Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

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524 SONATA
and the broadening of life brought a new kind of
vigour into art and literature. Beethoven was
the first great composer to whom the limitless
field of unoonventionalised human emotion was
opened, and his disposition was ready for the
opportunity. Even in the ordinary trifles of life
he sometimes showed by an apparently superfluous
rebellion against polite usages his antipathy
to artificiality, and convei'sely the bent of
his sympathy towards unmistakable realities of
human feeling. He thus became the prototype
of genuine modern music, and the first exponent
of its essential qualities ; and the sonata form
being ready in its main outlines for his use, and
artistic instinct having achieved the most perfect
spontaneity in its employment, he took possession
of it as an appropriate mode of formulating
some of the richest and most impressive of his
thoughts. With him the idea asserted its rights.
This Is not to say that structure is ignored, but
that the utmost expansion and liberty is admitted
in the expression of the vital parts which
can be made consistent with perfect balance in
tlie unfolding of the whole ; and this obviously
depends upon the powers of the composer.
Under such circumstances he can only be guided
by the highest development of instinct, for the
process of balance and distribution becomes so
complicated that it is almost out of the reach of
conscious analysis, much more of the dictation of
science. The evolution of this vital ingredient,
the idea, is so obscure and difficult that it is out
of the question to enter upon it in this place.
It is an unhappy fact that the scientists who
have endeavoured to elucidate music, with a few
great and honourable exceptions, foreseeing that
the analysis of ideas was quite beyond their
reach, at all events until immense advances are
made in the sciences which have direct reference
to the human organism, have set their faces to
tlie structural elements, as if music consisted of
nothing but lines and surfaces. The existence
of idea is so habitually ignored that it necessarily
appears to be non-existent in their estimate
of art. On the other hand, the philosophers
who have said anything about it appear on the
surface not to be in accord ; though in reality
their views are both compatible and necessary,
but require a more detailed experience of the
art and of its historical development to explain
their interaction. But meanwhile the external
method of the scientists gains disproportionate
pre-eminence, and conscientious people feel uneasily
that there may be no such things as ideas
at all, and that they will be doing better to
apply themselves to mathematics. And yet the
idea is everything, and without it music is absolutely
null and void ; and though a gi-eat and
comprehensive mathematician may make an
analysis after the event, a synthesis which is
merely the fruit of his calculations will be
nothing more than a sham and an imposture.
In fact, the formulation of the idea is a most
vital matter in musical history, and its progress
can be traced from the earliest times, proceeding
simultaneously with the development of the
general structure of the sonata. The expressive
raw material was drawn from various sources.
The style of expression developed under the influences
of religion in the ages preceding the
beginnings of instrumental music, supplied
something ; dance music of all orders, mimetic
and merely rhythmic, supplied much ; the
pseudo-realism of the drama, in respect of vocal
inflexionand imitations of natural circumstances,
also something ; and the instincts surviving in
the race from countless past ages, the actual
cries arising from spontaneous nervous reaction,
and many other similar causes, had a share in
suggestion, and in actual, though unrealised,
motive power. And all these, compounded and
inseparably intermingled, supplied the basis of
the expressive element in music. Through all
the time from Monteverde to Beethoven this
expressive element was being more and more
clearly drawn into compact and definite proportions
; floating at first vaguely on the surface,
springing out in flashes of exceptional brightness
here and there, and at times presenting almost
perfect maturity by fits of individual good
fortune ; but hardly ever so free but that 'some
of the matrix is felt to be clinging to the ore.
It obtained complete but restricted symmetry
with the composers immediately preceding Beethoven,
but arrived only at last with him at that
expansion which made it at once perfect and
intelligible, and yet boundless in range within
the limits of the art-material at the composer's
comjnandr'
Prior to Beethoven, the development of a long
work was based upon antitheses of distinct tunes
and concrete lumps of subject representing
separate organisms, either merely in juxtaposition,
or loosely connected by more or less empty
passages. There were ideas indeed, but ideas
limited and confined by the supposed necessities
of the structure of which they formed a part.
But what Beethoven seems to have aimed at
was the expansion of the term ' idea from the
'
isolated subject to the complete whole ; so that
instead of the subjects being separate, though
compatible items, the whole movement, or even
the whole work, should be the complete and
uniform organism which represented in its
entirety a new meaning of the word 'idea,' of
which the subjects, in their close connection and
inseparable aflinities, were subordinate limbs.
This principle is traceable in works before his
time, but not on the scale to which he carried
it, nor with his conclusive force. In fact, the
condition of art had not been sufficiently mature
to admit the terms of his procedure, and it was
barely mature enough till he made it so.
His early works were in conformity with the
style and structural principles of his predecessors
but he began, at least in pianoforte works, to