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THE ART OF MUSIC

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

Home Concert

Painting by Fritz von Uhde

THE ART OF MUSIC: VOLUME SEVEN

Pianoforte and Chamber Music

Department Editor:

LELAND HALL, M.A.
Past Professor of Musical History, University of Wisconsin

Introduction by
HAROLD BAUER

NEW YORK
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC

Copyright, 1915, by
THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF MUSIC, Inc.
[All Rights Reserved]

PREFATORY NOTE

The editor has not attempted to give within the limits of this single volume a detailed history of the development of both pianoforte and chamber music. He has emphasized but very little the historical development of either branch of music, and he has not pretended to discuss exhaustively all the music which might be comprehended under the two broad titles.

The chapters on pianoforte music are intended to show how the great masters adapted themselves to the exigencies of the instrument, and in what manner they furthered the development of the difficult technique of writing for it. Also, because the piano may be successfully treated in various ways, and because it lends itself to the expression of widely diverse moods, there is in these chapters some discussion of the great masterpieces of pianoforte literature in detail.

The arrangement of material is perhaps not usual. What little has been said about the development of the piano, for example, has been said in connection with Beethoven, who was the first to avail himself fully of the advantages the piano offered over the harpsichord. A discussion, or rather an analysis, of the pianoforte style has been put in the chapter on Chopin, who is even today the one outstanding master of it.

In the part of the book dealing with chamber music the material has been somewhat arbitrarily arranged according to combinations of instruments. The string quartets, the pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets, the sonatas for violin and piano, and other combinations have been treated separately. The selection of some works for a more or less detailed discussion, and the omission of even the mention of others, will undoubtedly seem unjustifiable to some; but the editor trusts at least that those he has chosen for discussion may illumine somewhat the general progress of chamber music from the time of Haydn to the present day.

For the chapters on violin music before Corelli and the beginnings of chamber music we are indebted to Mr. Edward Kilenyi, whose initials appear at the end of these chapters.

Leland Hall

INTRODUCTION

The term Chamber Music, in its modern sense, cannot perhaps be strictly defined. In general it is music which is fine rather than broad, or in which, at any rate, there is a wealth of detail which can be followed and appreciated only in a relatively small room. It is not, on the whole, brilliantly colored like orchestral music. The string quartet, for example, is conspicuously monochrome. Nor is chamber music associated with the drama, with ritual, pageantry, or display, as are the opera and the mass. It is—to use a well worn term—very nearly always absolute music, and, as such, must be not only perfect in detail, but beautiful in proportion and line, if it is to be effective.

As far as externals are concerned, chamber music is made up of music for a solo instrument, with or without accompaniment (excluding, of course, concertos and other like forms, which require the orchestra, and music for the organ, which can hardly be dissociated from cathedrals and other large places), and music for small groups of instruments, such as the string trio and the string quartet, and combinations of diverse instruments with the piano. Many songs, too, sound best in intimate surroundings; but one thinks of them as in a class by themselves, not as a part of the literature of chamber music.

With very few exceptions, all the great composers have sought expression in chamber music at one time or another; and their compositions in this branch seem often to be the finest and the most intimate presentation of their genius. Haydn is commonly supposed to have found himself first in his string quartets. Mozart’s great quartets are almost unique among his compositions as an expression of his genius absolutely uninfluenced by external circumstances and occasion. None of Beethoven’s music is more profound nor more personal than his last quartets. Even among the works of the later composers, who might well have been seduced altogether away from these fine and exacting forms by the intoxicating glory of the orchestra, one finds chamber music of a rich and special value.

This special value consists in part in the refined and unfailing musical skill with which the composers have handled their slender material; but more in the quality of the music itself. The great works of chamber music, no matter how profound, speak in the language of intimacy. They show no signs of the need to impress or overwhelm an audience. Perhaps no truly great music does. But operas and even symphonies must be written with more or less consideration for external circumstances, whereas in the smaller forms, composers seem to be concerned only with the musical inspiration which they feel the desire to express. They speak to an audience of understanding friends, as it were, before whom they may reveal themselves without thought of the effectiveness of their speech. They seem in them to have consulted only their ideals. They have taken for granted the sympathetic attention of their audience.

The piano has always played a commanding rôle in the history of chamber music. From the early days when the harpsichord with its figured bass was the foundation for almost all music, both vocal and instrumental, few forms in chamber music have developed independently of it, or of the piano, its successor. The string quartet and a few combinations of wind instruments offer the only conspicuous exceptions. The mass of chamber music is made up of pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets, of sonatas for pianoforte and various other instruments; and, indeed, the great part of pianoforte music is essentially chamber music.

It may perhaps seem strange to characterize as remarkably fine and intimate the music which has been written for an instrument often stigmatized as essentially unmusical. But the piano has attracted nearly all the great composers, many of whom were excellent pianists; and the music which they have written for it is indisputably of the highest and most lasting worth. There are many pianoforte sonatas which are all but symphonies, not only in breadth of form, but in depth of meaning. Some composers, notably Beethoven and Liszt, demanded of the piano the power of the orchestra. Yet on the whole the mass of pianoforte music remains chamber music.

The pianoforte style is an intricate style, and to be effective must be perfectly finished. The instrument sounds at its best in a small hall. In a large one its worst characteristics are likely to come all too clearly to the surface. And though it is in many ways the most powerful of all the instruments, truly beautiful playing does not call upon its limits of sound, but makes it a medium of fine and delicately shaded musical thought. To regard it as an instrument suited primarily to big and grandiose effects is grievously to misunderstand it, and is likely, furthermore, to make one overlook the possibilities of tone color which, though often denied it, it none the less possesses.

In order to study intelligently the mechanics, or, if you will, the art of touch upon the piano, and in order to comprehend the variety of tone-color which can be produced from it, one must recognize at the outset the fact that the piano is an instrument of percussion. Its sounds result from the blows of hammers upon taut metal strings. With the musical sound given out by these vibrating strings must inevitably be mixed the dull and unmusical sound of the blow that set them vibrating. The trained ear will detect not only the thud of the hammer against the string, but that of the finger against the key, and that of the key itself upon its base. The study of touch and tone upon the piano is the study of the combination and the control of these two elements of sound, the one musical, the other unmusical.

The pianist can acquire but relatively little control over the musical sounds of his instrument. He can make them soft and loud, but he cannot, as the violinist can, make a single tone grow from soft to loud and die away to soft again. The violinist or the singer both makes and controls tone, the one by his bow, the other by his breath; the pianist, in comparison with them, but makes tone. Having caused a string to vibrate by striking it through a key, he cannot even sustain these vibrations. They begin at once to weaken; the sound at once grows fainter. Therefore he has to make his effects with a volume of sounds which has been aptly said to be ever vanishing.

On the other hand, these sounds have more endurance than those of the xylophone, for example; and in their brief span of failing life the skillful pianist may work somewhat upon them according to his will. He may cut them exceedingly short by allowing the dampers to fall instantaneously upon the strings, thus stopping all vibrations. He may even prolong a few sounds, a chord let us say, by using the sustaining pedal. This lifts the dampers from all the strings, so that all vibrate in sympathy with the tones of the chord and reënforce them, so to speak. This may be done either at the moment the notes of the chord are struck, or considerably later, after they have begun appreciably to weaken. In the latter case the ear can detect the actual reënforcement of the failing sounds.

Moreover, the use of the pedal serves to affect somewhat the color of the sounds of the instrument. All differences in timbre depend on overtones; and if the pianist lifts all dampers from the strings by the pedals, he will hear the natural overtones of his chord brought into prominence by means of the sympathetic vibrations of other strings he has not struck. He can easily produce a mass of sound which strongly suggests the organ, in the tone color of which the shades of overtones are markably evident.

The study of such effects will lead him beyond the use of the pedal into some of the niceties of pianoforte touch. He will find himself able to suppress some overtones and bring out others by emphasizing a note here and there in a chord of many notes, especially in an arpeggio, and by slighting others. Such an emphasis, it is true, may give to a series of chords an internal polyphonic significance; but if not made too prominent, will tend rather to color the general sound than to make an effect of distinct drawing.

It will be observed that in the matter of so handling the volume of musical sound, prolonging it and slightly coloring it by the use of the pedal or by skillful emphasis of touch, the pianist’s attention is directed ever to the after-sounds, so to speak, of his instrument. He is interested, not in the sharp, clear beginning of the sound, but in what follows it. He finds in the very deficiencies of the instrument possibilities of great musical beauty. It is hardly too much to say, then, that the secret of a beautiful or sympathetic touch, which has long been considered to be hidden in the method of striking the keys, may be found quite as much in the treatment of sounds after the keys have been struck. It is a mystery which can by no means be wholly solved by a muscular training of the hands; for a great part of such training is concerned only with the actual striking of the keys.

We have already said that striking the keys must produce more or less unmusical sounds. These sounds are not without great value. They emphasize rhythm, for example, and by virtue of them the piano is second to no instrument in effects of pronounced, stimulating rhythm. The pianist wields in this regard almost the power of the drummer to stir men to frenzy, a power which is by no means to be despised. In martial music and in other kinds of vigorous music the piano is almost without shortcomings. But inasmuch as a great part of pianoforte music is not in this vigorous vein, but rather in a vein of softer, more imaginative beauty, the pianist must constantly study how to subject these unmusical sounds to the after-sounds which follow them. In this study he will come upon the secret of the legato style of playing.

If the violinist wishes to play a phrase in a smooth legato style, he does not use a new stroke of his bow for each note. If he did so, he would virtually be attacking the separate notes, consequently emphasizing them, and punctuating each from the other. Fortunately for him, he need not do so; but the pianist cannot do otherwise. Each note he plays must be struck from the strings of his instrument by a hammer. He can only approximate a legato style—by concealing, in one way or another, the sounds which accompany this blow.

The so-called legato touch on the keyboard is one in which the fingers cling closely to the keys, and by which, therefore, the keys are pressed down rather than struck. In this way the player actually eliminates one of the three sounds of attack, namely, that of the finger hitting the key. To a certain extent he also minimizes the sound of the key hitting its base, a sound which, moreover, the felt cushion of the base does much to lessen. At the risk of throwing all preconceived theories of legato touch into question, it may be said that this unpleasant sound can be wholly eliminated by a sort of light, quick, lifting touch, which, without driving the key down even to its base, will yet cause the hammer to spring up and hit the string above it.

By such means as these the pianist can at least subdue, if he cannot silence, the noises which in some measure must inevitably accompany his playing. The more he can do so, the smoother and pleasanter his playing will become. In so far as the tone of the pianoforte can be sensuous and warm, he can make it so in the measure in which he avoids giving prominence to the blows and thuds which ever threaten it perilously. The player who pounds is the player whose ear has not taken into account this harsh and unmusical accompaniment of noises. The player who can make the piano sing is he who, in listening to the mysterious vibrations of its after-sounds, has come to recognize and subdue those noises which too often interrupt and obscure them.

The value of the piano as an instrument of musical expression will always be the subject of discussion. It has undoubtedly two great shortcomings, which place the pianist under serious disadvantages. It cannot sustain tone, and the tones which can be produced on it will ever be more or less marred by unmusical noises which cannot often be avoided. But these very shortcomings make possible some peculiar beauties and a peculiar vitality which characterize pianoforte music alone. And, apart from these, in its great power, its possibilities of dynamic nuances, and its unlimited scope of harmonic effects, it is not excelled, if, indeed, it is equalled, by any other single instrument.

Finally, let it be remembered that there is in a great deal of pianoforte music—in that of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms and Debussy—almost unfailingly an intimacy of mood. It is for this quality of intimacy that pianoforte music will long be cherished
as chamber music. It is a quality of which the player who wishes not only to interpret great music, but also to win what there is of genuine musical beauty from his instrument, should ever be mindful.

Harold Bauer

November, 1915.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME SEVEN

ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME SEVEN

PIANOFORTE AND CHAMBER MUSIC

CHAPTER I
KEYBOARD INSTRUMENTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
KEYBOARD TECHNIQUE

Keyboard instruments and their derivation; the clavichord and its mechanism; the harpsichord and its relatives, virginal, cembalo, etc.; technique and use of the harpsichord—The beginnings of harpsichord music; the Gabrielis and Merulo; early forms; the influence of harmony and the crystallization of form—Frescobaldi and other organist-composers for harpsichord; early English virginal collections; John Bull, etc.—Genesis of the suite; influence of lute-music; Froberger, Denis Gaultier, etc.; Kuhnau—Development of the harpsichord ‘style’; great players: Chambonnières, etc.

I

The foundations of pianoforte music were laid during the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth, with the foundations of instrumental music in general. Though there were at this time no pianofortes, there were three keyboard instruments, all of which not only took their part in the development of instrumental music, but more especially prepared the way for the great instrument of their kind which was yet unborn. These were the organ, the harpsichord, and the clavichord.

The organ was then, as now, primarily an instrument of the church, though there were small, portable organs called regals, which were often used for chamber music and even as a part of accompaniment, together with other instruments, in the early operas. With the history of its construction we shall not concern ourselves here (see Vol. VI, Chap. XIV). From the middle of the fourteenth century Venice had been famous for her organists, because the organs in St. Mark’s cathedral were probably the best in Europe. Up to the end of the seventeenth century they were very imperfect. Improvements were slow. Great as was the rôle taken by the organ all over Europe, from the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome to the northern town of Lübeck in Germany, the action was hard and uneven, the tuning beset with difficulties. But the organ was the prototype of all keyboard instruments. Upon the imperfect organs of those days composers built up the keyboard style of music.

The harpsichords and the clavichords were what one might call the domestic substitutes for the organ. Of these the clavichord was perhaps slightly the older instrument. Its origin is somewhat obscure, though it is easy to see in it the union of the organ keyboard with strings, on the principle of that ancient darling of the theorists, the monochord, the great and undisputed ruler over intervals of musical pitch, from the days of Pythagoras down throughout the Middle Ages. This monochord was hardly an instrument. It was a single string stretched over a movable bridge. By shifting the bridge the string could be stopped off into different lengths, which gave out, when plucked, different pitches of sound. The relative lengths of the stopped string offered a simple mathematical basis for the classification of musical intervals.

The clavichord worked on the same principle. At the back end of each key lever was an upright tangent, at first of wood, later of metal, which, when the key was depressed, sprang up against the wire string stretched above it. The blow of this tangent caused the wire to vibrate and produce sound; and at the same time the tangent determined the length of the string which was to vibrate, just as the finger determines the length of a violin string by stopping it at some point on the fingerboard. The strings of the clavichord were so stretched that of the two lengths into which the tangent might divide them, the longer lay to the left. It was this longer length which was allowed to vibrate, giving the desired pitch; the shorter length to the right being muffled or silenced by strips of felt laid or woven across the strings. Thus the little tangents at the back end of the keys performed the double function of sounding the string by hitting it and determining its pitch by stopping it. Thus, too, one string served several keys. By the middle of the sixteenth century the normal range was four full octaves, from C to c³. There were many more keys than strings, which was a serious restriction upon music for the instrument; for notes which lay as closely together as, let us say, C-sharp and E could not be sounded at once, since both must be played upon the same string. Not until practically the beginning of the eighteenth century were clavichords made with a string for each key. They were then called bundfrei, in distinction from the older clavichords, which had been called gebunden.

The clavichord always remained square or oblong in shape, and for many years had no legs of its own, but was set upon a table like a box—hence one of its old names, Schachbrett, chess-board. The case was often of beautiful wood, sometimes inlaid and adorned with scrolls, and the under side of the cover was often painted with allegorical pictures and pious or sententious mottoes. The keys were small, the touch extremely light. The tone, though faint, had a genuine sweetness and an unusual warmth; and, by a trembling up and down movement of the wrist while the finger still pressed the key, the skilled player could give to it a palpitating quality, allied to the vibrato of the human voice or the violin, which went by the name of Bebung. This lifelike pulsing of tone was its most precious peculiarity, one which unhappily is lacking to the pianoforte, in most ways immeasurably superior. Hardly less prized by players who esteemed fineness of expression above clearness and brilliance, was the responsiveness of its tone to delicate gradations of touch. This made possible fine shading and intimate nuances. On this account it was highly valued, especially in Germany, as a practice instrument, upon which the student could cultivate a discriminating sensitive touch, and by which his ear could be trained to refinement of perception.

