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The Art of Music
A Comprehensive Library of Information
for Music Lovers and Musicians

Editor-in-Chief

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

Columbia University

Associate Editors

EDWARD B. HILL LELAND HALL
Harvard University Past Professor, Univ. of Wisconsin

Managing Editor
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER
Modern Music Society of New York

In Fourteen Volumes
Profusely Illustrated

NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC

Beethoven

After the painting by Karl Stieler (Original owned by H. Hinrichsen, Leipzig)

THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME TWO

A Narrative History of Music

Department Editors:

LELAND HALL
AND
CÉSAR SAERCHINGER

Introduction by

LELAND HALL
Past Professor of Musical History, University of Wisconsin

BOOK II
CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM

NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC
1915

Copyright, 1915, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
(All Rights Reserved)

A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME II

In the first volume of The Art of Music the history of the art has been carried in as straight a line as possible down to the death of Bach and Handel. These two great composers, while they still serve as the foundation of much present-day music, nevertheless stand as the culmination of an epoch in the development and style of music which is distinctly of the past. Many of the greatest of their conceptions are expressed in a language, so to speak, which rings old-fashioned in our ears. Something has been lost of their art. In the second volume, on the other hand, we have to do with the growth of what we may call our own musical language, with the language of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and Brahms, men with whose ideals and with whose modes of expression we are still closely in touch. In closing the first volume the reader bids farewell to the time of music when polyphony still was supreme. In opening this he greets the era of melody and harmony, of the singing allegro, the scherzo, the rondo, of the romantic song, of salon music, of national opera and national life in music.

We have now to do with the symphony and the sonata, which even to the uninitiated spell music, no longer with the toccata and the fugue, words of more or less hostile alarm to those who dread attention. We shall deal with forms based upon melody, shall trace their growth from their seeds in Italy, the land of melody, through the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. We shall watch the perfecting of the orchestra, its enrichment in sonority and in color. We shall see the Lied spring from the forehead of Schubert. We shall mark the development of the pianoforte and the growth of a noble literature of pianoforte music, rivalling that of the orchestra in proportion and in meaning. A new opera will come into being, discarding old traditions, alien myths, allying itself to the life of the peoples of Europe.

Lastly we shall note the touch of two great forces upon music, two forces mysteriously intertwined, the French Revolution and the Romantic Movement. Music will break from the control of rich nobles and make itself dear to the hearts of the common people who inherit the earth. It will learn to speak of intimate mysteries and intensely personal emotion. Composers will rebel from dependence upon a patronizing class and seek judgment and reward from a free public. In short, music will be no longer only the handmaiden of the church, or the servant of a socially exalted class, but the voice of the great human race, expressing its passions, its emotions, its common sadness and joy, its everyday dreams and even its realities.

The history of any art in such a stage of reformation is necessarily complicated, and the history of music is in no way exceptional. A thousand new influences shaped it, hundreds of composers and of virtuosi came for a while to the front. Political, social and even economical and commercial conditions bore directly upon it. To ravel from this tangle one or two threads upon which to weave a consecutive narration has been the object of the editors. Minuteness of detail would have thwarted the purpose of this as of the first volume, even if space could have been allowed for it. The book has, therefore, been limited to an exposition only of general movements, and to only general descriptions of the works of the greatest composers who contributed to them. Many lesser composers, famous in their day, have not been mentioned, because their work has had no real historical significance. They will, if at all vital, receive treatment in the later volumes.

On the other hand, the reader is cautioned against too easy acceptance of generalities which have long usurped a sway over the public, such as the statement that Emanuel Bach was the inventor of the sonata form, or that Haydn was the creator of the symphony and of the string quartet. Such forms are evolved, or built up step by step, not created. The foundations of them lie far back in the history of the art. In the present volume the attention of the reader will be especially called to the work of the Italian Pergolesi, and the Bohemian Johann Stamitz, in preparing these forms for Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Just as, in order to bring into relief the main lines of development, many men and many details have been omitted, so, in order to bring the volume to well-rounded close, the works of many men which chronologically should find their place herein have been consigned arbitrarily to a third volume. Yet such treatment is perhaps not so arbitrary as will at first appear. Wagner, Brahms, and César Franck are the three greatest of the later romantic composers. They developed relatively independently of each other, and represent the culmination of three distinct phases of the romantic movement in music. Their separate influences made themselves felt at once even upon composers scarcely younger than they. Men so influenced belong properly among their followers, no matter what their ages. Inasmuch as the vast majority of modern music is most evidently founded upon some one of these three men, most conspicuously and almost inevitably upon Wagner, contemporaries who so founded their work will be treated among the modern composers, as those men who lead the way over from the three great geniuses of a past generation to the distinctly new art of the present day. Notable among these are men like Max Bruch, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and Camille Saint-Saëns. Some of these men, by the close connection of their art to that of past generations, might perhaps more properly be treated in this volume, but the confusion of so many minor strands would obscure the trend of the narrative. Moreover, exigencies of space have enforced certain limits upon the editors. Thus, also, the national developments, the founding of distinctly national schools of composition in Scandinavia, Russia, Bohemia and elsewhere, directly influenced by the romantic movement in Germany, have had to find a place in Volume III.

It is perhaps in order to forestall any criticism that may be made in the score of what will seem to some serious omissions. Composers of individual merit, though their music is of light calibre, are perhaps entitled to recognition no less than their confrères in more ambitious fields. We refer to such delightful writers of comic opera as Johann Strauss, Millöcker, Suppé, etc., and the admirable English school of musical comedy headed by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Without denying the intrinsic value of their work, it must be admitted that they have contributed nothing essentially new or fundamental to the development of the art and are therefore of slight historical significance. The latter school will, however, find proper mention in connection with the more recent English composers to whom it has served as a foundation if not a model. More adequate treatment will be accorded to their works in the volumes on opera, etc.

In closing, a word should be said concerning the contributors to the Narrative History. There is ample precedent for the method here employed of assigning different periods to writers especially familiar with them. Such collaboration has obvious advantages, for the study of musical history has become an exceedingly diverse one and by specialization only can its various phases be thoroughly grasped. Any slight difference in point of view or in style will be more than offset by the careful and appreciative treatment accorded to each period or composer by writers whose sympathies have led them to a careful and adequate presentation, in clear perspective, of the merits of a given style of composition. The editors have endeavored as far as possible to avail themselves of the able researches recently made in Italy, Germany, France, etc., and they extend their acknowledgment to such authors of valuable special studies as Johannes Wolf, Hermann Kretschmar, Emil Vogel, Romain Rolland, Julien Tiersot, etc., and especially to the scholarly summary of Dr. Hugo Riemann, of Leipzig. A more extensive list of these works will be found in the Bibliographical Appendix to Volume III.

Leland Hall

CONTENTS OF VOLUME TWO

A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF MUSIC

CHAPTER I
THE REGENERATION OF THE OPERA

The eighteenth century and operatic convention—Porpora and Hasse—Pergolesi and the opera buffa—Jommelli, Piccini, Cimarosa, etc.—Gluck’s early life; the Metastasio period—The comic opera in France; Gluck’s reform; Orfeo and Alceste—The Paris period; Gluck and Piccini; the Iphigénies; Gluck’s mission—Gluck’s influence; Salieri and Sarti; the development of opéra comique; Cherubini.

While the deep, quiet stream of Bach’s genius flowed under the bridges all but unnoticed, the marts and highways of Europe were a babel of operatic intrigue and artistic shams. Handel in England was running the course of his triumphal career, which luckily forced him into the tracks of a new art-form; on the continent meantime Italian opera reached at once its most brilliant and most absurd epoch under the leadership of Hasse and Porpora; even Rameau, the founder of modern harmonic science, did not altogether keep aloof from its influence, while perpetuating the traditions of Lully in Paris. Vocal virtuosi continued to set the musical fashions of the age, the artificial soprano was still a force to which composers had to submit; indeed, artificiality was the keynote of the century.

The society of the eighteenth century was primarily concerned with the pursuit of sensuous enjoyment. In Italy especially ‘the cosmic forces existed but in order to serve the endless divertissement of superficial and brainless beings, in whose eyes the sun’s only mission was to illumine picturesque cavalcades and water-parties, as that of the moon was to touch with trembling ray the amorous forest glades.’ Monnier’s vivid pen-picture of eighteenth century Venetian society applies, with allowance made for change of scene and local color, to all the greater Italian cities. ‘What equivocal figures! What dubious pasts! Law (of Mississippi bubble fame) lives by gambling, as does the Chevalier Desjardins, his brother in the Bastille, his wife in a lodging-house; the Count de Bonneval, turbaned, sitting on a rug with legs crossed, worships Allah, carries on far-reaching intrigues and is poisoned by the Turks; Lord Baltimore, travelling with his physician and a seraglio of eight women, with a pair of negro guards; Ange Goudar, a wit, a cheat at cards, a police spy and perjurer, rascally, bold, and ugly; and his wife Sarah, once a servant in a London tavern, marvellously beautiful, who receives the courtly world at her palace in Pausilippo near Naples, and subjugates it with her charm; disguised maidens, false princes, fugitive financiers, literary blacklegs, Greeks, chevaliers of all industries, wearers of every order, splenetic grands seigneurs, and the kings of Voltaire’s Candide. Of such is the Italian society of the eighteenth century composed.

Music in this artificial atmosphere could only flatter the sense of hearing without appealing to the intelligence, excite the nerves and occasionally give a keener point to voluptuousness, by dwelling on a note of elegant sorrow or discreet religiousness. The very church, according to Dittersdorf, had become a musical boudoir, the convent a conservatory. As for the opera, it could not be anything but a lounge for the idle public. The Neapolitan school, which reigned supreme in Europe, provided just the sort of amusement demanded by that public. It produced scores of composers who were hailed as maestri to-day and forgotten to-morrow. Hundreds of operas appeared, but few ever reached publication; their nature was as ephemeral as the public’s taste was fickle, and a success meant no more to a composer than new commissions to turn out operas for city after city, to supply the insatiate thirst for novelty. The manner in which these commissions were carried out is indicative of the result. Composers were usually given a libretto not of their choosing; the recitatives, which constituted the dramatic groundwork, were turned out first and distributed among the singers. The writing of the arias was left to the last so that the singers’ collaboration or advice could be secured, for upon their rendition the success of the whole opera depended; they were, indeed, written for the singers—the particular singers of the first performance—and in such a manner that their voices might show to the best advantage. As Leopold Mozart wrote in one of his letters, they made ‘the coat to fit the wearer.’ The form which these operas took was an absolute stereotype; a series of more or less disconnected recitatives and arias, usually of the da capo form, strung together by the merest thread of a plot. It was a concert in costume rather than the drama in music which was the original conception of opera in the minds of its inventors.

Pietro Metastasio, the most prolific of librettists, was eminently the purveyor of texts for these operas, just as Rinuccini, the idealist, had furnished the poetic basis for their nobler forerunners. Metastasio’s inspiration flowed freely, both in lyrical and emotional veins, but ‘the brilliancy of his florid rhetoric stifled the cry of the heart.’ His plots were overloaded with the vapid intrigues that pleased the taste of his contemporaries, with quasi-pathetic characters, with passionate climaxes and explosions. His popularity was immense. He could count as many as forty editions of his own works and among his collaborators were practically all the great composers, from Handel to Gluck and Cimarosa. As personifying the elements which sum up the opera during this its most irrational period we may take two figures of extraordinary eminence—Niccola Porpora and Johann Adolf Hasse.

I

Niccola Porpora (1686-1766), while prominent in his own day as composer, conductor, and teacher (among his pupils was Joseph Haydn), is known to history chiefly by his achievements as a singing master—perhaps the greatest that ever lived. The art of bel canto, that exaltation of the human voice for its own sake, which in him reached its highest point, was doubtless the greatest enemy to artistic sincerity and dramatic truth, the greatest deterrent to operatic progress in the eighteenth century. Though possessed of ideals of intrinsic beauty—sensuousness of tone, dynamic power, brilliance, and precision like that of an instrument—this art would to-day arouse only wonder, not admiration. Porpora understood the human voice in all its peculiarities; he could produce, by sheer training, singers who, like Farinelli, Senesino, and Caffarelli, were the wonder of the age. By what methods his results were reached we have no means of knowing, for his secret was never committed to writing, but his method was most likely empirical, as distinguished from the scientific, or anatomical, methods of to-day. It was told that he kept Caffarelli for five or six years to one page of exercises, and then sent him into the world as the greatest singer of Europe—a story which, though doubtless exaggerated, indicates the purely technical nature of his work.

Porpora wrote his own vocalizzi, and, though he composed in every form, all of his works appear to us more or less like solfeggi. His cantatas for solo voice and harpsichord show him at his best, as a master of the florid Italian vocal style, with consummate appreciation of the possibilities of the vocal apparatus. His operas, of which he wrote no less than fifty-three, are for the most part tedious, conventional, and overloaded with ornament, in every way characteristic of the age; the same is true in some measure of his oratorios, numerous church compositions, and chamber works, all of which show him to be hardly more than a thoroughly learned and accomplished technician.

But Porpora’s fame attracted many talented pupils, including the brilliant young German, Hasse (1699-1783), mentioned above, who, however, quickly forsook him in favor of Alessandro Scarlatti, a slight which Porpora never forgave and which served as motive for a lifelong rivalry between the two men. Hasse, originally trained in the tradition of the Hamburg opera and its Brunswick offshoot (where he was engaged as tenor and where he made his debut with his only German opera, ‘Antiochus’), quickly succumbed to the powerful Italian influence. The Italians took kindly to him, and, after his debut in Naples with ‘Tigrane’ (1773), surnamed him il caro sassone. His marriage with the celebrated Faustina Bordoni linked him still closer to the history of Italian opera; for in the course of his long life, which extends into the careers of Haydn and Mozart, he wrote no less than seventy operas, many of them to texts by the famed Metastasio, and most of them vehicles for the marvellous gifts of his wife. While she aroused the enthusiasm of audiences throughout Europe, he enjoyed the highest popularity of any operatic composer through half a century. Together they made the opera at Dresden (whither Hasse was called in 1731 as royal kapellmeister) the most brilliant in Germany—one that even Bach, as we have seen, was occasionally beguiled into visiting. Once Hasse was persuaded to enter into competition with Handel in London (1733), the operatic capital of Europe, where Faustina, seven years before, had vanquished her great rival Cuzzoni and provided the chief operatic diversion of the Handel régime to the tune of £2,000 a year! Only the death of August the Strong in 1763 ended the Hasses’ reign in Dresden, where during the bombardment of 1760 Hasse’s library and most of the manuscripts of his works were destroyed by fire. What remains of them reveals a rare talent and a consummate musicianship which, had it not been employed so completely in satisfying the prevailing taste and propitiating absurd conventions, might still appeal with the vitality of its harmonic texture and the beauty of its melodic line. Much of the polyphonic skill and the spontaneous charm of a Handel is evident in these works, but they lack the breadth, the grandeur and the seriousness that distinguish the work of his greater compatriot. Over-abundance of success militates against self-criticism, which is the essential quality of genius, and Hasse’s success was not, like Handel’s, dimmed by the changing taste of a surfeited public. Hasse’s operas signalize at once the high water mark of brilliant achievement in an art form now obsolete and the ultimate degree of its fatuousness.

Hasse and Porpora, then, were the leaders of those who remained true to the stereotyped form of opera, the singers’ opera, whose very nature precluded progress. They and a host of minor men, like Francesco Feo, Leonardo Vinci, Pasquale Cafaro, were enrolled in a party which resisted all ideas of reform; and their natural allies in upholding absurd conventions were the singers, that all-powerful race of virtuosi, the impresarios, and all the great tribe of adherents who derived a lucrative income from the system. Against these formidable forces the under-current of reform—both musical and dramatic—felt from the beginning of the century, could make little head. The protests of men like Benedetto Marcello, whose satire Il teatro alla moda appeared in 1722, were voices crying in the wilderness. Yet reform was inevitable, a movement no less momentous than when the Florentine reform of 1600 was under way—the great process of crystallization and refinement which was to usher in that most glorious era of musical creation known as the classic period. Like the earlier reform, it signified a reaction against technique, against soulless display of virtuosity, a tendency toward simplicity, subjectivity, directness of expression—a return to nature.

Though much of the pioneer work was done by composers of instrumental music whose discussion must be deferred to the next chapter, the movement had its most spectacular manifestations in connection with opera, and in that aspect is summed up in the work of Gluck, the outstanding personality in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the domain of absolute music it saw its beginnings in the more or less spontaneous efforts of instrumentalists like Fasch, Foerster, Benda, and Johann Stamitz. First among those whose initiative was felt in both directions we must name Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the young Neapolitan who, born in 1710, had his brilliant artistic career cut short at the premature age of twenty-six.

II

Pergolesi was the pupil of Greco, Durante, and Feo at the Conservatorio dei Poveri at Naples, where a biblical drama and two operas from his pen were performed in 1731 without arousing any particular attention. But a solemn mass which he was commissioned to write by the city of Naples in praise of its patron saint, and which was performed upon the occasion of an earthquake, brought him sudden fame. The commission probably came to him through the good offices of Prince Stegliano, to whom he dedicated his famous trio sonatas. These sonatas, later published in London, brought an innovation which had no little influence upon contemporary composers; namely, the so-called cantabile (or singing) allegro as the first movement. Riemann, who has edited two of them,[1] calls attention to the richly developed sonata form of the first movement of the G major trio especially, of which the works of Fasch, Stamitz, and Gluck are clearly reminiscent. ‘The altogether charming, radiant melodies of Pergolesi are linked with such conspicuous, forcible logic in the development of the song-like theme, always in the upper voice, that we are not surprised by the attention which the movement aroused. We are here evidently face to face with the beginning of a totally different manner of treatment in instrumental melodies, which I would like to call a transplantation of the aria style to the instrumental field.’[2] We shall have occasion to refer to this germination of a new style later on. At present we must consider another of Pergolesi’s important services to art—the creation of the opera buffa.[3]

We have had occasion to observe in another chapter the success of the ‘Beggar’s Opera’ in England in 1723, which hastened the failure of the London Academy under Handel’s management. Vulgar as it was, this novelty embodied the same tendency toward simplicity which was the essential element of the impending reform; it was near to the people’s heart and there found a quick response. This ballad-opera, as it was called, was followed by many imitations, notably Coffey’s ‘The Devil to Pay, or The Wives Metamorphosed’ (1733), which, later produced in Germany, was adapted by Standfuss (1752) and Johann Adam Hiller (1765) and thus became the point of departure for the German singspiel. This in turn reacted against the popularity of Italian opera in Germany. The movement had its Italian parallel in the fashion for the so-called intermezzi which composers of the Neapolitan school began very early in the century to interpolate between the acts of their operas, as, in an earlier period, they had been interpolated between the acts of the classic tragedies (cf. Vol. I, p. 326 ff). Unlike these earlier spectacular diversions, the later intermezzi were comic pieces that developed a continuous plot independent of that of the opera itself—an anomalous mixture of tragedy and comedy which must have appeared ludicrous at times even to eighteenth century audiences. These artistic trifles were, however, not unlikely, in their simple and unconventional spontaneity, to have an interest surpassing that of the opera proper. Such was the case with La serva padrona, which Pergolesi produced between the acts of his opera Il pigionier (1733). This graceful little piece made so immediate an appeal that it completely overshadowed the serious work to which it was attached, and, indeed, all the other dramatic works of its composer, whose fame to-day rests chiefly upon it and the immortal Stabat mater, which was his last work.

La serva padrona is one of the very few operatic works of the century that are alive to-day. An examination of its contents quickly reveals the reason, for its pages breathe a charm, a vivacity, a humor which we need not hesitate to call Mozartian. Indeed, it leaves little doubt in our minds that Mozart, born twenty-three years later, must have been acquainted with the work of its composer. At any rate he, no less than Guglielmi, Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa, the chief representatives of the opera buffa, are indebted to him for the form, since, as the first intermezzo opera capable of standing by itself (it was afterward so produced in Paris), it must be regarded as the first real opera buffa.

Most of the later Neapolitans, in fact, essayed both the serious and comic forms, not unmindful of the popular success which the latter achieved. It became, in time, a dangerous competitor to the conventionalized opera seria, as the ballad-opera and the singspiel did in England and Germany, and the opéra bouffon was to become in France. Its advantage lay in its freedom from the traditional operatic limitations (cf. Vol. I, page 428). It might contain an indiscriminate mixture of arias, recitatives, and ensembles; its dramatis personæ were a flexible quantity. Moreover, it disposed of the male soprano, favoring the lower voices, especially basses, which had been altogether excluded from the earlier operas. Hence it brought about a material change in conditions with which composers had thus far been unable to cope. In it the stereotyped da capo aria yielded its place to more flexible forms; one of its first exponents, Nicolo Logroscino,[4] introduced the animated ensemble finale with many movements, which was further developed by his successors. These wholesome influences were soon felt in the serious opera as well: it adopted especially the finale and the more varied ensembles of the opera buffa, though lacking the spicy parodistical element and the variegated voices of its rival. Thus, in the works of Pergolesi’s successors, especially Jommelli and Piccini, we see foreshadowed the epoch-making reform of Gluck.

