We have outgrown this
tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key
especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan
declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.
Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the
conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more
simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-,
F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic
peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the
over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and
empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the
out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to
produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily
bread of our composers.
One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if
one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick
the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to
the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided
concerning the characters of the keys; in practice, however, the
composer is sure to feel that everything does not sound equally well in
all keys and therefore must decide each individual case separately, in
conformity with his artistic ear and instinct; I will merely add--also
in conformity with the ear of his time.
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