Italian music

“ The essence and perennial charm of German music lies in its melodious harmony. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that there is more melody in Italian than in German music. The only difference is that in Italian music the melody is more prominent, being unencumbered by complicated harmonies and accompaniments, while in German music the melody is interwoven with the various harmonic parts, which makes it difficult to follow at first. ”

“ As a parent of musical form he was the protagonist of Italian music, both sacred and secular, and left an admirable model, which even the new school of opera so soon to rise found it necessary to follow in the construction of harmony. The splendid and often licentious music of the theatre built its most worthy effects on the work of the pious composer, who lived, laboured, and died in an atmosphere of almost anchorite sanctity. ”

“ Such are the simple and meagre records of the life of the composer who carved and laid the foundation of the superstructure of Italian music; who, viewed in connection with his times and their limitations, must be regarded as one of the great creative minds in his art; who shares with Sebastian Bach the glory of having built an imperishable base for the labours of his successors. ”

“ France patiently, slowly, parsimoniously setting aside her musical possessions, as the French peasant hoards his cash in the famous woollen stocking!—And so they will find themselves young, vigorous and, as it were, renewed when Italy will be exhausted by her extravagant expenditure of energy.
Blame her who will! Even though the virtues of domestic economy are worthy of all esteem, all my sympathies are for the art that gives itself without counting the cost. It is the charm of this Italian music of the eighteenth century that it spends itself with both hands without recking of the future. ”

“ Doubtless ninety-nine out of every hundred musicians and music-lovers still believe that Italy has no art-song, that her composers are still devoting their energies to turning out those delectable morceaux in ballad-style which Italian opera singers have sung in the past, and still do, to an extent, when they are called upon to take part in a concert. ”

“ It grows on the Italian side of the Alps; for sunshine [128] and song seem inseparably connected, and the balmy atmosphere which makes Italy so rich in music, and imparts to her language such liquid melody, seems breathed into her trees. Those acquainted with music are well aware that the value of an instrument is prodigiously increased by the age of the wood, and that the purity of its tone depends very much on the skillfulness of the hand which has played upon it. ”

“ But a relation between music and poetry in which melody renounces all its inherent rights could not long be maintained. The genius of Italy in the seventeenth century was musical, not poetic. Just so soon as the infinite possibilities of charm that lie in free melody were once perceived, no theories of Platonizing pedants could check its progress. The demands of the new age, reinforced by the special Italian gift of melody, created an art form in which absolute music triumphed over the feebler claims of poetry and rhetoric. ”

“ He could write Italian music to delight the Italians, German music to satisfy the Germans, and now, was he determined to reach the soul of the people, rather than continue to cater for the amusement of a comparatively few wealthy dwellers in the metropolis? ”

“ The Italian, on the other hand, makes everything subordinate to feeling; for him the music must sparkle with pleasure, burn with passion, or lighten with rage; borne upon the tide of emotion, the under-current of harmony is a matter of little moment ”

“ It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species determined in the last quarter of the {342} sixteenth century. How that art at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be read in an English work of singular ability and originality. ”

“ In regard to modern Italian music this judgment may be just. These superficial compositions are a product of Italian music in its decline, and can force for themselves a certain popularity only by their pleasant and easy melodies. Even the old Italian music seems at first sight to pay little or no regard to the sense of the words, especially when the time, according to the classic German method, is set too quick. Upon closer study, however, we soon perceive that, although the music is treated as the chief thing, the meaning of the words is certainly given when the music is rightly performed. ”

“ Whoever has heard Italian music performed both by Italian and German singers will readily be convinced that the difference rests not only on style and method, but still more essentially on the peculiarities of the Italian national character. It should not therefore be matter for surprise that music which to Germans appears false or unnatural should make a much deeper impression on Italians than the merely sensual one which strikes the ear. ”

“ The strictly classical musicians of the present reject all Italian music as bad. The objection made to it is, that the music is never adapted to the words, but often expresses something wholly different and sometimes directly opposite to their meaning, and that it never gives back to us any high, poetic sentiment, but aims to bribe us with ornaments only, and accidents. ”

“ The great spirit of the Italian Renaissance, which was essentially a spirit of freedom and joy in individuality, thus took shape in Germany, England, and France, and laid a hand upon music as it had already done in Italy. On every hand it scatters its seeds, which will take root and later flower. ”

“ POPULARITY OF ITALIAN MUSIC. In Germany, music had, by the first quarter of the present century, attained a high position; such men as Handel, Glück, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber had enriched the world with masterpieces; all the larger towns possessed a good opera house, and the best singers and instrumentalists were heard in the concert halls. But the repertoires consisted almost exclusively of Italian music, especially of the works of that most prolific writer and universal favourite, Gioacchino Rossini. ”

“ Although we of the nineteenth century think of Italy chiefly as an opera-producing country, we must not forget that she was, in earlier days, identified with important phases in the development of instrumental music. Not only were the piano and violin invented in Italy, but the latter instrument was brought in that country to the highest possible degree of perfection; and the achievements of Italian organists are of primary importance in the history of music. ”

