Modern Music

THE conflicts of the age in which we live are no less spiritual and intellectual than international and social. The modern man is a battleground of new forces, new impulses, which are striving for a part in his psychic life to the detriment of his strength and purposefulness. In music, these attributes of the will are represented by rhythm; and rhythm has weakened and declined as the super-acute sensibilities of the modern temperament have sought musical expression. There has been a corresponding decline in the constructive idea in music, which is closely connected with rhythm, for a hesitant and over-refined type of humanity demands art of a like quality. For the present, the great battle between form and content--a matter of absorbing interest--stands at a deadlock.

There is no doubt that the constructive power of rhythm in conflict with the refining influence of harmony has, in the recent past, produced extraordinarily attractive music, and has led to the discovery of a new and wonderful musical world; but great music cannot be based on "charm" alone, and the creative spirit in man has sought and is seeking to evoke form and order from artistic chaos. There has been a corresponding battle between sensationalism and intellectualism in the realm of philosophy. In art, as in life, men have tended to become more conscientious as they have become more self-conscious. History teaches that few works of art survive, and suggests that only certain select ideas, artistically expressed in a very special way, retain their value for succeeding generations. From the early years of the nineteenth century the spread of education, the increasing sense of citizenship, did much to modify the "guild" spirit of the musician, to destroy the isolation which had been at once a limitation and a source of strength to the profession, and to make the composer familiar with literary as well as musical expression. The immediate result was spiritual schism. The older idea of music as a moving pattern in sound--a pleasurable end in itself--began to appear a mere aesthetic dream in the light of a new desire to make it a vehicle of expression, while at the same time the love of beautiful sounds for their own sake was exceedingly strong, being apparently almost inseparable from the craftsmanship and technique of the art. Another aspect of music had, however, already been made prominent by its long association with lyric poetry. Franz Schubert wrote great and expressive music under the inspiration of Goethe's Prometheus and An Schwager Kronos, though he could at other times sink to the level of the Viennese street-ballad. In these songs his sensibilities, his emotions, as apart from his purely musical sense, are creative, while his texture, hovering between major and minor and full of startling modulations, is exceedingly "modern."

As a more sensitive, temperamental type developed, tone began to acquire colour-value. The fact first emerged in the crisp pianoforte style of Robert Schumann, an innate and prolific musician, who was also something of a poet, while in Chopin's imaginative pianoforte work, tone and colour are so closely united that clear visual images arise spontaneously in the mind of the listener. His Mazurkas exemplify this in a very striking way; their musical compactness and brevity intensifying the brilliance of their colour. In Schumann's Carnival and Chopin's Mazurkas, the union of tone and colour, dimly sought in previous ages, became at last an active force in music. It was achieved unconsciously, for these two composers of the Romantic school were following a purely musical impulse. They did not calculate upon the effect of colour when composing, but they achieved the miracle of coloured tone subconsciously. Certain poets, such as Tieck, had already worked consciously towards this end; but Schumann and Chopin, though they recognised the link between music and poetry, never sought inspiration directly in the painter's art. Yet the hour was at hand when composers were to awake to the connection between tone and colour, music and painting, and were thereafter to use colour consciously as an essential element in the art of music. In Schumann, Schubert and Chopin, it was a strong but still unrecognised influence. They sought no inspiration in the visual sense, but as they worked in the narrow range of the keyboard, their consciousness dominated by a purely musical conception of form answerable at the tribunal of the ear alone, deep in their subconsciousness, colour perceptions were stirring, shaping their work to ends beyond their ken.

The French mind, with its quick apprehension of truth its susceptibility to sense-impressions, its natural bent to the visual arts, was first to perceive the intimate connection existing between tone and colour, between music and painting. Theatrical art, in which the whole body and soul of a man are used as a medium of artistic expression, flourished exceedingly on French soil, and the great Court Ballets were witness to the fact that music and painting are closely akin. Rococo art is essentially the same, whether given to the eye by Watteau or to the ear by Couperin. French clear-sightedness is, however, partly counter-balanced by the self-satisfaction and complacency which persists even in their devotion to music. This destroys the simplicity of their work and tends to substitute mere virtuosity and artificiality for real inner worth. The German, on the contrary, has earnestness enough to give depth to his music, but his reasoning powers are frequently clouded by sentiment, and he thus lagged far behind in the realisation of the unity of the arts, which was clearly grasped and acted upon in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. There the existing divorce between painting and music was recognised, and the newlyawakened artistic sensibilities began a conscious attempt to effect a reunion, to enhance the value of tone by allying it with colour on the principle of their underlying unity. At the same time a new development in visual art called a new system of aesthetics into being. The French Romantics had cultivated susceptibility to colour; in the light of the writings of such men as Lamartine and Chateaubriand, Delacroix acquired a fresh angle of vision. Aesthetic criticism kept pace with the new movement, possibly outstripped it; and the varied and stimulating intellectual life of Paris raised the level of artistic sensibility and judgment.

