Chapter IX: Liszt and the Present Time 271 (2)

The “Sellinger’s Round” is more stirring. Its theme is in a swinging 6/8 rhythm, running easily through the harmonies of the tonic, the super-dominant and the sub-dominant. It strikes one like an old legend, as in the first part of Chopin’s Ballade in F major, of which this piece is a prototype. The first variation retains the rhythm and only breaks the harmonies. Its gentle fugalisation is more distinctly marked in the third variation, which at the conclusion adopts running semiquavers, after Bird’s favourite manner, anticipating at the conclusion of the one variation the motive of the next. The semiquavers go up and down in thirds, or are interwoven by both hands, while melody and accompaniment continue their dotted 6/8, in a fashion reminding us of Schumann. In the later variations the quaver movement is again taken up, but more florid and more varied with runs which pursue each other in canon. This piece, perhaps the first perfect clavier-piece on record, which had left its time far behind, was written in 1580.

Alongside of William Bird stands Dr John Bull (1563-1628). These two represent the two types which run through the whole history of the clavier. Bird, the more intimate, delicate, spiritual intellect; Bull, the untamed genius, the flashing executant, the restless madcap, the rougher artist. It is noticeable how these two types stand thus together on the very threshold of the clavier-art.

John Bull, at nineteen, became organist of Hereford Cathedral, and at twenty-two a member of the Royal Chapel. In the following year he becomes Bachelor of Music of Oxford, three years later Doctor of Music of both Oxford and Cambridge. When, in 1596, Sir Thomas Gresham founded his College in London, he was made Professor in Music, and that without (as the statute demanded) lecturing in Latin. But he held this post no more than five years. We find him, “on grounds of health,” travelling in foreign countries. His playing created the greatest enthusiasm. The French, the Spanish, and the Austrian courts were in a furore. Like all later executants, he is the subject of myths. There is an anecdote that a kapellmeister of St Omer showed him, as an extraordinary curiosity, a piece in forty parts.[26] Bull, nothing daunted, added another forty parts to it. The kapellmeister stares, and takes him for the devil himself. After an absence of six years he returned to England, where, like his satanic prototype, he resists all authority. He resigned all academic positions, threw up his post in the Royal Chapel, and in 1613 again set out, without permission, for the Continent. Four years later he emerges as organist of Notre Dame in Antwerp, where he died in 1628.

From these few biographical notices we figure him as a restless ambitious spirit. As the peaceful life of a mediæval painter is to the splendid existence of the seventeenth century artists, so is the relation of Bird to Bull. And Bull’s works exhibit many of the lineaments of an elegant _faiseur_.[27] He is not so fond as Bird of the primeval freshness of the popular songs and dances, nor does he work out his pieces with Bird’s virgin purity. The side-issue is often with him the main object; the figuration is often licentious, and both hands vie in the performance of the closest and most difficult passages. Often, indeed, his pieces assume a grotesque appearance, hard and antiquated harmonies, in which the leading note is conspicuous by its absence, being crossed with runs in semiquavers, dotted rhythms, rapidly intruded chords, four-fold imitations, syncopated grace-notes, mingled two and three-time passages in wild and bewildering confusion. The eye looks as it were on a specimen of Indian ornamentation, in which, among the confused lines, a pure human feature is almost indistinguishable. From the first piece of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Bull’s thirty “Walsingham” Variations, which later Bird treats so much more simply, the executant shines out in his whole personality. There are thirty studies on figure motives which in Bird are reduced to a dozen. The semiquavers run like will of the wisps in their most unsubstantial courses, resembling endless chains, which are here and there interrupted with leaps of a sixth or seventh, to knit them together in the self-same run higher up or lower down. The ornamentation is richer than with Bird, melting in its _sfumato_[28] the lines of the voice almost after the manner of Couperin. The clavier, even more than the organ, lent itself, with its isolated tones, to such trills, slurs, and mordents,[29] which give to the sound an apparently longer existence. It is these that, down to the time of the German classical music, give the stamp to the special physiognomy of the clavier-piece. I called them just now _sfumato_. As in painting the sharp outline of the body gradually gives way to greater truth to nature, and in Lionardo is replaced by the specifically pictorial obliteration of the _sfumato_, by which, so to speak, we see round the corners; so the ornamentation in these pieces, in which the clavier is seeking its own means of expression, assumes the habit of obliterating its thin outlines until finally the figures thus obtained regulate the lines of the melody as a fixed motif, or even become an end in themselves. It takes an inner effort before we can transplant ourselves into this old world of ornamentation. We must learn to feel it as it would be played by the old masters: we must, if possible, play it ourselves on old and lightly-responding spinets. Our heavy and serious pianos are unsuitable to them; they sound too forcibly and harshly. The average pianist cannot play them; and hence, in his new edition, Pauer has for the most part cut them out.

Doctor Bull’s flying fingers, utterly altering as they did many a church-tune and many a dance, were constantly making discoveries among the clavier-figures, just as the worst of executants has since done. Thus, in Bull’s somewhat bewildering forest, we find many a germ of future wealth: broken triads, which even in the contrary motion of both hands delight us in the midst of all kinds of consecutive fifths; broken octaves, of which Beethoven was so fond, a greater frequency of the crossing of the hands, by which the voice-part gained a wider field, and finally endless repetitions of the same note, either singly or in the middle of a passage,--this last a genuine clavier-device, for which later the new repeating mechanism was invented. Also, in harmonic relation, Bull seeks out many novelties, boldly bending the voice-part to his will; as he does in the truly stupendous Prelude No. 43, in the Virginal Book, or in the bold enharmonic modulation in Piece 51, an exercise in DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, a theme which appears a tone higher at each repetition, starting from G, in the midst of close figuration, until the C sharp simply changes to D flat.

