Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, The Musical Ear 1852 (which became a part of his Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, 1859), tr. Frances H. King, vol. VIII. of Masterpieces of German Literature, 1914, pp. 461-464:
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 comprehension of and taste in music,» and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest: «Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and sound judgment. If one wished for an example, and were the reader perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music, it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could represent the so necessary harmony, the style, the suitable melody, and then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry.»
With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar forms also in concert music. To be sure, as a natural consequence he had to remain solitary.
The above mentioned music «for the diversion of the mind and wit» loved short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions of the same thought. The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the same or in changed forms. We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear; therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more dangerous, than the old. Musical pieces increase in length from year to year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough. Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's works. He listened to the man of the future with the ear of his own past age, and in so far was quite right. To the people of the earlier period of the eighteenth century Beethoven's works would certainly have seemed unspeak-ably confused and bombastic, indeed like the products of musical insanity and, moreover, swarming with the worst kind of stylistic and grammatical blunders, as they did indeed appear at times even to the older contemporaries of the master. Little by little, however, it has grown to be rather risky to assert this fact, for every musical ass now argues that because his works please nobody, therefore he must be a Beethoven.
The concise thoughts and phrases of the old masters are disturbing to our dreamy musical ear—they are disquieting, they wake us up. Modern musicians are very seldom able to perform impressively this all too concise style of composition because they are no longer accustomed to interchange forte and piano and melodic expression in such short musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods, yard-long fortes, pianos and crescendos. By far the greater part of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III., portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in an—allemande. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano. The Hamburg organist, Matthias Weckmann, set the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah to music, and the then celebrated missionary to the Jews, Edzardi, bore him witness that in the bass he had painted the Messiah as plainly as if he had seen Him with his own eyes. We have no longer any ear for the comprehension of such rationalistically allegorized music; indeed, we can understand the ear which a former age possessed for it just as little as we can understand the euphony which the ear of the Middle Ages found in Guido's fourth-harmonies, which now even the dogs cannot put up with. . . .
There is certainly a wonderful charm in conjuring up the spirit of past ages from yellowed sheets of music, and, with the help of historical study, in quiet cozy hours, to tune one's own ear anew, so that it may once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and which would be lost for us—since picture and word stand too far off—had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among the features of the character-picture.
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