Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/106

MUSIC [HISTORY. or pipe which produces it be doubled. The law is without exception throughout the compass in which our ears can distinguish pitch, and so, of necessity, a string of twice the length of that whose vibrations induce the deepest perceiv able sound must stir the air at such a rate as to cause a tone at an 8th below that lowest audible note. It is hence manifest that, however limited our sense of the range of musical sound, this range extends upward and downward to infinity. Piano- The pianoforte owes its invention to the period now forte. under review. This instrument may be styled the voice of the musician, the only means whereby unaided he can give complete utterance to his thoughts, the only vehicle for the communication of musical ideas in their entirety. This is not said in depreciation of other in struments of various excellence which have qualities im possible to the pianoforte, but has reference to the totality of musical speech that is possible, and to the convenience with which this is produced on the instrument in question. The characteristic difference between this instrument and earlier ones of a similar class is that the strings of the pianoforte are struck by hammers impelled by the keys under the performer s finger, and yield louder or softer tone according to the force he uses, whereas its prede cessors yielded variety of loudness only by mechanical instead of personal means, and hence were not the living exponents as it is of the executant s impulse. Whether one speak of the happiness kindled in the homestead by this most facile and most self-sufficient instrument, or of the fuel of such happiness, namely, the measure less amount of music of every style and quality that has been written for the pianoforte, its existence is to be accounted as an influence all but infinite upon society as much as upon art. The term " pian e forte " is applied to a musical instrument by Paliarino or Pagliarini, a manufacturer of Modena, in 1598, but no particulars have reached us of its structure or effect. Some instru ments which foreshadow the chief essentials of the modern pianoforte, made by Bartolomeo Cristofori, a Paduan then working in Florence, are described in letters of 1709, and must have been made some years earlier, and pianofortes by this ingenious inventor still exist bearing date 1720 and 1726. Marius, a Frenchman, submitted plans for an instrument with hammer action to the Academic Royale des Sciences in 1716, and Schroter, a German, claimed to have devised two models in 1717 and 1721 ; but the first pianofortes made away from Italy Avere by Gottfried Silbermann. in 1726, who worked from the designs of Cristofori. 1 Drama- Let us now revert to the opera, in which vast modinca- ,ic con- tions were germinated towards the middle of the 1 8th music centui 7> an d ripened before its close into noble maturity. Allusion has been made in the notice of Pergolese to the appropriation of the lyric element to comic subjects. At first wholly unregarded as a sphere for art uses, then admitted for interludial purposes in a fabrication styled intermezzo that was played between the acts of a serious composition, comedy became in course of time the basis of the most highly important, because the most comprehensive and truly the grandest, and further because the most especially musical, application of the art to dramatic ends. The class of writing here to be considered is that struc ture of concerted vocal music through which a continuous action proceeds, involving the embodiment of the charac teristics of the several persons concerned, with their opposi tion and combination. Handel had been remarkably happy in uniting in one piece the utterances of three, four, and 1 These dates have been gathered and verified by Mr A. J. Hipkins, to whose exhaustive papers on this class of instruments and their best esteemed makers readers are referred. See also PIANOFORTE. even five distinct persons ; he did not, however, make these several individualities interchange speech in dialogue, but caused them to sing, as it were, so many monologues at once, each independent of the others, and Handel was not singular in his occasional practice though he was in his excellence. Nicolo Logroscino (1700-1763), a Neapolitan, who never would write but to the dialect of his own country, was so exclusively comic and so surpassingly successful as to gain the cognomen of "II Dio dell opera buffa." It was he who first enchained a series of pieces (technically styled movements) in unbroken sequence, during which different persons entered or left the scene, discoursed in amity or disputation, or united either in the outpouring of a common sentiment or in the declaration of their various passions. For some time this form of lyrical dramatic art was only applied to comic subjects ; Paesiello is said to have been the first musician who introduced its use into serious opera ; it reached perfection under the masterly, magical, nay, superhuman touch of Mozart, whose two finales in Figaro and two in Don Giovanni are models which should be the wonder of all time and yet can never be approached. The spoken drama is limited to the onefold utterance of a single person, for, however rapid the colloquy, if any two spoke together, each would eclipse the other s voice retort may be instantaneous, but cannot be simultaneous. In a painting the different char acters and emotions of the persons presented are shown at once, but, as if under the glance of Medusa, they are fixed for ever in one attitude with one expression. In an opera finale the manifold passions of as many human beings, vivified by the voices of the same number of singers, come at once on our hearing with prolonged manifestation, and this is the wielding of a power that is not in the capability of any other of the fine arts. Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) was a Bohemian Gluck. by birth, and a wanderer by habit. He was a grand reformer, or rather restorer, of dramatico-musical art, yes, and a prophet, for he not only revived the principles enunciated in Florence on the threshold of the 17th century, which had been superseded by the vocalisms that had usurped the throne of truth, but he fully forestalled by this revival all that is good in what is nowadays denoted by the cant term "music of the future." As was the wont of his age, Gluck went to extend his art experience, perhaps to complete his education, to Italy, and there produced so many meritorious works in the style of the time as to establish a high reputation. This led to his engagement to write for the Italian Opera in London, whither he came in 1746. The work he composed for this occasion and one he then reproduced met with small favour, and a " pasticcio " from his previous works, Piramo e Tisbe, had no better fortune. The failure brought the conviction that, whatever the abstract merit of music, a piece that was appropriate to one character in one situation could not be fitted to another personage under different circumstances, and that admired pieces culled from different works could not be concocted into a whole with appearance of unity. Gluck therefore resolved to abandon the prevailing customs in writing for the stage, and to devise a system of dramatic composition wherein the musical design should grow out of the action of the scene, being ever dependent upon and illustrative of it, and yet being always a design faithful to the principles of what may be named musical architec ture. As did Monteverde and his contemporaries, so did this composer aim to distinguish his dramatic persons by assigning music of different character to each; he required that the overture should announce the cast of feeling and thought that was to pervade the work, and he strove to make the whole of the music appropriate to the individuals, to the situations in which they were concerned, and to the