Chapter II: The Golden Age of Harpsichord Music (2)

Furthermore, that he created a new development of pianoforte technique by certain innovations in the manner of fingering passages, is open to question. It is well known that up to the beginning of the eighteenth century the use of the thumb on the keyboard was generally discountenanced. Bach himself had seen organists play who avoided using the thumb even in playing wide stretches. Scales were regularly played by the fingers, which, without the complement of the thumb, passed sideways over each other in a crawling motion which is said to have been inherited from the lutenists. Couperin advocated the use of the thumb in scales, but _over_, and not under, the fingers. Bach seems the first to have openly advised and practised passing the thumb under the fingers in the manner of today. Yet even he did not give up entirely the older method of gliding the fingers over each other in passages up and down the keyboard.

His system passed on through the facile hands of his son Emanuel, the greatest teacher of the next generation; and if it is not the crest of the wave of new styles of playing which was to break over Europe and flood a new and special pianoforte literature, is at any rate a considerable part of its force. Yet it must be borne in mind that Scarlatti founded by his own peculiar gifts a tradition of playing the piano and composing for it, in which Clementi was to grow up; and that, influential as Emanuel Bach was, Clementi was the teacher of the great virtuosi who paved the way to Chopin, the composer for the piano _par excellence_.

The foundation of all Bach’s music is the organ. Even in his works for violin alone, or in those for double chorus and instruments, the conjunct, contrapuntal style of organ music is unmistakable. His general technique was acquired by study of the organ works of his great predecessors, Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bohm, and others. He was first and always an organist. So it is not surprising to find by far the greater part of his harpsichord and clavichord music shaped to a polyphonic ideal; and, what is more, written in the close, smooth style which is primarily fitting to the organ.

His intelligence, however, was no less alert than it was acute. There is evidence in abundance that he not only knew well the work of most of his contemporaries, but that he appropriated what he found best in their style. He seems to have found the violin concertos of Vivaldi particularly worthy of study. He was indebted to him for the form of his own concertos; and, furthermore, he adapted certain features of Vivaldi’s technique of writing for the violin to the harpsichord. Of the influence of Couperin there is far less than was once supposed. The ‘French Suites’ were not so named by Bach and are, moreover, far more in his own contrapuntal style than in the tender style of Couperin. Kuhnau’s Bible sonatas are always cited as the model for Bach’s little Capriccio on the departure of his brother; but elsewhere it is hard to find evidence of indebtedness to Kuhnau.

But he even profited by an acquaintance with the trivial though enormously successful Italian opera of his day, and used the _da capo_ aria as frankly as A. Scarlatti or J. A. Hasse. Still, whatever he acquired from his contemporaries was but imposed upon the great groundwork of his art, his organ technique. He never let himself go upon the stream of music of his day, but held steadfast to the ideal he had inherited from a century of great German organists, of whom he was to be the last and the greatest.

So, for the most part, the forms which had evolved during the seventeenth century were the forms in which he chose to express himself. Of these, two will be for ever associated with him, because he so expanded them and filled them with his poetry and emotion that no further growth was possible to them. These are the fugue and the suite.

V

Most of Bach’s predecessors and many of his contemporaries regarded the fugue as the highest form of instrumental music. It was the form in which they put their most serious endeavor. The harmonic basis of music was generally accepted and skill in weaving a contrapuntal or a polyphonic piece out of a principal motive or theme, and two or three subsidiary ones, was more or less common to all musicians. Yet fugues up to the time of Bach lacked a logical unity of construction. Excellent as the craftsmanship displayed in them might be, the effect was not satisfactory. There seemed, for instance, to be no very clear reason why a fugue should end except that the composer chose to end it. There was no principle of balance governing the work as a whole. It was architecturally out of proportion, or it failed to impress its proportions upon the listener. Bach alone seems to have given the fugue a perfectly balanced form, to have endowed it not only with life but with organization as well.

The secret of this is that at the bottom of his fugues lies a broadly conceived, well-balanced and firmly constructed harmonic plan. It must be granted, besides, that the subjects out of which he builds them have a singular vitality and are full of suggestion. But Bach, with his fertility in highly charged musical ideas and his apparently unlimited power to weave and ravel and weave musical material in endless variety of effects, rarely let his skill or his enthusiasm betray his sense of proportion. There is a compactness in nearly all his fugues which results from the compression of expressive ideas within the well-defined limits of a logical, harmonic plan.