There is a Lute Book of Bull’s in Vienna which gives us pieces like the following: “Miserere Mei,” “Galliard,” “La chasse du Roy,” “Salve Regina,” “Canon perpetuus, carens scriptura, notulis in systemati positis scriptus,” and so on. Let us not think too badly of them. The Virginal Book also has a variegated collection. In the time of variations, “variatio delectat,” there are collections for household use, which are not necessarily an indication of a want, on the part of the originator, of the sense of the characteristic in an instrument. At this epoch the instrument delivers men from the mediæval love of grouping instruments. And I even find that Bull in certain pieces has shown a noteworthy sense for characteristic. He has once a simple bag-pipe melody e f e d e f d c, called “Les Buffons,” with a series of variations in humorous style. There are at first chords with simple broken accompaniment, then hopping semiquaver figures, then a popular canon, then slurred sixths, and similarly right on to the conclusion, which is as usual fully harmonised, in the turns of which, of course, his want of plasticity, as contrasted with Bird, is clearly shown. More striking still is the working out of his best-known piece, the variations on the fresh delightful song, the “King’s Hunt,” giving us a romantic reminiscence of horns and trumpets. Something of this romance runs through his figures. He uses the horn-motive of the second part specially for a longer variation, which is simple and full of character. The flourish of runs in quavers, which he also uses in Galliard No. 17 of the Virginal Book, and the systematic answering of right-hand chords by the left hand, which appears also in Galliard 11, are here specially characteristic. We seem to see tramping horses and waving flags delineated in ancient technique. He was specially good in such hunting pieces. On the musical side, as his somewhat awkward variations on the fine “Jewel,” though among his best pieces, clearly show, he cannot be compared to the magical Bird; but his sense for characteristic and for technique has aided the advance of the clavier. Both of these superiorities are parts of his nature, which expressed itself most completely in this style. The clavier needed both types.

The most characteristic and notable piece of this school is the third in the Virginal Book, a Fantasia by John Munday, which represents no less a phenomenon than the changes of the weather. Over its sections, which have no thematic connection, but have various distinctions of rhythm--_e.g._, quietly moving semibreves and minims; jerky dotted quavers interspersed with semiquaver rests; extensive runs in semiquavers, etc.--he writes in this succession four times each, “Fine Weather,” “Lightning,” and “Thunder.” Instead of “fine” appears once “warm” weather; and a slow passage, marked “a clear day,” forms the conclusion. The characterisation is of course extremely superficial, and the last time the lightning rolls just like the thunder. But this novelty, as a symptom, ought not to be overlooked. It reveals to us the consciousness of characteristic, and the increasingly intimate character of the clavier. Technically, Bull inaugurated a school. Of the various authors of the Virginal Book, Ferdinand Richardson (who exhibits pure part-writing), Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons, Peter Philips, to a large extent follow his footsteps. Farnaby thus early writes pieces for two virginals; he darts, in the midst of his technique, through a graceful “Spagnioletta,” and often lights on interesting modern passing chords, as, for example, running upwards, b, f sharp, d, a, where a follows b and c d. In the use of chords Peter Philips (who arranges many pieces of Orlando Lassus in the Virginal Book) stands in the first rank. In the Pavan (No. 76), which is dated 1592, he has in the conclusion[30] unheard-of simple alternating triads; in the Galliard he deals with the most beautiful suspended chords; and in the “Galiarda Dolorosa” (No. 81) he introduces chromatic colouring.[31] We can perceive how much he must have learnt on his Italian and Dutch travels from the flourishing art of the Continent. The spirit of Bird does not exert so powerful or so enduring an influence as that of Bull. The anonymous Piece 14 of the Virginal Book is a famous Alman (German dance), which in the severity of its subject reminds us of Bird, and its working-out is done by means of single-note passages of melodious motive.

In their clearness of arrangement and harmonious development, so far as they do not deal with dance or song, the majority of the pieces of the Virginal Book are marked by the spirit of the Toccata of the great Dutchman Sweelinck, which appears as Piece 96. Here the spirit of Bach is seen before its time. Gradually the distinctive edges of individuality fade away. A piece by Thomas Morley on the theme, “Goe from my window,” whose melody he himself partially employs again in his “Nancie,” appears again almost unaltered in the same Virginal Book, and is then ascribed to John Munday. With John Blow, Henry Purcell, Thomas Augustine Arne, in the following generations,[32] English clavier music blends with the general Continental stream, till it is absorbed and must seek its nourishment from without.

[1] The Cor Anglais is mentioned here as expressing a
tone-colour which is entirely foreign to the pianoforte.
This instrument is the alto hautboy. Its name is a curious
instance of a “ghost” word, viz.: in its original meaning,
“Cor anglé,” a bent or “angled” tube, German “Krummhorn,”
it was misunderstood and explained as Cor Angl_ais_, Corno
Inglese, English Horn.

[2] Readers who do not know the picture must not be misled
by this expression. St Jerome’s window-frames are filled
with numberless little rounds of bottle-glass.

[3] The bagpipers play before Othello’s house, and the
clown reproves their nasal tone. Othello himself gave them
money to go away, which argues rather in his favour. As for
Caliban, he was a true musician, except when drunk. Even
then he liked howling catches. See especially Tempest, Act
iii. 2, 136.

