154.
“Cheerful” Music.—If for a long time we have heard no music, it then goes like a heavy southern wine all too quickly into the blood and leaves behind it a soul dazed with narcotics, half-awake, [pg 269] longing for sleep. This is particularly the case with cheerful music, which inspires in us bitterness and pain, satiety and home-sickness together, and forces us to sip again and again as at a sweetened draught of poison. The hall of gay, noisy merriment then seems to grow narrow, the light to lose its brightness and become browner. At last we feel as if this music were penetrating to a prison where a poor wretch cannot sleep for home-sickness.
155.
Franz Schubert.—Franz Schubert, inferior as an artist to the other great musicians, had nevertheless the largest share of inherited musical wealth. He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so that for a few centuries musicians will continue to nibble at his ideas and inspirations. In his works we find a store of unused inventions; the greatness of others will lie in making use of those inventions. If Beethoven may be called the ideal listener for a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the ideal troubadour.
156.
Modern Musical Execution.—Great tragic or dramatic execution of music acquires its character by imitating the gesture of the great sinner, such as Christianity conceives and desires him: the slow-stepping, passionately brooding man, distracted by the agonies of conscience, now flying in terror, now clutching with delight, now standing still in despair—and all the other marks of great sinfulness. [pg 270] Only on the Christian assumption that all men are great sinners and do nothing but sin could we justify the application of this style of execution to all music. So far, music would be the reflection of all the actions and impulses of man, and would continually have to express by gestures the language of the great sinner. At such a performance, a listener who was not enough of a Christian to understand this logic might indeed cry out in horror, “For the love of Heaven, how did sin find its way into music?”
157.
Felix Mendelssohn.—Felix Mendelssohn's music is the music of the good taste that enjoys all the good things that have ever existed. It always points behind. How could it have much “in front,” much of a future?—But did he want it to have a future? He possessed a virtue rare among artists, that of gratitude without arrière-pensée. This virtue, too, always points behind.
158.
A Mother of Arts.—In our sceptical age, real devotion requires almost a brutal heroism of ambition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending of the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be possible for ambition—in its eagerness to be the last devotee of all the ages—to become the begetter of a final church music, as it has been the begetter of the final church architecture? (They call it the Jesuit style.)
159.
Freedom in Fetters—a Princely Freedom.—Chopin, the last of the modern musicians, who gazed at and worshipped beauty, like Leopardi; Chopin, the Pole, the inimitable (none that came before or after him has a right to this name)—Chopin had the same princely punctilio in convention that Raphael shows in the use of the simplest traditional colours. The only difference is that Chopin applies them not to colour but to melodic and rhythmic traditions. He admitted the validity of these traditions because he was born under the sway of etiquette. But in these fetters he plays and dances as the freest and daintiest of spirits, and, be it observed, he does not spurn the chain.
160.
Chopin's Barcarolle.—Almost all states and modes of life have a moment of rapture, and good artists know how to discover that moment. Such a moment there is even in life by the seashore—that dreary, sordid, unhealthy existence, dragged out in the neighbourhood of a noisy and covetous rabble. This moment of rapture Chopin in his Barcarolle expressed in sound so supremely that Gods themselves, when they heard it, might yearn to lie long summer evenings in a boat.
161.
Robert Schumann.—“The Stripling,” as the romantic songsters of Germany and France of the [pg 272] first three decades of this century imagined him—this stripling was completely translated into song and melody by Robert Schumann, the eternal youth, so long as he felt himself in full possession of his powers. There are indeed moments when his music reminds one of the eternal “old maid.”
162.
Dramatic Singers.—“Why does this beggar sing?” “Probably he does not know how to wail.” “Then he does right.” But our dramatic singers, who wail because they do not know how to sing—are they also in the right?