Doubtless, the definiteness of this harmonic plan is more or less concealed from our modern ears by the uninterrupted movement of the voice parts, which was part of the conventional ideal of polyphonic writing. We are used to the pauses or stereotyped repetitions of the more modern style, which throw harmonic goals into prominence whereon the mind may perch and rest for a moment. Such perches are for the most part lacking in the Bach fugues. The subject takes flight and flies without rest until the end. Moreover, the art of playing Bach which brings out more than the regular and mechanical march of the voice-parts is unhappily extremely rare. Evenness of execution, that unhappy _bête-noire_ of the striving student, is exalted far above any really more difficult, subtle variation of touch which may veil the flow of the various independent melodies in order to bring out the beautiful changing harmonies, arising from them like colored mist. But a simple analysis of any fugue will reveal the clear, well-balanced plan underneath it.

Pause for a moment at one or two of those that are better known. Take, for example, the fugue in C-sharp major from the first book of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord.’ There is the conventional opening section, in which the theme and secondary themes are announced. We have tonic, dominant, and a clear cadence again in the tonic. Then begins the strong pull toward the dominant, so nearly inevitable in most kinds of musical form, and finally the dominant triumphant with the main theme strong and clear, and a solid cadence.

Here, on the basis of harmony, the first broad part ends, and the music goes on to explore and develop through other keys. The harmonies are rich, the counterpoint melodious, the theme whispered as a recollection from the first land of familiar tonic and dominant. Then clearly we are held for a moment to enjoy E-sharp minor before we play back again, with fragments of the theme, to our well-known dominant and tonic. Off again on motives we cannot fail to recognize, as if we were again to wander afield in harmonies. But, no; we sink firmly upon a swelling G-sharp, our dominant again, the best known note of our theme. The captive harmonies rise and fall. Movement they have, but escape is impossible. The return home is inevitable, it is imminent, it is done. Cheerfully our theme traces its old ground. It pauses a moment as if contemplating further flight, but the tonic key is all-powerful and the flight is ended and with it our fugue.

It is all lucid and logical: the first broad section with its twice-told tonic and its accustomed urge to the dominant; the many measures of wandering that yet pause to make harmonies clear; the long struggle against the anchoring G-sharp that pulls ultimately home.

Or take, for example, the more complicated fugue in G minor (Book I). We find, with few exceptions, the same plan. There are four voices to enter, and the exposition of the theme and counter-subjects is consequently longer. But they come in regularly, one after the other, tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant; and then the irresistible sway of the whole fabric to the relative major, made clear by an unusually obvious cadence. There follows the development section and the various episodic modulations, all held intimately together by recurrences of the main theme. The keys are well-defined. Then, instead of a firm anchoring of all this variety on a pedal point, we have a descending, regular sequence which inevitably suggests an objective point to be reached--the return of the music at last to the keys in which it was first made known to us. And now in this final restatement, instead of retracing step by step the opening measures, we hear the entrances of the theme pressed close together, overlapping, a persistent leading F-sharp from which there is but one escape, the final chords settling majestically into G minor.

Both these fugues are built upon a well-balanced and yet varied harmonic groundwork. The art of Bach shows especially in the middle or developing section in the clearness with which he brings out the various harmonic stages through which he leads his music, and in the manner in which, by the unmistakable method of a persistent pedal point or a regular sequence, he brings back the final restatement of his material in a section balancing the opening section.

Other fugues in the same collection, such as those in C-sharp minor and in B-flat minor, are more architectural. But, though the marvellous building up of themes and counter-themes, as in the C-sharp minor fugue, seems to outline a very cathedral of sound, we shall find none the less the same tri-partite harmonic base underneath the work as a whole.

In longer fugues, such as the great one in C minor coupled with a toccata and that in D minor which is associated with the ‘Chromatic Fantasy,’ the balance between the opening and closing sections is somewhat obscured by the long free section in between. But even here a unity is maintained by the skillful repetition of striking passages and the return to the final section is always magnificently prepared.