[4] This passage is the only one in Shakespeare where the
slightest inaccuracy or looseness in the use of a technical
word is to be noticed. The word “jacks” is here used
carelessly, meaning the “keys,” over which of course the
fingers walk, and which leap up to kiss the inward of the
hand. The actual “jacks” are _inside_ the instrument.

[5] _Cf._ Shakespeare on “eight-bar strains.” See
“Shakespeare and Music” (Dent), by E. W. Naylor.

[6] Readers to whom this ancient method of composition
is new will find in Mendelssohn’s “St Paul,” an easily
accessible example, viz.: the chorus “But our God abideth
in Heaven,” where the second trebles sing in long notes the
old melody of the Apostles’ Creed. No one could recognise
it in the midst of the counterpoint of the other vocal
parts, and this is the point in question; namely, that the
mediæval writers used secular tunes in the same way, and
were held blameless.

[7] Named after Jacques Arcadelt, of the early sixteenth
century, one of the many natives of Flanders who so
distinguished that period of Madrigal composition; a
first-rate man.

[8] Doubtless the author refers to the tendency in
the sixteenth century for voice parts to be made
interchangeable with instrumental parts. Many instances
might be given both in Italy and England, _e.g._ if a
tenor voice were absent, the part was played by a tenor
instrument, viol, cornetto, trombone, or what not. This
was the more easily made habitual since instrumental
accompaniment merely consisted in doubling the vocal parts.

[9] This paragraph replaces some rather obscure sentences
in the original, and aims at conveying their general sense.

[10] An excellent book, which ought to be known widely,
containing many examples of early lute music, is W. G. v.
Wasielewski’s History of sixteenth century instrumental
music. Berlin, 1878.

[11] Meaning the “Tablature,” a system of writing music
for the lute which has nothing in common with our “staff”
notation. A set of six horizontal lines (representing six
strings), was used, and letters (_a_, _b_, _c_, etc.) on
these indicated the semitones, reckoning _a_ as the “open
string,” _b_ as the semitone above that, and so on, for
each separate string.

[12] Another spelling for Pavana, or Pavan, slow dance in
square time.

[13] The play was _Gorboduc_, otherwise _Ferrex and
Porrex_. The author is better known as Thomas Sackville.

[14] See “Shakespeare and Music,” pp. 169-171, for other
English examples.

[15] “The English call it quite appositely by the name
‘Consort’ (from Latin consortium) when several persons with
various instruments, such as ... etc. ... play together in
sweet concord with one another.”

[16] It is misleading to say “in six parts.” There are six
voices, but the canon proper only takes four. The other two
sing, independently of the canon, a “bussing bass,” founded
alternately on Do and Re.

[17] In the early seventeenth century it was matter of
complaint in England that “French songs” and instrumental
music “in the Italian manner” were more popular than
necessary.

[18] These were also called by the plain English name
“fancies.”

[19] When Sir Toby says to the caper-cutting Sir Andrew: “I
did think, by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was
formed _under the star_ of a galliard,” may he not refer to
one of these dedications of dances to noblemen?

[20] _Drehleier._ The instrument referred to is of the
ninth century.

[21] _Bundfrei_ and _gebunden_, the former only was capable
of striking any combination of notes at once--_e.g._, four
or five adjacent semitones.

[22] One of the many names of what we know best as
“harpsichord.”

[23] What were known as “short octaves” were to be seen
almost in our own time in certain old organs. For three
centuries the following or a similar arrangement was
practised. Supposing the lowest notes of the keyboard ran
thus: E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, the first E being that
under the bass staff. But when the E key was put down, the
note _sounded_ was the C a third below; when the F sharp
key was played, the resulting note was the D below; the G
sharp key produced the low E, which should have had its
own key to itself. Thus the keyboard, which apparently
stopped at E under the bass staff, really had D and C
below, arranged to sound on two other keys. So to produce a
diatonic scale beginning from the low C of the violoncello,
the keys actually played had to be: E, F sharp, G sharp, F,
G, etc., which would produce C, D, E, F, G, etc.

[24] Penna’s name should not be connected with the word
“Penna” in the title of Diruta’s book, where it merely
means “quill,” and “stromenti di Penna” = “harpsichords.”

[25] This is also the case with the English variations. The
last one is commonly the most valuable and convincing.

[26] It is right to mention here that Thomas Tallis
actually did write a motet in forty parts, “Spem in alium
non habui,” which, thanks to the enthusiasm of Dr Mann of
Cambridge, has been published (1888), and performed in
public on more than one occasion during the last few years.

[27] Meaning a “manufacturer” of show pieces.

[28] _Sfumato_ means “smoky,” and refers, in painting, to
the blurring of the outlines.

[29] The mordent is a grace where the main note is
alternated rapidly with the note below.

[30] This is a really fine passage, and (by the way) bears
every mark of the madrigal for double chorus.

[31] The passage has four times over a chromatic scale
of six notes, _every note_ properly harmonised. Neither
Purcell (a century later) nor Bach (later still) could have
done it better.

[32] The author here makes a startling leap of a century
or so in his chronicle of English composers. From Munday,
who was a grown man in 1586, he suddenly goes to Blow and
Purcell, who flourished in 1690, and even mentions Arne in
the same breath, who died in 1778.

