Loreto, founded in 1537 by a protonotary apostolic of Spanish nationality, Giovanni di Tappia, "to receive the sons of the poorest citizens and educate them in religion and the fine arts/' This very large college contained at first as many as eight hundred children, boys and girls. Then, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it ceased receiving girls and began to teach music exclusively. When Burney visited it there were two hundred children. They wore a white cassock and cymar.
4. The Collegio de la Pietd de Turchini, founded at the end of the sixteenth century by a confraternity which accepted the poor children of the quarter. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were a hundred pupils. They wore a blue cassock and cymar. The most celebrated Neapolitan composers were professors in this college. Francesco Provenzale was one of the first masters in this college.
Each of these conservatoires had two head- masters : one to correct compositions, the other to teach singing. These were also assistant masters (maestri scolari) for each instrument. The children,
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as a rule, remained in the college for eight years. If, after a few years' training, they did not prove to be sufficiently talented, they were sent away. A certain number were received as paying boarders. The best pupils were retained, after this period of training, to become teachers in their turn.
Burney gives a picturesque description of a visit to the Collegia di San Onofrio :
On the first-floor landing a clarinet was pegging away ; on the second-floor landing a horn was bellowing. In a common room seven or eight harpsichords, a still larger number of violins and some voices were performing each a different com- position, while other pupils were writing. The beds served as tables for the harpsichords. In a second room the violoncellos were assembled ; in a third, the flutes and oboes. The clarinets and horns had no other place than on the stairs. In the upper part of the house, and quite apart from the other children, sixteen young castrati had warmer rooms on account of the delicacy of their voices. All these little musicians were working unremittingly from rising (two hours before daybreak in winter) to going to bed (about eight o'clock in the evening) ; they had only an hour and a half for rest and dinner and a few days' vacation in the autumn.
These conservatoires, which were a mine of opera singers and composers for all Europe, were already nearing their decline in Burney's day. Their most brilliant period seems to have been in the first thirty years of the eighteenth century, in the life- time of Alessandro Scarlatti.
There were in Naples foreign musical agents whose sole business it was to recruit musicians and sopranos for their managements. Such was a certain
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M. Gilbert whom Lalande met with, who was working for the benefit of France.
They recruited composers also. The two most famous Neapolitan composers of the middle of the eighteenth century — Jommelli and Piccinni — were recruited, the one, Jommelli, for Germany, where he remained for fifteen years at Stuttgart ; the other, Piccinni, for Paris, where he was set up in opposition to Gluck. He died there after having been professor at the Royal School of Singing and Declamation, and Inspector of the Paris Conservatoire. These two men formed a perfect contrast. Piccinni, small, thin, pale, with a tired face, extremely polished, gentle and vehement at the same time, rather serious as to the outer man, with an affectionate heart, impressionable to excess, was above all inimitable in musical comedy, and it was a misfortune for him that his little comic operas in the Neapolitan dialect could not be transplanted beyond the limits of his native country, where they were all the rage ; but, as the Abbe Galiani said, " it was really impossible that this style of music should find its way into France since it did not even reach Rome. One had to be a Neapolitan to appreciate the masterly state of perfection to which Piccinni had brought comic opera in Naples." — Jommelli, on the contrary, was appreciated abroad better than in Naples. The Neapolitans resented the fact that he had become unduly Germanised at Stuttgart. Physically he was like a German musician. " He was an extremely corpulent man/' says Burney ; "his face reminded me of Handel's. But he is much more polished and pleasant in his manners." A true artist, exalted and emotional, but a trifle heavy, he brought back from Germany a love of harmony and compact
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orchestration ; he contributed in no small degree to the revolution which was brought about in his time in Neapolitan opera, in which the orchestra began to rage and roar to the detriment of the singers, who were compelled to shout. " As for the music," says Burney, " all the chiaroscuro is lost ; the half- shades and the background disappear ; one hears only the noisy parts."
Venice was distinguished from Naples by the delicacy of its taste. In place of the Neapolitan conservatoires it had its famous conservatoires for women ; the Pietd, the Mendicanti, the Incurabili and the Ospedaletto di S. Giovanni e Paolo.
These were hospitals for foundlings, under the patronage of the leading aristocratic families of the city. Young girls were kept there until their marriage, and were given a thorough musical edu- cation. " Music " says Grosley, " was the principal part of an education which seemed more adapted to form Lais and Aspasias than nuns or mothers of families." But it must not be supposed that all were musicians. At the Pietd barely seventy out of a thousand were such ; in each of the other hospitals forty to fifty. But nothing was left undone to attract musical pupils thither ; and it was a common practice to admit children who were not orphans provided they had fine voices. They were brought thither from all Venetia : from Padua, Verona, Brescia and Ferrara. The professors were : at the Pietd t Furlanetto ; at the Mendicanti, Bertoni ; at the Ospedaletto, Sacchini ; at the Incurabili, Galuppi, who followed Hasse. The rivalry that existed between these illustrious composers excited
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the emulation of the pupils. Each conservatoire had five or six assistant masters for singing and instrumental music ; and the elder girls, in turn, taught the youngest. The pupils learned not only to sing but to play all instruments ; the violin, the harpsichord, even the horn and the bass viol. Burney says that they were able, as a rule, to play several instruments and that they changed from one to another with facility. These women's orchestras gave public concerts every Saturday and Sunday evening. They were one of the principal attractions of Venice ; and no foreign traveller who visited the city has failed to describe them for us. They were as pleasant to look at as to hear. '• " Nothing could be more delightful " says President de Brosses, " than to see a young and pretty nun in a white habit, with a bunch of pomegranate-flowers over one ear, conduct the orchestra and beat time with all the grace and accuracy imaginable." He adds that " for fine execution and as conductor of an orchestra the daughter of Venice is second to none." Some of these fair musicians were famed all over Italy ; and Venice used to be split into hostile camps in support of this or that singer.
But the somewhat fantastic tales of galant travel- lers might give us a false impression of the serious nature of the musical training given in these con- servatoires. Burney, who carefully inspected them, speaks of their learning with admiration. The best of the schools was the Incurabili, which was directed by Galuppi. Galuppi was then seventy years of age ; but he was still lively and alert, and the fire in him burned even brighter as he grew older. He was very slender, with small face full of
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intelligence. His conversation sparkled with wit. His manners were distinguished, and he had a love of all the arts ; he owned some magnificent canvases by Veronese. His character was esteemed no less than his talents ; he had a numerous family and lived a quiet, respectable life. As a composer he was one of the last representatives of the old Venetian tradition; one of those brilliant and impulsive geniuses in whom imagination, natural talents and scholarship are allied with a fascinating brilliance. A true Italian, full of the classic spirit, he defined good music, in his conversation with Burney, as " beauty, limpidity and good modulation." " Extremely busy in Venice, where he combined the functions of senior choirmaster of St. Mark's and the Incur dbili and organist in aristocratic houses with that of a composer of operas, he neglected none of his duties and his conservatoire was a model of good behaviour." " The orchestra," says Burney, " was subjected to the strictest dis- cipline. None of the performers appeared eager to shine ; all remained in that sort of subordina- tion which a servant is required to observe in respect of his master." The artists gave evidence of great technical skill ; but their taste was always pure and Galuppi's art was to be detected in the least cadences of his pupils. He trained them in all styles of music, sacred or profane ; and the concerts which he directed lent themselves to the most varied vocal and instrumental combinations. It was not unusual, in Venice, to employ, in a church, two orchestras, two organs and two choirs, one echoing the other ; and Burney heard, in St Mark's, under Galuppi's direction, a mass with six orchestras : two large orchestras in the galleries of the two
is
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principal organs, and four lesser orchestras distributed, in twos, between the aisles, each group being supported by two small organs. This was in the Venetian tradition : it dated from the Gabrieli, from the sixteenth century.
Apart from the conservatoires and the churches, numerous concerts or " academies " were held in private houses. In these the nobility took part. Noble ladies performed on the harpsichord, playing concertos. Sometimes festivals were organised in honour of a musician : Burney was present at a " Marcello " concert. These musical " evenings " were often prolonged far into the night. Burney records that four conservatoire concerts and several private " academies " were held on the same evening.
The concerts did no harm to the theatres, which in Venice as in Naples constituted the city's chief title to musical fame. For a long time they were the foremost theatres of Italy.
At the Carnival of 1769, seven opera-houses were open simultaneously ; three giving " serious " opera (opera seria) and four comic opera (opera buff a), without speaking of four theatres producing comedy ; all were full, night after night.
A last detail gives evidence of the liberality and the truly democratic spirit that inspired these Italian cities. The gondoliers enjoyed free admission to the theatre ; and " when a box belonging to a noble family was not occupied the director of the opera allowed the gondoliers to instal themselves therein.11 Burney sees here, correctly enough, one of the reasons of " the distinguished manner in which the men of the people sing in Venice as compared with men of the same class elsewhere." Nowhere was there
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better music in Italy ; nowhere was it more widely
spread among the people.
* * *
All around these two operatic capitals — Venice with its seven theatres, Naples with its four or five— of which the San Carlo, one of the largest in Europe, had an orchestra of eighty performers* — the opera was flourishing in all the cities of Italy : in Rome, with her famous theatres — the Argentina, the Aliberti, the Capranica ; in Milan and Turin, whose opera houses gave daily performances, during the season, save on Fridays, and where stupendous actions were represented, such as battles fought by cavalry ;f at Parma, where stood the Farnese theatre, the most luxurious in Italy ; at Piacenza, Reggio, Pisa, and Lucca, which, according to Lalande, possessed " the most perfect orchestra ; " throughout all Tuscany, and all Venetia, and at Vicenza and Verona, which city, writes Edmund Rolfe, " was mad over opera. "J It was the great national passion. The Abbe Coyer, in 1763, was in Naples during a famine ; the rage for spectacles was not diminished thereby.
Let us enter one of these opera-houses. The performance begins, as a rule, at eight o'clock, and ends about half-past twelve. § The cost of the places in the parterre is a paule** (sixpence
* Marquis d'Orbessan, Voyage $ Italic, 1749-50 (Melanges histor- iques et critiques, Toulouse, 1768.)
f Edmund Rolfe, in 1761 : Continental Diary, published by E. Neville Rolfe (Naples, 1897).
I To say nothing of the lesser cities, where one always found good orchestras and good companies.
§ Lalande (1765, at Parma).
** Burney. — The Italian opera-houses ^ere generally leased to an association of noblemen, each of whom subscribed for one box, and sub-let the rest by the year, reserving the parterra and the upper gallery only (at Milan and Turin, for example).
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English) unless admission is free, as is often the case in Venice and Naples. The public is noisy and inattentive ; it would seem that the peculiar pleasure of the theatre, dramatic emotion, counts for very little. The audience chats at its ease during part of the performance. Visits are paid from box to box. At Milan " each box opens out of a complete apartment, having a room with a fireplace and all possible conveniences, whether for the preparation of refreshments or for a game of cards. On the fourth floor a faro-table is kept open on either side of the building as long as the opera continues."* — " At Bologna the ladies make themselves thoroughly at home ; they talk, or rather scream, during the performance, from one box to that facing it, stand- ing up, clapping and shouting Bravo \ As for the men, they are more moderate ; when an act is finished, and it has pleased them, they content themselves with shouting until it is performed again.' 'f In Milan "it is by no means enough that everybody should enter into conversation, shouting at the top of his voice, or that one should applaud, by yelling, not the singing, but the singers, as soon as they appear and all the time they are singing. . . .
" Besides this, the gentlemen in the parterre have long sticks, with which they beat the benches as hard as they can, by way of admiration. They have collea- gues in the boxes of the fifth tier, who, at this signal, throw down thousands of leaflets containing a sonetto printed in praise of the signora or the virtuoso who has just been singing. All the occupants of the boxes lean half out of them to catch these leaflets ; the parterra capers about and the scene closes with
* Burney.
f Letters of President de Brasses (1739).