The tone of the clavichord was extremely delicate. Its subtle carrying quality could not secure it a place in the rising orchestras, nor in the concert hall. It belonged in the study, or by the fireside, and in such intimate places was enshrined and beloved by those who had ears for the finer whisperings of music. But not at once was it so beloved in the course of the early development of our instrumental music. Frail and restricted, it was but a makeshift to bring within the circle of the family the growing music of its powerful overshadowing prototype—the organ.

The harpsichord was quite different and shared with its weaker sister only the keyboard and the wire strings. It was in essence a harp or a psalter played by means of a keyboard. The strings were tuned as in a harp and were plucked by means of quills attached to the key-levers. The tone was sharp and dry and could not be influenced by the player’s touch. Instruments of this nature seem first to have been made in England. At any rate it was in England that a considerable literature was first written for them. The English virginals are small harpsichords. The origin of the quaint name is no longer carried back to the love of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth for such music as the instrument could produce. Nor is it likely that it was so named on account of its size (it could be held on the lap), whereby it recommended itself to the convenience of young ladies with a musical turn. Most likely its name is due to its range, which was the high range of a young woman’s voice, an octave higher than the centre octave of the organ.

The harpsichord, or, more exactly, instruments which were plucked by quills attached to key-levers, went by many names besides virginals. In Italy it was called the clavicembalo, later the gravicembalo, or merely cembalo; in France the clavecin; in Germany the Kielflügel. The more or less general name of spinet seems to be derived from the name of a famous Italian maker working at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Giovanni Spineta, of Venice.

These instruments developed side by side with the clavichord but to much greater proportions. In the course of time several strings were strung for one note, one or all of which might be used, at the discretion of the player, by means of stops similar in appearance and use to organ stops. Sometimes the extra strings of a note would be tuned at the octave or upper fifth, permitting the player to produce the mixture effects common to the organ. Many instruments were fitted with two and even three banks of keys, which operated upon distinct sets of strings, or might bring some special sort of quill into play; and these keyboards could be used independently for contrast, or coupled for volume, or the music might be divided upon them. There were also pedals for special effects.

There was great need of these numerous sets of strings, these various sorts of quills, these keyboards and devices for coupling them, because the mechanism of the harpsichord action was unsusceptible to the fine gradations of touch. It was essentially a mechanical instrument; its range of what we may call tone-shading was defined by the number of purely mechanical adjuncts with which it happened to be furnished. Variety depended upon the ingenuity of the player in bringing these means into play. This does not, of course, imply that there was no skill in ‘touching’ the harpsichord. The player had to practice hours then as now, to make his touch light and, above all, regular and even. The slightest clumsiness was perhaps even more evident to the ear of the listener in the frosty tones of the harpsichord than it would be today in the warmer and less distinct tone of the pianoforte. But once this evenness and lightness attained, the science of ‘touch’ was mastered and the player proceeded to search out musical effects in other directions.

In the course of these years from 1500 to 1750 it was made more and more to impress the ear by means of added strings and stops and sets of quills, till it became the musical keystone of chamber music, of growing orchestra and flowering opera. At the same time it was made ever more beautiful to the eye. It grew fine in line and graceful in shape; its wood was exquisitely finished and varnished; it was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and was beautifully decorated and enscrolled. The keys were small and usually of box-wood, the diatonic keys often black, the chromatic keys white with mother-of-pearl or ivory. Artisan and artist lavished their skill upon it. What a centre it became! How did it sound under the fingers of Count Corsi, behind the scenes of his private theatre in the Palazzo Corsi at Florence, while noble men and gentle ladies sang out the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a great king of France and Maria de Medici his bride, when the first Italian opera was sung in public?

The great Monteverdi’s antique orchestra clustered about two harpsichords, only a few years later in Mantua, when ‘Ariadne’ brought tears to the eyes of princes. How was it in Venice when Cavalli was of all musicians the most famous, in the public theatre of San Cassiano? It supported the oratorios of Carissimi in Rome, and his cantatas as well. And in 1679 the great Bernardo Pasquini, organist of the people and the senate of Rome, presided at the harpsichord when the new theatre of Capranica was opened, and the amiable Corelli led the violins. And so they all presided at the harpsichord, these brilliant writers of operas now of all music the most discarded, down to the days of the great Scarlatti in Naples, of Handel in London, of Keiser and Graun in Hamburg, and Hasse, the beloved Saxon, in Dresden. Lully the iron-willed, he who watched alertly the eyebrow of great King Louis XIV of France, sat at his harpsichord in his lair and spilled snuff on the keys while he wrought his operas out of them. Then there was Mattheson, who would sing Antony, and die in the part, yet would come back and play the harpsichord in the Hamburg opera house orchestra after all the house had seen him die. He was determined to sit at the harpsichord, in the centre of the orchestra, and accompany his Egyptian queen to death, when all knew he should rightfully be waiting for her in Heaven with a lyre!

The harpsichord was indeed the centre of public music of orchestra and opera. Even after a race of virtuosi had pulled it to the fore as a brilliant solo instrument it still held its serviceable place in the orchestra. When in the course of time overtures became symphonies, it was still from the harpsichord that the conductor, usually the composer, led the performance of them. Gluck wished to banish it from the orchestra of the opera house; but, when Haydn came to London in 1790 and again in 1794 to lead a performance of his specially composed symphonies, he sat at the instrument which, more than any other, had assisted at the growth of independent instrumental music—at the harpsichord, now slowly but surely withdrawing into the background before the victorious pianoforte.

It is easy to pick flaws in it, now that we can thunder it to silence with our powerful concert grands. It is natural to smile at its thin and none too certain sounds. It is difficult to imagine that the hottest soul of a musician-poet could warm away the chill of it. But what a place it held, and how inextricably is it woven with the development of nearly all the music that now seems the freest speech of passion and imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico Scarlatti, François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the sons of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and the child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music they wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer voice through our pianoforte; but they who wrote it never heard it so; and we who hear it, hear it not as they. Even when by the efforts of some devoted student it is brought to performance upon the instrument which saw its birth, we cannot truly hear it as it sounded once. We listen, as it were, to an intruder hailing from the past, whose usurpation of our modern ears we tolerate because we are curious and because he is winning. With the wigs and powder, the breeches and slippers, the bows and elegancies, it has faded into the past. Its sound is dumb and its spirit is gone.

II

The clavichord and the harpsichord were the instruments upon which music was first shaped for the pianoforte during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Looming behind them and quite dominating them until the last quarter of the seventeenth, until even much later in Germany, was the organ. Instrumental music had a long road to travel before either of the two smaller instruments received the special attention of composers. The organ led this uncertain way, setting out milestones which mark the successive stages in the development of the great forms of instrumental music. Later bands of strings took this leadership away from her. Always the clavichord and the harpsichord followed submissively in the trail of the organ, or carried the impedimenta for the strings, until late in the seventeenth century. Considering the wilderness through which composers had to make their way, their progress was rapid. In the course of the seventeenth century they found forms and styles of music quite unknown when the march began.

Top: the virginal and the gravicembalo.
Bottom: the clavicord and the harpsichord.

In the year 1600 there was no pure-blooded instrumental music. The sets of pieces for organ, lute, or groups of instruments which had appeared up to that time, and such sets had appeared as early as 1502, were almost strict copies of vocal forms, in which the vocal style was scarcely altered. Frequently they were simply arrangements of famous madrigals and chansons of the day. The reason is obvious. For well over a century and a half, the best energy of musicians had gone into the perfecting of unaccompanied choral music, into masses and motets for the church, and into madrigals, the secular counterparts of the motets. Long years of labor had amassed a truly astonishing technique in writing this sort of music. The only art of music was the special art of vocal polyphony. Instruments were denied a style and almost a music of their own.[1] But improvements in sonority and mechanism brought instruments into prominence, and the spirit of the Renaissance stimulated composers to experiment with music for them. This was the beginning of a new art, fraught with difficulties and problems, to meet which composers had only the skill acquired in the old.

By far the most serious of these was the problem of form. The new music was independent of words, and, in order to enjoy freedom from words of any sort and at the same time to exist and to walk abroad, it had to become articulate of itself; had, so to speak, to build a frame or a skeleton out of its proper stuff. It had to be firmly knit and well balanced.

The music of the masses of Palestrina, woven about a well-known text, like that of the madrigals and chansons of Arcadelt and Jannequin, which depended upon popular love-poems, was vague and formless. Such inner coherence as it had of itself was the result of continuous and skillful repetition of short phrases or motives in the course of the various voice-parts. In religious music these motives were for the most part fragments of the plain-song chant, nearly as old as the church itself; and masses frequently went by the name of the plain-song formula out of which they were thus built. Over and over again these bits of melody appeared, now in one part, now in another, the voices imitating each other so constantly that the style has been aptly called the imitative style. It was this style in which the great organists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century first shaped music for the organ. It was the one principle of musical form upon which they knew how to build.

Thus were constructed the ricercars of the famous Andrea Gabrieli (d. 1586), Claudio Merulo (d. 1604), and Giovanni Gabrieli (d. 1612), the great pioneers. The name ricercar is itself significant. It came from ricercare (rechercher), to seek out over and over again. Such were the pieces, a constant seeking after the fleeing fragment of a theme. Older names, originally applied to vocal music, were fuga and caccia—flight and chase. Always there was the idea of pursuit. A little motive of a few notes was announced by one part. The other parts entered one by one upon the hunt of this leader, following, as best the composer could make them, in its very footsteps.

There was a unity in this singleness of purpose, a very logical coherence, so long as the leader was not lost sight of. Little counter-themes might join in the chase and give a spice of variety within the unity. But unhappily for the musical form of these early works, the theme which began was run to earth long before the end of the piece; another took its place and was off on a new trail, again to be run down and to give way to yet a third leader. Unity and coherence were lost, the piece ambled on without definite aim or limit. There is, however, a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli in which the opening theme and a definite counter-theme are adhered to throughout. This is a rather brilliant exception, becoming as the century grows older more and more the rule until, other principles mastered and applied, composers have built up one of the great forms, the true fugue. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the name fantasia is applied to this same incoherent form and in the seventeenth that of capriccio appears. Later, at the time of Bach, the word ricercar signified a fugue worked with unusual technical skill.[2]

The ricercar was the most important of the early instrumental forms, if form it may be called which was at first but a style. The canzona, another form at first equally favored by composers, was destined to have but little effect upon the development of keyboard music. There was no real principle of construction underlying it. It was merely the instrumental counterpart of the famous French chansons of the day. These were part-songs divided into several contrasting sections according to the stanzas of the poems to which they were set. Some of the sections were in simple chord style, like hymns of the present day; others in more or less elaborate polyphonic style. The instrumental canzona followed the same plan. The sections were irregular in length, in number and in metre; and the piece as a whole lacked unity and balance. After the middle of the seventeenth century it was generally abandoned by organists. Other composers, however, took it up, and by regulating the length and number of the various sections, by expanding them, and, finally, by bringing each to a definite close, laid the foundations for the famous Italian sonata da chiesa, cousin germain to the better known Suite.

Other names appear in the old collections, such as Toccata and Prelude, which even today have more or less vague meaning and then were vaguer still. Toccata was at first a general name for any keyboard music. All instrumental music was originally sonata (from sonare, to sound), in distinction from cantata (from cantare, to sing); and from sonata keyboard music was specially distinguished by the appellation toccata (from toccare, to touch). When a characteristic keyboard style had at last worked itself free of the old vocal style, the word toccata signified a piece of music which need have no particular form but must display the particular brilliance of the new style.

The Prelude, too, was at first equally free of the limits of form. As the name plainly tells, it was a short bit of music preparatory to the greater piece to come. Not long ago it was still the fashion for concert pianists to preludize before beginning their programs, running scales and arpeggios over an improvised series of harmonies. The old preludes were essentially the same, very seriously limited, of course, by the childish condition of instrumental technique, and more or less aimless because harmonies were then undefined and unstable. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century organists built up definite schemes, if not forms, of preludizing before the singing of chorales in the Lutheran Church; but this art was naturally restricted to the organ. Preludes for the harpsichord and clavichord took on definite form only when the relatively modern system of major and minor keys had grown up out of the ruin of the ancient system of ecclesiastical modes.

Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that all forms of instrumental music had to attend the definite shaping and establishment of the harmonic idea of music. This was a slow process, and nearly all instrumental music written before 1650, no matter how skillfully the thematic material is woven, lacks to our ears logical form, because of the vagueness or the monotony of its harmony. The system of harmony upon which our great instrumental music rests is so clear and familiar that it is hard for us to imagine another art of music in which it did not constitute a groundwork, in the structure of which, indeed, it held no firm place. Yet in the magnificent vocal music in the style of which Palestrina has left imperishable models, harmony, as we understand it today, did not enter. He and his great predecessors were guided seldom, it is easy to say they were guided not at all, by the beauties of chord progressions. They did not aim at modulations. Rather, by the rules of the art of their day, modulation was forbidden them. No composer might lead his music out of the mode in which it began, to bewilder his hearer in a vague ecstasy of unrest, later to soothe him, gently shifting the harmonies back again home. Before his mind was the ideal of weaving many voice-parts, and to his pen the skill of countless imitations and independent melodies. The beauty of consonance after dissonance could not be appreciated by him, since to him each dissonance was a blemish. His was a music of flowing concord. Such harmonic discord as was inevitable was so smoothly prepared, so gently touched, that it now passes all but unobserved. This was essentially religious music.

Many causes brought about the awakening of musicians to the beauty of harmony and its expressive power. The most effectual was the growing opera. The aim of the first writers of opera was the combination of dramatic recitation and music, from the union of which they shaped a style of music we now call recitative. The singing or reciting voice was accompanied by a few scattered chords upon the harpsichord, these chords serving at first mainly to mark cadences, later little by little to intensify the emotion of the play. It was then but a step to dramatic effects of harmony, to harsh, unprepared discords. The player at the harpsichord, always the nucleus about which the operatic orchestra grouped itself, began to appreciate chords as a power in music. The organist, under the influence of the dramatic style, thought of chords now and then in his slow-moving ricercars. The modes were broken down. A new system of scales, our own, grew up, which was adaptable to the new need of composers, to the sequence and contrast of chords. Harmony grew into music, became more than themes, than imitation and pursuit, the balance of its form.

Until music had thus knit itself anew upon harmony, it was fundamentally unstable. Toccatas, ricercars, canzonas, preludes, even fugues, all wandered unevenly, without proper aim, until harmony came to lay the contrast and balance of chords and keys as the great principle of form. Especially was instrumental music dependent upon this logical principle, for, as we have noted, music without words stands in vital need of self-sufficing form, and without it totters and falls in scattered pieces.

The best skill at knitting themes together was of no avail without harmony. It left but a texture of music flapping to the caprice of the wind of invention. Or, to change the figure, composers laid block by block along the ground; but, without harmony, had not the art to build them up one upon the other into lasting temples. And so the music of the Gabrielis, of Merulo, and of many another man from many a wide corner of Europe lies hidden in the past. It is tentative, not perfect. And the music of later and perhaps greater men lies similarly hidden.

III

The construction of instrumental music on the basis of one central key with excursions or modulations into other keys for the sake of development and variety began to be understood about the middle of the seventeenth century. A very noticeable advance in this direction shows in the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), one of the most brilliant organists before the time of Bach. Much of his music has an archaic sound to our ears. He is by no means wholly free of the old modal restrictions. But he stands as one of the pioneers in the relatively new art of organ music—a bold innovator, guided by the unerring taste of a great artist.

