Donald Francis Tovey

“ As our range of investigation widens, and thoroughness of analysis and study increases, so we shall surely find in ourselves an ever-deepening conviction that Beethoven, whether in range, depth and truth of thought, perfect sense of beauty, or absolute conscientiousness of execution, is the greatest musician, perhaps the greatest artist, that ever lived. There is no means of measuring Beethoven’s influence upon subsequent music. Every composer of every school claims it. ”

“ It is impossible to read any large quantity of Orlando’s mature music without feeling that a mind like his would in modern times have covered a wider field of mature art than any one classical or modern composer known to us. ”

“ No amount of “Umarbeitung” could, for instance, turn the aria of Hercules into the Virgin’s cradle-song, or Wollust’s aria into the exhortation of Zion to prepare for the Bridegroom. In short, Bach’s melodies are characteristic, not like a mask with a set expression, but like a living face that is the more individual for the mobility of its features. Within these limits, that is, short of dramatic expression in just so far as “the end of drama is not character but action,” there is nothing good that Bach’s art does not express. ”

“ In any extensive anthology of liturgical polyphony such as the Musica Divina of Proske, his work stands out as impressively as Palestrina’s and Lasso’s; and the style, in spite of a resemblance to Palestrina which amounts to imitation, is as individual as only a successful imitator of Palestrina can be. That is to say, Victoria’s individuality is strong enough to assert itself by the very act of following Palestrina’s path. When he is below his best his style does not become crabbed or harsh, but over-facile and thin, though never failing in euphony. ”

“ Probably no composer has ever had more ideal circumstances for artistic inspiration and expression than had Orlando. His duty was to make music all day and every day, and to make it according to his own taste. Nothing was too good, too severe or too new for the duke. Church music was not more in demand than secular. Instrumental music, which in the 16th century had hardly any independent existence, accompanied the meals of the court; and Orlando would rise from dessert to sing trios and quartets with picked voices. The daily prayers included a full mass with polyphonic music. ”

“ Beethoven’s orthodoxy in such matters has provoked the smiles of Philistines, especially when it showed itself in his objections to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and his grounds for selecting the subject of Fidelio for his own opera. The last thing that Philistines will ever understand is that genius is far too independent of convention to abuse it; and Beethoven’s life, with all its mistakes, its grotesqueness and its pathos, is as far beyond the shafts of Philistine wit as his art. ”

“ There is, no doubt, great scope for a variation-form which is neither melodic nor anatomic, and we have not a word to say against the legitimacy of many forms of effective modern fantasia-variations; but the fact remains that it is very hazardous to talk of an “advance” in the variation-form, when even the best fantasia-variations are not only unconnected with any classical type but evidently unable to get nearly as far from either the melody or the harmony of their theme as the 25th of Bach’s “Goldberg” variations or many variations in the earliest sets by Beethoven. ”

“ In the canonic forms, the earliest known in music as an independent art, the laws of texture also determine the shape of the whole, so that it is impossible, except in the light of historical knowledge, to say which is prior to the other. The principle of canon being that one voice shall reproduce the material of another note for note, it follows that in a composition where all parts are canonic and where the material of the leading part consists of a pre-determined melody, such as a Gregorian chant or a popular song there remains no room for further consideration of the shape of the work. ”

“ If a painter could have a scale of light and shade as nearly approaching nature as the practical intonation of music approaches the acoustic facts it really involves, a visit to a picture gallery would be a severe strain on the strongest eyes, as Ruskin constantly points out. Yet music is in this respect exactly on the same footing as other arts. It constitutes no exception to the universal law that artistic ideas must be realized, not in spite of, but by means of practical necessities. However independent the treatment of discords, they assert themselves in the long run as transient. ”

“ But Beethoven’s highest art in variation-form is to be found in his independent sets of variations. In some of the earliest of these, notably in the 24 on a theme by Righini (which was his chief bravura performance as a young pianoforte player) , he far transcends not only the earlier or sonata-form idea of melodic variations, but fuses their resources with those of the ground-bass, and adds to them his own unparalleled grasp of rhythmic organization.. Beethoven is the first composer who can be said to have discovered that a theme consists not only of melody and harmony but of rhythm and form. ”

“ Beethoven himself in later years partly affected and partly felt a lack of sympathy with his own early style. But he had other things to do than to criticize it. Modern prejudice has not his excuse, and the neglect of Beethoven’s early works is no less than the neglect of the key to the understanding of his later. It is also the neglect of a mass of mature art that already places Beethoven on the same plane as Mozart, and contains perhaps the only traces in all his work of a real struggle between the forces of progress and those of construction. ”

“ As the composers of the 16th century made progress in harmonic and contrapuntal expression through the discipline of strict canonic forms, it became increasingly evident that there was no necessity for the maintenance of strict canon throughout a composition. On the contrary, the very variety of canonic possibilities, apart from the artistic necessity of breaking up the uniform fulness of harmony, suggested the desirability of changing one kind of canon for another, and even of contrasting canonic texture with that of plain masses of non-polyphonic harmony. ”