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a general ' Ah ! ' as though they were admiring a Midsummer Night bonfire."*
This description, a trifle exaggerated, is none the less not so very unlike certain Italian performances of the present day. A French or German spectator present at such scenes would be inclined to doubt the sincerity of the emotion which the Italian public professes to experience at the opera ; he would conclude that the pleasure of going to the theatre was, for these people, simply the pleasure of finding themselves in a crowd. — Nothing of the kind. All this uproar is suddenly hushed at certain passages of the work. — "They listen, they go into ecstasies only when the arietta is sung/' says the Abbe* Coyer. " I am wrong : they pay attention also to the recitatives obbligati, more moving than the ariette." At these moments, " however slight the nuances, none escapes these Italian ears ; they seize them, feel them, savour them with a relish which is as a foretaste of the joys of Paradise/'
Let us not suppose that these are " concert pieces/' valued solely for their beauty of form. They are, in most cases, expressive and sometimes highly dramatic passages. President de Brosses reproaches the French for judging Italian music before they have heard it in Italy. " One must be perfectly acquainted with the language and able to enter into the meaning of the words. In Paris we hear dainty Italian minuets or great arias loaded with roulades ; and we pretend that Italian music, in other respects melodious, is capable of nothing better than playing with syllables, and is lacking in the expression characteristic of the emotion. . . /' Nothing could be more mistaken ; it excels, on the
* Letters of President de Brosses (1739).
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contrary, in the interpretation of emotion, in accord- ance with the genius of the language ; and the passages most relished in Italy are the simplest and most affecting, " the passionate, tender, touch- ing airs, adapted to theatrical expression and cal- culated to display the capacities of the actor," such as are found in Scarlatti, Vinci, and Pergolesi. These are naturally the very passages which it is most difficult to send abroad, " since the merit of these scraps of tragedy consists in accuracy of expression," which one cannot realise without knowing the language.
Thus we find in the Italian public of the eighteenth century an extreme indifference to dramatic action, to the play ; in this superb heedlessness of the subject they will even give the second or third act of the opera before the first when it suits some personage who cannot spend the whole evening in the theatre. Don Leandro de Moratin, the Spanish poet, sees, at the opera, Dido dying on her pyre ; then, in the following act, Dido comes to life again and welcomes JEne&s. But this same public that is so disdainful of drama becomes furiously enthusi- astic over a dramatic passage divorced from the action.
The fact is that it is above all lyrical, but with a lyrical quality that has nothing abstract about it ; which is applied to particular passions and cases. The Italian refers everything to himself. It is neither the action nor the characters that interest him. It is the passions ; he embraces them all ; he experiences them all in his own person. Hence the frenzied exaltation into which the opera throws him at certain moments. In no other country has the love of the opera this passionate quality,
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because no other nation displays this personal and egoistical character. The Italian does not go to the opera-house to see the heroes of opera, but to see himself, to hear himself, to caress and inflame his passions. All else is indifferent to him.
What intensity must the art possess that is kindled by these burning hearts ! But what a danger is here ! For everything in art that is not subjected to the imitation or the control of nature, all that depends merely upon inspiration or inward exalta- tion, all in short that presupposes genius or passion, is essentially unstable, for genius and passion are always exceptional, even in the man of genius, even in the man of passionate feeling. Such a flame is subject to momentary eclipses or to total disappearance ; and if, during these phases of spiritual slumber, scrupulous and laborious talent, observation and reason do not take the place of genius the result is absolute nullity. This remark may be only too readily verified among Italians of all ages. Their artists, even their indifferent ones, have often more genius than many famous and generously endowed Northern artists ; but this genius is squandered over mere nothings, or drowses, or goes astray ; and when it is no longer at home the house is empty. . . .
The salvation of the Italian music of the eighteenth century should have been found in a style of music which it had just created : the opera buff a, the intermezzo, which, at its point of departure, in Vinci and Pergolesi, is based on the humorous observation of the Italian character. The Italians, who are pre-eminently given to a bantering style of humour, have left veritable masterpieces of this description. President de Brosses was right to
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speak with enthusiasm of these little comedies. "The less serious the style/' he informs us, "the greater the success of Italian music ; for it exhales the spirit of gaiety and is in its element/' And he writes, just after seeing La Serva Padrona : "It is not true that one can die of laughter ; for if it were I should certainly have died of it, despite the grief which I felt to think that my merriment prevented me from hearing as much as I could have wished of the heavenly music of this farce."
But, as always happens, the men of taste, the musicians, entirely failed to rate these works at their true value ; they regarded them as unimportant entertainments, and they would have blushed to place them in the same rank as the musical tragedies. Constantly, in history, this unintelligent hierarchy of styles has caused indifferent works in a noble style to be prized more highly than admirable works in a less exalted style. In President de Brosses' day, the prdcieux et prdcieuses of Italy affected to despise the opera buffa and laughed at " de Brosses' infatuation for these farces." Con- sequently these excellent little compositions were soon overlooked ; and abuses as great as those to be found in opera made their way into the inter- mezzi : the same improbability and the same carelessness in respect of the action. Burney is compelled to admit that " if one takes away the music of a French comic opera it remains a pleasant comedy, while without music the Italian comic opera is insupportable." At the close of the century Moratin laments the absurdity of this class of com- position. Yet this was the period of Cimarosa, Paisiello, Guglielmi, Andraozzi, Fioraventi and many others. What might not these lesser masters
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have done with stricter discipline and more con- scientious poets !
In Venice, as we have seen, this passion for the opera was combined with a very ardent love of instrumental music, which at this period did not exist in Naples. This had always been so since the Renaissance ; and even at the beginning of the seventeenth century this characteristic distinguished the opera of the Venetian Monteverdi from Neapoli- tan, Florentine or Roman opera.
In a general fashion, we may say that the North of Italy — Venetia, Lombardy, Piedmont — was in the eighteenth century a paradise of instrumental music.
It was a country of great instrumentalists, and above all of violinists. The art of the violin was peculiarly Italian. Endowed with a natural sense of the harmony of form, lovers of beautiful melodic outline, creators of the dramatic monody, the Italians ought to have excelled in music for the violin. " No one in Europe " says M. Pirro* " can write, as they do, with the lucidity and expressive- ness which it demands." Corelli and Vivaldi were the models of the German masters. The golden age of Italian violin music was the period 1720- 1750, the age of Locatelli, Tartini, Vivaldi and Francesco- Maria Veracini. Great composers and performers, these masters were distinguished by the severity of their taste.
The most famous of these was Tartini of Padua. " Padua," says Burney, "is no less famed for the fact that Tartini lived and died there than for the
* Pirro, L'Orgue de Bach (Paris, Fischbacher, 1895).
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fact that Titus Livius was born there. People visited his house, later his tomb, " with the fervour of pilgrims to Mecca." No less famous as composer and theorist than as performer, and one of the creators of the science of modern harmony, Tartini was one of the musical authorities of his century. No Italian virtuoso regarded himself as consecrated until he had won Tartini's approbation. Of all the musicians of his country he was pre-eminent in matters of taste, and he above all was unprejudiced in respect of the artistic merits of other nations. " He is polite, complaisant, without pride and without eccentricity " says De Brosses ; "he argues like an angel, and without partiality, as to the different merits of French and Italian music I was quite as much pleased by his conversation as by his playing." — " His playing had little that was dazzling about it ; " for this virtuoso had a horror of empty virtuosity. When Italian violinists came to him that he might listen to their tricks of style, "he would listen coldly and then say: ' That is brilliant ; that is lively ; that is very good, but,1 he would add, placing his hand over his heart, ' it has nothing to say to me here.' " His style was remarkable for the extreme distinctness with which every note was sounded — " one never lost the least of them " — and for its intense feeling. Until his death Tartini modestly filled a place in the orchestra of the Santo at Padua.
In addition to this great name there are others that have retained a legitimate fame even down to our own days. In Venice there was Vivaldi ; he too was known to De Brosses ; he promptly became one of the Frenchman's most intimate friends, " in order " says the latter " to sell me his
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concertos at a very dear rate. . . He is an vecchio, who composes with the most prodigious fury. I have heard him undertake to compose a concerto with all its parts more rapidly than a copyist could copy it." Already he was no longer greatly esteemed in his own country, " where fashion was everything ; where his works had been heard too long, and where the music of the previous year no longer paid/' But one compensation was left him ; that of being a model for Johann Sebastian Bach.
The other violinists of the same period — Nardini, Tartini's best pupil ; Veracini, whose compositions were noted for their profundity, and in whom some have seen a precursor of Beethoven ; Nazzari and Pugnani — had the same sober and expressive qualities, avoiding rather than striving for effect. Burney writes of Nardini " that he should please rather than surprise ; " and President de Brosses says of Veracini that " his playing was accurate, noble, scholarly and precise, but somewhat lacking in grace."
The art of the harpsichord had already had its masters, such as Domenico Zipoli, a contemporary and rival of Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti, a precursor of genius, who opened up new paths on which Philipp Emmanuel Bach was to follow him. A master who won even greater fame for the art was Galuppi. But even in Burney's time its decadence was perceptible. " To tell the truth," he says, "I have not met with a great harpsichord-player, nor with an original composer for this instrument, in all Italy. The reason of this is that here the instru- ment is used only to accompany the voice; and at present it is so greatly neglected, as much by the
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composers as by the players, that it is difficult to say which are worse, the instruments or those who play on them." — The art of the organist had been better preserved since old Frescobaldi's day. But in spite of way in which Burney and Grosley have praised the Italian organists, we may accept as correct the verdict of Rust, who says that " the Italians seemed to think it impossible to give real pleasure by playing on instruments actuated by a keyboard." Here we recognise their expressive genius, which found its favourite instruments in the voice and the violin.*
But what was of more importance than the great virtuosi, so numerous in Northern Italy, was the general taste for symphonic music. The Lombard and Piedmontese orchestras were famous. The most celebrated was that of Turin, which included Pugnani, Veracini, Sernis and the Besozzi. There was " symphonic music " in the Chapel Royal every morning, from eleven o'clock to noon ; the king's orchestra was divided into three groups which were distributed in these galleries at some distance one from another. The understanding between them was so excellent that they had no need of anyone to beat time. This custom, which was general in Italy, naturally struck foreign travellers. " The composer " says Grosley " applies himself
* Wind instruments were to some extent neglected. Alessandro Scarlatti, who was with difficulty persuaded by Hasse to grant an interview to the famous flautist Quantz, in 1725, said to him : " My son, you are aware of my antipathy for wind instruments ; they are never in tune.'' (Quantz himself repeats this remark to Burney). — In 1771 Mozart discovered that for the great festival of San Petronio at Bologna it was necessary to send to Lucca for the trumpets, and that they were detestable. — Good wind-instruments were hardly to be found save in Venice and the north of Italy. Turin boasted of the two brothers Besozzi, one of whom played the oboe and the other the bassoon ; they were known all over Europe.
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merely to encouraging the players by voice or gesture, as the commander of an army encourages troops about to charge. All this music, despite the variety and complication of its parts, is executed without any beating of time." And this proves, no doubt, that the variety and complication of this music were not as yet very great, or it could not have been accorded such liberty ; but it is also a proof of the experience and the musical spirit of the Italian orchestras.* It is enough to consider the French orchestras of those days, which did not play more difficult music, but which none the less had to be conducted by great sweeps of the baton — and stamping of the feet. — " These people " writes De Brosses " greatly excel us in accuracy. Their orchestras have a great feeling for gradations of tone and chiaroscuro. A hundred string and wind instruments will accompany voices without smother- ing them."t
In Milan above all symphonic music was greatly esteemed. We might almost say that it originated in Milan, for there dwelt one of the two or three men who may lay claim to the glory of having created the symphony, in the modern sense of the word — and he was, I believe, that one of the three whose titles to this fame were most considerable. J He was G. B. Sammartini, Haydn's precursor and model. He was chapel-master to almost half the churches in Milan and for them he composed innumer- able symphonic pieces. Burney, who knew him and
* It seems that this custom had become obsolete by the end of the century. Goethe complains, at Vicenza (1786) "of the accursed beating by the maestro, which I had thought peculiar to France."
f This was no longer so in Burney's time, when the orchestra was tending to dominate the voices.