The “isolation” of the early English clavier school is
fairly explained by the immense amount of attention
that was now given, from 1600-1695, in England, to the
development of the dramatic scena or cantata, for one
or two voices, to the song, and to the cultivation of
concerted music for strings and keyed instruments. It is
only to prevent any one from supposing that there was _no_
“secular” music in England between the days of Elizabeth
and the coming of Purcell that I give a few names, all of
which have a real claim to remembrance. Songs--Campion
(flourished 1600), Johnson (1600), Cæsar (early 17th
cent.), Cooper (1612), Laneare (1620), H. Lawes (1630),
Wilson (1640). Cantatas or “Scenas”--H. Lawes (1630), C.
Colman (1640). Instrumental music--Gregorie (mid. 17th
cent.), Jenkins (1630), W. Lawes (1630), Lock (1650),
Sympson (1660).

Old French Dance-Pieces

The independent musical fame of England--omitting Purcell, the evening star--rests solely on this early period. Hence we have been led to trace the musical history of England further back than that of countries where the stream spread over a wider area. Old English music, indeed, had no influence worthy of the name. It stands, like a half-mediæval prelude, before the actual history of the piano. It is true that it shows the forces which are to work in the future; but they are not yet brought into the line which they are constantly and exclusively to follow. This process begins rather in France; it unites itself later with a second movement which comes from Italy, and follows a broader and more lively path through Germany until it reaches our own times.

Oskar Fleischer, the founder of the splendid Berlin collection of old musical instruments, has endeavoured, in his book on Gaultier, the great French lute-player, to describe English and French relations in the seventeenth century. But the hints which, in his view, the elder Gaultier[33] gained in England, are only matters of execution. Flourishes which in England were marked, without precise discrimination, with / or //, found a more exact representation among French lutenists. I do not mean that every performer did not put his own interpretation upon them. Every lutenist or clavier-player issues a new code of these _agréments_; but the basis remains essentially the same, and it is possible that the flourishes were adopted, by an impulse derived from England, into lute-music and thence into clavier-music. Thence they soon spread themselves over the whole musical field. But it is a mistake to imagine that these _agréments_, which infest old French compositions like locusts, were a peculiarity of the country, the “style galant” of France. The peculiarity lies elsewhere, in the form, in the dance.

English clavier-music had attached itself to the song. From the song it derived its stiffness of form and the grace of its melodic outline--two important aids in the advance of music. But its treatment of these pieces was conducted in a manner which reminds us of the middle ages of music. The form, a continuous succession of variations, sprang from the idea of figuration, which constituted the essence of mediæval music; and the voice parts were worked out in general on the fugal principle or in canonic imitation, both factors of the mediæval music. The early ripening of English music, and its close connection with the old Dutch vocal or organ composition, brought it about that the _form_ rested still partly on tradition, while the _content_ already pointed towards the future. Even dances were worked out in this manner, which belonged especially to the time. In France the system was the exact opposite. There, the form of the variation, and the absolutely fugal clavier-exercise, are as seldom found as the simply-harmonised song.

The emancipation in France was due to the attainment of a point of departure which was as distant as possible from anything vocal. The dance--although of course there were some sung dances--had early allied itself with the purely instrumental exercise. It has never been treated so entirely “à plaisir des gorges,”[34] as Gargantua expresses it. It had a stiff arrangement in common with a stiff harmony. It never showed much affinity with the contrapuntal twists and turns of the voice, to which song associates itself so easily from its close connection with choral music. If we compare the earliest instrumental dances of the sixteenth century with the dances, in several parts, of the old song-books--the “Rat’s-Tail,” the “Crane-Bill,” “Fox-Tail,” “Cat’s-Paw,” “Peacock’s-Tail,” and the like, we see how rapidly the influence of the instrument over a clear and light vocal current was increased in France. Here especially does the dance, from the very earliest times, enjoy great popularity. It is very early set to the lute or the clavier, other instruments being but rarely employed. Men grew accustomed to pieces in a condensed musical style, harmonised simply and melodiously, contracted in form. These were regarded on their own merits, and not as subjects for variations and figurations. It was for this reason that the French clavier-piece was more fruitful, more musical, and more capable of development than the English.

The dance then is the darling conception of French music; and French dances are the nucleus of all instrumental music. So early as 1530--for we can go back a great distance--the Paris printer, Attaignant, the oldest of French note-engravers, published all kinds of musical volumes “reduict de musique en la tablature du jeu d’Orgues, Espinettes, Manicordions,”[35] etc. We wonder to-day how M. Attaignant could transcribe his pieces “out of music” into the script of organs, spinets and monochords. But by “music” he meant nothing more nor less than song, and song, down to his day, was nothing more nor less than music. A few years after the German music-publisher Agricola[36] wrote:--

“Drumb lern singen du kneblein klein
Itzund inn den jungen jarn dein,
Recht nach musicalischer art
Las aber keinen vleis gespart.”

“Thou little boy, come learn to sing,
Now, ere thy youth has taken wing.
Let all be done with art refined,
And give thereto thy heart and mind.”
[E. E. K.]