There is nothing to show, however, that Pergolesi himself was conscious of being a reformer. His personal character, irresponsible, brilliant rather than introspective, would argue against that. We must think of him as a true genius gifted by the grace of heaven, romantic, wayward, and insufficiently balanced to economize his vital forces toward a ripened age of artistic activity. He nevertheless produced a number of other operas, mostly serious, masses, and miscellaneous ecclesiastical and chamber works. His death was due to consumption. So much legend surrounds his brief career that it has been made the subject of two operas, by Paolo Serrão and by Monteviti.

C. S.

III

About the close of Pergolesi’s career two men made their debuts whose lives were as nearly coeval as those of Bach and Handel and who, though of unequal merit, if measured by the standards of posterity, were both important factors in the reform movement which we are describing. These men were Jommelli and Gluck, both born in 1714, the year which also gave to the world Emanuel Bach, the talented son of the great Johann Sebastian.

Nicola Jommelli was born at Aversa (near Naples). At first a pupil of Durante, he received his chief training under Feo and Leo. His first opera, L’Errore amoroso, was brought out under an assumed name at Naples when the composer was but twenty-three, and so successfully that he had no hesitation in producing his Odoardo under his own name the following year. Other operas by him were heard in Rome, in Bologna (where he studied counterpoint with Padre Martini); in Venice, where the success of his Merope secured him the post of director of the Conservatorio degli incurabili; and in Rome, whither he had gone in 1749 as substitute maestro di capella of St. Peter’s. In Vienna, which he visited for the first time in 1748, Didone, one of his finest operas, was produced. In 1753 Jommelli became kapellmeister at Ludwigslust, the wonderful rococo palace of Karl Eugen, duke of Württemberg, near Stuttgart. Like Augustus the Strong of Saxony, the elector of Bavaria, the margrave of Bayreuth, the prince-bishop of Cologne, this pleasure-loving ruler of a German principality had known how to s’enversailler—to adopt the luxuries and refinements of the court of Versailles, then the European model for royal and princely extravagance. His palace and gardens were magnificent and his opera house was of such colossal dimensions that whole regiments of cavalry could cross the stage. He needed a celebrated master for his chapel and his opera; his choice fell upon Jommelli, who spent fifteen prosperous years in his employ, receiving a salary of ‘6,100 gulden per annum, ten buckets of honorary wine, wood for firing and forage for two horses.’

At Stuttgart Jommelli was strongly influenced by the work of the German musicians; increased harmonic profundity and improved orchestral technique were the most palpable results. He came to have a better appreciation of the orchestra than any of his countrymen; at times he even made successful attempts at ‘tone painting.’ His orchestral ‘crescendo,’ with which he made considerable furore, was a trick borrowed from the celebrated Mannheim school. It is interesting to note that the school of stylistic reformers which had its centre at Mannheim, not far from Stuttgart, was then in its heyday; two years before Jommelli’s arrival in Stuttgart the famous Opus 1 of Johann Stamitz—the sonatas (or rather symphonies) in which the Figured Bass appears for the first time as an integral obbligato part—was first heard in Paris. The so-called Simphonies d’Allemagne henceforth appeared in great number; they were published mostly in batches, often in regular monthly or weekly sequence as ‘periodical overtures,’ and so spread the gospel of German classicism all over Europe. How far Jommelli was influenced by all this it would be difficult to determine, but we know that when in 1769 he returned to Naples his new manner found no favor with his countrymen, who considered his music too heavy. The young Mozart in 1770 wrote from there: ‘The opera here is by Jommelli. It is beautiful, but the style is too elevated as well as too antique for the theatre.’ It is well to remark here how much Jommelli’s music in its best moments resembles Mozart’s. He, no less than Pergolesi, must be credited with the merit of having influenced that master in many essentials.

Jommelli allowed none but his own operas to be performed at Stuttgart. The productions were on a scale, however, that raised the envy of Paris. No less a genius than Noverre, the reformer of the French ballet, was Jommelli’s collaborator in these magnificent productions; and Jommelli also yielded to French influences in the matter of the chorus. He handled Metastasio’s texts with an eye to their psychological moments, and infused into his scores much of dramatic truth. In breaking up the monotonous sequence of solos, characteristic of the fashionable Neapolitan opera, he actually anticipated Gluck. All in all, Jommelli’s work was so unusually strong and intensive that we wonder why he fell short of accomplishing the reform that was imminent. ‘Noverre and Jommelli in Stuttgart might have done it,’ says Oscar Bie, in his whimsical study of the opera, ‘but for the fact that Stuttgart was a hell of frivolity and levity, a luxurious mart for the purchase and sale of men.’

Jommelli’s last Stuttgart opera was Fetonte.[5] When he returned to Italy in 1769 he found the public mad with enthusiasm over a new opera buffa entitled Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola. In Rome it was played in all the theatres, from the largest opera house down to the marionette shows patronized by the poor. Fashions were all alla Cecchina; houses, shops, and wines were named after it, and a host of catch-words and phrases from its text ran from lip to lip. ‘It is probably the work of some boy,’ said the veteran composer, but after he had heard it—‘Hear the opinion of Jommelli—this is an inventor!’

The boy inventor of Cecchina was Nicola Piccini, another Neapolitan, born in 1728, pupil of Leo and Durante, who was destined to become the most famous Italian composer of his day, though his works have not survived to our time. His debut had been made in 1754 with Le donne dispettose, followed by a number of other settings of Metastasio texts. We are told that he found difficulty in getting hearings at first, because the comic operas of Logroscino monopolized the stage. Already, then, composers were forced into the opera buffa with its greater vitality and variety. Piccini’s contribution to its development was the extension of the duet to greater dramatic purpose, and also of the concerted finale first introduced by Logroscino. We shall meet him again, as the adversary of Gluck. Of hardly less importance than he were Tommaso Traetto (1727-1779), ‘the most tragic of the Italians,’ who surpassed his contemporaries and followers in truth and force of expression, and in harmonic strength; Pietro Guglielmi (1727-1804), who with his 115 operas gained the applause of all Italy, of Dresden, of Brunswick, and London; Antonio Sacchini (1734-1786), who, besides grace of melody, attained at times an almost classic solidity; and Giovanni Paesiello (1741-1816), whose decided talent for opera buffa made him the successful rival of Piccini and Cimarosa.

Paesiello, with Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), was the leading representative of the buffa till the advent of Mozart. As Hadow suggests, he might have achieved real greatness had he been less constantly successful. ‘His life was one triumphal procession from Naples to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Vienna, from Vienna to Paris.’ Ferdinand of Sicily, Empress Catharine of Russia, Joseph II of Austria, and even Napoleon were successively his patrons; and his productiveness was such that he never had time, even had he had inclination, to criticise his own works. Of his ninety-four operas only one, ‘The Barber of Seville,’ is of historic interest, for its popularity was such that, until Rossini, no composer dared to treat the same theme. Cimarosa deserves perhaps more extended notice than many others on account of his Matrimonio segreto, written in Russia, which won unprecedented success there and in Italy. It is practically the only one of all the works of composers just mentioned that has not fallen a victim to time. Its music is simple and tuneful, fresh and full of good humor.

The eighteenth century public based its judgments solely on mere externals—a pleasing tune, a brilliant singer, a sumptuous mise-en-scène caught its favor, the merest accident or circumstance might kill or make an opera. To-day a composer is carried off in triumph, to be hissed soon after by the same public. Rivalry among composers is the order of the day. Sacchini, Piccini, Paesiello, Cimarosa, are successively favorites of Italian audiences; in London Christian Bach and Sacchini divide the public as Handel and Bononcini did before them; in Vienna Paesiello and Cimarosa are applauded with the same acclaim as Gluck; in St. Petersburg Galuppi,[6] Traetta, Paesiello, and Cimarosa follow each other in the service of the sovereign (Catharine II), who could not differentiate any tunes but the howls of her nine dogs; in Paris, at last, the leading figures become the storm centre of political agitations. All these composers’ names are glibly pronounced by the busy tongues of a brilliant but shallow society. Favorite arias, like Galuppi’s Se per me, Sacchini’s Se cerca, se dice, Piccini’s Se il ciel, are compared after the manner of race entries. Florimo, the historian of the Naples opera, dismissed the matter with a few words: ‘Piccini is original and prolific; Sacchini gay and light, Paesiello new and lithe, Cafaro learned in harmony, Galuppi experienced in stagecraft, Gluck a filosofia economica.’ They all have their merits—but, after all, the difference is a matter of detail, a fit subject for the gossip of an opera box. Even Gluck is but one of them, if his Italian operas are at all different the difference has escaped his critics.

But all of these composers, as well as some of their predecessors, worked consciously or unconsciously in a regeneration that was slowly but surely going forward. The working out of solo and ensemble forms into definite patterns; the development of the recitative from mere heightened declamation to a free arioso, fully accompanied, and to the accompagnato not followed by an aria at all; the introduction of concertising instruments which promptly developed into independent inner voices and broadened the orchestral polyphony, the dynamic contrasts—at first abrupt, then gradual—which Jommelli took over from the orchestral technique of Mannheim; the ingenious construction of ensembles and the development of the finale into a pezzo concertanto—all these tended toward higher organization, individual and specialized development, though purely musical at first and strictly removed from the influence of other arts. The dramatic elements, the plastic and phantastic, which, subordinated at first, found their expression in ‘laments’ and in simile arias (in which a mood was compared to a phenomena of nature), then in ombra scenes, where spirits were invoked, and in similar exalted situations, gradually became more and more prominent, foreshadowing the time when the portrayal of human passions was to become once more the chief purpose of opera.

IV

The last and decisive step in the revolution was the coming of Gluck. ‘It seems as if a century had worked to the limit of its strength to produce the flower of Gluck—the great man is always the composite genius of all the confluent temporal streams.’[7] Yet he himself was one of these composite forces from which the artistic purpose of his life was evolved. The Gluck of the first five decades, the Gluck of Italian opera, of what we may call the Metastasio period, was simply one of the many Italians unconsciously working toward that end. His work through two-thirds of his life had no more significance than that of a Leo, a Vinci, or a Jommelli. Fate willed, however, that Gluck should be impressed more strongly by the growing public dissatisfaction with senseless Italian opera, and incidentally should be brought into close contact with varied influences tending to the broadening of his ideas. Cosmopolite that he was, he gathered the essence of European musical culture from its four corners. Born in Germany, he was early exposed to the influence of solid musicianship; trained in Italy he gained, like Handel, its sensuous melody; in England he heard the works of Handel and received in the shape of artistic failure that chastisement which opened his mind to radical change of method. In France, soon after, he was impressed with the plastic dramatic element of the monumental Lully-Rameau opera. Back in Vienna, he produced opéra comique and held converse with lettered enthusiasts. Calzabigi, like Rinuccini in 1600, brought literary ideas of reform. Metastasio was relegated—yet not at once, for Gluck was careful, diplomatic. He fed his reform to the public in single doses—diluted for greater security, interspersed with Italian operas of the old school as sops to the hostile singers, jealous of their power. Only thus can we explain his relapses into the current type. He knew his public must first be educated. He felt the authority of a teacher and he resorted to the didactic methods of Florence—of his colleagues of 1600, whom Calzabigi knew and copied. Prefaces explaining the author’s purpose once more became the order of the day; finally the reformer was conscious of being a reformer, of his true life mission. Except for what human interest there is in his early life we may therefore pass rapidly over the period preceding 1762, the momentous year of Orfeo ed Euridice.

Born July 2, 1714, at Weidenwang, in the upper Palatinate, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s early years were passed in the forests of Bavaria and Bohemia. His father, Alexander Gluck, had been a game-keeper, who, having established himself in Bohemia in 1717, had successively entered the employ of various territorial magnates—Count Kaunitz in Neuschloss, Count Kinsky in Kamnitz, Prince Lobkowitz in Eisenberg, and, finally, the grand-duchess of Tuscany in Reichstadt. His intention toward his son had been at first to make of him a game-keeper, and it is recorded that young Christoph was put through a course of Spartan discipline with that end in view, during which he was obliged to accompany his father barefooted through the forest in the severest winter weather.

Birthplace of Gluck at Weidenwang (Central Franconia)

From the age of twelve to eighteen, however, he attended the Jesuit school at Kommotau in the neighborhood of the Lobkowitz estate and there, besides receiving a good general education, he learned to sing and play the violin and the 'cello, as well as the clavichord and organ. In 1732 he went to Prague and studied under Czernohorsky.[8] Here he was soon able to earn a modest living—a welcome circumstance, for there were six younger children at home, for whom his father provided with difficulty. In Prague he gave lessons in singing and on the 'cello; he played and sang in various churches; and on holidays made the rounds of the neighboring country as a fiddler, receiving his payment in kind, for the good villagers, it is said, often rewarded him with fresh eggs. Through the introductions of his patron, Prince Lobkowitz, it was not long before he obtained access to the homes of the music-loving Bohemian nobility, and when he went to Vienna in 1736 he was hospitably received in his protector’s palace. Prince Lobkowitz also made it possible for him to begin the study of composition. In Vienna he chanced to meet the Italian Prince Melzi, who was so pleased with his singing and playing that he made him his chamber musician and took him with him to Milan. Here, during four years, from 1737 to 1741, Gluck studied the theory of music under the celebrated contrapuntist Giovanni Battista Sammartini, and definitely decided upon musical composition as a career.

His studies completed, he made his debut as a creative artist at the age of twenty-seven, with the opera Artaserse (Milan, 1741), set to a libretto of Metastasio. It was the first of thirty Italian operas, composition of which extended over a period of twenty years, and which are now totally forgotten. The success of Artaserse was instantaneous. We need not explain the reasons for this success, nor the circumstances that, together with its fellows, from Demofoonte to La finta schiava, it has fallen into oblivion.

His Italian successes procured for him, however, an invitation in 1745 to visit London and compose for the Haymarket. Thither he went, and produced a new opera, La caduta de’ giganti, which, though it earned the high praise of Burney, was coldly received by the public. A revised version of an earlier opera, Artamene, was somewhat more successful, but Piramo e Tisbe, a pasticcio (a kind of dramatic potpourri or medley, often made up of selections from a number of operas), fell flat. ‘Gluck knows no more counterpoint than my cook,’ Handel is reported to have said—but then, Handel’s cook was an excellent bassist and sang in many of the composer’s own operas. Counterpoint, it is true, was not Gluck’s forte, and the lack of depth of harmonic expression which characterized his early work was no doubt due to the want of contrapuntal knowledge. Handel quite naturally received Gluck with a somewhat negligent kindness. Gluck, on the other hand, always preserved the greatest admiration for him—we are told that he hung the master’s picture over his bed. Not only the acquaintance of Handel, whose influence is clearly felt in his later works, but the musical atmosphere of the English capital must have been of benefit to him.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson of his life was the London failure of Piramo e Tisbe. He was astonished that this pasticcio, which presented a number of the most popular airs of his operas, was so unappreciated. After thinking it over he may well have concluded that all music properly deserving of the name should be the fitting expression of a situation; this vital quality lacking, in spite of melodic splendor and harmonic richness and originality, what remained would be no more than a meaningless arrangement of sounds, which might tickle the ear pleasantly, but would have no emotional power. A short trip to Paris afforded him an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the classic traditions of the French opera as developed by Lully and Rameau. Lully, it will be remembered, more nearly maintained the ideals of the early Florentines than their own immediate successors. In his operas the orchestra assumed a considerable importance, the overture took a stately though conventional aspect. The chorus and the ballet furnished a plastic background to the drama and, indeed, had become integral features. Rameau had added harmonic depth and variety and given a new charm to the graceful dance melodies. Gluck must have absorbed some or all of this; yet, for fifteen years following his visit to London, he continued to compose in the stereotyped form of the Italian opera. He did not, it is true, return to Italy, but he joined a travelling Italian opera company conducted by Pietro Mingotti, as musical director and composer. One of his contributions to its répertoire was Le nozze d’Ercole e d’Ebe, which was performed in the gardens of the Castle of Pillnitz (near Dresden) to celebrate the marriage of the Saxon princess and the Elector of Bavaria in June, 1747. How blunted Gluck’s artistic sense must have been toward the incongruities of Italian opera is shown by the fact that the part of Hercules in this work was written for a soprano and sung by a woman. In others the rôles of Agamemnon the ‘king of men,’ of demigods and heroes were trilled by artificial sopranos.

After sundry wanderings Gluck established himself in Vienna, where in 1748 his Semiramide reconosciuta had been performed to celebrate the birthday of the Empress Maria Theresa. It was an opera seria of the usual type and, though terribly confused, it revealed at times the power and sweep characteristic of Handel.

In Vienna Gluck fell in love with Marianna Pergin, the daughter of a wealthy merchant whose father would not consent to the marriage. The story that his sweetheart had vowed to be true to him and that he wandered to Italy disguised as a Capucin to save expenses in order to produce his Telemacco for the Argentina Theatre in Rome has no foundation. But at any rate the couple were finally married in 1750, after the death of the relentless father. This signalized the close of Gluck’s nomadic existence. With his permanent residence in Vienna began a new epoch in his life. Vienna was at that time a literary, musical, and social centre of importance, a home of all the arts. The reigning family of Hapsburg was an uncommonly musical one; the empress, her father, her husband (Francis of Lorraine), and her daughters were all music lovers. Maria Theresa herself sang in the operatic performances at her private theatre. Joseph II played the 'cello in its orchestra. The court chapel had its band, the cathedral its choir and four organists. In the Hofburg and at the rustic palace of Schönbrunn music was a favorite diversion of the court, cultivated alike by the Austrian and the Hungarian nobility. The royal opera houses at Launburg and Schönbrunn placed in their service a long series of the famous opera composers.

Semiramide had recommended its composer to the favor of Maria Theresa, his star was in the ascendant. In September, 1754, his comic opera Le Chinese, with its tragic-comic ballet, L’Orfano della China, performed at the countryseat of the Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen in the presence of the emperor and court, gave such pleasure that its author was definitely attached to the court opera at a salary of two thousand ducats a year. His wealthy marriage and his increasing reputation, instead of tempting him to indulge in luxurious ease, spurred him to increased exertions. He added to the sum total of his knowledge by studies of every kind—literary, poetic, and linguistic—and his home became a meeting place for the beaux esprits of art and science. He wrote several more operas to librettos by Metastasio, witnessed the triumph of two of them in Rome, after which he was able to return to Vienna, a cavaliere dello sperone d’oro (knight of the golden spur), this distinction having been conferred upon him by the Pope. Henceforth he called himself Chevalier or Ritter (not von) Gluck.

V

For the sake of continuity we are obliged at this point to resume the thread of our remarks concerning the opera buffa of Pergolesi. In 1752, about the time of Gluck’s official engagement at the Vienna opera, an Italian troupe of ‘buffonists’ introduced in Paris La serva padrona and Il maestro in musica (Pergolesi’s only other comic opera). Their success was sensational, and, having come at a psychological moment, far-reaching in results, for it gave the impulse to a new school, popular to this day—that of the French opéra comique, at first called opera bouffon.

The latter part of the eighteenth century had witnessed the birth of a new intellectual ideal in France, essentially different from those associated with the preceding movements of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Neither antiquity nor the Bible were in future to be the court of last instance, but judgment and decision over all things was referred to the individual. This theory, and others laid down by the encyclopedists—the philosophers of the time—reacted equally on all the arts. New theories concerning music were advanced by laymen. Batteaux had already insisted that poetry, music, and the dance were, by very nature, intended to unite; Diderot and Rousseau conceived the idea of the unified work of art. Jean Jaques Rousseau,[9] the intellectual dictator, who laid a rather exaggerated claim to musical knowledge, and the famous satirist, Baron Melchior Grimm, now began a literary tirade against the old musical tragedy of France, which, like the Italian opera, had become paralyzed into mere formulas. Rousseau, who had shortly before written a comic opera, Le devin du village (The Village Seer), in French, now denounced the French language, with delightful inconsistency, as unfit to sing; Grimm in his pamphlet, Le petit prophète de Boehmisch-Broda, threatened the French people with dire consequences if they did not abandon French opera for Italian opera buffa.[10] This precipitated the widespread controversy between Buffonists and anti-Buffonists, known as the Guerre des bouffons, which, in this age of pamphleteers, of theorists, and revolutionary agitators, soon assumed political significance. The conservatives hastened to uphold Rameau and the cause of native art; the revolutionists rallied to the support of the Italians. Marmontel, Favart, and others set themselves to write after the Italian model, ‘Duni brought from Parma his Ninette à la cour and followed it in 1757 with Le peintre amoureux; Monsigny[11] left his bureau and Philidor[12] his chess table to follow the footsteps of Pergolesi; lastly came Grétry from Rome and killed the old French operatic style with Le Tableau parlant and Zémire et Azor!’ The result was the production of a veritable flood of pleasing, delightful operettas dealing with petty love intrigues, mostly of pastoral character, in place of the stale, mythological subjects common to French and Italian opera alike. The new school quickly strengthened its hand and improved its output. Its permanent value lay, of course, in the infusion of new vitality into operatic composition in general, a rejuvenation of the poetic as well as musical technique, the unlocking of a whole treasure of subjects hitherto unused.