I The two others are Gossec (France) and Stamitz (Germany).
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heard several concerts given under his direction, says that " his symphonies were full of a spirit and a fire which were peculiar to him. The instru- mental parts were well written ; he did not leave a single instrument idle long ; and the violins above all were given no time to rest." Burney complained of him — and the same complaint was afterwards made of Mozart — that his music had " too many notes and too many allegro passages. He seemed positively to gallop. The impetuosity of his genius impelled him forward in a series of rapid movements which, in the long run, fatigued both the orchestra and the audience/1 Burney nevertheless admires " the truly divine beauty " of some of his adagios.
The Milanese gave evidence of a very decided taste for this symphonic music. There were many concerts in Milan, not only public, but private, at which small orchestras of amateurs performed ; at these concerts they played the symphonies of Sammartini and Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. It often happened even that a performance of opera was replaced by a concert. And even in opera the result of this preference for instrumental music was — to the scandal of the elderly admirers of Italian singing — that the orchestra was too numerous, too powerful, and the complicated accompaniments tended to
conceal the melody and stifle the voices. * * «
Thus the principal centres of instrumental music were Turin and Milan ; for vocal music, Venice and Naples.
Bologna stood at the head of Italian music : the brain that reasoned and controlled, the city
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of theorists and academicians. There dwelt the principal musical authority of eighteenth-century Italy, the authority recognised at once by the Italians and by the masters of all Europe ; by Gluck, Johann Christian Bach and Mozart — Father Martini. This Franciscan monk, choirmaster of the church of his order in Bologna, was a pleasant and scholarly composer, whose work exhibited a certain rococo grace; a learned historian, a master of counter- point and an impassioned collector, who gathered about him, in his library of seventeen thousand volumes, the musical knowledge of the period. This he generously shared with all those who applied to him, for he was full of kindliness ; his was one of those pure and serene souls which are to be found among the old Italian artists. He was greatly beloved, and musicians were constantly appealing to his wisdom, whether in writing or by visiting him in Bologna. Burney speaks of him with affection :
" He is advanced in age and in bad health. He has a dis- tressing cough ; his legs are swollen and his whole appearance is that of a sick man. One cannot, by reading his books, form an idea of the character of this good and worthy man. His character is such that it inspires not only respect, but affection. With the purity of his life and the simplicity of his manners he combines gaiety, kindness and philanthropy. I have never liked anyone so well after so slight an acquaintance. I was no more reserved with him at the end of a few hours than I should have been with an old friend or a beloved brother."
Bologna boasted also of the principal musical academy in Italy ; the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1666, into which Italian and foreign masters held it an honour to be received. The little Mozart was admitted to it after a competition, in which, so the legend records, he was secretly assisted by the worthy Father Martini. It was
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the same with Gretry, who does not conceal the fact in his memoirs. The Philharmonic Society discussed questions of theory and musical science ; and it gave a yearly festival at which the new works of Bolognese composers were performed. This festival, which was a solemn affair, was held in the church of San Giovanni in Monte, where the Santa Cecilia of Raphael was at that time exhibited. The orchestra and the choirs included a hundred musicians ; each composer conducted his own works. All the musical critics of Italy were present at these performances of church and instrumental music, by which reputations were made. Burney, at one of these festivals, met Leopold Mozart " and his son, the little German whose precocious and almost supernatural talents," he tells us, " astonished us in London some years ago when he was little more than a baby. . . . This young man," he adds farther on, "who has surprised Europe by his execution and his precocious know- ledge, is also a very able master of his instrument."*
Lastly, Rome exercised a dictatorship over the whole of Italian music.
Rome boasted a speciality in the religious music of the Sistine Chapel, which was then, however, in a state of decline, owing to the competition of the theatres, which by their large salaries attracted the best artists. f Rome had her great collections
* Burney is among the most disdainful critics of Mozart's sister Marianne. " The young person seems to have attained her highest development, which is nothing very wonderful ; and if I may judge by the orchestral music of her composition that I have heard, it is prematurely ripened fruit which is extraordinary rather than excellent."
f "As persons of distinguished merit attached to the Sistine Chapel find little encouragement there, the music is beginning to be less excellent ; there is a perceptible falling off. . . The result is
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of ancient music. She had her seven or eight famous theatres, among others the Argentina and the Aliberti for opera seria and the Capranica for opera buff a.
Above all, Rome, thanks to the attraction which her fame, her traditions and her eternal charm have always possessed for cultivated minds, had a public of rare musical competence, a truly sover- eign public, which was aware of its own value, perhaps too much so, and pronounced its judgments without appeal,
" There are in Rome," writes Gretry, " a number of amateurs, of old abbes, who, by their wise criticism, restrain the young composer who allows himself to be carried away beyond the boundaries of his art. So when a composer has succeeded in Naples, Venice or even Bologna, they say to themselves : ' We must see him in Rome. '. "
The performances of new operas in Rome were terrible ordeals for the composers ; verdicts were promulgated which claimed to be final, and the judges brought to these verdicts the passion of the Italian temperament. The fight was on from the very beginning of the evening. If the music was condemned the hearers were capable of distinguish- ing between the composer and the singers ; they hissed the maestro and applauded the artists. Or it was the singer who was hissed, while the com- poser was carried in triumph on to the stage.
bound to be the gradual decline of this noble establishment, the home of ancient music, as well as the graceful simplicity that made the reputation of this chapel." (Burney). — A friend of Burney's, who had spent twenty years in Rome, had warned him that the Papal choir no longer enjoyed its erstwhile superiority. Formerly the musicians attached to the Pope's service were the best paid. But " their salary has remained the same. Meanwhile, living has become dearer. The result is that the musicians are obliged, in order to live, to add another profession to that of singing, which loses thereby, while the musical execution in the theatres improves daily."
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" The Romans," says Gre try, " have a habit of shouting, in the theatre, during a composition in which the orchestra predominates : Brava la viola, brava il fagotto, brava I'oboe ! (Bravo violin, bravo bassoon, bravo oboe !). If it is a melodious and poetical song that pleases them they address themselves to the author, or they sigh and weep ; but they also have a terrible mania for shouting, one after another : Bravo Sacchini, bravo Cimarosa, bravo Paisiello ! at the performance of operas by other composers ; a punishment well calculated to suppress the crime of plagiarism."
With what brutality this popular justice was some- times executed we learn from the story of poor Pergolesi, who, says tradition, at the first per- formance of his Olimpiade, received, amidst a storm of hooting, an orange, full in his face. And this fact is a sufficient proof that the Roman public was not infallible. But it laid claim to infallibility. Faithful to its traditions, it arrogated to itself an empire over music :
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento. . . .
No one found anything surprising in this : the privilege of the Roman public was admitted. " Rome, capital of the world," wrote " Amadeo Mozart " in one of his letters, in 1770. * * *
Such, in its broad outlines, was the fabric of Italian music in the eighteenth century. We perceive what abundance, what vitality it displayed. Its greatest danger — that to which it succumbed — was its very exuberance. It had no time to recollect itself, to meditate upon its past. It was eaten up by its mania for novelty.*
* I am speaking of the public taste. The cult of the past was cherished by a small ilite. And apart from Father Martini and his library of seventeen thousand volumes, Italy had no lack of collectors, such as Professor Campioni, of Florence, who collected the madrigals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ; the singer, Mazzanti,
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" You mention Carissimi," wrote De Brosses. " For God's sake be careful not to speak of him here, under penalty of being regarded as a dunce ; those who succeeded him have long been regarded as out of fashion ! "
The same writer, ravished by hearing a famous singer in Naples — il Senesino — " perceived with astonishment that the people of the country were by no means satisfied. They complained that he sang in a stile antico. You must understand that the taste in music changes here at least every ten years/'
Burney is still more positive :
" In Italy they treat an opera already heard like a last year's almanack. . . . There is a rage for novelty ; it has sometimes been the cause of the revolutions which one observes in Italian music ; it often gives rise to strange concetti. It leads composers to seek novelty at any cost. The simplicity of the
of Rome, who made a collection of everything relating to Palestrina ; the Abbe Orsini and the Chevalier Santarelli, of Rome, who collected all documents relating to bygone opera and oratorio. (Burney). The old style was also in some degree preserved in the church music. Burney often notes, in Milan, Brescia,Vicenza, Florence, etc., that the church music was " in the old style, full of fugues."
It is true that a great deal of profane music was executed in the churches, such as that described by the Chevalier Goudar in an amus- ing narrative (UEspion Chinois, 1765) : " I went recently, in Bologna, to what they call here a grand musical mass. On entering the church I thought at first that I must be at the opera. In troductions, symphonies, minuets, rigadoons, airs for the solo voice, duets, choruses, accompanied by drums, trumpets, kettledrums, hunting horns, oboes, violins, fifes, flageolets : in a word, all that goes to make the music of a play was employed in this music. It was a masterpiece of impiety. If the composer had wished to write a mass for the goddess of pleasure he could not have employed more moving sounds nor more lascivious modulations."
But Burney assures us that " it was only on feast-days that one could hear this style of modern music in the churches. On ordinary days, in the cathedral churches, the music was of the old style, and solemn ; and in the parish churches it was simply plain-song, sometimes with the organ but more often without.*'
Nevertheless, in a century and a country as irreligious as Italy was in the i8th century, church music could not be a sufficient counterweight to profane music, which was led away by the thirst for novelty.
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old masters does not please the public. It does not sufficiently tickle the pampered taste of these spoilt children, who can no longer take pleasure save in astonishment."*
This inconstancy of taste, this perpetual restless- ness, was the reason why no music worthy of mention was being printed in Italy.
" Musical compositions last such a short time, and the vogue of novelties is so great, that the few copies which might be required are not worth the expense of engraving or printing. . . The art of engraving music, moreover, appears to be entirely lost. One finds nothing in all Italy resembling a music publisher's."!
Burney is even beginning to foresee, in the midst of the artistic splendour which he loves, the complete and by no means distant disappearance of Italian music. He believes, in truth, that the stupendous energy expended upon it will be transformed, that it will create other arts :
" The language and genius of the Italians are so rich and so fertile that when they are weary of music — which will without a doubt happen very soon, from very excess of enjoyment — this same mania for novelty, which has made them pass so quickly from one style of composition to another, and which often makes them change from a better style to a worse, will force them to seek amusement in a theatre without music ! " J
Burney 's prediction was only partly realised. Italy has since then attempted, not without success, to establish " a theatre without music." She has, above all, spent the best of her energies, apart from the theatre and music, in her political conflicts, in the wonderful epopde of her Risorgimento, in which all that was great and generous in the nation was expended and often sacrificed in a spirit of exaltation.
* Here Burney is referring more especially to the Neapolitans, f Burney : in Venice. I Burney : in Bologna.
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But Burney has plainly perceived the secret of this Italian music, the principle of its life, its greatness and its death ; the Italy of the eighteenth century is all for the present moment ; for her there is no longer past or future. She reserves nothing ; she is burning herself up.
What a difference between this thriftless Italy and the wise economy of France and Germany at the same period ! — Germany slowly and silently amass- ing her stores of science, of poetry, of artistic genius ; France patiently, slowly, parsimoniously setting aside her musical possessions, as the French peasant hoards his cash in the famous woollen stocking ! — And so they will find themselves young, vigorous and, as it were, renewed when Italy will be exhausted by her extravagant expenditure of energy.