Bach did not bind himself to rules in writing his fugues. He handled his material with great freedom. Witness many fugues like that in F minor in the second part of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ in which he often subdued the main theme to a capricious, obvious second theme. Such a treatment of the fugue approaches the dramatic; and this, together with the division, quite clear in so many, into three sections of exposition, development and restatement, cannot but suggest some sort of kinship between the fugue as Bach conceived it and the movement in so-called sonata form which grew to such splendid proportions in the half-century after his death. At any rate, we are compelled to recognize that in spite of the contrapuntal style, inherited from an age in which harmonic sequence was a secondary element in music, the Bach fugues owe their imperishable form to the same principles of harmonic foundation as those upon which the sonata-form of Mozart and Beethoven is known to rest.

VI

Though in the matter of musical form the name of Bach at once suggests the fugue, he brought the suite to no less perfection and significance. It must, however, be granted that the suite suffers by comparison with the fugue as a great form in music. First, the convention that all its movements be in the same key is more than likely to make the work as a whole monotonous. Secondly, the more or less obligatory dependence upon dance rhythms tends to restrict emotional vivacity and subtlety. Thirdly, since there can be but little contrast and variety among the separate movements, the suite lacks organic or internal life.

On the other hand, the emphasis laid upon rhythm may give the individual movements more obvious charm than the fugue is likely to exert. Furthermore, though the scope of the movements is more restricted than that of the fugue, the form is freer. And the neat balance of structure, with its two repeated sections, is undoubtedly more sympathetic to our modern ear than the involved architecture of the fugue. Lastly, though the sequence of allemande, courante, bourrée, gigue and other conventional movements may give us too much of a good thing, the sarabande does afford that striking point of contrast which is the precious asset of the great cyclic forms, whether sonata, string quartet, or symphony.

Bach wrote three complete sets of suites: the so-called French suites, which seem to have been written for his second wife during the time of his stay at Cöthen; the English suites,[20] and the ‘Partitas,’ which we may call the German suites. Both the English suites and the Partitas were written at Leipzig, and the latter were among the few works engraved and printed during his lifetime.

Inasmuch as the form of the suite, its sequence and normal number of movements, had been clearly defined both by Froberger and Kuhnau some time before Bach began to write, he cannot be said to have assisted in its creation, as he did in the creation of the fugue. From the point of view of form he neither added anything nor, strictly speaking, improved upon what he inherited. What he did do was to expand the limits of the various movements to great and noble proportions, and to fill them with a wealth of musical vigor and imagination hardly suggested before his day in any instrumental music except Corelli’s.

The French suites are the simplest and the most conventional. The style of them is unquestionably lighter than that of the later suites; but this may well be due less to an attempt to write in the _style galant_ of Couperin, than to a desire to compose music technically within the grasp of his young and charming second wife. The sequence of the movements is conventional. All six have as their first three movements the normal allemande, courante and sarabande. All close with a gigue. Between the sarabande and the gigue he placed a number of extra dances, two minuets in the first suite, an air and minuet in the second, two minuets and an _Anglaise_ in the third. The fourth and fifth have each three of these _intermezzi_, including gavottes, a bourrée and a loure; and the last has an odd group of four, consisting of a gavotte, a polonaise, a bourrée and a minuet. Only two of the courantes follow the French model with its complicated shifting rhythm. The others are of the more rapid Italian style.

The movements are all short and in the now familiar binary form, with its first section modulating from tonic to dominant, and repeated; and its second section going by way of a few more complicated modulations back again from dominant to tonic. There is little trace of a marked differentiation between the musical material given first in the tonic, and that given later in the dominant.

The hand of Bach is, however, not to be mistaken even here in these relatively simple pieces. The style is firm and for the most part close upon the organ style; the melodies--and there are melodies--are surprisingly sweet and fresh; the rhythm, delightfully crisp and vivacious. It is to be regretted that these early suites have generally dropped from the concert stage.

In looking over the English suites, which are undoubtedly the greatest works of their kind, one is first struck by the magnificent preludes. Each of the six suites has its prelude, longer by far and more powerful than any of the subsequent movements. In breadth of plan, in all-compelling vigor and vitality, in a magnificent, healthy emotion, these preludes may hold their places beside any single movements which have since been written. It cannot be denied that their style is more the style of organ than pianoforte music. A certain severity must also be admitted, which may leave something lacking to the modern ear that in a relatively long movement craves something of sensuous warmth. But their power is truly immense.

The style is highly contrapuntal and with few exceptions follows the convention of uninterrupted movement. This tends, as in many of the fugues, to hide the formal outline. The listener hears the music flowing on page after page and may be pardoned if, being able to recognize in the torrent of sound only one distinctly recurring theme, he thinks he is hearing music akin to the fugue. As a matter of fact, however, with the exception of only the first, the structure of these preludes is astonishingly formal and astonishingly simple. The second, fourth, fifth and sixth are fundamentally arias, on a huge scale.