Gluck at Vienna, already acquainted with French opera, was quick to see the value of this new genre, and he produced, in alternation with his Italian operas, a number of these works, partly with interpolations of his own, partly rewritten by him in their entirety. Among the latter class must be named La fausse esclave (1758); L’île de Merlin (1758); L’arbre enchantée (1759); L’ivrogne corrigé (1760); Le cadi dupé (1761); and La recontre imprévue (1764). As Riemann suggests, it is not accidental that Gluck’s idea to reform the conventionalized opera dates from this period of intensive occupation with the French opéra bouffon. There is no question that the simpler, more natural art, and the genuineness and sincerity of the comic opera were largely instrumental in the fruition of his theories. His only extended effort during the period from 1756 to 1762 was a pantomimic ballet, Don Giovanni, but the melodramas and symphonies (or overtures) written for the private entertainment of the imperial family, as well as seven trio sonatas, varied in expression and at times quite modern in spirit, also date from this time. It is well to remember also that this was a period of great activity in instrumental composition; that the Mannheim school of symphonists was just then at the height of its accomplishment.

Gluck’s first reform opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, appeared in 1762. The young Italian poet and dramatist, Raniero da Calzabigi, supplied the text. Calzabigi, though at first a follower of Metastasio, had conceived a violent dislike for that librettist and his work. A hot-headed theorist, he undoubtedly influenced Gluck in the adoption of a new style, perhaps even gave the actual initiative to the change. The idea was not sudden. We have already pointed out how the later Neapolitans had contributed elements of reform and had paved the way in many particulars. They had not, however, like Gluck, attacked the root of the evil—the text. Metastasio’s texts were made to suit only the old manner; Calzabigi’s were designed to a different purpose: the unified, consistent expression of a definite dramatic scheme. In the prefaces which accompanied their next two essays in the new style, Alceste and Paride, Gluck reverted to almost the very wording of Peri and Caccini, but nevertheless no reaction to the representative style of 1600 was intended. Though he spoke of ‘forgetting his musicianship,’ he did not deny himself all sensuous melodic flow in favor of a parlando recitative. Too much water had flowed under the bridges since 1600 for that. Scarlatti and his school had not wrought wholly in vain. But the coloratura outrage, the concert-opera, saw the beginning of its end. The da capo aria was discarded altogether, the chorus was reintroduced, and the subordination of music to dramatic expression became the predominating principle. Artificial sopranos and autocratic prime donne could find no chance to rule in such a scheme; their doom was certain and it was near. In the war that ensued, which meant their eventual extinction, Gluck found a powerful ally in the person of the emperor, Francis I.

In that sovereign’s presence Orfeo was first given at the Hofburgtheater in Vienna. Its mythological subject—the same that Ariosti treated in his favolo of 1574, that Peri made the theme of his epoch-making drama of 1600, that Monteverdi chose for his Mantuan debut in 1607—was surely as appropriate for this new reformer’s first experiment as it was suited to the classic simplicity and grandeur of his music. The opera was studied with the greatest care, Gluck himself directing all the rehearsals, and the participating artists forgot that they were virtuosi in order better to grasp the spirit of the work. It was mounted with all the skill that the stagecraft of the day afforded. Although it did not entirely break with tradition and was not altogether free of the empty formulas from which the composer tried to escape, it was too new to conquer the sympathies of the Viennese public at once. Indeed, the innovations were radical enough to cause trepidations in Gluck’s own mind. His strong feelings that the novelty of Orfeo might prevent its success induced him to secure the neutrality of Metastasio before its first performance, and his promise not to take sides against it openly.

Gluck’s music is as fresh to-day as when it was written. Its beauty and truth seemed far too serious to many of his contemporaries. People at first said that it was tiresome; and Burney declared that ‘the subordination of music to poetry is a principle that holds good only for the countries whose singers are bad.’ But after five performances the triumph of Orfeo was assured and its fame spread even to Italy. Rousseau said of it: ‘I know of nothing so perfect in all that regards what is called fitness, as the ensemble in the Elysian fields. Everywhere the enjoyment of pure and calm happiness is evident, but so equable is its character that there is nothing either in the songs or in the dance airs that in the slightest degree exceeds its just measure.’ The first two acts of Orfeo are profoundly human, with their dual picture of tender sorrow and eternal joy. The grief of the poet and the lamentations of his shepherd companions, rising in mournful choral strains, insistent in their reiteration of the motive indicative of their sorrow, are as effective in their way as the musical language of Wagner, even though they lack the force of modern harmony and orchestral sonority. The principle is fundamentally the same. Nor is Gluck’s music entirely devoid of the dramatic force which has come to music with the growth of the modern orchestra. Much of the delineation of mood and emotion is left to the instruments. Later, in the preface to Alceste, Gluck declared that the overture should be in accord with the contents of the opera and should serve as a preparation for it—a simple, natural maxim to which composers had been almost wholly blind up to that time. In Gluck’s overtures we see, in fact, no Italian, but a German, influence. They partake strongly of the nature of the first movements of the Mannheim symphonies, showing a contrasting second theme and are clearly divided into three parts, like the sonata form. Thus the new instrumental style was early introduced into the opera through Gluck’s initiation, and thence was to be transferred to the overtures of Mozart, Sacchini, Cherubini, and others.

In 1764 Orfeo was given in Frankfort-on-the-Main for the coronation of the Archduke Joseph as Roman king. The imperial family seems to have been sympathetically appreciative of Gluck’s efforts with the new style; but nevertheless his next work, Telemacco, produced at the Burgtheater in January, 1765, though considered the best of his Italian operas, was a peculiar mixture of the stereotype and the new, as if for a time he lacked confidence. Quite different was the case of Alceste (Hofburgtheater, Dec. 16, 1767). In this, his second classic music drama, the composer carried out the reforms begun in Orfeo more boldly and more consistently. Calzabigi again wrote the text. The music was neither so full of color nor so poetic as that of its predecessor, yet was more sustained and equal in beauty. The orchestration is somewhat fuller; the recitatives have gained in expressiveness; there are effects of great dramatic intensity, and arias of severe grandeur. Berlioz called Alceste’s aria ‘Ye gods of endless night’ the perfect manifestation of Gluck’s genius. Like Orfeo, Alceste was admirably performed, and again opinions differed greatly regarding it. Sonnenfels[13] wrote after the performance: ‘I find myself in wonderland. A serious opera without castrati, music without solfeggios, or, I might rather say, without gurgling; an Italian poem without pathos or banality. With this threefold work of wonder the stage near the Hofburg has been reopened.’ On the other hand, there were heard in the parterre such comments as ‘It is meant to call forth tears—I may shed a few—of ennui’; ‘Nine days without a performance, and then a requiem mass’; or ‘A splendid two gulden’s worth of entertainment—a fool who dies for her husband.’ This last is quite in keeping with the sentiment of the eighteenth century in regard to conjugal affection. It took a long while for the public to accustom itself to the austerity and tragic grandeur of this ‘tragedy set to music,’ as its author called it. Yet Alceste in its dual form (for the French edition represents a complete reworking of its original) is Gluck’s masterpiece, and it still remains one of the greatest classical operas.

Three years after Alceste came Paride ed Elena (Nov. 30, 1770), a ‘drama for music.’ In the preface of the work, dedicated to the duke of Braganza, Gluck again emphasized his beliefs. Among other things he wrote: ‘The more we seek to attain truth and perfection the greater the need of positiveness and accuracy. The lines that distinguish the work of Raphael from that of the average painter are hardly noticeable, yet any change of an outline, though it may not destroy resemblance in a caricature, completely deforms a beautiful female head. Only a slight alteration in the mode of expression is needed to turn my aria Che faro senza Euridice into a dance for marionettes.’ Paride ed Elena, constructed on the principles of Orfeo and Alceste, is the least important of Gluck’s operas and the least known. The libretto lacks action, but the score is interesting because of its lyric and romantic character. Much of its style seems to anticipate the new influences which Mozart afterward brought to German music. It also offers the first instance of what might be called local color in its contrasting choruses of Greeks and Asiatics.

It is interesting to note that at the time of composing the lyrical ‘Alceste’ Gluck was also preparing for French opera with vocal romances, Lieder. His collection of songs set to Klopstock’s odes was written in 1770. They have not much artistic value, but they are among the earliest examples of the Lied as Mozart and Beethoven later conceived it, a simple song melody whose mission is frankly limited to a faithful emphasis of a lyrical mood. Conceived in the spirit of Rousseau, they are spontaneous and make an unaffected appeal to the ear. The style is nearer that of French opéra comique, at which Gluck had already tried his hand, thus obtaining an exact knowledge of the spirit of the French language and of its lyrical resources.

VI

The wish of Gluck’s heart was to carry to completion the reforms he had initiated, but Germany had practically declared against them. His musical and literary adversaries at the Viennese court, Hasse and Metastasio, had formed a strong opposition. Baron Grimm spoke of Gluck’s reforms as the work of a barbarian. Agricola, Kirnberger, and Forkel were opposed to them. In Prussia, Frederick the Great had a few arias from Alceste and Orfeo sung in concert, and decided that the composer ‘had no song and understood nothing of the grand opera style,’ an opinion which, of course, prevented the performance of his operas in Berlin. In view of all this it is not surprising that he should turn to what was then the centre of intellectual life, that he should seize the opportunity to secure recognition for his art in the great home of the drama—in Paris.

Let us recall for a moment Gluck’s connection with the French opéra bouffon. Favart had complimented him, in a letter to the Vienna opera director Durazzo, for the excellence of his French ‘déclamation.’ Evidently Gluck and his friend Le Blanc du Roullet, attaché of the French embassy, had kept track of the Guerre des bouffons, and had taken advantage of the psychology of the moment, for Rameau had died in 1764 and the consequent weakening of the National party had resulted in the victory of the Buffonists. Du Roullet suggested to Gluck and Calzabigi that they collaborate upon a French subject for an opera, and chose Racine’s Iphigénie. The opera was completed and the text translated by du Roullet, who now wrote a very diplomatic letter to the authorities of the Académie royale (the Paris opera). It recounted how the Chevalier Gluck, celebrated throughout Europe, admired the French style of composition, preferred it, indeed, to the Italian; how he regarded the French language as eminently suited to musical treatment, and that he had just finished a new work in French on a tragedy of the immortal Racine, which exhausted all the powers of art, simple, natural song, enchanting melody, recitative equal to the French, dance pieces of the most alluring freshness. Here was everything to delight a Frenchman’s heart; besides, his opera had been a great financial success in Bologna, and so valiant a defender of the French tongue should be given an opportunity in its own home.

The academy saw a new hope in this. It considered the letter in official session, and cautiously asked to see an act of Iphigénie. After examination of it Gluck was promised an engagement if he would agree to write six operas like it. This condition, almost impossible of acceptance for a man of Gluck’s age, was finally removed through the intercession of Marie Antoinette, now dauphiness of France, Gluck’s erstwhile pupil in Vienna.

Gluck was invited to come to Paris as the guest of the Académie and direct the staging of Iphigénie. He arrived there with his wife and niece[14] in the summer of 1773. Lodged in the citadel of the anti-Buffonists, he incurred in advance the opposition of the Italian party, but, diplomat that he was, he at once set about to propitiate the enemy. Rousseau, the intellectual potentate of France, was eventually won over; but, despite the fact that Gluck’s music was essentially human and should have fulfilled the demands of the ‘encyclopedists,’ such men as Marmontel, La Harpe, and d’Alambert were arrayed against him, together with the entire Italian party and many of the followers of the old French school, who refused to accept him as the successor of Lully and Rameau. Mme. du Barry was one of these. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, constituted herself Gluck’s protector. It was the Guerre des bouffons at its climax.

The première of Iphigénie en Aulide (April, 1774) was awaited with the greatest impatience. Gluck had spared no pains in the preparation. He drilled the singers, spoiled by public favor, with the greatest vigor, and ruthlessly combatted their caprices. The obstacles were many: Legras was ill; Larivée, the Agamemnon, did not understand his part; Sophie Arnold, known as the greatest singing actress of her day, sang out of tune; Vestris, the greatest dancer of his time—he was called the ‘God of the Dance’—was not satisfied with his part in the ballet of the opera. ‘Then dance in heaven, if you’re the god of the dance,’ cried Gluck, ‘but not in my opera!’ And when the terpsichorean divinity insisted on concluding Iphigénie with a chaconne, he scornfully asked: ‘Did the Greeks dance chaconnes?’ Gluck threatened more than once to withdraw his opera, yielding only to the persuasions of the dauphiness.

The second performance of the opera determined its triumph, a triumph which in a manner made Paris the centre of music in Europe.[15] Marie Antoinette even wrote to her sister Marie Christine to express her pleasure. Gluck received an honorarium of 20,000 francs and was promised a life pension. Less severe and solemn than Alceste, Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride (written ten years later to a libretto by Guillard and not heard until May 18, 1779) were the favorites of town and court up to the very end of the ancien régime. Not only are both more appealing and less sombre, but they are also more delicate in form, more simple in sentiment, and more intimate than Alceste.

Gluck’s fame was now universal. Voltaire, the oracle of France, had pronounced in his favor. The nobility sought his society, the courtiers waited on him. Even princes hastened, when he laid down his bâton, to hand him the peruke and surcoat cast aside while conducting. A strong well-built man, bullet-headed, with a red, pockmarked face and small gray, but brilliant, eyes; richly and fashionably dressed; independent in his manner; jealous of his liberty; opinionated, yet witty and amiable, this revolutionary à la Rousseau, this ‘plebeian genius’ completely conquered all affections of Parisian society. He was at home everywhere; every salon lionized him, he was a familiar figure at the levers of Marie Antoinette.

In August, 1774, a French version of Orfeo, extensively revised, was heard and acclaimed. This confirmed the victory—the anti-Gluckists were vanquished for the time. But a permanent connection with the Paris opera did not at once result for Gluck, and the next year he returned to Vienna, taking with him two old opera texts by Quinault—Lully’s librettist—Roland and Armide, which the Académie had commissioned him to set. He set to music only the latter of the two poems, for, when he learned that Piccini likewise had been asked to set the Roland, and had been invited to Paris by Marie Antoinette, he destroyed his sketches. An older light operetta, Cythère assiegée, which he recast and foolishly dispatched to Paris, thoroughly displeased the Parisians. The opposition was quick to seize its advantage. It looked about for a leader and found him in Piccini, now at the head of the great Neapolitan school. He was induced to come to Paris by tempting promises, but was so ill-served by circumstances that, in spite of the manœuvres and the intrigues of his partisans, his Roland was not given until 1778.

On April 23, 1776, Gluck directed the first performance of his new French version of Alceste. It was hissed. In despair Gluck rushed from the opera house and exclaimed to Rousseau: ‘Alceste has fallen!’ ‘Yes,’ was the answer, ‘but it has fallen from the skies!’ In 1777 came Armide. In this opera Gluck thought he had written sensuous music.[16] It no longer makes this impression—the passion of ‘Tristan,’ the oriental voluptuousness of the Scheherazade of Rimsky-Korsakov, and the eroticism of modern dramatic scores have somewhat cooled the warmth of the love music of Armide. On the other hand, the passion of hatred is delineated in this opera powerfully and vigorously enough for modern appreciation. Armide is beautiful throughout by reason of its sincerity.

Piccini’s Roland followed Alceste in a few months, January, 1778. It was a success, but only a temporary one. After twelve well-attended performances it ceased to draw. Nevertheless it fanned the flame of controversy. The fight of Gluckists and Piccinnists, in continuation of the Guerre des bouffons, of which the principals, by the way, were quite innocent, was at its height. Men addressed each other with the challenge ‘Êtes-vous Gluckiste ou Piccinniste?’ Piccini was placed at the head of an Italian troupe which was engaged to give performances on alternate nights at the Académie. The two ‘parties’ were now on equal footing. Finally it occurred to the director to have the two rivals treat the same subject and he selected Racine’s Iphigénie en Tauride. Piccini was handicapped from the start. His text was bad, neither his talent nor his experience was so suited to the task as Gluck’s. The latter’s version was ready in May, 1779, and was a brilliant success. According to the Mercure de France no opera had ever made so strong and so universal an impression upon the public. ‘Pure musical beauty as sweet as that of Orfeo, tragic intensity deeper than that of Alceste, a firm touch, an undaunted courage, a new subtlety of psychological insight, all combine to form a masterpiece such as throughout its entire history the operatic stage has never known.’ Piccini, who meantime had produced his Atys, brought out his Iphigénie in January, 1781. Despite many excellences it was bound to be anti-climax to Gluck’s. Needless to say it admits of no comparison.

Too great stress has often been laid on the quarrels of the ‘Gluckists’ and ‘Piccinnists,’ which, it is true, went to absurd lengths. As is usually the case with partisanship in art, the chief characters themselves were not personal enemies. The Italian sympathizers merely took up the cry which the Buffonists had formerly raised against the opera of Rameau. According to them Gluck’s music was made up of too much noise and not enough song. ‘But the Buffonist agitation had been justified by results; it had produced the opéra comique, which had assimilated what it could use of the Italian opera buffa.’ Not so this new controversy. Hence, despite a few days of glory for Piccini, his party was not able to reawaken in France a taste for the superficial charm of Italian music. ‘The crowd is for Gluck,’ sighed La Harpe. And when, after the glorious success of Iphigénie en Tauride, Piccini’s Didon was given in 1783, it owed the favor with which it was received largely to the fact that in style and expression it followed Gluck’s model.

In 1780, six months after the Iphigénie première, Gluck retired to Vienna to end his days in dignified and wealthy leisure. He had accomplished his task, fulfilled the wish of his heart. In his comfortable retreat he learned of the failure of Piccini’s Iphigénie en Tauride, while his own was given for the 151st time on April 2, 1782! He also enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing that Les Danaïdes, the opera written by his disciple and pupil, Antonio Salieri, justified the truth of his theories by its success on the Paris stage in 1784. It was this pupil, who, consulting Gluck on the question of whether to write the rôle of Christ in the tenor in his cantata ‘The Last Judgment,’ received the answer, half in jest, half in earnest, ‘I’ll be able before long to let you know from the beyond how the Saviour speaks.’ A few days after, on Nov. 15, 1787, the master breathed his last, having suffered an apoplectic stroke.

The inscription on his tomb, ‘Here rests a righteous German man, an ardent Christian, a faithful husband, Christoph Ritter Gluck, the great master of the sublime art of tone’ emphasizes the strongly moral side of his character. For all his shrewdness and solicitude for his own material welfare, his music is ample proof of his nobility of soul; its loftiness, purity, unaffected simplicity reflect the virtues for which men are universally respected.

In its essence Gluck’s music may be considered the expression of the classic ideal, the ‘naturalism’ and ‘new humanism’ of Rousseau, which idealized the old Greek world and aimed to inculcate the Greek spirit; courage and keenness in quest of truth and devotion to the beautiful. The leading characteristics of his style have been aptly defined as the ‘realistic notation of the pathetic accent and passing movement, and the subordination of the purely musical element to dramatic expression.’ ‘I shall try,’ he wrote in the preface to Alceste, ‘to reduce music to its own function, that of seconding poetry by intensifying the expression of sentiments and the interest of situations without interrupting the action by needless ornament. I have accordingly taken great care not to interrupt the singer in the heat of the dialogue and make him wait for a tedious ritornel, nor do I allow him to stop on a sonorous vowel, in the middle of a phrase, in order to show the agility of a beautiful voice in a long cadenza. I also believed it my duty to try to secure, to the best of my power, a fine simplicity; therefore I have avoided a display of difficulties which destroy clarity. I have never laid stress on aught that was new, where it was not conditioned in a natural manner by situation and expression; and there is no rule which I have not been willing to sacrifice with good grace for the sake of the effect. These are my principles.’ The inscription, Il préféra les Muses aux Sirènes (He chose the Muses rather than the Sirens), beneath an old French copper-plate of Gluck, dating from 1781, sounds the keynote of his artistic character. A prophet of the true and beautiful in music, he disdained to listen for long to the tempting voices which counselled him to prefer the easy rewards of popular success to the struggles and uncertainties involved in the pursuit of a high ideal. And, when the hour came, he was ready to reject the appeal of external charm and mere virtuosity and to lead dramatic musical art back to its natural sources.

VII

Gluck’s immediate influence was not nearly as widespread as his reforms were momentous. It is true that his music, reverting to simpler structures and depending on subtler interpretation for its effects put an end to the absolute rule of prime uomini and prime donne, but, while some of its elements found their way into the work of his more conventional contemporaries, his example seems not to have been wholly followed by any of them. His dramatic teachings, too, while they could not fail to be absorbed by the composers, were not adopted without reserve by any one except his immediate pupil Salieri, who promptly reverted to the Italian style after his first successes. Gluck was not a true propagandist and never gathered about him disciples who would spread his teachings—in short he did not found a ‘school.’ Even in France, where his principles had the weight of official sanction, apostasy was rife, and Rossini and Meyerbeer were probably more appreciated than their more austere predecessor. His influence was far-reaching rather than immediate. It remained for Wagner to take up the thread of reasoning where Gluck left off and with multiplied resources, musically and mechanically, with the way prepared by literary forces, and himself equipped with rare controversial powers, demonstrate the truths which his predecessor could only assert.