Blame her who will I Even though the virtues of domestic economy are worthy of all esteem, all my sympathies are for the art that gives itself without counting the cost. It is the charm of this Italian music of the eighteenth century that it spends itself with both hands without recking of the future. No matter if beauty be not lasting : what does matter is that it shall have been as beauti- ful as possible. Of the fugitive radiance of the beautiful dead centuries a joy and a light remain for ever in the heart.
II.
GERMANY
DESPITE a century and a half of great musicians, Germany, about the year 1750, was far from having won, in the musical judgment of Europe, the position that she holds to-day. It is true that those days
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were past when a Roman chronicler said of the students of the German College in Rome :
" If by chance these students had to make music in public it is certain that it would be a Teutonic music, fit to excite laughter and to fill the hearers with merriment."*
The time was even past — though not very remote — when Lecerf de la Vieville made careless mention of the Germans " whose reputation in music is not great, "f and the Abbe de Chateauneuf congratu- lated a German performer on the dulcimer " all the more because he came from a country not likely to produce men of brilliance and talent.'1}
By 1780 Saxony had produced Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. She had Gluck and Philipp Emmanuel Bach. Yet she was still endur- ing the crushing yoke of Italy. Although certain of her musicians, who were becoming conscious of their power, suffered this domination with impat- ience, they were not as yet sufficiently united to end it. The gifts of fascination possessed by their rivals were too great ; the Italian art was too complete, whatever its deficiency of ideas. It showed up in a crude light the awkwardness, the dullness, the faults of taste which are not lacking in the German masters and often repel him who examines the works of artists of the second rank.
The English traveller Burney, who, in his notes on Germany, § finally pays a very great tribute to
* Chronicle of Father Castorio (1630) cited Henri Quittard in his preface to the Sacred Histories of Carissimi, published by the Schola Cantorum.
Comparison de la musique francaise et de la musique italienne
).
Abbe de Ch&teauneuf, Dialogue sur la musique des anciens
§ Charles Burney : The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773) : — French translation of the same period.
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the greatness of German music, is none the less continually shocked by the clumsiness of musical performances ; he gnashes his teeth over the ill- tuned instruments, the inharmonious organs, the shrieking voices.
" One does not find in German street musicians the same delicacy of ear which I have met with in the same class of persons in Italy." *
In the musical schools of Saxony and Austria " the playing of the pupils is generally hard and clumsy."
At Leipzig the singers produce merely a disagree- able noise, a yelping, when the high notes are taken ; a sort of stricken shriek, instead of emitting the voice while diminishing or swelling the tone.
In Berlin the instrumental school " makes hardly any use of forte and piano. Each performer simply vies with his neighbour. The chief aim of the Berlin musician is to play louder than he. . . There is no gradation ... no attention to the nature of the tone produced by the instruments, which have only a certain degree of power when producing a musical note, after which there is nothing but a noise."
At Salzburg the very large orchestra of the Prince Archbishop " was remarkable chiefly for its in- elegance and its noise." Mozart speaks of it with disgust : " It is one of the great reasons why Salzburg is hateful to me ; this Court orchestra is so uncouth, so disorderly and so debauched ! An honest man with decent manners cannot live with such people ! "f
* Burney in Vienna.
f Letter from Mozart to his father (gth July, 1778). The best musician at Salzburg, almost a genius, Michael Haydn, had just been playing the organ while abominably drunk.
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Even at Mannheim, which had the most perfect orchestra in Germany, the wind instruments — the bassoons and oboes — were not in tune.
As for the organ, it was torture to hear it played in Germany. In Berlin " the organs are big, clumsy, loaded with stops, noisy and out of tune." In Vienna, in the cathedral, " the organs are horribly out of tune." Even in Leipzig, in the holy city of the organ, the city of the great Johann Sebastian Bach, " despite all my investigations/' says Burney, " I did not hear anyone play the organ well any- where/'
It would seem that with the exception of a few princely Courts, " where the arts," says Burney, " rendered power less insupportable, and intellectual diversions were perhaps as necessary as those of active life," the love of music was not nearly so ardent or so universal as in Italy.
During the first weeks of his tour Burney was disappointed :
" Travelling along the banks of the Rhine, from Cologne to Coblentz, I was peculiarly surprised to find no trace of that passion for music which the Germans are said to possess, especially on the Rhine. * At Coblentz, for example, although it was Sunday, and the streets were filled with crowds of people, I did not hear a single voice or instrument, as is usual in most Roman Catholic countries."
Hamburg, lately famed for its opera, the first and most celebrated in Germany, has become a musical Bceotia. Philipp Emmanuel Bach feels lost there. When Burney goes to see him, Bach tells him : " You have come here fifty years too late."
And in a jesting tone that conceals a little bitterness and shame, he adds :
* Burney passed through Bonn some time after Beethoven's death.
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" Good-bye to music ! The Hamburgers are good people, and I enjoy here a tranquillity and independence that I should not have in a Court. At the age of fifty I abandoned all ambition. ' Let us eat and drink,' I said, for 'to-morrow we shall sleep.' And here I am, reconciled with my position, except when I meet men of taste and intellect who ca n appre- ciate a better music than that we produce here ; then I blush for myself and for my good friends the Hamburgers.'"
Burney concludes that the Germans must owe their knowledge of music not to nature but to study.*
He will gradually change his opinion, on discover- ing the hidden wealth, the originality, the powerful vitality of German art. He will come to realise the superiority of German instrumental music. He will even take pleasure in German singing, and will prefer it to any others, Italian excepted. But his first impressions make it clear enough that the choice spirits of the period, the princes and amateurs, favoured the Italians at the expense of their own compatriots, with an exaggeration that even the Italianate Burney recognised.
* * *
Italian music had several centres in the heart of Germany. These, in the seventeenth century,
* Burney, in Dresden. Let us note the vulgarity of the popular spectacles in Germany, and even in Vienna, where Burney records programmes of barbarous amusements like the following : " i. Fight between mastiffs and a wild Hungarian bull, surrounded by fire ; that is, having fire fixed under the tail and crackers to the ears and horns. 2. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs. 3. Fight between a large bear and mastiffs. 4. Fight between a savage wolf and beagles. 5. Fight between a wild Hungarian bull and savage famish- dogs. 6. Fight between a bear and hounds. 7. Fight between a wild boar and mastiffs protected by iron armour. 8. Fight between a tiger and mastiffs. Fight between an infuriated bear, not having eaten for a week, and a young wild bull, which he will eat alive on the spot — or assisted by a wolf."
Two or three thousand persons, among whom were women of quality, used to witness these fights, which were frequently arranged in an amphitheatre in Vienna. Such were the spectacles which delighted the eyes of the audiences of Haydn and Mozart.
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were Munich, Dresden and Vienna. The greatest Italian masters — Cavalli, Cesti, Draghi, Bontempi, Bernabei, Torn, Pallavicino, Caldara, Porpora, Vivaldi, Torelli, Veracini — had sojourned there and reigned supreme. Dresden above all displayed a dazzling efflorescence of Italianism during the first half of the eighteenth century, in the days when Lotti, Porpora and Hasse, the most Italianate of the Germans, directed the opera.
But in 1760 Dresden was barbarously devastated by Frederick the Great, who applied himself to effacing its splendour for good and all. He methodic- ally destroyed by his artillery, during the siege of the city, all its monuments, churches, palaces, statues and gardens. When Burney passed through it the city was no more than a heap of rubbish. Saxony was ruined, and for a long time to come played no further part in musical history. " The theatre was closed for reasons of economy." The band of instrumentalists, famous all over Europe, was dispersed among foreign cities. " The poverty was general. Those artists who had not been dis- missed were rarely paid. The greater part of the nobility and the bourgeoisie was so poor that it could not afford to have its children taught music. But for a wretched comic opera there was no other spectacle in Dresden save that of poverty/'* There was the same devastation at Leipzig.
The citadels of Italianism in the second half of the century were Vienna, Munich and the towns on the banks of the Rhine.
At Bonn, when Burney was making his tour, the band of musicians maintained by the Elector
* Burney adds that not a boat was to be seen on the Elbe, and that for three years no oats had been given to the horses, nor hair-powder to the soldiers.
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of Cologne was almost wholly composed of Italians, under the direction of the Kapellmeister Lucchesi, a composer well known in Tuscany.
At Coblentz, where Italian operas were often performed, the Kapellmeister was Sales of Brescia.
Darmstadt had formerly been distinguished by the presence of Vivaldi, the Court violinist.
Mannheim and Schwetzingen, the summer resi- dence of the Elector Palatine, had Italian opera- houses. That of Mannheim was able to contain five thousand persons ; the staging was sumptuous, and the company more numerous than at the Paris or London opera-houses. Almost all the performers were Italian. Of the two Kapellmeisters one, Toeschi, was Italian, and the other, Christian Cannabich, had been sent to Italy at the Elector's expense to study under Jommelli.
At Stuttgart and at Ludwigsburg, where the Duke of Wiirtemberg was in conflict with his subjects, on account of his extravagant passion for music,* Jommelli was fifteen years Kapellmeister and director of the Italian opera. f The theatre was enormous ; it could be opened at the back, thus forming, when required, an open-air amphitheatre, "which was some- times filled by the populace, expressly for the purpose of obtaining effects of perspective." All the opera buff a singers were Italian. The orchestra included numerous Italians, and in particular some famous
* The Wiirtembergers had protested in the Diet of the Empire against their sovereign's prodigality ; they accused him of ruining the country by his music. His melomania was compared with Nero's ; in his craze for things Italian the Duke had boys castrated at Stuttgart by two surgeons from Bologna. Burney speaks with con- temptuous pity of this prince, "half of whose subjects are theatrical musicians, violinists and soldiers, and the other half beggars and outcasts."
t Another Italian, Boroni, succeeded him.
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violinists : Nardini, Baglioni, Lolli and Ferrari. " Jommelli," writes Leopold Mozart, " is taking all imaginable pains to close the Court to Germans. . In addition to his salary of four thousand florins, the upkeep of four horses, lighting, and fuel, he has a house in Stuttgart and another at Lud- wigsburg. . . . Add to this that he has un- limited power over his musicians. . . . Would you like a proof of the degree of his partiality for people of his own nation ? Just think of it — he and his compatriots, of whom his house is always full, have gone to the length of declaring, in respect of our Wolfgang,* that it was an incredible thing that a child of German birth could possess such passion and animation. "f
Augsburg, which had never ceased to be in touch with Venice and Upper Italy; Augsburg, where Italian influence had permeated architecture and the arts of design in the time of the Rennaissance — Augsburg, which was the native city of Hans Burgk- mair and the Holbeins, was also the cradle of the Mozarts. Leopold Mozart had, it is true, settled at Salzburg, but in 1763 he made a journey to Augs- burg, with his little boy, aged seven ; and Teodor de Wyzewa has shown that it was there, in all prob- ability, that Mozart " began to initiate himself into the free and majestic beauty of Italy/'J
* The little Mozart.
f nth July, 1763. Letter from Leopold Mozart to Haguenauer of Salzburg, published by Nissen, reproduced by Teodor de Wyzewa.
% A publisher of music, J. J. Lotti, was at that time publishing a great deal of Italian music at Augsburg ; and Wyzewa remarks that one of his publications, the Thirty arias for organ and harpsichord, by Guiseppi Antonio Paganelli, of Padua (1756) had a very great resemblance to the first sonata which the little Mozart wrote in Brussels, on the I4th October, 1763, a few weeks after passing through Augsbourg. (T. de Wyzewa, Les premiers voyages de Mozart, Revue des Deux-Mondes, ist November, 1904.)
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Munich was almost an Italian city. It had Italian comic-opera houses and Italian concerts and the most famous Italian singers and performers. The sister of the Elector of Bavaria, the Dowager Electress of Saxony, was a pupil of Porpora and had composed Italian operas, words and music. The Elector was himself an excellent virtuoso and a fairly good composer.