A romantic glory is about his name. As a player he was probably unmatched in his day, and his fame was widespread. It is said that when he played in St. Peter’s at Rome, where for many years he held the position of organist, the vast cathedral was filled with people come to hear him. One of the great masters of the next generation, the German Froberger, was granted four years of absence from his duties at the court of Vienna, that he might go to study with Frescobaldi in Rome. His compositions were published in several sets, which included ricercars, toccatas, preludes, canzonas, capriccios, and so forth. All these, not excepting even the preludes, are in the contrapuntal style which is the outgrowth of the old vocal polyphony. But they are greatly enlivened by rapid figures, scales and arpeggios as well as trills and ornamental devices. Such figures, being not at all suitable to voices but only to a keyboard instrument, mark the progress of the keyboard style toward a distinct individuality if not independence from the ancient past of vocal masses and motets, an independence which no great music has ever quite achieved.

All these sets of pieces were written in good faith for the harpsichord as well as for the organ. But in reality, except in so far as certain principles of form are valuable to all music, and a few figures of musical ornamentation are common to all keyboard music, harpsichord music profits but vicariously from Frescobaldi. His music is essentially organ music, and the development it marks as accomplished, and that toward which it points, are proper to the organ and not to the harpsichord. To the one instrument breadth and power are fitting, to the other lightness and fleetness. Inasmuch as the same distinction exists between the organ and the pianoforte at the present day, with some allowances made for improvements in the mechanism of the organ and for the great sonority of the pianoforte, which allowances affect only the degree but not the kind of differences, Frescobaldi can be said to have influenced the development of pianoforte music only by what he contributed toward the solution of very general problems of form and structure.

The same must be said of many other great organists of his and of later days, such as Zweelinck, Samuel Scheidt, Buxtehude, Bohm, Pachelbel, and others. It may be noted that after the death of Frescobaldi the art of organ-playing passed from Italy, the land of its birth and first considerable growth, to Germany. Here a great line of virtuosi added more and more to the splendor and dignity of organ music, perfecting and embellishing style, inventing new forms and making them firm. They remained loyal to the polyphonic style, partly because this is almost essentially proper to the organ with its unlimited power to sustain tone; partly because it is the impressive and noble style of music most in keeping with the spirit of the church, from which the organ will apparently never be wholly dissociated.[3]

It cannot be said that this style is in any measure so fitting to the harpsichord and the clavichord or to the pianoforte. For these, a markedly different sort of polyphony has been devised. But so long as organists alone walked in music with the power of assurance—and they were well in command of the problems of their special art while other instrumentalists and writers of operas were floundering about—so long did their influence keep instrumental music in sway.

How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all keyboard instruments. They helped to give music a form made of its own stuff, and a beauty and permanence which is the result of such form perfected. In their workshops two of such forms were rough-hewn which proved of later service to pianoforte music—the harmonic prelude and the fugue.

We must look elsewhere for the development of other forms, less perfect perhaps, but no less important in the history of pianoforte music. Such are the rondo and the variation form. The rondo may be mentioned here because of its great antiquity. Like the ballade, it was originally a dance song, really a song with a burden and varying couplets. No form could be simpler. The burden recurring regularly gives an impression of unity, which, only in case of too many recurrences, has the fault of monotony. The varying couplets, constituting the episodes between the reiterations of the burden or main theme, offer variety and contrast. Yet, in spite of the merits of this scheme of musical structure, the form was little used by composers down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Relatively long pieces of music, in which the rondo form could be used, were generally written in the style of fugues. Furthermore, until the harmonic art was developed and the contrast of keys appreciated, the episodes, being restricted by the old modal laws to the tonality of the main theme, would be in a great measure without the virtue of contrast.

The variation form, on the other hand, was greatly used, conspicuously so by a number of writers for the virginal in England, whose works, surviving in several ancient collections, form a unique and practically isolated monument in the history of pianoforte music. These collections have often been described in detail and carefully analyzed. The most comprehensive is that long known as the Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book, now called merely the Fitzwilliam Collection, a beautifully worked manuscript preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. Others are Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book and Will Foster’s, both of which are at Buckingham Palace; a smaller book, known as Lady Nevile’s Book, and the Parthenia, famous as the first collection of virginal music printed in England.

The Parthenia was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection, the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti.

Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians.

The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping figures.

Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music.

Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor, are the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la. Every composer tried a hand at this sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was attempted. Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the successive notes of the scale. It was set upon its way in various rhythms, sometimes in long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet again in dotted rhythms. At the best the result was a display of some cleverness on the part of the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic alterations, some novelty in combinations of rhythms. It can hardly be supposed that they expressed any æsthetic aspiration. They stand in relation to the development of pianoforte music only as technical exercises of a sort.

The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon songs, but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand, toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers since the time of Bach.

The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary work upon the development of harpsichord music in general was probably relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch organist, is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the intimacy between Holland and England in matters musical. The presence of famous English organists in Holland throughout the first half of the seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the course of harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to the time of Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as perhaps the most remarkable feature of this English virginal music is the occasional flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for harpsichordal effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred to no emulation in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music as such upon the history of the special art may be set down as practically negligible. The famous collections endure, quite like Purcell’s music a whole century later, as an isolated monument of a sudden national development.

The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which, as independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their organic unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their own skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone, with its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new time. The others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of them, however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of wide proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord and clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and special instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We shall have to wait another half-century before that sense has become keen enough to influence development of harpsichord music.

IV

Meanwhile the growth and relative perfection of another form is to be observed, namely, the suite.[4] This is a conventional group of four short pieces in dance forms and rhythms. A great amount of dance music had been published for the lute in Italy as early as 1502. Of the twenty-one pieces published in the Parthenia more than a hundred years later, five were pavans and ten were galliards. In all these early dance pieces the rhythm is more or less disguised under a heavy polyphonic style; so we may presume that they were not intended to be played in the ballroom, but rather that the short and symmetrical forms of good dance music were regarded by composers as serviceable molds into which to cast their musical inspirations. Indeed, they must have made a strong appeal to composers at a time when they were baffled in their instrumental music by ignorance of the elementary principles of musical structure.

The early Italian lute collections already reveal a tendency on the part of composers to group at least two of these dances together. The two chosen are the pavan and the galliard, the one a slow and stately dance in double time, the other a livelier dance in triple time. Often, it is true, these two are not grouped together in the printed collections; but it seems likely that the lutenists of the sixteenth century were fond of such a selection in performance. In 1597 Thomas Morley, an English musician, published in the form of dialogues his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.’ In this he treated of dance music at some length, and made special note of the pleasing effect to be got by alternating pavans and galliards.

This group of two pieces is the nucleus about which the suite developed during the first half of the seventeenth century. The several steps in its growth are rather obscure; and, as they are to be observed more in music for groups of strings than in harpsichord music, it will serve us merely to mention them. The pavan and the galliard gave way early to the allemande and the courante. The origin of the former is doubtful. There were two kinds of courantes—one evidently native to France, the other to Italy. Both were in triple time, but were in many other ways clearly differentiated. To the allemande and courante was later added a slow dance from Spain—the sarabande; and before the middle of the century the gigue, or giga, from Italy, made secure its place as the last of the standard group of four. These four pieces so combined were invariably in the same key. Apart from this they had no relationship.[5] The tie which held them together was wholly one of convention.

Such is the stereotype of the suite when it becomes firmly established in music for the harpsichord, as we find it in the works of the German J. J. Froberger. Froberger died in 1667, but his suites for harpsichord, twenty-eight in all, were written earlier; some in 1649, others in 1656, according to autograph copies. He had been a wanderer over the face of Europe. After studying with Frescobaldi in Rome he had spent some years in Paris, where he had come into contact with French composers for the harpsichord, whose work we shall discuss later on. Thence he had gone to London, where his skill in playing the organ and harpsichord seems to have lifted him from the mean position of pumping air into the organ at Westminster (he had been robbed on his journey and had reached London friendless and poverty-stricken) to that of court favorite. Later he returned to Europe, evidently pursued by ill luck, and he died at Héricourt, near Montbelliard, at the home of Sibylla, Duchess of Würtemberg, a pupil who had offered him refuge.

By far the majority of his suites for the harpsichord, and be it noted they are for harpsichord and not for organ, are in the orthodox order of Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue. The dances are all constructed upon the same plan, a plan at the basis of which the new idea of harmony has at last been solidly established. Each piece is divided neatly into two sections of about equal length, each of which is repeated. The harmonic groundwork is simple and clear. The dance opens in the tonic key. If the piece is major it modulates to the dominant, if minor to the relative major; and in that key the first section ends. This section having been repeated, the second section begins in the key in which the first section left off, and modulates back again, usually through one or two keys, to end in the tonic. The whole makes a compact little piece, very neatly balanced. It would seem to be quite sealed in perfection and to contain no possibilities of new growth; but the short passages of free modulation through which the second section pursues its way from dominant or relative major back to tonic contained germs of harmonic unrest which were to swell the whole to proportions undreamed of.

The change from tonic to dominant and back, with the few timid modulations in the second section, offered practically all the contrast and variety there was within the limits of a single piece. Except in the sarabande, the musical texture was woven in a flowing style. The effect is one of constant motion. A figure, not a theme, predominated. The opening figure, it is true, was modified, often gave way to quite a different figure in the dominant key; but the style remained always the same, and there was but the slightest suggestion of contrast in the way one figure glided into another.

In the suite as a whole, the uniformity of key which ruled over all four movements precluded in the main all contrast but the contrast of rhythm. Yet a few peculiarities of style became associated with each of the dances and thus gave more than rhythmical variety to the whole. The counterpoint of the allemande, for example, was more open and more dignified, so to speak, than that of the fleet, sparkling Italian courante. In the French courante a counterpoint of dotted quarters and eighths prevailed, and a shifting between 6/4 and 3/2 rhythm stamped the movement with a rhythmic complexity not at all present in the other movements. The second section of the gigue was almost invariably built upon an inversion of the figures of the first section, and the solid chord style of the sarabande not only contrasted radically with the style of allemande, courante, and gigue, but, moreover, beguiled composers into the expression of personal emotion now noble, now tender, which put sarabandes in general in a class by themselves amid the music of that time.

Though the normal suite was constituted of these four dances in the order we have named, other dances came to find a place therein. Of these the favorites were gavottes, minuets, bourrées, loures, passepieds, and others; and they were inserted in any variety or sequence between the sarabande and the gigue. Sometimes in place of extra dances, or among them, is to be found an air or aria, the salient quality of which is not rhythm, but melody, usually highly ornamented in the style made universally welcome by the Italian opera. More rarely the air was simple and was followed by several variations. The best known of these airs and variations which were incorporated into suites is probably Handel’s famous set upon a melody, not his own, which has long gone by the name of ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith.’ By the beginning of the eighteenth century many composers were accustomed to begin their suites with a prelude, usually in harmonic style.

In the music of the great French lutenists and clavecinists of the seventeenth century the suite never crystallized into a stereotyped sequence. The principle of setting together several short pieces in the same key was none the less clearly at work, though nothing but the fancy of the composer seems to have limited the number of pieces which might be so united. On the other hand, the idea of emphasizing rhythm as the chief element of contrast within the suite was often secondary to the idea of contrasting mood. How much of this contrast of mood was actually effective it is hard to say, but the great number of little pieces composed either for lute or clavecin in France of the seventeenth century, were given picturesque or fanciful names by their composers.

This custom was firmly established by the great lutenist, Denis Gaultier, whose collection of pieces, La rhétorique des dieux, comprises some of the most exquisite and most beautifully worked music of the century. The pieces in the collection are grouped together by modes; but the modes by this time have become keys, and differ from each other in little except pitch. The greater part of the pieces are given names, borrowed for the most part from Greek mythology. Phaèton foudroyé, and Juno, ou la jalouse are indicative of the general tone of them.

Close upon Gaultier’s pieces for lute came the harpsichord pieces of Jacques Champion, son of a family of organists, who took upon himself the name of Chambonnières. Two books of his pieces were published in 1670. Here again the pieces are grouped in keys, in, however, no definite number; and, though most have still only dance names to distinguish them, many are labelled with a title.

In spite of these titles, the tendency to call upon an external idea to aid in the construction of a piece of music is not evident in this early harpsichord music. There is little attempt at picture drawing in music. The names are at the most suggestive of a mood, indicative of the humor which in the composer gave birth to the music, hints to the listener upon the humor in which he was to take it. The structure of the music is independent of the titles, and is of a piece with the structure of the dance tunes which make up the German suite. The influence of this music was not important upon the growth of form, but upon the molding and refinement of style.

To be sure, a tendency toward realistic music crops out from time to time all through the seventeenth century. The twitter of birds no less than the roar of battle was attempted by many a composer, resulting, in the case of the latter especially, in hardly more than laughably childish imitations. Further than this composers did not often go until, just before Bach entered upon his professional career, J. F. Kuhnau, of Leipzig, published his extraordinary Biblical sonatas. Besides these, the ‘Rhetoric of Gods,’ the ‘Hundred Varieties of Musical Fruit,’ the ‘jealous ladies’ and the ‘rare ladies,’ even the battles and the gossips, all of which have been imitated in music, appear conventional and absolute. Here is narrative in music and a flimsiness of structure which is meaningless without a program. There are six of these strange compositions, upon the stories of David and Goliath, of David and Saul, of Jacob and Leah, and others. Some years later they undoubtedly suggested to Sebastian Bach the delicate little capriccio which he wrote upon the departure of his brother for the wars. Apart from this they are of slight importance except as indications of the experimental frame of mind of their composer. Indeed, beyond imitation and to a small extent description, neither harpsichord nor pianoforte music has been able to make much progress in the direction of program music.

Kuhnau’s musical narratives were published in August, 1700. Earlier than this he had published his famous Sonata aus dem B. The work so named was appended to Kuhnau’s second series of suites or Partien. It has little to recommend it to posterity save its name, which here appears in the history of clavier music for the first time. Nor does this name designate a form of music akin to the sonatas of the age of Mozart and Beethoven, a form most particularly associated with the pianoforte. Kuhnau merely appropriated it from music for string instruments. There it stood in the main for a work which was made up of several movements like the suite, but which differed from the suite in depending less upon rhythm and in having a style more dignified than that which had grown out of experiments with dance tunes. In addition, the various movements which constituted a sonata were not necessarily in the same key. Here alone it possessed a possible advantage over the suite. Yet though in other respects it cannot compare favorably to our ears with the suite, Kuhnau cherished the dignity of style and name with which tradition had endowed it. These he attempted to bestow upon music for the clavier.[6]

The various movements lack definite form and balance. The first is in rather heavy chord style, the chords being supported by a dignified counterpoint in eighth notes. This leads without pause into a fugue on a figure of lively sixteenth notes. The key is B-flat major. There follows a short adagio in E-flat major, modulating to end in C minor, in which key the last movement, a short allegro in triple time, is taken up. The whole is rounded off by a return to the opening movement, signified by the sign Da Capo.

Evidently pleased with this innovation, Kuhnau published in 1696 a set of seven more sonatas called Frische Clavier Früchte. These show no advance over the Sonata aus dem B in mastery of musical structure. Still they are evidence of the efforts of one man among many to give clavier music a life of its own and to bring it in seriousness and dignity into line with the best instrumental music of the day, namely, with the works of such men as Corelli, Purcell, and Vivaldi. That he was unable to do this the verdict of future years seems to show. The attempt was none the less genuine and influential.

In the matter of structure, then, the seventeenth century worked out and tested but a few principles which were to serve as foundation for the masterpieces of keyboard music in the years to come. But these, though few, were of vast importance. Chief among them was the new principle of harmony. This we now, in the year 1700, find at the basis of fugue, of prelude and toccata, and of dance form, not always perfectly grasped but always in evidence. Musical form now and henceforth is founded upon the relation and contrast of keys.

Consistently to hold to one thematic subject throughout a piece in polyphonic style, skillfully to contrast or weave with that secondary subjects, mark another stage of development passed. The fugue is the result, now articulate, though awaiting its final glory from the hand of J. S. Bach. To write little dance pieces in neat and precise form is an art likewise well mastered; and to combine several of these, written in the same key, in an order which, by affording contrast of rhythms, can stir the listener’s interest and hold his attention, is the established rule for the first of the so-called cyclic forms, prototype of the symphony and sonata of later days. Such were the great accomplishments of the musicians of the seventeenth century in the matter of form.

