IX
The outstanding characteristic of the nineteenth century is its moral fervour. The religious preoccupation of Victorian England is only a small part of this age of aspiration. In most countries of Europe philosophy, science, literature, art, and social life bear witness to the ethical passion, even in the cases of the most indignant revolt against it. It dominates music from the time of Beethoven onwards; and even now it is not entirely extinct in the musical world. The spirit of the French Revolution transformed the musician from a lackey to a prophet. Mozart was cut off just as he had recorded his vision of the new age in The Magic Flute. Beethoven proclaims it in the Choral Fantasia and illuminates it still more intensely in Fidelio, in the Choral Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets. One cannot class Beethoven with the Romantics any more than Kant or Goethe. Romanticism stood not for enlightenment but for the reaction against it. The Romantics were like men who after an earthquake return to the ruins of their city to see what they can recover from them. It was not always their own property that they recovered. The aristocrats had lost their material privilege, but they were still determined to remain a class apart. The Catholic revival, on the Continent even more than in England, was the assertion of aristocracy as a moral principle. It affected music apart from the music that was definitely liturgical because it brought about a revival of interest in Palestrina comparable to the revival of interest in Dante. The emancipation of the artist from feudal servitude encouraged him to assume something of the privilege of the aristocracy. The typical figure of this movement is Paganini, from whom are descended Liszt and a multitude of minor musicians who made it their life-work to play the prophet in public. The mechanical developments of the new century contributed to the development of the new outlook on music. As travelling became easier and music-printing cheaper concerts increased in number and increasing newspapers gave them increasing publicity. “Seid umschlungen, Millionen!” sang Beethoven, and the millions were embraced, though perhaps not quite in the way in which Schiller and he had intended.
The modern musician is often tempted to see nothing in the art of the past century but pretentiousness. It is not altogether just to accuse the century of megalomania. Isolated musicians, such as Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, were certainly possessed with the idea of their own greatness. One might say the same of Beethoven himself; but in Beethoven’s case the consciousness of his own greatness was inseparable from a deep feeling of humility and an overwhelming sense of duty. Beethoven was no respecter of persons, but he had the philosopher’s intuition of his relation to humanity and of humanity’s relation to the universe. Undoubtedly many artists of the nineteenth century were stimulated by his example to attempt works on a needlessly colossal scale, especially in Germany, where metaphysical studies have always influenced a circle that extended far beyond the professed philosophers. An ethical view of music became more and more strongly marked in Germany; during the latter half of the century it made itself felt in England, and to a slighter extent even in France. By the end of the century there was a very definite tendency to regard music as a form of free religious worship, expressing and stimulating mystical experience for temperaments which could no longer be satisfied by dogmatic theology.