Scarcely had he entered Austria but Burney noted " the corrupt, factitious, Italianised melody which one hears in the towns of this vast empire."
Salzburg, whose musical life is described by Teodor de Wyzewa in some charming pages devoted to La Jeunesse de Mozart, was half Italian in music, as in architecture. About 1700 a writer of bad opere buffe, Lischietti, of Naples, was Kapell- meister there.
But the German metropolis of Italianism was Vienna. There reigned the monarch of the opera, the opera made man : Metastasio. Father of an innumerable progeny of operatic poems, each of which was set to music, not once, but twice, thrice, ten times, and by all the famous composers of the century, Metastasio was regarded by all the artists of Europe as a unique genius. " He has," says Burney, " all the feeling, all the soul and complete- ness of Racine with more originality." He was the first authority in the world on theatrical music. " This great poet," says Burney again, " whose writings perhaps contributed more to the perfection of vocal melody, and consequently of music in general, than the united efforts of all the composers of Europe," let it be understood that he sometimes gave the musicians the motive or subject of their airs ; and he arrogated to himself a protective
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supremacy over them. Nothing better shows the Italianisation of Germany better than this fact ; the most famous representative of Italian opera chose as his residence not Rome or Venice but Vienna, where he held his court. Poet Laureate to the Emperor, he disdained to learn the language of the country in which he lived ; he knew only three or four words of it ; just what he needed, as he said, ' to save his life ' ; that is, to make himself under- stood by his servants. Worshipped by Germany, he did not conceal his disdain of her.
His right hand in Vienna, his principal inter- preter in music, was the composer Hasse, the most Italianate of German musicians.* Adopted by Italy, baptised by her il Sassone (the Saxon), the pupil of Scarlatti and Porpora, Hasse had acquired a sort of Italian chauvinism that surpassed that of the Italians themselves. He would not hear of any other music ; and he was ready to fall upon President de Brosses when the latter, while in Rome, attempted to uphold the superiority of Frangois Lalande in the matter of church music.
" I saw," says De Brosses, " my man ready to suffocate for anger against Lalande and his supporters. He was already exhibiting a display of chromatics, and if Faustina, his wife,f had not thrust herself between us he would in a moment have seized me with a semi-quaver and crushed me with a diesig."
We may say that the German Hasse was, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the favourite
* Johann Adolph Hasse, born at Bergedorf, near Hamburg, in 1699 ; died in Venice, 1782. He was the greatest master of the opera at Dresden, re-organising and directing it from 1731 to 1763. He wrote more than a hundred operas.
t Hasse married the most famous Italian songstress of his time, La Faustina (Bordoni).
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Italian composer of opera seria in Germany, England, and Italy even. He had set to music all Metastasio's operatic libretti, with a single exception — some of them three or four times, and all at least twice ; and although one could not possibly say that Metastasio worked slowly,* Hasse did not find that he wrote quickly enough ; and to pass the time he composed the music for various operas by Apostolo Zeno. The number of his works was so great that he confessed that " he might very well fail to recog- nise them if they were shown to him ; " he derived more pleasure, he said, in creating than in preserving what he had written ; and he compared himself with " those fertile animals whose offspring are destroyed in the act of birth or left to the mercy of chance. "f
* Metastasio used to boast of having written his best drama, Hypermnestre, in nine days. Achilles in Scyros was written, set to music, staged and performed within eighteen days.
f Burney gives us an excellent portrait of this great composer, whose fame, in the eighteenth century, was far greater than that of Bach. He was everywhere regarded as the composer who, " in respect of vocal music, was closest to nature, most graceful and most judicious, and also as the most fertile of living authors." " He was tall and strongly built. His face must have been handsome and finely chiselled. He seemed older than Faustina, who was small, dark, witty and animated, although he was ten years the younger. He was very quiet and kindly in manner. He was talkative and full of commonsense ; equally devoid of pride and prejudice ; he spoke ill of no one ; on the contrary, he did justice to the talents of several of his rivals. He had an infinite respect for Phillip Emmanuel Bach, and spoke of Handel only with reverence, but he declared that he had been unduly ambitious to parade his talents, to work out his parts and subjects, and that he was over-fond of noise. Faustina added that his voice parts were often uncouth. Above all he admired the old Keiser, "one of the greatest musicians the world has ever possessed," and Alessandro Scarlatti, " the greatest harmonist of Italy, that is, of the whole world." On the other hand, he found Durante " harsh and grotesque, coarse and barbarous." When Burney saw Hasse all his books, manuscripts and personal belongings had been burned in 1760, during the bombardment of Dresden by the King of Prussia, at the moment when the composer was about to have the complete edition of his works engraved at the cost of the King of Poland. But this disaster had not affected his serenity. " He is so pleasant, so easy in his welcome, that I felt as much at my ease with him,
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This illustrious representative of Italian opera in German was, it is true, beginning to be discussed. About 1760 another party, and a very zealous one, was formed in Vienna in opposition to Metastasio and Hasse. But who were its leaders ? Raniero da Calsabigi of Leghorn — yet another Italian ! — the librettist of Orfeo and Alceste ; and Gluck — no less Italianate than Hasse, a pupil of Sammartini's in Milan, the author of two score dramatic works in the Italian style, who professed all his life, to write Italian operas.* — Such were the opposing
after a quarter of an hour, as though I had known him a score of years." Burney, who "owed to his works a great part of the pleasure .yhich music had afforded him since his childhood " compares him with Raphael, and likens his rival Gluck to Michel Angelo. And in truth there is hardly a more beautiful melodic pattern than Hasse's ; only Mozart is perhaps his equal in this respect. The oblivion into which this admirable artist has fallen is one of the worst examples of historical injustice, and we shall endeavour some day to repair it.
* Burney's portrait of Gluck is one of the best that we have of this great man.
Burney was introduced to him by the British Ambassador Extraordinary, Lord Stormont, — and the introduction was not superfluous, for " Gluck was of as fierce a temper as Handel, of whom we know that everyone was afraid. ... He was living with his wife and a young niece, a remarkable musician. He was comfortably lodged in well-furnished rooms. ... He was horribly scarred by small-pox. His face was ugly and he had an ugly scowl." But Burney had the good fortune to find him in " an unusually good temper. . . . Gluck sang. Although he had little voice he produced a great effect. With a wealth of accom- paniment he combined energy, an impetuous fashion of dealing with the allegro passages, and a judicious expressiveness in the slow movements ; in short, he so cleverly concealed what was defective in his voice that one forgot that he had none. He sang nearly all Alceste, several passages from Paris and Helen and a few airs from Racine's Iphigenia, which he had just finished writing. ... He did all this from memory, without a single written note, with prodigious facility. He rose very late. It was his custom to write all night and rest in the morning."
Burney met him again at a dinner-party given by Lord Stormont. Gluck was his neighbour at table. Rendered expansive by the bumpers he had drained, Gluck confided to Burney that he had just received from the Elector Palatine a tun of excellent wine, in token of
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camps ; and between them there was no question of the superiority of Italian opera : that was contested by neither ; the only point at issue was whether certain reforms should or should not be introduced into opera. " The school of Hasse and Metastasio," says Burney, " regarded all innovation as charla- tanry and remained attached to the old form of musical drama, in which the poet and the musician demanded equal attention on the part of the specta- tors— the poet in the recitative and narrative and the composer in the airs, duets and choruses. — The school of Gluck and Calsabigi devoted themselves rather to scenic effects, to the propriety of the characters, to simplicity of diction and musical execution, rather than to what they called flowery descriptions, superfluous comparisons, a cold and sententious morality, with tedious symphonies and long musical developments." — Here we have the whole difference ; at bottom it is a question of age, not of race or style. Hasse and Metastasio were old ; they complained that there had been no good music written since the days of their youth. But
gratitude for one of his comic operas ; the prince had been delighted to learn that the music was that " of an honest German who loved a good old wine." He boasted freely of his fashion of leading an orchestra, " in which he was as formidable as Handel. He said that he had never known any to rebel, although he forced the musicians to give up all other occupations for the opera, and often made them rehearse parts of his operas twenty or thirty times." He spoke to Burney of his stay in England, " to which he attributed entirely the study which he had made of nature for his dramatic compo- sitions." He was there at the time of Handel's glory ; there had been no room for him, and the people were greatly incensed against foreigners. It was only with difficulty that Gluck's Caduta del Giganti had been performed ; and it had been a failure. Gluck had been struck by the fact " that naturalness and simplicity acted most strongly upon the spectators, and since then he had endeavoured never to depart from them. It may be remarked " — says Burney — " that the majority of the airs in Orfeo&re as simple and natural as English ballads."
16
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neither Gluck nor Calsabigi had any more idea than the older men of dethroning Italian music and replacing it by another style. In his preface to Paride ed Elena, written in 1770, after Alceste, Gluck speaks only of " destroying the abuses which have found their way into Italian opera and are degrading it."
Viennese society was divided between these two Italianate coteries, which exhibited only the merest shade of difference. The whole Imperial family was musical. The four Archduchesses played and sang in Metastasio's operas, set to music alternately by Hasse and by Gluck. The Empress sang and had even acted formerly on the boards of the Court theatre. Salieri had just been appointed composer to the Chamber and director of the Italian theatre ; and he remained conductor of the Court orchestra until 1824, an obstacle in the way of German composers, and of Mozart in particular.
Vienna, then, even into the nineteenth century, remained a centre of Italian art in Germany. In the days of Beethoven and Weber, Rossini's Tancred was enough to ruin the painfully erected fabric of German music ; and we know with what unjust violence Wagner spoke of this city — unfaithful, in his opinion, to the Germanic spirit : " Vienna — does not that say everything ? Every trace of German Protestantism effaced ; even the national accent lost, Italianised ! " *
* * *
In opposition to the Germany of the South and the ancient capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the new capital of the future German Empire, Berlin, was already growing in importance.
* Richard Wagner, Beethoven, 1870.
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" The music of this country " writes Burney in Berlin, " is more truly German than that of any other part of the Empire." Frederick the Great had set his heart upon Germanising it ; he would allow no operas to be performed in his States other than those of his favourite Graun and the Saxon Agricola and a few — only a few — of Hasse's. But observe how difficult it was for German taste to liberate itself ! These operas were Italian operas, and the king could not even imagine that there could be any object in singing in any other language than Italian.
" A German singer ! " he used to say. " I would as soon hear my horse neigh ! "*
And who were these German composers, whose exclusive and intolerant protector he had appointed himself ? so that Burney was justified in saying : " The names of Graun and Quantz are sacred in Berlin, and more respected than those of Luther and Calvin. There are many schisms ; but the heretics are forced to keep silent. For in this land of univer- sal tolerance in matters of religion, whosoever should dare to profess other musical dogmas than those of Graun and Quantz might count quite certainly on being persecuted . . ."
J. J. Quantz, who was composer and musician in ordinary to the Royal chamber, and also taught the King to play the flute, " had the taste which people had forty years ago " — that is, the Italian taste. He had travelled extensively in Italy. He was of the school of Vivaldi, Gasparini, Alessandro
* Frederick the Great had, moreover, a violent antipathy for sacred music. " It was enough," Agricola told Burney, " that a composer should have written an anthem or an oratorio, for the king to regard his taste as debased and out of fashion."
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Scarlatti and Lotti, and for him the golden age of music was the age of these musical forbears. As Burney says, " he had been liberal and advanced . . . some twenty years previously." It was much the same with Graun, and Karl Heinrich Graun was, with Hasse, the most famous name in German music in the days of Bach and Handel.* Marpurg calls him " the greatest ornament of the German muse, the master of pleasing melody . . . tender, sweet, sympa- thetic, exalted, stately and terrible by turns. All the strokes of his pen were equally perfect. His genius was inexhaustible. Never has any man been more generally regretted by a whole nation, from the king to the least of his subjects."
