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Page 66
Every person with even the very smallest love and sympathy for
art possesses ideas which are valuable to that art. From the
tiniest seeds sometimes the greatest trees are grown. Why,
therefore, allow these tender germs of individualism to
be smothered by that flourishing, arrogant bay tree of
tradition--fashion, authority, convention, etc.
My reason for insisting on the importance of all lovers of
art being able to form their own opinions is obvious, when we
consider that our musical public is obliged to take everything
on trust. For instance, if we read on one page of some history
(every history of music has such a page) that Mozart's sonatas
are sublime, that they do not contain one note of mere filigree
work, and that they far transcend anything written for the
harpsichord or clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we
echo the saying, and, if necessary, quote the "authorities." Now
if one had occasion to read over some of the clavichord music
of the period, possibly it might seem strange that Mozart's
sonatas did not impress with their magnificence. One might
even harbour a lurking doubt as to the value of the many
seemingly bare runs and unmeaning passages. Then one would
probably turn back to the authorities for an explanation and
find perhaps the following: "The inexpressible charm of Mozart's
music leads us to forget the marvellous learning bestowed upon
its construction. Later composers have sought to conceal the
constructional points of the sonata which Mozart never cared to
disguise, so that incautious students have sometimes failed to
discern in them the veritable 'pillars of the house,' and have
accused Mozart of poverty of style because he left them boldly
exposed to view, as a great architect delights to expose the
piers upon which the tower of his cathedral depends for its
support." (Rockstro, "History of Music," p. 269.) Now this
is all very fine, but it is nonsense, for Mozart's sonatas
are anything but cathedrals. It is time to cast aside this
shibboleth of printer's ink and paper and look the thing itself
straight in the face. It is a fact that Mozart's sonatas are
compositions entirely unworthy of the author of the "Magic
Flute," or of any composer with pretensions to anything beyond
mediocrity. They are written in a style of flashy harpsichord
virtuosity such as Liszt never descended to, even in those of
his works at which so many persons are accustomed to sneer.
Such a statement as I have just made may be cried down as
rank heresy, first by the book readers and then by the general
public; but I doubt if anyone among that public would or could
actually turn to the music itself and analyze it intelligently,
from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint, in order to
verify or disprove the assertion.
Once a statement is made it seems to be exceedingly difficult
to keep it from obtaining the universal acceptance which it
gains by unthinking reiteration in other works. One of the
strangest cases of this repetition of a careless statement may
be found in the majority of histories of music, where we are
told that musical expression (that is to say, the increasing
and diminishing of a tone, crescendo and diminuendo) was
first _discovered_ at Mannheim, in Germany, about 1760. This
statement may be found in the works of Burney, Schubart,
Reichardt, Sittard, Wasielewski, and even in Jahn's celebrated
"Life of Mozart." The story is that Jommelli, an Italian,
first "invented" the crescendo and diminuendo, and that when
they were first used, the people in the audience gradually
rose from their seats at the crescendo, and as the music
"diminuendoed" they sat down again. The story is absurd,
for the simple reason that even in 1705, Sperling, in his
"Principae Musicae," describes crescendos from _ppp_ to _fff_,
and we read in Plutarch of the same thing.
Shedlock, in his work "The Pianoforte Sonata," quotes as the
first sonatas for the clavier those of Kuhnau, and cites
especially the six _Bible_ sonatas. Now Kuhnau, although
he was Bach's predecessor at St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig,
was certainly a composer of the very lowest rank. The _Bible_
sonatas, which Shedlock paints to us in such glowing colours,
are the merest trash, and not to be compared with the works of
his contemporaries. I do not think that they have any place
whatsoever in the history or development either of music or
of that form called the sonata.
The development of the suite from dance forms has already
been shown, and we will now trace the development of the
sonata from the suite in Italy, Germany, and France. As an
example of this development in Italy, a so-called sonata by
G.B. Pescetti will serve (the sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti
were not originally so named, and the sonatas before that were
simply short pieces, so designated to distinguish them from
dance music). This sonata was published about 1730, and was one
of nine. The first movement is practically of the _allemande_
type, and its first period ends in the dominant key. There
is but the slightest trace of a second theme in the first
part; yet the improvement in contrapuntal design over the
suites is evident. The second movement is in the same key,
and retains the characteristic rhythm of the _sarabande_;
at the end, the improvement, so far as design is concerned,
is very noticeable. The last movement, still in the same key,
is a _gigue_, thus keeping well in the shadow of the suite.
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