A HISTORY OF THE PIANOFORTE AND PIANOFORTE PLAYERS

A

HISTORY of the PIANOFORTE
AND
PIANOFORTE PLAYERS

TRANSLATED AND REVISED
FROM THE GERMAN OF

OSCAR BIE

BY

E. E. KELLETT, M.A.

AND

E. W. NAYLOR, M.A., Mus.D.

WITH NUMEROUS PORTRAITS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AND FACSIMILES

LONDON
J. M. DENT & COMPANY
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
MDCCCXCIX

All rights reserved

Dedicated

TO

EUGENE D’ALBERT

Editors’ Preface

This work does not profess to be so much a literal translation as a somewhat free version of Dr Bie’s “Das Klavier.” The author, writing as he does for a German public, naturally uses a more philosophic style than would be generally intelligible in England. Availing themselves, therefore, of Dr Bie’s kind permission, the Editors, with a view to making the book more acceptable to English readers, have allowed themselves considerable liberty both in omission and in addition. For all portions of the text which are enclosed in square brackets they hold themselves responsible. The footnotes, except a few which are specially marked, have been added by Dr Naylor.

E. W. N.
E. E. K.

Contents

Guido of Arezzo and his protector, Bishop Theodal, playing on
a Monochord. Vienna Hofbibliothek.

Old England: a Prelude

[The drift of the remarks immediately following, which the author entitles a “Prelude,” is, that Music is at the present time flourishing more at home than in public; that the playing of chamber compositions is more popular than the representation of huge operas; and that therefore it is a suitable time to consider the history and scope of the instrument which, more than all others, has made possible this cultivation of domestic music. He begins then by contrasting the huge performances of Wagnerian drama at Bayreuth with what he calls the “intimate” character of a private pianoforte recital at home.]

Those were great days in which the foundation-stone was laid at Bayreuth. Days in which the creative philosopher of the stage threw his sceptre over the Ninth Symphony; days when choice spirits met together, who tremblingly passed through the moment in which they saw something never heard of become reality; days of a joyous intoxication when Liszt and Wagner embraced each other with tears; days that Nietzsche calls the happiest he had ever spent, when something brooded in the air that he could trace nowhere else—something ineffable but full of hope—those days, alas! return no more. In those days music, that music which the million greet with cheers of rapture, stood enthroned on the Stage, which gives to art its public hold upon the world. The living, new-creating music has to-day once more fled to the concert hall, to the haughty and more select rows of aristocratic amateurs who listen to the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss. These are tender and delicate creations beside the dramas of Wagner. They are elves, they elude us, and there are those, who see them not. We have been driven to them as the highest musical expressions of our time.

Since the trumpet-notes of Bayreuth died away we have conducted our musical devotions on a smaller, more intimate scale. Already, beyond the concert hall, we see opening the private chamber, holiest of all, and the chamber music, which is to the music of the stage what etching is to painting. It is the old ebb and flow. As we passed from the single instrument to the orchestra, from Beethoven’s orchestra with its travail for expression to Wagner’s stage with its world-embracing aims, so we are now passing back from the stage to undiluted music first before thousands of listeners, then before hundreds only.

And now, if I had my way, I would bring the pianoforte before a small audience, say of ten persons, not in the concert hall but in the home, where the artist may give his little concerts, in the fitting hour of twilight, playing to a company every one of whom he knows. Under such circumstances, indeed, one can implicitly trust himself to the intimate character of the pianoforte. Then stream from it the sweet tones of the harp, then, like strings of pearls, come chains of roses from its notes, or Titanic forces seem to escape from it, and my soul lies wholly in the player’s finger-tips. Is it then that the piano is a contemptible instrument compared with the violin or the string-quartet? Do I then remember how it sings so hoarsely, and how its scales are so broken, and how the soul of its melody is so dead without the breath of the rising and falling tone?

Of course, if it expresses itself in the piano-concerto, on the podium of the orchestra, or even if it trusts itself, in trio or quartet, to the company of strings or wind, then it moves my compassion. A foreign atmosphere envelops it even if Beethoven’s concerto in E flat major is resounding; and a weakness haunts it, if in chamber music it alternates with the dominating melody of the singing violin. But when once the clang of the violin and of the Cor Anglais[1] has faded from our ears, and all comparison has been laid aside, then, and then only, the soul of the pianoforte rises before us. Every good thing must be considered per se apart from all comparison. Is it no good thing to have the whole material of tone before one’s ten fingers, to penetrate it, truly to penetrate it; to feel beneath one’s nerves all the subtleties of all music—the song, the dance, whispering, shrieking, weeping, laughter?—all, I mean, voiced in the tone of the pianoforte, the epic tone of this modern Cithara, which, in its own kind, embraces the lyrical nature of the violin and the dramatic nature of the orchestra? In such all-embracing power the piano is in the twilight chamber a strange and dear tale-teller, a Rhapsode for the intimate spirit, which can express itself in it by improvisation, and an archive for the historian to whom it unrolls the whole life of modern music in its universal speech from a point of view which gives us the whole in the average. Then only do I love the piano—then is it faithful, then noble, genuine, unique.

Queen Elizabeth of England is sitting in the afternoon at her spinet. She is thinking of the conversation which she has had this forenoon with Sir James Melville—a conversation which the latter has preserved for us in writing. He was in 1564 ambassador from Mary Stuart to Elizabeth. Elizabeth had asked him what was Mary’s style of dress, the colour of her hair, her figure, her way of life. “When Mary returns from the hunt,” he answered, “she gives herself up to historical reading or to music, for she is at home with lute and virginal.” “Does she play well?” asked Elizabeth. “For a queen, very well,” was the answer. And so, this afternoon, Elizabeth is sitting at the spinet, and playing Bird’s or Dr Bull’s Variations on popular airs. She plays from the very (or a similar) copy which to-day is marked in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge as Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book. She does not notice that Sir James and Lord Hunsdon are secretly listening. When suddenly she sees them standing behind her she stops playing. “I am not used,” she says, “to play before men; but when I am solitary, to shun melancholy.”

Fifty years before, Albert Dürer had given an illustration of Melancholy in his famous engraving. Melancholy, as dignified Depression, is sitting in the open air, surrounded by the implements for Manual Labour, Art and Science. It expressed the anticipated pain of the misfortune which lurks in the good fortune of knowledge and intelligence; the pain of the dawning Age of Wisdom, for which Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, had already shown a just contempt. In his St Jerome, Dürer represents the deliverance from Melancholy. St Jerome, in the contemporary engraving, is sitting quietly and contentedly at home, while the sun shines through the circular panes,[2] the papers, books and cushions being so neatly disposed around, and the lion so wonderfully sleeping beside him. But—in the corner stands his house-organ or spinet!

Something of the spirit of the St Jerome breathes through the Elizabethan music—a tone of the Volkslied, or of that intimate world-sense, alongside of the decaying mediæval counterpoint (decaying as the Gothic architecture was decaying) like scenes of popular life or of lyrical beauty, which display themselves chiefly in the drama, in the midst of scenes of historic ceremonial. Everyone has observed what a subtle sense for soft musical tones is revealed throughout Shakespeare’s plays. The Duke in Twelfth Night loves the Volkslied, the old song, “old and plain,” which “the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones, do use to chant: it is silly sooth, and dallies with the innocence of love like the old age.” He heard it last night; he will hear it again to-day: “Methought it did relieve my passion much, More than light airs and recollected terms Of these most brisk and giddy-pacèd times.” And it is the fool who sings it to him—that typical figure of the love-thoughts and of the love-business of the people: the fool, who in every play has the largest store of old popular songs, and who in this very drama empties a very cornucopia of them. But Shakespeare’s holiest encomium on music is sung at night, in that idyllic scene at the close of the Merchant of Venice, between Lorenzo and Jessica. The moonlight sleeps upon the bank; the lovers sit in silence before Portia’s house and let the music steal upon their ears. “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.” Lorenzo endeavours to cheer Jessica with the music. We can well believe that his impassioned words express the feelings of the poet himself, who has marked his Shylock, his Cassius, his Othello,[3] his Caliban, with the stain of a heedlessness of music:—

“The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”

Portia enters the moonlit garden and hears the gentle tones, not knowing whence they come. She feels keenly the eternal magic of invisible music which lies pillowed in silence and night. The whole scene is a hymn on the infelt soul of musical self-centredness, wherein man finds his best self.

So too, perhaps, stood Shakespeare by the spinet of his beloved, and to his musical sense the tones and the love are blended together, his loved one becoming transfigured into music:—

“How oft when thou, my music, music playest,

Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds

With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently swayest

The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,

Do I envy those jacks[4] that nimble leap

To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,

Whilst my poor lips, that should that harvest reap,

At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand.

To be so tickled, they would change their state

And situation with those dancing chips,

O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,

Making dead wood more blessed than living lips.

Since saucy jacks[4] so happy are in this,

Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.”

It is in the Elizabethan age that the clavier begins for the first time to play a part in the world. In the English clavier-music, as in all English music at that time, there is a ravishing bloom, which vanished just as quickly from the popular concerts, never to appear again. Circumstances combined to favour it. A certain repose, a dependence upon art came upon the London society of that day, and at such times art penetrates easily into the privacy of the home. For centuries had the Low Countries held the sway of music; but the art of tone, which had made its way thither under the stars of Dufay, Okeghem, and Josquin des Près, remained in the service of the Church. It represented the rapid development of contrapuntal vocal harmony, as it had slowly developed itself into music per se from the figurations, which at the end of the tenth century began to found themselves on the canto fermo of the Gregorian material. Around the Gregorian pillars there had arisen a mathematical system of rules and proportions; of musical vaultings, symmetries, and mouldings, in which the ordering world-spirit seemed to have realised itself. As yet, however, there was no melody whose contour was unifying; no harmony whose development was to be foreseen; no singing voice resting on the support of an accompaniment. The voices ran according to the laws of their tempi, all equally important from soprano to bass; and their harmony only aided in reducing them to an average. The instrument of this great sacred music was the human voice, at first only the bearer of the tone, but then gradually here and there betraying a greater depth of feeling: and yet this great function of the voice had a value for expression which is not to be underrated. Even in this mathematical tone-system there lay the power of exhibiting nature as she is.

Orlando Gibbons. After Grignon’s
engraving in Hawkins.

If art was to escape from these rudiments into more intimate circles, the appropriate social surroundings must be provided. The home must develop.

The public art of the Middle Ages had divided its favours between church and hall; it was in the church that counterpoint found its development; it was in the hall that the old popular song, without making special advance, maintained itself. The popular song ranged itself over against counterpoint, for it was pure melody, as we understand melody to-day, and it was well arranged as to rhythm in four or eight-bar “strains.”[5] In two ways, however, counterpoint and popular song might meet: the first might absorb the second, or vice versa. It is well known what took place when counterpoint absorbed the popular song: throughout the later Middle Ages popular songs, even the vulgarest, are taken up in masses or motets as motives for figures; nay, more, when they alternate, while the Gregorian cantus holds its own alongside, church hymns are named after popular songs, and we stumble everywhere upon masses named after their underlying melody,[6] “L’homme armé,” “Malheur me bat,” “O Venus,” and the like. But, as might be expected, these are taken up utterly into the framework of the voice-mathematic; their peculiar aroma disappears; they are thrown into contrapuntal form. Far from betraying a worldly element, such as Ambrose conveyed under allegorical paintings of old landscape in religious pictures, they betray on the contrary a total absence of the secular sense. To them the content of the melody is so indifferent that they never once display it.

Young Scholar and his Wife.
Painting by Gonzales Coques (1614-1684), in the Royal Gallery at Cassel.

Secondly, the popular song on its own side stands apart from counterpoint. Since counterpoint is the recognised style of the time, popular song has no choice but to appropriate that means of expression. Hence arises the Madrigal, the most festive form of this appropriation, which sets popular themes to many parts, but with the utmost art. It exhausts all the requirements of better taste in secular music in the sixteenth century. Societies like the Arcadeltian[7] have resulted in an extraordinary growth of published material, and it is no mere accident that this process has continued in England, thanks to the exertions of a Madrigal Society, down to our own time. Yet the popular song was too opposed to the choral setting to feel itself at home in this form long and universally. It tended to unison or to the total absence of words; in the latter case it could still remain contrapuntal and became simply a tone-piece;[8] in the former the counterpoint existed, so to speak, simply at the pleasure of the melody, as it did in hundreds of old melodies throughout the world. These old popular songs, of remarkable origin in their plain melodious orderliness, became finally the precursors of modern music. While they marked the monodic principle, and gave to the expression the full value which it had in all early music, they accustomed the ears to the pleasure of the fully-outlined melody, and compelled the combination with this of an equally well-outlined harmony. Thus the way was prepared for the great discovery of the monodic opera, which arose in Florence about 1600.

But in that wonderful drama, which the emancipation of the secular or popular principle in the music of the sixteenth century presents, the instrument appears as the second agent, with its greater freedom as contrasted with the human voice. Choral counterpoint penetrates into the music of the future in the two ways of the one-part song and of the instrumental polyphony, which form a quite natural whole. In proportion as vocal music became more individual and more full of soul, the absolute instrumental music gained in meaning. But we must mark two impulses which necessarily condition each other. As the one-part song was, so to speak, a victory of the logic of expression over the metaphysic of many-parts, so the latter also was a transference of counterpoint to the instrument.

[In the late sixteenth century, counterpoint can scarcely be said to survive in any popular shape except that of the Catch or (endless) canon, the performance of which, when the complete melody is once learnt, is merely mechanical, and requires no great intelligence or attention from the singer. But to perform continuous contrapuntal music requires very great intelligence, and such concentrated attention as is seldom found in its perfection amongst mere singers. Instrumentalists therefore, as being superior in these indispensable qualities, were naturally called upon, first to assist, and then to displace the singers, who had allowed themselves to rest on their physical gifts rather than on the accomplishments of the intellect.][9] Thus it is the instrument which opens to the popular song and to the dance of the same kind, within the contrapuntal style, new paths of promise; and this principle of popular music, after it had held itself for a century in the almost neglected plain melody under the wintry covering of ecclesiastical counterpoint, becomes, in a moment, conscious of its immeasurable powers. Still, further, here there was the ground on which the popular song, so long differenced from counterpoint, gradually overcame it and was able to develop its principle freshly and clearly. In the opera we see it suddenly break with counterpoint; but this kind of art suffered by this suddenness, since it swung uneasily to and fro from the heights of the stage-reformation to the depths of virtuosity. Instrumental music escaped this sudden break, took up into itself counterpoint, transformed it out of itself, and passed on to meet a development far more regular and advancing with giant strides. What instrument, then, was best for the reproduction of the contrapuntal play of the voices? Next to choral song stood the organ, with its power of holding on its tones. Slowly, therefore, as we might expect, the organ steps into the contest with the church-choir. At first more clumsily, then more gently, its voices contrast and work into counterpoint. The organ also offers, as exchange for the sung chorus, direct transferences from motets of Josquin and Orlando Lasso. But so soon as the organ recollects that it is not vocal but an instrument, it begins—shall we say?—to run off into flourishes. All kinds of adornments and grace-notes start up, and finally the organist prides himself on departing utterly from the composer’s or author’s intention, and embroidering the theme at pleasure. A Prelude and a Fugue in this style appeared to the men of that time dreadful enough to linger over; as Hermann Finck writes, “they run sometimes by the half-hour, up and down over the key-board, trusting thus, with God’s help, to attain the highest, never asking where Dan Time, or Dan Accent, or Dan Tone, or Bona Fantasia, are staying in the meanwhile.” Further, when the organ had purified itself in the great epoch of German church-music, it had perforce to remain in the service of the Church. It felt the influence of the audience, which was brought into rhythm and harmony by the secular principle of music—that influence which, in the Protestant Choral and in the creations of Bach, made itself felt as a brilliant reaction of the secular musical sense on the church tradition.