Hector Berlioz was a type of the new artist-musician. He appeared with a certain symbolic fitness at a moment when Paris was hearing Beethoven's symphonies under the German conductor, Habenech, but assimilating very little of their meaning. As a Frenchman, endowed with the new artistic perceptions, Berlioz needed just this experience of symphonic perfection to lift him above his racial limitations, and in the resultant fusion of the most absolute musical impressions with the new aesthetic sensibility, the unity of the arts became a part of conscious thought.

Setting out from entirely different standpoints, Beethoven and Berlioz found common ground in the orchestra. Berlioz idolised Beethoven, yet he initiated an entirely contrary musical development. Beethoven in his preface to the Pastoral Symphony calls it an expression of feeling rather than a picture, but a comparison with the Scène aux Champs in Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique reveals a world of difference in the two. Beethoven sets down the musical thoughts arising in a perfectly simple "awareness" of nature, while Berlioz's wood-wind expresses the sum of pleasant visual and auditory impressions received by a sensitive town-dweller when visiting the country. In this, as in all his work, he is never for a moment unself-conscious, and it is typical of him that he once planned a symphony with reference to his beloved Ophelia, He calculated on the emotional effect of each instrument with intense care, was not always above a cheap effect, and took an exaggerated delight in shocking his audience.

The way was now clear for the use of tone-colour as an end in itself. Music gained and also lost something as the tendencies of the age were focussed within it. The newlyacquired colour-sense enriched the sources of creative impulse, yet the same temperamental awakening which brought this about caused an increase of self-consciousness, a hypercritical spirit, which robbed musical thought of much of its freshness. Increase of culture and self-criticism in the artist, the pursuit of novelty, produced great work but ended the age of innocence in music. The greater men, as always, still achieved unity of form and content, but the new colourism lent meretricious brilliance to much inferior work.

The orchestra was adapted in various ways, by novel grouping, increased use of wind and percussion instruments, and development of solo parts, to express the new appeal to the combined senses of sight and hearing. Disputes as to orchestral essentials and non-essentials were carried on with increasing acumen among the disputants, and there were many shades of opinion. The nineteenth century saw an astonishing development of technical and material resources, and it is not surprising that men were dazzled by these things and tended to overvalue them. 

 

Berlioz stood at the parting of the ways, and had, indeed, himself initiated the divergence, but his devotion to Beethoven prevented him from doing more than indicate the new musical direction. Liszt, Hungarian by birth, French by adoption and German by choice, was the destined leader of the new music. In him the artistic energies of his time were concentrated as in a burning-glass. He became a rallying-point of a new international community of art and intellect, and in him musicianship was linked with general culture. The stimulating, if sometimes superficial, Parisian world in which he moved, formed a thousand new associations in his exceedingly quick and sensitive mind. Literature and philosophy left their mark upon him. His nature was partly original and partly imitative. Paganini's genius fascinated him and he himself aimed at and achieved a high degree of virtuosity as a pianist. He deliberately sought emotional intoxication, yet his dominating intellect never lost control.

Constructive and destructive elements in the new movement were clearly revealed in Liszt. His eager imagination saw the experiences of life and the arts as the means of enriching music, but the very quantity and variety of the mental material thus accumulated over-developed his selfconsciousness, over-strained his powers and endangered the spontaneity of his work.

Tone-colour was no sooner an established fact than means were sought to explore its possibilities and exploit its charm to the full. Increasing technical perfection in the instrument increased the range of colour at command. Higher ends, moreover, were served than mere delight in gay colour. It was now possible to mirror the world of nature and of art in music far more clearly, and the things of the mind also, even irony, satire, and caricature. The Mephistophelian spirit (foreshadowed in the capricious leaps of the E-flat clarinet, and in the "Witches' Sabbath" of the Symphonit Fantastique)  was introduced by Liszt into music in the grand manner. Criticism took its place beside emotion in music; the twentieth century is perhaps doing its best and most original work in the intellectual, unemotional scherzo.

