onscious of the
enchantments of the modern orchestra and of the perfect adaptability of
music to the subtlest needs of the dramatist. Beethoven had shown how
those inarticulate mood-poems which surge through men who have, like
himself, no exceptional command of words, can be written down in music
as symphonies. Not that Mozart and Beethoven invented these applications
of their art; but they were the first whose works made it clear that the
dramatic and subjective powers of sound were enthralling enough to stand
by themselves quite apart from the decorative musical structures of
which they had hitherto been a mere feature. After the finales in Figaro
and Don Giovanni, the possibility of the modern music drama lay bare.
After the symphonies of Beethoven it was certain that the poetry that
lies too deep for words does not lie too deep for music, and that
the vicissitudes of the soul, from the roughest fun to the loftiest
aspiration, can make symphonies without the aid of dance tunes. As much,
perhaps, will be claimed for the preludes and fugues of Bach; but
Bach's method was unattainable: his compositions were wonderful webs
of exquisitely beautiful Gothic traceries in sound, quite beyond all
ordinary human talent. Beethoven's far blunter craft was thoroughly
popular and practicable: not to save his soul could he have drawn one
long Gothic line in sound as Bach could, much less have woven several
of them together with so apt a harmony that even when the composer is
unmoved its progressions saturate themselves with the emotion which (as
modern critics are a little apt to forget) springs as warmly from our
delicately touched admiration as from our sympathies, and sometimes
makes us give a composer credit for pathetic intentions which he does
not entertain, just as a boy imagines a treasure of tenderness and noble
wisdom in the beauty of a woman. Besides, Bach set comic dialogue to
music exactly as he set the recitatives of the Passion, there being for
him, apparently, only one recitative possible, and that the musically
best. He reserved the expression of his merry mood for the regular
set numbers in which he could make one of his wonderful contrapuntal
traceries of pure ornament with the requisite gaiety of line and
movement. Beethoven bowed to no ideal of beauty: he only sought the
expression for his feeling. To him a joke was a joke; and if it sounded
funny in music he was satisfied. Until the old habit of judging all
musi