" Graun " — says Burney more soberly — "was, thirty years ago, a composer of graceful simplicity, having been the first among the Germans to renounce the fugue and all such laboured inventions ! "
A poor compliment to us, who have since then returned with such singular affection to " all such laboured inventions ! " But for an Italianate musician this was the best of compliments. Graun, indeed, had applied himself to acclimatising, in Berlin, the Italian operatic style, and in particular the style of Leonardo Vinci, that composer of genius
* Karl Heinrich Graun was born in 1701 at Wahrenbriick, in Saxony, and died in 1759. He entered the service of Frederick the Great in 1735. He organised the opera in Berlin, and wrote for it twenty-seven works. Frederick the Great was on several occasions his collaborator ; he furnished him with the libretti of Fratelli Nemici, after Racine (1750), Mevope, after Voltaire (1756), Coriolano (1749), Silla (1753) and Montezuma (1755). This last work — an anti-clerical opera — in which Frederick wished to show, as he wrote to Algarotti, "that even the opera may serve to reform morals and destroy super- stitions," has been republished by Herr Albrecht Mayer-Reinach, in the collection of Denktn&ler deutscher Tonkunst (Leipzig, Breitkopf, 1904).
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who bears a doubly famous name. This is tanta- mount to saying that his tastes were those of the generation of Italians who lived between the times of Alessandro Scarlatti and Pergolesi. He too, like Quantz, dated back to 1720.
In patronizing Graun and Quantz, Frederick was therefore merely an Italianate conservative, who sought to defend, against the fashion of the day, "the productions of an age which was regarded as the Augustan age of music ; the age of Scarlatti, Vinci, Leo and Porpora, as well as that of the greatest singers, since when, he considered, music had degenerated." In the face of a denationalised Vienna it was not worth while to pose as the repre- sentative of German art. Frederick would not have been far from agreement, in fundamentals, with the most Italianate coterie of Vienna : that of Hasse and Metastasio.* There was one only difference between his taste and that of the Viennese coterie : namely, his favourites were not the equals of Hasse and Metastasio. " Admitting," says Burney, " that the period of art which the king prefers is the best, he has not chosen its best representatives."
I am wrong : there was one other difference. In Vienna, whatever the exigencies of the musical fashion, music had always been free ; the authori- ties, anything but liberal in other matters, allowed the musicians and lovers of music liberty of taste. In Berlin they had to obey ; no taste other than the king's was permitted.
The extent to which the meddling tyranny of Frederick the Great interfered with music is
* He allowed operas by Hasse to be performed in Berlin, but was a declared enemy of Gluck ; he treated Alcests to the harshest criticism, as did Agricola, Kirnberger, Forkel, and all his regiment of theorists, who fell into step behind him.
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unimaginable. It was the same despotic spirit that prevailed throughout the whole organisation of Prussia.* An inquisitional and menacing super- vision weighed upon music — for the king was a musician : a flautist, a virtuoso, a composer, as all had reason to know. Every afternoon, at Sans- Souci, from five to six o'clock, he gave a concert consisting of performances on the flute. The Court was invited by command, and listened piously to the three or four " long and difficult " concertos which it pleased the king to inflict upon them. There was no danger of his running short of these : Quantz had composed three hundred, expressly for these concerts ; he was forbidden to publish any of them, and no one else might play them. Burney amiably observes that " these concertos had no doubt been composed in an age when people held their breath better ; for in some of the difficult passages, as in the organ-points, his Majesty was obliged, against the rules, to take breath in order to finish the passage. "f The Court listened in resignation, and it was forbidden to betray the
* It should be noted how a stranger, even one with the highest recommendations, was received in the Prussian capital. Burney tells us of his arrival in Berlin. Despite his passport and a previous inspection by the customs officials on the Prussian frontier, he was led like a prisoner to the Berlin custom-house, and left shivering there for two hours in the rainy courtyard while the least of his effects were being examined. Very different was the Austrian custom-house, where young Mozart, at the age of seven, disarmed the officials by playing them a minuet on his little violin. But the most incredible part of Burney's narrative is the account of his visit to Potsdam. At the principal entrance and then at each door in the palace he was subjected to an interrogatory which was, he says, quite the most curious thing that had happened to him during his travels. " It could not have been more rigorous at the postern gate of a besieged city.'*
f Burney admits elsewhere that he played with "great precision, a clean and uniform attack, brilliant fingering, a pure and simple taste, a great neatness of execution, and equal perfection in all his pieces. His shakes are good, but too long and too studied."
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least sign of approbation. The contrary eventu- ality had not been foreseen. Only the gigantic Quantz, worthy, in respect of stature, to figure in one of the King of Prussia's regiments,* " had the privilege of shouting bravo to his royal pupil, after each solo, or when the concert was finished."
But without lingering over these well-known facts let us see how the royal flautist endeavoured to rule, by blows of his stick, the whole musical world of Berlin, and especially the opera.
Certainly he had done good. From the death of Frederick I. (1713) to 1742, Berlin had had no opera, f Immediately upon his accession Frederick II. built one of the greatest opera houses in existence, with the inscription : Fredericus Rex Apollini et Musis. He got together an orchestra of fifty performers, engaged Italian singers and French dancers, and prided himself upon having a company which in Berlin was said to be the best in Europe. The king bore all the expenses of the opera, and admission was gratuitous to all who were decently clothed ; which made it possible, after all, to exclude the popular element, even from the parterre. J
But although the artists were royally paid I fancy they earned their salaries. Their situation was by no means restful.
* The appearance of this old musician was of unusual majesty : " The son of Hercules he justly seems By his broad shoulders and gigantic limbs."
f Frederick- William I. had suppressed plays and orchestra by this simple note • " Devil take them ! "
\ At Mannheim and Schwetzingen all the subjects of the Elector Palatine were admitted to the opera, and went to the Elector's concerts ; which fact, according to Burney, did no little " to form the judgment and establish the decided taste for music which one finds throughout the Electorate."
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" The king " says Burney, " stood always behind the Kapellmeister, with his eyes on the score, which he folio wed, so that one might truthfully say that he played the part of director- general. ... In the opera-house, as in the camp, he was a strict observer of discipline. Attentively observing the orchestra and the stage, he noted the least sign of negligence in the music or the movements of the performers and reprimanded the culprit. And if any member of the Italian company dared to infringe this discipline, by adding to or subtracting from his part, or by altering the least passage, he was subsequently ordered by the king to apply himself strictly to the execution of the notes written by the composer, under penally of corporal punishment."
This detail gives us the measure of the musical freedom enjoyed in Berlin. An Italian pseudo- classicism reigned in a tyrannical fashion permitting neither change nor progress. Burney is scandalised by this tyranny.
" Thus," he says, " music is stationary in this country, and will be so long as his Majesty allows the artists no more liberty in this art than he grants in matters of civil government, striving to be at the same time the sovereign of the lives, for- tunes and interests of his subjects, and the supervisor of the least of their pleasures."
We may add that Berlin was above all a city of musical professors and theorists, who assuredly did not permit themselves to discuss the king's taste, for they were all more or less officials, like the chiefest among them, Marpurg, who was director of the royal lottery and councillor to the Ministry of War. They avenged themselves upon this constraint by bitter disputes, and their squabbles did nothing to add to the liberty or the amenity of musical life in Berlin.
" Musical disputes," says Burney, " are accompanied in Berlin with more heat and animosity than anywhere else. Indeed, as there are more theorists than performers in this city,
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there are also more critics, which is not calculated to purify the taste nor to feed the imagination of the artists."
Those whose tempers required freedom could not endure Berlin. If Philipp Emmanuel Bach remained in the city from 1740 to 1767 it was much against his will. The poor fellow could not leave Berlin — he was not allowed to do so ; and he suffered in his taste and his self-respect. His position and his salary were both unsatisfactory ; he was obliged, day after day, to accompany the royal flautist on the harpsichord ; and both Graun and Quantz, " whose style was absolutely opposed to that which he was striving to establish/' were preferred to him. This explains why he was, later on, so delighted to find himself in the good town of Hamburg, which was devoid of interest in music and of taste, but was hospitable, good-natured and free. To an artist, anything — even ignorance — is better than despotism in matters of taste.
Such, then, at first sight, was the musical culture of the great German cities. Italian opera was supreme, and Burney closed his observations of Germany with these words :
" To sum up : the points of comparison between the melodic style of the Germans and that of the Italians are as numerous as the analogies of taste offered by the majority of the composers and artists of these two countries. The reason for this resides in the relations obtaining between the Empire and its extensive possessions beyond the Alps, and also in the Italian opera- houses which have almost always existed in Vienna, Munich, Dresden, Berlin, Mannheim, Brunswick, Stuttgart, Cassel.etc."
But had not Germany lately produced the eminently German genius, the vast and profound achievements of Johann Sebastian Bach ? How
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is it that his name finds so little space in Burney's notes and in his picture of Germany ?
We have here a fine example of the diversity of the judgments pronounced upon a genius by his contemporaries and by posterity ! At a distance of two centuries it seems to us impossible that he should not have held a predominant position in the musical world of his period. We may at a pinch admit that a great man may remain absolutely unknown if the circumstances of his life are such that he is isolated and can neither publish his works nor force the public to give him a hearing. But we find it difficult to believe that he could be known and not recognised ; that people should have had an indifferent and merely benevolent opinion of him; that they should have been unable to distinguish between him and the artists of the second rank by whom he was surrounded. Yet such things are constantly happening.
Shakespeare was never completely ignored or unrecognised. M. Jusserand has shown that Louis XIV. had his plays in his library and that they were read in France in the seventeenth century. The public of his own time appreciated him, but not more than it appreciated many other dramatists and less than it appreciated some. Addison, who was acquainted with his works, forgot, in 1694, to mention him in his Account of the Best English Poets.
It was almost the same with Johann Sebastian Bach. He had a respectable reputation among the musicians of his time, but this celebrity never extended beyond a restricted circle. His life in Leipzig was difficult, straitened, almost poverty- stricken, and he was a victim of the persecutions of
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the Thomasschule, whose council did not regret his death, and, like the Leipzig newspapers, did not even mention it in its annual opening address. It refused the small customary pension to his widow, who died in 1760 in a condition of indigence. Fortunately Bach had trained a number of scholarly pupils, to say nothing of his sons, who cherished a pious recollection of his teaching. But how was he known twenty years after his death ? As a great organist and a masterly teacher. Burney remembers him when he passes through Leipzig, but only to cite the opinion of Quantz, who said of Bach " that this able artist had brought the art of playing the organ to the highest degree of perfection/' He adds :
" In addition to the excellent and very numerous compo- sitions which he wrote for the church, this author has published a book of preludes and fugues for the organ, on two, three or four different motives, in modo recto et contrario, and in each of the twenty-four modes. All the organists existing to-day in Germany were trained in his school, just as most of the harpsi- chord-players and pianists have been trained in that of his son, the admirable Karl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, who has long been so well-known. ' '
Observe the position of the epithet " admirable." In 1770 the " admirable Bach " is Philipp Emmanuel Bach. He is the great man of the family. And Burney goes into raptures over the fashion in which " this sublime musician " had contrived to train himself.*
* Despite the absurdity of comparing him with, and preferring him to his father, Philipp Emmanuel Bach was none the less a music- ian of genius, who lacked only a character, or at all events a will, equal to the height of musical inspiration. But a sort of dis- couragement and lethargy paralysed his admirable powers, and it is a melancholy sight to see in him, at certain moments, as it were the soul of a Beethoven, struggling in the bonds of a straitened life, giving off flashes of genius and then relapsing into apathy.