V

In the matter of style, likewise, much was accomplished. We have had occasion frequently to point out that in the main the harpsichord remained throughout the first half of the seventeenth century under the influence of the organ. For this instrument a conjunct or legato style has proved to be most fitting. Sudden wide stretches, capricious leaps, and detached runs seldom find a place in the texture of great organ music. The organist strives for a smoothness of style compatible with the dignity of the instrument, and this smoothness may be taken as corollary to the fundamental relationship between organ music and the vocal polyphony of the sixteenth century.

On the other hand, by comparison with the vocal style, the organ style is free. Where the composer of masses was restricted by the limited ability of the human voice to sing wide intervals accurately, the organist was limited only by the span of the hand. Where Palestrina could count only upon the ear of his singers to assure accurate intonation, the organist wrote for a keyboard which, supposing the organ to be in tune, was a mechanism that of itself could not go wrong. Given, as it were, a physical guarantee of accuracy as a basis for experiment, the organist was free to devise effects of sheer speed or velocity of which voices would be utterly incapable. He had a huge gamut of sounds equally at his command, a power that could be mechanically bridled or let loose. His instrument could not be fatigued while boys could be hired to pump the bellows. So long as his finger held down a key, or his foot a pedal, so long would the answering note resound, diminishing, increasing, increasing, diminishing, according to his desire, never exhausted.

Therefore we find in organ music, rapid scales, arpeggios rising from depths, falling from heights, new figures especially suited to the organ, such as the ‘rocking’ figure upon which Bach built his well-known organ fugue in D minor; deep pedal notes, which endure immutably while above them the artist builds a castle of sounds; interlinked chords marching up and down the keyboard, strong with dissonance. There are trills and ornamental turns, rapid thirds and sixths. And in all these things organ music displays what is its own, not what it has inherited from choral music.

Yet, notwithstanding the magnificent chord passages so in keeping with the spirit of the instrument, in which only the beauty of harmonic sequence is considered, the treatment of musical material by the organists is prevailingly polyphonic. The sound of a given piece is the sound of many quasi-independent parts moving along together, in which definite phrases or motives constantly reappear. The harmony on which the whole rests is not supplied by an accompaniment, but by the movement of the several voice-parts themselves in their appointed courses. And it may be said as a generality that these parts progress by steps not wider than that distance the hand can stretch upon the keyboard.

During the first half of the seventeenth century the harpsichord was but the echo of the organ. Even the collections of early English virginal music, which in some ways seem to offer a brilliant exception, are the work of men who as instrumentalists were primarily organists. In so far as they achieved an instrumental style at all it was usually a style fitting to a small organ. The few cases where John Bull’s cleverness displayed itself in almost a true virtuoso style are exceptions which prove the rule. Not until the time of Chambonnières and Froberger do we enter upon a second stage.

About the middle of the seventeenth century Chambonnières was famous over Europe as a performer upon the harpsichord. As first clavicinist at the court of France, his manner of playing may be taken to represent the standard of excellence at that time. Constantine Huygens, a Dutch amateur exceedingly well-known in his day, mentions him many times in his letters with unqualified admiration, always as a player of the harpsichord, or as a composer for that instrument. Whatever skill he may have had as an organist did not contribute to his fame; and his two sets of pieces for harpsichord, published after his death in 1670, show the beginnings of a distinct differentiation between harpsichord and organ style.

Title page of Kuhnan's "Neue Clavier-Übung".

The harpsichord possesses in common with the organ its keyboard or keyboards, which render the playing of solid chords possible. The lighter action of the harpsichord gives it the advantage over the organ in the playing of rapid passages, particularly of those light ornamental figures used as graces or embellishments, such as trills, mordents, and turns. A further comparison with the organ, however, reveals in the harpsichord only negative qualities. It has no volume of sound, no power to sustain tones, no deep pedal notes. Consequently the smooth polyphonic style which sounds rich and flowing on the organ, sounds dry and thin upon the weaker instrument. The composer who would utilize to advantage what little sonority there is in the harpsichord must be free to scatter notes here and there which have no name or place in the logic of polyphony, but which make his music sound well. Voice parts must be interrupted, notes taken from nowhere and added to chords. The polyphonic web becomes disrupted, but the harpsichord profits by the change. It is Chambonnières who probably first wrote in such a style for the harpsichord.

He learned little of it from what had been written for the organ, but much from music for the lute, which, quite as late as the middle of the century, was interchangeable with the harpsichord in accompaniments, and was held to be equal if not superior as a solo instrument. It was vastly more difficult to play, and largely for this reason fell into disuse. The harpsichord is by nature far nearer akin to it than to the organ. The free style which lutenists were driven to invent by the almost insuperable difficulties of their instrument, is nearly as suitable to the harpsichord as it is to the lute. Without doubt the little pieces of Denis Gaultier were played upon the harpsichord by many an amateur who had not been able to master the lute. The skilled lutenist would find little to give him pause in the harpsichord music of Chambonnières. The quality of tone of both instruments is very similar. For neither is the strict polyphony of organ music appropriate; for the lute it is impossible. Therefore it fell to the lutenists first to invent the peculiar instrumental style in which lie the germs of the pianoforte style; and to point to their cousins, players of the harpsichord, the way towards independence from organ music.

Froberger came under the influence of Denis Gaultier and Chambonnières during the years he spent in Paris, and he adopted their style and made it his own. He wrote, it is true, several sets of ricercars, capriccios, canzonas, etc., for organ or harpsichord, and in these the strict polyphonic style prevails, according to the conventionally more serious nature of the compositions. But his fame rests upon the twenty-eight suites and fragments of suites which he wrote expressly for the harpsichord. These are closely akin to lute music, and from the point of view of style are quite as effective as the music of Chambonnières. In harmony they are surprisingly rich. Be it noted, too, in passing, that they are not lacking in emotional warmth. Here is perhaps the first harpsichord music which demands beyond the player’s nimble fingers his quick sympathy and imagination—qualities which charmed in Froberger’s own playing.

Kuhnau as a stylist is far less interesting than Froberger, upon whose style, however, his clavier suites are founded. His importance rests in the attempts he made to adapt the sonata to the clavier, in his experiments with descriptive music, and in the influence he had upon his contemporaries and predecessors, notably Bach and Handel. Froberger is the real founder of pianoforte music in Germany, and beyond him there is but slight advance either in style or matter until the time of Sebastian Bach.

What we may now call the harpsichord style, as exemplified in the suites of Chambonnières and Froberger, is relatively free. Both composers had a fondness for writing in four parts, but these parts are not related to each other, nor woven together unbrokenly as in the polyphonic style of the organ. They cannot often be clearly followed throughout a given piece. The upper voice carries the music along, the others accompany. The arrangement is not wholly an inheritance from the lute, but is in keeping with the general tendency in all music, even at times in organ music, toward the monodic style, of which the growing opera daily set the model.

But the harpsichord style of this time is by no means a simple system of melody and accompaniment. Though the three voice parts which support the fourth dwell together often in chords, they are not without considerable independent movement. They constitute the harmonic background, as it were, which, though serving as background, does not lack animation and character in itself. In other words, we have a contrapuntal, not a polyphonic, style.

A marked feature of the music is the profuse number of graces and embellishments. These rapid little figures may be akin to the vocal embellishments which even at the beginning of the seventeenth century were discussed in theoretical books; but they seem to flower from the very nature of the harpsichord, the light tone and action of which made them at once desirable and possible. They are but vaguely indicated in the manuscripts, and there can be no certainty as to what was the composer’s intention or his manner of performance. Doubtless they were left to the discretion of the player. At any rate for a century more the player took upon himself the liberty of ornamenting any composer’s music to suit his own whim. These agrémens[7] were held to be and doubtless were of great importance. Kuhnau, in the preface to his Frische Clavier Früchte, speaks of them as the sugar to sweeten the fruit, even though he left them much to the taste of players; and Emanuel Bach in the second half of the eighteenth century devoted a large part of his famous book on playing the clavier to an analysis and minute explanation of the host of them that had by then become stereotyped. They have not, however, come down into pianoforte music. It is questionable if they can be reproduced on the pianoforte, the heavy tone of which obscures the delicacy which was their charm. They must ever present difficulty to the pianist who attempts to make harpsichord music sound again on the instrument which has inherited it.

The freedom from polyphonic restraint, inherited from the lute, and the profusion of graces which have sprouted from the nature of the harpsichord, mark the diversion between music for the harpsichord and music for the organ. In other respects they are still much the same; that is to say, the texture of harpsichord music is still close—restricted by the span of the hand. This is not necessarily a sign of dependence on the organ, but points rather to the young condition of the art. It is not to be expected that the full possibilities of an instrument will be revealed to the first composers who write for it expressly. They lie hidden along the way which time has to travel. But Chambonnières, in France, and Froberger, in Germany, opened up the special road for harpsichord music, took the first step which others had but to follow.

Neither in France nor in Germany did the next generation penetrate beyond. Le Gallois, a contemporary of Chambonnières, has remarked that of the great player’s pupils only one, Hardelle, was able to approach his master’s skill. Among those who carried on his style, however, must be mentioned d’Anglebert,[8] Le Begue,[9] and Louis and François Couperin, relatives of the great Couperin to come.

In Germany Georg and Gottlieb Muffat stand nearly alone with Kuhnau in the progress of harpsichord music between Froberger and Sebastian Bach. Georg Muffat spent six years in Paris and came under French influence as Froberger had come, but his chief keyboard works (Apparatus Musico Organisticus (1690)) are twelve toccatas more suited to organ than to harpsichord. In 1727 his son Gottlieb had printed in Vienna Componimenti musicali per il cembalo, which show distinctly the French influence. Kuhnau looms up large chiefly on account of his sonatas, which are in form and extent the biggest works yet attempted for clavier. By these he pointed toward a great expansion of the art; but as a matter of fact little came of it. In France, Italy, and Germany the small forms were destined to remain the most popular in harpsichord music; and the sonatas and concertos of Bach are immediately influenced by study of the Italian masters, Corelli and Vivaldi.

In Italy, the birthplace of organ music and so of a part of harpsichord music, interest in keyboard music of any kind declined after the death of Frescobaldi in 1644, and was replaced by interest in opera and in music for the violin. Only one name stands out in the second half of the century, Bernardo Pasquini, of whose work, unhappily, little remains. He was famous over the world as an organist, and the epitaph on his tombstone gives him the proud title of organist to the Senate and People of Rome. Also he was a skillful performer on the harpsichord; but he is more nearly allied to the old polyphonic school than to the new. A number of works for one and for two harpsichords are preserved in manuscript in the British Museum, and these are named sonatas. Some are actually suites, but those for two harpsichords have little trace of dance music or form and may be considered as much sonatas as those works which Kuhnau published under the same title. All of Kuhnau’s sonatas appeared before 1700 and the date on the manuscript in the British Museum is 1704. Pasquini was then an old man, and it is very probable that these sonatas were written some years earlier; in which case he and not Kuhnau may claim the distinction of first having written music for the harpsichord on the larger plan of the violin concerto and the sonatas of Corelli.[10]

Two books of toccatas by Alessandro Scarlatti give that facile composer the right to be numbered among the great pioneers in the history of harpsichord music. These toccatas are in distinct movements, usually in the same key, but sharply contrasted in content. The seventh is a theme and variations, in which Scarlatti shows an appreciation of tonal effects and an inventiveness which are astonishingly in advance of the time. He foreshadows unmistakably the brilliant style of his son Domenico; indeed, he accounts in part for what has seemed the marvellous instinct of Domenico. If, as is most natural, Domenico approached the mysteries of the harpsichord through his father, he began his career with advantages denied to all others contemporary with him, save those who, like Grieco, received that father’s training. Alessandro Scarlatti was one of the most greatly endowed of all musicians. The trend of the Italian opera during the eighteenth century toward utter senselessness has been often laid partly to his influence; but in the history of harpsichord music that influence makes a brilliant showing in the work of his son, who contributed perhaps more than any other one man to the technique of writing not only for harpsichord but for pianoforte.

Little of the harpsichord and clavichord music of the seventeenth century is heard today. It has in the main only an historical interest. The student who looks into it will be amazed at some of its beauties; but as a whole it lacks the variety and emotional strength which claim a general attention. Nevertheless it is owing to the labor and talent of the composers of these years that the splendid masterpieces of a succeeding era were possible. They helped establish the harmonic foundation of music; they molded the fugue, the prelude, the toccata, and the suite; they developed a general keyboard style. After the middle of the century such men as Froberger and Kuhnau in Germany, Chambonnières, d’Anglebert, and Louis and François Couperin in France, and Alessandro Scarlatti in Italy, finally gave to harpsichord music a special style of its own, and to the instrument an independent and brilliant place among the solo instruments of that day. Out of all the confusion and uncertainty attendant upon the breaking up of the old art of vocal polyphony, the enthusiasm of the new opera, the creation of a new harmonic system, the rise of an instrumental music independent of words, these men slowly and steadily secured for the harpsichord a kingdom peculiarly its own.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It should be noted in passing that during the early stages of the growth of polyphonic music, roughly from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, composers had brought over into their vocal music a great deal of instrumental technique or style, which had been developed on the crude organs, and on the accompanying instruments of the troubadours. In the period which we are about to treat the reverse is very plainly the case.

[2] At the head of Sebastian Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer stands the Latin superscription: Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta. The initial letters form the word ricercar.

[3] Cf. Vol. VI, Chap. XV.

[4] Suites were known in England as ‘lessons,’ in France as ordres, in Germany as Partien, and in Italy as sonate da camera.

[5] There was a form of suite akin to the variation form. In this the same melody or theme served for the various dance movements, being treated in the style of the allemande, courante, or other dances chosen. Cf. Peurl’s Pavan, Intrada, Dantz, and Gaillarde (1611); and Schein’s Pavan, Gailliarde, Courante, Allemande, and Tripla (1617). This variation suite is rare in harpsichord music. Froberger’s suite on the old air, Die Mayerin, is a conspicuous exception.

[6] ‛Denn warum sollte man auf dem Clavier nicht eben wie auf anderen Instrumenten dergleichen Sachen tractieren können?’ he writes in his preface to the ‘Seven New Partien,’ 1692.

[7] So they were called in France, which until the time of Beethoven set the model for harpsichord style. In Germany they were called Manieren.

[8] D’Anglebert published in 1689 a set of pieces, for the harpsichord, containing twenty variations on a melody known as Folies d’Espagne, later immortalized by Corelli.

[9] Le Begue (1630-1702) published Pièces de clavecin in 1677.

[10] See J. S. Shedlock: ‘The Pianoforte Sonata,’ London, 1895.

CHAPTER II
THE GOLDEN AGE OF HARPSICHORD MUSIC

The period and the masters of the ‘Golden Age’—Domenico Scarlatti; his virtuosity; Scarlatti’s ‘sonatas’; Scarlatti’s technical effects; his style and form; æsthetic value of his music; his contemporaries—François Couperin, le Grand; Couperin’s clavecin compositions; the ‘musical portraits’; ‘program music’—The quality and style of his music; his contemporaries, Daquin and Rameau—John Sebastian Bach; Bach as virtuoso; as teacher; his technical reform; his style—Bach’s fugues and their structure—The suites of Bach: the French suites, the English suites, the Partitas—The preludes, toccatas and fantasies; concertos; the ‘Goldberg Variations’—Bach’s importance; his contemporary Handel.

In round figures the years between 1700 and 1750 are the Golden Age of harpsichord music. In that half century not only did the technique, both of writing for and performing on the harpsichord, expand to its uttermost possibilities, but there was written for it music of such beauty and such emotional warmth as to challenge the best efforts of the modern pianist and to call forth the finest and deepest qualities of the modern pianoforte.

It was an age primarily of opera, of the Italian opera with its senseless, threadbare plots, its artificial singers idolized in every court, its incredible, extravagant splendor. The number of operas written is astonishing, the wild enthusiasm of their reception hardly paralleled elsewhere in the history of music. Yet of these many works but an air or two has lived in the public ear down to the present day; whereas the harpsichord music still is heard, though the instrument for which it was written has long since vanished from our general musical life.

