【英文读物】Three Great Epoch-Makers in Music

【英文读物】Three Great Epoch-Makers in MusicPREFACE Bearing in mind Emerson's saying that every action admits of being outdone, and around every circle another may be drawn, we none the less believe that a comparison of Sebastian Bach, Frederic Chopin and Richard Strauss, will show that, because of excellences peculiar to his day, and also individual excellences, no one of these three epoch-makers wholly outdoes, wholly encircles either of the others. Rather is he a link of a chain in which Beethoven, Wagner, and certain others are indispensable.That chain had beginning in the remote past, but, because inadequate, many early links are now broken. Of musicians prior to Bach, Gregory and Palestrina alone have endured the strain of time. The inadequacy of the old, true of not another art, proves music to be virtually an achievement of the last two and one-half centuries. This brief term, a mere fraction of that which must be allowed to certain of the sister arts, argues for music a very considerable period of future development.Comparison of the Gregorian Chants with the Wagnerian scores may bring doubt upon this statement, but, since the advent of Richard Strauss, it seems probable that the musician of the future will smile at the ideals of our contemporary composers. What were the tendencies whose centering in one master mind produced the great classical beginnings of modern music, we would show in our estimate of Bach. The tendencies eventuating in the free style of the romanticist, and the abandon of the ultra school, we would indicate in our estimate of Chopin. And, because of present tendencies, what direction tonal development will yet take, we shall endeavor to ascertain in our estimate of Richard Strauss.JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH Chapter 1 Far down the vista of history stands the Grecian Homer, unique, and, save for Hesiod, alone amidst the memorable years. Alone we say, but from the view-point of his contemporaries was visible in the backgroundeven to the dim horizon of civilizationmany an eminence inferior only when compared with that colossal peak of Ionic song. To every philologist, to every classical scholar, the development and finish of the Homeric hexameter argues convincingly a poetical ancestry of which the Iliad and the Odyssey are culmination.The chiselled achievements of Phidias, and whatsoever else extant of Attic sculpture, attest the attained perfection of an art in whose day of puerility the primitive cave-dweller, with a bit of broken flint, idly scratched upon the bones of his prey, crude semblance of man, animal, fish, reptile and bird. The worthiest triumphs of Renaissance painting are traceable to the cruel, warlike impulse of the savage daubing himself to hideousness with earthy pigments and the red juice of ripened berries. The grand creations of the German tone-builders were evolved from the battle-yells of aboriginal tribes.Thus in Earth's purest, highest things is exemplified the law whereby the noble somehow emerged from the ignoble like the sweet and tinted flower rooted in the unsavory compost: whereby also the formative mind of man itself gained scope and symmetry, not through sudden and strenuous exercise, but in a way comparable to the sphering and solidifying and upbuilding of a planet, in fact, that infinitely gradual and orderly process which Nature in her wisdom has everywhere counterparts, as when she evolved these modern years from the countless, non-achieving ages of unrecorded savagery; ages repulsive with the dominant, brute passions of men.Thus, in view of the foregoing, it may with assurance be admitted that every genius is endowed not only by the immediate, gracious gift of God, but also by the accumulated bequeathings of every predecessor in the same domain of usefulness.Well we know that while the puny efforts of the ordinary individual ripple but for an instant some little surface of the vast ocean of mortal life, others there be, centers of mental and spiritual power at once wide-reaching, deep-sounding, and long-enduring. Always in touch with unseen angel hands, these are verily the world's immortals co-working with the Divine Law of human progress. Deathless are they in deed and name; the prophet of Truth, the priest of God, the patriot Warrior, the incorruptible Statesman, the wise Ruler, the inspired Artist and the uplifted Singer.Our immediate purpose bids us choose from this noble company; let us look somewhat into the dedicated life of Johann Sebastian Bach; let us inquire briefly into the musical mission of one of the chief promoters of human enlightenment.At cursory glance, the solid and abiding work of Bach may be called the bed-rock, the basic strata, whereon rests our musical world of this present. But, remembering the Flemish Fuguists and their predecessors, the Canon writers of the Gotho-Belgic school, and, earlier, the Parisian developers of the primitive counterpoint originating in French Flanders during the te