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Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung” (Part II)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

Leo Spitzer
Leo Spitzer*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

In discussing the idea of musical World Harmony we have had occasion to mention the tetrachord and the fourth (interval) in their symbolic or allegoric impact. The number 4 is a constitutive element in Pythagorean cosmology since the speculations on the “well-tempered” state—of the soul, of the body, or of the universe itself—rest on the harmonious combination of four elements.

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Traditio , Volume 3 , 1945 , pp. 307 - 364
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Copyright © 1945 by Cosmopolitan Science & Art Service Co., Inc. 

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References

46 The telescoping of reality and of speculation, which I call “harmonizing” is in fact just what was achieved by the earliest Greek thought—an achievement for which Gomperz, from the point of view of modern science, finds only words of blame: “Xenophanes had figured out a theory according to which sea and land will gradually be mixed up with each other until a state of universal ‘muddification’ is reached. Then, sea and land will little by little be separated again. Now, in support of this theory, Xenophanes adduced two series of observations. First, shells are found in mid-land and even on hilltops. Secondly, in certain places the rock exhibits imprints of fossils that could only have originated at a time when the rock was mud Xenophanes did not see that these facts do not bear out either his assumption that ‘muddification’ took place everywhere at the same time, or his contention that a new period of ‘muddification’ is impending. This was because he compared his theory as a whole with the evidence of one element of his hypothesis.” Granted that in our case, the Pythagoreans, acting on the assumption—unsupported by evidence—that vibration must always produce a sound, reached the conclusion that a sound may be produced by revolving stars—is not this telescoping and harmonizing, even when leading to conclusions which cannot stand up under modern scientific analysis, the corollary of synthetic thought, of the urge to seek unity in the variety of the world? And are modern “scientists” less prone to speculation resting on insufficient factual evidence?Google Scholar

47 The word family of was revived in Romance in the Renaissance period: “L'ǎme d'ung homme indebté est toute hectique, dyscrasiée“ (Rabelais); compare also in pt. I n.6 the passage from D'Aubigné; Brissaud, Histoire des expressions populaires, p. 85, lists dyscrasie as common among physicians as late as the nineteenth century; discrasia in Italian is listed for Redi, eighteenth century, in Tommaseo-Bellini (= stemperamento di umori); the Greek compound (Ptolemy) appears in 1604 in English as idiosyncrasy, “a peculiarity of constitution or temperament”, in French in Ch. Nodier, Histoire du roi de Bohěme, 1830, p. 20: “Que de siècles n'auroit-il pas fallu pour remettre mes molécules constitutives en harmonie, pour raccrocher mes atomes, pour idiosyncraser mes monades”, in German since 1750 (Schiller: “wenn es mir erlaubt wäre von Temperamenten, Idiosynkrasien, und Konsensus zu reden”): in this language it has a more pejorative meaning (e.g. “the loathings of a pregnant woman”).Google Scholar