Practically the whole seventeenth century has been required to lay down a firm foundation for the development of instrumental music in all its branches. This being well done, the music of the next epoch is not unaccountably surprising. As soon as principles of form had become established, composers trod, so to speak, upon solid ground; and, sure of their foothold, were free to make rapid progress in all directions. In harpsichord music few new forms appeared. The toccata, prelude, fugue, and suite offered room enough for all the expansion which even great genius might need. Within these limits the growth was twofold: in the way of virtuosity and refinement of style, and in the way of emotional expression. That music which expands at once in both directions, or in which, rather, the two growths are one and the same, is truly great music. Such we shall now find written for the harpsichord.

Each of the three men whose work is the chief subject of this chapter is conspicuous in the history of music by a particular feature. Domenico Scarlatti is first and foremost a great virtuoso, Couperin an artist unequalled in a very special refinement of style, Sebastian Bach the instrument of profound emotion. In these features they stand sharply differentiated one from the other. These are the essential marks of their genius. None, of course, can be comprehended in such a simple characterization. Many of Scarlatti’s short pieces have the warmth of genuine emotion, and Couperin’s little works are almost invariably the repository of tender and naïve sentiment. Bach is perhaps the supreme master in music and should not be characterized at all except to remind that his vast skill is but the tool of his deeply-feeling poetic soul.

I

It will be noticed that each of these great men speaks of a different race. We may consider Scarlatti first as spokesman in harpsichord music of the Italians, who at that time had made their mark so deep upon music that even now it has not been effaced, nor is likely to be. His father, Alessandro, was the most famous and the most gifted musician in Europe. From Naples he set the standard for the opera of the world, and in Naples his son Domenico was born on October 26, 1685, a few months only after the birth of Sebastian Bach in Eisenach. Domenico lived with his father and under his father’s guidance until 1705, when he set forth to try his fame. He lived a few years in Venice and there met Handel in 1708, with whom he came back to Rome. Here in Rome, at the residence of Corelli’s patron, Cardinal Ottoboni, took place the famous contest on organ and harpsichord between him and Handel. For Handel he ever professed a warm friendship and the most profound admiration.

He remained for some years in Rome, at first in the service of Marie Casimire, queen of Poland, later as maestro di capella at St. Peter’s. In 1719 came a journey to London in order to superintend performances of his operas. From 1721 to 1725 he seems to have been installed at the court of Lisbon; and then, after four years in Naples, he accepted a position at the Spanish court in Madrid. Just how long he stayed there is not known. In 1754 he was back again in Naples, and in Naples he died in 1757, seven years after the death of Bach.

Scarlatti wrote many operas in the style of his father, and these were frequently performed, with success, in Italy, England, Spain, and elsewhere. During his years at St. Peter’s he also wrote sacred music; but his fame now rests wholly upon his compositions for the harpsichord and upon the memory of the extraordinary skill with which he played them.

We have dwelt thus briefly upon a few events of his life to show how widely he had travelled and in how many places his skill as a player must have been admired. That in the matter of virtuosity he was unexcelled can hardly be doubted. It is true that in the famous contest with Handel he came off the loser on the organ, and even his harpsichord playing was doubted to excel that of his Saxon friend. But these contests were a test of wits more than of fingers, a trial of extempore skill in improvising fugues and double fugues, not of virtuosity in playing.

Two famous German musicians, J. J. Quantz and J. A. Hasse, both heard him and both marvelled at his skill. Monsieur L’Augier, a gifted amateur whom Dr. Burney visited in Vienna, told a story of Scarlatti and Thomas Roseingrave,[11] in which he related that when Roseingrave first heard Scarlatti play, he was so astonished that he would have cut off his own fingers then and there, had there been an instrument at hand wherewith to perform the operation; and, as it was, he went months without touching the harpsichord again.

Whom he had to thank for instruction is not known. There is nothing in his music to suggest that he was ever a pupil of Bernardo Pasquini, who, however, was long held to have been his master. J. S. Shedlock, in his ‘History of the Pianoforte Sonata,’ suggests that he learned from Gaëtano Greco or Grieco, a man a few years his senior and a student under his father; but it would seem far more likely that Domenico profited immediately from his father, who, we may see from a letter to Ferdinand de’ Medici, dated May 30, 1705, had watched over his son’s development with great care. It must not be forgotten that Alessandro Scarlatti’s harpsichord toccatas, described in the previous chapter, are, in spite of a general heaviness, often enlivened by astonishing devices of virtuosity.

Scarlatti wrote between three and four hundred pieces for the harpsichord. The Abbé Santini[12] possessed three hundred and forty-nine. Scarlatti himself published in his lifetime only one set of thirty pieces. These he called exercises (esercizii) for the harpsichord. The title is significant. Before 1733 two volumes, Pièces pour le clavecin, were published in Paris; and some time between 1730 and 1737 forty-two ‘Suites of Lessons’ were published in London under the supervision of Roseingrave. More were printed in London in 1752. Then came Czerny’s edition, which includes two hundred pieces; and throughout the nineteenth century various selections and arrangements have appeared from time to time, von Bülow having arranged several pieces in the order of suites, Tausig having elaborated several in accordance with the modern pianoforte. A complete and authoritative edition has at last been prepared by Sig. Alessandro Longo and has been printed in Italy by Ricordi and Company.

By far the greater part of these many pieces are independent of each other. Except in a few cases where Scarlatti, probably in his youth, followed the model of his father’s toccatas, he keeps quite clear of the suite cycle. The pieces have been called sonatas, but they are not for the most part in the form called the sonata form. This form (which is the form in which one piece or movement may be cast and is not to be confused with the sequence or arrangement of movements in the classical sonata) is, as we shall later have ample opportunity to observe, a tri-partite or ternary form; whereas the so-called sonatas of Scarlatti are in the two-part or binary form, which is, as we have seen, the form of the separate dance movements in the suite. Each ‘sonata’ is, like the dance movements, divided into two sections, usually of about equal length, both of which are to be repeated in their turn. In general, too, the harmonic plan is the same or nearly the same as that which underlies the suite movement, the first section modulating from tonic to dominant, the second back from dominant to tonic. But within these limits Scarlatti allows himself great freedom of modulation. It is, in fact, this harmonic expansion within the binary form which makes one pause to give Scarlatti an important place in the development of the sonata form proper.

The harmonic variety of the Scarlatti sonatas is closely related to the virtuosity of their composer. He spins a piece out of, usually, but not always, two or three striking figures, by repeating them over and over again in different places of the scale or in different keys. His very evident fondness for technical formulæ is thus gratified and the piece is saved from monotony by its shifting harmonies.

A favorite and simple shift is from major to minor. This he employs very frequently. For example, in a sonata in G major, No. 2 of the Breitkopf and Härtel collection of twenty sonatas[13] measures 13, 14, 15, and 16, in D major, are repeated immediately in A major. In 20, 21, 22, and 23, the same style of figure and rhythm appears in D major and is at once answered in D minor. Toward the end of the second part of the piece the process is duplicated in the tonic key. In the following sonata at the top of page seven occurs another similar instance. It is one of the most frequent of his mannerisms.

The repetition of favorite figures is by no means always accompanied by a change of key. The two-measure phrase beginning in the fifteenth measure of the third sonata is repeated three times note for note; a few measures later another figure is treated in the same fashion; and in yet a third place, all in the first section of this sonata, the trick is turned again. Indeed, there are very few of Scarlatti’s sonatas in which he does not play with his figures in this manner.

We have said that often he varies his key when thus repeating himself, and that such variety saves from monotony. But it must be added that even where there is no change of key he escapes being tedious to the listener. The reason must be sought in the sprightly nature of the figures he chooses, and in the extremely rapid speed at which they are intended to fly before our ears. He is oftenest a dazzling virtuoso whose music appeals to our bump of wonder, and, when well played, leaves us breathless and excited.

The pieces are for the most part extremely difficult; and this, together with his ever-present reiteration of special harpsichord figures, may well incline us to look upon them as fledgling études. The thirty which Scarlatti himself chose to publish he called esercizii, or exercises. We may not take the title too literally, bearing in mind that Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord’ was intended for practice, as were many of Kuhnau’s suites. But that Scarlatti’s sonatas are almost invariably built up upon a few striking, difficult and oft-repeated figures, makes their possible use as technical practice pieces far more evident than it is in the ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord’ or even the ‘Inventions’ of Bach. He undoubtedly offers the player enormous opportunity to exercise his arms and his fingers in the production of brilliant, astonishing effects.

Of these effects two will always be associated with his name: the one obtained by the crossing of the hands, the other by the rapid repetition of one note. Both devices will be found freely used in the works of his father, and it is absurd to suppose that the son invented them. Yet it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he made more use of them than any man down to the time of Liszt. The crossing of the hands is not employed to interweave two qualities of sound, as it oftenest is in music for the organ or for the German and French harpsichords which have two or more manuals that work independently of each other. The Italian harpsichords had but one bank of keys, and Scarlatti’s crossing of the hands, if it be not intended merely for display, succeeds in making notes wide apart sound relatively simultaneous, and thus produces qualities of resonance which hitherto had rested silent in the instrument.

It has been suggested that the device of repeated notes was borrowed from the mandolin, on which, as is well known, a cantabile is approximated by rapid repetition of the notes of the melody. Scarlatti, however, rarely employs it to sustain the various notes of his tune. In his sonatas it is usually, if not intentionally, effective rhythmically; as it is, unfailingly, in more modern pianoforte music. On the harpsichord, moreover, as on the pianoforte, it can make a string twang with a sort of barbaric sound that still has the power to stir us as shrieking pipes and whistles stirred our savage ancestors.

Still another mannerism of his technique or style is the wide leap of many of his figures. A plunge from high to low notes was much practised in contemporary violin music and was considered very effective, and probably suggested a similar effect upon the harpsichord. Into this matter again Scarlatti may well have been initiated by his father, by whom it was not left untried. In the son’s sonatas it succeeds in extending the range of sonority of the harpsichord, and thus points unmistakably to developments in the true pianoforte style.

It is, in fact, by this extension of figures, by sudden leaps, by crossing of hands, that Scarlatti frees harpsichord music from all trace of slavery to the conjunct style of organ music; and he may therefore be judged the founder of the brilliant free style which reached its extreme development in the music of Liszt. Though we may not fail to mention occasionally his indebtedness to his father and to instrumental music of his time, we cannot deny that he is a great inventor, the creator of a new art. He was admitted by composers of his day to have not only wonderful hands, but a wonderful fecundity of invention.

What guided him was chiefly instinct. He had, no doubt, considerable strict training in the science of counterpoint and composition. He wrote, as we know, not only harpsichord pieces, but operas and sacred music as well. In the sonatas there is a great deal of neat two-part writing, and an occasional flash of skill in imitations; but musical science is almost the last thing we should think of in connection with them. Rules are not exemplified therein. Burney relates, through L’Augier, that Scarlatti knew he had broken established rules of composition, but reasoned that ‘there was scarce any other rule worth the attention of a man of genius than that of not displeasing the only sense of which music is the object.’ And, further, that he complained of the music of Alberti and other ‘modern’ composers because it did not in execution demand a harpsichord, but might be equally well or perhaps better expressed by other instruments. But, ‘as Nature had given him [Scarlatti] ten fingers, and, as his instrument had employment for them all, he saw no reason why he should not use them.’ He might have included his two arms among his natural gifts. Certainly the free use he made of them in most of his sonatas marks a new and extraordinary advance in the history of keyboard music.

In the matter of form Scarlatti is not so strikingly an innovator as he is in that of style. He is in the main content to cast his pieces in the binary mold common to most short instrumental pieces of his day. Yet, as has already been suggested, the harmonic freedom which he enjoys within these relatively narrow limits is significant in the development of the sonata form; and even more significant is his distribution of musical material within them.

The binary form, such as we find it in the suites of Froberger and even in those of J. S. Bach, is essentially a harmonic structure. The balance and contrast which is the effect of any serviceable shape of music is here one of harmony, principally of tonic and dominant and dominant and tonic, with only a few measures of modulation for variety. There is, in addition, some contrast between that musical material which is presented first in the tonic key and that which appears later in the dominant. But, while we may speak of these materials as first and second themes or subjects, their individuality is hardly distinct and is, in effect, obliterated by the regularity and smoothness of style in which these short pieces are conventionally written. The composer makes no attempt to set them off clearly, one against the other. The entrance into the dominant key is almost never devised in such a way as to prepare the listener for a new musical thought, quite separate and different from that which he has already heard. The transitional passage from tonic to dominant emerges from the one and merges into the other, without break or distinctions.

In the matter of setting his themes in their frame, Scarlatti hardly differs from his contemporaries. His style, though free and varied, is in constant motion. But his genius was especially fertile in clean-cut figures; and when, as he often does, he combines two or three distinct types of these in one short piece, the music is full of thematic variety and sparkles with an animation which at times is almost dramatic.

Scarlatti is, indeed, hovering close to the sonata form in a great many of his pieces, and in one actually strikes it.[14] We shall, however, postpone a more detailed discussion of Scarlatti’s pieces in relation to the sonata form to the next chapter. The distribution of his musical material is quite whimsical and irregular, always more instinctive than experimental. It is chiefly by the quality of this material that he stands apart from his contemporaries, and as the founder of the free and brilliant pianoforte style.

There remains little to be said of the æsthetic worth of his music. During the years of his most vigorous manhood he was almost invariably a virtuoso. Sheer delight in tonal effects rather than more sober need of self-expression stimulated him. The prevalence of trumpet figures such as those which constitute the opening phrases of the eleventh and fourteenth sonatas in the Breitkopf and Härtel edition already referred to, suggests that he took a good deal of material ready-made from the operas of the day. Burney says there are many passages in which he imitated the melody of tunes sung by carriers, muleteers, and common people. But what he added to these was his own. A number of pieces are conspicuous by especially free modulation and expansion of form; and in these, technical effects are not predominant, but rather a more serious interest in composition. It has therefore been suggested that these pieces are the work of later years.[15] Though it is said that while in Spain he grew too fat to cross his hands at the harpsichord as was his wont in his youth, this physical restriction is not alone responsible for the mellowness and warmth of such pieces as the so-called Pastoral in D minor, familiar to audiences in Tausig’s elaborated transcription. A great number of his pieces are rich in pure musical beauty; and the freshness which exhales from all true musical utterance is and probably always will be theirs.

None of his contemporaries in Italy approached him in the peculiar skill which has made him conspicuous in the history of pianoforte music. Francesco Durante (1684-1755) and Nicolo Porpora (1686-1767), the great singing master, both wrote pieces for the harpsichord; the one, ‘sonatas’ in several movements, the other fugues; but their music lacks charm and can hardly be considered at all influential in the development of the art of writing for keyboard instruments. Domenico Alberti and P. D. Paradies will be considered in the following chapter.

II

The art of Couperin is flawless, the charm of his music not to be described. It has that quality of perfection with which Nature marks her smallest flowers. It is the miniature counterpart in music of a perfected system of living, of the court life of France under Louis XIV.

Scarlatti was a rover. He tried his fortune in Italy, in England, in Portugal and Spain. He won it by the exhibition of his extraordinary and startling powers. He was on the alert to startle, his tribute the bravas and mad applause of his excited hearers. He was the virtuoso in an old sense of the word, the man with his powers consciously developed to the uttermost. Bach, on the other hand, was an introspective, mighty man, immeasurably greater than his surroundings, fathomless, personal, suggestive. Between them stands Couperin, for the greater part of his life in the intimate service of the most brilliant court the world has ever seen, delicate in health, perfect in etiquette, wise and tender.

Of his life little need be said. He was born in Paris on November 10, 1668, the son of Charles Couperin, himself a musician and brother to Louis and François Couperin, disciples of the great Chambonnières. The father died about a year after his son was born, and the musical education of the young François seems to have been undertaken by his uncle, François, and later by Jacques Thomelin, organist in the king’s private chapel in Versailles. Practically nothing is known of his youth, and, though it is certain that he was for many years organist at the church of St. Gervais in Paris, as his uncle and even his grandfather had been before him, the time at which he took up his duties there has not been exactly determined. There is on record, however, the account of a meeting held on the twenty-sixth of December, 1693, at Versailles, at which Louis XIV heard Couperin play and chose him from other competitors to succeed Thomelin as his private organist. Thenceforth he passed his life in service of the king and later of the regent. He died in Paris in 1733, after several years of ill health.

