“ And so men have come to ask of a monarch, not whether he is a legitimate son of his house, but whether he derives his authority from the will of the nation. They have come to ask of a philosophy, not whether it is consistent, but whether it is true. And they have come to ask of an art-form, not whether it is perfect, but whether it is fitting to its subject-matter.
When we come to compare the music of the nineteenth century with that of the century preceding we find a contrast as striking as that between the state of Europe as Napoleon left it with that as he found it. ”

“ Wagner expressed this feeling when he said, ‘For inasmuch as he elevated music, conformably to its utmost nature, out of its degradation as a merely diverting art to the height of its sublime calling, he has opened to us the understanding of that art in which the world explains itself.’ Herein lies his true relation to the world of art and the secret of his greatness; for almost unchallenged he takes the supreme place in the realm of pure instrumental music. His power is that of intellect combined with greatness of character. ‘He loves love rather than any of the images of love. ”

“ Brahms stood upon the outer edge of romanticism, on the threshold of the movement to come. He took himself seriously, not however with enjoyment in individual liberty, with conscious indulgence in mood and reverie, but with grim determination to shape himself and his music to an ideal, which, were it only that of perfect law, was fixed above the attainment of the race. If, as it has been often written, Beethoven’s music expresses the triumph of man over destiny, Brahms may well speak of a triumph in spite of destiny. That over which Beethoven triumphed was the destiny which touches man ”

“ He loves God, whom he cannot name, whom he worships in no church built with hands, with an equal rapture. Virtue appears to him with the same loveliness as beauty.... There are times when he despairs for himself, never for the world. Law, order, a faultless celestial music, alone exist for him; and these he believed to have been settled before time was, in the heavens. Thus his music was neither revolt nor melancholy,’ and it is this, the noblest expression of a strange and otherwise inarticulate soul, which lives for the eternal glory of the art of music. ”

“ Oh, what superb evocations, feudal pomp, military mysticism, the thrill of fantastic legend, the cries of passion traversing history. And what skill the personality of the instruments, dramatic recitative symphonically accompanied by the orchestra, the typical phrase upon which an entire work is built.... An ingenious fellow, a most ingenious fellow!’
The French grand opera of Rossini and Meyerbeer was the musical expression of dramatic passionate sentiments, affording scope to every excellence of vocal and orchestral technique and even to every device of stage setting. ”

“ If Haydn and Mozart did not create the symphony, the excellence of their music standardized it. The blemish of conventionality and empty formalism cannot touch the excellence of their best work. Such excellence would have no power to move us were it only skill. There is genuine emotional inspiration in most of the Salomon symphonies and in the three great symphonies of Mozart. In Haydn’s music it is the simple emotion of folk songs; in Mozart’s it is more veiled and mysterious, subtle and elusive. In neither is it stormy and assertive, as in Beethoven, but it is none the less clearly felt. ”

“ No musician ever devoted himself more wholeheartedly to the study of folk-music, but he failed to imbue his works with the spirit of it. One has but to contrast him with Haydn or with Schubert to be convinced. The Liebeslieder waltzes, and the set of waltzes arranged for four hands, charming as they are, lack the true folk-spirit of spontaneity and warmth. For all their seeming simplicity they hold back something; they are veiled and therefore suggestive, not immediate. They breathe of the ever-changing sea, not of the warm and stable earth. ”

“ It is hard to get at, hard for the player, the singer, and the leader to reveal, but the fact none the less remains that Brahms is one of the very great composers, one who truly had something to say. One may feel at times that he set himself deliberately to say it in a manner new and strange; but it is none the less evident to one who has given thought to the interpretation of what lies behind his music, that the form of his utterance, though at first seemingly awkward and willful, is perfectly and marvellously fitting. ”

“ Most typical of the romantic period—more typical even than its art of song—was its orchestral music. Here all that was peculiar to it—individuality, freedom of form, largeness of conception, sensuousness of effect—could find fullest development. The orchestra in its eighteenth-century perfection was a small, compact, well-ordered body of instruments, in which every emphasis was laid on regularity and balance. The orchestra of Liszt’s or Berlioz’s dramatic symphonies was a bewildering collection of individual voices and romantic tone qualities. ”

