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 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.
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