The aria form is one of the simplest in music, one of the most effective as well, and was the first to develop under the influence of the Italian opera of the seventeenth century. It has frequently been called the A-B-A form. This is because it is made up of three distinct sections of which the first and last, predominantly in the tonic key, are identical, and the middle in some contrasting key or keys and of contrasting musical material. To spare themselves the trouble of writing out the last section, composers adopted the convention of merely writing the Italian words _da capo_ (from the beginning) at the end of the second section, and of placing a double bar at the end of the first, over which the singer or player was not to pass upon his second performance of this section. Bach could have adopted this economical device, had he so desired, in the four preludes just mentioned; for each of them proves, upon examination, to be composed of three distinct sections, the middle more or less the longest, the first and last note for note the same.

We have already remarked how most of Bach’s fugues, especially the shorter ones, can be divided into three sections based upon harmony. In the preludes to the English suites the question of musical material enters into the division. Take for analysis the prelude in A minor to the second suite. The first section ends at the beginning of the fifty-fifth measure. It will be seen to open with a bold figure, the first notes of which are at once imitated in the left-hand part. There follows then a constant flow of figure work over a relatively simple harmonic foundation and through orderly sequences, the hands frequently imitating each other. Fragments of the opening phrase are heard five times. In the thirty-first measure a very distinct phrase is introduced, still in the tonic key, it will be observed, though in dominant harmony; and this is repeated in purely conventional manner in three registers, giving way to formal passage work which, falling and rising, leads to a good stout reiteration of the opening motive. With this the first section ends, in a full tonic cadence.

The second section begins at once with a wholly new figure which dominates the music from now on up to the one hundred and tenth measure. At this measure the second section ends, and here Bach might have written the words _da capo_; for what follows is but a repetition of the first fifty-five measures.

It must be noticed that, although the middle section is decidedly dominated by a figure which does not appear in the first, still the first theme is not allowed to be forgotten. It may be found five times in the course of the middle section, dividing, as it were, the new material into distinct clauses, and serving as well to impress upon our ears the unity of the piece as a whole.

This device is not truly germane to the aria form. It is suggestive of the rondo in general; and in particular of the modified rondo form of the Vivaldi violin concerto, of which we know Bach made a minute study.

In the splendid prelude to the third suite, in G minor, this concerto form is far more in evidence than the aria form. But the fourth, fifth, and sixth (barring the slow introduction) are like the second in superbly simple three-part aria form. This fact is well worth recollecting in connection with the development of the sonata form of a later period.

The remaining movements of the suites present no irregularities. These are the dignified allemandes, the Italian or French courantes, the elusive, sad sarabandes, always one or two Intermezzi, a Gavotte, a Bourrée, a Passepied or a Minuet, and the final Gigues with their conventional contrapuntal tricks and turns.

The Partitas are far less regular in structure. The opening movements are called by various names. There is a prelude for the first, short and in simple, rich style; a _Sinfonie_ for the second, with three distinct parts, suggesting the French overture; a _Fantasie_ for the third; and for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, respectively, an Overture, a Preamble, and a Toccata. The second and third have odd movements, such as a Rondo, a Caprice, a Burlesca, and a Scherzo. On the whole, in spite of the technical perfection never absent in Bach’s work, and some movements such as the closing Gigue of the first partita, these suites are inferior to the English suites. There is something tentative about the new styles of preludes and about the interpolation of freakish intermezzi, which rather mars them from the point of view of unity and balance in the cyclic forms.

But the English suites stand out as magnificent specimens of vigorous and yet emotional music, great and broad in scope, perfect in detail--keyboard music which in many ways has never been surpassed.

VII

Besides the fugues and the suites there is a great deal of other and less easily defined harpsichord and clavichord music. We are not wanting in titles. We have Preludes, Toccatas, and Fantasias, also some Capriccios. These are, on the whole, of free and more or less whimsical structure. The preludes, and one thinks of the forty-eight little masterpieces of the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord,’ are usually simple and short. They are for the most part clearly harmonic music. Some are nothing more than a series of chords, notably those in C major, C minor, D minor, in the first part. The origin of this simple form of music has already been discussed; but the origin of the particular and well-nigh matchless beauty of these of Bach’s preludes can be found only in the great depths of his own genius, which here more almost than anywhere else, is incomprehensible. The subtlety of the modulations, the great tenderness and poetry of the chords, the infinite suggestion of feeling--all these within little pieces that might easily be printed on half a page, that have no definite outline, no trace of melody: we can but close our eyes and wonder.