For music, he had once before said, is the foundation on which all instruments rest. Attaignant was one of the first to make transcripts of this “music” for keyed instruments. Nay, more; as far as our knowledge goes, he was the first who in general printed for such instruments. On his title-pages stand for the first time the words spinet and clavichord, although the claims of the organ are allowed. And it is noteworthy that the dances play the principal part in his books. Here the Frenchman already peeps out. Galliards, Basse-dances,[37] Branles, Pavans, are brought into a clear and relatively good harmonic form, without much complication of the instrumental parts. They are often, as for example in a charming Galliard in F major, of entrancing _naiveté_. Not too many runs in the treble, not too much harmony in the bass, and all exquisitely adapted for the instrument.[38]

A hundred years after, the dance still rules French music, and not merely French music, but French life. The forms of social intercourse, as they were fashioned for the universal use of Europe at the court of the Parisian princes, were modelled on the broad rhythms of the dance. Going and coming, bowing and sitting, complimenting and smiling--all the pleasure in the formal beauty of hollow conventionalities, all this is nothing but the light and yet regulated step, the theatrical and yet sympathetic essence of the dance. The French people, having resolved to live their life, determined to do it prettily; and therefore to put even their ordinary motions and common gestures under the mild rule of the dancing master. Even in rough and ready England, traces of this are extant; witness the would-be grace of the formula of “introduction.”

In lute-music the dance takes the form of ceaseless corantos and sarabands; on the stage it supplies the framework for the love-representations of the time. In 1671 appeared _Pomona_, Perrin and Cambert’s first French public opera. In it, cattle drivers and agricultural labourers ply their dances. The great Lully, most fertile composer of the nobly tedious French national operas, is inconceivable apart from the school of the dance. His tunes, at every possible opportunity, run off into the beloved dances of three or four strains, now inserted in airs and prologues, now as episodic dances. By this means the flexibility of the voice parts increases year by year; and since Lully is a composer for the clavier, many of his dances easily adapt themselves to clavier-arrangements, to which indeed they are very early subjected. Lully is the most vigorous teacher in the rehearsal of opera-dances. The style and the school of dances reach such a height in Paris, that they give the law to the whole world just as their social etiquette does. “France,” writes Mattheson, “is and remains the true school of dancing.”

After the time of Lully, who had done so much for the development of the characteristic dance, the art advances with rapid strides. The Pantomime was invented by the Duchess of Maine: it was in 1708, at her famous festivals, “les Nuits de Sceaux,” that the last scene of the fourth act of Corneille’s “Horace,” was pantomimically represented with musical accompaniment.

Of old the parts of women in the dance had been taken by men. Lully ventured to introduce female dancers. Here begins the epoch of famous “danseuses” who, in accordance with a natural law, become the centre of public interest. We owe to Castil Blaze a list of those _grandes dames_ who took up the profession. Henceforward the art of song and that of dancing divided equally the popular affection, for the two were not always separate callings. La Prévost was the first to essay a solo dance, which she set to a violin solo of Rebel. La Pélissier inaugurated costume-dances. She had purchased the whole wardrobe of Adrienne Lecouvreur, lately deceased, and was thus able to appear in the ballet “Le Carneval et la Folie,” in the characters of Jocasta, Mariamne, Zenobia, Chimène, Roxana, Paulina, Célimène, Agatha, and Elvira. Next we see rising the star of La Camargo, who from her début in the ballet “Caractères de la Danse,” was the amazement of the world, the discoverer of operatic airs set to the dance, the glass of fashion, the arbitress of mode, against whose decisions there was no appeal. But, as Castil Blaze tells us in his history of the French theatre, all were surpassed by La Sallé, with her noble figure, her lovely form, her perfect grace, her dancing so full of expression and voluptuous languor. Not only does she dance; she writes dances. She invents a Pygmalion, in which the divine statue assumes life, and engages in a long pantomime with the sculptor, who teaches her to assume her humanity by means of the measured motions of the dance. La Sallé brought this ballet on the stage in London first and then in Paris; and the London correspondent of the _Mercure de France_ writes to his paper of the extraordinary furore created by the new art. For Sallé had at last rejected the lingering relics of the old ballet--the anachronisms of costume--in order to be able to give full expression to the spirit of the dance. “She ventured,” says the correspondent, “to appear without skirt or bodice, with loose hair, and absolutely unadorned. Over corset and undergarments she had only a simple muslin dress, and seemed the very image of a Greek statue.” Sallé appears to have practised her dances without virtuosity, as a mere artistic representation. She essayed no acrobatic leaps, no _entrechats_, no pirouettes. Contrasting her with Camargo, Voltaire exclaimed:--

“Ah, Camargo, que vous êtes brillante!
Mais que Sallé, grands dieux, est ravissante!
Que vos pas sont légers, et que les siens sont doux!
Elle est inimitable, et vous êtes nouvelle:
Les Nymphes sautent comme vous,
Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”

The victories of the dance were universal. Even public ceremonies were taken up in its advance. The “Messe des Révérences” was altered into the “Ballet des Écrevisses.” In their first delight of dominion, love and the pleasure of life revel in the light and magical rhythms of the dance. The great and flourishing masked balls of the opera, acquiring a new rapture, lead on to new dances--the Calotins, the Farandoule, the Rats, Jeanne qui saute, Liron Lirette, le Poivre, la Fürstemberg, le Cotillon qui va toujours, la Monaco--old songs of universal popular origin; or, like wines and laws, named after towns and races, and now, as dances, naturalised on the parquet. How ancient is this connection between song and dance, in which the name of the song remains attached to the dance! This is a process which is of daily occurrence in our music-halls.