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) with Les Danaïdes, in 1781, achieved a notable success in frank imitation of Gluck’s manner; indeed, the work, originally intrusted to Gluck by the Académie de Musique, was, with doubtful strategy, brought out as that master’s work, and in consequence brought Salieri fame and fortune. Other facts in Salieri’s life seem to bear out similar imperfections of character. He was, however, a musician of high artistic principles. When in 1787 Tarare was produced in Paris it met with an overwhelming success, but Salieri nevertheless withdrew it after a time and partially rewrote it for its Vienna production, under the title of Axur, Rè d’Ormus. ‘There have been many instances in which an artist has been taught by failure that second thoughts are best; there are not many in which he has learned the lesson from popular approbation.’[17] Salieri’s career is synchronous with Mozart’s, whom he outlived, and against whom he intrigued in ungenerous manner at the Viennese court, where he became kapellmeister in 1788. He profited by his rival’s example, moreover, but his music ‘falls between the methods of his two great contemporaries, it is less dramatic than Gluck’s and it has less melodic genuineness than Mozart’s.’

Prominent among those who adhered to Italian operatic tradition was Giuseppe Sarti (1729-1802), ‘a composer of real invention, and a brilliant and audacious master of the orchestra.’ We have W. H. Hadow’s authority for the assertion that he first used devices which are usually credited to Berlioz and Wagner, such as the use of muted trumpets and clarinets and certain experiments in the combination of instrumental colors. Sarti achieved truly international renown; from 1755 to 1775 he was at the court of Copenhagen, where he produced twenty Italian operas, and four Danish singspiele; next he was director of the girls’ conservatory in Venice and till 1784 musical director of Milan cathedral,[18] and from 1784 till 1787 he served Catherine II of Russia as court conductor. His famous opera, Armida e Rinaldo, he produced while in this post (1785), as well as a number of other works. In 1793 he founded a ‘musical academy’ which was the forerunner of the great St. Petersburg conservatory, and he was its director till 1801. His introduction of the ‘St. Petersburg pitch’ (436 vibrations for A) is but one detail of his many-sided influence.

Not the least point of Sarti’s historical importance is the fact that he was the teacher of Cherubini. Luigi Cherubini occupies a peculiar position in the history of music. Born in Florence in 1760 and confining his activities to Italy for the first twenty-eight years of his career, he later extended his influence into Germany (where Beethoven became an enthusiastic admirer) and to Paris, where he became a most important factor of musical life, especially in that most peculiarly French development—the opéra comique. His operatic method represents a compromise between those of his teacher, Sarti, and of Gluck, who thus indirectly exerts his influence upon comic opera. Successful as his many Italian operas—produced prior to 1786—were, they hardly deserve notice here. His Paris activities, synchronous with those of Méhul, are so closely bound up with the history of opéra comique that we may well consider them in that connection.

The opéra comique, the singspiel of France, was comic opera with spoken dialogue. Its earlier exponents, Monsigny, Philidor, and Gossec, were in various ways influenced by Gluck in their work. Grétry,[19] whose Le tableau parlant, Les deux avares, and L’Amant jaloux are ‘models of lightness and brilliancy,’ like Gluck ‘speaks the language of the heart’ in his masterpieces, Zémire et Azor and Richard Cœur de Lion, and excels in delineation of character and the expression of typically French sentiment. Grétry’s appearance marked an epoch in the history of opéra comique. His Mémoires expose a dramatic creed closely related to that of Gluck, but going beyond that master in its advocacy of declamation in the place of song.

Gossec, also important as symphonist and composer of serious operas (Philemon et Baucis, etc.), entered the comic opera field in 1761, the year in which the Opéra Comique, known as the Salle Favart, was opened, though his real success did not come till 1766, with Les Pêcheurs. Carried away by revolutionary fervor, he took up the composition of patriotic hymns, became officially connected with the worship of Reason, and eventually left the comic opera field to Cherubini and Méhul. Both arrived in Paris in 1778, which marks the second period of opéra comique.

The peaceful artistic rivalry and development of this period stand in peculiar contrast to the great political holocaust which coincides with it—the French Revolution. That upheaval was accompanied by an almost frantic search for pleasure on the part of the public, and an astounding increase in the number of theatres (seventeen were opened in 1791, the year of Louis XVI’s flight, and eighteen more up to 1800). Cherubini’s wife herself relates how the theatres were crowded at night after the guillotine had done its bloody work by day. Music flourished as never before and especially French music, for the storm of patriotism which swept the country made for the patronage of things French. In the very year of Robespierre’s execution (1794) the Conservatoire de Musique was projected, an institution which has ever since remained the bulwark of French musical culture.[20]

In 1789 a certain Léonard, friseur to Marie Antoinette, was given leave to collect a company for the performance of Italian opera, and opened his theatre in a hall of the Tuileries palace with his countryman Cherubini as his musical director. The fall of the Bastille in 1794 drove them from the royal residence to a mere booth in the Foire St. Germain, where in 1792 they created the famous Théâtre Feydeau, and delighted Revolutionary audiences with Cherubini versions of Cimarosa and Paesiello operas. Here, too, Lodoïska, one of Cherubini’s most brilliant works, was enthusiastically applauded. Meantime Étienne Méhul (b. Givet, Ardennes, 1763; d. Paris, 1817), the modest, retiring artist, who had been patiently awaiting the recognition of the Académie (his Alonzo et Cora was not produced till 1791) had become the hero of the older enterprise at the Salle Favart,[21] and there produced his Euphrosine et Corradin in 1790, followed by a series of works of which the last, Le jeune Henri (1797), was hissed off the stage because, in the fifth year of the revolution, it introduced a king as character—the once adored Henry IV! This was followed by a more successful series, ‘whose musical force and the enchanting melodies with which they are begemmed have kept them alive.’ His more serious works, notably Stratonice, Athol, and especially Joseph, a biblical opera, are highly esteemed. M. Tiersot considers the last-named work superior to that by Handel of the same name. Méhul was Gluck’s greatest disciple—he was directly encouraged and aided by Gluck—and even surpassed his master in musical science.

Cherubini’s Médé and Les deux journées were produced in 1797 and 1800, respectively. The latter ‘shows a conciseness of expression and a warmth of feeling unusual to Cherubini,’ says Mr. Hadow; at any rate it is better known to-day than any of the other works, and not infrequently produced both in France and Germany. It is opéra comique only in form, for it mixes spoken dialogue with music—its plot is serious. In this respect it furnishes a precedent for many other so-called opéras comiques. Cherubini’s musical resources were almost unlimited, wealth of ideas is even a fault with him, having the effect of tiring the listener, but his overtures are truly classic, his themes refined, and his orchestration faultless. In Les deux journées he abandoned the Italian traditions and confined himself practically to ensembles and choruses. He must, whatever his intrinsic value, be reckoned among the most important factors in the reformation of the opera in the direction of music drama.

Cherubini was not so fortunate as to win the favor of Napoleon, as did his colleagues, Gossec and Grétry and Méhul, all of whom received the cross of the Legion of Honor. He returned to Vienna in 1805 and there produced Faniska, the last and greatest of his operas, but his prospects were spoiled by the capture of Vienna and the entry of Napoleon, his enemy, at the head of the French army. He returned to France disappointed but still active, wrote church music, taught composition at the conservatory and was its director from 1821 till his death in 1842. The opéra comique continued meantime under the direction of Paesiello and from 1803 under Jean François Lesueur (1760-1837) ‘the only other serious composer who deserves to be mentioned by the side of Méhul and Cherubini.’ Lesueur’s innovating ideas aroused much opposition, but he had a distinguished following. Among his pupils was Hector Berlioz.

F. H. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Collegium musicum No. 29.

[2] Riemann: Handbuch, II³, p. 121.

[3] Usually Nicolo Logroscino is named as having gone before him, but, as that composer is in evidence only from 1738 (two years after Pergolesi’s death), the date of his birth usually accepted (1700) seems doubtful (cf. Kretzschmar in Peters-Jahrbuch, 1908).—Riemann: Ibid.

[4] Born in Naples, date unknown; died there in 1763. He was one of the creators of opera buffa, his parodistic dialect pieces—Il governatore, Il vecchio marito, Tanto bene che male, etc.—being among its first examples. In 1747 he became professor of counterpoint at the Conservatorio dei figliuoli dispersi in Palermo.

[5] After his return to Naples his three last works, Armida, Demofoonte, and Ifigenia in Tauride, passed over the heads of an unmindful public. The composer felt these disappointments keenly. Impaired in health he retired to his native town of Aversa and died there August 25, 1774.

[6] Baldassare Galuppi, born on the island of Burano, near Venice, In 1706; died in Venice, 1785, was a pupil of Lotti. He ranks among the most eminent composers of comic operas, producing no less than 112 operas and 3 dramatic cantatas in every musical centre of Europe. He also composed much church music and some notable piano sonatas.

[7] Oskar Bie; Die Oper (1914).

[8] Bohuslav Czernohorsky (1684-1740) was a Franciscan monk, native of Bohemia, but successively choirmaster in Padua and Assisi, where Tartini was his pupil. He was highly esteemed as an ecclesiastical composer. At the time when Gluck was his pupil he was director of the music at St. Jacob’s, Prague.

[9] Born 1712; died 1778. Though not a trained musician he evinced a lively interest in the art from his youth. Besides his Devin du village, which remained in the French operatic repertoire for sixty years, he wrote a ballet opera, Les Muses galantes, and fragments of an opera, Daphnis et Chloé. His lyrical scene, Pygmalion, set to music first by Coignet, then by Asplmayr, was the point of departure of the so-called ‘melodrama’ (spoken dialogue with musical accompaniment). He also wrote a Dictionnaire de musique (1767).

[10] Le petit prophète de Boehmisch-Broda has been identified by historians with the founder of the Mannheim school, Johann Stamitz, for the latter was born in Deutsch-Brod (Bohemia), and but two years before had set Paris by the ears with his orchestral ‘sonatas.’ The hero of the Grimm pamphlet is a poor musician, who by dream magic is transferred from his bare attic chamber to the glittering hall of the Paris opera. He turns away, aghast at the heartlessness of the spectacle and music.

[11] Pierre Alexandre Monsigny, born near St. Omer, 1729, died, Paris, 1817. Les aveux indiscrets (1759); Le cadi dupé (1760); On ne s’avise jamais de tout (1761); Rose et Colas (1764), etc., are his chief successes in opera comique.

[12] François-André-Danican Philidor, born, Dreux, 1726; died, London, 1795. Talented as a chess player he entered international contests successfully, and wrote an analysis of the game. His love for composition awoke suddenly and he made his comic-opera debut in 1759. His best works are: Le maréchal férant (1761); Tom Jones (1765), which brought an innovation—the a capelli vocal quartet; and Ernelinde, princesse de Norvège (1767), a grand opera.

[13] Sonnenfels, a contemporary Viennese critic, was active in his endeavors to uplift the German stage. (Briefe über die Wienerische Schaubühne, Vienna, 1768.)

[14] Gluck’s marriage was childless, but he had adopted a niece, Marianne Gluck, who had a pretty voice and pursued her musical training under his care. Both Gluck’s wife and niece usually accompanied him in his travels.

[15] After Iphigénie en Aulide Paris became the international centre of operatic composition. London was more in the nature of an exchange, where it was possible for artists to win a good deal of money quickly and easily; the glory of the great Italian stages dimmed more and more, and Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich were only locally important. Operatic control passed from the Italian to the French stage at the same time German instrumental composition began its victories.

[16] Gluck declared that the music of Armide was intended ‘to give a voluptuous sensation,’ and La Harpe’s assertion that he had made Armide a sorceress rather than an enchantress, and that her part was ‘une criallerie monotone et fatigante,’ drew forth as bitter a reply from the composer as Wagner ever wrote to his critics.

[17] W. H. Hadow: Oxford History of Music, Vol. V.

[18] During this period he produced his famous operas, Le gelosie vilane; Fernace (1776), Achille in Sciro (1779), Giulio Sabino (1781).

[19] André Erneste Modeste Grétry, born, Liège, 1742; died, near Paris, 1813. ‘His Influence on the opéra comique was a lasting one; Isouard, Boieldieu, Auber, Adam, were his heirs.’—Riemann.

[20] The Paris Conservatoire de Musique, succeeding the Bourbon École de chant et de déclamation (1784) and the revolutionary Institut National de Musique (1793), was established 1795, with Sarrette as director and with liberal government support. Cherubini became its director in 1822, and its enormous influence on the general trend of French art dates from his administration.

[21] The two theatres, after about ten years’ rivalry, united as the Opéra Comique which, under government subsidy, has continued to flourish to this day.

CHAPTER II
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE CLASSIC PERIOD

Classicism and the classic period—Political and literary forces—The conflict of styles; the sonata form—The Berlin school; the sons of Bach—The Mannheim reform; the Genesis of the Symphony—Followers of the Mannheim school; rise of the string quartet; Vienna and Salzburg as musical centres.

It is impossible to assign the so-called Classic Movement to a definite period; its roots strike deep and its limits are indefinite. It gathered momentum while the ideas from which it revolted were in their ascendency; its incipient stage was simultaneous with the reign of Italian opera. To define the meaning of classicism is as difficult as it is to fix the date of its beginning. By contrasting, as we usually do, the style of that period with a later one, usually called the Romantic, by comparing the ideal of classicism with the romantic ideal of subjective expression, we get a negative rather than a positive definition; for classicism is generally presumed to be formal, and antagonistic to that free ideal—a supposition which is not altogether exact, for it was just the reform of the classicists that opened the way to the free expressiveness which is characteristic of the ‘Romantics.’ On the other hand, the classic ideal of just proportions, of pure objective beauty, did find expression in the crystallized forms, the clarified technique, and the flexible articulation that superseded the unreasonably ornate, the polyphonically obscure, or the superficial, trite monotony of a great part of pre-classic music.

I

When Gluck’s Alceste first appeared on the boards of the Imperial Opera in 1768, Mozart, the twelve-year-old prodigy, was the pet of Viennese salons; Haydn, with thirty symphonies to his credit, was laying the musical foundations of a German Versailles at Esterhàz; Emanuel Bach, practically at the end of his career, had just left Frederick the Great to become Telemann’s successor at Hamburg; and Stamitz, the great reformer of style and the real father of the modern orchestra, was already in his grave. On the other hand, there were still living men like Hasse and Porpora, whose recollection reached back to the very beginnings of the century. These men belonged to an earlier age, and so did in a sense all the men discussed in the last chapter, with a few obvious exceptions. But their influence extended far into the period which we are about to discuss; their careers are practically contemporaneous with the classic movement. The beginnings of that movement, the first impulses of the essentially new spirit we must seek in the work of men who were, like Pergolesi, the contemporaries of Bach and Handel.

To the reader of history perhaps the most significant outward sign of the impending change is the shifting of musical supremacy away from Italy, which had held unbroken sway since the days of Palestrina. We have seen in the last chapter how with Gluck the operatic centre of gravity was transferred from Naples to Paris. We shall now witness a similar change in the realm of ‘absolute’ music—this time in favor of Germany. The underlying causes of this change are fundamentally the same as those which directed the course of literature and general culture—namely the social and political upheaval that followed the Reformation and ushered in a century of struggle and strife, that kindled the Phœnix of a united and liberated nation, the Germany of to-day. A glance at the political history of the preceding era will help our comprehension of the period with which we have to deal.

The peace of Westphalia (1648) had left the German Empire a dismembered, powerless mass. No less than three hundred ‘independent’ states, ruled over by petty tyrants—princes, dukes, margraves, bishops—each of whom had the right to coin money, raise armies and contract alliances, made up a nation defenseless against foes, weakened by internal and military oppression, steeped in abject misery and moral depravity. For over a hundred years it remained an ‘abortion,’ an ‘irregular body like unto a monster,’ as Puffendorf characterized it. Despite its pretensions it was, as Voltaire said, ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.’ Flood after flood of pillaging soldiery had passed across its fertile acres, spreading ruin and dejection; the ravages of Louis XIV, the invasion of Kara Mustapha, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Polish wars, left the people victims of the selfish ambitions of brutish monarchs, men whose example set a premium upon crime. These noble robbers had made of the map of Europe a crazy-quilt, the only sizable patches of which represented France, Austria, and Russia. Italy, like Germany, was divided, but with this difference—its several portions were actually ruled by the ‘powers’—Austria had Tuscany and Milan, Spain ruled Naples and Sicily, while France owned Sardinia and Savoy. Its superior culture, having thus the benefit of a benevolent paternalism, penetrated to the very hearts of the conquerors, to Vienna, Madrid, and Paris, and spread a thin but glittering coat all over Europe. Germany, on the other hand, was, under the sham of independence, so constantly threatened with annihilation, so impoverished through strife, that the very idea of culture suggested a foreign thing, an exotic within the reach only of the mighty. Friedrich von Logau in the early seventeenth century bewailed the influx of foreign fashions into Germany, while Moscherosch denounced the despisers and traitors of his fatherland; and Lessing, over a century later, was still attacking the predominance of French taste in literature. We must not wonder at this almost total eclipse of native culture. The fact that the racial genius could perpetuate its germ, even across this chasm of desolation, is one of the astounding evidences of its strength.

That germ, to which we owe the preservation of German culture, that thin current which ran all through the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, had two distinct manifestations: the religious idealism of the north, and the optimistic rationalism of the south, which found expression in the writings of Leibnitz. The first of these movements produced in literature the religious lyrics of Protestant hymn writers, in music the cantatas, passions, and oratorios of a Bach and a Handel. Its ultimate expression was the Messias of Klopstock, which in a sense combined the two forms of art; for, as Dr. Kuno Francke[22] says, it is an ‘oratorio’ rather than an epic. As for Leibnitz, according to the same authority, ‘it is hard to overestimate his services to modern culture. He stands midway between Luther and Goethe.... In a time of national degradation and misery his philosophy offered shelter to the higher thought and kept awake the hope of an ultimate resurrection of the German people.’ The one event which signalizes that resurrection more than any is the battle of Rossbach in 1757. This was the shot that reverberated through Europe and summoned all eyes to witness a new spectacle, a prince who declared himself the servant of his people. With Frederick the Great as their hero the Germans of the North could rally to the hope of a fatherland; their poets, tongue-tied for centuries, broke forth in new lyric bursts; the vision of a united, triumphant Germany fired patriots, philosophers, scientists and artists with enthusiasm for a new ideal. This idealism—or sentimentality—stood in sharp contrast to the somewhat cynical rationalism of Rousseau, Diderot, and d’Alembert, but it had an even stronger influence on art.

The immediate effect of this regeneration was an increased output of literature and of music, a greater individuality, or assertiveness, in the native styles, the perfection of its technique, and the crystallization of its forms. In literature it bore its first fruits in the works of Klopstock and Wieland. Already in 1748 Klopstock had ‘sounded that morning call of joyous idealism which was the dominant note of the best in all modern German literature.’ This poet is an important figure to us, for he is of all writers the most admired in the period of musical history with which these chapters deal. His very name brought tears to the eyes of Charlotte in Goethe’s Werther; Leopold Mozart could go no further in his admiration of his son’s genius than to compare him to Klopstock. Wieland, who lived less in the realm of the spiritual but was fired with a greater enthusiasm for humanity, was among the first to give expression to his hope of a united Germany. He was personally acquainted with Mozart and early appreciated his genius.[23]

A transformation was thus wrought in the minds of the people of northern Europe. Much as in the humanitarian revelation of the Italian Renaissance, men became introspective, discovered in the recesses of their souls a new sympathy; men’s hearts became more receptive than they had ever been; and, as, after the strife of centuries, Europe settled down to a placid period of reconstruction, all this found manifold expression in people’s lives and in their art.

The close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 had brought an era of comparative peace. Austria, though deprived of some territory, entered upon a period of prosperity which augured well for the progress of art; Prussia, on the other hand, proceeded upon a career of unprecedented expansion under the enlightened leadership of the great Frederick. The Viennese court, which had patronized music for generations, now became what Burney called it, ‘the musical capital of Europe,’ while Berlin and Potsdam constituted a new centre for the cultivation of the art. Frederick, the friend of Voltaire, though himself a lover of French culture, and preferring the French language to his own, nevertheless encouraged the advancement of things native. He insisted that his subjects patronize home manufactures, affect native customs, and, contrary to Joseph II in Vienna, he engaged German musicians for his court in preference to Italians. The two courts may thus be conceived as the strongholds of the two opposing styles, German and Italian, which in fusing produced the new expressive style that is the most characteristic element of classic music.

