Читать книгу: «The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 08», страница 31

Let us linger a moment longer in the region of the Rhine, which was in Germany, for nearly two centuries, the subject of the most salable landscape fancy articles. In the seventeenth century it was already a sort of industry to turn out mechanically so-called "Rhine rivers." In the same way that we now reproduce Rhine scenes on plates, cups, tin-ware and pocket-handkerchiefs, in those days folding-screens, fire-places, bay-windows, even door-cases, but more especially the space over the doorway (though the latter were executed in the fresco style of the cooper), were decorated with "Rhine rivers." But these "Rhine rivers" are totally unlike those which the manufacturers of views of the Rhine furnish us with today. The eye revealed by the one is very different from that which we find in the other; at the most they have the water in common.

In the old "Rhine rivers" there are, for the most part, rounded-off mountainous formations, whereas we now make the angularity of the real Rhine mountains still more angular if possible; the castles, as indicative of a too barbaric taste, are often omitted or changed into a sort of Roman ruin; the portrayal is so free that it ceases to be a portrait, and yet they believed that they had adhered all the more strictly to the peculiar motive of Rhine scenery. The most lively activity of men and animals, ships and rafts, and all sorts of land conveyances, formed the principal ornament; there had to be a sort of antlike swarming to and fro on a river Rhine of this description if it was to be considered really beautiful. In Saftleewen's views of the Rhine this fondness is already discernible. Although in his pictures there is still evidence of a very clear eye for mountainous formation and the architectonic adornment of the region, yet the monotonous, unnaturally tender and misty coloring indicates the effort to soften and equalize the contrast of forms, while life is introduced into the landscape only by means of the immeasurably rich accessories which make every rock, every valley, and especially the entire river, swarm with people. These are, in truth, cultural landscapes, in which we perceive the greatest charm of the region to lie in the pathway of human work, just as the whole age in which they were painted longed to get away from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War into the crowded activity of work and festive pleasures, which, however, were far less apt to be found on the real Rhine than on the painted "Rhine rivers" of the seventeenth century. Johannes Griffier affords us an even clearer idea than Saftleewen of the model pictures of the mechanical old "Rhine rivers." Griffier paints from imagination an idyllic river valley, adorned with Roman ruins such as never stood on the Rhine, animated by all kinds of jolly people, such as it would have been hard, in that day, to find gathered in our devastated provinces. That was then dubbed a river Rhine. Griffier, however, certainly believed that he had beheld the genuine scenery of the Rhine; he did not laboriously evolve his pictures shut up in a room, but painted his imaginative pieces in a skiff, direct from nature. And it really was the actual Rhine that he saw, only he looked at it with the idealistic eye of the seventeenth century.

If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the identically same landscape. While in Saftleewen, for example, we always see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere! Let us now compare both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky, dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light break forth, and similar violent light-effects. One might think that sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation sees in a different style.

The masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked at natural scenery in a very much more objective manner than we do. Wherever there is bright springtime or summer, wherever all the trees are green and the flowers blooming, wherever the cloudless sky is glittering in deepest blue, and all forms stand out detached from one another in the luminous clearness of the full, joyous, midday sunlight—there for them is genuinely beautiful natural scenery. It was not lack of technique that prevented the artists of that period from painting faded yellow autumn pictures, or thunder-storms and rain landscapes as we do. With regard to more difficult points they were technically so far advanced that they could surely have produced a gray sky instead of a blue, and yellow-red trees instead of green, if they had seriously tried to do so. But with their far brighter eyes they saw the landscape far brighter than we do, and therefore, of necessity, they painted it so. Whoever compares medieval lyrics, where the same sunny, springlike tone plays through all the verses, with modern lyrics, will become more deeply conscious of this necessity.

And as those men found their calm nature reflected in the midday clearness of the most peaceful of spring days, so it is necessary for us to seek the mirror of our own passionate agitation in the pathos of the stormy, mournful, autumnally decaying, desolate, savage landscape. They therefore really painted pictures of mood just as we do. Only they strove, as it were, to preserve the most general elemental mood of natural beauty, while we strain ourselves in depicting individual changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures, since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams, almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy. That is another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.

Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much, however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general, of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men have seen very differently in different ages and represented accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same throughout the centuries.

The purest Gothic architecture portrayed in the pigtail age nearly always has a pigtail look. The ornamentation of leaves and vines, executed in accordance with the laws of organic necessity, becomes, without the draughtsman being aware of it, an arbitrarily curved rococo scroll; the proportions, which in reality soar upward, spread out in width, so that one might think it possible for the eyesight to change also, and yet in the building itself perhaps not a stone has been disturbed since its erection; the pigtail surely did not transport itself into the original—it existed only in the eye of the copyist. The views of cities and buildings furnish the most striking examples of this, for in them we can see how these additions have been made, in woodcut, to the numerous topographical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost every medieval tower here bears the stamp of the Renaissance, every pointed arch is, if possible, compressed into a Roman arch, so firmly implanted were these new forms in the eye and hand of the people of that time. For even in an external sense men no longer possessed an organ for the old lines. Peter Neefs, the celebrated architectural painter of this age, did indeed stand on such a high plane of art and technique that he reproduced the perspectives of his Gothic churches absolutely correctly. He had in this particular preserved the objectivity of the artistic eye which is absolutely lacking in the mechanical works mentioned above; nevertheless, even here, he shows himself to be the child of his age. For example, he almost always paints the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the master would not have cut off precisely the characteristic terminations of the columns and vaultings by the arbitrary horizontal line of the frame. Thus, in very truth, Neefs paints rigid Gothic, but in his pictures we can recognize the seventeenth century which, at the most, could see the medieval forms correctly with the outer but not with the inner eye.

All the outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife, because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded themselves everywhere, not only before the creative vision but also before the inner receptive vision. Mignon, at that time, painted flowers preferably in the stage of their most fully developed splendor, and fruits succulently ripe to bursting; he despised closed buds. This is something more than a mere fancy of this particular master; it is a token of the eye of the whole generation, which was dull as regards the beauty of buds, not only in the flower-piece but in all subjects of the plastic arts.

This changing play of "vision" takes place everywhere that beauty meets the gaze, but principally in the case of the beautiful in nature, because this, as such, must first be conceived by the vision. The eye for the beautiful in art remains more constant in comparison.

In youth one has a totally different eye for natural scenery than in old age. This is the reason why we often feel greatly disappointed when we behold a familiar region after a long time. There is no more thankless task than to try to convince another of the beauty of natural scenery.

One tries, as it were, to implant in him one's own eye—an effort which rarely succeeds. So it is, furthermore, the business of the landscape painter to implant his own eye for natural scenery in every one who looks upon his pictures, in such a manner that the latter shall get out of the landscape the same beauties which the eye of the artist put into it. If he succeeds in this, one must at least concede that he has worked clearly, logically, and conscious of his effects.

The eye for natural scenery is never an absolute one, and if out of ten generations each one finds the primitive canon of natural beauty in something different, then none is entirely right and none entirely wrong. This uncertainty of the eye for natural scenery might drive a painter crazy if he should insist upon knowing definitely, once for all, whether the succeeding century would not perhaps have just as good a right to laugh at his ideal of the beautiful in nature as we have to laugh at the preferences for natural scenery of the two preceding generations. He might then, in consideration of the tremendous fluctuations in the conception of the beautiful in nature, lose confidence in his own eyes to such an extent that at last he would no longer have any guarantee to assure him that the mountain which he is drawing as a rounded knoll is not perhaps, in reality, pointed and jagged, while the roundish outline merely holds his eyes captive, as it did those of the painters of the pigtail.

If, however, the eye for natural scenery only sees bona fide, as the jurists say, then it follows that it saw correctly for its age.

Whether our grandchildren will laugh at us because we saw thus and not otherwise need not disturb our peace of mind, for no present has any kind of guarantee that it will not be laughed at by the immediate future.

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THE MUSICAL EAR¹⁵ (1852)

By W.X. RIEHL

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING

The North German pitch differs in general from the South German—I mean the orchestral pitch.