Other preludes which are far more articulate, so to speak, are still fundamentally only harmonic music. So we may reckon the preludes in C-sharp major, in C-sharp minor, in E-flat minor, in G minor, in E major, in the first book. In these there is but a faint network of melody, usually contrapuntally treated, thrown over the profoundly moving harmonies underneath. Some others are little studies in fleetness or brilliancy of playing, such as those in D major and B-flat major; and still others are lyrical, suggesting Couperin, or even the Preludes of Chopin. It may be mentioned in passing that there is little internal relationship between preludes in the ‘Well-tempered Clavichord’ and the fugues which follow them. Nor is there evidence to show that the ones were composed for the others. Rather there is in many cases reason to believe that the preludes were composed often without any consideration of a fugue to follow. Still one cannot fail to observe, or rather to feel, a subtle affinity between most of the little pieces so united, which must have guided Bach in his selection and pairing.

Fac-simile of Bach's Manuscript of the Prelude in C major
(Well-Tempered Clavichord.])

The toccatas and the fantasias are on a much broader plan than the preludes. The former are essentially impressive, if not show pieces. They are usually built up upon a series of brilliant runs, oftenest scales or close arpeggios, with slower moving passages of chords and contrapuntal weavings scattered here and there. The fantasias are, as the name implies, quite free and irregular in form. Both fantasias and toccatas are for the most part distinctly in organ style. Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.

There are several ‘concertos’ and ‘sonatas’ of which to say much is to repeat what has already been said of other forms of his music. Both are obviously indebted to Vivaldi for style, or the external features of style, as well as for form.

The idea of the concerto in Bach’s day was not the idea which Mozart planted firmly in the mind of musicians. To show off the special qualities of the harpsichord against the background of an orchestra is not often evident as a purpose in Bach’s concertos. He wrote for the harpsichord much as he wrote for the orchestra; or for the orchestra as he wrote for the harpsichord. To the solo instrument he allotted passages which required a fineness in execution of details, or passages which he wished to be softer than the general run of the music. There is a clear intention to get contrast between the group of instruments and the solo instrument, but apparently little to write for the two in a distinct style.

One may take the D minor concerto for harpsichord and a group of instruments, or even better, the Italian Concerto, for a single harpsichord, preferably with two manuals, as the perfect type. The arrangement and number of movements is well worth noticing. There are three, of which the first and last are in the same key and of about the same length and style. The middle movement is in a contrasting key, is shorter and nearly lyric in character. The scheme is perfectly balanced as a whole, and, it will be noticed, shows little kinship with the suite.

The first and last movements are in the same rapid tempo and both are treated contrapuntally throughout. Their internal structure is fundamentally tri-partite, like the fugues and the preludes in the English suites, the opening and closing sections being the same. The middle section brings out new material, but also retains suggestions of that already announced; the new material tending to take on an episodic character, like the couplets in Couperin’s rondos. This is unusually clear in the middle section of the last movement of the Italian Concerto, in which there are three very distinct episodes, one of which appears twice, quite after the manner of the Beethoven rondo. But one feature, which Bach probably acquired from Vivaldi, makes the whole procedure different from Couperin’s. This is that the main theme, either the short or long part of it which may be restated between the episodes, appears in different keys. The same feature is evident in the preludes to the English suites.

The slow movements in both the D minor and the Italian concertos are written upon a favorite plan of Bach’s. The bass repeats a certain form or ground over and over again, above which the treble spins an ever varied, rhapsodical melody, highly ornate in character. The plan is an exceedingly simple and a very old one. It may be traced in the old motets of the mensuralists of the thirteenth century, with their droning _ordines_; and in the favorite ‘divisions’ of the early English composers. The Chaconne and the Passacaglia are but variants from the same root. It is, of course, a simple form of variations.

This leads us, at last, to a brief consideration of what is perhaps from the point of view of the pianist, if not indeed from that of the musician, the most astonishing of Bach’s harpsichord music,--the Goldberg Variations. The story of their origin will bear repetition for the light it throws on the mood in which they were written.