Alongside of the organ came the lute, which for so long had been the chief instrument of the home. Yet the lute, with its tones drawn from so few strings, was unable to show itself very productive. It had provided the accompaniment of songs, and music in many parts had very early been arranged for it.[10] At all times, therefore, the lute had imitated the contrapuntal style, though in simple fashion, and occasionally certain passages had been accented with chords thrown in arpeggio-wise. Whether the lute accompanied a voice, or whether it took up the popular melody into itself to produce “absolute” music, it exhibited a style of its own, conditioned by its own limitations, even as, alongside of the organ, it had its own note-script.[11] It was not convenient accurately to retain on the lute every separate voice. An instrumental style was formed; men became accustomed to the sufficiency of this simplicity of tone; dances were written for the lute, as Hans Judenkunig in his lute-book offers a “Court-dance, Panana[12] alla Veneziana, Rossina ein welscher Dantz” and the like. As time went on, all well-known pieces were arranged for the lute, as they are to-day for the piano. Encyclopædias appear—as for example in 1603 the “Thesaurus” in ten volumes of “Besardus nec non praestantissimorum musicorum, qui hoc seculo in diversis orbis partibus excellunt, selectissima omnis generis cantus in testudine (the lute) modulamina continens.” Graceful figurations arise, which in France and Italy receive fine names, while the German lute-player sets himself strongly against these complicated “battements,” “tremblements,” or “flattements,” against this or that “passagio largo,” “stretto,” “raddopiato.” But, on the whole, much as the lute achieved, it could not suffice to compel the complete admission of the whole musical material into the home.

The heavy churchiness of the organ and the light secularity of the lute were thus constrained to unite themselves in an instrument which was sufficiently flexible to effect the representation of all the voice parts at once yet more easily than in the choir, and which could embrace the whole tonic scale so completely as to expand the limits of the voice both above and below. It must be a light, moveable instrument, a miniature of the organ. The clavier offered itself for this end; and in it organ and lute met in fruitful wedlock.

Such is the position and the meaning of the clavier in the great struggle for freedom of the secular music-principle which fills the sixteenth century. With this begins the history of the clavier, and simultaneously the history of the orchestra. The orchestra flourishes where the clavier flourishes, and vice versa. The combination of single instruments in a body, and that one instrument which alone can represent that combination, are manifestations of the same movement, namely, of the transference of the church choral tone-practice into the sphere of the secular, where in place of the counterpoint which ran on by the hour, an interlaced system of harmonies, a strict organisation of melodies, gradually assumed the mastery. The orchestra occupied itself with public representations; the clavier with the advance of the new music in the home. Already, in Venice, had instruments taken their share with the singers in the church; now chamber-music also began to flourish. Later, in France, the court-orchestra gained a special significance, and very shortly the clavier also made its importance felt. In Naples the orchestra appears simultaneously with the Italian opera, and shortly afterwards arises Scarlatti with his clavier-pieces. In Old England the orchestra was regarded with a special affection; and thus it is that in England the clavier first flourishes.

The early development of instrumental music in Venice cannot have been without its influence upon London, which not only cast an eye on the social and topographical aspect of the city of the lagoons, but also allowed itself to be consciously influenced by Italian culture. So early as 1512 we hear of Italian masques performed in the Palace at Greenwich; and when, in 1561, a tragedy by Lord Buckhurst[13] was performed with introductory pantomimes and orchestral music, we recognise the Venetian touch in the individual character of the instruments. In Act I. the violin, in Act II. horns, in Act III. flutes, in Act IV. oboes, in Act V. drums and pipes are set down.[14] The orchestra of Queen Elizabeth exhibits strong features of the mediæval physiognomy: there are sixteen trumpets (about equal to the number of the singers in the associated chorus) and three kettle-drums stand in close relation to them. It is the old official festival music once more. Eight violins, one lute, one harp, one bagpipe, two flutes, and three virginals are the relatively weaker supplanters of the more intimate orchestral type. The respective costliness appears from the account: the lute, £60; the violin, £20; the bagpipes, £12. The Italian operatic orchestra started on the opposite path, gradually getting rid of the stringed instruments and adopting wind. It was, however, very thin, and even in France the orchestra of the sixteenth century appears hardly more elaborate than a Papal orchestra of the fifteenth. It is the English orchestra that at this time stands at the head, not even the thirty instrumentalists of Munich being equal to it. Above all there seems to be growing a division of labour between orchestra and chamber-music, so much so that Prätorius, when in his great musical work (1618), he mentions such combinations of lute-choirs, calls this style of chamber-music especially English. “Die Engelländer nennens gar apposite à consortio ein consort,[15] wenn etliche Personen mit allerley Instrumenten, als Klavicymbel und Gross-spinett, grosse Lyra, Doppelharff, Lauten, Theorben, Bandorn, Penorcon, Zittern, Viol de Gamba, einer kleinen Diskant-Geig, einer Quer-Flöt oder Bock-Flöt, bisweilen auch einer stillen Posaun oder Racket zusammen in einer Compagny und Gesellschaft gar still, sanfft und lieblich accordiren, und in anmuthiger Symphonia mit einander zusammen stimmen.” Hence it appears that the orchestra and the chamber-music of old England were the chief things. In the former the wind prevailed, in the latter the strings; but the clavier had its place in both kinds. For the clavier, during many years, even when it had made good its position as a solo instrument, still took its part in orchestral combinations. Even in Hasse’s time the Kapellmeister at Dresden sat at the clavier.

Under such circumstances it is no wonder that the old English clavier should have flourished, or that it was in England that it first recognised its mission. The influence of this was great enough to bring about a speedy development on the continent. The cultivation of music was not only wide-spread, but also very ancient; so much so that the old musical writer Tinctor (1434-1520) expressly ascribes the origin of all contrapuntal music to England. The compositions of the thirteenth century were, in grace of melody, simplicity of rhythm, and modernity of harmony, far in advance of their age. (Compare the canon in six parts,[16] “Sumer is icumen in” of the Monk of Reading, before 1226.) It is noteworthy that the English possessed of old a popular, simple, melodious tendency in music which reminds us of Mendelssohn. This has made English music great and also small. Great, for at a time when the whole musical world struggled with the contrapuntal want of system in harmony and melody, the English were capable of preparing the way, in systematic, plastic form, for the new conquering secular principle. Small, because so soon as this principle became universally recognised, they laid themselves to sleep in the luxurious enjoyment of their tradition, and set up foreign ideals, such as Mendelssohn and Handel,[17] who were endowed with the like gifts.

Lady at the Clavier.
Painting by Dirk Hals (?1656), in the Rijksmuseum at Amsterdam.

Madrigals of Elizabeth’s time are so familiar to us that Dr Ambros, of Prague, could produce them in Prague with great success, drawing from J. J. Maier’s German collection. That free geniality of the English in its ancient dress, which conceals all triviality, overcomes us even to-day. With the clavier-pieces it is the same. We are charmed with the extreme simplicity of their musical form, and we love them because they come before us in an archaic dress. They exhale an aroma whose popular sweetness mingles beautifully with the slight harshness of their naïve style. Allowing ourselves a touch of triviality, we find ourselves wondering that these works seem to be quite outside their own time, and in the modernness of their spirit surpass even the renowned contemporary performances of Gabrieli and the other Venetians.

In this London, the imitator and rival of Venice, we fall upon the first clavier-books that, as such, were ever collected in the world. Strictly speaking, they are not the absolute first. We read on the title-page of a collection of Chansons, Madrigals and Dances, issued at Lyons in 1560 by S. Gorlier: “Premier Livre de tablature d’Espinette.” We learn from Prätorius that the inscription, “For an Instrument,” which appears so often on old works, is not to be understood universally, but to be confined to the clavier. Nevertheless, it is in England that we first find in any numbers collections of expressly-marked clavier-pieces, springing from a special impulse of musical enthusiasm. First in interest stands the so-called Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book, one of the chief treasures of the Fitzwilliam Museum, lately transcribed into our own script for Breitkopf and Härtel. Granting that it may have been written after the time of Elizabeth, it yet, with its three hundred pieces, goes back to the earliest names of this school—Tallis, Bird, Farnaby, Bull. Next, in the library of the late Rimbault, an important English historian of music, we find, in manuscript, a Virginal Book of the Earl of Leicester, and another of Lady Nevill. Doubtless great lords and ladies had many manuscript collections of this kind, including copies of the favourite pieces of the day. But soon manuscript gave way to print. In 1611 appeared the first copper-engraved set of pieces ever seen in England. This was “Parthenia, or the Maydenhead of the first Musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls. Composed by three famous masters: William Byrd, Dr John Bull, and Orl. Gibbons, Gentilmen of His Majestie’s most illustrious Chappell.” A modern edition of this collection was issued in 1847 by the indefatigable London Musical Antiquarian Society. From the materials collected by this Society Ernst Pauer, whose contributions to the history of the clavier have achieved a great repute, formed his collected edition of Old English Composers, which presents, in modernised form, special pieces by Bird, Bull, Gibbons, Blow, Purcell, and even Arne, who, though later, is not uninteresting.

Title-page of the first English engraved Clavier Music, 1611.

The pieces in these collections are of three kinds. First, free fantasias,[18] such as were also composed for organ and lute under the name of prelude, preamble, or even toccata (here denoting simply piece). In their essence fugal they are broken and intersected by florid passages. In the second class, a canto fermo was taken from a church melody, and developed after the approved fashion in fugal or figured style. Or, finally—and this is the most usual case, and the style most appropriate to the clavier—a number of variations, or even groups of variations, if the theme has several sections, are formed into a series. The theme itself is a popular song or dance. Popular songs, as they swept uncounted through England and Scotland, are inexhaustible. Even to-day they retain their freshness. To the whole piece they impart their tense and melodious rhythm. The dances—in common time called Pavans, in triple, Galliards—are frequently named after noblemen,[19] and are in their variations adorned with the same encomiastic flourishes as the songs.

The clavier, for which these English musicians wrote their pieces, was of the kind called a virginal. The virginal was a peculiarly handy kind of spinet. It is not to be assumed that, after the quibbling and flattering fashion of the time, it was so called in compliment to the Maiden Queen. The name is older. Possibly it is due to the fact that the small size of the instrument made it specially suitable for young girls. We find scarcely any pictures of men sitting at the clavier. In Italy the same name was in vogue; but we are not here concerned with the whole history of the nomenclature of old keyed instruments. We are only so far interested in the history of the instrument as it forms the basis for the rise of the literature, i.e. style of composition, which concerns us in its human aspect. The histories of the clavier, those of Rimbault, Oskar Paul, and others, place the history of the instrument in the foreground. Even Weitzmann has appended to the last edition of his “History of Clavier-Playing and Clavier-Literature,” a comprehensive chapter on this subject. But the history of the clavier is a very complicated matter if we are tedious on it, and a very simple matter if, without becoming inexact, we are brief upon it.

It is a union of the harp with the mechanism of key-action. Harps, in which the strings are plucked with the plectrum, are in some form or other as old as music itself, and appear in the most various shapes in the first dawn of civilisation. The mechanism of the keyboard, which by means of an easy leverage adapted to the human fingers, gives the player control over the sounds of pipes or strings, is not quite so ancient, since it presumes a certain inventive capacity; but it is old enough to be equally beyond our chronological powers. In Europe we find keyed organs as early as the first centuries after Christ. The application of this action to stringed instruments was completed in the monochord. The monochord, an instrument well-known to the earliest theoretical musicians, was a board with a string stretched across it on which the intervals could be clearly marked and sounded by mathematical division: the half marking the octave above the pitch of the whole length of the string; the third part of it giving a fifth above that octave; the quarter part giving a fourth above that fifth, namely a note two octaves above the pitch of the whole string; the fifth part sounding a major third above the last named note, viz., a seventeenth above the pitch of the whole length; and so on.

The simple monochord developed itself after the tenth century in two directions, the musical and the technical. Its development was musical, inasmuch as three or four strings took the place of the one in order to produce a chord instead of a simple arpeggio; an aim which the church music attained by the multiplication of instruments sounding only one note each at a time. It was technical, inasmuch as, in place of the constant alteration of the “bridge” which divided the string, keys were introduced, which not only divided the string at the desired spot, by a flat metal pin (called “tangent” from its action in simply “touching” against the wire), but also caused it to sound. With twenty keys and only a few strings, of course it was necessary for several keys to divide the same string, and to sound it at different points in its length; whereby the simultaneous sounding of several notes was brought into the proper limits. Though thus really many-stringed, the instrument still retained its name of monochord. Gradually the number of keys increased, and in increasing proportion the number of strings, which still remained of equal length. About the year 1450, probably, the clavier attained this, its earliest form of the monochord. It served an educational purpose. Virdung, Abbot of Amberg, who in 1511 published his German “Music with Illustrations,” is our authority for the development of the monochord up to the first true clavier-form—that of the clavichord—which is nothing more nor less than the many-stringed many-keyed “monochord” which we have just described. The self-contradictory “mono” was rejected, and ‘clavi’ substituted (Lat. clavis, a key). The clavis is the key which in the organ admits the wind to the pipes, in the clavier sets the strings in motion.

From the Weimar “Wunderbuch,” a Clavichord of about 1440.
One of the oldest representations.

From the Weimar “Wunderbuch,” Primitive Spinet, of about 1440.
One of the oldest representations.

The clavichord introduced a new means of “expression,” viz., the “Bebung” (trembling, shivering), which could be applied to any of the notes by a gentle after-pressure of the key, a mournful, soul-moving vibrato, which was only possible with the peculiar mechanism of the clavichord, where a “tangent” both divided the string and at the same moment instantaneously created the sound. A slight relaxation of this pressure on the key caused a slight lowering of pitch; a slight renewal of pressure a corresponding heightening. The German players of the eighteenth century could scarcely find it in their hearts to resign this delicate effect, even for the advantages of the modern pianoforte. Here for the first time the keyboard mechanism had succeeded in producing a modification of the tones by “touch” alone, and the keyed instrument had gained its soul. How confined were the old eight keys of the Hurdygurdy,[20] the favourite instrument till the rise of the lute, where the strings were strained against a rosined wheel turned by a crank (a sort of everlasting fiddle-bow), while the keys divided the strings into notes—an antiquated compromise between clavier and violin! How clumsy was the treatment of the organ-keys so late as the fourteenth century, in which, according to Prätorius, the keys were struck with the fist! But from this time the art of mechanics develops quickly, and the rapid increase of the number of keys in the clavichord shows us how speedily its supremacy was attained. The fall of the key was shallow, the quick-sounding tone encouraged ornamental flourishes, which were more easily played on the clavichord than on our heavy-touched pianoforte. Yet it was long before the number of strings became equal to that of the keys. Not till the eighteenth century (about 1725) do we find clavichords with a string to every key. (These are called free instruments, in contra-distinction to the old tied.)[21] It is obvious that the “tied” clavichords did not admit of all chords; but those which were impossible were discords, avoided on other grounds by the older music. To sound C and D flat together was impossible; but no one complained, for no one, for reasons of style, wished to try it. But, on very old clavichords, C and E are also incapable of being simultaneously sounded—a fact which gives us many a hint for the criticism of the oldest pieces.

In the form of a simple case, fit to be laid on the table, and later when fitted with its own stand, frequently painted on top and sides, or with its keys set in ivory and metal, the clavichord continues to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although the strings were then duplicated, although it was possible to attain in the touch stronger or weaker, louder or softer, expression, yet it could not, with its far too great simplicity of tone, hold its place in the rapidly hurrying development of music. It had taken one thousand years to improve the monochord, five hundred more to produce a clavichord, two hundred and fifty more were required to bring the clavicymbal[22] form to its perfection; and yet a hundred and fifty for the clavicymbal to emerge into a Steinway or a Bechstein.