“ We may go further and say that a 16th-century discord, with its preparation and resolution, is, on a very small scale, like a simile, in which both the figure and its interpretation are given, whereas modern discord is like the metaphor, in which the figure is a substitute for and not an addition to the plain statement. It is not surprising that the sudden opening up of the whole possibilities of modern harmony at the end of the 16th century at first produced a chaos of style. ”

“ In the Dorian mode our sensations of tonality are more confused. We seem to be wandering through all the key-relationships of a minor tonic without defining anything, until at the final close the harmonies gather strength and bring us, perhaps with poetic surprise, to a close in D with a major chord. ”

“ The true principles on which keys are related proved so elastic in the hands of Beethoven that their results utterly outstripped the earlier theory which adhered desperately to the limitations of the 16th century; and so vast is the range of key which Beethoven is able to organize in a convincing scheme of relationship, that even modern theory, dazzled by the true harmonic possibilities, is apt to come to the conclusion, more lame and impotent than any ancient pedantry, that all keys are equally related. ”

“ This admirably illustrates Bach’s grasp of the true idea of a concerto, namely, that whatever the relations may be between the forces in respect of volume or sound, the whole treatment of the form must depend upon the healthy relation of function between that force which commands more and that which commands less attention. Ceteris paribus the individual, suitably placed, will command more attention than the crowd, whether in real life, drama or instrumental music. ”

“ When improvements in the structure of an instrument remove from the modern composer’s memory an entire category of limitations which in classical music determined the very character of the instrument, the temptation is easy to regard the improvement as a kind of access of wisdom, in comparison with which not only the older form of the instrument, but the part that it plays in classical music, is crude and archaic. ”

“ In music itself there is nothing else of so wide a range without grave artistic defects from which Beethoven is entirely free. Wagnerian opera aims at an ideal as truly artistic, and in so far of wider range than Beethoven’s that it passes beyond the bounds of pure music altogether. Within those bounds Beethoven remained, and even the apparent exceptions (such as Fidelio and his two great examples of “programme music,” the Pastoral Symphony and the sonata, Les Adieux) only show how universal his conception of pure music is. ”

“ With all his unreality of style, Liszt's symphonic poems are remarkable steps towards the attainment of a kind of instrumental music which, whether its form is dictated by a programme or not, is at any rate not that of the classical symphony. The programmes of Liszt's works have not always, perhaps not often, produced a living musical form; a form, that is, in which the rhythms and proportions are neither stiff nor nebulous. ”

“ With the next sentence “ecce enim beatam me dicent” the tone brightens to a quiet joy, but Bach takes advantage of the syntax of the Latin in a way that defies translation, and the sentence is finished by the chorus. “Omnes generationes” seem indeed to pass before us in the crowded fugue which rises in perpetual stretto, the incessant entries of its subject now mounting the whole scale, each part a step higher than the last, and now collecting in unison with a climax of closeness and volume overwhelming in its impression of time and multitude. ”

“ Yet his was the most subtle and universal force in the development of music, even when his musical language seemed hopelessly forgotten. Mozart, when rapidly advancing to the height of his mastery, had but to read the Baron von Swieten’s manuscript copies of the motets and of the Wohltemperirtes Klavier, and his style, quite apart from his immediate essays in the old art-forms, and apart also from the influence of his study of Handel, developed a new polyphonic richness and depth of harmony which steadily increased until his untimely death. ”

“ Explicit programme music has thus never been a thing of cardinal importance, either in the transitional periods in which it has been most prominent, or in the permanent musical classics. At the same time, artistic creation is not a thing that can be governed by any a priori metaphysical theory; and no great artist has been so ascetic as always to resist the inclination to act on the external ideas that impress him. No composer writes important music for the voice without words; for speech is too ancient a function of the human voice to be ousted by any a priori theory of art ”

“ One can only be thankful that he did not live to see anything but the wonderful promise of his son Friedermann, who, in the words of the brilliantly successful K. Philipp Emanuel Bach, was more nearly capable of replacing his father than all the rest of the family together. The prospect of complete loss of the tradition of his own polyphonic art he faced with equanimity, saying of the new style, which in the hands of his own son, Philipp Emanuel, was soon to eclipse it for the next hundred years, “The art has advanced to great heights: the old style of music no longer pleases our modern ears.” ”

“ What is undoubtedly newest in the last works is the enormous development of those polyphonic elements which are always essential to the life of a composition, but which have very different functions and degrees of prominence in different forms and stages of the art. Polyphony inevitably draws attention to detail, and thus Beethoven in his middle period found its more obvious manifestations but little conducive to the breadth of designs which were not as yet sufficiently familiar to take any but the foremost place. ”

“ In their perfect fusion of untranslatable dramatic emotion with every beauty of musical design and tone they have never been equalled, nor is it probable that any other art can show a wider range of thought embodied in a more perfect form. ”

“ But it is impossible to study the history of music Without coming to the conclusion that in all mature periods music has been self-sufficient to this extent, that, whatever stimulus it may receive from external ideas, and however much of these ideas it may have embodied in its structure, nothing has survived as a permanently intelligible classic that has not been musically coherent to a degree which seems to drive the subject-matter into the background, even in cases where that subject-matter is naturally present, as in songs, choral works and operas. ”