The great François was, no doubt, an unusually skillful organist, but his fame rests upon his work for the clavecin, the French harpsichord, and his book of instruction for that instrument. His duties at court were various. He says himself that for twenty years he had the honor to be with the king, and to teach, almost at the same time, Monseigneur le Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, and six princes or princesses of the royal house.

In his preface to the Concerts royaux he informs us that chamber concerts were given in the king’s presence on Sunday afternoons at Versailles, and that he was commanded to write music for them and that he himself played the clavecin at them. His book on the art of playing the clavecin, written in 1716, was dedicated to the king. By all accounts he was a beloved and highly prized teacher and performer. And neither his pupils nor his fame were confined solely to the court.

There is no doubt that he was a public favorite and that he published his pieces for the clavecin to satisfy a general demand. Also in a measure to safeguard his music. For at that time instrumental pieces were not often published, but were circulated in manuscript copies in which gross errors grew rapidly as weeds; and which, moreover, were common booty to piratical publishers, especially in the Netherlands. So Couperin took minute care in preparing his music for his public. Each set of pieces was furnished with a long preface, nothing in the engraving was left to chance, the books were beautifully bound so that all might be in keeping with the dainty and exquisite art of the music itself. Since his day his pieces were never published again until Madame Farrenc included the four great sets in her famous Trésor des Pianistes (1861-72). This edition was, according to Chrysander,[16] very carelessly prepared and is full of inaccuracies. Chrysander planned a new, accurate and complete edition, to be edited by Brahms, of which unhappily only one volume, containing Couperin’s first two books, ever came to print.

The original editions being now rare and priceless, and hardly serviceable to the average student on account of the confusing obsolete clef signs, it is to be hoped that before long Chrysander’s plan will be carried out and the almost forgotten treasures of Couperin’s clavecin music be revealed in their great beauty to the lover of music.

Couperin published in all five books of pièces de clavecin. Of these the first appeared early in the century and is not commonly reckoned among his best works. The other four sets appeared respectively in 1713, 1716, 1722, and 1730.

Each book contains several sets of pieces grouped together in ordres, according to key.[17] The canon of the suite is wholly disregarded and there is very little of the spirit of it. The first ordre, it is true, has as the first six pieces an allemande, two courantes, a sarabande, a gavotte, and a gigue; but there are twelve pieces in addition, of which only three are named dances. The second ordre, too, has an allemande, two courantes, and a sarabande at the beginning; but there follow eighteen more pieces of which only four are strictly dances. The fourth ordre is without true dance forms; so are the sixth, the seventh, the tenth, and others. Even the orthodox dances are given secondary titles, or the dance name is itself secondary. In fact, not only by including within one ordre many more pieces than ever found place within the suite, but by the very character of the pieces themselves, Couperin is dissociated from the suite writers.

He wrote in the preface to his first book of pieces,[18] that in composing he always had a particular subject before his eyes. This accounts for the titles affixed to most of his pieces. We have already referred to ‘battle’ pieces of earlier composers, and to Kuhnau’s narratives in music. Couperin’s music is not of the same sort. The majority of his titled pieces are pure music, admirable and charming in themselves. They are seldom copies. They make their appeal, or they are intelligible, not by what they delineate, but by what they express or suggest. The piece as a whole gives an impression, not the special figures or traits of which it is composed.

Let us consider a few of many types. Take what have been often called the portraits of court ladies. In these we cannot by any effort of the imagination find likenesses. It would be ludicrous to try. As ladies may differ in temperament from each other, so do these little pieces differ. There is the allemande L’Auguste, which is a dignified, somewhat austere dance piece in G minor; another, La Laborieuse, in a complicated contrapuntal style unusual with him. There are three sarabandes called La Majesteuse, La Prude, and La Lugubre, impressive, meagre, and profound in turn. These pieces are hardly personal, nor have they peculiar characteristics apart from the spirit which is clear in each of them.

Another type of portrait fits its title a little more tangibly. There is La Mylordine, in the style of an English jig; La Diane, which is built up on the fanfare figure always associated with the hunt; La Diligente, full of bustling finger work. Les Nonnettes are blonde and dark, the blondes, oddly enough, in minor, the dark in major.

Many others are so purely music, delicate and tender, that the titles seem more to be a gallant tribute to so and so, rather than the names of prototypes in the flesh. La Manon, La Babet, La fleurie, ou la tendre Nanette, L’Enchanteresse, La tendre Fanchon, and many others are in no way program music; nor can they ever be interpreted as such, since no man can say what charming girl, two centuries dead, may have suggested their illusive features.

It is these ‘portraits’ particularly which are Couperin’s own new contribution to the art of music. So individual is the musical life in each one, so special and complete its character, so full of sentiment and poetry, that, small as it is, it may stand alone as a perfect and enduring work of art. It has nothing to do with the suite or with any of the cyclic forms. Here are the first flowers from that branch of music from which later were to grow the nocturnes of Field, the Moments musicals of Schubert, the preludes of Chopin.

Between these and the few pieces which are frankly almost wholly dependent upon a program are a great number of others lightly suggestive of their titles. Sometimes it is only in general character. Les vendangeuses and Les moissoneurs do not seem so particularly related to wine-gathering or harvesting that the titles might not be interchanged; but both have something of a peasant character. In Les abeilles and in Le moucheron the characterization is finer. The pleasant humming of the bees is reproduced in one, the monotonous whirring of the gnat in the other. Les bergeries is simply pastoral, Les matelots Provençales is a lively march, followed by a horn-pipe. Les papillons is not unlike the little piece so named in the Schumann Carnaval, though here it means but butterflies. There are some imitative pieces which are in themselves charming music, such as Les petits moulins à vent, Le réveille-matin, Le carillon de Cythère, and Les ondes, with its undulating figures and fluid ornamentation.

Finally the program music is in various degrees programmistic. A little group of pieces called Les Pèlerines (Pilgrims) begins with a march, to be played gaily. Then comes a little movement to represent the spirit of alms-giving, in a minor key, to be played tenderly; and this is followed by a cheerful little movement of thanks, to which is added a lively coda. The whole is rather an expression of moods than a picture of actions. Les petits ages is in some respects more literal. The first movement, La muse naissante, is written in a syncopated style, the right hand always following the left, which may well express weakness and hesitation. L’adolescente, the third movement, is a lively rondo in vigorous gavotte rhythm.

Two sets are entirely program music. One of these, Les Bacchanales, has a march (pésament, sans lenteur) of the gray-clad ones; then three movements expressive of the delights of wine, the tenderness to which it warms and the madness to which it enflames. The music is not of itself interesting. More remarkable, though devoid of musical worth save a good bit of the comical, is Les fastes de la grande et ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx. These records or tales are divided into five acts, which represent the notables and judges of the kingdom, the old men and the beggars (over a drone bass), the jugglers, tumblers and mountebanks, with their bears and monkeys, the cripples (those with one arm or leg played by the right hand, those who limp played by the left), and, finally, the confusion and flight of all, brought about by the drunkards and the bears and monkeys.

III

The last of these compositions are in no way representative of Couperin the artist. They might have been written by any one who had a love for nonsense, and they are not meant to be taken seriously. The quality of Couperin’s contribution to music must be tested in such pieces as Le bavolet-flottant, La fleurie, Les moissoneurs, Le carillon de Cythère, and La lugubre. His harmony is delicate, suggesting that of Mozart and even Chopin, to whom he is in many ways akin. He does not, like Scarlatti, wander far in the harmonic field; but in a relatively small compass glides about by semi-tones. There is, of course, a great deal of tonic and dominant, such as will always be associated with a certain clear-cut style of French dance music; but the grace of his melody and his style is too subtle to permit monotony. The harmonies of the sarabande La lugubre are profound.

In form he is precise. His use of the rondo deserves special attention. In this form he cast many of his loveliest pieces, and it is one which never found a place in the suite. It is very simple, yet in his hands full of charm. The groundwork of one main theme recurring regularly after several episodes or contrasting themes was analyzed in the previous chapter. Couperin called his episodes couplets, and his rondos are usually composed of the principal theme and three couplets. He does not invariably repeat the whole theme after each couplet, but sometimes, as in Les bergeries, only a characteristic phrase of it. The couplets are generally closely related to the main theme, from which they differ not in nature, but chiefly in ornamentation and harmony. Much of the charm of his music is due to the neat proportions of this hitherto neglected form. It was native to him as a son of France, where, from the early days of the singers of Provence, the song in stanzas with its dancing refrain had been beloved of the people. Through him it found a place in the great instrumental music of the world.

Couperin’s style is too delicate to be caught in words. To call it the style galant merely catalogues it as a free style, highly adorned with agrémens. The freedom is of course the freedom from all trace of polyphony in the old sense, of strict leading of voices from beginning to end. Couperin adds notes to his harmonic background when and where he will; so that it is impossible to say whether a piece is in two, or three, or four parts, because it is in no fixed number of parts at all.

The countless agrémens are more than an external feature of his music, and of other music of his time. The analogies which have often been drawn between them and the formal superficialities of court life under the great Louis are in the main false. Both Couperin and Emanuel Bach, a man of perhaps less sensitive, certainly of less elegant, taste, regarded them as of vital importance. Even the learned Kuhnau, who can hardly be called a stylist at all, considered them the sugar of his fruit. It would seem as if only by means of these flourishes harpsichord music could take on some grace of line and warmth of color. Whatever subtlety of expression the dry-toned instrument was capable of found life only in the agrémens. We cannot judge of the need of them nor of their peculiar beauties by the sound of them on the modern pianoforte, even under the lightest fingers. It is open to question whether any but a few of them should be retained in the performance of Couperin’s works, now that the instrument, the shortcomings of which they were intended to supplement, has been banished in general from the concert stage.

This is not only because the peculiarities of the pianoforte call for a different kind of ornamentation, but also because the playing of harpsichord flourishes is practically a lost art. Couperin and Emanuel Bach left minute directions and explanations in regard to them; but in their treatises we have only the letter of the law, not the spirit which inspired it. Even in their day, in spite of all laws, the agrémens were subject to the caprice of the player; and they remained so down to the time of Chopin.

Neither the freedom from polyphonic strictness nor the profusion of ornaments are the special peculiarities of Couperin’s style. They were more or less common to a great deal of the harpsichord music of his day. But he had a way, all his own at that time, of accompanying his melodies with a sort of singing bass or a melodious inner voice that moved with the melody in thirds or sixths, or in smooth contrary motion. This may be studied in such pieces as La fleurie, Le bavolet-flottant, Les moissoneurs, Les abeilles, and many others. It has little to do with polyphony. The accompanying voices are only suggested. They never claim attention by their own movement. They seem a sort of spirit or tinted shadow of the melody, hardly more than whispering.

This accounts in part for what we may call the tenderness of Couperin’s music, a quality which makes itself felt no matter how elusive it may be. He marked most of his pieces to be played with a special expressiveness, and frequently used the word tendrement. This, he admitted in one of his prefaces, was likely to surprise those who were aware of the limitations of the clavecin. He knew that the ‘clavecin was perfect as regards scope and brilliance, but that one could not increase or diminish the tone on it.’ His thanks would be forthcoming to one who through taste and skill would be able to improve its expression in this respect. He was not above all else a virtuoso. ‛J’ayme beaucoup mieux ce qui me touche que ce qui me surprend,’ he wrote in 1713. There is no doubt that he desired the greatest refinement of touch and shading in the expression of his music, and that he suffered under the limitations of the instrument for which he wrote. For the texture of his music is soft and delicate, its loveliness has a secret quality, hardly more than suggested by the shadowy inner voices. We cannot but be reminded of Chopin, in whose music alone the spirits of music whispered again so softly together.

Among the contemporaries of Couperin, Marchand, Claude Daquin (1694-1772), and J. P. Rameau (1683-1764) are best known, at least by name, today. Marchand is remembered chiefly by reason of the episode with Bach in Dresden. Daquin enjoyed a brilliant reputation as an organist in his day. One of his pieces for clavecin—‘The Cuckoo’—is still heard today. J. B. Weckerlin quoted an amusing bird-story[19] about Daquin, the burden of which is that one Christmas eve Daquin imitated the song of a nightingale so perfectly on the organ in church that the treasurer of the parish dispatched beadles throughout the edifice in search of a live songster.

Rameau is a greater figure in the general history of music than Couperin himself; yet, though his harpsichord pieces are, perhaps therefore, better known than those of the somewhat earlier man, they lack the most unusual charm and perfection of Couperin’s. There are fifty-three of these in all. Ten were published in 1706, of which a gavotte in rondo form in A minor is best known. A second set of twenty-one pieces appeared in 1724, containing the still famous Rappel des oiseaux, the Tambourin, Les niais de Sologne, La poule, the Gavotte with variations, in A minor, and many others. Sixteen more followed, written between 1727 and 1731. In 1747 a single piece—La Dauphine—was published. Besides these, all written originally for harpsichord, he published five arrangements of his Pièces de concert, written in the first place for a group of three or more instruments.

Rameau’s style is less delicate than Couperin’s. It is not only that there are fewer agrémens. The workmanship is more vigorous, more dramatic; the music itself less intimate. The first gavotte in A minor, the doubles in the Rigaudon and in Les niais de Sologne, the variations in the second gavotte in A minor, and La Dauphine, all speak of a technical enlargement. Yet a certain fineness is lacking. It will be noticed that he showed hardly more allegiance to the canon of the suite than Couperin had shown; and there is a large portion of titles such as Les tendres plaintes, Les soupirs, L’entretien des muses, and there are also many portraits: La joyeuse, La triomphante, L’Egyptienne, L’agaçante, and others.

In the preface to the new edition of his works published under the supervision of Camille Saint-Saëns, there is the following quotation from Amadée Mereaux’s Les clavecinistes de 1637-1790, which summarizes his position in the history of harpsichord music. ‘If there is lacking in his melodies the smoothness of Couperin, the distinction, the delicacy, the purity of style which give to the music of that clavecin composer to Louis XIV its so precious quality of charm, Rameau has at least a boldness of spirit, an animation, a power of harmony and a richness of modulation. The reflection of his operatic style, lively, expressive, always precise and strongly rhythmical, is to be found in his instrumental style. In treatment of the keyboard Rameau went far ahead of his predecessors. His technical forms, his instrumental designs, his variety and brilliance in executive resources, and his new runs and figures are all conquests which he won to the domain of the harpsichord.’ Rameau is primarily a dramatic composer. It may be added that several of his harpsichord pieces later found a place in his operas, usually as ballet music.

IV

A glance over the many pieces of Scarlatti and Couperin discovers a vast field of unfamiliar music. If one looks deep enough to perceive the charm, the beauty, the perfection of these forgotten masterpieces, one cannot but wonder what more than a trick of time has condemned them to oblivion. For no astonished enthusiasm of student or amateur whose eye can hear, renders back glory to music that lies year after year silent on dusty shelves. The general ear has not heard it. The general eye cannot hear it as it can scan the ancient picture, the drama, the poetry of a time a thousand or two thousand years ago. Music that is silent is music quite forgotten if not dead.

And, what is more, the few pieces of Couperin which are still heard seem almost to live on sufferance, as if the life they have were not of their own, but lent them by the listener disposed to imagine a courtier’s life long ago washed out in blood. ‘Sweet and delicate,’ one hears of the music of Couperin, as one hears of some bit of old lace or old brocade, that has lain long in a chest of lavender. Yet the music of Couperin is far more than a matter of fashion. It is by all tokens great art. The lack is in the race of musicians and of men who have lost the art of playing it and the simplicity of attentive listening.

To a certain extent the music of Sebastian Bach suffers from the same lack. On the other hand, the spirit of his music is perennial and it holds a rank in the modern ear far above that held by any other harpsichord music. Apart from indefinable reasons of æsthetic worth there are other reasons why Bach’s music, at any rate a considerable part of it, is still with us.

