Donald Francis Tovey

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The little scherzo no less clearly foreshadows the new era in music by the fact that in so small and light a movement a modulation from A to G sharp minor can occur too naturally to excite surprise. If the later work of Beethoven were unknown there would be very little evidence that this sonata was by a young man, except, perhaps, in the remarkable abruptness of style in the first movement, an abruptness which is characteristic, not of immaturity, but of art in which problems are successfully solved for the first time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now it can only be said that an intonation which makes nonsense of chords of which every classical composer from the time of Corelli has made excellent sense, is a very unjust intonation indeed; and to anybody who realizes the universal relation between art and nature it is obvious that the chord of the diminished 7th must owe its naturalness to its close approximation to the natural ratios of the minor scale, while it owes its artistic possibility to the extremely minute instinctive modification by which its dissonance becomes tolerable. ”

“ He will always work at the kind of art that is most complete and consistent in all its aspects. The same spirit of truthfulness that makes Sebastian Bach hold himself aloof from the progressive art which he encourages in his sons, drives Beethoven to invent new forms and new means of expression with every work he writes. Gluck abolished the Da Capo Aria, because it was unfit for dramatic music. Bach did not abolish it, because he did not intend to write dramatic music in the strict sense of the term. ”

“ And yet, whatever disguise may have been foisted on it by corrupt traditions and ignorance of its idioms, whenever any fragment of it gained the inner ear of a true composer the effect on the history of music was immediate and profound. Indeed his influence is by no means chiefly manifested in the time when his work became known in its larger aspects, though the Bach-revival is very obviously connected with certain tendencies in the “Romantic” movement in music. ”

“ The boldness with which the slow introduction is blended in broad statement and counter-statement with the allegro, is directly impressive, as is also the entry of the second subject with its dark harmony and tone, but the work needs long familiarity before its vast mass of thought reveals itself to us in its true lucidity. ”

“ Practically every law of harmony in 16th-century music may be equally well regarded as a law of vocal effect. Discords must not be taken unprepared, because a singer can only find his note by a mental judgment, and in attacking a discord he has to find a note of which the harmonic meaning is at variance with that of other notes sung at the same time. ”

“ And when they become so great as to make a new epoch it is generally at the cost of a period of experiment too heterogeneous and insecure for works of art to attain great permanent value. But in Beethoven’s case, as we have said, the process of development is so smooth that it is impossible to separate the periods clearly, although the ground covered is, as regards emotional range, at least as great as that between Bach and Mozart. No artist has ever left more authoritative documentary evidence as to the steps of his development than Beethoven. ”

“ This system of equal temperament, with twelve equal semitones in the octave, obviously annihilates important distinctions, and in the most used keys it sours the concords and blunts the discords more than unequal temperament; but it is never harsh; and where it does not express harmonic subtleties the ear instinctively supplies the interpretation; as the observing faculty, indeed, always does wherever the resources of art indicate more than they express. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Just intonation is a reality in so far as it emphasizes the contrast between concord and discord; but when it forbids artistic interaction between harmony and melody it is a chimera. It is sometimes said that Bach, by the example of his forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, first fixed the modern scale. ”

“ Bach himself is known to have executed it in a very polyphonic style, and this for the excellent reason that plain chords would have contrasted so strongly with the real instrumental parts that they could not fail to attract attention even in the softest tones of the harpsichord or the organ, while light polyphony in these tones would elude the ear and at the same time perfectly bridge over the gap in the harmony. There seems no good reason why in modern performances the pianoforte should not be used for the purpose ”

“ A close study of the texture of Brahms’s work shows that he develops Bach’s and Beethoven’s artistic devices pari passu, and that the result is a complete unification of that opposition between polyphony and form which in the infancy of the sonata (as in every transitional stage in musical history) threatened to wreck the art as a false antithesis wrecks a philosophy. Perhaps the only great composers who escaped the direct influence of Bach are Gluck and Berlioz. ”