As a side issue, it may be noted that the new orchestral colour had a modifying and enriching effect upon pianoforte music. When Liszt arranged Berlioz's fantastic symphony for the piano, he made that instrument an echo of the orchestra. It had shown its colouristic capacity in the work of the Romantics, Schumann and Chopin, and it now attained a further superficial development; but its enhanced usefulness as a medium for pianoforte arrangements of orchestral work of the most elaborate kind injured, to some extent, its individual quality.

All the new methods were used at once in programmemusic, which began early to show signs of disruption. Composers applied the new and attractive discovery of tonecolour to one field of musical expression after another. Their work tended to become superficial, for the two inspirational sources mingled and clouded their music; so that, instead of attaining to the meaning behind graphic art, it remained often enough, after the expenditure of much energy, merely graphic. In this it differed from all earlier music, in which tone-painting had never been more than a diversion.

Liszt never attained the goal which he set before him. The imitative side of his nature, which sought to kindle imagination through memory, was perpetually at war with the creative and original side, which needed rather to exclude every borrowed thought; while his speculative mind, his readiness to assimilate new experience, besides encroaching on the purely musical idea, were insufficiently supported by technical skill to issue in any perfect work of art. The very virtuosity which had extracted such magic from the keys was a hindrance to him, making him a skilful arranger of the work of others rather than an original composer. Nevertheless the most valuable ideas of his period are traceable to him. He stood for the unity of the arts; his tone-colourism prepared the way for future developments in musical material, and, through the union of West and Middle Europe in his mind and person, he heralded the greatest creative genius of the nineteenth century.

In Richard Wagner all the aspirations of the new temperament were fulfilled. He was essentially unlike any previous type of musician; he was not indeed a "musician's musician" at all. He found inspiration, not in purely musical ideas, but in the manifold interests to which his quick perceptions and highly-developed nervous system provided the key, and which he afterwards made his own by right of knowledge and intellectual grasp. The whole went to nourish a sensuous love of the theatre. With the stage as his chosen medium he worked methodically to reconcile opposites and to exploit yet further the enchanting possibilities of newly-discovered tone-colour; but his work rests on a basis of ethical and metaphysical ideas, and Wagner's particular blend of ethics, metaphysics and learning is a marvellous thing. He achieved it by withdrawing into himself, by suffering no distractions, by waiting in patience, and then, when the time was ripe, putting the whole force of his personality into the creative act. He produced his works at long intervals. Not only did he master and co-ordinate his many interests into significant unity, but he claimed the whole of human culture as his province, grasped the most divergent departments of mental activity and interpreted them through the medium of sensuous music to the men of his day. The age of innocence was indeed lost, but in Tristan, which expounded the supernatural with all the persuasive power of sensuous music, the Romantic movement found its apotheosis.

On the technical side the new music had now freed itself from the established forms and rhythms of classical music, from the convention of the sonata; it had become varied in colour but infirm of purpose. It had taken several generations to perfect the sonata-form, and there followed a time of sensuous reaction in which linear polyphony with its farreaching intellectual possibilities was found unsatisfying to the ear and was abandoned in favour of sheer pleasure in instrumental tone and in, the virtuosity which could exploit it. Music was to be rebuilt on a grand scale, and the old scaffolding of the fugue, which had served Bach to express his mystic impersonal vision, was discarded. The sonata was based on the rhythm of life as it had come down to it from the older forms of march, dance and song. A very vital will, rooted in a lofty type of sensuousness, had subordinated other elements in music--such as melody and harmony-to the power of a rhythm which was closely bound up with man's physical being. When this rhythm originally became victorious in music it had replaced the old horizontal method by vertical treatment. The old thorough-bass had prepared the way for the "chord" which was now a force in music, and its importance naturally increased as the ear became more sensitive, as instrumental tone collectively and individually increased in charm, and as the human voice began to be used to the full. At the same time, the chord became a powerful means of emotional expression. For a short time, a few decades perhaps, it remained subordinate to rhythmic construction, so that the symmetry of a form which had developed from the simplest elements to the sonata was still undisturbed. But further possibilities in the chord were soon perceived. The emotional force of the leading-note, of suspensions, of chromatic progressions within the boundaries of the key-system, led gradually and inevitably to the undermining of rhythm, the expression of purpose, by harmony, the expression of emotional excitement, and this was intensified all the more when the singing voice found its power of expression enhanced and enriched by changing harmonies.

