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It is at all times difficult to draw a line between religious exaltation and rhetorical pretentiousness. A consideration of the technical means of expression in music may help us to clear our minds. Since the middle of the fifteenth century music has exhibited a perpetual struggle between counterpoint and harmony, between what are sometimes called the horizontal and vertical tendencies of the art. The horizontal conception of music is, as all musicians know, the primary musical instinct to sing and to elaborate the art by the combination of voices each singing its own independently expressive line and achieving further emotional force by the ordered clash of dissonance. The vertical conception cannot really be separated entirely from the horizontal, for it has grown out of it. It derives its emotional force from the assumption of periodic stresses, and the study of harmony is therefore inseparable from that of rhythm. It is regular rhythm which gives different kinds of chords their æsthetic and the quasi-logical values.
Melody represents individuality and counterpoint the interaction and conflict of individualities. Harmony represents the community as a whole under the direction of the mind which has created the music. It is therefore natural that as music comes to be associated with communal feeling on a large scale, with such ideas, for instance, as the universal brotherhood of man, it should tend to become more and more predominantly vertical in method. The ordinary music-lover can realize this from his recollections of Bach and Handel. Bach’s music is mainly horizontal in tendency. It is music for small groups of performers, seldom suited to interpretation by large bodies. Handel’s music, in which the vertical method is far more conspicuous, gains rather than loses by the multiplication of voices and instruments, and for this reason Handel is to most Englishmen the ideal composer for occasions of national ceremony. The emotional effect is intensified by the actual increase of sound and along with this by the rhythmical unanimity of the chorus or orchestra. The ordinary man seems to be curiously susceptible to emotion at the sight of several hundred people doing exactly the same thing at one moment, as in military and gymnastic displays, even though the movements executed may be not in the least interesting in themselves.
The communal feeling which is at the back of most of the music of the nineteenth century finds its technical expression in blocks of chords and in strongly accentuated rhythms. A typical example is the theme which opens the finale of Beethoven’s C minor symphony. Lohengrin and Elijah are full of instances. In some cases the impression may be no more than momentary, a mere two or three chords, but the trick makes its effect. It becomes too obviously a trick in the hands of Liszt. As a pianist he could not help being attracted by it. The mechanism of the pianoforte suits full chords better than the complication of counterpoint, and the percussive action of itself exaggerates rhythmical stresses. It was the ideal instrument for Liszt’s grand heroic manner.
The pianoforte was the amateur’s instrument as well as the virtuoso’s. The nineteenth century is the age of the amateur pianist. Music became the pleasure of the rising middle class, for whose domestic consumption an endless flood of polite and agreeable music was printed after the examples set by Mendelssohn and Schumann. Whatever the present age may think of those two composers it can safely be said that no musicians have ever been regarded by the general musical public with so widespread and so heartfelt an affection. Whoever easily recalls the lines
must surely connect them in immediate memory with the Scenes of Childhood or the Songs without Words.
It used often to be said of Mendelssohn that “he had nothing to say, but said it like a gentleman.” To that I may add the observation of one of my own teachers: “When Mendelssohn couldn’t think of anything else to say, he said his prayers.” Is it surprising that the England of Thackeray adored him? To Mendelssohn and Schumann we owe the fashion of what used to be called “characteristic pieces”—quasi-pictorial exploitations of certain idioms which at once established themselves as universally recognizable conventions both of technique and of sentiment—all those “hunting songs,” “spinning songs,” barcarolles, cradle songs, wedding marches and funeral marches. At this distance of time they may have the charm of old-world refinement. But considered historically, what they brought into music was a multitude of insincere clichés. Mendelssohn and Schumann are themselves remembered for their very genuine merits. The style which they represented was absorbed into the work of followers whom it is equally impossible to forget as well as into that of the innumerable hundreds of purely commercial composers. Romantic cliché reached its apotheosis in the symphonic monstrosities of Gustav Mahler. But between Mendelssohn and Mahler there came others—worthy in some ways of our deepest and sincerest respect—who from their own high seriousness became victims of the impressive platitude. Ethical fervour led them only too fatally into reverent pomposity.
All this false sentiment was diffused universally by the pianoforte; not merely by the enormous multiplication of instruments and of performers thereon, but by the intrinsic acoustical character of the instrument itself. For the sound of the pianoforte cannot press onwards like that of the voice, the wind instrument or the violin. That is why “horizontal” music is in reality impossible to it; the most it can do is to recall the memory of something heard before. It can do this with extraordinary subtlety. The sudden impact of the hammer on the string gives it even in its most delicate moments a far clearer articulation than the voice or the singing instruments. Its whole art is an art of evasion, illusion and association. It was the ideal instrument for the romantic temperament. It suggested melody, it intensified harmony; it falsified the values of both.
The pianoforte naturally attracted intelligent musicians of all grades because it seemed to place the whole of music within the grasp of two hands. Singing came to be regarded as something almost vulgar, the more so since nature has not always distributed voices and brains in equal proportions. As the ethical view of music deepened, musicians of serious intention turned more to the stringed instruments than to the human voice. The instruments could do so much more, they could run about faster, they had in practice a cleaner accuracy of intonation and a more extended compass. It was easy to forget that after all they were nothing more than instruments, and indeed the very fact that they were instruments seemed to give them a magical character that appealed mysteriously to the romantic mind.