Romain Rolland

“ History is the most partial of the sciences. When it becomes enamoured of a man it loves him jealously; it will not even hear of others. Since the day when the greatness of Johann Sebastian Bach was admitted all that was great in his lifetime has become less than nothing. The world has hardly been able to forgive Händel for the impertinence of having had as great a genius as Bach's and a much greater success. The rest have fallen into dust; and there is no dust so dry as that of Telemann, whom posterity has forced to pay for the insolent victory which he won over Bach in his lifetime. ”

“ The Italian refers everything to himself. It is neither the action nor the characters that interest him. It is the passions; he embraces them all; he experiences them all in his own person. Hence the frenzied exaltation into which the opera throws him at certain moments. In no other country has the love of the opera this passionate quality, because no other nation displays this personal and egoistical character. The Italian does not go to the opera-house to see the heroes of opera, but to see himself, to hear himself, to caress and inflame his passions. All else is indifferent to him. ”

“ In Bouchard's day Neapolitan music was behind that of the rest of Italy. In Burney's time the Neapolitan composers were renowned not only for their natural genius, but for their science. And here we see what artistic institutions may do, not indeed to transform a race, but to make it produce what it has in reserve, and what, but for them, would probably never have sprung from the soil.
These institutions, in the case of Naples, were its famous conservatoires for the musical training of poor children. An admirable idea, which our modern democracies have neither conceived nor revived. ”

“ Without speaking of the individual value of these artists, which is often very great, it is their spirit which leads the way to the classic masterpieces of the close of the eighteenth century. J. S. Bach and Händel are two mountains which dominate but close a period. Telemann, Hasse, Jommelli and the Mannheim symphonists are the rivers which have made for themselves a way towards the future. As these rivers have poured themselves into greater rivers—Mozart, Beethoven,—which have absorbed them, we have forgotten them while still beholding the lofty summits in the distance. ”

“ Like Lully, he managed a theatre, directed an Academy of Music and sought to reform—or to form—the musical taste of a nation. But he never had Lully's powers of control; for Lully was an absolute monarch of French music; and if Händel relied, as he did, on the king's favour, that favour was a long way from being as important to him as it was to Lully. He was in a country which did not obey the orders of those in high places with docility; a country which was not enslaved to the State; a free country, of a critical, unruly temper ”

“ The German ear, however accustomed to the cooing of foreign song, cannot but hear the beauty in a popular song that issues from the heart. And thou, song of the Fatherland! how dost thou uplift the soul when poet and composer are patriots, and their emotions mingle like drops of dew in the calyx of a flower! I myself, twenty years ago, worked miracles with the Kriegsliedern of Gleim set to music by Bach. ”

“ A letter in the London Daily Post for the 13th April, 1739, says that "a people which appreciates the music of Israel in Egypt should have nothing to fear on whatever occasion, though all the might of an invasion were gathered against it." [34]
No music in the world gives forth so mighty a faith. It is the faith that removes mountains, and, like the rod of Moses, makes the eternal waters gush forth from the rock of hardened souls. Certain passages from his oratorios, certain cries of resurrection are living miracles, as of Lazarus rising from the tomb. ”

“ President de Brosses was right to speak with enthusiasm of these little comedies. "The less serious the style," he informs us, "the greater the success of Italian music; for it exhales the spirit of gaiety and is in its element." And he writes, just after seeing La Serva Padrona: "It is not true that one can die of laughter; for if it were I should certainly have died of it, despite the grief which I felt to think that my merriment prevented me from hearing as much as I could have wished of the heavenly music of this farce." ”

“ In a German musician reason retains its rights, even over music. But this virile intelligence was beginning to allow itself to be impaired by the seductions of Italy.
In Dresden and Leipzig, as in Florence and Rome, Kuhnau saw princes becoming the patrons of the sensuous and demoralising art which was the natural ally of despotism. His novel affords us a proof of the irresistible attraction which the Italian virtuoso exercised upon all classes of society. When Caraffa puts up at a country inn he is confident of meeting with the same welcome as in the homes of the wealthy city merchants. ”