In the first place, the style of its texture is solid. Instead of being crushed, as Couperin’s music is, by the heavy, rich tone of the modern pianoforte, it seems to grow stronger by speaking through the stronger instrument. Bach’s style is nearly always an organ style, whether he is writing for clavichord, for chorus, for bands or strings. It is very possible that a certain mystical, intimate sentiment which is innate in most of his clavichord music cannot find expression through the heavy strings of the pianoforte. This may be far dearer than the added depth and richness which the pianoforte has, as it were, hauled up from the great reservoirs of music he has left us. But it is none the less true that the high-tensioned heavy strings on their gaunt frame of cast iron need not call in vain on the music of Bach to set the heart of them vibrating.

In the second place, the two-and three-part ‘Inventions,’ and the preludes and fugues in the ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord’ have proved themselves to be, as Bach himself hoped, the very best of teaching or practice pieces. It is not that your conventional Mr. Dry-as-dust teacher has power to inflict Bach upon every tender, rebellious generation. It is rather that the pieces themselves cannot be excelled as exercises, not only for the fingers but for the brain. One need not delve here into the matter of their musical beauty, but one must pause in amazement before their sturdiness, which can stand up, still resilient, under the ceaseless hammering of ten million sets of fingers. Clementi and Czerny are being pounded into insensibility; Cramer, despite the recommendations of Beethoven, is breathing his last; Moscheles, Dohler, Kalkbrenner, and a host of others are laid to rest. But here comes Bach bobbing up in our midst seeming to say: ‘Hit me! Hit me as hard as you like and still I’ll sing. And when you know me as well as I know you, you’ll know how to play the piano.’ So Bach has been, is, and will be introduced to young people. He inspires love, or hate, or fear—a triple claim to remembrance.

In the third place, there is an intellectual complexity in his music which, as a triumph of human skill over the masses of sound, deserves and has won an altar with perpetual flame. And the marvel is that this skill is rarely used as an end in itself, but as a means of expressing very genuine and frank emotion. Here we come upon perhaps the great reason of Bach’s immortality—the warmth of his music. It is almost uniquely personal and subjective. In it he poured forth his whole soul with a lack of self-consciousness and a complete concentration. His was a powerful soul, always afire with enthusiasm; and his emotion seems to have clarified and crystallized his music as heat and pressure have made diamonds out of carbon.

Bach was a lovable man, but a stern and somewhat bellicose one as well. He was shrewd enough to respect social rank quite in the manner of his day, as the dedication of the Brandenburg concertos plainly shows; but the records of his various quarrels with the municipal authorities of Leipzig prove how quick he was to unrestrained wrath whenever his rights either as man or artist were infringed upon. A great deal of independence marked him. The same can hardly be said either of Scarlatti or of Couperin, the one of whom was lazy and good-natured, the other gently romantic and extremely polite. Scarlatti rather enjoyed his indifference to accepted rules of composition; and there was nothing either of self-abasement or of self-depreciation in Couperin; but both lacked the stalwart vigor of Bach. Scarlatti aimed, confessedly, to startle and to amuse by his harpsichord pieces. He cautioned his friends not to look for anything particularly serious in them. It is hard to dissociate an ideal of pure and only faintly colored beauty from Couperin. But in the music of Bach one seldom misses the ring of a strong and even an impetuous need of self-expression. In the mighty organ works, and in the vocal works, one may believe with him that he sang his soul out to the glory of his Maker; but in the smaller keyboard pieces sheer delight in expressing himself is unmistakable.

It is this that makes Bach a romanticist, while Couperin, with all his fanciful titles, is classic. It is this that made Bach write in nearly the same style for all instruments, drawing upon his personal inspiration without consideration of the instrument for which he wrote; while Couperin, exquisitely sensitive to all external impressions, forced his fine art to conformity with the special and limited qualities of the instrument for which he wrote the great part of his music. And, finally, it is this which produced utterance of so many varied moods and emotions in the music of Bach; while in the music of Couperin we find all moods and emotions tempered to one distinctly normal cast of thought.

Bach has been the subject of so much profound and special study that there is little to be added to the explanation of his character or of his works. In considering him as a composer for the harpsichord or clavichord, one has to bear two facts in mind: that he was a great player and a great teacher.

There is much evidence from his son and from prominent musicians who knew him, that the technical dexterity of his fingers was amazing. He played with great spirit and, when the music called for it, at a great speed. Perhaps the oft-repeated story of his triumph over the famous French player, Marchand, who, it will be remembered, defaulted at the appointed hour of contest, has been given undue significance. As we have had occasion to remark, in speaking of the contest between Handel and D. Scarlatti, such tourneys at the harpsichord were tests of wits, not of fingers. Bach was first of all an organist and it may be suggested, with no disloyalty to the great man among musicians, that he played the harpsichord with more warmth than glitter. We find little evidence in his harpsichord music of the sort of virtuosity which makes D. Scarlatti’s music astonish even today; or, it may be added, of the special flexible charm which gives Couperin’s its inimitable grace.

Bach is overwhelming as a virtuoso in his organ music, especially in passages for the pedals. In his harpsichord music he achieves a rushing, vigorous style. It must not be overlooked that Bach wrote also for the clavichord, quite explicitly, too. Most of the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues are distinctly clavichord, not harpsichord, music. That is to say, they require a fine shading which is impossible on the harpsichord. When he wrote for the harpsichord he had other effects in mind. The prelude of the English suite in G minor or the last movement of the Italian concerto may be taken as representative of his most vigorous and effective harpsichord style. They are different not only in range and breadth, but in spirit as well, from practically all of the ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord.’ Nevertheless, though these may be taken fairly as examples of his harpsichord style at its best and strongest, they are not especially effective as virtuoso music. There is sheer virtuosity only in the Goldberg Variations.

To Bach as a teacher we owe the Inventions and the ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord,’ both written expressly for the use and practice of young people who wished to learn about music and to acquire a taste for the best music. Volumes might well be filled with praise of them. It will suffice us only to note, however, that to master the technical difficulties of the keyboard was always for Bach only a step toward the art of playing, which is the art of expressing emotion in music. These two sets of pieces are all-powerful evidence of this—his creed—in accordance with which he always nobly lived and worked. They have but one parallel in pianoforte music: the Études of Chopin. The ‘Well-Tempered Clavichord’ is, and always will be, essentially a study in expression.

His system of tempering or tuning the clavichord, by reason of which he has often been granted a historical immortality, was the relatively simple one of dividing the octave into twelve equal intervals. Only the octave itself was strictly in tune, but the imperfections of the other intervals were so slight as to escape detection by the most practised ear. By paying the nominal toll of theoretical inaccuracy, Bach opened the roads of harmonic modulation on every hand. It must not be forgotten, however, that most of the pieces of Couperin or Scarlatti, not to mention many an outlandish chromatic tour de force in the works of the early English composers, would have been intolerable on a harpsichord strictly in tune. Other men than Bach had their systems of temperament. We may take Bach’s only to be the simplest.

Furthermore, that he created a new development of pianoforte technique by certain innovations in the manner of fingering passages, is open to question. It is well known that up to the beginning of the eighteenth century the use of the thumb on the keyboard was generally discountenanced. Bach himself had seen organists play who avoided using the thumb even in playing wide stretches. Scales were regularly played by the fingers, which, without the complement of the thumb, passed sideways over each other in a crawling motion which is said to have been inherited from the lutenists. Couperin advocated the use of the thumb in scales, but over, and not under, the fingers. Bach seems the first to have openly advised and practised passing the thumb under the fingers in the manner of today. Yet even he did not give up entirely the older method of gliding the fingers over each other in passages up and down the keyboard.

His system passed on through the facile hands of his son Emanuel, the greatest teacher of the next generation; and if it is not the crest of the wave of new styles of playing which was to break over Europe and flood a new and special pianoforte literature, is at any rate a considerable part of its force. Yet it must be borne in mind that Scarlatti founded by his own peculiar gifts a tradition of playing the piano and composing for it, in which Clementi was to grow up; and that, influential as Emanuel Bach was, Clementi was the teacher of the great virtuosi who paved the way to Chopin, the composer for the piano par excellence.

The foundation of all Bach’s music is the organ. Even in his works for violin alone, or in those for double chorus and instruments, the conjunct, contrapuntal style of organ music is unmistakable. His general technique was acquired by study of the organ works of his great predecessors, Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bohm, and others. He was first and always an organist. So it is not surprising to find by far the greater part of his harpsichord and clavichord music shaped to a polyphonic ideal; and, what is more, written in the close, smooth style which is primarily fitting to the organ.

His intelligence, however, was no less alert than it was acute. There is evidence in abundance that he not only knew well the work of most of his contemporaries, but that he appropriated what he found best in their style. He seems to have found the violin concertos of Vivaldi particularly worthy of study. He was indebted to him for the form of his own concertos; and, furthermore, he adapted certain features of Vivaldi’s technique of writing for the violin to the harpsichord. Of the influence of Couperin there is far less than was once supposed. The ‘French Suites’ were not so named by Bach and are, moreover, far more in his own contrapuntal style than in the tender style of Couperin. Kuhnau’s Bible sonatas are always cited as the model for Bach’s little Capriccio on the departure of his brother; but elsewhere it is hard to find evidence of indebtedness to Kuhnau.

But he even profited by an acquaintance with the trivial though enormously successful Italian opera of his day, and used the da capo aria as frankly as A. Scarlatti or J. A. Hasse. Still, whatever he acquired from his contemporaries was but imposed upon the great groundwork of his art, his organ technique. He never let himself go upon the stream of music of his day, but held steadfast to the ideal he had inherited from a century of great German organists, of whom he was to be the last and the greatest.

So, for the most part, the forms which had evolved during the seventeenth century were the forms in which he chose to express himself. Of these, two will be for ever associated with him, because he so expanded them and filled them with his poetry and emotion that no further growth was possible to them. These are the fugue and the suite.

V

Most of Bach’s predecessors and many of his contemporaries regarded the fugue as the highest form of instrumental music. It was the form in which they put their most serious endeavor. The harmonic basis of music was generally accepted and skill in weaving a contrapuntal or a polyphonic piece out of a principal motive or theme, and two or three subsidiary ones, was more or less common to all musicians. Yet fugues up to the time of Bach lacked a logical unity of construction. Excellent as the craftsmanship displayed in them might be, the effect was not satisfactory. There seemed, for instance, to be no very clear reason why a fugue should end except that the composer chose to end it. There was no principle of balance governing the work as a whole. It was architecturally out of proportion, or it failed to impress its proportions upon the listener. Bach alone seems to have given the fugue a perfectly balanced form, to have endowed it not only with life but with organization as well.

The secret of this is that at the bottom of his fugues lies a broadly conceived, well-balanced and firmly constructed harmonic plan. It must be granted, besides, that the subjects out of which he builds them have a singular vitality and are full of suggestion. But Bach, with his fertility in highly charged musical ideas and his apparently unlimited power to weave and ravel and weave musical material in endless variety of effects, rarely let his skill or his enthusiasm betray his sense of proportion. There is a compactness in nearly all his fugues which results from the compression of expressive ideas within the well-defined limits of a logical, harmonic plan.

Doubtless, the definiteness of this harmonic plan is more or less concealed from our modern ears by the uninterrupted movement of the voice parts, which was part of the conventional ideal of polyphonic writing. We are used to the pauses or stereotyped repetitions of the more modern style, which throw harmonic goals into prominence whereon the mind may perch and rest for a moment. Such perches are for the most part lacking in the Bach fugues. The subject takes flight and flies without rest until the end. Moreover, the art of playing Bach which brings out more than the regular and mechanical march of the voice-parts is unhappily extremely rare. Evenness of execution, that unhappy bête-noire of the striving student, is exalted far above any really more difficult, subtle variation of touch which may veil the flow of the various independent melodies in order to bring out the beautiful changing harmonies, arising from them like colored mist. But a simple analysis of any fugue will reveal the clear, well-balanced plan underneath it.

Pause for a moment at one or two of those that are better known. Take, for example, the fugue in C-sharp major from the first book of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord.’ There is the conventional opening section, in which the theme and secondary themes are announced. We have tonic, dominant, and a clear cadence again in the tonic. Then begins the strong pull toward the dominant, so nearly inevitable in most kinds of musical form, and finally the dominant triumphant with the main theme strong and clear, and a solid cadence.

Here, on the basis of harmony, the first broad part ends, and the music goes on to explore and develop through other keys. The harmonies are rich, the counterpoint melodious, the theme whispered as a recollection from the first land of familiar tonic and dominant. Then clearly we are held for a moment to enjoy E-sharp minor before we play back again, with fragments of the theme, to our well-known dominant and tonic. Off again on motives we cannot fail to recognize, as if we were again to wander afield in harmonies. But, no; we sink firmly upon a swelling G-sharp, our dominant again, the best known note of our theme. The captive harmonies rise and fall. Movement they have, but escape is impossible. The return home is inevitable, it is imminent, it is done. Cheerfully our theme traces its old ground. It pauses a moment as if contemplating further flight, but the tonic key is all-powerful and the flight is ended and with it our fugue.

It is all lucid and logical: the first broad section with its twice-told tonic and its accustomed urge to the dominant; the many measures of wandering that yet pause to make harmonies clear; the long struggle against the anchoring G-sharp that pulls ultimately home.

Or take, for example, the more complicated fugue in G minor (Book I). We find, with few exceptions, the same plan. There are four voices to enter, and the exposition of the theme and counter-subjects is consequently longer. But they come in regularly, one after the other, tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant; and then the irresistible sway of the whole fabric to the relative major, made clear by an unusually obvious cadence. There follows the development section and the various episodic modulations, all held intimately together by recurrences of the main theme. The keys are well-defined. Then, instead of a firm anchoring of all this variety on a pedal point, we have a descending, regular sequence which inevitably suggests an objective point to be reached—the return of the music at last to the keys in which it was first made known to us. And now in this final restatement, instead of retracing step by step the opening measures, we hear the entrances of the theme pressed close together, overlapping, a persistent leading F-sharp from which there is but one escape, the final chords settling majestically into G minor.

Both these fugues are built upon a well-balanced and yet varied harmonic groundwork. The art of Bach shows especially in the middle or developing section in the clearness with which he brings out the various harmonic stages through which he leads his music, and in the manner in which, by the unmistakable method of a persistent pedal point or a regular sequence, he brings back the final restatement of his material in a section balancing the opening section.

Other fugues in the same collection, such as those in C-sharp minor and in B-flat minor, are more architectural. But, though the marvellous building up of themes and counter-themes, as in the C-sharp minor fugue, seems to outline a very cathedral of sound, we shall find none the less the same tri-partite harmonic base underneath the work as a whole.

In longer fugues, such as the great one in C minor coupled with a toccata and that in D minor which is associated with the ‘Chromatic Fantasy,’ the balance between the opening and closing sections is somewhat obscured by the long free section in between. But even here a unity is maintained by the skillful repetition of striking passages and the return to the final section is always magnificently prepared.

Bach did not bind himself to rules in writing his fugues. He handled his material with great freedom. Witness many fugues like that in F minor in the second part of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ in which he often subdued the main theme to a capricious, obvious second theme. Such a treatment of the fugue approaches the dramatic; and this, together with the division, quite clear in so many, into three sections of exposition, development and restatement, cannot but suggest some sort of kinship between the fugue as Bach conceived it and the movement in so-called sonata form which grew to such splendid proportions in the half-century after his death. At any rate, we are compelled to recognize that in spite of the contrapuntal style, inherited from an age in which harmonic sequence was a secondary element in music, the Bach fugues owe their imperishable form to the same principles of harmonic foundation as those upon which the sonata-form of Mozart and Beethoven is known to rest.

VI

Though in the matter of musical form the name of Bach at once suggests the fugue, he brought the suite to no less perfection and significance. It must, however, be granted that the suite suffers by comparison with the fugue as a great form in music. First, the convention that all its movements be in the same key is more than likely to make the work as a whole monotonous. Secondly, the more or less obligatory dependence upon dance rhythms tends to restrict emotional vivacity and subtlety. Thirdly, since there can be but little contrast and variety among the separate movements, the suite lacks organic or internal life.