“ For some years I have been interested in the new musical development that is going on in Italy. There had been a period when her church music led the world in the variety and beauty of its form. Later on, especially in the eighteenth century, she had produced many composers of distinction in instrumental music, but from then on and until very recent times, opera had almost completely monopolized her writers. The splendid opera-houses which are to be found in her smallest towns are eloquent testimony to the important place which that form of art occupies in the hearts of the Italian people. ”

“ If the men would only express their enthusiasm meanwhile with less frightful sounds! This mad noise in an Italian theatre often annoys me. But music is the soul of these men, their life, their national business. In other countries, certainly, there are musicians who equal the greatest Italian masters, but there is no other musical nation. Here, in Italy, music is not represented by individuals; it manifests itself in the whole population; music has become a nation. ”

“ There is therefore reason to hope, that, if once the system of musical education can be founded on a solid basis, the most gratifying results may follow in Italian music of the future. The inhabitants of the Apennine peninsula, with their sensuous nature, their musical language, and their overflowing love for singing and music in general, must perforce continue to cultivate an art without which their life as a nation would be incomplete. ”

“ The innumerable joke songs of Italy present a peculiar problem to the singer. They must be sung with the most expert enunciation, with a fine technique that conceals all art, and with a spirit bursting with fun. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they are impossible to any but the Italian born and bred. Their purely musical value, it must be admitted, is usually slight; but they have none the less a high place in folk-song literature. It is only fair to say that the musicianship of the Italian songs is often careless and faulty. ”

“ If any fidelity be preserved in the record, it always casts new light on their works. The exuberance of Italian praise is the better extreme of the two, for the heart, with all its blunders, tells truth more easily than the head. The records before us of the great composers are by the patient and reverent Germans, the sensible, never to be duped Englishman, or the sprightly Frenchman; but a Vasari was needed also to cast a broader sunlight on the scene. All artist lives are interesting. And those of the musicians, peculiarly so to-day, when Music is the living, growing art. ”

“ Consistently with this not infrequently Italian music, in which this truth is pre-eminently emphasized, will, just as poetry will, pass into mere melodious sound simply, and can readily appear to part company with the emotional stimulus and its particular mode of expression, or even in fact do so, for the very good reason that its object is the enjoyment of art by itself, and the contentment of all who thus are able to enjoy themselves. ”

“ And when the Italian Song (especially the Sicilian) breaks out in full passion it is not to be matched for crude emotional power the world over. Any one of these songs, as, for instance, the fine one known from its refrain as O, Mama mia, shows the inspiration of the bloody Italian operas of the ’nineties.
Much of the Italian folk-music is enlivened with the most powerful rhythm imaginable. The dance is cultivated in Italy as it is in scarcely any other country in the world. ”

“ With us in the north it is quite different; there music only becomes a man, and is called Mozart or Meyerbeer; and when, moreover, they would accurately investigate what is the best that this northern music offers us, they find it in Italian sunshine and orange-perfume; and much rather than to our Germany those belong to fair Italy, the home of music. Yes, Italy will always be the home of music, even though her great maestri descend early into the grave or become dumb—even though Bellini dies and Rossini keeps silence. ”

“ The emotional Italians would not have made music's foundation as deep or as broad, but they were well fitted to contribute grace and beauty to its superstructure. The sensuous element in music is almost wholly a reflex of Italian temperament. ”

“ If the Italians have a genius for music above the English, the English have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature, and capable of giving the mind a much nobler entertainment. Would one think it was possible (at a time when an author lived that was able to write the Phedra and Hippolitus) for a people to be so stupidly fond of the Italian opera as scarce to give a third day's hearing to that admirable tragedy? Music is, certainly, a very agreeable entertainment ”

“ A melody may be as ample a medium for religious expression as an eight-voice fugue; hence, it is not imperative that Italian musicians should practise writing oratorios on a wholesale scale before essaying Church music. ”

“ Music came to expression last of the forms of art, and when mental movement was less intense. For this reason the Italian mind failed to rule in it after the early beginnings in the new direction had been made. [Pg 220] The representative element entered the art of music in Italy; but the mastery of its application, and the development of new forms fully completing the representation, were carried on by other nationalities where the mental movement still retained the pristine vigor of new impulses and rich vitality. ”

“ The art of engraving music, moreover, appears to be entirely lost. One finds nothing in all Italy resembling a music publisher's." [19]
Burney is even beginning to foresee, in the midst of the artistic splendour which he loves, the complete and by no means distant disappearance of Italian music. ”

“ But in all music Italy led the way, and German sacred music was constantly influenced by the Italians, with the result that Italian dramatic methods were often used by German composers of sacred music, not with any loss of seriousness and dignity to its character, but rather to the intenser expression of that deep personal religious feeling which characterised both the poetry and the music of the Protestant nations. ”

“ The full extent of the morbid, we might almost say the insane, passion for sensuous, nerve-exciting tone is sufficiently indicated by the encouragement in theatre and church of those outrages upon nature, the male soprano and alto. A school of composers of brilliant melodic genius appeared in Italy, France, and Germany, who supplied these singers with showy and pathetic music precisely suited to their peculiar powers. Italian melody and Italian vocalism became the reigning sensation in European society, and the opera easily took the primacy among fashionable amusements. ”