48 Cf. Thomas, Mélanges, p. 156 and REW s.v. trinio (the word, a variant of ternio, is attested in Isidore, XVIII, 65 as “trice in dice” along with binio, quaternio). DuCange s.v. has also a trinion, “chimes” attested for Mǎcon in 1495; he refers to trasellum, trisellum, “chimes” in Burgundy (a.1497), evidently a diminutive of tres, and to a “tintinnabulum seu tricodonum bene ordinatum melodiosum” (in which tricodonum is evidently a Greek in a papal bull of 1482. All these examples make me doubt the correctness of the etymology usually given for It. trillo, trillare, “trill, to trill’ (from which Fr trille, Germ. Triller and Eng. trill are ultimately derived): the REW suggests an onomatopeic origin, evidently in view of such onomatopeic formations as Fr tralala, turelure, tirelire, torelore. But It. trillare never shows the characteristic vocalic variants of an onomatopoeia, and Span. Port. Catal. trinar, “to trill”, are evidently not to be derived from onomatopoeias. Since It. trillare has the additional meaning “to shake”, and Eng. to trill that of “to tremble”, one might think of an origin semantically parallel to It. tremolare “to quaver”—but, in that case the Iberian -n- forms would again be unexplained. Thus I would assume for the Iberian trinar a Lat. meaning first “to play a trio”, “to chime” (parallel to trinio > O. Prov trinho, “chimes of three bells”), then “to twitter, to trill”, and for Ital. trillare a * trinulare (cf. phonetically cunula > It. culla) with the same semantic development. For the derivation as such, cf. Sp. trinca, “number of three” (whose formation is not at all unclear, REW s.v. trinus: cf. the trinicum sacramentum, attested for Marseille in DuCange, evidently a “threefold oath”). For the semantic development of Old French trebl(oi)er, “to sing in three voices”, “to sing in treble” (probably also “to trill”, cf. the quotation in Godefroy from Gautier de Coinci: “Qui lors oy chanter archangres, / Deschanter puceles et angres, / Treibloier virges, sainz et saintes, / Beles notes y oist maintes”; and from d'Andeli, H.: “Li douz ton diatesalon, / Diapanté, diapason, / Sont hurtees de divers gerbes / Par quarreures et par trebles “), derived from Lat. triplus, “threefold” (the highest voice of the soprano or treble making the trio complete). The meaning “chimes” is not lacking (Renard: “Les sains sone de grant air, / A glas, a treble, a carenon” [= triplus, * quatrinio]; Eng. treble-bell).+O.+Prov+trinho,+“chimes+of+three+bells”),+then+“to+twitter,+to+trill”,+and+for+Ital.+trillare+a+*+trinulare+(cf.+phonetically+cunula+>+It.+culla)+with+the+same+semantic+development.+For+the+derivation+as+such,+cf.+Sp.+trinca,+“number+of+three”+(whose+formation+is+not+at+all+unclear,+REW+s.v.+trinus:+cf.+the+trinicum+sacramentum,+attested+for+Marseille+in+DuCange,+evidently+a+“threefold+oath”).+For+the+semantic+development+of+Old+French+trebl(oi)er,+“to+sing+in+three+voices”,+“to+sing+in+treble”+(probably+also+“to+trill”,+cf.+the+quotation+in+Godefroy+from+Gautier+de+Coinci:+“Qui+lors+oy+chanter+archangres,+/+Deschanter+puceles+et+angres,+/+Treibloier+virges,+sainz+et+saintes,+/+Beles+notes+y+oist+maintes”;+and+from+d'Andeli,+H.:+“Li+douz+ton+diatesalon,+/+Diapanté,+diapason,+/+Sont+hurtees+de+divers+gerbes+/+Par+quarreures+et+par+trebles+“),+derived+from+Lat.+triplus,+“threefold”+(the+highest+voice+of+the+soprano+or+treble+making+the+trio+complete).+The+meaning+“chimes”+is+not+lacking+(Renard:+“Les+sains+sone+de+grant+air,+/+A+glas,+a+treble,+a+carenon”+[=+triplus,+*+quatrinio];+Eng.+treble-bell).>Google Scholar

49 In the passage from Hamlet, referring to the protagonist's derangement: “Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! / The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's / eye, tongue, sword / The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, / The observer of all observers, quite, quite down! / And I / That suck'd the honey of his music vows, / Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, / Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh; / That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy”, we may assume a metaphor drawn from the carillon with three bells: the chimes of reason are out of tune, the music of proportion and equilibrium is destroyed.Google Scholar

50 Distinctions such as that between temperamentum innatum and t. influxum have gone over to Descartes: tempérament acquis and t. inné, compare also his cerveau mal tempéré. Similarly Goethe writes of Newton as a “wohlorganisierter, gesunder, wohltemperierter Mann, ohne Leidenschaft, ohne Begierden”, and we shall have occasion in another study to read a passage from Rousseau in which the harmonious mixture in the soul is compared to that in the climate.Google Scholar

50a We can watch the decomposition of World Music in the “enlightened” criticism levelled at one of the most admired stanzas of Spencer (II, 12, 71)—which deals with the harmonious concert and “divine respondence” of voices, instruments, birdsong, and waterfall—by Thomas Twining in 1789 (as quoted by E. E. Stoll, MLR XL, 60): “I cannot consider as music, much less as ‘delicious music,’ a mixture of incompatible sounds unmusical. The singing of birds cannot possibly be ‘attempered’ to the notes of a human voice. The mixture is, and must be, disagreeable. To a person listening to a concert of voices and instruments, the interruption of singing birds, wind, and waterfalls, would be little better than the torment of Hogarth's enraged musician.” Technical musicality destroys here the sensivity for World Music.Google Scholar