II

To make clear this conflict of styles represented by the north and the south, by Berlin and Vienna, respectively, we need only ask the reader to recall what we have said about the music of Bach in Vol. I and that of Pergolesi in the last chapter. In the one we saw the culmination of polyphonic technique upon a modern harmonic basis, a fusion of the old polyphonic and new monodic styles, enriched by infinite harmonic variety, with a wealth of ingenious modulations and chromatic alterations, and a depth of spirit analogous to the religious idealism which we have cited as the dominant intellectual note of post-Reformation Germany. In the other, the direct outcome of the monodic idea, and therefore essentially melodic, we found a consummate grace and lightness, but also a certain shallowness, a desire to please, to tickle the ear rather than to stir the deeper emotions. In the course of time this style came to be absolutely dominated by harmony, through the peculiar agency of the Figured Bass. But instead of an ever-shifting harmonic foundation, an iridescent variety of color, we have here an essentially simple harmonic structure, largely diatonic, and centring closely around the tonic and dominant as the essential points of gravity, swinging the direction of its cadences back and forth between the two, while employing every melodic device to introduce all the variety possible within the limitations of so simple a scheme.

While, then, the style of Bach, and the North Germans, on the one hand, had a predominant unity of spirit it tended to variety of expression; the style of the Italians, on the other hand, brought a variety of ideas with a comparative simplicity of scheme or monotony of expression, which quickly crystallized into stereotyped forms. One of these forms, founded upon the simple harmonic scheme of tonic and dominant, developed, as we have seen, into the instrumental sonata, a type of which the violin sonatas of Corelli and his successors, Francesco Geminiani, Pietro Locatelli, and Giuseppe Tartini, and the piano sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti are excellent examples. Many Italians managed to endow such pieces with a breadth, a song-like sweep of melody, to which their inimitable facility of vocal writing led them quite naturally. Pergolesi especially, as we have said, deserves special merit for the introduction of the so-called ‘singing allegro’ in the first movements of his sonatas. Germans were quick to follow these examples and their innate tendency to variety of expression caused them to add another element—that of rhythmic contrast.[24] Indeed, although the Italian style continued to hold sway throughout Europe long after 1700, we find among its exponents an ever greater number of Germans. Their proclivity for harmonic fullness, pathos, and dignity was, moreover, reinforced by the influence of French orchestral music of the style of Lully and his successors. It was reserved for the Germans, also, to develop the sonata form as we know it to-day, to build it up into that wonderful vehicle for free fancy and for the philosophic development of musical ideas.

Before introducing the reader to the men of this epoch, who prepared the way for Haydn and Mozart, we are obliged, for a better understanding of their work, to describe briefly the nature and development of that form which serves, so to speak, as a background to their activity.

Certain successive epochs in the history of our art have been so dominated by one or another type of music that they might as aptly derive their names from the particular type in fashion as the early Christian era did from plain-chant. Thus the sixteenth century might well be called the age of the madrigal, the early seventeenth the period of accompanied monody, and the late seventeenth the epoch of the suite. As the vogue of any of these forms increases, a chain of conventions and rules invariably grows up which tends first to fix it, then to force it into stereotypes which become the instrument of mediocre pedants. The very rules by which it grows to perfection become the shackles which arrest its expansion. Thus it usually deteriorates almost immediately after it has reached its highest elevation at the hand of genius, unless it gives way to the broadening, liberalizing assaults of iconoclasts, and only in the measure to which it is capable of adapting itself to broader principles is further life vouchsafed to it. It continues then to exist beyond the period which is, so to speak, its own, in a sort of afterglow of glory, less brilliant but infinitely richer in interest, color and all-pervading warmth. All the types above mentioned, from the madrigal down, have continued to exist, in a sense, to our time, and, though our age is obviously as antagonistic to the spirit of the madrigal as it is to that of plain-chant, we might cite modern part-songs partaking of the same spirit which have a far stronger appeal. The modern symphonic suites of a Bizet or a Rimsky-Korsakoff as compared to the orchestral suite of the eighteenth century furnish perhaps the most striking case in point.

The period which this and the following chapters attempt to describe is dominated by the sonata form. Not a composer of instrumental music—and it was essentially the age of instrumental music—but essayed that form in various guises. Even the writers of opera did not fail to adopt it in their instrumental sections, and even in their arias. But the decades which are our immediate concern represent a formative stage, because there is much variety, much uncertainty, both in nomenclature and in the matter itself. Nomenclature is never highly specialized at first. A name primarily denotes a variety of things which have perhaps only slight marks of resemblance. Thus we have seen how sonata, derived from the verb suonare, to sound, is at first a name for any instrumental piece, in distinction to cantata, a vocal piece. The canzona da sonar (or canzon sonata) symbolized the application of the vocal style to instruments, and the abbreviation ‘sonata’ was for a time almost synonymous with sinfonia, as in the first solo sonatas (for violin) of Bagio Marini about 1617. The sonata in its modern sense is essentially a solo form; but, during a century or more of its evolution, the most familiar guise under which it appeared was the ‘trio-sonata.’ That, as we have seen, broadened out to symphonic proportions (while adapting some of the features of the orchestral suite) and the sonata became more specifically a solo piece, or, better, a group of pieces, for the sonata of our day is a ‘cyclical’ piece. But through all its outward manifestations, and irrespective of them, it underwent a definite and continuous metamorphosis, by which it assumed a more and more definite pattern, or patterns, which eventually fused into one.

The ‘cycle sonata’ undoubtedly had its root idea in the dance suite, and for a long time that derivation was quite evident. The minuet, obstinately holding its place in the scheme until Beethoven converted it into the scherzo, was the last birthmark to disappear. The variety of rhythm that the dance suite offers is also clearly preserved in the principle of rhythmic contrasts between the movements. These comprise usually a rapid opening movement embodying the essentials of the ‘sonata form’; a contrasting slow movement, shorter and in less conventional form—sometimes aria, sometimes ‘theme and variations’—stands next; the finale, in the lighter Italian form, was usually a quick dance movement or short, brilliant piece of slight significance; in the German and more developed examples it was often a rondo (one principal theme recurring at intervals throughout the piece with fresh ‘episodical’ matter interspersed), and more and more frequently it was cast in the first-movement form. Between the slow movement and the finale is the place for the minuet (if the sonata is in four movements). Haydn, though not the first so to use it, quickened its tempo and enriched it in content. A second minuet (Menuetto II) appears in the earlier symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, which by and by is incorporated with the first as ‘trio’—the familiar alternate section always followed by a repeat of the minuet itself.

Of course, the distinguishing feature of the sonata over all other forms is the peculiar pattern of at least one of its movements—most usually the first—the outcome of a long evolution, which, in its finally settled form, with the later Mozart and with Beethoven, became the most efficient, the most flexible, and the most convincing medium for the elaboration of musical ideas. The ‘first-movement form,’ as it has been called, appears in the eighteenth century in either of two primary patterns: the binary (consisting of two sections), and the ternary (consisting of three). The binary, gradually introduced by the Italians, notably Pergolesi and Alberti, is simply a broadening of the ‘song-form’ in two sections (each of which is repeated), having one single theme or subject, presented in the following key arrangement (‘A’ denoting the tonic or ‘home’ key and ‘B’ the dominant or related key): |:A—B:| |:B—A:|. This, with broadened dimensions and more definite thematic distinction, within each section gave way to: |:A¹—B²:||:B¹—A²:| (¹ and ² representing first and second theme, respectively). In this arrangement the second section simply reproduces the thematic material of the first, but in the reverse order of keys or tonality. It should be added that the ‘second theme’ was usually, at this early stage of development, a mere suggestion, an embryo with very slight individuality. The leading representatives of this type of form as applied to the suite as well as the sonata were Pergolesi, Domenico Alberti, Handel, J. S. Bach, J. F. Fasch, Domenico Scarlatti, Locatelli, and Gluck, and most of the later Italians, who continued to prefer this easily comprehended form, placing but simple problems of musicianship before the composer. It was eminently suited to the easy grace of polite music, of the ‘salon’ music of the eighteenth century.

But in the works of German suite writers especially the restatement of the first theme after the double bar displays almost from the beginning a tendency toward variety, abridgment, expansion, and modulation of harmony. Gradually this section assumed such a bewildering, fanciful character, such a variety of modulations, that the subject in its original form was forgotten by the hearer, and all recollection of the original key had been obliterated from the mind. Composers then grasped the device of restating the first theme in the original key after this free development of it, and then restating the second theme as before. Both the tonic and the dominant elements of the first section (or exposition) are now seen to be repeated in the tonic key in the restatement section (or recapitulation) and the form has assumed the following shape:

||:A¹—B²:||:(A²)| Development or |A¹—B¹:|
‘Working-out’

This is clearly a three-division form, and as such is closely allied to the ballad form, or ternary song-form, which is as old as the binary. Already Johann Sebastian Bach in his Prelude in F minor, in the second part of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ gives an example of it, and in Emanuel Bach and his German contemporaries this type becomes the standard. But it is curious to observe how strongly the Italian influence worked upon composers of the time, for, whenever the desire to please is evident in their work, we see them adopt the simpler pattern, and even when the ternary form is used the so-called ‘working-out’ is little more than an aimless sequence of meaningless passage work intended to dazzle by its brilliance and its grandiose effects, with but little relation to the subject matter of the piece. Even Mozart and Haydn veered back and forth between the two types until they had arrived at a considerably advanced state of maturity.

The second theme, as time went on, became more and more individualized and, as it assumed more distinct rhythmic and melodic characteristics, it lent itself more freely to logical development, like the principal subjects, became in fact a real ‘subject’ on a par with the first. With Stamitz and the Mannheim school, at last, we meet the idea of contrast between the two themes, not only in key but in spirit, in meaning. As with characters in a story, these differences can readily be taken hold of and elaborated. The themes may be played off against each other, they may be understood as masculine and feminine, as bold and timid, or as light and tragic—the possibilities of the scheme are unlimited, the complications under which an ingenious mind can conceive it are infinite in their interest. Thus only, by means of contrast, could states of mind be translated into musical language, thus only was it possible to give voice to the deeper sentiments, the new feelings that were tugging at the heart-strings of Europe. Only with this great principle of emotional contrast did the art become receptive to the stirrings of Sturm und Drang, of incipient Romanticism, thus only could it give expression to the graceful melancholy of a Mozart, the majestic ravings of a Beethoven.

III

Having given an indication of the various stages through which the sonata form passed, we may now speak of the men who developed it. We are here, of course, concerned only with those who cultivated the later and eventually universal German type.

In the band of musicians gathered about the court of Frederick the Great we find such pioneers as Joachim Quantz, the king’s instructor on the flute;[25] Gottlieb Graun, whose significance as a composer of symphonies, overtures, concertos, and sonatas is far greater than that of his brother Karl Heinrich, the composer of Der Tod Jesu; and the violinist Franz Benda, who was, however, surpassed in musicianship by his brother Georg, kapellmeister in Gotha. All of these and a number of others constitute the so-called Berlin school, whose most distinguished representative by far was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most eminent of Johann Sebastian’s sons. He has been called, not without reason, the father of the piano sonata, for, although Kuhnau preceded him in applying the form to the instrument, it is he who made it popular, and who definitely fixed its pattern, determined the order of its movements—Allegro; Andante or Adagio; Allegro or Presto—so familiar to all music-lovers.

Emanuel Bach was born in Weimar in 1714. He was sent to Frankfort to study law, but instead established a chorus with himself as its leader. In 1738 he went to Berlin, where, two years later, we see him playing the accompaniments to ‘Old Fritz’s’ flute solos. The royal amateur’s accomplishments were of doubtful merit, but Bach stood the strain for twenty-seven years, at the end of which the king abandoned the flute for the sword, and Bach abandoned the king to finish his days in Hamburg as director of church music. But church music was not his métier. His cantatas were ‘pot-boilers.’ Emanuel was made of different stuff from his father. He fitted into his time—a polished courtier, more witty than pious, more suave than sincere, more brilliant than deep, but of solid musicianship none the less—the technician par excellence, both as composer and executant, a clean-cut formalist, a thorough harmonist ‘crammed full of racy novelty,’ though not free from pedantry, and preferring always the galant style of the period. The ‘polite’ instrument, the harpsichord, was essentially his. The ‘Essay on the True Manner of Playing the Clavier,’ which he wrote in Berlin, is still of value to-day. His technique was, no doubt, derived from that of his father, but he introduced a still more advanced method of fingering.

His great importance to history, however, lies in his instrumental compositions, comprising no less than two hundred and ten solo pieces—piano sonatas, rondos, concertos, trio-sonatas of the conventional type (two violins and bass), six string quartets and the symphonies printed in 1780. These works exercised a dual force. While yielding to the taste of the time, they held the balance to the side of greater harmonic richness and artistic propriety; on the other hand, they played an important part in the further development of the prevailing forms to a point where they could become ‘free enough and practical enough to deal with the deep emotions.’ ‘As yet people looked on the art as a refined sort of amusement. Not until Beethoven had written his music did its possibilities as a vehicle for deep human feeling and experience become evident.’[26] By following fashion Bach became its leader, and so exercised a widespread influence over his contemporaries and immediate followers. For a few years, says Mr. W. H. Hadow, the fate of music depended upon Emanuel Bach; Mozart himself, though directly influenced by him only in later life, called him ‘the father of us all.’

Bach may hardly be said to have originated the modern ‘pianistic’ style—the free, brilliant manner of writing particularly adapted to the requirements of the instrument. Couperin and the astonishing Domenico Scarlatti were before him. Naturally the instrument which he used was not nearly so resonant or sonorous as the piano of our day; an instrument the strings of which were plucked by quills attached to the key lever, not hit by hammers as the strings of our piano, was, of course, devoid of all sustaining power. This fact accounts for the infinite number of ornaments, trills, mordents, grace notes, bewildering in their variety, with which Bach’s sonatas are replete. Despite the technical reason for their existence we cannot forego the obvious analogy between them and the rococo style prevalent in the architecture and decorations of the period. Emanuel Bach’s music was as fashionable as that style, and his popularity outlasted it. Strange as it may seem, ‘Bach,’ in the eighteenth century and beyond, always meant ‘Emanuel’!

Quite a different sort of man was Emanuel’s elder brother, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, the favorite son of his father and thought to be the most gifted, too. But the definition of genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains’ would not fit his gifts. Wilhelm preferred a good time to concentrated labor, hence his name is not writ large in history. Yet his work, mostly preserved only in manuscript—concertos, suites, sonatas and fantasias—shows more real individuality, more Innigkeit and, at times, real passion than does his brother’s. And, moreover, something that could never happen to his brother’s works happened to one of his. It was ascribed to his father and was so published in the Bach Society’s edition of Sebastian’s works. In the examples of his work, resurrected by the indefatigable Dr. Riemann, we are often surprised by harmonic vagaries and rhythmic ingenuities that recall strongly the older Bach; the impassioned fancy of that polyphonic giant finds often a faint echo in the rhapsodic wanderings of his eldest son.

Friedemann Bach’s life was, like his work, rambling, irregular. Born in 1710, he was organist in Dresden from 1733 to 1747; then at Halle, in the church that was Handel’s drilling ground under old Zachau. His extravagances cost him this post and perhaps many another, for he roved restlessly over Germany for the rest of his life until, a broken-down genius of seventy-four, he ended his career in Berlin in 1784.

In sharp contrast to the career of the oldest son of Bach stands that of the youngest, Johann Christian (born 1734, in Leipzig), chiefly renowned as an opera composer of the Italian school. He has been called the ‘Milanese Bach,’ because from 1754 to 1762 he made that Italian city his home and there wrote operas, and became a Catholic to qualify as the organist of Milan Cathedral; and the ‘London Bach’ because there he spent the remaining twenty years of his life, a most useful and honorable career. His first London venture was in opera, too, but his historic importance does not lie in that field. Symphonies (including one for two orchestras), concertos for piano and various other instruments, quintets, quartets, trios, sonatas for violin, and numerous piano pieces which did much to popularize the new instrument, are his real monuments. Trained at first by his brother Emanuel, he was bound to follow the polite, elegant style of the period, and more so perhaps because of his Italian experience. For that reason his value has been greatly underestimated. But he is, nevertheless, an important factor in the stylistic reform that prepared the way for the great classics, and the upbuilding of German instrumental music. Of his influence upon Mozart and Haydn we shall have more to say anon. That influence was, of course, largely Italian, for Bach followed the Italian pattern in his sonatas. It was he that passed on to Mozart the singing allegro which he had brought with him from Italy, and so he may be considered in a measure the communicator of Pergolesi’s genius.

As the centre of London musical life Christian Bach exercised a tremendous influence in the formation of popular taste.[27] The subscription concerts which he and another German, Carl Friedrich Abel (1725-1787), instituted in 1764, were to London what the Concerts spirituels were to Paris. Not only symphonies, but cantatas and chamber works of every description were here performed in the manner of our public concerts of to-day, and the higher forms of music were thus placed for the first time within the reach of a great number of people. After 1775 these concerts took place in the famous Hanover Square Rooms and were continued until 1782. In the following year another series, known as the ‘Professional Concerts,’ was begun and since that time the English capital has had an unbroken succession of symphonic concerts.

IV

The writer of musical history is confronted at every point with the problem of classification. The men whom we have discussed can, though united by ties of nationality and even family, hardly be considered as of one school. We have taken them as the representatives of the North German musical art; yet, as we were obliged to state, Southern influence affected nearly all of them. Similarly, we should find in analyzing the music of the Viennese that a more or less rugged Germanism had entered into it. J. J. Fux (1660-1741), the pioneer of the ‘Viennese school’; Georg Reutter, father and son (1656-1738, and 1708-1772); F. L. Gassmann (1723-1774); Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736-1809); Leopold Hoffman (1730-1772); Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777); and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), who, with others, are usually reckoned as of that school, are all examples of this Germanism. Indeed, these men assume a historic importance only in the degree to which they absorb the advancing reforms of their northern confrères. All of them are indebted for what merit they possess to the great school of stylistic reformers who, about the year 1750, gathered in the beautiful Rhenish city of Mannheim, and whose leader, Johann Stamitz, was, until recently, unknown to historians except as an executive musician. His reappearance has cleared up many an unexplained phenomenon, and for the first time has placed the entire question of the origins of the Classic, or Viennese, style, the style of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, in its proper light. Much of the merit ascribed to Emanuel Bach, for instance, in connection with the sonata, and to Haydn in connection with the symphony belongs rightfully to Stamitz. We may now safely consider the Viennese school, like that of Paris, as an offshoot of the Mannheim school and shall, therefore, discuss both as subsidiary to it.

The Mannheim reform brought into instrumental music, as we have said, one essentially new idea—the idea of contrast. Contrast is one of the two fundamental principles of musical form; the other is reiteration. Reiteration in its various forms—imitation, transposition, and repetition—is a familiar element in every musical composition. The ‘germination’ of musical ideas, the logical development of such ideas, or motives—into phrases, sentences, sections, and movements, is in practice only a broadening of that principle. All the forms which we have discussed—the aria, the canzona, the toccata, the fugue, and the sonata—owe their being to various methods of applying it. Contrast, the other leading element of form, may be applied technically in several different ways, of which only two interest us here—contrast of key and dynamic contrast. Contrast of key is the chief requisite in the most highly organized forms, such as the fugue and the sonata, and as such had been consciously employed for practically two hundred years. But dynamic contrast—the change from loud to soft, and vice versa, especially gradual change, which, moreover, carries with it the broader idea of varying expression, contrast of mood and spirit, never entered into instrumental music until the advent of Johann Stamitz. It is this duality of expression that distinguishes the new from the old; this is the outstanding feature of Classic music over all that preceded it.