A certain Count Kaiserling, at one time Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony, supposedly suffered from insomnia and nervous depression. He had in attendance a clavecinist named Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s, who, among other duties, had by his playing to wile away the miserable night hours of his unhappy patron. Hearing of the great Bach through Goldberg, Kaiserling requested him to write some harpsichord music of pleasant, cheerful character especially for these weary vigils. Bach composed and sent back a theme and thirty variations, which so pleased the count that he presented Bach with a goblet filled with one hundred Louis d’or.

One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. Yet an examination of them will convince one that Kaiserling must have rewarded Bach for sheer delight in the music, not for the blessed forgetfulness in sleep to which it may have been expected to seduce him. The quality of these variations is inexpressibly vivacious and charming. Bach shows himself, it is true, always the master of sounds and the science of music; but this may be taken as the secure foundation on which he allows himself for once to be the brilliant and even dazzling virtuoso.

With the object in view of enchanting an amateur who must have been, _ex officio_, very much a man of the world at large, Bach composed objectively. That is to say he wrote not so much to express himself as to please another. The same might be said of two other of the latest harpsichord works, the _Musikalisches Opfer_ and the _Kunst der Fuge_; except that in both of these masterpieces his aim was more technical. In the Goldberg Variations he is, so to speak, off duty.

Consequently, there is in them little trace of the stern, albeit tender idealist, or of the teacher, or of the man sunk in the mystery of religious devotion. There are nine canons, at every interval from the unison to the ninth, some in contrary motion. But even in these learned processes there is a social suavity and charm. Witness especially the canon at the third (the ninth variation), and that at the sixth (the eighteenth variation). Only the twenty-fifth variation seems to show Bach entirely submerged within himself. Elsewhere he is for the most part primarily a virtuoso. In the matter of wide skips, of crossing the hands, and of sparkling velocity, he outruns Scarlatti. In fact the virtuosity of the variations as a whole is far beyond Scarlatti.

To begin with, he wrote for a harpsichord with two manuals; and in many of the variations, conspicuously in the eighth, the eleventh, the twentieth, and the twenty-third, he availed himself to the uttermost of the advantages of such an instrument. The hands constantly pass by each other on their way from one extremity of the keyboard to the other, or cross and recross. The parts which they play are interwoven in complications which, unhappily, must forever be the despair of the pianist. In such cases, of course, he may not justly be compared with Scarlatti, who wrote always for one manual.

But take for example the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth variations, which may be played on either one or two manuals. The trills and double trills in the former, together with the wide and sudden crossing of the hands, savor of Paganini and Liszt. So do the interlocked chord trills in the latter, and the airy, whirring triplets which follow them. Indeed, leaving aside a few effects in double notes, and certain others of the thunder and lightning variety which were wholly beyond the possibilities of the harpsichord, the modern pianoforte virtuoso style has little to show in advance upon the style of the Goldberg Variations.

Furthermore, if the Goldberg Variations are thus amazing from the point of view of the pianist, they are none the less so to the musician regarding their general form. There is in them positively no trace of the stereotyped form of variations of that day, which consisted either of a repetition of the theme with more and more elaborate ornament, or at best of a series of arabesques over the more or less bare harmonic foundation of the theme. The theme is for Bach but the simple germ of an idea, which, throughout the whole elaborate series, undergoes change, transformation, metamorphosis, hardly to be recognized in any of its varied forms, scarcely suggesting a unity to the work as a whole. Mood and rhythm change. New ideas sprout, seemingly quite independent of their origin. Even the harmonic foundation is veiled and altered. Bach speaks, as it were, in beautiful metaphors.

This conception and treatment of the variation form render it true greatness; endow it, indeed, as a form, with immortal life. External figurations will grow old-fashioned, or the ear will become satiated with them. But the Goldberg Variations have an inner life that cannot wither or decay. Bach’s warm imagination inspired them, gave them poetry as well as brilliance. No more modern variations are quite comparable with them except Brahms’ great series on a theme of Handel, in which, however, there is less warmth than severity, less imagination than art.

VIII

How shall Bach be placed in the history of music, in particular of pianoforte music? What part may he be said to play in the development of the art? The paternity which most composers of the nineteenth century rejoiced to fasten upon him, is hardly fitting. Bach was the father of twenty-two children in this life, but musically he died without heir. His sons Emanuel and Christian were two of the most influential composers of the next generation; but both discarded their father’s inheritance as of little service to them in the forward march of music.