51 The relationship of temperare with the climate (as we have it in English: cf. Laurence Sterne: “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb” etc.) appears in the Middle Ages, for example in a mozarabic Good Friday rite (cf. Rheinfelder, H., Volkstum und Kultur der Romanen, II, 137): “Pestem et famem abluat: Indulgentia / Medelam aegris conferat: Indulgentia / Captivos reddat patriae: Indulgentia / Vices aërum temperet: Indulgentia / Te deprecamur Domine: Indulgentia” (the plural of aër in the meaning of “climate” is Greek, and is attested in Lucretius as well as in the late Latin Expositio Mundi, 5th cent. [?]: “civitates aeres temperatos habent”) Note also temperantia aeris in Carmina Burana, ed. Schmeller, 55: “Sol tellurem recreat, / ne fetus eius pereat, / ab aeris temperantia / rerum fit materia, / unde multiplicia / generantur semina.”Google Scholar

52 Here belongs the dialectal phonetic variant of Eng. to temper: to tamper = “to work with clay, to machinate, to plot, to meddle, to interfere with” (which is also a semantic, more materialistic variant of to temper) and dialectal Fr. étremper, “élever ou abaisser la charrue suivant que la terre est plus ou moins profonde. On dit qu'une femme étrempe suivant qu'elle relève plus ou moins sa robe, d'après l'état du chemin” [in Vendǒme, according to Martellière], which shows a somewhat materialized meaning still inspired by the moral idea of “modifying according to decency.”Google Scholar

53 Another word for “temper” is complexio attested in Firmicus, fourth century A.D.: “Tranquilli, quieti, alacris, bonae, complexionis”; it is found earlier in Seneca as complexio aëris, in Cicero as “complexiones et copulationes et adhaesiones atomorum inter se”, an expression which pictures the loving sympathy of Nature, and the sexual copulation (amplexus, Gr. of the atoms contained therein; similarly the combination of four elements, extant in any body, was portrayed as a manifestation of cosmic love (Cassiodorus, ThLL). Thus everything had a complexion (Ps. Apuleius: “invenitur quandoque nigra mandragora complexionem frigidam e siccam habens”). From philosophers and physicists the word went over to grammarians and rhetoricians, as was the case with consonantia: “mira verborum complexio, brevis complexio totius negotii” (Cicero), after a similar use of the Greek model The meaning of Eng. complexion goes back to the idea that the temperament manifests itself in the color of the face (we may remember the dark face of Dürer's Melancolia). Complexio and the following words have their part in the history of Stimmung. Lat. constitutio followed partway the development taken by complexio: Cicero has corporis firma constitutio, translated by Forcellini “buona complessione”; then from the “robust constitution” we come to “(good) quality of the body”—but throughout there is no idea of the mixture of elements! Lat. dispositio, which was first used in reference to the disposition of elements in the body, and the resultant energy, came, with the Schoolmen, close to the meaning of inclinatio (intellectus dispositio, Albertus Magnus), hence Fr. dispos, disposé, Eng. disposed, Germ. disponiert (indisposé, indisposed, indisponiert, “slightly ill”). In the following Montaigne passages I have underlined the expressions for the good natural constitution of the human body—sometimes impaired by man: structure et composition is synonymous with complexio, constitutio: the re-formations are accumulated in order to stress that reintegration which, in the meaning of the writer, is the duty of man in conformity with the purposes of Nature: (2.17): “Le corps a une grand’ part à nostre estre, il y tient un grand rang; ainsi sa structure et composition sont de bien juste considération. Ceux qui veulent desprendre nos deux pièces principales, et les sequestrer l'un de l'aultre, ils ont tort; au rebours, il les faut r'accoupler et rejoindre; il faut ordonner à l'ǎme non de se tirer à quartier, de s'entretenir à part, de mespriser et abandonner le corps, mais de se r'allier à luy, de l'embrasser, l'espouser en somme, et luy servir de mary, à ce que leurs effects ne paraissent pas divers et contraires, ains accordans et uniformes. Les Chrestiens ont une particuliere instruction en cette liaison; ils sçavent que la justice divine embrasse cette société et joincture du corps et de l'ǎme“ Similarly, de- dis- show the wilful counteracting of Nature by man: (3.13): “A quoy faire demembrons nous en divorce un bastiment tissu d'une si joincte et fraternelle correspondence? Au rebours, renouons le par mutuels offices: que l'esprit esveille et vivifie la pesanteur du corps, le corps arreste la legereté de l'esprit et la fixe.”Google Scholar