The Viennese pitch is the highest in Germany. They go still higher, however, in St. Petersburg; the pitch in which they play on the Neva is the highest in the whole of Europe. The climax of the European concert-pitch of the present day may be represented in its three principal degrees by the orchestral tone of the three capitals—Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg—ascending from the lowest pitch to the highest. There is no German concert-pitch, but there are dozens of different German concert-pitches—a Viennese, a Berlin, a Dresden, a Frankfurt pitch, etc., so that in the light of such distinctions even the above-mentioned division into northern and southern tone appears like a very general hypothesis. The Parisian pitch and the French pitch, on the contrary, are accepted without caviling as synonymous.¹⁶ Italy, on the other hand, is also without a uniform pitch; as early as a hundred years ago a distinction was made there between the Roman, the Venetian, the Lombard pitch, ascending from the lower to the higher. It may therefore be said that in Rome they play approximately in the Parisian pitch, in upper Italy in the Viennese and St. Petersburg pitch. I am not indulging in any political metaphors, but in sober musical truth.

Is it possible, however, that this variety of musical tone, the historical roots of which extend back so far, may be something arbitrary and accidental? The very usage of the German language lends a significant double meaning to the word Stimmung (pitch, tone, mood). It stamps with the same name, on the one hand, the given basis upon which are built up the harmonies of music and, on the other, the harmonies of emotional life.

It is one of the most fascinating, but at the same time most difficult tasks of the history of culture to catch, as it were, the personal emotions, the pitch upon which each generation is based, in distinction from the perception of the outspoken deeds and thoughts of the age.

This task would be incapable of solution if the history of art did not furnish us a key to it. I have already shown in the preceding essay on the Eye for Natural Scenery, that the question does not concern the historical appreciation of the work of art as such, so much as the investigation of the special manner in which a generation has perceived and enjoyed the beautiful. And indeed this is more easily discerned in the case of the most fluid, subjective species of the beautiful, in natural beauty, than in the more objective artistic beauty.

In art, however, musical beauty comes closest to natural beauty, since it is in its turn the most subjective, the most general in its expression, and the most versatile in its forms. The phenomenon, so important from the point of the history of culture, namely, that each age sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears, can therefore nowhere be more sharply observed than in the conception of natural beauty and in the fundamental forms of musical expression which happen to prevail for the time being. I will speak, therefore, of these fundamental forms and not of musical works of art, for by means of what one might call, by way of comparison, musical natural beauty, by means of the prototypes of the high or low tones, of tone-color, of time, of rhythm, etc., we can test most clearly the unconscious transformation of the musical ear in contrast to the conscious development of artistic taste.

Let us compare the orchestral pitch of the eighteenth with that of the nineteenth century. As the peoples of Europe became more passionate and agitated in public and in private life, and as our whole intellectual life rose to a higher level, our orchestral tone was keyed up higher. In 1739 Euler reckoned the vibrations of the great eight-foot C to be one hundred and eighteen to the second. In 1776, Marpurg, for the same tone, gives one hundred and twenty-five vibrations. Chladni, in the year 1802, calculated its vibrations as a hundred and twenty-eight, twenty years later as a hundred and thirty-six to a hundred and thirty-eight to the second. And since then we have, no doubt, gone noticeably higher!

We find, then, that the tone has risen most emphatically since the appearance of the Romanticists; in the days of the Classical School it remained the same for the greatest length of time. The latter was the period of the most moderate artistic expression. At present, on the contrary, we thirst for shriller and shriller tones, higher and higher singing. Even though every violin treble-string snaps and every singer's throat becomes exhausted before its time, we go on forcing the tone higher from decade to decade.

The entirely reversed relation of church-pitch to concert-pitch, which has taken place in the course of time, appears noteworthy in this connection. Even in the eighteenth century, church-pitch was much higher than concert-pitch, and surely for a reason far deeper than the mere wish to save tin on the organ pipes. For the old masters used church music for the portrayal of strong emotions, and on this account they needed the shriller pitch. Bach is much more shrilly and characteristically dramatic in his church cantatas than contemporary masters of Italian opera. Chamber and theatrical music, for which the lower, milder, more agreeable orchestral tone was chosen, was played, for the most part, only with the semblance of emotion. When Gluck and Mozart transported tragedy from the church to the stage and concert hall, concert-pitch naturally had to assume the rôle of church-pitch, and thus the former has in fact gradually become higher than the latter.