The clavicymbal represents a second form of the clavier, which begins its career about 1400. Its invention is directly due to the influence of the organ. When the clavier began to replace the organ in the home, a desire was felt for the stronger notes of the great wind-instrument. The clavichord was unequal to the task. A new technique was required. The strings, instead of being touched and divided, were plucked with quills, which stood out at the side from the jacks, at the end of the key-lever. For this purpose it was necessary of course that the strings should be tuned each to its proper note, and therefore have each its due length. The mechanism of plucking, and the measurement of the strings, give to the clavicymbal its character as distinct from the clavichord. The tone becomes rippling, metallically glittering, firm and yet rattling; nay, it might be called romantic, if it could sustain its poetical air, which it gains for us in the first instance by its strange character. But it was a defect that the tone was unsuitable for nuances; for, unlike the clavichord, it was unable to produce forte, piano, or the “Bebung.” Here a hint was taken from the organ. Stops, as with the organ, were added; these, as they were drawn out or pushed in, made it possible to use either one, two, or three strings on any single key, thus offering three gradations from piano to forte. Or, by the same means of a stop, a damper of leather or cloth was put on the strings, and thus an imitation of the lute was effected. Or, thirdly, both these appliances were united by providing two keyboards placed one over the other, on which at will the player could play loud or soft. Hence arose dozens of combinations. Strings were coupled in unison or octave, registers were made either for hand or foot, keyboards were made to shift, the shapes of the cases were either rectangular or in the “flügel” form (like our grand pianos) to accommodate the gradual shortening of the strings as they reached the higher octaves, the cases were either small, or larger, and furnished with magnificent stands, such as were brought out by the first famous clavier-manufactory, that of the Ruckers at Antwerp, who flourished at the end of the sixteenth century; there were almost as many names as shapes. Those with smaller cases were called Virginals, those in the shape of a swine’s head were called Spinets (“Spinet” referring to the plectrum of quill); while the larger instruments were “Clavi-cymbals” (cembalo, a “dulcimer”; though the clavicymbal was a harp-with-keys, not by any means a dulcimer, which is the progenitor of the pianoforte, a very different matter), or in Italy “Gravicymbels,” in England “Harpsichords,” in France “Clavecins.” The keyboard, at first incomplete in the lower “short” octave,[23] gradually spread itself over three or even five octaves. The fulness of tone was greater, but the touch necessarily heavier than of old. The new instrument was unsuited for the quick development of a natural system of “fingering.”

A Concerted Performance. Engraved by H. Goltzius (1558-1617).

The technique of clavier-playing advanced but slowly from the mere tapping of the finger-ends to the dexterity of to-day, which lays under contribution the whole arm as far as the elbow. In the first clavier and organ “school,” which was published by Girolamo Diruta in Venice about 1600, and which bears the title, “Il Transilvano, sopra il vero modo di sonare organi e stromenti di Penna,” are already to be found rules for the use of the fingers, for the holding of the hands, and as to the differences of organ and clavier-playing; but fifty years later, according to Weitzmann, Lorenzo Penna,[24] in his “Albori musicali,” knows no other rules than that the hand should be raised high, and that, as the right ascends the scale and the left descends, the third and fourth fingers should be alternately used, and vice versa with the third and second. Old pictures confirm this statement. In England we meet notable examples of the influence of this Italian fingering. The thumb, as the finger that passes under the others, is still for a long time an enfant terrible. The technique is still that of the zither, simply transferred to keys. It is not till the time of Bach that the special technique of percussion springs into existence.

It is astonishing to see what feats were attempted by the old English masters of the virginal in spite of their scanty means. We feel how they love this instrument, which, in spite of itself, pointed out to them the way to the Promised Land of music, namely, to the stiff rhythm and arrangement of the secular music. For example, we actually find in the virginal books pieces by the famous Amsterdam organist, Sweelinck, and arrangements of compositions by Orlando Lasso, as well as all kinds of transcriptions of Italian works; but the gems are the variations on popular songs and the dances. In the contemporary virginal music of Venice this relation is reversed. There the Ricercari (pieces for lute, organ, or harpsichord, displaying the tricks of counterpoint), the Toccatas, the Preambles, are overlaid by the heavy, clumsy harmonies of the Middle Ages; they stagger about in uncertain syncopations, dabbling with 5/4 time, and confused with the most intricate figurations. It is only towards the end[25] that they yield a clear formal idea. Not until the younger Gabrieli do we see rhythm more clearly defined.

In England, however, the fruitful songs and dances admit none of these flabby harmonies; all the ornamentation of the variations is accommodated to the simple fabric of the piece; the clear melody is allied with an equally clear harmony; and they are woven, by the quick and light tone of the virginal, into a musical movement which, in order to live, must include a thousand delicately elaborated nuances of thought.

Compared with the lute dances, which necessarily retained the stiffness of their fabric, there is here a blossoming field, a veritable new world. The organ gives the voice parts their character, the lute supplies their tone-colour, but the child of these two parents has its own standing and its own future.

About 1500 we meet with the first Old English clavier-pieces, as well as Aston’s Hornpipe, a variation on a popular song. A manuscript collection in the British Museum, known as the “Mulliner Book” (Mulliner was a master in St Paul’s School), offers us the earliest specimens of clavier-works of this kind, by various masters, from the middle of the sixteenth century. Many of the pieces by Thomas Tallis, the old master of this school, are exceedingly rhythmical. He was organist under four reigns—those of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary and Elizabeth. There is a canon in two parts, in lines which can be grasped at a glance, and which makes full use of sequential repetitions—a sure sign, from the early times of church music, of the advancing rhythmical consciousness. Gradually there is added to the canon a running bass, which at first sounds twice, and finally rolls forth quite unhindered, rendering the whole picture easily grasped by the eye. The unaided eye indeed, in these old pieces, is a good judge. Without being preoccupied by the archaism, which perhaps wearies the ear, it detects the intellectual art of the composer, as it were, at a certain distance. It observes the great and small curves of the voice-contours, sees the succession of the canonic themes, notices the parentheses in which long passages are confined, and the delight of the composer in the clearness of the pattern. It is indeed as a finely-sewn, carefully-fashioned pattern that we see an exercise of this kind, simply worked out, but richly adorned with broken chords—such, for example, as the figuration of the “Felix namque” which Tallis has as the third piece in the Fitzwilliam Virginal-Book. The nuances of the accompaniment rejoice in their ornamental existence.

William Bird, the pupil of Tallis, whose life reaches from 1538 or 1546 to 1623, would be reckoned as the father of modern piano-music, if only this English school had exerted some influence on art, and did not stand so isolated in musical history. We shall call him the first of the clavier-masters. Both organist and singer in the Royal Chapel, where both services were alternately demanded from all the adult musicians, he had a considerable interest in the monopoly of music printing and of the music paper duty which was granted by Elizabeth first to Tallis and then to him. A happy man he was not; he appears to have suffered more than most in the religious persecutions of the time. We have hardly a word in the authorities as to the hours of work of these old musicians; but indirectly we learn from the Act against Rogues and Vagabonds that private instruction was a not unusual parergon of the musicians.

Page from “Parthenia,” the first English engraved Clavier Music, 1611.

Prosniz, the collector of all clavier-literature, in his “Handbuch der Klavierlitteratur”—a work not to be implicitly relied on—calls Bird’s music coarse and tasteless. Weitzmann agrees, saying that it is composed with intelligence and art, but heavy and without soul. But this is the fate of all transition styles. If we observe, from the standpoint of modern music, the traces of the old style, as for instance the change of time and the “flabbiness” of the harmony in the Fantasia, which comes eighth in the Virginal Book, or the cross-passages in the interesting Piece 60, they are indeed coarse and tasteless. But we must endeavour in such things to put aside the modern point of view. Mediæval music is not a preliminary step to the modern, but something quite different. It is pictorial, as the other is plastic. If we would hear their “molluscous” harmonies, and their indistinctness of rhythmical arrangement, we must lay aside the rhythmical canons of modern music; we must accept the molluscous nature and want of distinctness as something purposed, and we must follow without preoccupation this web of voices, enjoying it note by note. The piece is so delicate, so quite in colour, that the last note is a shock to us. In fact, the conclusion of these pieces, with its formal clash, under which the harmonies and voices assemble themselves in a stiff group, is a contradiction to their inmost being, a desertion of the pictorial principle and—in a word—the germ of the coming style. In a greater degree than we can bring ourselves to believe, the ultra-modern expression-music is allied to this conception of the art of tone.

It is true that we justly judge Bird chiefly from the modern point of view, since we are investigating the progress of history, and therefore work for the new, the developing, rather than for the old. But it is precisely from this point of view that he presents such surprises that we are not at first able to form a decisive opinion about him. I find a quiet pleasure in observing his harmonies, which are felt rather than calculated, as, for example, the sudden D major chord in the famous song, “John, come kiss me now” (Virginal Book, No. 10), and in studying the delicate parallel legato passages, the gradual change of melody, the growing complexity, the unusual variations, the alternation of hands, the rhythmical developments. In the ninth variation there run together plain quavers, dotted quavers, and the melody above all.

New suggestions, aroused by the clavier, are constantly being introduced. Prelude xxiv. has a stiff structure. The Passamezzo-Pavan and Galliard (Nos. 56 and 57) present broken chords as a genuine clavier-motif, and the most delicate canonic repetitions by means of a thematic modulation from the key of F to that of G. Very neat is the descending D C A in the seventh galliard-variation alternating with E D B. Bird is particularly fond of writing a passage based on a chord of F, and immediately followed by another based on G. This is akin to the practice of the drone in bagpipes, and has analogy with the ancient “Pes,” or “pedal” two-part vocal accompaniment in “Sumer is icumen in.” The similarity to the bagpipe drone is rather striking in “The woods so wild” (Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, No. 67) or in “The Bells,” where the lower bell voices repeat themselves in a way that reminds us of the pedal bass of Chopin’s Berceuse.

The rich technique of “Fortune” (No. 65), the wealth of figures in “O Mistress Mine” (No. 66), the harmonies of the Passamezzo dances (Nos. 56 and 57), cling to the memory. But chief are his two most modern clavier-pieces—the variations on “The Carman’s Whistle” (No. 58) and “Sellinger’s Round” (No. 64, where the piece is complete, not abridged as in Pauer’s edition). These have often been issued in popular form, and in Pauer’s collection are provided with modern execution marks.

“The Carman’s Whistle” is a perfected popular melody, one of those tunes which will linger for days in our ears. At the beginning of the third and fourth bars Bird sets the first and second bars in canon, in the simplest and most straightforward style. Next come harmonies worthy of a Rameau, with the most delicate passing notes. In the variations certain figures are inserted which are easily worked into the canonic form, now legato with the charm of the introduction of related notes, now diatonic scales most gracefully introduced, now staccato passages which draw the melody along with them like the singing of a bird. Finally fuller chords appear, gently changing the direction of the theme. From first to last there is not a turn foreign to the modern ear.

The “Sellinger’s Round” is more stirring. Its theme is in a swinging 6/8 rhythm, running easily through the harmonies of the tonic, the super-dominant and the sub-dominant. It strikes one like an old legend, as in the first part of Chopin’s Ballade in F major, of which this piece is a prototype. The first variation retains the rhythm and only breaks the harmonies. Its gentle fugalisation is more distinctly marked in the third variation, which at the conclusion adopts running semiquavers, after Bird’s favourite manner, anticipating at the conclusion of the one variation the motive of the next. The semiquavers go up and down in thirds, or are interwoven by both hands, while melody and accompaniment continue their dotted 6/8, in a fashion reminding us of Schumann. In the later variations the quaver movement is again taken up, but more florid and more varied with runs which pursue each other in canon. This piece, perhaps the first perfect clavier-piece on record, which had left its time far behind, was written in 1580.

Alongside of William Bird stands Dr John Bull (1563-1628). These two represent the two types which run through the whole history of the clavier. Bird, the more intimate, delicate, spiritual intellect; Bull, the untamed genius, the flashing executant, the restless madcap, the rougher artist. It is noticeable how these two types stand thus together on the very threshold of the clavier-art.

John Bull, at nineteen, became organist of Hereford Cathedral, and at twenty-two a member of the Royal Chapel. In the following year he becomes Bachelor of Music of Oxford, three years later Doctor of Music of both Oxford and Cambridge. When, in 1596, Sir Thomas Gresham founded his College in London, he was made Professor in Music, and that without (as the statute demanded) lecturing in Latin. But he held this post no more than five years. We find him, “on grounds of health,” travelling in foreign countries. His playing created the greatest enthusiasm. The French, the Spanish, and the Austrian courts were in a furore. Like all later executants, he is the subject of myths. There is an anecdote that a kapellmeister of St Omer showed him, as an extraordinary curiosity, a piece in forty parts.[26] Bull, nothing daunted, added another forty parts to it. The kapellmeister stares, and takes him for the devil himself. After an absence of six years he returned to England, where, like his satanic prototype, he resists all authority. He resigned all academic positions, threw up his post in the Royal Chapel, and in 1613 again set out, without permission, for the Continent. Four years later he emerges as organist of Notre Dame in Antwerp, where he died in 1628.

John Bull, at the age of 26, after Caldwall’s engraving in Hawkins.

From these few biographical notices we figure him as a restless ambitious spirit. As the peaceful life of a mediæval painter is to the splendid existence of the seventeenth century artists, so is the relation of Bird to Bull. And Bull’s works exhibit many of the lineaments of an elegant faiseur.[27] He is not so fond as Bird of the primeval freshness of the popular songs and dances, nor does he work out his pieces with Bird’s virgin purity. The side-issue is often with him the main object; the figuration is often licentious, and both hands vie in the performance of the closest and most difficult passages. Often, indeed, his pieces assume a grotesque appearance, hard and antiquated harmonies, in which the leading note is conspicuous by its absence, being crossed with runs in semiquavers, dotted rhythms, rapidly intruded chords, four-fold imitations, syncopated grace-notes, mingled two and three-time passages in wild and bewildering confusion. The eye looks as it were on a specimen of Indian ornamentation, in which, among the confused lines, a pure human feature is almost indistinguishable. From the first piece of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Bull’s thirty “Walsingham” Variations, which later Bird treats so much more simply, the executant shines out in his whole personality. There are thirty studies on figure motives which in Bird are reduced to a dozen. The semiquavers run like will of the wisps in their most unsubstantial courses, resembling endless chains, which are here and there interrupted with leaps of a sixth or seventh, to knit them together in the self-same run higher up or lower down. The ornamentation is richer than with Bird, melting in its sfumato[28] the lines of the voice almost after the manner of Couperin. The clavier, even more than the organ, lent itself, with its isolated tones, to such trills, slurs, and mordents,[29] which give to the sound an apparently longer existence. It is these that, down to the time of the German classical music, give the stamp to the special physiognomy of the clavier-piece. I called them just now sfumato. As in painting the sharp outline of the body gradually gives way to greater truth to nature, and in Lionardo is replaced by the specifically pictorial obliteration of the sfumato, by which, so to speak, we see round the corners; so the ornamentation in these pieces, in which the clavier is seeking its own means of expression, assumes the habit of obliterating its thin outlines until finally the figures thus obtained regulate the lines of the melody as a fixed motif, or even become an end in themselves. It takes an inner effort before we can transplant ourselves into this old world of ornamentation. We must learn to feel it as it would be played by the old masters: we must, if possible, play it ourselves on old and lightly-responding spinets. Our heavy and serious pianos are unsuitable to them; they sound too forcibly and harshly. The average pianist cannot play them; and hence, in his new edition, Pauer has for the most part cut them out.