54 In Latin, the plural chordae “strings” was used to refer to the lute itself: cf. Porphyrius in his commentary on Horace, Carm. I, 17, 18: “fides autem chordae dicunter”; Cassiodorus, commenting on Psalm 150,4: “laudate eum in chordis et organo”, writes: “quoniam praeter psalmum et citharam alia inveniri potuerant, quae chordarum tensionibus personarent, generaliter chordas posuit, ut omne ipsum instrumentum domini laudibus imputaret.”Google Scholar

55 This passage is a reproduction of Latin mnemotechnic lines concerned with the four temperaments; they are to be found in the Regimen sanitatis salernitanum, which was often translated into Romance (cf. Morawski, Neuph. Mitt. [1927], 199, and Langlois, C. V, La connaissance de la nature et du monde, p. 314). We may compare the Italian passage, quoted above, on the sanguine temperament, with the following lines of the Latin model: “Largus, amans, hylaris, ridens, rubeique coloris. / Cantans, carnosus satis, audax atque benignus.” It is characteristic of the harmonizing tendency of the popular songs of the Singleton collection, that a “Trionfo delle quatro scienze matematiche” (loc. cit. p. 510) ascribes to Music the color red—that is, associates her with the sanguine temperament (evidently because of the cantans of the Latin verse), while Arithmetic appears as a yellow old woman, a choleric, because the corresponding Latin verse on the choleric temperament contained the epithets: “hirsutus, astutus, siccus, croceique coloris” Here we have to do with a harmonizing quite in the manner of the Pythagoreans.Google Scholar

56 In the Vita nuova, which is still shaped after the traditional pattern of a Provençal troubadour novel, the poet, who has displeased his Lady, is advised by Amor (XII) to reconcile her with a poem—but a poem which will not speak to her directly (immediatamente), but uses the intermediary of music (fa che siano [the words] quasi un mezzo): “falle adornare di soave armonia, ne la quale io sarò tutte le volte che farà mestiere.” Scartazzini explains, “falle dare il suono da un musico valente” This is surely wrong: it is the recon-ciliatory and curative power of music that must be meant, as well as the omnipresence of Love in Music (in accordance with the Augustinian and troubadour equation). The ballata which follows is thus quite in line with the mediatory part that Amor would have the words play: “Con dolze sono quando se’ [“when thou (sc. the Ballad) art before Her”] con lui [Amor the mediator], comincia este parole [“Say, Ballad, to Amor”:] / Per grazia de la mia nota soave [“in reward for my sweet music”] reman tu qui con lei”—all these expressions are the devices of the flattering, mediating attitude of a “go-between” (Cf. Travaux du séminaire roman d'Istanbul, I). To our modern mind such an allegory may appear shocking, but it must be remembered that in the medieval civilization the use of intermediaries with high-born persons was quite usual (cf. the examples furnished by K. Lewent, Mod. Lang. XXXVIII, 44), necessary because of the hierarchical position occupied by the lady—and what nobler intermediary than music could Dante find?Google Scholar

57 The ticking of the clock has often been compared to the human heart beat, as for example in the song Die Uhr by Seidl, J. G., set to music by Loewe, where we find the suggestion that the divine Maker has put in it order (“Es ist ein grosser Meister der künstlich ihr Werk gefügt”). This is, ultimately, the “machine theory”, used so often by the Church Fathers to prove the existence of God; Gregory of Nyssa, in his dialogue with Makrina, states that just as an engine is to be explained, not by the “elements” but by the mind of its maker, so the functioning of the world can only be retraced to the mind of God. The first clock with bells was, according to Rheinfelder (Kultsprache und Profansprache), set up in Milan 1336; thus l'orologio tin tin suonando was really a modern device for Dante.Google Scholar