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" How did he form his style ? It is difficult to say. He had neither inherited it nor acquired it from his father, who was his sole master ; for that worthy musician, whom no one has equalled in knowledge and invention, thought it necessary to concentrate in his own two hands all the harmony of which he could avail himself ; and undoubtedly in his system he sacrificed melody and expression. "
Nothing could be more characteristic than the promptitude with which the sons of Johann Sebastian — who, for that matter, venerated him — denied his
Burney's portrait of him is the best ever drawn. I cannot resist the temptation of quoting some part of it.
Philipp Emmanuel Bach had invited Burney to dine with him. Burney was shown up " into a music-room, large and elegantly adorned with pictures, drawings and engraved portraits of more than a hundred and fifty famous musicians, of whom several were English, and some portraits in oil of his father and grandfather. Philipp Emmanuel sat down to his Silbermann harpsichord. He played three or four very difficult pieces with all the delicacy, accuracy and passion for which he was so justly distinguished among his compatriots. In the pathetic and tender movements he seemed to draw from his instrument cries of grief and lamentation, such as he alone could produce. The dinner was good, elegant and cheerful. There were present three or four friends, well-bred people, and his family ; Frau Bach, his elder son, a student (a law-student — the younger was a painter) and his daughter. After dinner Philipp Emmanuel played again, almost uninterruptedly, until eleven o'clock at night. He became animated to the point of appearing to be inspired. His eyes were fixed, the lower lip drooping, and his whole body was soaked in perspiration. He said that if he often had occasion to force him- self to work thus he would grow young again. He is fifty-nine years of age. He is rather short of stature ; his hair and eyes are black and his complexion brown ; he is full of fire and is of a very gay and vivacious temper."
Burney was convinced that Philipp Emmanuel was not only one of the greatest composers for the harpsichord, but "the best and most skiltul artist in the matter of expression. . . He could play in every style, but he confined himself more especially to the emotional style. He was a learned writer, even more so than his father when he chose to be so, especially in the variety of his modu- lations." Burney compared him with Domenico Scarlatti : " Both, being sons of celebrated composers, dared to attempt new paths. It is only now that the ear is becoming accustomed to Domenico Scarlatti. Philipp Emmanuel Bach seemed likewise to have out- stripped his period. . . . His style is so out of the common that one has to be in some degree accustomed to it in order to appreciate it." And Burney, justly enough, recognised, in his inspired passages, " the effusions of a cultivated genius."
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taste and his principles. Philipp Emmanuel speaks with irony of musical science, especially of canons, " which are always dry and pretentious." He regards it " as a defect of genius to abandon oneself to these dreary and insignificant studies."* He asks Burney whether the latter has met with any great contra- puntist in Italy. Burney replies in the negative. " Faith," says Philipp Emmanuel, " if you did find one it wouldn't be a very valuable discovery, for when one knows counterpoint there are other things too that are necessary to make a good composer."
Burney is wedded to his own opinion, and both agree that " music must not be a large gathering where everybody speaks at once, so that there is no longer any conversation, nothing but wrangling and ill-breeding and noise. A sensible man should wait for the moment in conversation when he can put in his word with effect." — It was the school of pure melody, in the Italian style, that condemned the old German polyphony. Italianism had permeated even the Bach family.
Johann Sebastian himself was possibly not indifferent to the charm of Italian opera. According to his historian, Forkel, he relished the work of Caldara, Hasse and Graun. He was a friend of Hasse's and La Faustina's ; and in Leipzig or Dresden he often went, with his elder son, to hear the Italian opera. He used laughingly to apologise for the pleasure which he took in these little escapades. " Friedmann," he would say, " shall we go and hear those pretty little Dresden songs
• This opinion acquires a particular meaning when we read, a little farther on, that " Johann Sebastian Bach had pitilessly forced him to spend the first few years of his life " in such studies.
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again ? " Is it so difficult to recognise in certain passages of his compositions reminiscences of these " little songs ? " And who knows whether, in other circumstances, had he had a theatre at his disposal, he would not have gone with the tide, as the others did ?
His sons offered no resistance to the movement. Italianism conquered them so thoroughly that one of them became — for a time — completely the Italian, under the name of Giovanni Bacchi. I am referring to Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of the family. He was fifteen years old at the time of his father's death, and had received at his hands a thorough musical training ; he displayed a preference for the organ and the clavier. After his father's death he went to his brother Philipp Emmanuel in Berlin. There he found the Italian- ised opera of Graun and Hasse. The impression which it made upon him was so profound that he set out for Italy. He went to Bologna, and there this son of Johann Sebastian Bach placed himself under the discipline of Father Martini.* For eight years, with Martini's assistance, he worked incessantly at the task of acquiring an Italian training and an Italian soul. At intervals he went to Naples, and there became a champion of the Neapolitan school of opera ; and he produced a series of Italian operas based on poems by Metastasio, including Catone in Utica (1761) and Alessandro nelle Indie (1762), which enjoyed a great success. Burney said that " his airs were in the best Neapolitan taste." — But this is not all ; having abjured his father's musical taste he likewise abjured his faith ; the son of the great Bach became a Catholic. He
* We learn of this training from thirty-one letters written by Johann Christian to Father Martini.
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was appointed organist in the Duomo of Milan, under an Italian name.* It would be difficult to mention a more categorical example of the conquest of the Germanic spirit by Italy.
And we are not speaking of second-rate men, having no other claim to our attention than the fact that they were the sons of a great man. Johann Sebastian's sons were themselves great artists, whom history has not placed in their proper rank. Like the majority of the musicians of this transition period, they have been unduly sacrificed to those who preceded them and those who followed them. Philipp Emmanuel, far in advance of his time and very imperfectly understood, excepting by a few, has rightly been described by M. Vincent d'Indy as one of the first direct forerunners of Beethoven. Johann Christian is hardly less important ; from him derives not Beethoven, but Mozart, f
Another remarkable musician, who, even more than Philipp Emmanuel, was the precursor — one might almost say the model — of Beethoven, in his great sonatas and variations : Frederick Wilhelm Rust, a friend of Goethe's, musical director to Prince Leopold III. of Anhalt, at Dessau, was seduced like the rest by the Italian charm. J He journeyed to
• See Max Schwartz, Johann Christian Bach, 1901.
t Max Schwartz points out the direct influence of Johann Christian Bach upon clavier music and opera, and above all upon the first of Mozart's symphonies. Mozart often speaks of Johann Christian in his letters. He declares that he " loves him with all his heart " ; that he has " a profound esteem for him." Certain airs of Johann Christian's used to haunt him. He applied himself to rivalling him, to writing fresh melodies to the same words.
J See Wilhelm Hosaus : Frederick Wilhelm Rust (1882). Rust had been a pupil of Johann Sebastian's eldest son — Wilhelm Friedmann — who had best^reserved his father's traditions. He also took lessons from Philipp Emmanuel. It is only of late that his artistic importance has been revealed, thanks to the publications of some of his compositions by one of his descendants.
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Italy and remained there for two years, assiduously visiting the opera-houses and making the acquaint- ance of the principal teachers — Martini, Nardini, Pugnani, Farinelli, and, above all, Tartini, from whom he learned a great deal ; and this sojourn in Italy had a decisive effect upon his artistic edu- cation. Thirty years later, in 1792, he once more related his reminiscences of travel in one of his sonatas, the Sonata italiano.
If the leaders of German music — such as the Bachs, Rust, Gluck, Graun and Hasse — were affected to such an extent by the influence of Italian art,* how should German music hold out against the foreign spirit ? Where was its genius to find salvation ? * * *
To begin with, it was inevitable that the mass of lesser musicians, the musical phis of Germany, those who had not the means to go to Italy and Italianise themselves, suffered from their humiliat- ing situation and the preference given to the Italians. Burney, compelled to admit that the Italians in Germany were often much better paid than German artists who were superior to them, adds that for this reason " one must not blame the Germans unduly for endeavouring to disparage the merit of the great Italian masters, and to treat them with a severity and a disdain which are due merely to gross ignorance and stupidity/' — " All are jealous of the Italians," he says elsewhere. It is true that
* I do not speak of the young musicians of the following period — of Haydn, a pupil of Porpora's and a brilliant imitator ot Sammartini — of Mozart, who during the first part of his life was a pure Italian and whose first operas were performed and acclaim ed in Ita ly. Hasse, on the other hand, who was inimical to Gluck because he did not consider him sufficiently faithful to the true Italian tradition, loved and admired Mozart, in whom he saw his more fortunate or greater successor.
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this remark occurs at the end of a sentence in which Burney remarks that the Germans also furiously attacked one another. Every town was divided into jealous factions. " Everyone is jealous of everyone else, and all are jealous of the Italians." This lack of union was to be as disastrous to the Germans in art as in politics ; it rendered them all the more incapable of defending themselves against the foreign invasion, inasmuch as their leaders, the Glucks and Mozarts of the profession, seemed to have gone over to the enemy.
But to the popular taste Italianism remained all but unknown. The catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs of the eighteenth century afford us proof of this.* In these great European markets, in which music occupied an important place, Italian opera, so to speak, scarcely showed it self, f Of German religious music there was abundance : Lutheran canticles, oratorios, Passions, and above all the collections of Lieder and Liedlein, the eternal and inviolable refuge of German thought.
On the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that Italian opera and Italian music were represented in Europe, about the middle of the eighteenth century, not by Italians, but by Germans ; by Gluck in Vienna, Johann Christian Bach in London, Graun in Berlin and Hasse in Italy itself. How could it be otherwise than that a new spirit should find its way into this Germanised Italianism ?
* The catalogues of the Frankfurt and Leipzig fairs, from 1564 to 1759, were published by Dr. Albert Gohler: Verzeichniss der in den Frankfurter und Leipzig?* M^sskatalogen der Jahre 1564 bis 1759, angezeigten Musikalien,ang'fertigt und mit Vorschlagen zur Forderung der musikalischen Biicherbeschreibung begleitet, von Dr. Albert Gohler (Leipzig, Kahnt, 1902, in 8vo.) See also an interesting article by Michel Breuet in the Tribune de Saint-Gervais (May-June, 1904).
f Nor did French music, nor the work of the great Bach.
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In these German masters, conscious of their superi- ority, there gradually developed a desire, avowed or unconfessed, to conquer Italy with her own weapons. We are struck by the Germanic pride which we perceive increasing in Gluck and Mozart. And these brilliant Italianisers are the first to try their powers in the German Lied.*
Even in the theatre we see the German language reconquering its place. f Burney, who, after calling attention to the musical qualities of the language, was at first astonished that more use was not made of it in the theatre, very soon realised that musical compositions In the German language were beginning to spread through Saxony and in the north of the Empire. Since the middle of the century the poet Christian Felix Weisse and the musicians Stand- fuss and Johann Adam Hiller were composing, at Leipzig, in imitation of the English operetta and the comic operas of Favart, German operettas (Singspiele) , the first example of which (1752) (Der Teufel ist los, oder die verwandelten Weiber). " The Devil is loose, or the Gossips Transformed/'^ was soon followed by a quality of similar works.
* Gluck, as early as 1770, set the odes of Klopstock to music.
f At the Hamburg opera-house operas had been performed in the German tongue at the end of the seventeenth century. But from the opening years of the eighteenth century Keiser and Handel bad set the example of mixing Italian words with German in the same opera ; and shortly afterwards Italian had invaded everything.
§ Music by Standfuss and Hiller. The same piece had been produced, unsuccessfully, in Berlin, in 1743, as adapted from an English operetta by Coffey, with the original English melodies. — Der Teufel ist los had a second part, which, played in 1759, under the title of Der lustige Schuster (7 he Merry Cobbler) was very popular. These Singspiele were the rage in Germany for twenty years ; one might say that they were the opera of the lower middle classes of Germany. It is worth noting that Killer's chief pupil was Christian Gottlob Neefe, Beethoven's master.