Famous _danseuses_ received characteristic nicknames. The elder Duval du Tillet was called “La Constitution,” because her father was an eminent clerical constitutionalist; the younger was affectionately dubbed “Church Calendar.” La Mariette was called “the Princess,” on more private grounds. It was the same with their male companions. The three brothers Malter were called “the Bird,” “the Devil,” and “Knickerbockers.” I stay to refer to this as this French nickname-mania explains the bizarre inscriptions of so many clavier-pieces. An amusing story is told of a certain Cléron, who, in the demi-mondaine circles from which her beauty and seductive arts had brought her to the opera, was known as “Frisky” (Frétillon). In the opera she greeted her new friends very affectionately, but added, “I shall do my best to be agreeable to you; but if any one calls me Frisky, let him know I will give him the best box on the ear he ever had in his life.” Mademoiselle Cléron was no boaster, adds the narrator, and was pretty likely to keep her word.

The due understanding of old French clavier-music then, must start from the knowledge of the dance. Almost all its pieces are dances, whether they declare themselves as such or not. They take up the numerous existing dance-forms and develop them in the ways already described. But in addition to this formal principle we must notice a second, the symbolic. The pieces _mean_ something, and mean more and more the further the century advances. As if to console themselves for the want of content which belongs to the dance in itself, composers are fond of indicating in their titles and dedications all kinds of relations which give to their pieces a more marked physiognomy or a more comprehensible expressiveness. For this purpose they had not only at their disposal the old song-names which clung to the dances, but a hundred other associations. They loved the dance, but they loved associations also. Nicknames and allusions flew from the smiling lips, and men had the fairest inducements to take the abstract in a concrete sense. The chief inducement was the stage with its representative music, the stage, so passionately loved by the French in the middle ages that even from the thirteenth century we have dramatic lyrical plays with the most delicate songs by the trouvère Adam de la Hale. These stand like flowers in the midst of their time, and penetrated so deeply into the life of the people that the little song of Marion “Robin m’aime” is still, they say, sung in the Hennegau. The fairies, which had already played their part in the works of this mediæval opera-composer and writer, had in the later French opera their rich harvest of beings of symbolic meaning. In Lully’s works there is quite a swarm of abstract figures, gods, demi-gods, personifications, which in small scenes or great airs bring out this characterising function of music to the utmost degree possible. But what such things as the good and bad Dreams, or the nymphs and Corybantes in the “Atys,” entering as chorus, performed in characteristic music was as nothing to what was done by the great ballets which drew heaven and hell into the circle of their representations. “Le Triomphe des Sens,” “Les Voyages d’Amour,” “Les Génies,” “Le Triomphe de l’Harmonie,” “L’Ecole des Amants”--all these are titles of operas and ballets of those times which had as their aim to represent musical things as symbols of sensuous incidents. From the lists of ballets and operas performed from Lully’s time right into the eighteenth century the application of fêtes, rococo-amusements, love-pictures by Watteau, or idyllic porcelain-ornamentation, to stage purposes, speaks with no uncertain sound. In such an environment, recollecting the renowned fantastic art of the contemporary Callot, we are led to understand the unusual preference for the direct association of clavier-pieces with particular persons or things.

But here we must speak specially of programme-music.

A Pavan called “La Bataille,” full of vigorous trumpet-signals and horn-echoes, was inserted by Tielman Sufato in his collection of 1551. Shortly before that date a Zürich lute book included dance-songs, “mitsampt dem Vogelgesang und einer Feldschlacht.” The song of birds, the imitation of animals, and all kinds of confused shrieking--a comic counterpoint--offers rich material to the programme-music of the sixteenth century. Even before an Italian had written the famous fugal chorus, in which the scholars, with a comical employment of the dismembered canonic voice-exercise, declined _qui_, _quæ_, _quod_, in the ears of the raging schoolmaster--even before this, contrapuntal janglings were well known. Jannequin, the Frenchman, depicted in _chansons_ with many parts the battle of Marignano, the capture of Boulogne, war, jealousy, women’s gossip, the hare and hounds; or, on the other hand, the song of birds, the lark or the nightingale. We hear in the music of this time the thirds of the cuckoo, the clucking dactyls of the hen, the chromatic mewings of the cat, the trills of song-birds. The boldest of these pieces--an earlier Howleglass--was perhaps Eckard’s representation of the turmoil in St Mark’s Place at Venice (1589), in which noblemen, beggars, hawkers, soldiers, appear with all the artistic counterpoint appropriate to their respective classes. Thus programme-music, in the sixteenth century, enjoyed an international repute. It must not, however, be regarded as an achievement of modern music, but rather as something as old as music itself. The tempest which the Greek Timotheus represented on the kithara, and the fight of Apollo with the Python, which Timosthenes depicted on the flute and kithara, in all its stages--the challenge, the struggle, the hissing, the victory--had a renown in very ancient times. Programme-music belongs to all ages of musical development, and appears always as a natural phenomenon, never as a revolutionary movement. It marks the _ne plus ultra_ of the need of musical expression, which cannot find satisfaction in pure musical forms, and seeks to justify itself by extra-musical titles. Thus on the extreme limit of ancient hymn-music stood a Timosthenes, on that of mediæval choral-music a Jannequin, on that of modern instrumental music a Berlioz.