“ It is a singular kind of music, as barbarous in its modulations, and as different from that of all the rest of Europe, as Scottish music. ... The artistic singing has an energy, a fire, which one does not perhaps meet with in any other part of the world, and which compensates for the lack of taste and delicacy. This manner of execution is so passionate that it is almost frenzied. It is owing to this impetuosity of temper that it is an ordinary thing to see a Neapolitan composer, starting with a gentle and sober movement, set the orchestra on fire before he has finished. ”

“ Yet the roots of Beethoven's art exist already, as has been shown, [16] in the Mannheim symphonies, in the work of that astonishing Johann Stamitz, whose orchestral trios, written in 1750, mark a new period. Through him instrumental music became the supple garment of the living soul, always in movement, perpetually changing, with its unexpected fluctuations and contrasts.
I do not wish to exaggerate. One can never express in art an emotion in all its purity, but only a more or less approximate image of it ”

“ One could not imagine a more absurd abuse of art."
The worthy Peter Schulz is a delightful musician, and he may be right, in theory, but of what use are theories? All the aestheticians in the world may prove by A + B that any musical description is absurd and that Händel, like Berlioz and Richard Strauss at a later date, sinned against good taste and against music itself; nothing can alter the fact that the "hailstorm chorus" in Israel in Egypt is a masterpiece, and that one could no more resist its whirlwind of sound than that of the March of Rakokczy or that of the battle in Heldenleben. ”

“ You must understand that the taste in music changes here at least every ten years."
Burney is still more positive:
" In Italy they treat an opera already heard like a last year's almanack. ... There is a rage for novelty; it has sometimes been the cause of the revolutions which one observes in Italian music; it often gives rise to strange concetti. It leads composers to seek novelty at any cost. The simplicity of the old masters does not please the public. It does not sufficiently tickle the pampered taste of these spoilt children, who can no longer take pleasure save in astonishment." ”

“ It is true that we are not always craving for extraordinary things; we often eat the simplest fruits of our fields with as much pleasure as the rarest and most exquisite foreign fruits, although the latter may be very costly and come from a great distance. I know there are gourmets among the amateurs of music who will accept nothing save that which comes from France or Italy—above all when fortune has permitted them to breathe the air of those countries. ”

“ There must have been many others of which we know nothing. Let us remember this, and also the fact that Händel's tranquillity concealed a prodigious expenditure of emotion. The indifferent, phlegmatic Händel is only the outer shell.
Those who conceive of him thus have never understood him, never penetrated his mind, which was exalted by transports of enthusiasm, pride, fury and joy; which was, at times, almost hallucinated. But music, for him, was a serene region which he would not allow the disorders of his life to enter ”

“ And he sets to music these words, which contain a tragic allusion to his own misfortune:
Our joy is lost in grief ... as day is lost in night.
Laboriously, in five days' time—five days!—and formerly he could have written a whole act in the time—he struggles on to the end of this sombre chorus, which illumines, in the darkness that envelops him, one of the grandest affirmations of faith in time of suffering. On emerging from these gloomy and tormented passages, a few voices (tenor and bass) in unison murmur very softly
All that is... ”

“ It must be admitted that Pepys had not very often occasion to repair to this consolation, for he was not often melancholy; he regards music rather as an unmixed delight, the most perfect in life:
I do consider that musick is all the pleasure that I live for in the world, and the greatest I can ever expect in the best of my life. ”

“ Compare, with the delight which the artists of the new period derive from describing themselves, the indifference of a Bach or a Händel, who does not even reply to the series of biographical queries sent him by Mattheson. It was not that Bach and Händel were less proud than Telemann, Holzbauer and their like. They were very much prouder. But their pride was to display their art and conceal their personality. The new period no longer distinguishes one from the other. Art becomes the reflection of personality. ”

“ Metastasio, a lover of il bel canto, and one of the last to preserve its true tradition, [21] was unwilling to sacrifice it. And what musician would reproach him for this? He wished the voice—poetry and music—always to be the centre of the picture; he distrusted the excessive development of the orchestra of those days; he found it all the more dangerous in that he was conscious of its strength and endeavoured to harness it in the service of his ideal of musical tragedy, harmoniously proportioned, [22] We must be truthful; under Gluck the drama gained much, but poetry nothing. ”

