BACH, BEETHOVEN, BRAHMS
| Autor: | Hermann Abert |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1927 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Musical Quarterly. :329-343 |
| ISSN: | 1741-8399 0027-4631 |
| Popis: | THE sacred number three has not alone left traces in the musical theory of the Middle Ages, but also makes its mysterious influence felt down to the most recent times, though mysticism has in increasing measure tended to become merely a sport. If the seventeenth century in Schein, Scheit and Schiitz, already boast its three great S's, who, to be sure, were almost exact contemporaries; then the nineteenth, in Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, grouped its three great B's, collating them from a period extending over some two hundred years. This triad, for which a fourth great B, namely Hans von Billow, was for a time largely in evidence as spokesman did not, it must be confessed, long continue uncontested with regard to its third member, for beside Brahms, the art of Anton Bruckner insisted on the recognition of its rights with increasing preemptoriness, and at the present time, as is well known even among laymen, there exists a large party which would like to set up the Austrian master in the place of Brahms. Now in such cases the old saw: De gustibus non est disputandum is especially valid, and to-day we have less reason than ever before to bloody our noses fighting about whether Brahms or Bruckner was "the greatest," and may be content to let every Philistine who is so preoccupied with one master that he cannot see the other, find salvation after his own fashion. Far more engrossing is the question how it came to pass that just the three B's already mentioned were grouped together, and from which point of view this triumvirate has been considered. For there can be hardly any doubt but what that Bach, that Beethoven and that Brahms admired in the year 1870, despite the equality of the external note-pictures is, in each case, quite another artist from the one admired in the year 1926. Above all, at that time, men were not yet quite clear as regards a fundamental principle in the history of art, to wit, that in the case of an older master one cannot mete with the measures of contemporary feelings, but only those which his own time and people and personality place at our disposal. For the artist as well as for the critics so intimately connected with him, this modern standpoint as a point of departure was quite self-evident; they heard in the older music only that to which their own individualities reacted; the sole point |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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