“ A perfect stream of posthumous symphonies, operas, quartets, songs, every sort of music appeared year after year till the world began to doubt their authenticity. Schumann, upon his visit to Vienna in 1838, still discovered priceless treasures, including the great C major symphony.
As a man Schubert never got far away from the peasant stock from which he came. He was casual and careless in his life; a Bohemian rather from shiftlessness than from high spirits; content to work hard and faithfully, and demanding nothing more than a seidel of beer and a bosom companion for his diversion. ”

“ We shall watch the perfecting of the orchestra, its enrichment in sonority and in color. We shall see the Lied spring from the forehead of Schubert. We shall mark the development of the pianoforte and the growth of a noble literature of pianoforte music, rivalling that of the orchestra in proportion and in meaning. A new opera will come into being, discarding old traditions, alien myths, allying itself to the life of the peoples of Europe. ”

“ Intimate biographies of Liszt have succeeded in staining the brilliant colors of the Liszt myth, but, on the whole, no composer who gained a prodigious reputation during his lifetime has lived up to it better, so to speak, after his death. As an unrivalled concert pianist, the one conqueror who never suffered a defeat, he might have become vain and jealous. There is hardly a trace of vanity or jealousy in his nature. His appreciation of other composers was always generous and remarkably just. No amount of difference in school or aim could ever obscure, in his eyes, the real worth of a man. ”

“ But in musical details he followed him; in the portrayal of mood, in painting backgrounds, and in the handling of the chorus. Gluck painted landscape, but Mozart drew portraits. In musical characterization his mastery is undisputed. Again we have no use for words; the musical accents, the contour of the phrase and its rhythm delineate the man more precisely than a sketcher’s pencil. Here once more beauty is the first law, it sheds its evening glow over all. ”

“ In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart, excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. ”

“ Liszt was, above all, the man of the world, the man who loved to dominate people by his art and understood supremely well how to do it. Chopin was by nature too sensitive ever to be a public virtuoso; he reflected the Paris of the thirties in terms of the individual soul where Liszt reflected it in terms of the crowd. Each of them loved his piano ‘as an Arab his steed,’ in Liszt’s words. Hence Schumann’s music, while supremely pianistic, has little concern for outward effect, and was, in point of fact, slow in winning wide popularity. ”

“ During the last half dozen years of Beethoven’s life, two younger men, strongly affected by the new era of freedom, were molding and coloring music in other ways. Schubert, fired by the poetry of the German romanticists, was pouring out songs full of freshness and the new spirit, expressing in music the wildness of storm and night, the gruesome forest-rider, the fairy whisperings of the brook, the still sadness of frosty winter. ”

“ The last and decisive step in the revolution was the coming of Gluck. ‘It seems as if a century had worked to the limit of its strength to produce the flower of Gluck—the great man is always the composite genius of all the confluent temporal streams.’ [7] Yet he himself was one of these composite forces from which the artistic purpose of his life was evolved. The Gluck of the first five decades, the Gluck of Italian opera, of what we may call the Metastasio period, was simply one of the many Italians unconsciously working toward that end. ”

“ His ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, written when he was seventeen, has a place on modern concert programs analogous to that of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony.’ This work is equally the delight of the musical purist and of the untechnical music-lover. It is marked by all Mendelssohn’s finest qualities. Not a measure of it is slipshod or lacking in distinction. Its scoring is deft in the extreme. Its themes are fresh and charming. And upon it all is the polish in which Mendelssohn excelled; no note seems out of place, and none, one feels, could be otherwise than as it is. ”

“ We shall look relatively in vain for such colors in the music of the ‘poets.’ They are lyricists, they express moods in music and each little piece partakes of the color of the mood which it enfolds—is in general delicate and monochrome. The poets are essentially composers for the pianoforte. They have chosen the instrument suitable for the home and for intimate surroundings, and their choice bars the brilliancy of color from their now exquisite now passionate and profoundly moving art. They are musicians of the spirit and the mood, meditative, genuine, passionate, tearful and gay by turn. ”