Doctor Bull’s flying fingers, utterly altering as they did many a church-tune and many a dance, were constantly making discoveries among the clavier-figures, just as the worst of executants has since done. Thus, in Bull’s somewhat bewildering forest, we find many a germ of future wealth: broken triads, which even in the contrary motion of both hands delight us in the midst of all kinds of consecutive fifths; broken octaves, of which Beethoven was so fond, a greater frequency of the crossing of the hands, by which the voice-part gained a wider field, and finally endless repetitions of the same note, either singly or in the middle of a passage,—this last a genuine clavier-device, for which later the new repeating mechanism was invented. Also, in harmonic relation, Bull seeks out many novelties, boldly bending the voice-part to his will; as he does in the truly stupendous Prelude No. 43, in the Virginal Book, or in the bold enharmonic modulation in Piece 51, an exercise in DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, a theme which appears a tone higher at each repetition, starting from G, in the midst of close figuration, until the C sharp simply changes to D flat.

There is a Lute Book of Bull’s in Vienna which gives us pieces like the following: “Miserere Mei,” “Galliard,” “La chasse du Roy,” “Salve Regina,” “Canon perpetuus, carens scriptura, notulis in systemati positis scriptus,” and so on. Let us not think too badly of them. The Virginal Book also has a variegated collection. In the time of variations, “variatio delectat,” there are collections for household use, which are not necessarily an indication of a want, on the part of the originator, of the sense of the characteristic in an instrument. At this epoch the instrument delivers men from the mediæval love of grouping instruments. And I even find that Bull in certain pieces has shown a noteworthy sense for characteristic. He has once a simple bag-pipe melody e f e d e f d c, called “Les Buffons,” with a series of variations in humorous style. There are at first chords with simple broken accompaniment, then hopping semiquaver figures, then a popular canon, then slurred sixths, and similarly right on to the conclusion, which is as usual fully harmonised, in the turns of which, of course, his want of plasticity, as contrasted with Bird, is clearly shown. More striking still is the working out of his best-known piece, the variations on the fresh delightful song, the “King’s Hunt,” giving us a romantic reminiscence of horns and trumpets. Something of this romance runs through his figures. He uses the horn-motive of the second part specially for a longer variation, which is simple and full of character. The flourish of runs in quavers, which he also uses in Galliard No. 17 of the Virginal Book, and the systematic answering of right-hand chords by the left hand, which appears also in Galliard 11, are here specially characteristic. We seem to see tramping horses and waving flags delineated in ancient technique. He was specially good in such hunting pieces. On the musical side, as his somewhat awkward variations on the fine “Jewel,” though among his best pieces, clearly show, he cannot be compared to the magical Bird; but his sense for characteristic and for technique has aided the advance of the clavier. Both of these superiorities are parts of his nature, which expressed itself most completely in this style. The clavier needed both types.

Henry Purcell, 1658-1695.

The most characteristic and notable piece of this school is the third in the Virginal Book, a Fantasia by John Munday, which represents no less a phenomenon than the changes of the weather. Over its sections, which have no thematic connection, but have various distinctions of rhythm—e.g., quietly moving semibreves and minims; jerky dotted quavers interspersed with semiquaver rests; extensive runs in semiquavers, etc.—he writes in this succession four times each, “Fine Weather,” “Lightning,” and “Thunder.” Instead of “fine” appears once “warm” weather; and a slow passage, marked “a clear day,” forms the conclusion. The characterisation is of course extremely superficial, and the last time the lightning rolls just like the thunder. But this novelty, as a symptom, ought not to be overlooked. It reveals to us the consciousness of characteristic, and the increasingly intimate character of the clavier. Technically, Bull inaugurated a school. Of the various authors of the Virginal Book, Ferdinand Richardson (who exhibits pure part-writing), Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons, Peter Philips, to a large extent follow his footsteps. Farnaby thus early writes pieces for two virginals; he darts, in the midst of his technique, through a graceful “Spagnioletta,” and often lights on interesting modern passing chords, as, for example, running upwards, b, f sharp, d, a, where a follows b and c d. In the use of chords Peter Philips (who arranges many pieces of Orlando Lassus in the Virginal Book) stands in the first rank. In the Pavan (No. 76), which is dated 1592, he has in the conclusion[30] unheard-of simple alternating triads; in the Galliard he deals with the most beautiful suspended chords; and in the “Galiarda Dolorosa” (No. 81) he introduces chromatic colouring.[31] We can perceive how much he must have learnt on his Italian and Dutch travels from the flourishing art of the Continent. The spirit of Bird does not exert so powerful or so enduring an influence as that of Bull. The anonymous Piece 14 of the Virginal Book is a famous Alman (German dance), which in the severity of its subject reminds us of Bird, and its working-out is done by means of single-note passages of melodious motive.

The so-called “Hand” of Guido of Arezzo, with an early and
extensively used diagram of the scale-notation.

In their clearness of arrangement and harmonious development, so far as they do not deal with dance or song, the majority of the pieces of the Virginal Book are marked by the spirit of the Toccata of the great Dutchman Sweelinck, which appears as Piece 96. Here the spirit of Bach is seen before its time. Gradually the distinctive edges of individuality fade away. A piece by Thomas Morley on the theme, “Goe from my window,” whose melody he himself partially employs again in his “Nancie,” appears again almost unaltered in the same Virginal Book, and is then ascribed to John Munday. With John Blow, Henry Purcell, Thomas Augustine Arne, in the following generations,[32] English clavier music blends with the general Continental stream, till it is absorbed and must seek its nourishment from without.

[1] The Cor Anglais is mentioned here as expressing a tone-colour which is entirely foreign to the pianoforte. This instrument is the alto hautboy. Its name is a curious instance of a “ghost” word, viz.: in its original meaning, “Cor anglé,” a bent or “angled” tube, German “Krummhorn,” it was misunderstood and explained as Cor Anglais, Corno Inglese, English Horn.

[2] Readers who do not know the picture must not be misled by this expression. St Jerome’s window-frames are filled with numberless little rounds of bottle-glass.

[3] The bagpipers play before Othello’s house, and the clown reproves their nasal tone. Othello himself gave them money to go away, which argues rather in his favour. As for Caliban, he was a true musician, except when drunk. Even then he liked howling catches. See especially Tempest, Act iii. 2, 136.

[4] This passage is the only one in Shakespeare where the slightest inaccuracy or looseness in the use of a technical word is to be noticed. The word “jacks” is here used carelessly, meaning the “keys,” over which of course the fingers walk, and which leap up to kiss the inward of the hand. The actual “jacks” are inside the instrument.

[5] Cf. Shakespeare on “eight-bar strains.” See “Shakespeare and Music” (Dent), by E. W. Naylor.

[6] Readers to whom this ancient method of composition is new will find in Mendelssohn’s “St Paul,” an easily accessible example, viz.: the chorus “But our God abideth in Heaven,” where the second trebles sing in long notes the old melody of the Apostles’ Creed. No one could recognise it in the midst of the counterpoint of the other vocal parts, and this is the point in question; namely, that the mediæval writers used secular tunes in the same way, and were held blameless.

[7] Named after Jacques Arcadelt, of the early sixteenth century, one of the many natives of Flanders who so distinguished that period of Madrigal composition; a first-rate man.

[8] Doubtless the author refers to the tendency in the sixteenth century for voice parts to be made interchangeable with instrumental parts. Many instances might be given both in Italy and England, e.g. if a tenor voice were absent, the part was played by a tenor instrument, viol, cornetto, trombone, or what not. This was the more easily made habitual since instrumental accompaniment merely consisted in doubling the vocal parts.

[9] This paragraph replaces some rather obscure sentences in the original, and aims at conveying their general sense.

[10] An excellent book, which ought to be known widely, containing many examples of early lute music, is W. G. v. Wasielewski’s History of sixteenth century instrumental music. Berlin, 1878.

[11] Meaning the “Tablature,” a system of writing music for the lute which has nothing in common with our “staff” notation. A set of six horizontal lines (representing six strings), was used, and letters (a, b, c, etc.) on these indicated the semitones, reckoning a as the “open string,” b as the semitone above that, and so on, for each separate string.

[12] Another spelling for Pavana, or Pavan, slow dance in square time.

[13] The play was Gorboduc, otherwise Ferrex and Porrex. The author is better known as Thomas Sackville.

[14] See “Shakespeare and Music,” pp. [169]-171, for other English examples.

[15] “The English call it quite appositely by the name ‘Consort’ (from Latin consortium) when several persons with various instruments, such as ... etc. ... play together in sweet concord with one another.”

[16] It is misleading to say “in six parts.” There are six voices, but the canon proper only takes four. The other two sing, independently of the canon, a “bussing bass,” founded alternately on Do and Re.

[17] In the early seventeenth century it was matter of complaint in England that “French songs” and instrumental music “in the Italian manner” were more popular than necessary.

[18] These were also called by the plain English name “fancies.”

[19] When Sir Toby says to the caper-cutting Sir Andrew: “I did think, by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was formed under the star of a galliard,” may he not refer to one of these dedications of dances to noblemen?

[20] Drehleier. The instrument referred to is of the ninth century.

[21] Bundfrei and gebunden, the former only was capable of striking any combination of notes at once—e.g., four or five adjacent semitones.

[22] One of the many names of what we know best as “harpsichord.”

[23] What were known as “short octaves” were to be seen almost in our own time in certain old organs. For three centuries the following or a similar arrangement was practised. Supposing the lowest notes of the keyboard ran thus: E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, the first E being that under the bass staff. But when the E key was put down, the note sounded was the C a third below; when the F sharp key was played, the resulting note was the D below; the G sharp key produced the low E, which should have had its own key to itself. Thus the keyboard, which apparently stopped at E under the bass staff, really had D and C below, arranged to sound on two other keys. So to produce a diatonic scale beginning from the low C of the violoncello, the keys actually played had to be: E, F sharp, G sharp, F, G, etc., which would produce C, D, E, F, G, etc.

[24] Penna’s name should not be connected with the word “Penna” in the title of Diruta’s book, where it merely means “quill,” and “stromenti di Penna” = “harpsichords.”

[25] This is also the case with the English variations. The last one is commonly the most valuable and convincing.

[26] It is right to mention here that Thomas Tallis actually did write a motet in forty parts, “Spem in alium non habui,” which, thanks to the enthusiasm of Dr Mann of Cambridge, has been published (1888), and performed in public on more than one occasion during the last few years.

[27] Meaning a “manufacturer” of show pieces.

[28] Sfumato means “smoky,” and refers, in painting, to the blurring of the outlines.

[29] The mordent is a grace where the main note is alternated rapidly with the note below.

[30] This is a really fine passage, and (by the way) bears every mark of the madrigal for double chorus.

[31] The passage has four times over a chromatic scale of six notes, every note properly harmonised. Neither Purcell (a century later) nor Bach (later still) could have done it better.

[32] The author here makes a startling leap of a century or so in his chronicle of English composers. From Munday, who was a grown man in 1586, he suddenly goes to Blow and Purcell, who flourished in 1690, and even mentions Arne in the same breath, who died in 1778.

The “isolation” of the early English clavier school is fairly explained by the immense amount of attention that was now given, from 1600-1695, in England, to the development of the dramatic scena or cantata, for one or two voices, to the song, and to the cultivation of concerted music for strings and keyed instruments. It is only to prevent any one from supposing that there was no “secular” music in England between the days of Elizabeth and the coming of Purcell that I give a few names, all of which have a real claim to remembrance. Songs—Campion (flourished 1600), Johnson (1600), Cæsar (early 17th cent.), Cooper (1612), Laneare (1620), H. Lawes (1630), Wilson (1640). Cantatas or “Scenas”—H. Lawes (1630), C. Colman (1640). Instrumental music—Gregorie (mid. 17th cent.), Jenkins (1630), W. Lawes (1630), Lock (1650), Sympson (1660).

D’Anglebert, Chamber Musician to Louis XIV., after Mignard.

Old French Dance-Pieces

The independent musical fame of England—omitting Purcell, the evening star—rests solely on this early period. Hence we have been led to trace the musical history of England further back than that of countries where the stream spread over a wider area. Old English music, indeed, had no influence worthy of the name. It stands, like a half-mediæval prelude, before the actual history of the piano. It is true that it shows the forces which are to work in the future; but they are not yet brought into the line which they are constantly and exclusively to follow. This process begins rather in France; it unites itself later with a second movement which comes from Italy, and follows a broader and more lively path through Germany until it reaches our own times.

Oskar Fleischer, the founder of the splendid Berlin collection of old musical instruments, has endeavoured, in his book on Gaultier, the great French lute-player, to describe English and French relations in the seventeenth century. But the hints which, in his view, the elder Gaultier[33] gained in England, are only matters of execution. Flourishes which in England were marked, without precise discrimination, with / or //, found a more exact representation among French lutenists. I do not mean that every performer did not put his own interpretation upon them. Every lutenist or clavier-player issues a new code of these agréments; but the basis remains essentially the same, and it is possible that the flourishes were adopted, by an impulse derived from England, into lute-music and thence into clavier-music. Thence they soon spread themselves over the whole musical field. But it is a mistake to imagine that these agréments, which infest old French compositions like locusts, were a peculiarity of the country, the “style galant” of France. The peculiarity lies elsewhere, in the form, in the dance.

English clavier-music had attached itself to the song. From the song it derived its stiffness of form and the grace of its melodic outline—two important aids in the advance of music. But its treatment of these pieces was conducted in a manner which reminds us of the middle ages of music. The form, a continuous succession of variations, sprang from the idea of figuration, which constituted the essence of mediæval music; and the voice parts were worked out in general on the fugal principle or in canonic imitation, both factors of the mediæval music. The early ripening of English music, and its close connection with the old Dutch vocal or organ composition, brought it about that the form rested still partly on tradition, while the content already pointed towards the future. Even dances were worked out in this manner, which belonged especially to the time. In France the system was the exact opposite. There, the form of the variation, and the absolutely fugal clavier-exercise, are as seldom found as the simply-harmonised song.

The emancipation in France was due to the attainment of a point of departure which was as distant as possible from anything vocal. The dance—although of course there were some sung dances—had early allied itself with the purely instrumental exercise. It has never been treated so entirely “à plaisir des gorges,”[34] as Gargantua expresses it. It had a stiff arrangement in common with a stiff harmony. It never showed much affinity with the contrapuntal twists and turns of the voice, to which song associates itself so easily from its close connection with choral music. If we compare the earliest instrumental dances of the sixteenth century with the dances, in several parts, of the old song-books—the “Rat’s-Tail,” the “Crane-Bill,” “Fox-Tail,” “Cat’s-Paw,” “Peacock’s-Tail,” and the like, we see how rapidly the influence of the instrument over a clear and light vocal current was increased in France. Here especially does the dance, from the very earliest times, enjoy great popularity. It is very early set to the lute or the clavier, other instruments being but rarely employed. Men grew accustomed to pieces in a condensed musical style, harmonised simply and melodiously, contracted in form. These were regarded on their own merits, and not as subjects for variations and figurations. It was for this reason that the French clavier-piece was more fruitful, more musical, and more capable of development than the English.

The dance then is the darling conception of French music; and French dances are the nucleus of all instrumental music. So early as 1530—for we can go back a great distance—the Paris printer, Attaignant, the oldest of French note-engravers, published all kinds of musical volumes “reduict de musique en la tablature du jeu d’Orgues, Espinettes, Manicordions,”[35] etc. We wonder to-day how M. Attaignant could transcribe his pieces “out of music” into the script of organs, spinets and monochords. But by “music” he meant nothing more nor less than song, and song, down to his day, was nothing more nor less than music. A few years after the German music-publisher Agricola[36] wrote:—

“Drumb lern singen du kneblein klein

Itzund inn den jungen jarn dein,

Recht nach musicalischer art

Las aber keinen vleis gespart.”

“Thou little boy, come learn to sing,

Now, ere thy youth has taken wing.

Let all be done with art refined,

And give thereto thy heart and mind.”

[E. E. K.]