Even before his death Bach knew that the forms and style of music which he had given his life to perfect and ennoble were already of the past. That he invented a simple system of temperament in order to afford himself the harmonic freedom necessary to his expression, or that he devised a system of fingering which considerably facilitated the playing of his difficult music, does not constitute him the progenitor of the new style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The composers who followed him knew little or nothing of his music. They were far less likely to appropriate what they might have found useful in his old-fashioned art, than to meet the problems inherent in the new, which they served, with their own ingenuity. Accept, if you like, Scarlatti as the founder of the modern pianoforte style; Couperin as the creator of the salon piece. The fugue had had its great day, and so had the suite. The flawless counterpoint of Bach, with its involutions and its smoothness, was of too compact a substance to serve the adolescent, transparent sonata. His harmonies were too rich and fluent. And Bach had been but once the Bach of the Goldberg Variations.

No; Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,--of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. And by virtue of this standard which he fixed, he has exercised over the development of music down to the present day a greater spiritual influence than that of any other single composer.

The harpsichord works of his great contemporary Handel are far less significant. Several sets of suites were published in London between 1720 and 1735, also six fugues for organ or harpsichord. In the third suite of the first set (1720) there is an air and variations. In the fifth of the same series is the so-called ‘Harmonious Blacksmith,’ the best known of his works for the harpsichord. It is a theme and variations. The air and variations in B-flat major which has served as the groundwork of a great cycle of variations by Brahms constitutes the first number of the second series (1733). There are in other suites a _Passacaglia_ and two _Chaconnes_, all of which are monotonous series of variations. One _Chaconne_ has no less than sixty-two varied repeats. In these works Handel shows little ingenuity. His technical formulas are conventional and in general uninteresting. The dance movements of the suites are worthier of a great composer.

Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach are the great names of harpsichord music; great because each stands for a supreme achievement in the history of the art. It may be questioned whether, if the pianoforte had not come to supplant the harpsichord, composers would have been able to progress beyond the high marks of these three men, either in style or in expressiveness. New forms had made their appearance, it is true, before the death of Bach. These would have run their course upon the harpsichord without doubt; but it is not so certain that they could have brought to light any new resources of the instrument. These had been not only fully appreciated by the three great men, Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach, but had been developed to their fullest extent. And, indeed, it may be asked whether any music has more faithfully expressed the emotions and the aspirations of humanity than the harpsichord music of Bach.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] An Englishman, organist at St. George’s, Hanover Square, from 1725 to 1737, when he became insane. He died about 1750. He had made the acquaintance of both Scarlattis during a stay in Italy, and was instrumental in bringing D. Scarlatti’s operas and harpsichord pieces before the British public.

[12] A learned Roman collector, born in 1778, died in 1862. Mendelssohn had the free use of his library and wrote that as regards old Italian music it was most complete.

[13] This collection is available to students in America. The sonatas contained in it are representative of Scarlatti’s style, though, of course, they represent but a small portion of his work. The collection can be far more easily used for reference than the cumbersome Czerny. Unfortunately the complete Italian edition is still rare in this country.

[14] J. S. Shedlock writes in ‘The Pianoforte Sonata’: ‘The return to the opening theme in the second section, which divides binary from sonata form, is, in Scarlatti, non-existent.’ Out of some two hundred sonatas which I have examined, I have found but one to disprove the statement. This one exception, No. 11 in the Breitkopf and Härtel edition of twenty, is so perfectly in sonata form that one cannot but wonder Scarlatti did not employ the form oftener. [EDITOR.]

[15] See articles by Edward J. Dent in _Monthly Musical Record_ for September and October, 1906.

[16] See Chrysander’s articles prefatory to his own edition (_Denkmäler_), edited by Brahms, in the _Monthly Musical Record_ for February, 1889, _et seq._

[17] The pieces in one _ordre_ may be in major or minor. The first _ordre_ is in G, that is the pieces in it are either in G minor or G major. The second is in D, minor and major, the third in C, etc.

[18] That which appeared in 1713. The earlier set is not commonly reckoned among his publications.

[19] _Musiciana_, Paris, 1877.

[20] The origin of the title is rather doubtful. On the first page of the manuscript copy, which was in the hands of Christian Bach, of London, were written the words: _Fait pour les anglais_. The first prelude is on a theme by Dieupart, a composer then popular in England.