Back Aa

Popular History of the Art of Music

<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII.</h2> <h3>HAYDN, MOZART AND BEETHOVEN COMPARED.</h3> <hr style="width: 15%;" /> <ANTIMG src="images/capt.png" width-obs="102" height-obs="100" alt="T" title="T" class="floatl" />HE three masters, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, in relation to the symphony stand upon a plane of substantial equality, whether we estimate their merits according to the absolute worth of the compositions they produced in this form, or in the value of the additions which each in turn made to the ideal of his predecessor. Naturally, as the latest of the three, though so far contemporaneous with them as to form part of a single moment in the progress of art, the symphonies of Beethoven are greater in certain respects, and, as also was to have been expected from his general depth of mind and seriousness of purpose, they are perhaps somewhat more severe—or elevated—in style and sentiment. Nevertheless, the ideal of the three writers was but slightly different. All alike sought to weave tones into a succession of agreeable and beautiful combinations, related as representing a continued flight of spirit—a reverie of the beautiful. Haydn has the honor of having created the form. His fortunate innovation upon the traditions of his predecessors, by adding the second and contrasting theme, and his happy faculty of working out the middle part of the first movement thematically in a style of free fantasy based upon the various devices of counterpoint and canonic imitation, not only[Pg 317] suggested to the later composers a way in which an endless variety of pleasing tone pictures might be created—but established, and demonstrated by the clearness with which he did it, and the ever fresh variety and charm of his works, that this was the way in which symphonic material must be put together. For further particulars relating to the sonata form, as such, the student is referred to my "Primer of Musical Forms" (Arthur P. Schmidt, Boston, 1891). The form thus established by Haydn, Mozart accepted, and followed in all his symphonies, with few and unimportant variations. His additions to the general ideal of orchestral effect were in the direction of a sweeter cantilena, a vocal and song-like quality, which pervades every movement, and which in the slow movement rises to a height of refined and exquisite song never surpassed by any composer. Beethoven is often more impassioned; at times more forcible. But it is never possible to say of the pure spirit of Mozart, that this refined and gentle soul might not have broken mountains and shaken the hills if he had chosen to do so. His refinement is like that of a seraph, as we see it illustrated in the feminine-looking faces of the Greek Apollos, and the St. Michaels and archangels of Guido Reni and Raphael. It is free from passion and toil; but no man dares set a limit to the strength therein concealed. In the slow movements of the pianoforte sonatas of Mozart we do not find this quality so plainly manifested. The instrument was still too imperfect, and did not invite it. Moreover, the greater portion of these compositions bear the appearance of having been written for the use of amateurs. But in the string quartette and the symphonies it is different. Here the spirit of[Pg 318] Mozart has free course, and he goes from one beauty to another, with the sure instinct of a master before whom all tonal kingdoms are wide open. This can be seen even in the pianoforte arrangements of the greater symphonies. The melodies, apparently so simple and diatonic, are susceptible of being sung with heartfelt fervor under the fingers of the violinist, or by the voice of the great singer, and when so sung they become transfigured with beauty—luminous from within, like lovely angel faces, glowing with radiance from the higher realms of bliss. Without this idea of singing, and more than this, of a pure spirit singing, the Mozart adagios are open to the charge often made against them in these later days[Pg 319] by the unthinking, who find in them only the external peculiarities of simplicity and diatonic quality, with the unsensationalism which technical reserve implies.   <ANTIMG src="images/fig59.png" width-obs="400" height-obs="413" alt="Fig. 59" title="Fig. 59" /> <div class="blockquot"> Fig. 59. REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE TITLE PAGE OF BEETHOVEN'S SONATA, OPUS 26, CONTAINING THE CELEBRATED FUNERAL MARCH. </div>   Nor is it true that Beethoven is incapable of this elevated soaring in the higher realms of the merely beautiful in song. There is generally an undercurrent of deeper pathos in all his sustained slow movements, but in the earlier symphonies, especially in the second, there is a long slow movement of heavenly depth and quality. Indeed, without pausing to individualize we may say once for all that the slow movements of Beethoven are nearly as sweet and as forgetful, as rapturous, as those of Mozart. Even when he takes the lower key of the minor, with its implication of suffering and pain, there is still a sweetness, which once heard can never be forgotten. Think of the lovely allegretto of the seventh symphony, with its persistent motive of a quarter and two-eighths. Even in an arrangement for the pianoforte this is still impressive; upon the organ yet more so; but how much more so when given by the orchestra, with the lovely changing colors of Beethoven's instrumentation! The progress from Haydn's slow movement to that of Beethoven is in the direction of depth, self-forgetfulness, and elevated reverie, having in it a quality distinctly church-like, devotional, worshipful and reposeful in the heavenly sense. The finest example of this is in the slow movement of the ninth symphony of Beethoven, where the composer has one of those lofty moods, which even in his younger times Mrs. Von Breuning used to call his "raptus"—rapture of song. In a technical point of view the handling of the themes becomes more masterly in Beethoven than even in Mozart—mainly perhaps because the symphonies of[Pg 320] Beethoven represent a more mature point in his mental and artistic career than do those of Mozart. The third symphony of Beethoven was written in 1803, the composer being thirty-three years old; the fourth waited until he was thirty-five or six. Mozart died at the age of thirty-five, and whatever we have from his lofty pen came to the young Mozart, not yet having reached middle life. Observe also the rapidity with which these great works followed one another from the pen of Beethoven, when once he had found his voice. The fifth symphony was written in 1808. In the same year he wrote also the sixth; four years later, in 1812, the next two symphonies, the seventh and eight. Then a long pause, filled up with other works, and at length when the composer was fifty-three years of age, in 1823, the mighty ninth. If Mozart's life had been spared to enter into the more comfortable and dignified openings which his death prevented, what might we not have had from him! In one sense there is a distinct difference between the symphonies of Mozart and those of Beethoven. The passionate ideal, the picture of a deep soul, tossed yet triumphant, is nearer to the latter. Whatever Mozart may have experienced in the way of "contradiction of sinners" (as St. Paul calls it), he never allows the fact to find entrance into his music, and especially into his symphonies. Whether he felt that these moments did not belong to a high ideal of orchestral pieces, or whether he was glad to find in the tone world forgetfulness of sorrows and troubles, we do not know. But Beethoven came nearer to the great time of the romantic. The inherent interest of whatever belongs to the human soul was an idea of his time, and unconsciously to himself,[Pg 321] perhaps, it entered into and colored his work. The ninth symphony belongs to the period when Hegel was delivering his lectures upon the deepest questions of philosophy, and laying it down as a fundamental principle that it is the place of art to represent everything whatever, which sinks or swells in the human spirit; not alone all the noble and the lovely, but also the ignoble, the vicious, the unworthy, and particularly the tragic—to the end that the soul may learn to know itself, and awaken to a deeper and better self-consciousness. Beethoven felt the mental movement of his day. While his acquaintance with other prominent literary men of his time made little headway, owing in part to his deafness, and in part to his very strong self-consciousness, he read and thought, and felt himself akin with the whole human race. He was a socialist and a republican by instinct. "Man stands upon that which he really is," was a form of self-assertiveness, which, if not actually enunciated by him, at least represents his attitude toward the conventionalities and superficialities of the courts, the social orders, and the general movement of mind into which he entered. Moreover this was the time when the romantic poets of Germany had already set the world thinking their new ideas. Close by the great composer, in the same city in fact, worked a young man, worshiping almost the very ground upon which Beethoven walked, but for the most part unknown to him—Franz Schubert, who in the symphony was classic to the very highest degree, and a tone poet gifted lyrically not less than Mozart himself, a composer whose ideas have equal refinement and grace with those of Mozart, together with a certain charm peculiarly their own, and an instinct for musical coloration, which has never found its superior.[Pg 322] This obscure young man, whose lofty genius was recognized only after his soul had taken its flight from earth, was the founder of the modern romantic school of music—the musical commentator upon the productions of all the best of German poets; a composer of such inexhaustible fertility and melodic inspiration that Schumann said of him, that if he had lived he would have set to music the whole German literature. Thus by the combined efforts of all these composers, of Schubert no less than of the three great masters of whom we are more particularly speaking, the symphony came to its full expression. In their relation to the sonata, these three great masters do not stand in the same position of quasi-equality. Haydn is here the first, as already in the symphony. But in his sonatas he is always rather hampered, and never attains the flow of his slow melodies for the violin. Mozart, also, while a beautiful player upon the pianoforte of his day, did not possess the prescience of Beethoven, who was able to see over the pianoforte of his time and write as if he felt the assurance of the nobler and yet nobler instruments of these later times. Here he stands with Bach, who in his great Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue requires and confidently expects the breadth of tone and the power of the modern piano. It was Beethoven's fortune to live during the early days of the modern instrument. Just after his death the era of virtuoso piano playing began, the first appearances of Thalberg having been made as early as about 1830. He was himself a great pianist, as we see in the concertos which he wrote, always intending to play them at some concert or other in near prospect. Occasionally indeed he overshot his mark, as notably in the fifth, which,[Pg 323] being finished just before his concert in 1809, he found too difficult for his fingers, whereupon he was obliged to fall back on the third. Moreover, the pianists Hummel and Dussek were already before the public, and Clementi had made his concert tours, and established the lines of the classical technique upon its brilliant side. All these influences find their illustration in the music of Beethoven, and especially find illustration in the