We can trace the psychology of this programme-music with great ease in the French instrumental art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first definite orchestral programme-piece--the storm in Marais’ opera Alcyone--to the volume of François Dandrieu, “contenant plusieurs Divertissements dont les principaux sont les caractères de la guerre, ceux de la chasse, et la fête de Village”; from the lute-dances of Gaultier to the clavier-pieces of Rameau, we see nothing but an endeavour of the developed dance-form to enter into relations with actual life--an endeavour which leads to the manifold names of the pieces. Formerly the dances had taken their names from the songs. Now, as definite pieces, they are so full of special significance, so rich in all kinds of characteristic figures and harmonies, that the composer feels his mind insensibly drawn to incidents of life, of persons, of characters, humours, landscapes, and calls upon all his fertility in association to fashion decorative titles out of them. Music, which has arrived at the limits of the traditional dance-forms, passes over from the formal to the characteristic. As Berlioz’ Queen Mab is nothing but a further development of Beethoven’s Scherzos, and not a heaven-descended music, discovered in Shakespeare, so the pieces of the great clavierist Couperin, whether they have descriptions of humours or personal names for titles, are merely the developments of dances, which, so fertile were they, reminded the composer of life itself. Couperin himself declares that he gives in his pieces portraits, which appear to give to others also, before whom they are performed, the actual features of the models. But it is obvious that he could hold himself as a portrait-painter, only so far as his music was rich enough, by its definite relations to actual life, to give clearer definition and a distinct picture to its stream as it flowed in a thousand forms. Like all programme-musicians, he is such, not from poverty in musical invention, but from wealth. The French are a people that revel in the fulness of forms, and find their very life in the special magic of the formal presentation of all things, whether social or artistic. Thus in their hands all musical forms, melodious, harmonic, rhythmic, grew so luxuriantly, that at all times, from Jannequin to St Saens, in order to live they have necessarily turned to programme-music.

Yet the titles of the clavier-pieces are not fully explained by this reference to the value of programme-music for the French mind. We must take into consideration also an old decorative tradition. Let us open the magnificent volume of lute-pieces by the famous Denis Gaultier,[39] which came into the Berlin Museum of Engravings along with the Hamilton collection. It is fantastically called “La Rhetorique des Dieux,” because only gods could speak so movingly by music, and equally fantastically he introduces all kinds of titles for the pieces, such as “Phaethon struck by lightning,” “le Panégyrique,” Minerva, Ulysses, Andromeda, Diana, “la Coquette virtuosa,” and the like, besides several “Tombeaux,” by which term dedications to deceased persons were generally indicated.[40] If we compared these sixteenth century pieces with their names, a certain nimble fancy is required to find actual programme-music in them. Of a genuine representation of the content there is no pretence. Minerva, Echo, and the Coquette would seem to have more in common than they ever suspected. The titles are nothing but decorative stamps, resembling those medallions of Aphrodite which are so often engraved over a love-poem. The interpretation is always in the widest spirit possible. It is amusing to see how the editor of the collection labours to explain the names while confining himself exclusively to the vaguest generalities. On “l’Homicide,” or The Fair Murderess, as it is also named, he writes: “This fair creature deals death to every one who sees and hears her; but this death is so unlike the usual death that it is the beginning of a life, not its end.” It could not easily be more plainly indicated that there is no clear representation of anything to be seen in the piece, and that the title is a piece of self-flattery in the dress of the fantastic. Already had the elder Gaultier, the founder of this lute-school, recognised, or perhaps even invented, these decorative titles, such as “le canon,” “la conquérante,” “les larmes du Boset,” or “la volte,” “l’immortelle,” “le loup.” This last, it is certain, is no ordinary wolf, but howls so musically that it is really a man.

The custom of adding decorative titles was made universal by the lute-players, but the tone-painting must always have been of the slightest. Otherwise the old historian of the lute, Baron, could not have been so irritated at them as to write, some decades later, “Gallot has given such strange names to his pieces that we have need of close study to see their relation with the subject. For example, when he wishes to express thunder and lightning on the lute, it is a pity he has never added a note to tell us _when_ it lightens and _when_ it thunders.” (We are reminded of the old English clavier-piece on the same theme.) “We shall seldom,” he adds, “light on a French piece but the name of some noble dame is attached to it, after whom, if she so pleases, the piece is named.”

The clavier-players adopted this custom all the more willingly as their instrument, so full of resource and so capable of expressing shades of meaning, allowed them to raise these titles from their decorative and shadowy existence into genuine programme-inscriptions. We see this remarkable process clearly exhibited in Chambonnières, a clavier-player who towers in solitary grandeur, and marks an epoch by his introduction of the clavier _suite_, by the clear adaptation of his dances to the clavier, by the first realistic use of these titles, and by the establishment of a precise character in the clavier-piece, which holds its ground even to-day. He is not, like William Bird, the original of modern clavier-music, but its actual father, from whom a straight unbroken line stretches down to the present day.

Jacques Champion de Chambonnières sprang from an old family of organists, and was born at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The year of his death seems to be fixed as 1670. Titon des Tilliers, who in 1732 wrote his “Parnasse Français,” a work of great antiquarian research, says of Chambonnières that he played the organ very well, but the clavier with special genius, and that his pieces as well as his execution gained a considerable renown. His fame increased until Louis XIV. appointed him his chief clavier-master; and his compositions appeared in two volumes. In Titon’s times these pieces were still admired. Copies of these works are very rarely to be found to-day; but the great French historian, Farrenc, had the good luck to get possession of one of them, and he has freshly edited it in his famous collection of old clavier-music, “Le Trésor des Pianistes.” While Attaignant still bound his dances together according to their classes, there are here mixed sets of dance-pieces after the example of the lutenists, in simple setting, but with the adornments of the time. The succession is not yet so elaborate as in later _suites_, and _courantes_ stand often one on top of another. The construction of the melodies has still a certain gentle, unforced charm, which gains our attention though its influence is scarcely irresistible. The canonic element appears strongly only in the Gigues, three-time dances with a lively movement. Every piece has its dance-inscription, and some have in addition their special titles, as La Dunkerque, La Verdinguette, la Toute Belle, Iris; or more distinct indications as the Slider, the Barricades, the Young Zephyrs, the Peasant Girl. A Pavan with slow conclusion in three sections is called “The Conversation of the Gods.” Here the sliding, the zephyr, and the peasant, are easily to be recognised in the music. Nevertheless, complete liberation from the merely decorative framework of the fantastic title was not yet attained.