Johann Stamitz was born in Deutsch-Brod, Bohemia, in 1717, and died at Mannheim in 1757. In the course of his forty years he revolutionized instrumental practice and laid the foundations of modern orchestral technique, created a new style of composition, which enabled Mozart and Beethoven to give adequate expression to their genius; and originated a method of writing which resulted in the abolition of the Figured Bass. When, in 1742, Charles VII had himself crowned emperor in Frankfort, Stamitz first aroused the attention of the assembled nobility as a violin virtuoso. The Prince Elector of the Palatinate, Karl Theodor, at once engaged him as court musician. In 1745 he made him his concert master and musical director. Within a year or two, Stamitz made the court band into the best orchestra of Europe. Burney, Leopold Mozart, and others who have left their judgment of it convince us that it was as good as an orchestra could be with the limitations imposed by the still imperfect intonation of certain instruments. It was, at any rate, the first orchestra on a modern footing, whose members were artists, bent upon artistic interpretation. It is curious to read Leopold Mozart’s expression of surprise at finding them ‘honest, decent people, not given to drink, gambling, and roistering,’ but such was the reputation musicians as a class enjoyed in those days.[28]

We may recall how Jommelli introduced the ‘orchestral crescendo’ in the Strassburg opera. That he emulated the Mannheim orchestra rather than set an example for it seems unquestionable; for Stamitz had already been at his work ten years when Jommelli arrived. The gradual change from piano to forte, and the sudden change in either direction to indicate a change of mood, not only within single movements, but within phrases and even themes, was bound to lead to important consequences. While fiercely opposed by the pedants among German musicians, the practice found quick acceptance in the large centres where Stamitz’s famous Opus 1 was performed. These Six Sonatas (or Symphonies), ‘ou à trois ou avec toutes (sic) l’orchestre,’ were brought out in 1751 at the Concerts spirituels under Le Gros.[29] Stamitz’s ‘Sonatas’ were performed with drums, trumpets, and horns. Another symphony with horns and oboes, and another with horns and clarinets (a rare novelty), were brought out in the winter of 1754-55, with Stamitz himself as conductor. These ‘symphonies’ were, as a matter of fact, trio-sonatas in the conventional form—two violins and Figured Bass—such as had been produced in great number since the time of Pergolesi. But there was a difference. The Figured Bass was a fully participating third part, not depending upon the usual harpsichord interpretation of the harmony. The compositions were, in fact, true string trios. But they were written for (optional) orchestral execution, and when so performed the added wind instruments supplied the harmonic ‘filling.’ This means, then, the application of the classic sonata form to orchestral music, and virtually the creation of the symphony.[30]

While not, by a long way, parallel with the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, these works of Stamitz are, nevertheless, true symphonies in a classic style, orchestral compositions in sonata form. They have the essential first-movement construction, they are free from the fugato style of the earlier orchestral pieces, and, instead of the indefinite rambling of passage work, they present the clear thematic phraseology, the germination of ideas, characteristic of the form. Their sincere phraseology, says Riemann, ‘their boldness of conception, and the masterly thematic development which became an example in the period that followed ... give Stamitz’s works lasting value. Haydn and Mozart rest absolutely upon his shoulders.’[31]

Following Stamitz’s first efforts there appeared in print a veritable flood of similar works, known in France as Simphonies d’Allemagne, most of them by direct pupils of Stamitz, by F. X. Richter, his associate in Mannheim, by Wagenseil, Toeschi, Holtzbauer, Filtz, and Cannabich, his successor at the Mannheim Pult. Stamitz’s own work comprises ten orchestral trios, fifty symphonies, violin concertos, violin solo and violin-piano sonatas, a fair amount for so short a career. That for a long time this highly interesting figure disappeared from the annals of musical history is only less remarkable than the eclipse of Bach’s fame for seventy-five years after his death, though in Stamitz’s case it was hardly because of slow recognition, for already Burney had characterized him as a great genius. Arteaga in 1785 called him ‘the Rubens among composers’ and Gerbert (1792) said that ‘his divine talent placed him far above his contemporaries.’

V

From these contemporaries we shall select only a few as essential links in the chain of development. Three men stand out as intermediaries between Stamitz and the Haydn-Mozart epoch: Johann Schobert, chiefly in the field of piano music; Luigi Boccherini, especially for stringed chamber-music; and Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, for the symphony. These signalize the ‘cosmopolization’ of the new art; representing, as it were, its French, Italian, and South German outposts.

Schobert is especially important because of the influence which he and his colleague Eckard exercised upon Mozart at a very early age.[32] These two men were the two favorite pianists of Paris salons about the middle of the century. Chamber music with piano obbligato found in Schobert one of its first exponents. A composer of agreeable originality, solid in musicianship, and an unequivocal follower of the Mannheim school, he must be reckoned as a valiant supporter of the German sonata as opposed to its lighter Italian sister, though French characteristics are not by any means lacking in his work.

As one in whom these characteristics predominate we should mention François Joseph Gossec, familiar to us as the writer of opéras comiques, but also important as a composer of trio-sonatas (of the usual kind), some for orchestral performance (like those of Stamitz, ad lib.), and several real symphonies, all of which are clearly influenced in manner by Stamitz and the Mannheimers. Gossec was, in a way, the centre of Paris musical life, for he conducted successively the private concerts given under the patronage of La Pouplinière, those of Prince Conti in Chantilly, the Concert des amateurs, which he founded in 1770, and, eventually, the Concerts spirituels, reorganized by him. The Mercure de France, in an article on Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, calls Gossec France’s representative musician among the pioneers of the new style. Contrasting his work with Rameau’s the critic refers to the latter as being d’une teneur (of one tenor), while Gossec’s is full of nuance and contrast. This slight digression will dispose of the ‘Paris school’ for the present; we shall now proceed to the chief Italian representative of Mannheim principles.

In placing Boccherini before Haydn in our account of the string quartet we may lay ourselves open to criticism, for Haydn is universally considered the originator of that form. But, as in almost every case, the fixing of a new form cannot be ascribed to the efforts of a single man. Although Haydn’s priority seems established, Boccherini may more aptly be taken as the starting point, for, while Haydn represents a more advanced state of development, Boccherini at the outset displays a far more finished routine.

In principle, the string quartet has existed since the sixteenth century, when madrigals[33] and frottole written in vocal polyphony and for vocal execution were adapted to instruments. The greater part of the polyphonic works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was written in four parts, and so were the German lieder, French chansons, and Italian canzonette, as well as the dance pieces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In instrumental music four-part writing has never been superseded, despite the quondam preference for many voices, and the one hundred and fifty years’ reign of Figured Bass. But a strictly four-part execution was adhered to less and less, as orchestral scoring came more and more into vogue for suite and sonata. Hence the string quartet, when it reappeared, was as much of a novelty in its way as the accompanied solo song seemed to be in 1600. Quartetti, sonate a quattro and sinfonie a quattro are, indeed, common titles in the early seventeenth century, but their character is distinctly different from our chamber music; they are orchestral, depending on harmonic thickening and massed chordal effects, while the peculiar charm of the string quartet depends on purity and integrity of line in every part, and while, at the same time, each part is at all times necessary to the harmonic texture. Thus the string quartet represents a more perfect fusion of the polyphonic and harmonic ideals than any other type. The exact point of division between ‘orchestral’ and true quartets cannot, of course, be determined, though the distinction becomes evident in works of Stamitz and Gossec, when, in one opus, we find trios or quartets, some of which are expressly determined for orchestral treatment while others are not.

It is Stamitz’s reform again which ‘loosened the tongue of subjective expression,’ and, by turning away from fugal treatment, prepared the way for the true string quartet. Boccherini’s first quartets are still in reality symphonies; and in Haydn’s early works, too, the distinction between the two is not clear. Boccherini’s, however, are so surprisingly full of new forms of figuration, so sophisticated in dynamic nuances, and so strikingly modern in style that, without the previous appearance of Stamitz, Boccherini would have to be considered a true pioneer.

Luigi Boccherini was born in 1743 in Lucca. After appearing in Paris as ‘cellist he was made court virtuoso to Luiz, infanta of Spain, and accordingly he settled in Madrid. Frederick William II of Prussia acknowledged the dedication of a work by conferring the title of court composer on Boccherini, who then continued to write much for the king and was rewarded generously, like Haydn and Mozart after him. The death of his royal patron in 1797 and the loss of his Spanish post reduced the composer to poverty at an old age (he died 1805). He has to his credit no less than 91 string quartets, 125 string quintets, 54 string trios and a host of other works, including twenty symphonies, also cantatas and oratorios. To-day he is neglected, perhaps unjustly, but in this he shares the fate of all the musicians of his period who abandoned themselves to the lighter, more elegant genre of composition.

The relation of Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf to the Mannheim school is, in the symphonic field, relatively the same as that of Schobert in regard to the piano, and Boccherini in connection with the string quartet. Again we must guard against the criticism of detracting from the glory of Haydn. Both Haydn and Dittersdorf were pioneers in developing the symphony according to the Mannheim principles, but, of course, Haydn in his later works represents a more advanced stage, and will, therefore, more properly receive full treatment in the next chapter. Ditters probably composed his first orchestral works between 1761 and 1765, while kapellmeister to the bishop of Grosswardein in Hungary, where he succeeded Michael Haydn (of whom presently). Though Joseph Haydn’s first symphony (in D-major) had already appeared in 1759, it had as yet none of the ear-marks of the new style.

Ditters was doubtless more broadly educated than most musicians of his time,[34] and probably in touch with the latest developments, a fact borne out by his works, which, however, show no material advance over his models.

These works include, notably, twelve orchestral symphonies on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, besides about one hundred others and innumerable pieces of chamber music, many of the lighter social genre, and several oratorios, masses, and cantatas. His comic operas have a special significance and will be mentioned in another connection. Ditters was more fortunate in honors than material gain. Both the order of the Golden Spur, which seems to have been a coveted badge of greatness, and the patent of nobility came to him; but after the death of his last patron, the prince bishop of Breslau, he was forced to seek the shelter of a friendly roof, the country estate of Ignaz von Stillfried in Bohemia, where he died in 1799.

His Vienna colleague, Georg Christian Wagenseil,[35] we may dismiss with a few words, for, though one of the most fashionable composers of his time, his compositions have hardly any historic interest—they lack real individuality. But he was in the line of development under the Mannheim influence, and he did for the piano concerto what Schobert did for the sonata—applied to it the newly crystallized sonata form. His concertos were much in vogue; little Mozart had them in his prodigy’s repertoire—and no doubt they left at least a trace of their influence on his wonderfully absorbent mind. Wagenseil enjoyed a favored existence at court as teacher of the Empress Maria Theresa and the imperial princesses, with the rank of imperial court composer. The Latin titles on his publications seem to reflect his somewhat pompous personality. Pieces in various forms for keyboard predominate, but the usual quota of string music, church music, and some symphonies are in evidence. His sixteen operas are a mere trifle in comparison with the productivity of the period.

Before closing our review of the minor men of the period which had its climax in the practically simultaneous appearance of Haydn and Mozart, we must take at least passing notice of two men, the brother of one and the father of the other, who, by virtue of this close connection, could not fail to exercise a very direct influence upon their greater relatives. By a peculiar coincidence these two had one identical scene of action—the archiepiscopal court of Salzburg, that Alpine fastness hemmed in by the mountains of Tyrol, Styria, and Bohemia. Hither Leopold Mozart had come from Augsburg, where he was born in 1719, to study law at the university; but he soon entered the employ of the Count of Thurn, canon of the cathedral, as secretary, and subsequently that of the prince archbishop as court musician, and here he ended his days at the same court but under another master of a far different sort. Johann Michael Haydn became his confrère, or rather his superior, in 1762, having secured the place of archiepiscopal kapellmeister, left vacant by the death of the venerable Eberlin. Before this he had held a similar but less important post at Grosswardein (Hungary) as predecessor to Ditters, and, like his slightly older brother Joseph, had begun his career as chorister in St. Stephen’s in Vienna.

Salzburg had always been one of the foremost cities of Europe in its patronage of musical art. Not only the reigning prelates, but people of every station cultivated it. At this time it held many musicians of talent; and its court concerts as well as the elaborate musical services at the cathedral and the abbey of St. Peter’s, the oratorios and the occasional performances under university auspices contributed to the creation of a real musical atmosphere. The old Archbishop Sigismund, whose death came only too soon, must, in spite of the elder Mozart’s misgivings on the subject, have been a liberal, appreciative patron, for the interminable leaves of absence, for artistic and commercial purposes, required by both father and son were sufficient to try the patience of anyone less understanding. Leopold’s chief merit to the world was the education of his son, for the sake of which he is said to have sacrificed all other opportunities as pedagogue. His talents in that direction were considerable, as his pioneer ‘Violin method’ (1756) attests. It experienced several editions, also in translations, some even posthumous. His compositions, through the agency of which his great son first received the influence of Mannheim, were copious but of mediocre value. Nevertheless, their formal correctness and sound musicianship were most salutary examples for the emulation of young Wolfgang. Leopold had the good sense to abandon composition as soon as he became aware of his son’s genius and to bend every effort to its development. The elder Mozart received the title of court composer and the post of vice-kapellmeister under Michael Haydn, when the latter came to Salzburg.

Michael Haydn’s career in Salzburg was a most honorable one. It placed him in a state of dignity which, though eminently gratifying, was less calculated to rouse inspiration and ambition than the stormier career of his greater brother. Notwithstanding this fact, he has left something like twenty-eight masses, two requiems, 114 graduals, 66 offertories, and much other miscellaneous church music; songs, choruses (the earliest four-part a capella songs for men’s voices); thirty symphonies (not to be compared in value to his brother’s), and numerous smaller instrumental pieces! But a peculiar form of modesty which made him averse to seeing his works in print confined his influence largely to local limits. It is a most fortunate fact that within these limits it fell upon so fertile a ground. For young Mozart was most keen in his observation of Haydn’s work, appreciated its value and received the first of those valuable lessons that the greater Joseph taught him in this roundabout fashion.

C. S.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] History of German Literature (1907).

[23] ‘The Emperor Joseph, who objected to Haydn’s “tricks and nonsense,” requested Dittersdorf in 1786 to draw a parallel between Haydn’s and Mozart’s chamber music. Dittersdorf answered by requesting the Emperor in his turn to draw a parallel between Klopstock and Gellert; whereupon Joseph replied that both were great poets, but that Klopstock must be read repeatedly in order to understand his beauties, whereas Gellert’s beauties lay plainly exposed to the first glance. Dittersdorf’s analogy of Mozart with Klopstock, Haydn with Gellert (!), was readily accepted by the Emperor.’ Cf. Otto Jahn: ‘Life of Mozart,’ Vol. III.

[24] Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758) was, according to Riemann, the first to introduce this contrast. He was one of the most interesting of the minor composers of Bach’s time. Cf. Riemann’s Collegium Musicum, No. 10.

[25] His compositions were chiefly for that instrument, and he achieved lasting merit with his Anweisung die Flöte traversière zu spielen (1752). He was born in 1697 and died in 1773.

[26] Surette and Mason: ‘The Appreciation of Music.’

[27] He was music master to the queen and in a way entered upon the heritage of Handel.

[28] For further details concerning the Mannheim orchestra we refer the reader to Vol. VIII, Chap. II.

[29] The Concerts spirituels, founded in 1725 by Philidor, were so called because they were held on church holidays, when theatres were closed. Mouret, Thuret, Royer, Mendonville, d’Auvergne, Gaviniès, and Le Gros succeeded Philidor in conducting them till the revolution in 1791 brought them to an end. Another series of concerts, though private, is important for us here, because of its early acceptance of Mannheim principles. This was inaugurated by a wealthy land owner, La Pouplinière, who had been an enthusiastic protector of Rameau. ‘It was he,’ said Gossec, ‘who first introduced the use of horns at his concerts, following the counsel of the celebrated Johann Stamitz.’ This was about 1748, and in 1754 Stamitz himself visited the orchestra, after which Gossec became its conductor and developed the new style.

[30] Riemann cites Scheibe in the Kritische Musikus to the effect that symphonies with drums and trumpets (or horns) were already common in 1754, but we may safely assume that they were not symphonies in our sense—orchestral sonatas—for it must be recalled that the word Sinfonia was applied to pieces of various kinds, from a note-against-note canzona (seventeenth century) to interludes in operas, oratorios, etc., and more especially to the Italian operatic overture as distinguished from the French. The German dance-suite, too, from 1650 on, had a first movement called Sinfonia, which was superseded by the overture (in the French style) soon after. In the early eighteenth century the prevailing orchestral piece was an overture, usually modelled after the Italian Sinfonia. Not this, indeed, but the chamber-sonata was the real forerunner of the symphony, as our text has just shown.

[31] Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, II². We are indebted to Riemann for this entire question of Stamitz, whose findings are the result of very recent researches.

[32] The first four piano concertos ascribed to Mozart in Koechel’s catalogue have now been proved to be merely studies based on Schobert’s sonatas. Cf. T. de Wyzewa et G. de St. Foix: Un maître inconnu de Mozart.

[33] The majority of madrigals were, however, written in five parts.

[34] This education he owed to the magnanimity of Prince Joseph of Hildburghausen, whom in his youth he attended as page. In 1761 the prince secured him a place in the Vienna court orchestra which he held till his engagement in Grosswardein.

[35] Born, Vienna, 1715; died there 1777.

CHAPTER III
THE VIENNESE CLASSICS: HAYDN AND MOZART

Social aspects of the classic period; Vienna, its court and its people—Joseph Haydn—Haydn’s work; the symphony; the string quartet—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—Mozart’s style; Haydn and Mozart; the perfection of orchestral style—Mozart and the opera; the Requiem; the mission of Haydn and Mozart.

I

We have prefaced the last chapter with a review of the political and literary forces leading up to the classic period. A brief survey of social conditions may similarly aid the reader in supplying a background to the important characters of this period and the circumstances of their careers. First, we shall avail ourselves of the picturesque account given by George Henry Lewes in his ‘Life of Goethe.’ ‘Remember,’ he says, ‘that we are in the middle of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution is as yet only gathering its forces together; nearly twenty years must elapse before the storm breaks. The chasm between that time and our own is vast and deep. Every detail speaks of it. To begin with science—everywhere the torch of civilization—it is enough to say that chemistry did not then exist. Abundant materials, indeed, existed, but that which makes a science, viz., the power of prevision based on quantitative knowledge, was still absent; and alchemy maintained its place among the conflicting hypotheses of the day.... This age, so incredulous in religion, was credulous in science. In spite of all the labors of the encyclopedists, in spite of all the philosophic and religious “enlightenment,” in spite of Voltaire and La Mettrie, it was possible for Count St. Germain and Cagliostro to delude thousands; and Casanova found a dupe in the Marquise d’Urfé, who believed he could restore her youth and make the moon impregnate her![36] It was in 1774 that Messmer astonished Vienna with his marvels of mystic magnetism. The secret societies of Freemasons and Illuminati, mystic in their ceremonies and chimerical in their hopes—now in quest of the philosopher’s stone, now in quest of the perfectibility of mankind—a mixture of religious, political, and mystical reveries, flourished in all parts of Germany, and in all circles.

‘With science in so imperfect a condition we are sure to find a corresponding poverty in material comfort and luxury. High-roads, for example, were only found in certain parts of Germany; Prussia had no chaussée till 1787. Mile-stones were unknown, although finger-posts existed. Instead of facilitating the transit of travellers, it was thought good political economy to obstruct them, for the longer they remained the more money they spent in the country. A century earlier stage coaches were known in England; but in Germany public conveyances were few and miserable; nothing but open carts with unstuffed seats. Diligences on springs were unknown before 1800,’ ... and we have the word of Burney and of Mozart that travel by post was nothing short of torture![37]

If we examine into the manners, customs, and tastes of the period we are struck with many apparently absurd contradictions. Men whose nature, bred in generations of fighting, was brutal in its very essence outwardly affected a truly inordinate love of ceremony and lavish splendor. The same dignitaries who discussed for hours the fine distinctions of official precedence, or the question whether princes of the church should sit in council on green seats or red, like the secular potentates, would use language and display manners the coarseness of which is no longer tolerated except in the lowest spheres of society. While indulging in the grossest vulgarities and even vices, and while committing the most wanton cruelties, this race of petty tyrants expended thousands upon the glitter and tinsel with which they thought to dazzle the eyes of their neighbors. While this is more true of the seventeenth than of the eighteenth century, and while Europe was undergoing momentous changes, conditions were after all not greatly improved in the period of Haydn and Mozart. The graceful Italian melody which reigned supreme at the Viennese court, or the glitter of its rococo salons, found a striking note of contrast in the broad dialect of Maria Theresa and the ‘boiled bacon and water’ of Emperor Joseph’s diet. A stronger paradox than the brocade and ruffled lace of a courtier’s dress and the coarse behavior of its wearer could hardly be found.

The great courts of Europe, Versailles, Vienna, etc., were imitated at the lesser capitals in every detail, as far as the limits of the princes’ purses permitted. As George Henry Lewes says of Weimar, ‘these courts but little corresponded with those conceptions of grandeur, magnificence, or historical or political importance with which the name of court is usually associated. But, just as in gambling the feelings are agitated less by the greatness of the stake than by the variations of fortune, so, in social gambling of court intrigue, there is the same ambition and agitation, whether the green cloth be an empire or a duchy. Within its limits Saxe-Weimar, for instance, displayed all that an imperial court displays in larger proportions. It had its ministers, its chamberlains, pages, and sycophants. Court favor and disgrace elevated and depressed as if they had been imperial smiles or autocratic frowns. A standing army of six hundred men, with cavalry of fifty hussars, had its war department, with war minister, secretary, and clerk. Lest this appear too ridiculous,’ Lewes adds that ‘one of the small German princes kept a corps of hussars, which consisted of a colonel, six officers and two privates!’ Similarly every prince, great or petty, gathered about him, for his greater glory, the disciples of the graceful arts. Not a count, margrave, or bishop but had in his retinue his court musicians, his organists, his court composer, his band and choir, all of whom were attached to their master by ties of virtually feudal servitude, whose social standing was usually on a level with domestic servants and who were often but wretchedly paid. We have had occasion to refer to a number of the more important centres, such as Berlin, where Frederick the Great had Johann Quantz, Franz Benda, and Emanuel Bach as musical mentors; Dresden, where Augustus the Third had Hasse and Porpora;[38] Stuttgart, where Karl Eugen gave Jommelli a free hand; Mannheim, where Karl Theodor gathered about him that genial band of musical reformers with Stamitz at their head; and Salzburg, where Archbishop Sigismund maintained Michael Haydn, Leopold Mozart, and many another talented musician.