The struggle between strength of will and emotional excitement, between rhythm and harmony, is perceptible in the "development" sections of Beethoven's pianoforte sonatas. His genius wrestles mightily with the problem of reconciling constructive stability with self-expression. Emotion tears the motiv to pieces and appears to destroy symmetry. Rhythms are opposed and modulation is rapid, but the composer's constructive and rhythmic instinct controls his imagination and attains unity. Recapitulation, long deferred, is hinted at and at last achieved; yet the more progressive element in his work shows that the new sensibilities had come to life in Beethoven. The "development" which shows the conflict between sense and sensibility extends to other parts of the sonata. There are amplifications and extensions. We come to the Beethoven of the later sonatas and quartets. The form is apparently preserved, is recognisable in its main features, but emotion has wrought drastic changes. Beethoven, not greatly daring, turns back to the old musical forms of Bach and writes a series of fugues of intense critical significance. At the height of his emotional transfiguration, striving passionately towards the beyond, he forces himself into the stereotyped framework of systematic polyphony. The fugues express his despairing struggle.

Beethoven's melodic style contained the first hint of a disturbance of balance in the musical elements. His two-bar rhythm was powerful enough to clothe his creative idea in suitable and definite form without rendering it less personal; he foresaw in advance the character of every work that he conceived, and the conscientiousness with which he tested the value of his idea is, unparalleled. It had to prove its worth by reference to an underlying intellectual conception which the composer earnestly desired to express, and it had also to satisfy a metaphysical ideal of form. This sense of responsibility increased as his work developed, and his difficulties increased with it. His imagination was dominated by a strict sense of logic, and the themes and motives which seem capable of such endless development were the result of the pains he took with his imaginative material; while the sense of logic itself originated in a paramount rhythmic instinct which trusted implicitly to duple time and used it to the full. The new spirit affected Beethoven's melody, more markedly than other elements in his music. In the slower movements it still moved with comparative ease, but even there it paid for its great intensity by loss of its former untroubled quality, foreshadowing much in modern music. Psychic inhibitions began to trouble Beethoven's apparently incorruptible rhythm. It remained a constructive force, consciously employed, but extension of certain parts of the sonata brought syncopation and the shifting of emphasis in their train. The variety of his rhythms in the development sections was symptomatic of the crisis. Little by little the rubato takes on increasing significance as an indication of future methods.

The sense of tonality, of cadence, remained dominant. Beethoven was strong enough to construct a vital tempo, an incisive rhythm, a colourful harmony, out of contradictory elements; but he still relied on the triad which he maintained unflinchingly, even in the swiftest modulation, to the end of his life. Beethoven's "diminished sevenths" sound a note of the most poignant tragedy; Wagner's tell merely of technical weakness, revealing his efforts to comply with a changing system of harmony. Beethoven is not by nature chromatic. Mozart's chromatics at times reveal emotional disturbance much more clearly; yet these sudden revelations do no damage to his art because it is the product of copious inspiration, sure technical mastery and unhampered joy of pure musical creation. That indeed is why Mozart's symphonies and chamber works, taken all together, seem too uniform in plan for the modern hearer and are characteristic and personal only when they uncover hidden tragedies.

In Beethoven the sonata attained perfection and then began to decay. As it became richer in content, wider in emotional appeal, more personal, its structure became less certain. The Hammerclavier sonata, Op. 101, is a striking example of this; the first movement is astonishing in its constructive elaboration, which seems to transcend the limitation of the sonata-form, the slow movement overwhelming in its lyrical expression, while the fugue, monumental and original as it is in form, is a prolonged agony.

The crisis was reflected in Beethoven's sense of tone. He derived his melodic ideas from folk-music; but, from the very first, he connected them with the keyboard, and this instrumental bias remained with him. When deafness came to shut off the world of outward sound, his sense of tone continued its inward development and sought orchestral expression for the free soul within. The human voice was never other than a hindrance to Beethoven's composition, and even had he been able to hear it he would have sought to transcend it. In the Ninth Symphony he exhausted its possibilities: the singers take up the poet's word, accentuate forcibly the common chord of the key and enter as a new body of orchestral instruments to dominate everything else.

Beethoven, in his treatment of melody, prognosticated the instrumental bent of modern music.

The Romantic movement revealed the fact that the sonataform was crumbling. Rhythm was so weakened by emotional excitement that it lost the greater part of its constructive power. The new sensibilities, which demanded a blend of the arts, gave colour to melody and harmony, and these, assisted by a new, worldly and sensuous melos, excluded rhythm from the great forms of music. The restless, uncertain spirit of the Romantics was expressed in syncopation and slurring of emphasis. A world of wonder was revealed in the capacity of the appoggiatura, for expressing inertia and yearning. Music became more susceptible to chromatic modulation, called new discord's into being, and created a new system of harmony. Subsidiary themes, interlaced, served to enhance the charm of a romantic and colourful type of music.