For music, he had once before said, is the foundation on which all instruments rest. Attaignant was one of the first to make transcripts of this “music” for keyed instruments. Nay, more; as far as our knowledge goes, he was the first who in general printed for such instruments. On his title-pages stand for the first time the words spinet and clavichord, although the claims of the organ are allowed. And it is noteworthy that the dances play the principal part in his books. Here the Frenchman already peeps out. Galliards, Basse-dances,[37] Branles, Pavans, are brought into a clear and relatively good harmonic form, without much complication of the instrumental parts. They are often, as for example in a charming Galliard in F major, of entrancing naiveté. Not too many runs in the treble, not too much harmony in the bass, and all exquisitely adapted for the instrument.[38]

A hundred years after, the dance still rules French music, and not merely French music, but French life. The forms of social intercourse, as they were fashioned for the universal use of Europe at the court of the Parisian princes, were modelled on the broad rhythms of the dance. Going and coming, bowing and sitting, complimenting and smiling—all the pleasure in the formal beauty of hollow conventionalities, all this is nothing but the light and yet regulated step, the theatrical and yet sympathetic essence of the dance. The French people, having resolved to live their life, determined to do it prettily; and therefore to put even their ordinary motions and common gestures under the mild rule of the dancing master. Even in rough and ready England, traces of this are extant; witness the would-be grace of the formula of “introduction.”

In lute-music the dance takes the form of ceaseless corantos and sarabands; on the stage it supplies the framework for the love-representations of the time. In 1671 appeared Pomona, Perrin and Cambert’s first French public opera. In it, cattle drivers and agricultural labourers ply their dances. The great Lully, most fertile composer of the nobly tedious French national operas, is inconceivable apart from the school of the dance. His tunes, at every possible opportunity, run off into the beloved dances of three or four strains, now inserted in airs and prologues, now as episodic dances. By this means the flexibility of the voice parts increases year by year; and since Lully is a composer for the clavier, many of his dances easily adapt themselves to clavier-arrangements, to which indeed they are very early subjected. Lully is the most vigorous teacher in the rehearsal of opera-dances. The style and the school of dances reach such a height in Paris, that they give the law to the whole world just as their social etiquette does. “France,” writes Mattheson, “is and remains the true school of dancing.”

After the time of Lully, who had done so much for the development of the characteristic dance, the art advances with rapid strides. The Pantomime was invented by the Duchess of Maine: it was in 1708, at her famous festivals, “les Nuits de Sceaux,” that the last scene of the fourth act of Corneille’s “Horace,” was pantomimically represented with musical accompaniment.

Le Maître de Musique.
Painting by Jan Steen (1626-1679), in the National Gallery, London.

Of old the parts of women in the dance had been taken by men. Lully ventured to introduce female dancers. Here begins the epoch of famous “danseuses” who, in accordance with a natural law, become the centre of public interest. We owe to Castil Blaze a list of those grandes dames who took up the profession. Henceforward the art of song and that of dancing divided equally the popular affection, for the two were not always separate callings. La Prévost was the first to essay a solo dance, which she set to a violin solo of Rebel. La Pélissier inaugurated costume-dances. She had purchased the whole wardrobe of Adrienne Lecouvreur, lately deceased, and was thus able to appear in the ballet “Le Carneval et la Folie,” in the characters of Jocasta, Mariamne, Zenobia, Chimène, Roxana, Paulina, Célimène, Agatha, and Elvira. Next we see rising the star of La Camargo, who from her début in the ballet “Caractères de la Danse,” was the amazement of the world, the discoverer of operatic airs set to the dance, the glass of fashion, the arbitress of mode, against whose decisions there was no appeal. But, as Castil Blaze tells us in his history of the French theatre, all were surpassed by La Sallé, with her noble figure, her lovely form, her perfect grace, her dancing so full of expression and voluptuous languor. Not only does she dance; she writes dances. She invents a Pygmalion, in which the divine statue assumes life, and engages in a long pantomime with the sculptor, who teaches her to assume her humanity by means of the measured motions of the dance. La Sallé brought this ballet on the stage in London first and then in Paris; and the London correspondent of the Mercure de France writes to his paper of the extraordinary furore created by the new art. For Sallé had at last rejected the lingering relics of the old ballet—the anachronisms of costume—in order to be able to give full expression to the spirit of the dance. “She ventured,” says the correspondent, “to appear without skirt or bodice, with loose hair, and absolutely unadorned. Over corset and undergarments she had only a simple muslin dress, and seemed the very image of a Greek statue.” Sallé appears to have practised her dances without virtuosity, as a mere artistic representation. She essayed no acrobatic leaps, no entrechats, no pirouettes. Contrasting her with Camargo, Voltaire exclaimed:—

“Ah, Camargo, que vous êtes brillante!

Mais que Sallé, grands dieux, est ravissante!

Que vos pas sont légers, et que les siens sont doux!

Elle est inimitable, et vous êtes nouvelle:

Les Nymphes sautent comme vous,

Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”

The victories of the dance were universal. Even public ceremonies were taken up in its advance. The “Messe des Révérences” was altered into the “Ballet des Écrevisses.” In their first delight of dominion, love and the pleasure of life revel in the light and magical rhythms of the dance. The great and flourishing masked balls of the opera, acquiring a new rapture, lead on to new dances—the Calotins, the Farandoule, the Rats, Jeanne qui saute, Liron Lirette, le Poivre, la Fürstemberg, le Cotillon qui va toujours, la Monaco—old songs of universal popular origin; or, like wines and laws, named after towns and races, and now, as dances, naturalised on the parquet. How ancient is this connection between song and dance, in which the name of the song remains attached to the dance! This is a process which is of daily occurrence in our music-halls.

Famous danseuses received characteristic nicknames. The elder Duval du Tillet was called “La Constitution,” because her father was an eminent clerical constitutionalist; the younger was affectionately dubbed “Church Calendar.” La Mariette was called “the Princess,” on more private grounds. It was the same with their male companions. The three brothers Malter were called “the Bird,” “the Devil,” and “Knickerbockers.” I stay to refer to this as this French nickname-mania explains the bizarre inscriptions of so many clavier-pieces. An amusing story is told of a certain Cléron, who, in the demi-mondaine circles from which her beauty and seductive arts had brought her to the opera, was known as “Frisky” (Frétillon). In the opera she greeted her new friends very affectionately, but added, “I shall do my best to be agreeable to you; but if any one calls me Frisky, let him know I will give him the best box on the ear he ever had in his life.” Mademoiselle Cléron was no boaster, adds the narrator, and was pretty likely to keep her word.

The due understanding of old French clavier-music then, must start from the knowledge of the dance. Almost all its pieces are dances, whether they declare themselves as such or not. They take up the numerous existing dance-forms and develop them in the ways already described. But in addition to this formal principle we must notice a second, the symbolic. The pieces mean something, and mean more and more the further the century advances. As if to console themselves for the want of content which belongs to the dance in itself, composers are fond of indicating in their titles and dedications all kinds of relations which give to their pieces a more marked physiognomy or a more comprehensible expressiveness. For this purpose they had not only at their disposal the old song-names which clung to the dances, but a hundred other associations. They loved the dance, but they loved associations also. Nicknames and allusions flew from the smiling lips, and men had the fairest inducements to take the abstract in a concrete sense. The chief inducement was the stage with its representative music, the stage, so passionately loved by the French in the middle ages that even from the thirteenth century we have dramatic lyrical plays with the most delicate songs by the trouvère Adam de la Hale. These stand like flowers in the midst of their time, and penetrated so deeply into the life of the people that the little song of Marion “Robin m’aime” is still, they say, sung in the Hennegau. The fairies, which had already played their part in the works of this mediæval opera-composer and writer, had in the later French opera their rich harvest of beings of symbolic meaning. In Lully’s works there is quite a swarm of abstract figures, gods, demi-gods, personifications, which in small scenes or great airs bring out this characterising function of music to the utmost degree possible. But what such things as the good and bad Dreams, or the nymphs and Corybantes in the “Atys,” entering as chorus, performed in characteristic music was as nothing to what was done by the great ballets which drew heaven and hell into the circle of their representations. “Le Triomphe des Sens,” “Les Voyages d’Amour,” “Les Génies,” “Le Triomphe de l’Harmonie,” “L’Ecole des Amants”—all these are titles of operas and ballets of those times which had as their aim to represent musical things as symbols of sensuous incidents. From the lists of ballets and operas performed from Lully’s time right into the eighteenth century the application of fêtes, rococo-amusements, love-pictures by Watteau, or idyllic porcelain-ornamentation, to stage purposes, speaks with no uncertain sound. In such an environment, recollecting the renowned fantastic art of the contemporary Callot, we are led to understand the unusual preference for the direct association of clavier-pieces with particular persons or things.

But here we must speak specially of programme-music.

A Pavan called “La Bataille,” full of vigorous trumpet-signals and horn-echoes, was inserted by Tielman Sufato in his collection of 1551. Shortly before that date a Zürich lute book included dance-songs, “mitsampt dem Vogelgesang und einer Feldschlacht.” The song of birds, the imitation of animals, and all kinds of confused shrieking—a comic counterpoint—offers rich material to the programme-music of the sixteenth century. Even before an Italian had written the famous fugal chorus, in which the scholars, with a comical employment of the dismembered canonic voice-exercise, declined qui, quæ, quod, in the ears of the raging schoolmaster—even before this, contrapuntal janglings were well known. Jannequin, the Frenchman, depicted in chansons with many parts the battle of Marignano, the capture of Boulogne, war, jealousy, women’s gossip, the hare and hounds; or, on the other hand, the song of birds, the lark or the nightingale. We hear in the music of this time the thirds of the cuckoo, the clucking dactyls of the hen, the chromatic mewings of the cat, the trills of song-birds. The boldest of these pieces—an earlier Howleglass—was perhaps Eckard’s representation of the turmoil in St Mark’s Place at Venice (1589), in which noblemen, beggars, hawkers, soldiers, appear with all the artistic counterpoint appropriate to their respective classes. Thus programme-music, in the sixteenth century, enjoyed an international repute. It must not, however, be regarded as an achievement of modern music, but rather as something as old as music itself. The tempest which the Greek Timotheus represented on the kithara, and the fight of Apollo with the Python, which Timosthenes depicted on the flute and kithara, in all its stages—the challenge, the struggle, the hissing, the victory—had a renown in very ancient times. Programme-music belongs to all ages of musical development, and appears always as a natural phenomenon, never as a revolutionary movement. It marks the ne plus ultra of the need of musical expression, which cannot find satisfaction in pure musical forms, and seeks to justify itself by extra-musical titles. Thus on the extreme limit of ancient hymn-music stood a Timosthenes, on that of mediæval choral-music a Jannequin, on that of modern instrumental music a Berlioz.

We can trace the psychology of this programme-music with great ease in the French instrumental art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first definite orchestral programme-piece—the storm in Marais’ opera Alcyone—to the volume of François Dandrieu, “contenant plusieurs Divertissements dont les principaux sont les caractères de la guerre, ceux de la chasse, et la fête de Village”; from the lute-dances of Gaultier to the clavier-pieces of Rameau, we see nothing but an endeavour of the developed dance-form to enter into relations with actual life—an endeavour which leads to the manifold names of the pieces. Formerly the dances had taken their names from the songs. Now, as definite pieces, they are so full of special significance, so rich in all kinds of characteristic figures and harmonies, that the composer feels his mind insensibly drawn to incidents of life, of persons, of characters, humours, landscapes, and calls upon all his fertility in association to fashion decorative titles out of them. Music, which has arrived at the limits of the traditional dance-forms, passes over from the formal to the characteristic. As Berlioz’ Queen Mab is nothing but a further development of Beethoven’s Scherzos, and not a heaven-descended music, discovered in Shakespeare, so the pieces of the great clavierist Couperin, whether they have descriptions of humours or personal names for titles, are merely the developments of dances, which, so fertile were they, reminded the composer of life itself. Couperin himself declares that he gives in his pieces portraits, which appear to give to others also, before whom they are performed, the actual features of the models. But it is obvious that he could hold himself as a portrait-painter, only so far as his music was rich enough, by its definite relations to actual life, to give clearer definition and a distinct picture to its stream as it flowed in a thousand forms. Like all programme-musicians, he is such, not from poverty in musical invention, but from wealth. The French are a people that revel in the fulness of forms, and find their very life in the special magic of the formal presentation of all things, whether social or artistic. Thus in their hands all musical forms, melodious, harmonic, rhythmic, grew so luxuriantly, that at all times, from Jannequin to St Saens, in order to live they have necessarily turned to programme-music.

Yet the titles of the clavier-pieces are not fully explained by this reference to the value of programme-music for the French mind. We must take into consideration also an old decorative tradition. Let us open the magnificent volume of lute-pieces by the famous Denis Gaultier,[39] which came into the Berlin Museum of Engravings along with the Hamilton collection. It is fantastically called “La Rhetorique des Dieux,” because only gods could speak so movingly by music, and equally fantastically he introduces all kinds of titles for the pieces, such as “Phaethon struck by lightning,” “le Panégyrique,” Minerva, Ulysses, Andromeda, Diana, “la Coquette virtuosa,” and the like, besides several “Tombeaux,” by which term dedications to deceased persons were generally indicated.[40] If we compared these sixteenth century pieces with their names, a certain nimble fancy is required to find actual programme-music in them. Of a genuine representation of the content there is no pretence. Minerva, Echo, and the Coquette would seem to have more in common than they ever suspected. The titles are nothing but decorative stamps, resembling those medallions of Aphrodite which are so often engraved over a love-poem. The interpretation is always in the widest spirit possible. It is amusing to see how the editor of the collection labours to explain the names while confining himself exclusively to the vaguest generalities. On “l’Homicide,” or The Fair Murderess, as it is also named, he writes: “This fair creature deals death to every one who sees and hears her; but this death is so unlike the usual death that it is the beginning of a life, not its end.” It could not easily be more plainly indicated that there is no clear representation of anything to be seen in the piece, and that the title is a piece of self-flattery in the dress of the fantastic. Already had the elder Gaultier, the founder of this lute-school, recognised, or perhaps even invented, these decorative titles, such as “le canon,” “la conquérante,” “les larmes du Boset,” or “la volte,” “l’immortelle,” “le loup.” This last, it is certain, is no ordinary wolf, but howls so musically that it is really a man.

The custom of adding decorative titles was made universal by the lute-players, but the tone-painting must always have been of the slightest. Otherwise the old historian of the lute, Baron, could not have been so irritated at them as to write, some decades later, “Gallot has given such strange names to his pieces that we have need of close study to see their relation with the subject. For example, when he wishes to express thunder and lightning on the lute, it is a pity he has never added a note to tell us when it lightens and when it thunders.” (We are reminded of the old English clavier-piece on the same theme.) “We shall seldom,” he adds, “light on a French piece but the name of some noble dame is attached to it, after whom, if she so pleases, the piece is named.”

The clavier-players adopted this custom all the more willingly as their instrument, so full of resource and so capable of expressing shades of meaning, allowed them to raise these titles from their decorative and shadowy existence into genuine programme-inscriptions. We see this remarkable process clearly exhibited in Chambonnières, a clavier-player who towers in solitary grandeur, and marks an epoch by his introduction of the clavier suite, by the clear adaptation of his dances to the clavier, by the first realistic use of these titles, and by the establishment of a precise character in the clavier-piece, which holds its ground even to-day. He is not, like William Bird, the original of modern clavier-music, but its actual father, from whom a straight unbroken line stretches down to the present day.