“ These worthy folk who go to hear Caraffa with a touching and absurd desire to respect and admire him are too good musicians not to be aware of the harpsichord-player's lack of talent; but their indulgence endeavours to find excuses for it. It is difficult to shake their confidence; but as soon as a suspicion finds its way into their worthy minds nothing can get it out again. They inspect the bogus Italian, all unknown to him, with conscientious deliberation ”

“ Immediately he begins to criticise the harpsichord; it is to the incomparable art of composition that he has applied all his genius. If he amuses himself on occasion by strumming on the clavier it is only because he is obliged to accompany himself when he sings one of his compositions. But this is one of his minor pastimes. Besides, Italian music for the clavier is simple and has none of those fantastic complications in which German taste delights. ”

“ I cannot understand how a man of Händel's talents could so far lower himself and his art as to endeavour to depict, by means of musical notes, in an oratorio on the Plagues of Egypt, the locusts hopping, the swarming of the lice and other equally disgusting things. ”

“ But, as always happens, the men of taste, the musicians, entirely failed to rate these works at their true value; they regarded them as unimportant entertainments, and they would have blushed to place them in the same rank as the musical tragedies. Constantly, in history, this unintelligent hierarchy of styles has caused indifferent works in a noble style to be prized more highly than admirable works in a less exalted style. ”

“ As to what an Italian virtuoso might be about the year 1700, and the mental vacuity of which he was capable, Caraffa provides us with a striking example, even though a trifle exaggerated. Nothing interests him apart from music, and all that interests him in music is virtuosity. ”

“ That a Beethoven should find solace for his sufferings and his passions in works of suffering and passion is easily understood. But that Händel, a sick man, assailed by anxieties, should find distraction in works expressing joy and serenity presupposes an almost superhuman mental equilibrium. How natural it is that Beethoven, endeavouring to write his Symphony of Joy, should have been fascinated by Händel! ”

“ I am convinced more and more, that, as every nation has a particular accent and tone in discourse, so as the tone of one not to agree with or please the other, no more can the fashion of singing to words, for that the better the words are set, the more they take in of the ordinary tone of the country whose language the song speaks, so that a song well composed by an Englishman must be better to an Englishman than it can be to a stranger, or than if set by a stranger in foreign words. ”

“ Yes, we have at last discovered that good taste in music of which Italy has never as yet offered us the perfect model. ... Good taste in music (the taste of a Hasse or a Graun) is the peculiar characteristic of the German intellect; no other nation can pride itself on this superiority. Morever, the Germans have for a long time been the chief masters of instrumental music, and they have retained this supremacy. ”

“ Here, then, we see popular music beginning frankly to permeate the scholarly style. German music recruits itself by steeping itself in the music of the races which surround the German frontier; it is about to borrow from them something of their natural spontaneity, their freshness of invention, and to them it will in time owe a renewed youth.
From Sorau Telemann proceeded to the Court at Eisenach, where he again found himself in a musical environment permeated by French influences. ”

“ Händel used to say, jestingly, that Telemann would write a piece of church music as quickly as one writes a letter. Graun wrote to Telemann in 1752: "I cannot agree with your saying: 'There is nothing new to be discovered in melody.' In the majority of French composers I certainly believe that melody is indeed exhausted, but not in a Telemann, if only he would not wear himself out by writing too much!" ”

“ Everywhere, as he journeys on, he makes free with the table, the cellar and the bed of the Cantors, organists and musicians of the petty States, whom he dazzles by his boasting. He exploits in wholesale fashion the absurd amateurs, the ignorant tradesmen who entertain artists in their desire to pass for connoisseurs. He instals himself in the country houses of rustic squires who, suffering from tedium, are anything but exacting as regards the quality of his music and his jests; he fills his purse and his belly until the moment when he becomes aware that he is beginning to weary his hosts ”