BY DANIEL GREGORY MASON AUTHOR OF “FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS” NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1911 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED C OPYRIGHT , 1904, B Y THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1904. Reprinted August, 1911. Norwood Press: Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A....

CHAPTER I THE PERIODS OF MUSICAL HISTORY The modern view of history is vivified by a principle scarcely dreamed of before the middle of the last century; the conception which permeates all our interpretations of the story of the world, which illuminates our study of all its phases, was by our grandfathers apprehended either vaguely or not at all. For them, history dealt with a more or less random series of happenings, succeeding each other accidentally, unaccountably, and at haphazard; each sing

CHAPTER II PALESTRINA AND THE MUSIC OF MYSTICISM It has been often pointed out by historians and critics that in their early stages the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting were the servants of religion. Nursed through their infancy by the cherishing hand of the church, they emerged into the secular world only with their comparative maturity. Architecture, which in our day and country embodies itself chiefly in great civic and mercantile buildings, began with the temples of the pagan Gr

CHAPTER III THE MODERN SPIRIT The need of mastering life, of reducing its multitudinous, thronging details to some sort of order, that shall lack neither the unity which alone can satisfy the mind, nor the variety requisite to do justice to the complexity of experience, is the one perennial need of humanity. The aim of all the chief human undertakings is to find schemes of order: physical science is the quest of order in the material world; morality is the quest of coordination and balance betwe

CHAPTER IV THE PRINCIPLES OF PURE MUSIC Just as success in the intellectual and moral worlds results from power to shape ideas and conduct, to make syntheses which combine the most various elements in unity, so artistic success results from the power to shape into a single organism the various elements of artistic effect. Art may make a deep appeal to us by the richness of its sensuous charm, and a still deeper by the eloquence of its emotional expression; the deepest of all appeals it will not

CHAPTER V HAYDN In the early eighteenth century there lived in a small village called Rohrau, situated near the Leitha River, which forms the boundary between Lower Austria and Hungary, a certain wheelwright and parish sexton, named Matthias Haydn, and his wife. They were simple peasant people, a little more educated than was usual with their class. Matthias Haydn, besides a smattering of general information, had a talent for harp-playing, though he could not read music. Frau Haydn’s accomplishm

CHAPTER VI MOZART Although Mozart, born twenty-four years later than Haydn, and therefore belonging to another generation, was under heavy obligations to his forerunner for technical resources and models of style, his disadvantage in years was so much more than cancelled by the superior brightness of his genius that he in his turn was able to exert a potent influence upon the older man. The two great predecessors of Beethoven, accordingly, can be understood only when they are considered as subje

CHAPTER VII BEETHOVEN One of the most fascinating, and at the same time, the most baffling problem of the biographer, is to determine just what proportion of the characteristics of a great man are inherited from his ancestors, and what proportion take their origin in himself as an individual, to what degree his personality is merely a resultant or résumé of various qualities converging from many points into a fresh focus, and to what degree it is a unique creation, without traceable precedents o

CHAPTER VIII BEETHOVEN (CONTINUED) History and analytic thought alike reveal the fact that the highest pinnacles of art can be scaled only at those happy moments when favoring conditions of two distinct kinds happen to coincide. The artist who is to attain supreme greatness must in the first place have at his command a type of artistic technique that has already been developed to the verge of maturity, but that still awaits its complete efflorescence. As Sir Hubert Parry well says: “Inspiration