Jacques Champion de Chambonnières sprang from an old family of organists, and was born at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The year of his death seems to be fixed as 1670. Titon des Tilliers, who in 1732 wrote his “Parnasse Français,” a work of great antiquarian research, says of Chambonnières that he played the organ very well, but the clavier with special genius, and that his pieces as well as his execution gained a considerable renown. His fame increased until Louis XIV. appointed him his chief clavier-master; and his compositions appeared in two volumes. In Titon’s times these pieces were still admired. Copies of these works are very rarely to be found to-day; but the great French historian, Farrenc, had the good luck to get possession of one of them, and he has freshly edited it in his famous collection of old clavier-music, “Le Trésor des Pianistes.” While Attaignant still bound his dances together according to their classes, there are here mixed sets of dance-pieces after the example of the lutenists, in simple setting, but with the adornments of the time. The succession is not yet so elaborate as in later suites, and courantes stand often one on top of another. The construction of the melodies has still a certain gentle, unforced charm, which gains our attention though its influence is scarcely irresistible. The canonic element appears strongly only in the Gigues, three-time dances with a lively movement. Every piece has its dance-inscription, and some have in addition their special titles, as La Dunkerque, La Verdinguette, la Toute Belle, Iris; or more distinct indications as the Slider, the Barricades, the Young Zephyrs, the Peasant Girl. A Pavan with slow conclusion in three sections is called “The Conversation of the Gods.” Here the sliding, the zephyr, and the peasant, are easily to be recognised in the music. Nevertheless, complete liberation from the merely decorative framework of the fantastic title was not yet attained.

The man to accomplish the great work was François Couperin, called by his time “the Great.” The piano-player of to-day hardly knows his name; and yet it is only two hundred years since men spoke of him in the same breath with Molière and Watteau. A genial, smiling, clean-shaven man—so the somewhat unsatisfactory portraits depict him—with half-length peruke, polite and yet slightly subtle, with a certain priestly sobriety of demeanour, his light fingers run over the hundred adornments of his spinet-pieces. He seems half astonished at his fame, and wholly ignorant that a whole art is one day to rear itself on his shoulders. It was only with difficulty that the pressure of his friends induced him to print his dances, which he wrote for himself in memory of his experiences, or the preludes which he wrote as exercises for his numerous pupils, or the concertos which he composed for Louis XIV.’s Sunday musical evenings. He watched with painful anxiety the tedious process of engraving. As we to-day inspect these prints, we are struck by the joyous naïveté of the art, by the graphic awkwardness with which the notes overflow the five-lined limits of the clef, and by the soul which breathes from the delicately-engraved prefaces. He thinks that his portraits are accurate pictures, and thankfully acknowledges his indebtedness to the intimate character of his instrument. His notes as to execution, his “gaiement,” “tendrement,” and “sans lenteur” (he is always warning the performer against slowness) and all the other guides to interpretation which he inserts, he excuses by saying that the pieces seemed to express something which could not be embraced in accurate language. In spite of all this pedantry of teaching he appeals to the sensitive musical appreciation which will find the right way of interpretation; and in spite of all this reference to the spiritual momentum of music he is a stern disciplinarian in form and technique. In the midst of the utmost freedom of movement we discern a strong feeling for style, just as in the contemporary architecture the most playful license of the rococo is strangely mingled with the most sober attention to classical rules.

François Couperin, “Le Grand.”

The Couperins, like the Chambonnières, were a widely spread musical family. It was old Chambonnières who, in a noteworthy fashion, had discovered Louis Couperin, the uncle of François. One morning the father of François and his two brothers who lived in the neighbourhood of the old master, brought a serenade for his inspection. Chambonnières was struck with it, asked after the composer, brought him to Paris, and thus laid the foundation of the fame of the family from which the great perfecter of his work was to spring. François was born in 1668. He lost his father when he was ten years old, but in Tomelin, the organist of St Jacques-la-Boucherie, he found a teacher and a second father. His life, as its details have come down to us, was simple and uneventful. He became organist of St Gervais and chamber-clavierist to the king, and died in 1733. But the dedications of his works enable us to conceive him more definitely. He appears in them as the professional artist and man of the world, pampered by noble ladies, and kissing their hands with graceful flatteries. We see him as he moves in the salons of Paris, which were then beginning to realise their mission. He is the admired artist of the court which he charms with his chamber-music; the intimate of the Duke of Burgundy and of the Dauphin, of Anne and Louis of Bourbon, giving his lessons and receiving pensions of a thousand francs. A true lady’s man, he thinks the hands of women better adapted to the clavier than those of men. He is the first to sanction ladies in his own family as clavier-players. His daughter Marguerite Antoinette, and his cousin Louise, played at court. Marguerite even became the teacher of the Princesses, and was official royal clavier-player—in France certainly, and probably in the world, the first woman to hold such a post.

The music of Couperin has something of this feminine quality. It is more truly “virginal” music than that which Queen Elizabeth once played in her quiet chamber. But its grace is not hidden; it is coquettish and conscious of itself. It is the high style of grace which belongs to the French culture of the eighteenth century. A spinet stands on a smooth parquet, and the ladies sit around with their roguish eyes and tip-tilted noses, smiling at all the well-recognised allusions, as the then flourishing pastel-art has fixed them for us in light colours. It is light, entertaining music, in which the thoughts of their own accord run on bright and resplendent paths. Short pieces; courantes with their lively, scarcely broken triple-rhythms; allemandes in their decorous and interwoven quadruple time; minuets with their pretty, melodious triple rhythm; chaconnes and passacaglie rearing their piquant erections on slow-moving basses; sarabands in their triple movements and interesting national colouring; gavottes with their graceful movement in soft two-time, the hurrying fugal gigues, and all the many other unnamed dances—all these give the ear, without exertion, a subtle delight. The rondo-form takes a supreme rank; it is constantly growing from a simple round-dance with refrain into a genuine clavier-composition, seeming to forebode the sonata which still remains unborn within it. Its theme, like a Ritornel, recurs among the “couplets” or episodical passages; but it is only seldom that the couplets set themselves in conscious opposition to the theme. Usually they adopt its rhythm or the character of its melody, and play with it until, neatly and gracefully, they glide back into the theme itself. There is no iron rigidity of thematic handling. A delicate colour-sense holds the parts together. Couperin does not regulate his pieces according to any definite scheme of dance-successions; he binds the dance and the non-dance, the piece in one or more sections, together into one bouquet which he offers to his lady-friends, often with a polite dedication appended, under the general title of “Ordre.” Twenty-seven such “Ordres,” in four volumes, were published by him between 1713 and 1730.

Concert.
Painting by Gerard Terborch (1617-1681), in the Royal Museum at Berlin.

The music of Couperin is as simple as possible. But we must not judge its sound by the somewhat heavy pianofortes of our time, which, even in the playfulness of a rapid passage, seem conscious of an arrière pensée. No; the spinet, which, even at its saddest, had a joyous exhilaration—this was the instrument of this playful music. The passages glide on, usually in two voices, of which the one is played by the right hand, the other by the left; and whether these voices are tied in chords or chord passages, or whether—as occurs more rarely—full chords, usually arpeggio, stand between, in either case there is a delicacy which recalls to us the origin of French clavier-music in the sweet-toned lute. But Couperin advanced yet further. In his last “Ordres” his compositions increase in depth; the more luxuriant conceptions and deeper feelings of a lesser Beethoven show themselves; the playful and ornamental element recedes into the background, and the compositions become those of a master who has summed up whole centuries of music in himself. From the insipid melodies of Lully’s time Couperin has fashioned more graceful and charming turns of expression; not only roguishly dancing-melodies, in which the vigorous popular songs seem to live again, but also melodies of the intellect, in which the soul of Mozart might seem to dwell. He prefers to advance in the diatonic scale; and the sense for the general outline of the composition, which is so often wanting in the older generation, is in him so unerring that he permits, with inimitable skill, the semiquavers of his “papillons” to sway up and down through entire bars. Yet occasionally his melodies seem ashamed of their nakedness, and, as in the “Sailor’s Song,” draw the flowery robe of adornments so closely round them that we can scarcely trace their limbs. There are the well-known short and long grace-notes, upper or lower, the pincés, ports de voix, tremblements, and the whole apparatus of ornamentation, which was then larger than it is now, and which, in spite of the stern admonitions of the composer’s marks, was frequently at the mercy of the performer. Like almost all composers of that day, Couperin gives in his first volume the table of his ornamentations, but he insists strongly on their exact carrying out. To players of to-day his agréments are anything but pleasant. They seem to destroy our sense for the pure run of the voices, and are painful in their superabundance. But we must play them with historical fingers, and seek to understand the psychology of their expression. They give to the quick clavier-tone a significance of its own; they are, so to speak, running drills, cutting the tones deeper into the relief of the piece, some more, some less, until they bring out the light and shade which serve to aid expression in the material of the clavier. Could we hear Couperin play, we should certainly hear the pure voice more distinctly than we imagine, enfolded as it would be here and there by deeper or brighter shadows of the ornamentations which bring out its form in plastic manner. His was a technique which was lost to us with the thorough comprehension of this music. Couperin took pains to bring it to the highest perfection. At times he introduced a slight tempo rubato; he took from the note at the conclusion something of its length, and gave to another at the beginning a short pause for breath, inventing for the former the mark of aspiration, for the latter that of suspension. Here the endeavour was the same as with Prall-triller[41] and grace-notes. Instead of the ornamentation, the short pause, like the white mounting of a picture, raises the important note, giving to it its meaning and with the meaning the due expression. But later, in the last “Ordres,” Couperin must have felt the inadequacy of these marks. The aspirations and suspensions retreat into the background, while the sign ) becomes more prominent. This sign simply marks off an independent musical phrase in order to resign its due interpretation to the sympathetic feeling of the player. Such is the trouble he takes with the traditional style of ornamentation and its spiritual expression.

But the remaining musical peculiarities of his composition follow the simplest lines of development. Freedom of motive increases. Tremolo accompaniments, interesting sequences, a playful counterpoint—this latter especially in the pieces for two claviers, or in the “Pièces croisées” for clavier with two manuals—in fact an inexhaustible array of new forms arises. Thus the harmonisation simplifies itself along with the advance of the entire musical development. Couperin modulates, into the dominant or sub-dominant, by means of their related notes, in major and minor keys. By his turn for repetitions of short figures on changing basses—a truly modern motive—or by bold passages of passing notes—for instance, in the saraband “La Majestueuse,” we find once e flat, d, f sharp, g, a, one over another—he gives us interesting harmonies, which appear, especially in the allemandes, as full, heavy chords, already anticipating Bach.

The theatre of Couperin is rich and varied. The representations which we see in this theatre under the innumerable titles of the pieces, range over the whole world. Some of the characters are also not strange to us; others we soon learn to know; a few remain unintelligible to us since the relations they betoken are too subjective. But all lend to the pieces a personal value and an intimate charm, as Goya’s editions present them to us; and it is from them that the clavier derives its great significance as interpreter of this intimate personal art.

“Nanette” greets us with her pleasant quavering melody; “Fleurie” is more subtle, and sways delightfully in richly-adorned 6/8 time; the “Florentine” blooms in graceful, gentle play of quick triolet-figures; but the “Garnier” has the dress of the confined fantastic time, having not yet cast off her heavy folds. “Babet” is “nonchalamment” contented; “Mimi” has a temperament which the many slurs and points of the ornamentation can scarcely fully exhibit. “Conti” (or “les Graces incomparables”) works lullingly out her counterpoint; “Forqueray” (or la Superbe) has a physiognomy of almost academic severity. Many ladies pass by us in these pastel-portraits. We are amused with the divine Babiche (Les amours badins) and the beautiful Javotte (or the “Infanta”); but the most beautiful in melody is Sœur Monique, an intellectually delicate creation, and the most beautiful in construction is “La Couperin” (perhaps the musician’s cousin Louise) who poses before us in a masterly, stately, and slightly fugal movement.

Then follow the troops of nameless ones. First the nuns—the blondes in the minor and the brunettes in the major section. Then the charming and melodious representatives of landscapes: Ausonian, Bourbon, Charlerois, Basque. Then the “Enchantress,” who of course in process of time suffered much from her magic. Then the “Working Woman,” who finishes her course, but is surpassed in it nevertheless by the “Diligent One.” The “Flatterer” and the “Voluptuous Woman” are a relatively quiet pair. The “Gloomy One” is sharply defined, with her dismal, jerky passages, and the heavy full chords. The “Sad One” exhibits the light sentimentality of all archaic melodies. The “Spectre” sweeps past in slurred thirds. Close behind come the “Gray Women” with their ponderous sad march. The “Fox-Tail” has tripping broken chords; the “Lonely One” shows her caprices in the rapid successions of grave and gay. Then follow, in endless succession, the “Princesse d’Esprit,” “l’Insinuante,” “l’Intime,” “la Galante,” “la Douce et Piquante,” faithful ones, risqué ones, bold, visionary, mysterious ones, with their chromatic descents. “Le Turbulent” is one of the few men in the list.

His more general portraits are the most satisfying. They depict emotions, characters, animals, plants, landscapes, occupations, bits from all kinds of life, which are often inscribed with the favourite antique titles. Thus “Diana” with her broken chords leads us into the forest, and shortly after in the second part we hear her horns sounding; while in the “Hunt” a more romantic note is struck. In a broad violoncello-like “Romance” the wood gods are singing and the satyrs dance a very melodious and attractive Bourrée. The Amazon rushes on in thirds, which bear a striking likeness to the leit-motif of Die Walküren; and Atalanta runs past in rapid figures. Hymen and Amor sing a marriage-song, the former in the first part more firmly, the latter in the second more delicately and tenderly. The Bells of Cythera sound to us from the holy island, rising and falling alternately, enlivened by glissando-passages. This motive Couperin adopted a second time in “Les Timbres.”

The Bees hum and revolve round one point; the Butterflies flutter past in ravishing triplets; the Fly buzzes and dances round her own melody; the retiring Linnet hurries through restless triplets; the complaining Grasshopper chirps in endless imitative short grace-notes; the Eel twists itself now tightly, now loosely; the Amphibian creeps along in legato notes, winding itself through bar-sections of Schubertian length; the Nightingale in Love sings her piercing plaintive accents in quick and ever quicker trills, or as Victor chants more joyfully and triumphantly. Or, again, blooming lilies rise before us in delicate self-enfolding figures with petal-like ornamentations; the sedge rustles eternally to its melody; the poppy spreads abroad a wonderful secret mysterious tune, with many slow arpeggio thirds; and garlands twine themselves in festal guise on a canonic trelliswork.

Life unfolds itself in its entire wealth. Here we have the rolling play of the waves, there the purling and rippling of the brooks, and the twittering of the birds—a foretaste of the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony. Then again, under the name of “Bontemps ou l’étincelante,” an appeal is made to the emotions of springtide or fair weather; we live as it were in a small forest of enchantment. In the second part—Les Grâces Naturelles—one of Couperin’s most intellectual melodies breaks forth, showing all the chaste delicacy of Mozart. There rises the blooming landscape of St Germain en Laye; farther off we catch a sight of teeming orchards from which the music of bagpipes sounds forth. The reapers draw nigh with cheerful song; the buffoons—males in minor and female in major—stir their happy limbs; the jugglers appear and ply their tricks;—we can hardly distinguish the trick and its solution, or the rapid intermingling of left and right hand—the knitters lace their rolling semiquavers together right to the “falling meshes” at the end; the click-clack of the lace-makers—tic, toc, choc, tic, toc, choc—beats joyfully hither and thither in the broken chords of a pièce croisée. Even the milk-maids of Bagnolet have their appropriate pieces. There the gossipping wife—a reminiscence of Jannequin—beats her rapid bubbling motive; there the short rolling courses of the famous little windmills play their humorous part; here hobbles a cheery lame man along; there staggers a bizarre, syncopated, now swift, now slow Chinese. “The Man with the queer Body” makes his springs, in scattered notes, and close by stands the idyll of “Dodo,” or “Love in the Cradle,” the bass of which rocks itself to and fro in a pièce croisée. “Wavering shadows” glide ghost-like in sadly-sounding movements throughout this play of life.

The “Sentiments,” full of feeling, with their beautiful “anticipation” notes, the long legato-movement of the “Idées Heureuses,” the “Regrets” and “Amusements” musically darting to and fro, the syncopated tender “L’Ame en Peine,” the wonderful “Langueurs Tendres,” the somewhat lengthy “Charmes,” the “Agréments” with their agréments, the free diatonic of the various morning melodies,[42] the gentle toying of the “Bagatelles,” of the “Petit Rien,” of the “Brimborions,” the rapture-like “Saillie”—these are inward reflexes which have not quite the clear sensuousness and realism of the outer experiences. The following are the most elaborately worked out, and are presented in “cycle” form.