Rhythm had lost much of its constructive power, but gained adaptability in the hands of a less purposeful but more sensitive and sympathetic generation of musicians. The rubato supported vocal sentiment against rhythm, but it was the singer himself who was to exert a new, powerful influence on march, dance and song. The imagination of the period was preoccupied with any new thing, and the musical forms natural to the peasant-mind were an irresistible lure. But the Romantics did not forget their own country, and Robert Schumann, in many ways a typical German Romantic, clung obstinately to a rhythm of his own which was incompatible with the greater musical forms. He attained neither Bach's contrapuntal mysticism nor Beethoven's constructive power, yet he derived something from both. The Romantic movement had influenced and changed him beyond all hope of return to the classical forms. It was otherwise with Mendelssohn, whose formalism was impervious to Romantic sentiment. The fairy spells of a midsummer night did indeed influence him momentarily in the direction of programmemusic, but the new impulse to expression was not in Mm, and, after this single glimpse of modernity, his music remained technically rooted in form, archaic rather than prophetic. At first it had something in common with Berlioz, but it drifted away from intellectualism and, apart from the Scherzos, became a weak reflection of eighteenth-century work.

Chopin's music, on the contrary, contained all the elements of the coming change--the emotional excitability which gave rise to tone-colour, intricate harmony making use of a new world of semitones, a feminine emphasis upon delicacy and intensity in the small forms, rather than on the majestic logic of the great. New rhythms and new colour were supplied by the national marches, songs and dances of Poland, and Chopin's innate talent for this branch of music flourished in the Parisian atmosphere. Something visionary in his art, his truly artistic ambition for perfection in his own genre, partly disguises an essentially mundane quality in his work.

In Chopin's sonatas the opening phrases, the principal and secondary themes, all within the sonata-form, yield a marvellous series of emotional pictures. The development of the B-flat minor sonata is almost hysterical in rhythm and harmony, and the closing movement foreshadows Impressionism. The restraints of the sonata-form have been shaken off, the emotions of a genius have undermined breadth of rhythm; but colour-values support the structure instead, and, where logic is wanting, moments of emotional tension carry the work along. It is totally unlike the work of Schumann who, provincial and stereotyped as he was, had absorbed something of Beethoven's spirit, a metaphysical interest of which Chopin was incapable.

Both romantic musicians possessed a melos founded on the pianoforte, by which they were technically and imaginatively inspired. The singer had yet to influence the melody which colour-values had kept solely instrumental. Its tone, its breadth, its phrasing, were imitated. This led to the prominence of melodic arabesques and melismata, which hang, like garlands, above their harmonic base. Melody thus won new fulness and new charm.

Chopin's Mazurkas broke entirely fresh ground. Schumann's songs with piano followed the words of the poet passionately, though at a distance, and helped to bridge the gulf between instrumental and vocal music; but Chopin, unfortunately, with all his romantic gifts did not write "vocally." Appoggiaturas and chromaticism, arising in mood and emotion, tended to separate vocal and instrumental music more widely, a tendency which Beethoven had already indicated. This, together with the crumbling of the constructive rhythm of the sonata, favoured the lesser rhythm of dance and song forms, in which Chopin was at ease. On a small scale he created a music of original charm, a first glimpse of a future in which the elements of music should serve for "expression," free of all rules. The present musical crisis is strikingly foreshadowed in Chopin's work.

A new Germany began to emerge with a far wider cultural horizon than the old, and sought to make the most of the lately-won musical freedom to express everything in life and in art; but new problems of form soon arose. Could the sonata-form be preserved, and, if so, how could it be modified so that the new freedom, the new cultural ideas, might enrich and not destroy it? Failure to effect this would inevitably lead to an impasse in German music, the character of which absolutely demands a clearly-defined form.

As will be seen from the foregoing, the terms "neo-German" and "neo-Romantic" are by no means interchangeable. Neo-Romanticism arose in Western Europe. The union of optic and acoustic art, the expression through music of a wide range of artistic and literary experience, and the combination of sensuous, nervous and intellectual forces to these ends called into being a more powerful and more individual type of orchestra, but the mind which conceived this development was French. Neo-Romanticism sprang up where the technical and mechanical resources of music were the subject of unemotional experiment. The technical improvement of keys and valves in wind-instruments hastened chromatic advance, and music as a whole was helped -- at any rate superficially -- by the somewhat theatrical outlook of the period.

