Note Return to text — IV THE ÆSTHETIC VIEW OF THE ART OF SINGING

Music, above all the other arts, finds the earliest and most universal recognition, and almost every one listens to it with pleasure. Helmholtz says that music is much more intimately related to our sensations than all the other arts put together. Tones touch the ear and are instantly felt to be agreeable or disagreeable, while the impressions of painting, poetry, &c., upon our senses must be brought to our consciousness, and be judged of there by comparison. But it is not only through the direct effect of tones, as it appears to me, but more through the life (Belebung) which animates it, that music comes so close to us, and is so natural and near of kin to us. That must needs be the most interior of the arts whose office it is to express the various moods of the human soul in their tenderest and most secret fluctuations. The incorporeal material of tone is far better fitted to express these different moods (Stimmungen) than it is possible for poetry to do. Peculiar, definite feelings it cannot, indeed, distinctly denote without the help of poetry. But it is this very indefiniteness that enables music so to insinuate itself into the soul of the hearer that the tones heard seem to be the expression of his own feelings, and not those of another. Hence it is that music, in its whole nature, acts beneficently and soothingly, because its ruling principle is always a striving after repose, after a rest in consonances, just as this is the innermost aim and struggle of our own life. In the other arts this is much less the case. Aristotle, in his twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth problems, distinguishes the influences of music as the expression of tones of feeling (Stimmungen), and not of definite feelings. And Brendel, who, in his history of music, holds to the order among the arts received by the Greeks, by which architecture takes the lowest place, then sculpture, painting, music, and, lastly, as the highest of the arts, poetry, remarks, that “Music, by virtue of its power to express the most delicate shades of sentiment, would certainly take the highest rank were it more definite.” It has always been attempted to extend the boundaries of music by calling in the assistance of painting and poetry. Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, etc., have imitated in their compositions the singing of birds, the rippling of water, storms, &c. And now our modern musicians of the future endeavor to express in tones definite thoughts and feelings, imagining that here a new epoch in art is to open. But these new compositions always require elaborate explanations. Music until now, at least, has not yet given up its ethereal, indefinite character. 18