The “Earlier Ages” appear in four figures—the first exercise gives the syncopated “Muse naissante,” the second the rocking “Enfantine,” the third the rioting “Adolescente,” the fourth the “Délices” in violoncello style, which is Couperin’s favourite for the attainment of the most delightful effects.

Or the great “Shepherds’ Feast” with the twanging musettes of Taverni or Choisy, and the lightly rocking rhythms.

Or the five-act Ballet of the “Pomp of the great and ancient Menestrandise.”[43] Act I., the pompous entry of the Notables and sworn probationers. Act II., a bag-pipe song of the hurdy-gurdy-men and beggars. Act III., a joyous dance of the jugglers, clog-dancers, and Merry-Andrews with bears and monkeys. Act IV., a duet of the crazy and the lame. Act V., breaking up of the whole troop by the animals—furious étude in semiquavers.

Next, the cycle of the old and young men; the former sober, the latter happy.

But, before all, that original of Schumann’s Carnival, “Les Folies françaises ou les Dominos.” Maidenhood in invisible colours, Shame in rose, Impetuosity in red, Hope in green, Faithfulness in blue, Perseverance in gray, Longing in violet, Coquetry in a domino of many colours, the old gallants in purple and gold, the cuckolds in brown, silent Jealousy in dark gray, Rage and Desperation in black. Externally the form is that of a great ballet of the time; internally it is the variation of collected pieces on a single harmonic succession, its contents are the allusions easily comprehended at the time; the characterisation is carried through with great skill; but its musical setting is even shorter than is usually the case with Couperin’s clavier-pieces.

The Preludes, which Couperin appended to his “Art de Toucher le clavecin,” he named, in accordance with their ad libitum performance, the Prose of clavier-literature. These dances and pictures were to him the poetry, rhymed and rhythmical. And it was precisely their formal completion which was of importance for the future of clavier-literature. We see the forms developing. In his best pieces the Sonata is already foreshadowed. The fulness of motives, as they occur to him in his two best compositions, the splendid “Favorite” and the stupendous “Passacaille,” is elsewhere thematically limited. In the recapitulation of the main theme at the beginning of the second part of the pieces, in the rhythmic similarity between the rondo-motive and its “couplets,” in many a thematic working-out, shown for example in “La Trophée” with its wonderfully modern sonata-style, lies the promise of thematically-developed music of succeeding generations. To the same purpose is his increasing sense for the association of several pieces. The many slow second pieces, or the popular dances such as the Polonaise, the Sezile, the Musette, which form the concluding parts of a group, the repetition of the first part after the second, the divisions into slow movement, slower, and lighter, which are specially visible in “La Triomphante,” and “Les Bacchanales”—all these are as much the germ of the future sonata arrangement, as the severer thematic was the germ of sonata-playing. The charm for us lies in observing, in the springtime of art, the natural uprising of these forms which appear to us almost laws of nature.

His “Art de toucher le clavecin,” the first school-book specially devoted to the clavier, was published in 1717 and dedicated to the king. This was a noteworthy advance. There was to be no longer a teaching of mere notation, but a teaching of technique and execution. “The method which I here propose,” says Couperin, “is unique, and has nothing to do with the tablature, which is only a counting of numbers. I deal here chiefly with all that belongs to good playing. I believe that my observations are clear enough to please connoisseurs and to help those who are willing to be helped. As there is a great difference between grammatical and rhetorical rules, so there is an infinite distance between tablature and the art of good playing.” Such a general musical “fabrication” and grammar, in spite of many advanced ideas, had been the work of St Lambert, which appeared from 1702 to 1707, and which in its first part (called “Principes du Clavecin”) devotes only a few lines to actual clavecin playing, and extends the second part (called “De l’accompagnement”) also to the organ, and other instruments. It is painful to him that his experience is treated lightly and turned into a “school.” The parents of the pupils, he says later, ought to place the most implicit reliance on the teacher, and yield him the completest powers. The teacher even takes the key of the instrument with him, and no playing should be attempted without his supervision. The scholar sits with his fore-arm horizontal before the clavier, elbows, hand and fingers in a line—the fingers thus lying quite flat on the keys. He has his body turned very slightly to the right, and the right foot a little stretched out. In order to prevent grimacing while playing, he often places a mirror in front in which he can watch his motions. A bar over the hands occasionally regulates the equality of their height; for the holding of the hands high makes the tone necessarily hard. Looking about of any kind is forbidden, and above all, coquetting with the public as if the playing were no trouble at all. And although, finally, everything in the performance depends on experience, taste, and feeling, yet rules are given for performance to which the player must conform. Couperin frequently disregards the fingering of his predecessors, and to the examples which he gives of his new art he adds confidently in a side-note that he is convinced that few persons in Paris have the old rules in their heads—Paris being the centre of all good. Step by step we have harder and harder studies developed from a single figure, and directions for finger exercises fill the rest of the volume. The change of fingers on one note, the avoidance of the same finger twice in scale passages, the first application of the thumb in passing under are his characteristic points. These are all symptoms of the endeavour to form a legato style suitable to the clavier; they are the external indications of the suppression of the lute. Couperin’s abhorrence of a vacuum runs through his whole teaching of the clavier. The adornments, the avoidance of too long note-values, the legato finger-exercise—all are the systematic development of the powers which arise from the necessity of short tones in the clavier. He once introduces a charming short fugal allemande, in which both voice-parts work in contrary motion in most flowing style in order to show what “sounds well” on the clavier, and opposes to it the one-sided broken chords of the Italian sonatas of whose light style he has on other grounds the highest opinion. “The clavier has its peculiarities as the violin has its. If its note cannot swell, if the repetitions of one tone by striking do not suit it, it has advantages on the other side, precision, neatness, brilliancy, and width of compass.” Perhaps Couperin was the first who had an absolutely good ear for the clavier.

In comparison with him his elder and younger contemporaries must give place. Dumont, le Begue, D’Anglebert, Loeilly, Marchand, Dandrieu, and even the brilliant Rameau, composer of operas and founder of modern musical theory, are his inferiors. It is now demonstrated that Rameau published his first clavier-compositions in 1706, seven years before those of Couperin. But these pieces had just as little meaning and result as those of Marchand which appeared the year previously. They must have differed little from the style of the old school of Chambonnières. Rameau in later years is much freer and more developed, like Couperin, whose work he continued with the happiest results. He is no pioneer, but an improver of the ways. How powerful are his allemandes, how dainty his gigues, how brilliant the conduct of the thematic in his Cyclopes and his Trois Mains! What a depth of invention appears in his variations on Gavottes, in his Gigues, and in his splendid Niais de Sologne! How wonderfully melodious is his “L’Enharmonique,” what a realism is there in his “Hen” and in the “Call of the Birds”! How clear, how penetrating, how rich in promise is his technique! In him there are musical conceptions of extreme penetration and melodious harmonic turns which live for ever in the ear. From the “twenties” to the “sixties” all kinds of new editions of his works were produced, so popular were they, as they would still be, if the public knew these enchanting little works.

Thus the fame of the clavier is fixed in the Paris of the beginning of the eighteenth century, and its future assured. It is a kind of symbol of history that from the guild of violinists, founded by a king of violin-players, which reigned throughout the seventeenth century, should have proceeded, first the dance-masters, for reasons of independence, and then the organists and clavierists, who actually maintained that a musician was he only who played an instrument with full harmony. The orchestra went its own way, the “grande bande des violons” and the “petits violons” of Lully’s time having laid the foundation. The clavier was again the opponent of the orchestra, and concentrated the whole body of tone in its keys. An intimate, personal interpreter of musical emotions, it chooses to perform its functions in itself. Its consciousness of its own importance grows to a height. No longer will a clavecin-player when accompanist be the Cinderella among a company of proud sisters. “The clavierist,” cried Couperin indignantly, “is the last to be praised for his share in a concerto. What injustice! His accompaniment is the foundation of a building which supports the whole, and of which no one ever speaks!”

Rameau, out walking. Old engraving from the
Nicolas-Manskopf collection, Frankfort.

[33] Gaultier “the Elder” was a French lute-player, who also published (in collaboration with his cousin Pierre Gaultier) a collection of pieces for lute, with instructions for playing. He flourished temp. Charles I. References to him may be found inter alia, in Herrick, who calls him Gotiere or Gotire.

[34] Anglicé, “for the sheer fun of howling.”

[35] Manicordion = Monocordion = a clavichord in which one string had still to provide several notes. See full explanation elsewhere in this book.

[36] Agricola. Pupil of J. S. Bach.

[37] Galliard, in triple time, with a “leap” in every other bar (second beat); Basse-dance also in triple time, but “sans sauter,” all solemn sliding.

[38] For examples of these pieces, Wasielewski’s book on sixteenth century instrumental music is invaluable. Also see Arbeau’s “Orchésographie,” and my “Shakespeare and Music.”

[39] This is yet a third musician of the name, according to Hawkins.

[40] Called a “knell” in England. See Shakespeare, Henry viii., iv. ii. 77.

[41] Prall means rebounding quickly, or springing back. The Prall-triller consists of the main note, the note above, and the main note again, and should be executed fast.

[42] Aubade, English “morning music” or “hunts-up.”

[43] The “Pomp” is the “Masque,” as it would be called in England. The “great and ancient Menestrandise” is the old association or guild of Minstrels. The Charter of the King of the Minstrels, granted by John of Gaunt, King of Castile and Leon, and Duke of Lancaster, dated 1381, may be seen in Hawkins’s History of Music. An old verse in “Robin Hood’s Garland” alludes to the festive sports of the Minstrels in these words, which almost reproduce the above description of Couperin’s piece:—

“This battle was fought near Tutbury town

When the bag-pipers baited the bull,

I am king of the fiddlers, and swear ’tis a truth,

And call him that doubts it a gull;

For I saw them fighting, and fiddled the while,

And Clorinda sung Hey derry down:

The bumpkins are beaten, put up thy sword, Bob,

And now let’s dance into the town.

Before we came to it we heard a great shouting,

And all that were in it look’d madly;

For some were a’ bull-back, some dancing a morrice,

And some singing Arthur a Bradley.”

Old engraving after Wagniger’s design. The true musician is climbing up the Ladder of Contrapuntal Art ever higher and higher (see in the engraving the words plus ultra) to the Concert of Angels (legitime certantibus). From the “Basis and Fundamental Tone” the musical notes are being carried to the Gold-furnace (various flames in which are labelled, e.g. motet, canzonet, canon, etc.). The enemies are seen up above breaking the tritone, the false fifth, and the ninth; arrows are being shot at the Artist on the left as he writes (volenti nil difficile, “nothing is difficult to the willing mind”), but they are shattered on the Shield of Minerva, on which is represented the Austrian Eagle.

Scarlatti

Domenico Scarlatti, perhaps the greatest clavier-player that Italy ever had, prefaces a collection of thirty sonatas, which appeared at Amsterdam,[44] with the following words: “Amateur or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any deep feeling. They are only a frolic of art, intended to increase thy confidence on the clavier. I had no ambition to make a sensation; I was simply requested to publish the pieces. Should they be not utterly unpleasing to thee, I shall all the more willingly undertake other commissions, in order to rejoice thee in a lighter and more varied style. Take then these pieces rather as man than as critic; so only shalt thou increase thine own content. To speak of the use of the two hands—D denotes dritta, the right, and M manca, the left. Farewell!” It is noticeable how here in a few words the whole essence of Italian clavier-music is summed up—the fresh, cheerful disposition of the artist; the respect for the amateur; the pleasure in mere sound and in musical construction; the thorough working-out of intellectual motives (in the manner of the Étude); and the stress laid upon the equal participation of both hands as essential factors in the “concert,” [using this word in its older sense as expressing the association of two or more vocal or instrumental “parts”]. The word “concert” was well understood in these early days to mean the combination of two viols; and music of such a kind was, in form and in content, the true precursor of clavier-music, in which the right and left hand “parts” are strictly on an equality both in difficulty and importance.

These are the distinguishing marks of Italian clavier-art, and within these limits it works.

But Scarlatti is especially remarkable to us in the present day, in that he occupies the position of an early writer whose pieces still play a part, though a small one, in modern public concerts. Liszt, for example, was partial to him, and arranged his “Cat’s Fugue”; while Bülow edited a representative selection from his pieces. Czerny published (through Haslinger) two hundred of his so-called Sonatas—though, by the way, the last of these pieces belongs really to the father, Alessandro Scarlatti. Before that time the remains of the master had formed no inconsiderable part of private manuscript collections, such as those of the Abbé Santini in Rome, and others.[45]

Domenico Scarlatti, the famous son of the not less famous Alessandro, who was a composer of operas and chief of the Neapolitan School, exhibits in old portraits a serious, severe, even pedagogic countenance. There is also much of the pedagogue in his pieces; yet I think him fresher, gayer, more happy in life and mind than this face would lead one to suppose. His “Exercises” move with vigorous strides, and are far too full of esprit to be pedantic. His life was that of an artist universally honoured, and rejoicing in his fame, a type of which his contemporary Handel is the model; and his biography reveals no less activity than his works. A pupil of his renowned father, in the midst of the volatile, melody-loving, easily-stirred Neapolitan world, he set out early for Rome, in order to become the scholar of the great theorist Gasparini and of the organist and clavier-player Pasquini. In 1709, at the age of twenty-six, he made the acquaintance of Handel at Venice, and in sheer admiration, followed him to Rome. There he remained ten years, and became kapellmeister of St Peter’s, gaining a reputation by the works of his genius. In 1720 we suddenly find him in London as clavicymbalist of the Italian opera. Here his “Narcissus” was performed. A year later again he was in Lisbon, where the King of Portugal made efforts to detain him, and where for a time he gave lessons to the Princess. At this time the fame of his playing and of his compositions reached the farthest bounds of Europe, and he ranked thenceforward as the first executant of the age. He returned again to Italy, and from Italy to Spain. He remained in Madrid from 1729 to his death in 1757. Here all kinds of honours were showered upon him; he was Knight of St James, and chamber-player to the Queen, who still retained a grateful memory of the lessons he had given her at Lisbon when she was Princess of Asturias. To her he dedicated his first-published pieces, prefixing to them the lively preface above quoted.

Italian music has to French the relation which Bull has to Bird, or the virtuoso to the poet. In Scarlatti we seek in vain for any inner motive, nor do we feel any need of an emotional rendering on the part of the performer; his short pieces aim only at sound effects, and are written merely from the love of brilliant clavier-passages, or to embody delicate technical devices. They are not denizens of Paradise, who wander, unconscious of their naked beauty, under over-arching bowers; they are athletes, simply rejoicing in their physical strength, and raising gymnastic to a high, self-sufficient art. We admire them, as we admire an acrobatic troupe of strong and stout character; we admire them—not too much, yet with a certain eager anticipation of the next interesting and unusual feat of skill. We wonder at their mastery of technique, and the systematic development of their characteristic methods; we rejoice that they never, in their desire to please, abandon the standpoint of the sober artists; but our heart remains cold. There is an icy, virgin purity in this first off-shoot[46] of absolute virtuosity, which kindles our sense for the art of beautiful mechanism, for the art of technique per se—an art which, after all, the historian of the clavier must not depreciate by comparing it with that of the inner music.

Adrian Willaert, of Venice, after the engraving
published in 1559 by Antonio Gardano, Venice.