The dramatic spirit gave a further impetus to the cult of colour begun by Berlioz and carried on by Liszt. A singular connection between France and Germany at that time, coupled with the suggestive influence of Liszt's brilliant cosmopolitanism, had domiciled Western stage-craft, with au its material glories, in the native city of Goethe--Weimar. It was thus ready to Richard Wagner's hand; his genius, at once comprehensive and ego-centric, seized upon the proffered material and transformed it for its own ends. Gluck had already exploited the German idea of the drama in a French atmosphere, and the more sensuous Weber had given it a significant twist in the hybrid form of the dramatic scena; but Wagner, a man of the new temperamental type, in touch with the sensitive culture of Western Europe, created and perfected a new German music-drama.

The rapid development of music-drama had a pronounced effect on symphonic music. There was no tendency to disparage Beethoven; on the contrary, he was increasingly honoured. The neo-Romantics recognised his work as the perfection of symphonic form, and his multiform motiv and its constructional uses formed a fruitful subject of study for the modern musician, for whom it mirrored the conflict between formative idea and established conventional form. The crisis of Ms "development" sections had a special appeal for him. Furthermore, the neo-Romantic could see how much Beethoven was obliged to leave unexpressed, as he wrestled with the half - developed orchestra of his day; there was cause enough to read or imagine a "programme" into the great composer's work.

Berlioz made the leitmotiv the formative principle in his symphonies, while leaving Beethoven's form practically unchanged. He would not allow his idée fixe to do it violence; in short, his genius not being bound up with the instinct for form, he shelved the problem.

Liszt went further and, at any rate, attempted a solution. The difficulty was intensified for him through his essentially gipsy musical temperament. His intellect was more restless and active, his colour-sense more fertile, than were those of Berlioz. His executive virtuosity, the theatricality acquired as a public performer whose attention is necessarily divided between his audience and his art, impelled him to perpetual experiment and spoiled the unity of his work. He introduced the "augmented triad," a perplexing and ambiguous chord, into music, and the parallelism of his tone and colour sense, achieved in interchange between pianoforte and orchestra, enhanced the fresh colouristic effect of his work. He had, however, no very delicate sense of tone as a composer, and he influenced music in the direction of colourful homophony, and therefore away from the sonata.

Wagner increased the difficulty by pronouncing the sonataform obsolete, and the influence of his opinion at that time was immense. He was strong enough to make his own form, and held that his own work should be sufficient proof to all contemporary and future composers that each new dramatic or imaginative idea could be and ought to be clothed in a new and suitable form.

The leitmotiv demanded a more intellectual attitude to music from both composer and audience. It had proved its constructive value in the symphonic poem and had now to be tested in opera.

The form which Wagner evolved for himself is little more than a very artistic delusion of form which the student of musical work dismisses as amateurish. The various phases of the leitmotiv render any attempt to evolve strict form abortive, as do the exigencies of scenes, dramatic, epic, psychologic and musical episodes. Once free of such compelling motives as dominated the Ring, music-drama began to develop a capacity for sectionalisation on a small scale; but it was permeated by the Romantic spirit, and such values as it contributed to music were in the nature of enhanced charm, not of great constructive ideas. Both the tendency to make melos dependent on the words, and the new "spoken song" (wmch destroyed melody in the older sense and shifted the centre of balance towards the orchestra which it needed for its support) made for fragmentary rather than continuous form. Though the capacity for great rhythmic construction was lost, very excellent work was achieved within the smaller formal subdivisions. The significant motiv was developed artistically, conscientiously and with restraint; with much variety of motion, pitch and colour. A vertical type of polyphony was ingeniously applied to express mood and dramatic situation. The chamber-music qualities of the strings and wood-wind were cleverly adapted to operatic ends. Suspensions and appoggiaturas, which express simultaneously restraint and desire, are the main devices by which this music maintains its perpetual state of excitement. Wagner's harmony was no novelty--it derived from Liszt and from ideas in the air at that time--but brilliant development and systematising made mediocre conceptions go a very long way.

The scenic conception supplied the place of a dominant rhythm and carried the composer almost automatically over the numerous imperfections, knots and repetitions in the elaborately-woven design of his music. The technique of the Meistersinger, a work in its kind exemplary and unique, forms the basis of such a purely instrumental work as the Siegfried Idyll, an attempt to express the lyrical quality of the last act of Siegfried in a small orchestral or chamber-music setting. In this work symphonic design is sacrificed to emotional background; it is reminiscent of the theatre, and is, indeed, a hybrid between symphony and opera. Its separate parts have a very definite form, but what makes the constant interchange of the two motives so attractive is the variation of tone obtained from a small orchestra by the transparent polyphony.

