7. THE RISE OF DRAMATIC MUSIC AND THE SONATA STYLE The fashionable distaste for polyphony was a mere negative force in the early 18th 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 18th century musicians could easily cover ten min utes 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 grow ing sense of contrast in various textures cheap and valueless in themselves. The rest of the story is told in the articles, INSTRU MENTATION, HARMONY, OPERA, SONATA FORMS, and GLUCK, BEETHOVEN, HAYDN, MOZART.
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 sys tem, more universal in emotional range than any art since Shake speare, and as perfectly balanced as the arts of ancient Greece. Until the end of the 19th 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 lan guage 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 under went 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 au thors ; 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. (See FUGUE for a demonstration of the irrelevance of traditional doctrine on that art-form.) Still more imperti nent is our orthodoxy on sonata-forms. It ignores the differences between Haydn and Mozart which are as radical as any innova tion Beethoven introduced; and, having thus cut away all ground for appreciating Beethoven, treats him as the central symphonic classic, and also as a stupendous revolutionary. This result is correct as far as it goes: central classics can be stupendous revo lutionaries. But correct pious opinions are the healthier for facts that can give us a right to them ; and the beginning of the 19th century was unfortunately the beginning of an age of humbug in musical education. (See CHERUBINI, who, however, has other claims to our respect.) One consequence is that many a musical revolt purports to revolt against the classics when its nearest contact with classical forms has been the perky generalizations of textbooks by writers who regarded the great masters as dan gerous, and who deduced their rules from the uniform procedures of lesser composers. Now these procedures were often derived from one or two popular works by the greatest men : thus Bee thoven himself produced one model sonata (op. 22)—if its "first subject" had only been long enough. And if Mozart's great C major quartet had not such a subversive introduction it might (and did) serve as a jelly-mould for all the quartets of Spohr. Take another jelly-mould from Spohr, and you have classical tradition.