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" The music/' says Burney, " was so natural and so agreeable that the favourite airs, like those of Dr. Arne, in England, were sung by all classes of the people, and some of them in the streets." Hiller gave the plebeian characters in his operas simple Lieder to sing, and these Lieder became as popular in Germany as the vaudeville in France. " To-day/' says Burney, " the taste for burlette (farces) is so general and so pronounced that there is some reason to fear, as sober individuals do, that it may destroy the taste for good music, and above all for music of a more exalted style/' But far from destroying it, these popular Lieder were one of the sources of the new German opera. * * *
But the capital fact which was to be the salvation of German music was the sudden development of instrumental music at this juncture. At the moment when Germany seemed to be abjuring, with vocal polyphony and the infinite resources of the contrapuntal style, the old German manner, her very personality — at the moment when she seemed to be abandoning the effort to express her complex and logical soul, to adopt the Latin style of sentiment, she had the good fortune to find, in the sudden outgrowth of instrumental music, the equivalent, and more, of what she had lost.
It may seem strange to speak of good fortune in respect of an event in which intelligence and determination evidently played a great part. However, we must allow here, as always in history, for chance, for the co-operation of circumstances, which now favour, now oppose the evolution of a people. It is true that the more vigorous peoples always end by constraining chance and forcing it
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to take their side. But we cannot deny that there is such a thing as chance,
And in this instance it is plainly visible.
The Germans were not alone in developing the resources of instrumentation. The same tendencies were manifest in France and Italy. The conserva- toires of Venice were devoting themselves to instru- mental music, with successful results ; the Italian virtuosi were everywhere famous, and the symphony had its birth in Milan. But symphonic music harmonised but ill with the Italian genius, which was essentially methodical, lucid and definite, a thing of clear outlines. At all events, to transform this genius and adapt it to the novel conditions would have necessitated an effort of which Italian music, overworked, exhausted and indolent, was no longer capable. In Italy the change would have meant a revolution. In Germany it meant evolution. Consequently the development of the orchestra assured Germany of victory, while it contributed to the decadence of Italian music. Burney com- plains that the Italian operatic orchestras had become too numerous and that their noise forced the singers to bawl. " All the chiaroscuro of music is lost ; the half-tints and the background disappear ; one hears only the noisy parts, which were intended to provide a foil for the rest." Consequently the Italian voices are being spoiled, and Italy is losing her prerogative of il bel canto, of which she was justly so proud. A useless sacrifice ; for while renouncing her own inimitable qualities she cannot acquire qualities and a style which are alien to her.*
* Hasse and Metastasio, the last representatives of the pure Italian tradition, had foreseen this danger. Metastasio, in his con- versations with Burney, complained forcibly of the progress of instru- mental music in opera.
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The Germans, on the other hand, are quite at home in the nascent symphony. Their natural taste for instrumental music, the necessity in which numbers of the little German Courts found themselves of confining themselves to such music, as the result of a strict application of the principles of the Reformed Church, which forbade them to main- tain an opera-house, the gregarious instinct which impelled the German musicians to unite in small societies, in small " colleges," in order to play together, instead of practising the individualism of the Italian virtuosi — all these things — every- thing, in short — even to the comparative inferiority of German singing, was bound to contribute to the uni- versal development of instrumental music in Germany. Nowhere in Europe were there more schools in which it was taught, or more good orchestras.
One of the most curious musical institutions in Germany was that of the " Poor Scholars," which corresponded (save that they were on a less generous scale) with the conservatoires for poor children in Naples. These Scholars, troops of whom Burney met in the streets of Frankfort, Munich, Dresden and Berlin, had in each city of the Empire " a school confided to the Jesuits, where they were taught to play instruments and to sing." The Munich school contained eighty children from eleven to twelve years of age. Before being admitted they had already to be able to play an instrument or to give signs of a marked vocation for music. They were kept at school until their twentieth year. They were boarded, fed, and taught, but not clothed. They had partly to earn their living by singing or playing in the streets. This was an absolute obligation upon them, " so that
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they should make their progress known to the public that maintained them/' — In Dresden the city was divided into wards or quarters, and the Poor Scholars, divided into bands of sixteen, seven- teen or eighteen, had to sing, in turns, before the doors of the houses of each quarter. They made up little choirs and orchestras — violins, 'cellos, oboes, horns and bassoons. Wealthy families subscribed to the schools in order that the Poor Scholars should play before their houses once or twice a week. They were even engaged for private entertainments, or for funerals. Lastly, they had to take part in the religious ceremonies of Sunday. It was a hard profession, and an irksome obligation to sing in the streets in winter, however inclement the weather. These Poor Scholars were afterwards appointed as schoolmasters in the parish schools, on condition that they knew enough of Greek and Latin and the organ. The most dis- tinguished were sent to certain of the Universities, such as Leipzig and Wittenburg, where more than three hundred poor students were maintained. They were allowed to devote themselves to music or to the sciences.
Some of the princely Courts had musical founda- tions for poor children. The Duke of Wurtemberg had installed at Ludwigsburg and " Solitude," in one of his summer palaces, two conservatoires, for the education of two hundred boys and a hundred girls of the poorer classes. " One of his favourite amusements was to be present at their lessons."
In addition to these schools for poor children the communal schools gave a considerable amount of attention to music, especially to instrumental music. Such was the rule in Austria, Saxony,
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Moravia, and above all in Bohemia. Burney records that every village in Bohemia had a public school where the children were taught music just as they were taught to read and write. He inspected some of them. At Czaslau, near Collin, he found " a class of young children of both sexes occupied in reading, writing, and playing the violin, the oboe, the bassoon and other instruments. The organist of the church, who improvised magni- ficently on a sorry little organ, had, in a small room, four harpsichords, on which his smalt pupils practised." At Budin, near Lobeschutz, more than a hundred children of both sexes were taught music, singing and playing in the Church.
Unhappily the skill thus acquired was stifled by poverty. " The majority of these children were destined for inferior situations of a menial or domestic nature, and music remained for them simply a private recreation ; which is perhaps, after all," says Burney philosophically " the best and most honourable use to which music could be applied." The rest entered the service of wealthy landowners, who with these servants made up orchestras and gave concerts. The nobility of Bohemia made the mistake of detaching themselves unduly from its interesting peasantry, living for the greater part of the year in Vienna, " If the Bohemians," says Burney, " had the advantages enjoyed by the Italians they would surpass them. They are perhaps the most musical race in all Europe." They excelled above all in the playing of wind-instruments : wood-wind toward the Saxon frontier and brass in the direction of Moravia. — It was one of these Bohemian schools that trained the reformer of instrumental music, the creator
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of the symphony, Stamitz, born at Teuchenbrod, the son of the Kantor of the church there. It was in these schools that Gluck received his earliest musical training. It was at Lukavec, near Pilsen, that Haydn, director of music in the private chapel of Count Morzin, wrote his first symphony in 1759. Lastly, the greatest German violinist, Franz Benda, who was, with Philipp Emmanuel Bach, the only musician in Berlin who dared to possess a style of his own, independently of Graun and the Italianisers, was also a Bohemian.
Thanks to these schools and these natural faculties, instrumental music was cultivated throughout Germany, even in Vienna and Munich, pre- eminently the centres of Italian opera. We say nothing of princely virtuosi : of the flute-playing king in Berlin ; of the 'cellist who was Emperor of Austria ; of the princely violinists, the -Elector of Bavaria and the Prince- Archbishop of Salzburg ; of the royal pianists, the Duke of Wiirtemburg and the Elector of Saxony, the latter of whom, by the way, was " so timid in society," says Burney, " that the Electress, his wife, herself had scarcely ever heard him ! . . . ." Nor do we insist upon the alarming consumption of concertos on the part of the German dilettanti ; an average of three or four concertos to the concert in Berlin, while in Dresden five or six were given in a single evening ! . . . But the nascent symphony was putting forth its shoots on every side. Vienna had a veritable efflorescence of symphonists ; among whom the naturalistic Hoffmann* and the imaginative
* " As much art as you like," Hoffmann used to tell his compa- triots, " provided it is always combined with nature ; and even in the marriage of art and nature the lady must always wear the breeches." (Burney.)
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Vasshall, with Ditters, Huber, Gusmanand the youth- ful Haydn, who had just made his first appearance, were singled out for praise. This music found an enthusiastic public in Vienna. Teodor von Wyzewa has described the Court music and " table music " of the Archbishop of Salzburg ; three concert- masters were responsible in turn for preparing the programmes of these orchestras and for conducting the performances. The work of Leopold Mozart shows what a quantity of instrumental music was demanded by the every-day life of these little German Courts. — To this we may add the private concerts and the serenades sung or played in the streets to the order of wealthy burghers.
The centre of instrumental music in Germany was in those days Mannheim — or, during the summer months, Schwetzingen, at a distance of some seven or eight miles from Mannheim. Schwetzingen, which was only a village, was apparently inhabited, says Burney, solely by a colony of musicians. " Here it was a violinist who was practising ; in the next house a flautist ; there an oboe, a bassoon, a clarionette, a 'cello, or a concert of several instruments combined. Music seemed the principal object in life." The Mannheim orchestra " con- tained, by itself, perhaps more distinguished virtuosi and composers than any other in Europe ; it was an army of generals."
This company of the elect, which also earned the admiration of Leopold Mozart and his son, used to give celebrated concerts. It was at these concerts that Stamitz, since 1745 first concert- master and musical director of the Prince's chamber music, made the first experiments in the German symphony.
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" It was here," says Burney, " that Stamitz, for the first time, ventured to cross the boundaries of the ordinary operatic overtures, which until then had merely served to challenge attention and impose silence. . . . This brilliant and ingenious musician created the modern symphonic style by the addition of the majestic effects of light and shade which he used to enrich it. First all the various effects were tested which could be produced by the combination of notes and tones ; then a practical understanding of the crescendo and diminuendo was acquired in the orchestra ; and the piano, which until then had been employed only as synonymous with echo, became, with the forte, an abundant source of colours which have their gamut of shades in music just as red and blue have in painting."
This is not the place to insist on this fact ; it is enough to note in passing the originality and the fertile audacity of the experiments made by the fascinating Stamitz, who to-day is so little and so imperfectly known, although, as Burney tells us, he was regarded in his day "as another Shakespeare, who overcame all difficulties and carried the art of music farther than any had ever done before his time ; a genius all invention, all fire, all contrast in the lively movements, with a tender, gracious and seductive melody, simple and rich accompaniments, and everywhere the sublime effects produced by enthusiasm, but in a style not always sufficiently
polished/'*
* * *
We see that in spite of Italianism the German genius had contrived to reserve to itself certain independent provinces in which it was able to grow
f Lastly we may mention a form of instrumental music in which the Germans were past masters, a form which they imposed upon the rest of Europe : military music. In France, according to Burney, in the second half of the century, " the scores of the marches and even the musicians in many of the garrisons were German." One of the best military bands was that of Darmstadt ; Burney tells us that it consisted of four oboes, four clarionettes, six trumpets, four bassoons, four horns and six bugles.
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in safety, until the day when, conscious of its power, it would give battle to the alien spirit and liberate itself from the yoke. None the less it is true that about the middle of the eighteenth century Italian opera was supreme in Germany, and the leaders of German music, those who were afterwards to be its foremost liberators, were all without exception profoundly Italianised. And magnificent as was the development of German music in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and their successors, it is permissible to believe that this was not the normal development of German music as it would have been had the latter, in taking shape, relied only upon its own resources, drawing only upon its own capital.
From the overwhelming triumph of the Italian opera over the Germany of the eighteenth century there has remained, through the centuries, the indelible mark of Italian feeling and the Italian style, which is perceptible even in the most thoroughly German masters of our own period. It would not be difficult to prove that Wagner's work is full of Italianisms ; that the melodious and expressive language of Richard Strauss is, to a great extent, fundamentally Italian. A victory such as that of the Italy of the eighteenth century over Germany leaves its indelible traces upon the history of the people that has suffered it.
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