Sequence, the repetition of a phrase on a higher degree, is one of Wagner's most important methods of expression. In classic-romantic music it was employed unwillingly as a stop-gap in cases of technical difficulty, but Wagner used it constructively with stimulating effect. Beethoven, indeed, had rendered it expressive; but through Wagner it attained psycho-physiological value and reached its apotheosis in Tristan, the most powerful and sincere of all his works.

Tristan expresses love dominating personality, thus attaining mystical significance. The treatment of this subject is highly artistic and consciously architectonic, making Tristan the perfect example of romantic charm. The music breathes inward intensity of feeling rising to ecstasy, and interprets the rhythm of the soul, the pulsations of the heart. Every musical means, rhythmic, dynamic, harmonic, orchestral, developed and perfected in the history of the art, is employed to give expression to a story of overwhelming passion. The composer's very highly evolved sense of tone gets the utmost appeal from strings and wood-wind. Tristan, as the apotheosis of neo-Romanticism, used, recombined and set its stamp upon all the elements of music. Chromaticism becomes the symbol of overmastering passion, while suspended resolution and deceptive cadence convey the impression of unrelieved tension. The connecting links and bridges, outward signs of classic-romantic music, have vanished, and we have instead the "endless melody," the most direct expressive medium, economically used and enhanced by every means within the composer's reach.

Romanticism had rendered rhythm more expressive and more adaptable. Still influenced by Beethoven, it possessed constructive force within the treatment of the motiv, but in the hands of a more excitable generation of musicians it began to feel the restraint of the beat irksome, and to make a bid for freedom by means of more frequent changes of time.

Sequence was influenced by all these changes and gained both in constructive and expressive power. Mystic eroticism made it the spokesman of certain psycho-physiological presuppositions. In the Prelude and Death Scene of Tristan, it expresses the co-ordination of all the faculties of body and soul in the yearning for perfection. A very high degree of attainment had been reached which was, in reality, the logical outcome of Beethoven's untrammelled self-expression. It is true that in the meantime music had begun to lose stability from the romantic alliance of the arts, from the theatrical and dramatic spirit and from its closer connection with intellectual culture, yet it was still Beethoven, in his last and most liberal phase, who despite new conditions, provided the music of the day with a sound and trustworthy architectural plan. Wagner took his stand on form, even in moments of greatest abandonment.

Beethoven's sonata is thus seen to be the foster-mother of formal instrumental music even in music-drama. Two-bar rhythm, periods and cadencing are still faintly perceptible amidst romantic emotionalism, rhythm is but loosened, yet the change has been enough to make a vast difference in the general effect of music. The fourfold construction of the sonata was undoubtedly derived from the natural stresses between the different parts within the frame of a strong yet variable form. Though the whole of this structure had been rendered unsafe by the disruptive tendency of the "development sections," these natural stresses between the parts would need some new form expressive of greater freedom and capable of greater development; a form changeable and malleable, and without constriction. Thus arose a new constructional idea, that of a sonata complete in one movement, yet preserving the contrasting parts.

The idea did not spring to life fully grown, though the music-drama first made it seem practicable. Its germ may be found in Schubert's C major Fantasy, though there it was hardly a constructional idea but rather a piece of romantic, imaginative playfulness. On the other hand, Beethoven Les Adieux sonata is actually based on, and worked out in, a single programmatic motive, and his last sonatas and quartets in their singular treatment of motivs of memory certainly tend towards the preservation of a single motiv throughout.

The single movement was, however, a real innovation. It represented an intellectual effort to make a virtue of necessity in the treatment of form, to unify changes of mood and place, to attain unity in diversity. Liszt, always in the vanguard of ideas, carried it out in an original and individual fashion. The type of symphony thus evolved was a curious and contradictory mixture of tone-sense and colour-sense, of superficiality and significance, of mere virtuosity and intellectual range. Liszt's invention, the Symphonic Poem, is so compounded of racial, cultural and social impressions that the general effect, though stimulating, is bewildering. Simple and complex rhythms, emphatic tonality and disruptive harmony, tumble over each other. The treatment of the motiv derived from Beethoven is nourished upon instrumental tone and the inspiration of the programme; it is both impressive and illuminating; but the creative will, which depends on the conscious workings of fancy, only partly attains its ideal. Liszt was a great man, but he felt the destructive as well as the constructive forces of his time to the full.