“ The mood, too, is prevailingly dark, not light. That he could at times rise out of it and give way to light-heartedness and frank humor no one can deny who will recall, for instance, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ where the mood is boisterous and full of fun, student fun. The Passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony hints at it as well, and some of the songs, and the last movement of the violin concerto. But these are in strong contrast to the general spirit of his music. His happier moods are ever touched with wistfulness or with sadness. ”

“ His art of orchestration, like his art of writing for the pianoforte, is peculiarly his own, and again is the most fitting imaginable to the quality of his inspiration. It is often striking. The introduction to the last movement of the first symphony, the coda of the first movement of the second symphony, the adagio of the fourth symphony are all points of color which as color cannot be forgotten; and in all his works for orchestra this is what Hugo Riemann calls a ‘gothic’ interweaving of parts, which, if it be not a subtle coloration, is at any rate most beautiful shading. ”

“ In spite of his deafness, rudeness, and eccentricity Beethoven seems to have had no small degree of fascination for women. He was continually in love, writing sincere and charming letters to his ‘immortal Beloved,’ and planning more than once, with almost pathetic tenderness, for marriage and a home. There is a genuine infatuation, an ardent young-lover-like exultation in courtship that lifts him for a time even out of his art and leaves him wholly a man—a man, however, whose passion was always stayed and ennobled by spiritual bonds. ”

“ The marvellous prelude in C-sharp minor is the ultimate glorification of improvisation with all the charm of willful fancy and aimlessness, and all the stimulation of a sensitive taste which could not endure having a single note out of place. The Preludes are complete and unique; a careful listener can hear the whole twenty-six successively and retain a distinct impression for each. This is the supreme test of style in a composer, and in sense of style no greater composer than Chopin ever lived. ”

“ The first one he wrote—at four—would have set the feet of gay salons to dancing, but later they took real meaning, became alive with more than rhythm. Whether they go carelessly romping through flowery fields, full of the effervescence of youth, as in the Jupiter symphony, whether they sway languidly in sensuous rhythms or race ahead in fretful flight, with themes flitting in and out in breathless pursuit, they are always irresistible. And what balmy consolation, what sweet reassurance there lies in his ‘trios.’ Haydn gave life to the minuet; Mozart gave it beauty. ”

“ His life was often distracted and melancholy; his music is never distracted or melancholy, except in so far as great art can be melancholy with a nobly tragic, universal depth of sadness. In political matters a revolutionist and in social life a rebel, in his art he accepted forms as he found them, expanding them, indeed, but not discarding them. Audacious and impassioned not only in private conduct but in his extempore playing, in his writing he was cautious and selective beyond all belief. ”

“ The dictum ‘sensuous but not sensual,’ which applies in general to all Gounod’s work, is especially appropriate to Faust. It shows at its best his lyric genius, his ability to produce powerful effects without effort, and that languorous seduction which has been deprecated as an enervating influence in French dramatic art. In spite of elements unsympathetic to the modern musician, Faust, taken as a whole, is a work of a high order of beauty, shaped by the hand of a master. ‘Every page of the music tells of a striving after a lofty ideal.’
In Faust Gounod’s work as a creator culminates. ”

“ The world was content to believe that his silence was permanent, that the marvellously productive career of the great master had come to a glorious and fitting close in Aïda and the Requiem. Nobody then could have believed that Aïda, far from making the culmination of Verdi’s achievement, was but the beginning of a new period in which his genius rose to heights that dwarfed even the loftiest eminence of his heyday. ”

“ Moreover, the honest critic must admit that the first two symphonies of Beethoven fall short of the artistic beauty and the real greatness of the Mozart G minor or C major. Indeed, it is to be doubted if any orchestral music can be more beautiful than Mozart’s little symphony in G minor, for that is perfect.
We find in them the fresh-morning Spring of symphonic music, when the sun is bright, the air still cool and clear, the sparkling dew still on the grass. After them a freshness has gone out of music, never to return. ”