“ The one composer of the mid-nineteenth century who really lived on programme music was Berlioz, but he shows a characteristic inability to make up his mind as to what he is doing at any given moment. Externals appeal to him with such overwhelming force that, with all the genuine power of his rhetoric, he often loses grasp of the situation he thinks he is portraying. The moonshine and the sentiment of the Scene d'amour, in his Romeo and Juliet symphony, is charming ”

“ Handel discovered and matured every possibility of oratorio as an art-form, except such as may now be brought to light by those composers with whom the influence of Wagner is not too overwhelming for them to consider how far his principles are applicable to an art unconnected with the stage. Handel shows us that a definite oratorio style may exist in many different degrees. He was evidently impressed by the German forms of Passion-music as combining the utmost dramatic interest with the most intense contemplative devotion ”

“ The modern sense of tonality is so firm, and modern designs so large, that it is desirable that different portions of a composition should be arranged round different harmonic centres or keys, and moreover that the relation between these keys and the primary key should be felt, and the whole design should at last return to the primary key, to remain there with such emphasis and proportion as shall leave upon the mind the impression that the whole is in the primary key and that the foreign keys have been as artistically grouped around it as its own local harmonies. ”

“ There is only one thing that is artistically legitimate, and that is a perfect work of art. And the only thing demonstrably prejudicial to such legitimacy in a piece of programme music is that even the most cultured of musicians generally understand music better than they understand anything else, while the greatest musicians know more of their art than is dreamt of in general culture. ”

“ The slow movement well illustrates the rare cases in which Beethoven imitates Mozart to the detriment of his own proper richness of tone and thought, while the finale in its central episode brings a misapplied and somewhat diffuse structure in Mozart’s style into direct conflict with themes as “Beethovenish” in their terseness as in their sombre passion. The second sonata is flawless in execution, and entirely beyond the range of Haydn and Mozart in harmonic and dramatic thought, except in the finale. ”

“ The pianoforte trios of Haydn are perhaps the only works of first-rate artistic importance in which there is no doubt that the earlier stages of the new art do not admit of sufficient polyphony to give the instruments fair play. Haydn finds the pianoforte so completely capable of expressing his meaning that he is at a loss to find independent material for any accompanying instruments; and the violoncello in his trios has, except perhaps in four passages in the whole collection of thirty-three works, not a note to play that is not already in the bass of the pianoforte ”

“ The success of this sombre classical tragedy, which shows Cherubini’s genius in its full power, is an honour to the Paris public. If Cherubini had known how to combine his high ideals with an urbane tolerance of the opinions of persons of inferior taste, the severity of his music would not have prevented his attaining the height of prosperity. But Napoleon Bonaparte irritated him by an enthusiasm for the kind of Italian music against which his whole career, from the time he became Sarti’s pupil, was a protest. ”

“ Only in his last period does the pianoforte cease to be Beethoven’s normal means of expression. Accordingly, if in the discussion of Beethoven’s works, with which we close this article, we dwell rather more on the pianoforte sonatas than on his greater works, it is not only because they are more easily referred to by the general reader, but because they are actually a key to his intellectual development, such as is afforded neither by his life nor by the great works which are themselves the crowning mystery and wonder of musical art. ”

“ He dwells upon his delight in human society, from which he has had so early to isolate himself, but the thought of which now fills him with dread as it makes him realize his loss, not only in music but in all finer interchange of ideas, and terrifies him lest the cause of his distress should appear. ”

“ Similar principles apply in infinite detail to the treatment of wind instruments, and we must never lose sight of them in speculating as to the reasons why the genius of Beethoven was able to carry instrumentation into worlds of which Haydn and Mozart never dreamt, or why, having gone so far, it left anything unexplored. A subject so vast and so incapable of classification cannot be discussed here, but its aesthetic principles may be illustrated by the extreme case of the trumpets and horns, which in classical times had no scale except that of the natural harmonic series. ”