In the strict sonata-form, undistracted by orchestral colour, he showed marked constructive power. The B minor sonata is an amazing proof of Ms intellectual co-ordinating ability. The varied development of the motiv is traceable to Beethoven. The courses of the "working-out" show the motiv developed in metre, in tone-colour, in dynamic gradation and in harmony, the whole being subject to a constructive idea which is supported by the contrasted moods. The determination with which the underlying idea and all its implications are preserved may perhaps suggest a persistent hallucination; the impression in performance may draw too much attention to the requirements of the virtuoso pianist, but it is none the less a hard-won intellectual triumph.

When Liszt aimed at a more superficial effect, as in a pianoforte concerto, his use of the single movement with a single motive throughout, in combination with his unique grasp of the possibilities of the keyboard, produced a very brilliant result.

A transvaluation of musical values had taken place. Sensibility in rebellion against the old security had changed not only melody, harmony and rhythm, but man's whole attitude to the art of music. Melody which satisfies the desire for a pattern complete in itself, became no more than a lyrical interlude in an art directed to other ends. Wind instruments were increasingly used, individually and in groups, as their possibilities, particularly those of the wood-wind, for expressing gradations of colour and variation of mood were fully realised. This development was hinted in Beethoven's work, but Berlioz was the first to apply it deliberately; and, from Ms day to the end of the nineteenth century, it added to the expressionistic resources of music by providing new associations of colour and a new and adaptable conception of form. The whole conception of musical sentiment underwent change; emotional effect was secured, not solely through melodic tone, but by all possible means. The problem of finding a form to express the inward values of outward things to the conscious enrichment of a musical work became pressing. It was only very occasionally solved, but the almost theatrical brilliance of much of the new music emphasised beauties of tone so that deficiencies of form went unpreceived.

"Music as a pattern in sound" and "Music as a means of expression" became the battle-cries of two opposing schools of thought and, as is the way with such cries, the character of each is exaggerated. The two ways frequently cross, for no music is independent of sound nor, consequently, of associations, and none can exist as "expression" alone. Yet the difference was acute. Chromaticism triumphed over the vocal element; diversified rhythm and colour made so determined an attack on the tottering sonata-form that a reaction was provoked.

All the forces of reaction were united in Johannes Brahms, the champion of symphonic and sonata form. He achieved neither more nor less than an apparent restoration of the old rhythmic and constructive security in a time of musical anarchy.

It is reasonable that such a composer should have come from Protestant North Germany, where the patient technique of many an obscure seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musician had culminated in the genius of Bach. Nevertheless, the more we study his mental and social background, the more astonishing does his achievement appear. Brahms was not uninfluenced by the developments of the preceding halfcentury; Romanticism touched him; syncopation and certain tricks of cross-accent in his work show that he felt the psychic perplexities of his period; and he was, moreover, oppressed by the responsibilities of his inheritance. But he was not highly susceptible; his musical temperament was not nervous, and colour was merely an incident in the structure of his work.

His artistic horizon was narrow and sombre. He knew nothing of the joys of the tone-colour sense, nor of the inspiring vision of a union of arts in music. He was not sensuous by nature and needed the stimulus of tradition. His simple straightforward will and mystic tendencies made him turn to the forms of Bach and Beethoven, whom he copied with exactitude, though he never caught their spirit. He thus became gradually at home in the classical forms, and sometimes used them mechanically when inspiration failed. His grasp of form was absolute, and so was his determination to include all his emotional experiences, however conflicting, within the same strong framework.

His capacity for emotional experience was, however, limited. Austerity and gloom were natural to him and his gaiety is always forced.

His work combines Bach's linear technique with Beethoven's emphasis of rhythm. Such romantic perplexities as assailed him served only to make his phrase more intricate, to extend his form and to enhance his tone-sense, which was at its best in expressing the graver emotions. He was never directly guided by his sense of tone; his harmony was based on knowledge of the subject influenced by church- and folk-music. He loved Schubert's clear twilight music and the minor key of Magyar folk-song. Hence arose thematic mannerisms; and the broken "diminished seventh" is to him a very natural means of expression.

His work springs from an inborn and highly cultivated professional sense. His songs evince strong poetic imagination; they are a real contribution to that branch of art and restore the balance between vocal and instrumental music. An original type of melody grew out of his rhythm and harmony.

Brahms belonged spiritually to an earlier generation. His success in attaining formal unity from diversity was a counterblast to neo-German music; but the way of the modern spirit could not be checked.