The man to accomplish the great work was François Couperin, called by his time “the Great.” The piano-player of to-day hardly knows his name; and yet it is only two hundred years since men spoke of him in the same breath with Molière and Watteau. A genial, smiling, clean-shaven man--so the somewhat unsatisfactory portraits depict him--with half-length peruke, polite and yet slightly subtle, with a certain priestly sobriety of demeanour, his light fingers run over the hundred adornments of his spinet-pieces. He seems half astonished at his fame, and wholly ignorant that a whole art is one day to rear itself on his shoulders. It was only with difficulty that the pressure of his friends induced him to print his dances, which he wrote for himself in memory of his experiences, or the preludes which he wrote as exercises for his numerous pupils, or the concertos which he composed for Louis XIV.’s Sunday musical evenings. He watched with painful anxiety the tedious process of engraving. As we to-day inspect these prints, we are struck by the joyous _naïveté_ of the art, by the graphic awkwardness with which the notes overflow the five-lined limits of the clef, and by the soul which breathes from the delicately-engraved prefaces. He thinks that his portraits are accurate pictures, and thankfully acknowledges his indebtedness to the intimate character of his instrument. His notes as to execution, his “gaiement,” “tendrement,” and “sans lenteur” (he is always warning the performer against slowness) and all the other guides to interpretation which he inserts, he excuses by saying that the pieces seemed to express something which could not be embraced in accurate language. In spite of all this pedantry of teaching he appeals to the sensitive musical appreciation which will find the right way of interpretation; and in spite of all this reference to the spiritual momentum of music he is a stern disciplinarian in form and technique. In the midst of the utmost freedom of movement we discern a strong feeling for style, just as in the contemporary architecture the most playful license of the rococo is strangely mingled with the most sober attention to classical rules.

The Couperins, like the Chambonnières, were a widely spread musical family. It was old Chambonnières who, in a noteworthy fashion, had discovered Louis Couperin, the uncle of François. One morning the father of François and his two brothers who lived in the neighbourhood of the old master, brought a serenade for his inspection. Chambonnières was struck with it, asked after the composer, brought him to Paris, and thus laid the foundation of the fame of the family from which the great perfecter of his work was to spring. François was born in 1668. He lost his father when he was ten years old, but in Tomelin, the organist of St Jacques-la-Boucherie, he found a teacher and a second father. His life, as its details have come down to us, was simple and uneventful. He became organist of St Gervais and chamber-clavierist to the king, and died in 1733. But the dedications of his works enable us to conceive him more definitely. He appears in them as the professional artist and man of the world, pampered by noble ladies, and kissing their hands with graceful flatteries. We see him as he moves in the salons of Paris, which were then beginning to realise their mission. He is the admired artist of the court which he charms with his chamber-music; the intimate of the Duke of Burgundy and of the Dauphin, of Anne and Louis of Bourbon, giving his lessons and receiving pensions of a thousand francs. A true lady’s man, he thinks the hands of women better adapted to the clavier than those of men. He is the first to sanction ladies in his own family as clavier-players. His daughter Marguerite Antoinette, and his cousin Louise, played at court. Marguerite even became the teacher of the Princesses, and was official royal clavier-player--in France certainly, and probably in the world, the first woman to hold such a post.

The music of Couperin has something of this feminine quality. It is more truly “virginal” music than that which Queen Elizabeth once played in her quiet chamber. But its grace is not hidden; it is coquettish and conscious of itself. It is the high style of grace which belongs to the French culture of the eighteenth century. A spinet stands on a smooth parquet, and the ladies sit around with their roguish eyes and tip-tilted noses, smiling at all the well-recognised allusions, as the then flourishing pastel-art has fixed them for us in light colours. It is light, entertaining music, in which the thoughts of their own accord run on bright and resplendent paths. Short pieces; _courantes_ with their lively, scarcely broken triple-rhythms; _allemandes_ in their decorous and interwoven quadruple time; _minuets_ with their pretty, melodious triple rhythm; _chaconnes_ and _passacaglie_ rearing their piquant erections on slow-moving basses; _sarabands_ in their triple movements and interesting national colouring; _gavottes_ with their graceful movement in soft two-time, the hurrying fugal _gigues_, and all the many other unnamed dances--all these give the ear, without exertion, a subtle delight. The rondo-form takes a supreme rank; it is constantly growing from a simple round-dance with refrain into a genuine clavier-composition, seeming to forebode the sonata which still remains unborn within it. Its theme, like a Ritornel, recurs among the “couplets” or episodical passages; but it is only seldom that the couplets set themselves in conscious opposition to the theme. Usually they adopt its rhythm or the character of its melody, and play with it until, neatly and gracefully, they glide back into the theme itself. There is no iron rigidity of thematic handling. A delicate colour-sense holds the parts together. Couperin does not regulate his pieces according to any definite scheme of dance-successions; he binds the dance and the non-dance, the piece in one or more sections, together into one bouquet which he offers to his lady-friends, often with a polite dedication appended, under the general title of “Ordre.” Twenty-seven such “Ordres,” in four volumes, were published by him between 1713 and 1730.