As for the greater courts, they became the nuclei for aggregations of men of genius, to many of whom the world owes an everlasting debt of gratitude, but who often received insufficient payment, and who, in some cases, even suffered indignities at the hands of their masters which are calculated to rouse the anger of an admiring posterity. London and Paris were, of course, as they had been for generations, the most brilliant centres—the most liberal and the richest in opportunities for musicians of talent or enterprise. At the period of which we speak the court of George II (and later George III) harbored Johann Christian Bach, Carl Friedrich Abel, and Pietro Domenico Paradies; at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette Rameau was in his last years, while Gluck and Piccini were the objects of violent controversy, while Philidor, Monsigny, and Grétry were delighting audiences with opéra comique, and while a valiant number of instrumentalists, like Gossec, Gaviniès, Schobert, and Eckhard, were building up a French outpost of classicism. Capitals which had but recently attained international significance, like Stockholm and St. Petersburg, assiduously emulated the older ones; at the former, for instance, Gustavus III patronized Naumann, and at the latter Catherine II entertained successively Galuppi, Traetto, Paesiello, and Sarti.

But Vienna was now the musical capital of Europe. It was the concentrated scene of action where all the chief musical issues of the day were fought out. There the Mannheim school had its continuation, soon after its inception; there Haydn and Mozart found their greatest inspiration—as Beethoven and Schubert did after them—it remained the citadel of musical Germany, whose supremacy was now fairly established. It is significant that Burney, in writing the results of his musical investigations on the continent, devotes one volume each to Italy and France but two to Germany, notwithstanding his strong Italian sympathies. However, the reason for this is partly the fact that Germany was to an Englishman still somewhat of a wilderness, and that the writer felt it incumbent upon him to give some general details of the condition of the country. We can do no better than quote some of his observations upon Vienna in order to familiarize the reader with the principal characters of the drama for which it was the stage.[39]

After describing the approach to the city, which reminds him of Venice, and his troubles at the customs, where his books were ‘even more scrupulously read than at the inquisition of Bologna,’ he continues: ‘The streets are rendered doubly dark and dirty by their narrowness, and by the extreme height of the houses; but, as these are chiefly of white stone and in a uniform, elegant style of architecture, in which the Italian taste prevails, as well as in music, there is something grand and magnificent in their appearance which is very striking; and even those houses which have shops on the ground floor seem like palaces above. Indeed, the whole town and its suburbs appear at the first glance to be composed of palaces rather than of common habitations.’

Now for the life of the city. ‘The diversions of the common people ... are such as seem hardly fit for a civilized and polished nation to allow. Particularly the combats, as they are called, or baiting of wild beasts, in a manner much more savage and ferocious than our bull-baiting, etc.’ The better class, of course, found its chief amusement in the theatres, but the low level of much of this amusement may be judged from the fact that rough horse-play was almost necessary to the success of a piece. Shortly before Burney’s visit the customary premiums for actors who would ‘voluntarily submit to be kicked and cuffed’ were abolished, with the result that theatres went bankrupt ‘because of the insufferable dullness and inactivity of the actors.’ By a mere chance Burney witnessed a performance of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, which as a play shocked his sensibilities, but he speaks in admiring terms of the orchestra, which played ‘overtures and act-tunes’ by Haydn, Hoffman, and Vanhall. At another theatre the pieces were so full of invention that it seemed to be music of some other world.

Musically, also, the mass at St. Stephen’s impressed him very much: ‘There were violins and violoncellos, though it was not a festival,’ and boys whose voices ‘had been well cultivated.’ At night, in the court of his inn, two poor scholars sang ‘in pleasing harmony,’ and later ‘a band of these singers performed through the streets a kind of glees in three and four parts.’ ‘Soldiers and common people,’ he says, ‘frequently sing in parts, too,’ and he is forced to the conclusion that ‘this whole country is certainly very musical.’

Through diplomatic influence our traveller is introduced to the Countess Thun (afterwards Mozart’s patron), ‘a most agreeable lady of very high rank, who, among other talents, possesses as great skill in music as any person of distinction I ever knew; she plays the harpsichord with that grace, ease, and delicacy which nothing but female fingers can arrive at.’ Forthwith he meets ‘the admirable poet Metastasio, and the no less admirable musician Hasse,’ as well as his wife, Faustina, both very aged; also ‘the chevalier Gluck, one of the most extraordinary geniuses of this, or perhaps any, age or nation,’ who plays him his Iphigénie, just completed, while his niece, Mlle. Marianne Gluck, sang ‘in so exquisite a manner that I could not conceive it possible for any vocal performance to be more perfect.’ He hears music by ‘M. Hoffman, an excellent composer of instrumental music’; by Vanhall, whom he meets and whose pieces ‘afforded me such uncommon pleasure that I should not hesitate to rank them among the most complete and perfect compositions for many instruments which the art of music can boast(!)’; also some ‘exquisite quartets by Haydn, executed in the utmost perfection’; and he attends a comic opera by ‘Signor Salieri, a scholar of M. Gassman,’ at which the imperial family was present, his imperial majesty being extremely attentive ‘and applauding very much.’[40] ‘His imperial majesty’ was, of course, Joseph II, who we know played the violoncello, and was, in Burney’s words, ‘just musical enough for a sovereign prince.’ The entire imperial family was musical, and the court took its tone from it. All the great houses of the nobility—Lichtenstein, Lobkowitz, Auersperg, Fürnberg, Morzin—maintained their private bands or chamber musicians. Our amusing informant, in concluding his account of musical Vienna, says: ‘Indeed, Vienna is so rich in composers and incloses within its walls such a number of musicians of superior merit that it is but just to allow it to be among German cities the imperial seat of music as well as of power.’

It need hardly be repeated that Italian style was still preferred by the society of the period, just as Italian manners and language were affected by the nobility. Italian was actually the language of the court, and how little German was respected is seen from the fact that Metastasio, the man of culture par excellence, though living in Vienna through the greater part of his life, spoke it ‘just enough to keep himself alive.’ Haydn, like many others, Italianized his name to ‘Giuseppe’ and Mozart signed himself frequently Wolfgango Amadeo Mozart!

This, then, is the city in which Haydn and Mozart were to meet for the first time just one year after Burney’s account. Though the first was the other’s senior by twenty-four years their great creative periods are virtually simultaneous. They date, in fact, from this meeting, which marks the beginning of their influence upon each other and their mutual and constant admiration. Both already had brilliant careers behind them as performers and composers, and it becomes our duty now to give separate accounts of these careers.

C. S.

II
JOSEPH HAYDN

The boundaries of Hungary, the home of one of the most musical peoples of the world, lies only about thirty miles from Vienna. Here, it is said, in every two houses will be found three violins and a lute. Men and women sing at their work; children are reared in poverty and song. In such a community, in the village of Rohrau, near the border line between Austria and Hungary, lived Matthias Haydn, wagoner and parish sexton, with Elizabeth, his wife. They were simple peasant people, probably partly Croatian in blood, with rather more intelligence than their neighbors. After his work was done Matthias played the harp and Elizabeth sang, gathering the children about her to share in the simple recreation. Franz Joseph, the second of these children, born March 31, 1732, gave signs of special musical intelligence, marking the time and following his mother in a sweet, childish voice at a very early age. When he was six he was put in the care of a relative named Frankh, living in Hainburg, for instruction in violin and harpsichord playing, and in singing. Frankh seems to have been pretty rough with the youngster, but his instruction must have been good as far as it went, for two years later he was noticed by Reutter, chapel master at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, and allowed to enter the choir school.

Reutter was considered a great musician in his day—he was ennobled in 1740—but he did not distinguish himself by kind treatment of little Joseph, who was poorly clad, half starved, and indifferently taught. The boy, however, seems, even at this early age, to have had a definite idea of what he wanted, and doggedly pursued his own path. He got what instruction he could from the masters of the school, purchased two heavy and difficult works on thoroughbass and counterpoint, spent play hours in practice on his clavier, and filled reams of paper with notes. He afterwards said that he remembered having two lessons from von Reutter in ten years. When he was seventeen years old his voice broke, and, being of no further service to the chapel master, he was turned out of the school on a trivial pretext.

The period that followed was one that even the sweet-natured man must sometimes have wished to forget. He was without money or friends—or at least so he thought—and it is said he spent the night after leaving school in wandering about the streets of the city. Unknown to himself, however, the little singer at the cathedral had made friends, and with one of the humbler of these he found a temporary home. Another good Viennese lent him one hundred and fifty florins—a debt which Haydn not only soon paid, but remembered for sixty years, as an item in his will shows. He soon got a few pupils, played the violin at wedding festivals and the like, and kept himself steadily at the study of composition. He obtained the clavier sonatas of Emanuel Bach and mastered their style so thoroughly that the composer afterward sent him word that he alone had fully mastered his writings and learned to use them.

At twenty Haydn wrote his first mass, and at about the same time received a considerable sum for composing the music to a comic opera. He exchanged his cold attic for a more comfortable loft which happened to be in the same house in which the great Metastasio lived. The poet was impressed by Haydn’s gifts and obtained for him the position of music master in an important Spanish family, resident in Vienna.

In this way, step by step, the fortunes of the young enthusiast improved. He made acquaintances among musical folk, and occasionally found himself in the company of men who had mounted much higher on the professional ladder than himself. One of these was Porpora, already successful and of international fame. Porpora was at that time singing master in the household of Correr, the Venetian ambassador at Vienna, and he proposed that Haydn should act as his accompanist and incidentally profit by so close an acquaintance with his ‘method.’ Thus Haydn was included in the ambassador’s suite when they went to the baths of Mannersdorf, on the border of Hungary. At the soirées and entertainments of the grandees at Mannersdorf Haydn met some of the well-known musicians of the time—Bonno, Wagenseil, Gluck, and Ditters—becoming warmly attached to the last-named. His progress in learning Porpora’s method, however, was not so satisfactory. The mighty man had no time for the obscure one; the difficulty was obvious. But Haydn, as always, knew what he wanted and did not hesitate to make himself useful to Porpora in order to get the instruction he needed. He was young and had no false pride about being fag to a great man for a purpose. His good-natured services won the master over; and so Haydn was brought into direct connection with the great exponent of Italian methods and ideas.

In 1755 he wrote his first quartet, being encouraged by a wealthy amateur, von Fürnberg, who, at his country home, had frequent performances of chamber music. Haydn visited Fürnberg and became so interested in the composition of chamber music that he produced eighteen quartets during that and the following year. About this time he became acquainted with the Count and Countess Thun, cultivated and enthusiastic amateurs, whose names are remembered also in connection with Mozart, Gluck, and Beethoven. Haydn instructed the Countess Thun both in harpsichord playing and in singing, and was well paid for his services.

The same Fürnberg that drew the attention of Haydn to the composition of string quartets also recommended him to his first patron, Count Morzin, for the position of chapel master and composer at his private estate in Bohemia, near Pilsen. It was there, in 1759, that Haydn wrote his first symphony. He received a salary of about one hundred dollars a year, with board and lodging. With this munificent income he decided to marry, even though the rules of his patron permitted no married men in his employ.

Haydn’s choice had settled on the youngest daughter of a wig-maker of Vienna named Keller; but the girl, for some unknown reason, decided to take the veil. In his determination not to lose so promising a young man, the wig-maker persuaded the lover to take the eldest daughter, Maria Anna, instead of the lost one. The marriage was in every way unfortunate. Maria Anna was a heartless scold, selfish and extravagant, who, as her husband said, cared not a straw whether he was an artist or a shoemaker. Haydn soon gave up all attempts to live with her, though he supplied her with a competence. She lived for forty years after their marriage, and shortly before she died wrote to Haydn, then in London, for a considerable sum of money with which to buy a small house, ‘as it was a very suitable place for a widow.’ For once Haydn refused both the direct and the implied request, neither sending her the money nor making her a widow. He outlived her, in fact, by nine years, purchased the house himself after his last visit to London and spent there the remainder of his life.

To go back, however, to his professional career. Count Morzin was unfortunately soon obliged to disband his players and the change that consequently occurred was one of the important crises of Haydn’s life. He was appointed second chapel master to Prince Anton Esterhàzy, a Hungarian nobleman, whose seat was at Eisenstadt. Here Haydn was to spend the next thirty years, here the friendships and pleasures of his mature life were to lie, and here his genius was to ripen.

The Esterhàzy band comprised sixteen members at the time of Haydn’s arrival, all of them excellent performers. Their enthusiasm and support did much to stimulate the new chapel master, even as his arrival infused a new spirit into the concerts. The first chapel master, Werner, a good contrapuntal scholar, took the privilege of age and scoffed at Haydn’s new ideas, calling him a ‘mere fop.’ The fact that they got on fairly well together is surely a tribute to Haydn’s good nature and genuine humbleness of spirit. The old prince soon died, being succeeded by his brother, Prince Nicolaus. When Werner died some five years later Haydn became sole director. Prince Nicolaus increased the orchestra and lent to Haydn all the support of a sympathetic lover of music, as well as princely generosity. He prepared for himself a magnificent residence, with parks, lakes, gardens, and hunting courses, at Esterhàz, where royal entertainments were constantly in progress. Daily concerts were given, besides operas and special performances for all sorts of festivals. The seclusion of the country was occasionally exchanged for brief visits to Vienna. In 1773 the Empress Maria Theresa—she who, as Electoral Princess, had studied singing with Porpora—was entertained at Esterhàz and heard the first performance of the symphony which bears her name. In 1780 Haydn wrote, for the opening of a new theatre at Esterhàz, an opera which was also performed before royalty at Vienna. He composed the ‘Last Seven Words’ in 1785, and in the same year Mozart dedicated to him six quartets in terms of affectionate admiration.

By the death of Prince Nicolaus, in 1790, Haydn lost not only a patron but a friend whom he sincerely loved. His life at Esterhàz was, on the other hand, full of work and conscientious activity in conducting rehearsals, preparing for performances, and in writing new music. On the other hand, it was curiously restricted in scope, isolated from general society, and detached from all the artistic movements of his period. His relations with the prince were genial and friendly, apparently quite unruffled by discord. Esterhàzy, though very much the grandee, was indulgent, and not only allowed his chapel master much freedom in his art, but also recognized and respected his genius. The system of patronage never produced a happier example of the advantages and pleasures to be gained by both patron and follower; but, after all, a comment of Mr. Hadow seems most pertinent to the situation: ‘It is worthy of remark that the greatest musician ever fostered by a systematic patronage was the one over whose character patronage exercised the least control.’ It is Haydn, of course, who is the subject of this remark.

There was, at that time, an enterprising violinist and concert manager, Johann Peter Salomon, travelling on the continent in quest of ‘material’ for his next London season. As soon as news of the death of Prince Nicolaus reached Salomon, he started for Vienna with the determination to take Haydn back with him to London. Former proposals for a season in London had always been ignored by Haydn, who considered himself bound not to abandon his prince. Now that he was free, Salomon’s persuasions were successful. Haydn, nearly sixty years of age, undertook his first long journey, embarking on the ocean he had never before seen, and going among a people whose language he did not know. He was under contract to supply Salomon with six new symphonies.

They reached London early in the year 1791, and Haydn took lodgings, which seemed very costly to his thrifty mind, with Salomon at 18 Great Pulteney street. The concerts took place from March till May, Salomon leading the orchestra, which consisted of thirty-five or forty performers, while Haydn conducted from the pianoforte. The enterprise was an immediate success. Haydn’s symphonies happened to hit the taste of the time, and his fame as composer was supplemented by great personal popularity. People of the highest rank called upon him, poets celebrated him in verse, and crowds flocked to the concerts.

Heretofore Haydn’s audiences had usually consisted of a small number of people whose musical tastes were well cultivated but often conventional; now he was eagerly listened to by larger and more heterogeneous crowds, whose enthusiasm reacted happily upon the composer. He wrote not only the six symphonies for the subscription concerts, but a number of other works—divertimenti for concerted instruments, a nocturne, string quartets, a clavier trio, songs, and a cantata—and was much in demand for other concerts. At the suggestion of Dr. Burney, the University of Oxford conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Music. The prince of Wales invited him to visit at one of the royal residences; his portrait was painted by famous artists; everybody wished to do him honor. The directors of the professional concerts tried to induce him to break his engagements with Salomon, but, failing in this, they engaged a former pupil of Haydn’s, Ignaz Pleyel from Strassburg, and the two musicians conducted rival concerts. The rivalry, however, was wholly friendly, so far as Haydn and his pupil were concerned. He visited Windsor and the races, and was present at the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey, where he was much impressed by a magnificent performance of ‘The Messiah.’

After a stay of a year and a half in London Haydn returned to Vienna, travelling by way of Bonn, where he met Beethoven, who afterward came to him for instruction. Arriving in Vienna in July, 1792, he met with an enthusiastic reception. Early in 1794 Salomon induced him, under a similar contract, to make another journey to London, and to supply six new works for the subscription concerts. Again Haydn carried all before him. The new symphonies gained immediate favor; the former set was repeated, and many pieces of lesser importance were performed. The famous virtuosi, Viotti and Dussek, took part in the benefits for Haydn and Salomon. Haydn was again distinguished by the court, receiving even an invitation to spend the summer at Windsor, which he declined. In every respect the London visits were a brilliant success, securing a competence for Haydn’s old age, additional fame, and a number of warm personal friendships whose memory delighted him throughout the remaining years of his life.

On his return to Vienna fresh honors awaited the master, who was never again to travel far from home. During his absence a monument and bust of himself had been placed in a little park at Rohrau, his native village. Upon being conducted to the place by his friends he was much affected, and afterwards accompanied the party to the modest house in which he was born, where, overcome with emotion, he knelt and kissed the threshold. In Vienna concerts were arranged for the production of the London symphonies, and many new works were planned. One of the most interesting of these was the ‘National Hymn,’ composed in 1797, to words written by the poet Hauschka. On the birthday of the Emperor Franz II the air was sung simultaneously at the National Theatre in Vienna and at all the principal theatres in the provinces. Haydn also used the hymn as the basis of one of the movements in the Kaiser Quartet, No. 77.

The opportunity afforded Haydn in London of becoming more familiar with the work of Handel had a striking effect upon his genius, turning it toward the composition of oratorios. His reputation was high, but it was destined to soar still higher. Through Salomon, Haydn had received a modified version of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ compiled by Lidley. This, translated into German by van Swieten, formed the libretto of ‘The Creation,’ composed by Haydn in a spirit of great humbleness and piety. It was first performed in Vienna in 1798 and immediately produced a strong impression, the audience, as well as the composer, being deeply moved. Choral societies were established for the express purpose of giving it, rival societies in London performed it during the season of 1800, and it long enjoyed a popularity scarcely less than that of ‘The Messiah.’ Even with this important work his energy was not dulled. Within a short time after the completion of ‘The Creation’ he composed another oratorio, ‘The Seasons,’ to words adapted from Thomson’s poem. This also sprang into immediate favor, and at the time of its production, at least, gained quite as much popularity as ‘The Creation.’

But the master’s strength was failing. After ‘The Seasons’ he wrote but little, chiefly vocal quartets and arrangements of Welsh and Scottish airs. On his seventy-third birthday Mozart’s little son Wolfgang, aged fourteen, composed a cantata in his honor and came to him for his blessing. Many old friends sought out the aged man, now sick and often melancholy, and paid him highest honors. His last public appearance was in March, 1808, at a performance of ‘The Creation’ at the university in Vienna, conducted by Salieri. Overcome with fatigue and emotion Haydn was carried home after the performance of the first part, receiving as he departed the respectful homage of many distinguished people, among whom was Beethoven. From that time his strength waned, and, on May 31, 1809, he breathed his last. He was buried in a churchyard near his home; but, in 1820, at the command of Prince Anton Esterhàzy, his body was removed to the parish church at Eisenstadt, where so many years of his tranquil life had been spent.

It is of no small value to consider Haydn the man, before even Haydn the musician, for many of the qualities which made him so respected and beloved as a man were the bedrock upon which his genius was built. There was little of the obviously romantic in his life, nearly all of which was spent within a radius of thirty miles; but it glows with kindness, good temper, and sterling integrity. He was loyal to his emperor and his church; thrifty, generous to less fortunate friends and needy relatives, generous, also, with praise and appreciation. Industrious and methodical in his habits, he yet loved a jest or a harmless bit of fooling. He was droll and sunny tempered, modest in his estimate of himself, but possessing at the same time a proper knowledge of his powers. He was not beglamored by the favor of princes; and, while steadfast in the pursuit of his mission, seemed, nevertheless, to have been without ambition, in the usual sense, even as he was without malice, avarice, or impatience. Good health and good humor were the accompaniment of a gentle, healthy piety. These qualities caused him to be beloved in his lifetime; and they rank him, as a man, forever apart from the long list of geniuses whose lives have been torn asunder by passions, by undue sensitiveness, by excesses, or overweening ambition—all that is commonly understood by ‘temperament.’ The flame of Haydn’s temperament burned clearly and steadily, even if less intensely; and the record of his life causes a thrill of satisfaction for his uniform and consistent rightness, his few mistakes.