The Scarlatti style is a genuine product of the Italian musical emotion. The Italian is not born for heavy, contrapuntal, “vain ticklings of the ears”; nor, on the other hand, for too intimate effusions or symbolic mysteries. He is sensuous through and through; delight in playing and in sound is the very life of his music, as delight in outline and in colour is the very life of his painting. The intoxication of absolute tone runs through the masses of his churches, the operas of his theatre, the chamber-music of his salons. Delight in sound gave the impulse to every Italian musician in his bid for fame. It created virtuosity, which loves playing for its own sake; it created the dramatic choruses, with which the Venetian school began its career; it created the melody predominating over the harmony, with the discovery of which in the Florentine opera the greatest blow was struck for the new principles of “secular” musicianship. From love of sound the Venetians cast the instruments free from their old corporate unity, and gave them an individual meaning and value. From love of sound Frescobaldi led the organ, Corelli the violin, Scarlatti the clavier, to undreamt-of technical creations. And the bel canto of the human voice almost attained the capacity of an instrument; so small was the influence of the mere words. They were enamoured of melody, which, unlike the ecclesiastical counterpoint, sought its new objective not in the manifold transformation, but in the natural development of a motive: they were captivated with the “da capo” repetition of concerted pieces or arias, a habit grounded on the psychological law of the higher effectiveness of all repeated passages. They rioted in the multitude of forms, in which they found a place for every kind of music, for every “tempo,” every rhythm, and for all kinds of expression. Throughout all this was to be perceived the sensuous Italian love for music, which expressed in this manifoldness its freedom of artistic activity, and in that freedom the unity of thematic construction and consequently the unity of formal repetition.

Frescobaldi.

Technical ability was appreciated in Venice earlier than elsewhere. The registers of organists at St Mark’s go back to 1318. In Venice not the office only, but the art, was honoured. The musician was not, as he was much later at Florence, interrupted by the ringing of a bell, if he continued his performance too long. The emancipation of artists, which in our own century we have seen carried out in the person of the orchestral conductor, was in Venice effected by the instrumental musician; and as to-day the orchestra has grown in repute by the agency of the conductor, so in those days the prestige of instrumental music advanced alongside that of the performer. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a Frescobaldi could already gain so important a position as player of the organ and clavier, that it was said that no clavier-player was respected who did not play after his new fashion. When he gave his first recital in St Peter’s, thirty thousand persons were there to hear him. What Frescobaldi was in the first half of the seventeenth century, that was Pasquini in the second half. In Italy, Austria, and France he was treated like a prince; and his tombstone bears the proud inscription, “Organist of the Senate and People of Rome.” With Scarlatti the art of clavier-playing reaches its height, and begins to decline. It is not clavierists but violinists, the wordless rivals of the singers, who have carried the type of Italian virtuosity into our own times—Corelli, Vivaldi, Locatelli, Tartini, Paganini.

This sensuous devotion to music apart from inner meaning, this passion for poetic beauty, the Italians have not yet, even under Wagnerian influences, wholly forgotten. The victorious rule of absolute tone, while it constituted their greatness, carried with it the germ of their decay. Virtuosity is the mark of their art and of their life. We must take them as they are, in the whole light-hearted temperament of their existence. This Bohemian type of the Italian musician of the time may profitably be compared with the similar French type. What a seductive brilliancy there is in the adventurous career of a Bononcini! His operas are received at Vienna with unparalleled enthusiasm. Queen Sophia Charlotte is the clavier-player at the production of his “Polifemo” in Berlin. In London he enters upon a contest with Handel, in which social intrigues are involved with high political aims. Next, he appears in a lawsuit, and is unmasked as a common plagiary[47] of a madrigal of Lotti’s; shortly after he is away to Paris with an alchemist, who swindles him of all his property, and leaves him to make his living by the sweat of his brow to his ninetieth year. Stradella’s fate is well known—how he ran away with the mistress of a Venetian before the first performance of his own opera;[48] was more than once attacked with a dagger, and finally actually murdered.[49] What, compared with this, is the story of Rameau’s youthful love and its punishment, and of his tardy attainment of the haven of fortune, or what the anecdotes of Marchand, with his love affairs, his expulsion from Paris, and his smiling return? The dangerous glitter of this Italian Bohemianism is the fitting framework of that sensuous, lively, irresponsible music.

It was inevitable that the Italians should invent the opera—the opera, in which every thing tends rapidly to the spectacular; singers, scene painters, musicians, and the public. Apart from its relation to opera all Italian music is unintelligible, and it is no accident that for centuries the Italians stood in the forefront of opera. Those lucky misunderstandings are well-known, which led, about the year 1600, to the rise of this form of art. A circle of Platonic dreamers (led by Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio) in Florence, anxious to revive the ancient tragedy, engaged certain musicians to compose monodic songs with accompaniment. They merely meant by this to be antique; but as a matter of fact they were unconsciously acting along the line of the most modern of needs, which had long tended towards isolated melody. The dainty and delicate songs, which took their origin in this, the Venetians, and afterwards the Neapolitans, accepted eagerly as a material on which to construct forms of ravishing virtuosity, until a Jomelli, with his dashing bravura passages on the most solemn words, finally arrives at that very “laceramento della poesia”[50] which the Florentine reformer Caccini had once fanatically combated as a madness of the ancient song in several parts. In a very short time the opera runs through the whole gamut of the joys and sorrows of virtuosity. The sweet charm of sound, exhibited by a voice which bears the melody, so suited to the narrow outlines of poetry, is found in the old vestal airs of Caccini and Peri. The delight in a multitude of forms, in an alternation of different rhythms in short portions of the aria, lived in the songs of the Venetian Cavalli, in which we are reminded of the alternating tempi of the old instrumental pieces[51]—the toccatas, fantasias, and canzoni. Yet empty vanity shows itself all too soon. The original simplicity was overlaid by various corrupt accretions, first by songs, introduced in loose dependence on the action, then by complete concerted pieces, which are indicated in the libretto—together with directions to tailors, architects, and decorators, and alongside of the titles and orders of the performers. In Naples, worse still, the music gradually declines into a stiff and wearisome form and sweet playful nothingness. The well-defined outline of the aria appears, now regularly written “da capo”; it alternates to a tiresome degree with the accompanied recitative; the chorus recedes into the background before the soloists. It is the old typical form, skilfully adapted to virtuosity, precisely as a sonata of Scarlatti is differentiated from a toccata of Frescobaldi or Pasquini. Originality is vanquished; elegance has created a set of formalities in which technique can freely exercise itself. The substantive style, so to speak, has given way to the adjective, and matter is conquered by form. This Neapolitan class of opera, which thus exalts the virtuoso, begins with Alessandro Scarlatti. He is the father of that species of art which is afterwards included in the name of Italian opera, in which we see a contempt for the words, a love of vocal bravura, the supremacy of the aria, and a delight in the human voice as an instrument. In the forms of his ornamentations we discover again in antitype the passages of Domenico; in his love of the da capo and instrumental repetitions of vocal phrases we see once more in antitype Domenico’s repetitions of shorter or longer groups of bars. In the “Alessandro nelle Indie” of the Neapolitan Leonardo Vinci the hero sings arias full of slurred “divisions,” syncopations, unprepared sevenths, which to a man acquainted with Scarlatti’s sonatas appear to bear a strong family resemblance to Scarlatti. Old rubbish bears germs of new creations; released from the heavy burden of the words, the light play of the voices in the clavier-pieces introduces a fresh, youthful life that is full of promise for the future.

The isolation of the voice and of the instrument, the sensuous delight in sound, demands a chamber-music and a chamber-style. Chamber-music demands the Maecenas of the great house, and the wealthy amateur, who is so powerful a factor in every advance of art. Roman musical life, for instance, draws its strength from the practical encouragement of the Pope’s, or from the concerts and operas performed in aristocratic houses. A Venetian nobleman, Benedetto Marcello, became a distinguished and favourite composer, a poet and a satirist. A Roman nobleman, Emilio dei Cavalieri, became the founder of the modern oratorio, an opera-composer of the advanced school, perhaps even the very earliest composer of vocal monody. Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer, became known by his monodies in that circle of Florentine Platonists, to whose worthy amateurism is due the origin of the opera; and he wrote a work on the technique and fingering of all instruments.

Music in the home is in Italy not too intimate, but proud, splendid, mere pastime. Like the opera of the virtuosos, like the secularised church-music, it tends to rely upon effect, and lives on applause. It depends chiefly on the performer, and knows little of the mutual intelligence of souls. A subtle aristocratic love of music runs through the Italy of the Middle Ages. Many are the names of high-born men and women who had mastered the art of the lute by ear—for a notation was as yet unknown.[52] In the Decameron (1350), alongside of the novel-telling, it is song, lute-playing, viol-playing, dance and choral refrain, with which that pleasant company loves most to kill the time.

The music of dances, songs, and instrumental pieces, which was soon to find its proper home in the clavier, is a child of the world, and, in the view of a serious theoretician like Pietro Bembo, it is exposed to all the dangers of emptiness and vanity. In 1529 he writes to his daughter Helena, who like many of the women in her position, intended to receive instruction on the clavier in her convent: “As to your request to be allowed to learn the monochord,[53] I answer that you cannot yet, on account of your youth, understand that playing is only suited for idle and volatile ladies; whereas I desired you to be the most pure and loveable maiden in the world. Also, it would bring you but little pleasure or renown if you should play badly; while to play well you would have to devote ten or twelve years to practice, without being able to think of anything else. Consider a moment whether this would become you. And if your friends wish you to learn to play in order to give them pleasure, reply that you do not wish to make yourself ridiculous in their eyes; and content yourself with the sciences and domestic occupations.”

A hundred years later chamber-music is at its zenith. The great Carissimi (d. 1674) put the flourishing chamber cantata[54]—that half-dramatic, half-lyric song of the seventeenth century—by the side of the monodic church-songs of Viadana; and Steffani added his renowned chamber-duets. The case was precisely similar with instrumental music; by the side of the “sonata da chiesa,” with its free and independent style, came the “sonata da camera,” as a suite of favourite dance forms;[55] and the “concerti,” with their several instruments playing to a small accompanying orchestra. Above all, the possibility is now realised of suitably accompanying monodies and concerted works on the clavier, from the figured bass; and this in its turn contributes not a little to the victorious advance of the melodic song. But as a solo-instrument, the clavier suns itself in the light of the chamber-style, in which brilliancy, dexterity of hand, and elasticity of form are not less admired than the many small and spirited caprices, which in the “grand” style of music have perhaps not yet been attempted.

A Clavier Lesson.
Painting by an unknown Dutch Master, 17th century, in the Royal Gallery at Dresden.

Among all the instruments of tone which achieve an independent existence in Italy, the clavier naturally takes its stand last. From its first movement towards this independence, in Venice in the sixteenth century, to the full liberty of a Scarlatti, stretches an interval of a hundred and fifty years. It was in fact partly too much occupied in the orchestra, and partly too dependent on the technique of the organ. We find it already in the orchestra in the first operas of Peri; under Monteverde, the first of all great orchestral geniuses, there were two claviers, on the right and left of the stage. They serve to accompany solo singing, or, along with small organs, to fill up the harmony of the orchestral body. As a rule the operatic composer writes only the figured bass, but occasionally adds some of the melodic voice-parts; the conductor completes the score, leaving to the several players, however, a certain freedom of improvisation in colouring, a freedom which a well-trained musician would not abuse to the detriment of the tout ensemble.

But clavier-pieces pure and simple had a characteristically dependent existence. Even in that Venetian circle where Willaert (1490-1563) Gabrieli,[56] and Merulo moved, in which instruments were first emancipated, in which they were boldly introduced into church-music, and solo-pieces were written for orchestral or for keyed instruments, even here the soul of the clavier lay still fettered. It is the organ that indicates colour and takes the lead. In the pieces of the two Gabrielis, or of Merulo, the old contrapuntal, pictorial fashion lives still almost untouched by external disturbances; and the picture seldom allows us to anticipate that stiff adherence to the theme, and that well-wrought harmony which, in the England of the same age, we found so full of promise. Down to the time of Frescobaldi, organist at St Peter’s in 1615, who stands as a landmark in this development, the Italian sense for absolute music is far too strong for an “applied” music to be able, as it did in France and England, to modernise the instrumental pieces by their necessary dependence on song and dance. Canzoni[57] are treated in a light fugal style; the so-called Ricercari[58] represent another and freer fugal form; the toccatas, capriccios and fantasias are variegated attempts to unite all tempi and all kinds of playing in one piece. The composers are aiming at typical forms, and only attain an unrestrained formlessness which all these pieces with their trifling differences alike exhibit. The juxtaposition of chords, successions of canonic imitations, free alternations of tempo, piquant applications of the newly-discovered chromatic possibilities—all these interest these writers much more than character or expression. All these ricercari, canzoni, fantasias, toccatas, are alike “sonatas”—pieces which exist for the sake of their tones and technique, and, as Couperin says, not in the least for the sake of their soul or content. Dance-suites and variations on songs, which as time went on gained in popularity, sharpened, here as elsewhere, the sense for form; but these never became the predominant class. The free form of the fantasia always ranked as the principal species of the higher clavier-pieces. In Frescobaldi we already see the process of crystallisation. His canzoni and fugues not only exhibit for the first time the good fugal style familiar to us, but also betray the modern sense for arrangement and method in their frequent division[59] into three movements, and in their progressive quickening of tempo. He it is also who reduces under a distinct law of arrangement the various movements of the whole instrumental fantasia.

With Pasquini in the second half of the seventeenth century, we meet the visible line of demarcation between organ and clavier. Hitherto the organ had been in everything the predominant partner. The whole aspect of the clavier-pieces was that of the organ. The old Venetians had frequently written for it in three or four parts and brought the instrument into popularity. But even Frescobaldi had written no piece for clavier alone. Diruta, organist at Chioggia, the pupil of Merulo, wrote a dialogue between 1597 and 1609 on the best method of playing organ and clavier, and had of course drawn attention to the characteristic features of clavier-playing; but all his observations on holding the hands horizontal,[60] on the good and bad fingers (the second and fourth are the “good,” and fall on the strong accents of the bar), or on the ornamentations and their execution, are in the first instance written with reference to the organ. Indeed, he actually begins his book with a panegyric on that instrument. As a matter of fact the true emancipator of the Italian clavier was Pasquini. He wrote for the clavicymbal alone; in his figures and style of play he thus early showed a genuine sense for the clavier; he abandoned the practice of setting chord passages and runs in close juxtaposition, but elaborated out of the two the proper clavier style; he brought into strong connection with a theme the quicker and slower parts of his sonatas, and set them clearly over against each other; and he attempts, as in his Capriccio on the motive of the cuckoo’s song, to draw from the clavier all kinds of characteristic effects, still wild and confused, but full of the freshness of spring.

Virginal in shape of a work-box.

The same opened, showing the instrument
within, which can be taken out.

The instrument taken out.
Constructed in 1631 by Valerius Perius Romanus.
De Wit collection, Leipsic.

So far is the early Italian clavier (when the violin begins its victorious career) from assuming a leading position, that the cembalo can do nothing better than make use of the experiences of the violin. For we must give up the legend of the genius of Michel Angelo Rossi. This story is one of the most amusing freaks of musical history. We find in many popular collections of old music an andante and allegro in G major by this man, who is tolerably well known as an operatic composer and violinist. He was a pupil of Frescobaldi and died in 1660. This piece is so captivating in its melody, so decided in its form, so restrained in its arrangement, that it would have done honour to Mozart. Had these pieces truly sprung from the intavolatura of Michel Angelo Rossi, the modernity of their form and melody would give such a shock to musical history that it would be shivered into fragments. Yet a man like Pauer, who published them, could actually believe that this music was possible before 1660.[61] A later historian, Rolland, in his “Histoire de l’Opéra avant Lully et Scarlatti,” led astray by the same mistake, fancies he detects in the choruses of Rossi’s opera of Hermione anticipations of the Zauberflöte.[62] Parry alone, the author of the brilliant article on the sonata in Grove’s Dictionary of Music, has boggled at this pseudo Rossi. Heaven knows to whom the pretty little pieces really belong. It is not unlikely that Scarlatti wrote them in his old age.