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.
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