It remains now to consider the nature of the service rendered by this remarkable man to his art, through the special types of composition indissolubly connected with his name. These are the symphony and the quartet.

III

The early history of the development of the symphony is essentially that of the development of the sonata, which we have described in the last chapter. When Joseph Haydn actually came upon the scene as composer, the term symphony, or ‘sinfonia,’ had been applied to compositions for orchestra, though these pieces bore little resemblance to modern productions. They were usually written in three movements, two of them being rather quick and lively, with a slow one between, and were scored for eight parts—four strings, two oboes or two flutes, and two ‘cors de chasse,’ or horns. Often the flutes or oboes were used simply to reinforce the strings, while the horns sustained the harmony. The figured bass was still in use, often transferred, however, to the viol di gamba, and the director used the harpsichord. The treatment of the parts was still crude and stiff, showing little feeling for the tone color of the instruments, balancing of parts, or variety of treatment.

The internal structure, also, was still very uncertain. The first movement, now usually written in strict sonata form, did not then uniformly contain the two contrasting themes, nor the codas and episodes of the modern schools; and the working-out section and recapitulation were seldom clearly defined. Even in the poorest examples, however, the sonata scheme was generally vaguely present; and in the best often definitely marked. We must not lose sight, however, of the epoch-making work of Stamitz and his associates at Mannheim, both in the fixing of symphonic form and the advancement of instrumental technique. Stamitz’s Opus I appeared, it will be recalled, in 1751; Dittersdorf’s emulation of the Mannheim symphonies began about 1761. The intervening decade was a period of experiment and constant improvement. Haydn, though his first symphony, composed in 1759, showed none of the new influence, must have been cognizant of the advance.

Haydn’s first symphony, written when he was twenty-seven, is described by Pohl as being a ‘small work in three movements, for two violins, viola, bass, two hautboys, and two horns; cheerful and unpretending in character.’ From this time on his experiments in the symphonic form were continuous, and more than one hundred examples are credited to him. He was so situated as to be able to test his work by actual performance. To this fortunate circumstance may be attributed the fact that he made great improvements in orchestration, and that he gained steadily in clearness of outline, variety of treatment, and enlargement of ideas.

In five years Haydn composed thirty symphonies, besides many other pieces. His reputation spread far beyond the bounds of Austria, and the official gazette of Vienna called him ‘our national favorite.’ His seclusion furthered his originality and versatility, and his history seems a singularly marked example of growth from within, rather than growth according to the currents of contemporary taste. By 1790 the number of symphonies had reached one hundred and ten, and the steps of his development can be clearly traced. There are traces of the old traditions in the doubling of the parts, sometimes throughout an entire movement; in the neglect of the wind instruments, sometimes for the entire adagio; and in long solo passages for bassoon or flute. Such peculiarities mark most of the symphonies up to 1790. Among these crudities, however, are signs of a steady advance in other respects. In the all-important first movement he more and more gave the second theme its rights, felt for new ways of developing the themes themselves, and elaborated the working-out section. The coda began to make its appearance, and the figured bass was abandoned. He established the practice of inserting the minuet between the slow movement and the finale, thus setting the example for the usual modern practice. The middle strings and wind instruments gradually grew more independent, the musical ideas more cultivated and refined, his orchestration clearer and more buoyant. His work is cheerful and gay, showing solid workmanship, sometimes deep emotion, rarely poetry. Under his hands the symphony, as an art form, gained stability, strength, and a technical perfection which was to carry the deeper message of later years, and the message of the great symphonic writers who followed him.

During Haydn’s comparative solitude at Eisenstadt, however, a wonderful youth had come into the European musical world, had absorbed with the facility of genius everything that musical science had to offer, had learned from Haydn what could be done with the symphony as he had learned from Gluck what could be done with opera, and had outshone and outdistanced every composer living at the time. What Haydn was able to give to Mozart was rendered back to him with abundant interest. Mozart made use of a richer and more flexible orchestration, achieved greater beauty and poignancy of expression; and Haydn, while retaining his individuality, still shows marked traces of this noble influence. The early works of Haydn were far in advance of his time, and were highly regarded; but they do not reveal the complete artist, and they have been almost entirely superseded in public favor by the London symphonies, composed after Mozart’s death. In these he reaches heights he had never before attained, not only in the high degree of technical skill, but in the flood of fresh and genial ideas, and in new, impressive harmonic progressions. The method of orchestration is much bolder and freer. The parts are rarely doubled, the bass and viola have their individual work, the parts for the wind instruments are better suited to their character, and greater attention is paid to musical nuances. In these last works Haydn arrived at that ‘spiritualization of music’ which makes the art a vehicle not only for intellectual ideas, but for deep and earnest emotion.

Parallel with the growth of the symphonic form and its variety of treatment came also a real growth of the orchestra. The organization of 1750, consisting of four strings and four wind instruments, had become, in 1791, a group of thirty-five or forty pieces, consisting of, besides the strings, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets and drums. To these were sometimes added clarinets, and occasionally special instruments, such as the triangle or cymbals. Thus, by the end of the century, the form of the symphony, according to modern understanding, was practically established, and the orchestra organized nearly according to its present state. Haydn represents the last stage of the preparatory period, and he was, in a very genuine and literal sense, the founder, and to some degree the creator, of the modern symphony.

The string quartet had its birth almost simultaneously with the symphony, and is also the child of Haydn’s genius. Its ancestors are considered by Jahn to be the divertimenti and cassations designed for table music, serenades, and such entertainments, and written often in four or five movements for four wind instruments, wind instruments with strings, or even for clavier. This species of composition was transferred, curiously enough, to two violins, viola and bass—the latter being in time replaced by the 'cello. This combination of instruments, so easily available for private use, appealed especially to Haydn, and his later compositions for it are still recognized as models.

The quartet, like the symphony, is based on the sonata form, and developed gradually, in a manner similar to the larger work. Haydn’s first attempt in this species was made at the age of twenty-three, and eighty-three quartets are numbered among his catalogued works. The early ones are very like the work of Boccherini, and consist of five short movements, with two minuets. As Haydn progressed his tendency was to make the movements fewer and longer. After Quartet No. 44 the four-movement form is generally used, and his craftsmanship grows more delicate. Gradually he filled the rather stiff and formal outline with ideas that are graceful and charming, even though they may sound somewhat elementary to modern ears. He recognized the fact that in the quartet each individual part must not be treated as solo, nor yet should the others be made to supply a mere accompaniment to the remainder. Each must have its rôle, according to the capacity of the instrument and the balance of parts. The best of Haydn’s quartets exhibit not only a well-established form and a fine perception of the relation of the instruments, but also the more spiritual qualities—tenderness, playfulness, pathos. He is not often romantic, neither is there any trace of far-fetched mannerisms or fads. He gave the form a life and freshness which at once secured its popularity, even though the more scientific musicians of his day were inclined to regard it with suspicion, as a trifling innovation. Nevertheless, it was the form which, together with the symphony, was to attest the greatness of Mozart and Beethoven; and it was from Haydn that Mozart, at least, learned its use.

It is impossible to estimate rightly Haydn’s service to music without taking into account one of his most striking and original characteristics—his use of simple tunes and folk songs. Much light has been thrown on this phase of his genius by the labors of a Croatian scholar, F. X. Kuhac, and the results of his work have been given to the English-speaking world by Mr. Hadow. As early as 1762, in his D-major symphony, composed at Eisenstadt, Haydn began to use folk songs as themes, and he continued to do so, in symphonies, quartets, divertimenti, cantatas, and sacred music, to the very end of his career. In this respect he was unique among composers of his day. No other contemporaneous writer thought it fitting or beautiful to work rustic tunes into the texture of his music. Mozart is witty with the ease of a man of the world, quite different from the naïve drollery of Haydn, whose humor, though perhaps a trifle light and shallow, is always mobile, fresh, and gay. It is pointed out, moreover, by the writers above mentioned that the shapes of Haydn’s melodic phrases are not those of the German, but of the Croatian folk song, and that the rhythms are correspondingly varied. Eisenstadt lies in the very centre of a Croatian colony, and Rohrau, Haydn’s birthplace, has also a Croatian name. Many of its inhabitants are Croatian, and a name, strikingly similar to Haydn’s was of frequent occurrence in that region. Add to this the fact that his music is saturated with tunes which have all the characteristics, both rhythmic and melodic, of the Croatian; that many tunes known to be of that origin are actually employed by him, and the presumption in favor of his Croatian inheritance is very strong.

But Haydn’s speech, like that of every genius, was not only that of his race, but of the world. He had the heart of a rustic poet unspoiled by a decayed civilization. Like Wordsworth, he used the speech of a whole nation, and lived to work out all that was in him. Although almost entirely self-taught, he mastered every scientific principle of musical composition known at his time. He was able to compose for the people without pandering to what was vicious or ignorant in their taste. He identified himself absolutely with secular music, and gave it a status equal to the music of the church. He took the idea of the symphony and quartet, while it was yet rather formless and chaotic, floating in the musical consciousness of the period as salt floats in the ocean, drew it from the surrounding medium, and crystallized it into an art form.

Something has already been said concerning Haydn’s popularity in England, and the genuine appreciation accorded him in that country. Haydn himself remarked that he did not become famous in Germany until he had gained a reputation elsewhere. Even in his old age he remembered, rather pathetically, the animosity of certain of the Berlin critics, who had used him very badly in early life, condemning his compositions as ‘hasty, trivial, and extravagant.’ It is only another proof that Beckmesser never dies. Haydn was his own best critic, though a modest one, when he said, ‘Some of my children are well bred, some ill bred, and, here and there, there is a changeling among them.... I know that God has bestowed a talent upon me, and I thank Him for it. I think I have done my duty, and been of use in my generation by my works.’ He rises above all his contemporaries, except Mozart, as a lighthouse rises above the waves of the sea. With Mozart and Beethoven he formed the immortal trio whose individual work, each with its own quality and its own weight, are the completion and the sum of the first era of orchestral music.

F. B.

IV
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Radically different from the career of Haydn is that of Mozart, which, indeed, has no parallel in the annals of music or any other art. It partakes so much of the marvellous as to defy and to upset all our notions of the growth of creative genius. What Haydn learned by years of endeavor and experience Mozart acquired as if by instinct. The forms evolved by the previous generation, that new elegance of melodic expression, the finesse of articulation and the principles of organic unity, all these were a heritage upon which he entered with full cognizance of their meaning and value. It was as though he had dreamed these things in a previous existence. They made up for him a language which he used more easily than other children use their mother tongue. It is a fact that he learned to read music earlier than words. What common children express in infantile prattle, this marvel of a boy expressed in musical sounds. At three he attempted to emulate his sister at clavier playing and actually picked out series of pleasing thirds; at four, he learned to play minuets which his father taught him ‘as in fun’ (a half-hour sufficed for one), and, at five, he composed others like them himself. At six, these compositions merited writing down, which his father did, and we have the dated notebook as evidence of these first stirrings of genius. At the age of seven Mozart appeared before the world as a composer. The two piano sonatas with violin accompaniment which he dedicated to the Princess Victoire have all the attributes of finished musical workmanship, and, even if his father retouched and corrected these and other early works, the performance, as that of a child, is none the less remarkable.

The extraordinary training and the wise guidance of the father, a highly educated musician, broad-minded and progressive, were the second great advantage accruing to Mozart, whose genius was thus led from the beginning into proper channels. Leopold Mozart, himself under the influence of the Mannheim school, naturally imparted to his son all the peculiarities of their style. Through him also the influence of Emanuel Bach became an early source of inspiration. Pure, simple melody with a natural obvious harmonic foundation was the musical ideal to which Mozart aspired from the first. Nevertheless, the study of counterpoint was never neglected in the training which his father gave him, though it was not until later, under the instruction of Padre Martini, that he came to appreciate its full significance and elevated beauty.

With Mozart the musical supremacy of Germany, first asserted by the instrumental composers of Mannheim and Berlin, is confirmed and extended to the field of vocal music and the opera. Mozart could accomplish this task only by virtue of his broad cosmopolitanism, which, like that of Gluck, enabled him to gather up in his grasp the achievements of the most diverse schools. To this cosmopolitanism he was predisposed by the circumstances of his birth as well as of his early life. The geographical position of Salzburg, where he was born in 1756, was, in a sense, a strategic one. Situated in the southernmost part of Germany, it was exposed to the influence of Italian taste; inhabited by a sturdy German peasantry and bourgeoisie, its sympathies were on the side of German art, and the musicians at court were, at the time of Mozart’s birth, almost without exception Germans. Yet the echoes of the cultural life not only of Vienna, Munich, and Mannheim, but of Milan, Naples, and Paris, reached the narrow confines of this mountain fastness, this citadel of intolerant Catholicism.

But Mozart’s cosmopolitanism was broader than this. He was but six years of age, gifted with a marvellous power of absorption, and impressionable to a degree, when his father began with him and his eleven-year-old sister, also highly talented and already an accomplished pianist, the three-years’ journey—or concert tour, as we should say to-day—which took them to Munich, to Vienna, to Mannheim, to Brussels, Paris, London, and The Hague. They played before the sovereigns in all these capitals and were acclaimed prodigies such as the world had never seen. How assiduously young Mozart emulated the music of all the eminent composers he met is seen from the fact that four concertos until recently supposed to have been original compositions were simply rearrangements of sonatas by Schobert, Honauer, and Eckhardt.[41] Similarly, in London he carefully copied out a symphony by C. F. Abel, until recently reckoned among his own works; and a copy of a symphony by Michael Haydn, his father’s colleague in Salzburg, has also been found among his manuscripts. But the most powerful influence to which he submitted in London was that of Johann Christian Bach, who determined his predilection for Italian vocal style and Italian opera.

Already, in 1770, when he and his father were upon their second artistic journey, he tried his hand both at Italian and German opera, with La finta semplice and Bastien und Bastienne, and it is significant that during their production he was already exposed to the theories of Gluck, who brought out his Alceste in that year. But it must be said that neither of the two youthful works shows any traits of these theories. The first of them failed of performance in Vienna and was not produced until later at Salzburg; the other was presented under private auspices at the estate of the famous Dr. Messmer of ‘magnetic’ fame. But in the same year Mozart, then fourteen years of age, made his debut in Italian opera seria with Mitradite at Milan. This was the climax of a triumphal tour through Italy, in the course of which he was made a member of the Philharmonic academies of Verona and Bologna, was given the Order of the Golden Spur by the Pope, and earned the popular title of Il cavaliere filarmonico.

Upon his return to Salzburg young Mozart became concert master at the archiepiscopal court, and partly under pressure of demands for occasional music, partly spurred on by a most extraordinary creative impulse, he turned out works of every description—ecclesiastical and secular; symphonies, sonatas, quartets, concertos, serenades, etc., etc. He had written no less than 288 compositions, according to the latest enumeration,[42] when, at the age of twenty-one, he was driven by the insufferable conditions of his servitude to take his departure from home and seek his fortune in the world. This event marked the period of his artistic adolescence. Accompanied by his mother he went over much of the ground covered during his journey as a prodigy, but where before there was universal acclaim he now met utter indifference, professional opposition and intrigue, and general lack of appreciation. However futile in a material sense, this broadening of his artistic horizon was of inestimable value to the ripening genius.

While equally sensitive to impressions as before, he no longer merely imitated, but caught the essence of what he heard and welded it by the power of his own genius into a new and infinitely superior musical idiom. Now for the first time he rises to the heights, to the exalted beauty of expression which has given his works their lasting value. Already in the fullness of his technical power, equipped with a musicianship which enabled him to turn to account every hint, every suggestion, this virtuoso in creation no less than execution fairly drank in the gospel of classicism. Mannheim became a new world to him, but in his very exploration of it he left the indelible footprints of his own inspiration.

If he met the Mannheim musicians on an equal footing it followed that he could approach those of Paris with a certain satirical condescension. But, if his genius was recognized, professional intrigue prevented his drawing any profit from it—he was reduced to teaching and catering to patronage in the most absurd ways, from writing a concerto for harp and flute (both of which he detested) to providing ballets for Noverre, the all-powerful dancer of the Paris opera. His adaptability to circumstances was extraordinary. But all to no avail; the total result of his endeavors was the commission to write a symphony for the Concerts spirituels then conducted by Le Gros. Nowhere else has he shown his power of adaptability in the same measure as in this so-called ‘Paris Symphony.’ It is, as Mr. Hadow says, perhaps the only piece of ‘occasional’ music that is truly classic. The circumstances of its creation appear to us ridiculous but are indicative of the musical intelligence of Paris at this time. The premier coup d’archet, the first attack, was a point of pride with the Paris orchestra, hence the piece had to begin with all the instruments at once, which feat, as soon as accomplished, promptly elicited loud applause. ‘What a fuss they make about that,’ wrote Mozart. ‘In the devil’s name, I see no difference. They just begin all together as they do elsewhere. It is quite ludicrous.’ For the same reason the last movement of the Paris Symphony begins with a unison passage, piano, which was greeted with a hush. ‘But directly the forte began they took to clapping.’ Referring to the passage in the first Allegro, the composer says, ‘I knew it would make an effect, so I brought it in again at the end, da capo.’ And, despite those prosaic calculations, the symphony ‘has not an unworthy bar in it,’ and it was one of the most successful works played at these famous concerts. Yet Paris held out no permanent hope to Mozart and he was forced to return to service in Salzburg, under slightly improved circumstances.[43]

It is nothing short of tragic to see how the young artist vainly resisted this dreaded renewal of tyranny, and finally yielded, out of love for his father. His liberation came with the order to write a new opera, Idomeneo, for Munich in 1781. This work constitutes the transition from adolescence to maturity. It is the last of his operas to follow absolutely the precedents of the Italian opera seria, and its success definitely determined the course of his artistic career. In the same year he severed his connection with the Salzburg court (but not until driven to desperation and humiliated beyond words), settled in Vienna, and secured in a measure the protection of the emperor. But for his livelihood he had for a long time to depend upon concerts, until a propitious circumstance opened a new avenue for the exercise of his talents. Meantime he had experienced a new revelation. His genius had been brought into contact with that of Joseph Haydn, whom he met personally at the imperial palace in 1781 during the festivities occasioned by the visit of Grand Duke Paul of Prussia.[44] This master’s works now became the subject of his profound study, which bore almost immediate results in his instrumental works.

The propitious circumstance alluded to above lay in another direction. Joseph II had made himself the protector of the German drama in Vienna and had given the theatre a national significance. His patriotic convictions induced him to adopt a similar course with the opera, though his own personal tastes lay clearly in the direction of Italy. At any rate, he abolished the costly spectacular ballet and Italian opera and instituted in their stead a ‘national vaudeville,’ as the German opera was called. The theatre was opened in February, 1778, with a little operetta, Die Bergknappen, by Umlauf, and this was followed by a number of operas partly translated from the Italian or French, including Röschen und Colas by Monsigny, Lucile, Silvain, and Der Hausfreund by Grétry; and Anton und Antonette by Gossec. In 1781 the emperor commissioned Mozart to contribute to the repertoire a singspiel, and a suitable libretto was found in Die Enführung aus dem Serail. It had an extraordinary success. In the flush of his triumph Mozart married Constanze Weber, sister of the singer Aloysia Weber, the erstwhile sweetheart of Mannheim. This again complicated his financial circumstances; for his wife, loyal as she was, knew nothing of household economy. Not until 1787 did Mozart secure a permanent situation at the imperial court, and then with a salary of only eight hundred florins (four hundred dollars), ‘too much for what I do, too little for what I could do,’ as he wrote across his first receipt. His duties consisted in providing dance music for the court! Gluck died in the year of Mozart’s appointment, but his position with two thousand florins was not offered to Mozart. To the end of his days he had to endure pecuniary difficulties and even misery.

Intrigue of Italian colleagues, with Salieri, Gluck’s pupil, at their head, moreover placed constant difficulties in Mozart’s way, and when, in 1785, his ‘Marriage of Figaro’ was brought out in Vienna it came near being a total failure because of the purposely bad work of the Italian singers. But at Prague, shortly after, the opera aroused the greatest enthusiasm, and out of gratitude Mozart wrote his next opera, Don Giovanni, for that city (1787). In Vienna again it met with no success. In this same wonderful year he completed, within the course of six weeks, the three last and greatest of his symphonies.

In a large measure the composer’s own character—his simple, childlike and loyal nature—stood in the way of his material success. When, in 1789, he undertook a journey to Berlin with Prince Lichnowsky Frederick William II offered him the place of royal kapellmeister with a salary of three thousand thalers. But his patriotism would not allow him to accept it in spite of his straitened circumstances; and when, after his return, he was induced to submit his resignation to the emperor, so that, like Haydn, he might seek his fortune abroad, he allowed his sentiment to get the better of him at the mere suggestion of imperial regret. The only reward for his loyalty was an order for another opera. This was Così fan tutte, performed in 1790.