last and greatest of his pianoforte sonatas. These beautiful tone poems were long regarded as impossible. But the genius of Schumann and Liszt came to their rescue by introducing a new style of touch and technique, which, when once found, proved to be the link missing for the proper interpretation of these till then obscure works. Moreover, Beethoven occupied a different attitude toward the sonata form from that which he held to the symphony. He deviated from the sonata form in every direction, and this not alone in his later works, when we might suppose he had become wearied with the repetition of his ideas in the same order, but in his works of middle life, when as yet he might apparently have gone on writing sonatas indefinitely, so fresh, so novel and so varied were the tone pictures which he gave the world under this name. He seems to have regarded music as an improvisation, not to be held to some one fixed type of expression, but free to go wherever the fancy of the poet took him, to the end that the entire heavens of the tone world might in time be visited. He expects of his readers an element of the devotee. It is not for amateurs that he writes, still less for the votaries of fashionable society, with its emptiness and repeated insincerities. There is a suggestion of entering into the closet, and of shutting the door, as a prerequisite to the full[Pg 324] enjoyment of these ineffable pictures and images which come from his revelation. In the present full-grown faith in the doctrine of the capacity of man for a development continually progressive, it would be presumptuous to say that the three composers, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, have reached the limit of art, so far as instrumental music goes. In the nature of the case, there is not, nor can there be an Ultima Thule in art. Whatever the splendor of color, the nobility of conception, or the sincerity and loyalty of purpose, and however resplendent the works created by these exceptional talents, there is reason to hope that better works still may yet be in store. Stronger and yet stronger imaginations, more perfect technique of expression and finer inspiration, may yet be the lot of fortunate individuals of the twentieth century, inheriting the richly diversified musical experiences of the present time. But in one direction there is little doubt that these three great masters did carry the art of instrumental music to a pinnacle beyond which no one as yet has been able to soar. They represent the climax of classical art. In the nature of the case, the term classical itself is subject to an element of uncertainty. According to the philosopher Hegel, the classical is that art in which the form is beautiful and wholly satisfactory in symmetry, while the content exactly matches it in fullness and beauty. Or, in ordinary usage, the classical is the first-class, the superior, the highly finished, the standard. And since music is a matter of sense perception, and the impressions resulting from it are in some degree dependent upon the ability of the hearer to find the principles of unity (in other words, "the sense of it"), every generation extends the list of the classical, and includes[Pg 325] much which the preceding one found imperfect and strained. So far as our knowledge and experience have yet gone, however, there is a sense in which the productions of these great masters are likely to remain long unmatched in beauty and worth. Nothing has been done since that surpasses the sustained beauty of the Beethoven adagios, of which we find the most beautiful specimens naturally among the orchestral pieces and in the chamber music, where he could depend upon the long phrases and sustained tones of the violins. But in the sonatas for pianoforte he is equally at home. He seems to have foreseen the possibilities of the modern piano. In his latest sonatas there are passages which foresee the modern technique, and suggest effects which only the pianoforte of the past thirty years has been capable of attaining. This is the prophetic element in the writings of this great master. The same difference in the sweep of mind shows itself in the lighter movements. In the minuets Haydn is playful, Mozart is occasionally tender and arch; Beethoven alone is vigorous and humoristic in the modern sense. And, in the finales of the sonatas there is a movement in those of Beethoven which we look for in vain in those of the older composers. It was not in Haydn, nor yet in Mozart, to play with tones in this masterly spirit. Hence the true relation of these great masters might be summed up without intending to be disrespectful to either, as the following: Haydn provided the form, the order of keys and the general character of the contrasts between the two subjects. Mozart invented a myriad of tender nuances which illustrated the fine points of music, and imparted to the works a sweetness and pleasing quality which everybody recognized as irresistible. Bee[Pg 326]thoven added to these ingredients of popular music a depth, a soulful quality, an earnestness and a universal intelligibility to spirits of the necessary depth, which have stood to all the world ever since as models. Such, in general, are the points of relation and of contrast. It is not to be overlooked, however, that the tendency of musical taste is to leave the works of Mozart behind. Haydn is gaining ground, relatively, through the admiration of musicians for the cleverness with which he treats themes. Beethoven holds his own by reason of his vigorous personality, which is to be felt in every page of his music. Mozart, however, appeals less to the taste of the present time, and his pianoforte works are now cultivated chiefly for technical purposes, in the earlier stages of study.   <ANTIMG src="images/deco2.png" width-obs="200" height-obs="50" alt="decoration" title="decoration" />   [Pg 327] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.