The Forms Of Music by Donald Francis Tovey

Author:Donald Francis Tovey [Tovey, Donald Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2013-04-16T03:00:00+00:00

VII. THE RISE OF DRAMATIC MUSIC AND THE SONATA STYLE

The fashionable distaste for polyphony was a mere negative force in the early eighteenth century. The positive force was, as in the monodic revolution a hundred and fifty years earlier, an impulse towards drama. Unlike the monodists who, when they rejected polyphony, had no power of composition beyond the single musical sentence, the eighteenth-century musicians could easily cover ten minutes with a well-balanced form; and the problem of making such forms dramatic was no longer confined to the monodist’s problem of making them rhetorical. On the contrary, the rhetoric had to be demolished; for the action of drama is not the action of rhetoric.

The distaste for polyphony was no unfavourable condition for the rise of dramatic music; it was the inverse aspect of a growing sense of contrast in various textures cheap and valueless in themselves. The rest of the story is told in the articles, INSTRUMENTATION, HARMONY, OPERA, and SONATA FORMS.

It is inadequate to call Gluck a ‘reformer’ of opera. Music itself was not dramatic before Gluck made it so. Hence it is a mistake to separate Gluck’s ‘reform’ from the whole process of the development of the sonata style. Lastly, we miss the whole meaning of that style unless we realize that as soon as it arose the purely instrumental music became more dramatic than any drama. At the same time it also became more powerfully architectural than any earlier music. The art comprised in the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven constitutes one unbroken aesthetic system, more universal in emotional range than any art since Shakespeare, and as perfectly balanced as the arts of ancient Greece. Until the end of the nineteenth century it would have seemed a paradox to maintain that Beethoven’s work belonged to the same aesthetic system as Haydn’s and Mozart’s; for critics were slow to escape from the habit of estimating works of art by the face value of their subjects and the dignity of their language. And the language of Haydn and Mozart corresponds with that of the comedy of manners, while Beethoven is the most tragic composer that ever lived. Nevertheless the huge expansion which music underwent at Beethoven’s hands was no revolution, and the popular idea of Beethoven as a revolutionary artist is based on two errors: first, the commonplace habit of seeking parallels between the works of genius and the personal eccentricities of their authors, and, secondly, the inadequacy of orthodox doctrine on musical forms. This inadequacy results from the fact that the doctrines are contemporaneous with the compositions and are accordingly hostile to all but the easiest conventions. A proper grammar of a classical art requires something of the attitude of the unjustly despised Byzantine scholars who sacrificed aesthetic pleasures in humble devotion to the task of securing the texts. It is when the languages are dead that they live for ever and suffer no corruption.

We need not expect scholarship in the orthodoxies that were current as to musical forms used in the lifetime of the classics themselves.

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