On the other hand, the emphasis laid upon rhythm may give the individual movements more obvious charm than the fugue is likely to exert. Furthermore, though the scope of the movements is more restricted than that of the fugue, the form is freer. And the neat balance of structure, with its two repeated sections, is undoubtedly more sympathetic to our modern ear than the involved architecture of the fugue. Lastly, though the sequence of allemande, courante, bourrée, gigue and other conventional movements may give us too much of a good thing, the sarabande does afford that striking point of contrast which is the precious asset of the great cyclic forms, whether sonata, string quartet, or symphony.

Bach wrote three complete sets of suites: the so-called French suites, which seem to have been written for his second wife during the time of his stay at Cöthen; the English suites,[20] and the ‘Partitas,’ which we may call the German suites. Both the English suites and the Partitas were written at Leipzig, and the latter were among the few works engraved and printed during his lifetime.

Inasmuch as the form of the suite, its sequence and normal number of movements, had been clearly defined both by Froberger and Kuhnau some time before Bach began to write, he cannot be said to have assisted in its creation, as he did in the creation of the fugue. From the point of view of form he neither added anything nor, strictly speaking, improved upon what he inherited. What he did do was to expand the limits of the various movements to great and noble proportions, and to fill them with a wealth of musical vigor and imagination hardly suggested before his day in any instrumental music except Corelli’s.

The French suites are the simplest and the most conventional. The style of them is unquestionably lighter than that of the later suites; but this may well be due less to an attempt to write in the style galant of Couperin, than to a desire to compose music technically within the grasp of his young and charming second wife. The sequence of the movements is conventional. All six have as their first three movements the normal allemande, courante and sarabande. All close with a gigue. Between the sarabande and the gigue he placed a number of extra dances, two minuets in the first suite, an air and minuet in the second, two minuets and an Anglaise in the third. The fourth and fifth have each three of these intermezzi, including gavottes, a bourrée and a loure; and the last has an odd group of four, consisting of a gavotte, a polonaise, a bourrée and a minuet. Only two of the courantes follow the French model with its complicated shifting rhythm. The others are of the more rapid Italian style.

The movements are all short and in the now familiar binary form, with its first section modulating from tonic to dominant, and repeated; and its second section going by way of a few more complicated modulations back again from dominant to tonic. There is little trace of a marked differentiation between the musical material given first in the tonic, and that given later in the dominant.

The hand of Bach is, however, not to be mistaken even here in these relatively simple pieces. The style is firm and for the most part close upon the organ style; the melodies—and there are melodies—are surprisingly sweet and fresh; the rhythm, delightfully crisp and vivacious. It is to be regretted that these early suites have generally dropped from the concert stage.

In looking over the English suites, which are undoubtedly the greatest works of their kind, one is first struck by the magnificent preludes. Each of the six suites has its prelude, longer by far and more powerful than any of the subsequent movements. In breadth of plan, in all-compelling vigor and vitality, in a magnificent, healthy emotion, these preludes may hold their places beside any single movements which have since been written. It cannot be denied that their style is more the style of organ than pianoforte music. A certain severity must also be admitted, which may leave something lacking to the modern ear that in a relatively long movement craves something of sensuous warmth. But their power is truly immense.

The style is highly contrapuntal and with few exceptions follows the convention of uninterrupted movement. This tends, as in many of the fugues, to hide the formal outline. The listener hears the music flowing on page after page and may be pardoned if, being able to recognize in the torrent of sound only one distinctly recurring theme, he thinks he is hearing music akin to the fugue. As a matter of fact, however, with the exception of only the first, the structure of these preludes is astonishingly formal and astonishingly simple. The second, fourth, fifth and sixth are fundamentally arias, on a huge scale.

The aria form is one of the simplest in music, one of the most effective as well, and was the first to develop under the influence of the Italian opera of the seventeenth century. It has frequently been called the A-B-A form. This is because it is made up of three distinct sections of which the first and last, predominantly in the tonic key, are identical, and the middle in some contrasting key or keys and of contrasting musical material. To spare themselves the trouble of writing out the last section, composers adopted the convention of merely writing the Italian words da capo (from the beginning) at the end of the second section, and of placing a double bar at the end of the first, over which the singer or player was not to pass upon his second performance of this section. Bach could have adopted this economical device, had he so desired, in the four preludes just mentioned; for each of them proves, upon examination, to be composed of three distinct sections, the middle more or less the longest, the first and last note for note the same.

We have already remarked how most of Bach’s fugues, especially the shorter ones, can be divided into three sections based upon harmony. In the preludes to the English suites the question of musical material enters into the division. Take for analysis the prelude in A minor to the second suite. The first section ends at the beginning of the fifty-fifth measure. It will be seen to open with a bold figure, the first notes of which are at once imitated in the left-hand part. There follows then a constant flow of figure work over a relatively simple harmonic foundation and through orderly sequences, the hands frequently imitating each other. Fragments of the opening phrase are heard five times. In the thirty-first measure a very distinct phrase is introduced, still in the tonic key, it will be observed, though in dominant harmony; and this is repeated in purely conventional manner in three registers, giving way to formal passage work which, falling and rising, leads to a good stout reiteration of the opening motive. With this the first section ends, in a full tonic cadence.

The second section begins at once with a wholly new figure which dominates the music from now on up to the one hundred and tenth measure. At this measure the second section ends, and here Bach might have written the words da capo; for what follows is but a repetition of the first fifty-five measures.

It must be noticed that, although the middle section is decidedly dominated by a figure which does not appear in the first, still the first theme is not allowed to be forgotten. It may be found five times in the course of the middle section, dividing, as it were, the new material into distinct clauses, and serving as well to impress upon our ears the unity of the piece as a whole.

This device is not truly germane to the aria form. It is suggestive of the rondo in general; and in particular of the modified rondo form of the Vivaldi violin concerto, of which we know Bach made a minute study.

In the splendid prelude to the third suite, in G minor, this concerto form is far more in evidence than the aria form. But the fourth, fifth, and sixth (barring the slow introduction) are like the second in superbly simple three-part aria form. This fact is well worth recollecting in connection with the development of the sonata form of a later period.

The remaining movements of the suites present no irregularities. These are the dignified allemandes, the Italian or French courantes, the elusive, sad sarabandes, always one or two Intermezzi, a Gavotte, a Bourrée, a Passepied or a Minuet, and the final Gigues with their conventional contrapuntal tricks and turns.

The Partitas are far less regular in structure. The opening movements are called by various names. There is a prelude for the first, short and in simple, rich style; a Sinfonie for the second, with three distinct parts, suggesting the French overture; a Fantasie for the third; and for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively, an Overture, a Preamble, and a Toccata. The second and third have odd movements, such as a Rondo, a Caprice, a Burlesca, and a Scherzo. On the whole, in spite of the technical perfection never absent in Bach’s work, and some movements such as the closing Gigue of the first partita, these suites are inferior to the English suites. There is something tentative about the new styles of preludes and about the interpolation of freakish intermezzi, which rather mars them from the point of view of unity and balance in the cyclic forms.

But the English suites stand out as magnificent specimens of vigorous and yet emotional music, great and broad in scope, perfect in detail—keyboard music which in many ways has never been surpassed.

VII

Besides the fugues and the suites there is a great deal of other and less easily defined harpsichord and clavichord music. We are not wanting in titles. We have Preludes, Toccatas, and Fantasias, also some Capriccios. These are, on the whole, of free and more or less whimsical structure. The preludes, and one thinks of the forty-eight little masterpieces of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ are usually simple and short. They are for the most part clearly harmonic music. Some are nothing more than a series of chords, notably those in C major, C minor, D minor, in the first part. The origin of this simple form of music has already been discussed; but the origin of the particular and well-nigh matchless beauty of these of Bach’s preludes can be found only in the great depths of his own genius, which here more almost than anywhere else, is incomprehensible. The subtlety of the modulations, the great tenderness and poetry of the chords, the infinite suggestion of feeling—all these within little pieces that might easily be printed on half a page, that have no definite outline, no trace of melody: we can but close our eyes and wonder.

Other preludes which are far more articulate, so to speak, are still fundamentally only harmonic music. So we may reckon the preludes in C-sharp major, in C-sharp minor, in E-flat minor, in G minor, in E major, in the first book. In these there is but a faint network of melody, usually contrapuntally treated, thrown over the profoundly moving harmonies underneath. Some others are little studies in fleetness or brilliancy of playing, such as those in D major and B-flat major; and still others are lyrical, suggesting Couperin, or even the Preludes of Chopin. It may be mentioned in passing that there is little internal relationship between preludes in the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord’
and the fugues which follow them. Nor is there evidence to show that the ones were composed for the others. Rather there is in many cases reason to believe that the preludes were composed often without any consideration of a fugue to follow. Still one cannot fail to observe, or rather to feel, a subtle affinity between most of the little pieces so united, which must have guided Bach in his selection and pairing.

Fac-simile of Bach's Manuscript of the Prelude in C major (Well-Tempered Clavichord).

The toccatas and the fantasias are on a much broader plan than the preludes. The former are essentially impressive, if not show pieces. They are usually built up upon a series of brilliant runs, oftenest scales or close arpeggios, with slower moving passages of chords and contrapuntal weavings scattered here and there. The fantasias are, as the name implies, quite free and irregular in form. Both fantasias and toccatas are for the most part distinctly in organ style. Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.

There are several ‘concertos’ and ‘sonatas’ of which to say much is to repeat what has already been said of other forms of his music. Both are obviously indebted to Vivaldi for style, or the external features of style, as well as for form.

The idea of the concerto in Bach’s day was not the idea which Mozart planted firmly in the mind of musicians. To show off the special qualities of the harpsichord against the background of an orchestra is not often evident as a purpose in Bach’s concertos. He wrote for the harpsichord much as he wrote for the orchestra; or for the orchestra as he wrote for the harpsichord. To the solo instrument he allotted passages which required a fineness in execution of details, or passages which he wished to be softer than the general run of the music. There is a clear intention to get contrast between the group of instruments and the solo instrument, but apparently little to write for the two in a distinct style.

One may take the D minor concerto for harpsichord and a group of instruments, or even better, the Italian Concerto, for a single harpsichord, preferably with two manuals, as the perfect type. The arrangement and number of movements is well worth noticing. There are three, of which the first and last are in the same key and of about the same length and style. The middle movement is in a contrasting key, is shorter and nearly lyric in character. The scheme is perfectly balanced as a whole, and, it will be noticed, shows little kinship with the suite.

The first and last movements are in the same rapid tempo and both are treated contrapuntally throughout. Their internal structure is fundamentally tri-partite, like the fugues and the preludes in the English suites, the opening and closing sections being the same. The middle section brings out new material, but also retains suggestions of that already announced; the new material tending to take on an episodic character, like the couplets in Couperin’s rondos. This is unusually clear in the middle section of the last movement of the Italian Concerto, in which there are three very distinct episodes, one of which appears twice, quite after the manner of the Beethoven rondo. But one feature, which Bach probably acquired from Vivaldi, makes the whole procedure different from Couperin’s. This is that the main theme, either the short or long part of it which may be restated between the episodes, appears in different keys. The same feature is evident in the preludes to the English suites.

The slow movements in both the D minor and the Italian concertos are written upon a favorite plan of Bach’s. The bass repeats a certain form or ground over and over again, above which the treble spins an ever varied, rhapsodical melody, highly ornate in character. The plan is an exceedingly simple and a very old one. It may be traced in the old motets of the mensuralists of the thirteenth century, with their droning ordines; and in the favorite ‘divisions’ of the early English composers. The Chaconne and the Passacaglia are but variants from the same root. It is, of course, a simple form of variations.

This leads us, at last, to a brief consideration of what is perhaps from the point of view of the pianist, if not indeed from that of the musician, the most astonishing of Bach’s harpsichord music,—the Goldberg Variations. The story of their origin will bear repetition for the light it throws on the mood in which they were written.

A certain Count Kaiserling, at one time Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, supposedly suffered from insomnia and nervous depression. He had in attendance a clavecinist named Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s, who, among other duties, had by his playing to wile away the miserable night hours of his unhappy patron. Hearing of the great Bach through Goldberg, Kaiserling requested him to write some harpsichord music of pleasant, cheerful character especially for these weary vigils. Bach composed and sent back a theme and thirty variations, which so pleased the count that he presented Bach with a goblet filled with one hundred Louis d’or.

One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. Yet an examination of them will convince one that Kaiserling must have rewarded Bach for sheer delight in the music, not for the blessed forgetfulness in sleep to which it may have been expected to seduce him. The quality of these variations is inexpressibly vivacious and charming. Bach shows himself, it is true, always the master of sounds and the science of music; but this may be taken as the secure foundation on which he allows himself for once to be the brilliant and even dazzling virtuoso.

With the object in view of enchanting an amateur who must have been, ex officio, very much a man of the world at large, Bach composed objectively. That is to say he wrote not so much to express himself as to please another. The same might be said of two other of the latest harpsichord works, the Musikalisches Opfer and the Kunst der Fuge; except that in both of these masterpieces his aim was more technical. In the Goldberg Variations he is, so to speak, off duty.

Consequently, there is in them little trace of the stern, albeit tender idealist, or of the teacher, or of the man sunk in the mystery of religious devotion. There are nine canons, at every interval from the unison to the ninth, some in contrary motion. But even in these learned processes there is a social suavity and charm. Witness especially the canon at the third (the ninth variation), and that at the sixth (the eighteenth variation). Only the twenty-fifth variation seems to show Bach entirely submerged within himself. Elsewhere he is for the most part primarily a virtuoso. In the matter of wide skips, of crossing the hands, and of sparkling velocity, he outruns Scarlatti. In fact the virtuosity of the variations as a whole is far beyond Scarlatti.

To begin with, he wrote for a harpsichord with two manuals; and in many of the variations, conspicuously in the eighth, the eleventh, the twentieth, and the twenty-third, he availed himself to the uttermost of the advantages of such an instrument. The hands constantly pass by each other on their way from one extremity of the keyboard to the other, or cross and recross. The parts which they play are interwoven in complications which, unhappily, must forever be the despair of the pianist. In such cases, of course, he may not justly be compared with Scarlatti, who wrote always for one manual.

But take for example the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth variations, which may be played on either one or two manuals. The trills and double trills in the former, together with the wide and sudden crossing of the hands, savor of Paganini and Liszt. So do the interlocked chord trills in the latter, and the airy, whirring triplets which follow them. Indeed, leaving aside a few effects in double notes, and certain others of the thunder and lightning variety which were wholly beyond the possibilities of the harpsichord, the modern pianoforte virtuoso style has little to show in advance upon the style of the Goldberg Variations.

Furthermore, if the Goldberg Variations are thus amazing from the point of view of the pianist, they are none the less so to the musician regarding their general form. There is in them positively no trace of the stereotyped form of variations of that day, which consisted either of a repetition of the theme with more and more elaborate ornament, or at best of a series of arabesques over the more or less bare harmonic foundation of the theme. The theme is for Bach but the simple germ of an idea, which, throughout the whole elaborate series, undergoes change, transformation, metamorphosis, hardly to be recognized in any of its varied forms, scarcely suggesting a unity to the work as a whole. Mood and rhythm change. New ideas sprout, seemingly quite independent of their origin. Even the harmonic foundation is veiled and altered. Bach speaks, as it were, in beautiful metaphors.

This conception and treatment of the variation form render it true greatness; endow it, indeed, as a form, with immortal life. External figurations will grow old-fashioned, or the ear will become satiated with them. But the Goldberg Variations have an inner life that cannot wither or decay. Bach’s warm imagination inspired them, gave them poetry as well as brilliance. No more modern variations are quite comparable with them except Brahms’ great series on a theme of Handel, in which, however, there is less warmth than severity, less imagination than art.

VIII

How shall Bach be placed in the history of music, in particular of pianoforte music? What part may he be said to play in the development of the art? The paternity which most composers of the nineteenth century rejoiced to fasten upon him, is hardly fitting. Bach was the father of twenty-two children in this life, but musically he died without heir. His sons Emanuel and Christian were two of the most influential composers of the next generation; but both discarded their father’s inheritance as of little service to them in the forward march of music.