58 We must remember that Jupiter, the “jovial”, was called Serenator by the Roman Orpheus, too, had the quality of appeasing Nature; thus we find with Maurice Scève verb serainer used of the Beloved who, like Orpheus, is able to charm Nature (Délie, st. 158) “Elle a le Ciel serainé au Pays Et son doulx chant A tranquillé la tempeste par l'ai” The Augustinian moderator is the Christian version of the Juppiter Serenator W shall later find in a passage from the Spanish siglo de oro a similarly Christianized version serenar Google Scholar

59 According to an article of Joan Murphy in MLN, LVIII, 375, the first English imitatio of any part of the Gerusalemme liberata to be published was Thomas Watson's Italia Madrigals Englished (1590), which happens to be a paraphrase of our stanza. But the English imitation (“Evry singing bird, that in the wood reioyces / come & assist me, with your charming voices: / Zephirus, come too, & make the leaves & the fountains / Gently to send a whispring sound unto the mountains: / And from thence pleasant Echo, sweetly replying, / Stay here playing, where my Phyllis now is lying”) has suppressed the references to world music (the temprare, air the musician), and introduces a madrigal element (“where my Phyllis now is lying”—and the remainder of the poem) unwarranted by the original. If source chasing have any value, it would be to show the banality of an imitation which erases all the intellectual content of a poem in favor of lyrical commonplaces.Google Scholar

60 Here I may quote just one passage from French Renaissance poetry (J. Lemaire de Belges, Description du temple de Vénus): “Les neuf beaux cieux que Dieu tourne et tempère / Rendent tel bruit en leurs sphères diffuses / Que le son vient jusqu'en notre hémisphère. / Et de là sont toutes grǎces infuses / Aux clairs engins, et le don célestin / De la liqueur et fontaine des Muses” The temperate climate of the heavens, the harmony of the spheres and the grace (with a Christian tinge: grǎces infuses!) of the muses—temperantia and con-sonantia—are fused with this poet who is able to render acoustically the clarity of classical music (one cannot fail to hear the crystalline sound of the line “aux clairs engins et le don célestin”).Google Scholar

60a Cf. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)Google Scholar

60b A commendable exception is F Baldensperger's edition of Shakespeare's sonnets (Les sonnets de Shakespeare, Univ of California Press, 1943). But why must he explain the musical similes of one sonnet “biographically”, by the poet's frequentation of “aristocratic society”, instead of relying on that Platonic and Christian tradition of World Music which Baldensperger's parallel texts serve to establish? It is not “aristocratic society” that suggests phrases such as “the true concord of well-tuned sounds”Google Scholar

61 One may oppose to this characterization of Shylock the passage in which this character describes himself, the Jew, as a human being with all the qualities of such a one (III, 1): “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” That is, the Jew has the same and as the Christian (and his revenge is the logical effect of the latter)—but he has no “music”, i.e. no grace. One may think that borrowed here from Jewish apologetic literature of the type of the Portuguese Samuel Usque's “Consolaçam ás tribulaçoens de Israel” (Ferrara 1553, quoted by Vossler, Poesie der Einsamkeit, III, 116) in which the “harmony” of the Jew with other rational beings was emphasized (“Que disformidade ha em minha figura, e que desconvenencia em meus membros das outras racionaes criaturas?”). I must, of course, dissociate myself from the haughty tone in which Gundolf, the Jewish-born German critic of genius, exculpates Shakespeare from “das moderne empfindsame oder anklägerische Mitleid”; “jede politische oder soziale Parteinahme für die ‘Erniedrigten und Beleidigten’ (note the quotation marks); any “nachfühlen-wollen mit russischer Brüderei”[!]. It is one thing to state that Shakespeare saw Shylock the Jew as the incarnation of “unmusical”, unredeemed disgrace, rather than as a victim of the social order (although this aspect is not missing in the play); it is quite another ironically to dismiss all modern attempts at alleviation of social injustice with the slur [?] of “Russian fraternalism.” Has he a truly musical soul that cannot hear the voice of human justice?Google Scholar

62 Portia, the incarnation of grace, can not be unconnected with music: when Bassanio has to choose between the caskets, a choice on which her own happiness depends, she suggests (III, 2): “Let music sound while he doth make his choice. / Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end, / Fading in music He may win? / And what is music then? Then music is / Even as the flourish when true subjects bow / To a new-crowned monarch: such it is / As are those dulcet sounds in break of day / That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear / And summon him to marriage.” Thus she trusts music (= grace) to influence his choice, while accepting beforehand the particular sound of music (the decision of Providence: death or a new life).Google Scholar

