Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 3.djvu/574

662 It must not be supposed that he makes a law of this procedure, but the remarkably frequent occurrence of so curious a device is certainly suggestive of conscious purpose in structural treatment. The result of this mode is that the movements often appear to be crowded with ideas. Commonly the features of the opening bars, which in modern times would be held of almost supreme importance, serve for very little except to determine the character of the movement, and often never make their appearance again. On the other hand he carries the practice before referred to, of making the latter part of each half of the movement correspond, to an extraordinary pitch, and with perfect success; for he almost invariably adopts the key distribution of binary form in its main outlines; and though it would not be accurate to speak of such a thing as a 'second subject' in his sonatas, the impression produced by his distribution of repetition and the clearness of his ideas is sufficient, in his best movements, to give a general structural effect very similar to complete binary form on a small scale. In order to realise to what extent the process of recapitulation is carried by him, it will be as well to consider the outline of a fairly characteristic sonata. That which stands fifteenth in the easily available edition of Breitkopf & Härtel commences with eight bars only in E minor; the next forty-six, barring merely a slight and unimportant digression, are in G major. This concludes the first half. The second half begins with reference to the opening figures of the whole and a little key digression, and then a characteristic portion of the second section of the first half is resumed, and the last thirty-four bars of the movement are a recapitulation in E minor of the last thirty-five of the first half, the three concluding bars being condensed into two.

In many respects his principles of structure and treatment are altogether in the direction of modern ways, and alien to fugal principles. That vital principle of the fugue—the persistence of one principal idea, and the interweaving of it into every part of the structure—appears completely alien to Scarlatti's disposition. He very rarely wrote a fugue; and when he did, if it was successful that was less because it was a good fugue than because it was Scarlatti's. The fact that he often starts with imitation between two parts is unimportant, and the merest accident of association. He generally treats his ideas as concrete lumps, and disposes them in distinct portions of the movement, which is essentially an unfugal proceeding; but the most important matter is that he was probably the first to attain to clear conception and treatment of a self-sufficing effective idea, and to use it, if without science, yet with management which is often convincingly successful. He was not a great master of the art of composition, but he was one of the rarest masters of his instrument; and his divination of the way to treat it, and the perfect adaptation of his ideas to its requirements, more than counterbalance any shortcoming in his science. He was blessed with ideas, and with a style so essentially his own, that even when his music is transported to another instrument the characteristic effects of tone often remain unmistakeable. Vivacity, humour, genuine fun, are his most familiar traits. At his best his music sparkles with life and freshness, and its vitality is apparently quite unimpaired by age. He rarely approaches tenderness or sadness, and in the whole mass of his works there are hardly any slow movements. He is not a little 'bohemian,' and seems positively to revel in curious effects of consecutive fifths and consecutive octaves. The characteristic daring of which such things are the most superficial manifestations, joined with the clearness of his foresight, made him of closer kinship to Beethoven and Weber, and even Brahms, than to the typical contrapuntalists of his day. His works are genuine 'sonatas' in the most radical sense of the term—self-dependent and self-sufficing sound-pieces, without programme. To this the distribution of movements is at least of secondary importance, and his confining himself to one alone does not vitiate his title to be a foremost contributor to that very important branch of the musical art. No successor was strong enough to wield his bow. His pupil Durante wrote some sonatas, consisting of a Studio and a Divertimento apiece, which have touches of his manner, but without sufficient of the nervous elasticity to make them important.

The contemporary writers for clavier of second rank do not offer much which is of high musical interest, and they certainly do not arrive at anything like the richness of thought and expression which is shown by their fellows of the violin. There appears however amongst them a tendency to drop the introductory slow movement characteristic of the violin sonata, and by that means to draw nearer to the type of later clavier or pianoforte sonatas. Thus a sonata of Wagenseil's in F major presents almost exactly the general outlines to be met with in Haydn's works—an Allegro assai in binary form of the old type, a short Andantino grazioso, and a Tempo di Minuetto. A sonata of Hasse's in D minor has a similar arrangement of three movements ending with a Gigue; but the first movement is utterly vague and indefinite in form. There is also an Allegro of Hasse's in B♭, quoted in Pauer's