There is still another fact connected with this. Händel's operas seem to us concert-like; the arias of Bach's church cantatas often appear operatic. Many numbers of these cantatas would disturb us today in church; on the other hand we consider them exquisite religious parlor music—which they were far from being in Bach's day. We are no longer such a vehemently excitable generation religiously as to be able to endure Bach's music to its full extent in church; on the other hand, as individuals, in the family, in society we are infinitely more vehemently excitable and much higher tuned spiritually as well than were those of the eighteenth century; we want Bach in the concert hall and in the parlor. The pious and yet forcible leader of St. Thomas' Choir has been made a parlor musician by us and for us—but for his own generation he was not one.

In the last hundred years the compass of pitch of almost all instruments has been considerably enlarged in the treble. The high registers in which every ordinary violinist must be able to play nowadays would in those days have seemed too break-neck for the foremost virtuosos. Men themselves were not tuned high enough to take pleasure in such poignant chirping. The flute of the seventeenth century was a fourth lower than that of the eighteenth. In the flute and the piccolo of the nineteenth century we have again risen a third, yes, an entire octave above the eighteenth century! Our great-grandfathers called the bass flute flauto d'amore, the alto oboe, oboe d'amore, a bass viol, viola d'amore, because their ear found preferably in the deep middle tones the character of the tender, the sweet, and the languishing. Now we can scarcely play on the violin or wind instrument a love melody which does not rise two or three octaves above the normal.

The standard Italian song-composers of the first half of the last century were especially fond of using the middle register for tones expressive of peculiarly dramatic pathos, as well as for powerful final passages of arias. Our differently tuned ear demands that these tones of passion shall, as a rule, be as high as possible. The alto voice as a solo voice has almost entirely disappeared from the operas in which it formerly played so conspicuous a part. The elevated tone of our whole inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.

In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the very construction of the human vocal organs. Scarcely is moderate and natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song. In every age the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the fewest possible tones. While the elder Bach in his arias often chases the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand, could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven) that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon it by the natural limitation of the human voice.

This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility. Some later Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal register of song. The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution. Do not our singers, who since Schubert's time are so fond of making a song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a drama?

In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong, easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining "behind the times" if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones into their next work, and when the wind instruments have been enriched by several new valves and regulators the scores immediately grow in proportion to these keys and pistons. But does art feel no shame at having thus fallen under the dominion of trade!

The ear of the eighteenth century preferred human voices whose timbre approached closest to the violin, the oboe or the 'cello, and considered that such were peculiarly fitted for lyric and dramatic expression. The eunuch sings as if he had an oboe in his throat; it is much too harsh and lacking in brilliancy for our ear, which values incomparably higher the more brilliant, clearer timbre, corresponding to the tone of the flute, clarinet, or horn. The favorite timbre of the eighteenth century compares with that of the nineteenth as dull oxidized gold does with that brightly polished. The period of the Romanticists marks here too the turning-point of taste; Beethoven completed the emancipation of the above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony. The modern treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord accelerated its victory at the same time. It worked favorably for the external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules of counterpoint. Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful. In such symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument ensemble, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained with a simple distribution of the string parts.

The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key—indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum. We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naïve, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is indeed a jump a dorio ad phrygium.

What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a jump a dorio ad phrygium—namely, the contrast between D-minor and E-minor—is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key—which for Aristotle bore the stamp of dignity and constancy—as D-minor, not only "grave" but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality," which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P. Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the selfsame key which for a former age was the tonus primus, the one particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the Freischütz hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century, Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was formerly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian key was formerly called the Phrygian, and vice versa. The fact is, however, that the names have not changed—it is the ear which has changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson, indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of tones"—an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.