nd his
school friend are playing one evening an _adagio_ of Schwindl on the
violin: "And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so
lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax. They laid down their
violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing
but 'excellent'--and went to bed." The ear of the sentimental period,
which had so suddenly become sensitive to the _adagio_, has never been
so tersely branded! From that time on there was a regular debauch of
_adagio_ beatitude. In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in
autograph albums that a bad man could not play an _adagio_, not to
mention other florid trash of this sort. Nevertheless, the moment when
we acquired an ear for the _adagio_ remains epoch-making in the history
of culture.

It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising
contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very
little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us.
[Illustration: A VILLAGE FUNERAL _From the Painting by Benjamin
Vautier_]

But that combinations of harmony should sound absolutely false and
nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another
age sounded beautiful and natural--this is a puzzling fact. The shrill
and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective
were thought to be ear-splitting a hundred years ago. But let us go
still further. The awful succession of fourths in the diaphonies of
Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, are so incongruous to our ear
that expert singers must exercise the utmost self-control in order even
to give utterance to such combinations of harmony--and yet they must
have sounded beautiful and natural to the medieval ear! Even dogs, which
listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl
lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth
passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation
of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to
help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one
had been able to play to them--well, let us say, modulations from
_Tannhaeuser_.

The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was _in
its trivial entirety_ a "diversion of the mind and wit." In the same way
that we now write "popular musical text-books," they wrote, in that day,
directions "how a _galant homme_ could attain complete compreh