63 Th. Warton's commentary on the parallel passage in Milton's poem, At a solemn music, line 18 (“[that we on earth with undiscording voice] May rightly answer that melodious noise“) points out the many contemporary passages where noise means “music” (also Spenser, Fairie Queene: “a heavenly noise”, Shakespeare, The Tempest: “[the] isle is full of noises” = “musical sounds”). The original meaning of noise being “strife” (as in Old French), we have here one of the numerous synonyms of “concert” (see the following discussion of this word) = “rivalling performance” In Old French, noise had already been used of the birds’ song, which was also conceived of as a kind of orchestra sounding the praises of God à l'envi. Cf. a forthcoming article in Word.Google Scholar

64 Masson, D. writes: “It is rather difficult to say whether in ‘the bass of Heaven's deep organ’ Milton had a precise reference to his optical diagram of space and the Universe [as expressed in his academic oration De Sphaerarum Concentu, written about the same time as the Ode], or merely brought in a musical effect as such. Warton's notion that it was a recollection of the organ he had heard in his school-time in St. Paul's Cathedral is very bald [sic]. An organ was no rarity with Milton.” O sancta simplicitas what anarchy in the table of values of these prosaic commentators! It is evident that the theme of the organ was given with the conception of world music (see below Kepler's basso of Saturn), that the “musical effect” is there, but subservient to the idea, and that the autobiographic clues supposedly revealing where Milton may have heard an organ are superfluous and sillyGoogle Scholar

65 We may compare Milton's poem to Campanella's Salmodia che invita il cielo, le sue parti e gli abitatori a lodar Dio benedetto, which presents a synthesis of the Biblical and the Greek elements fused in a Neo-Platonic vision of light-emanation: “Dal ciel la Gloria del gran Dio rimbomba: / Eglí à sonora tromba a pregi tanti: / I lumi stanti, e que’ ch'errando vanno / Musica fanno. // Musica fanno per ogni confino, / Dove il calor divino il ciel dispiega, Ed amor lega tanta luce, e muove / Altronde altrove. // Altronde altrove tutti van correndo, / Te Dio benedicendo e predicando, / Dolce sonando, ch'ogni moto è suono, / Com’ io ragiono. // Così io ragiono. / Ahimè, ch'udir non posso; / Ch'innato rumor grosso è che m'occupa / Le orecchia cupa, ed un molino vivo / Me ne fa privo. // Se mi fa privo, voi spiriti eletti, / Che non siete soggetti a corpo sordo, / Fate un accordo al suon di ta’ strumenti / Co’ vostri accenti. // Co’ vostri accenti sacri intellettuali, / D'una spiegando l'ali in altra stella, / Vostra favella, / Santo, Santo, Santo, Dicete in tanto.” And the poet continues by invoking the nine hierarchies of angels (according to Dionysius Areopagita), the patriarchs of the Old Testament, the apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, the blessed souls, the stars with their different powers of light—calling upon them to chime in with the “salmodia di Davide canoro” that ends with the words: “Mia squilla [pun usual with Campanella on his name] è ebra per troppo desío / Di cantar vostro, o stelle, il grande Dio; / Gloria all’ onnipotente Signor mio.” One may have noticed the contrast of the “rimbomba” of the first line (which renders Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei) with the Adonic line 4: “Musica fanno”—creation echoes to God and is answered by musica mundana. And the concatenation of the terzine (“Musica fanno. // Musica fanno; Altronde altrove. // Altronde altrove ” somewhat reminiscent of Dante's differente-mente) suggests the uninterrupted ‘chain of beings’ emanating from God. The particularly Neo-Platonic element has found its stylistic equivalent in the fusion of a song which “flows like music” There cannot be in Campanella that relative separation of cultural worlds which was found in Milton, who linked three civilizations with the thread of time. I may add here that the Adonic verse with its echo effect is a Renaissance device used to depict the “respond of the world” to music; we find, for example, in Ronsard's De l'election de son sepulchre: “Et vous, forěts et ondes, / Par ces'près vagabondes, / Et vous rives et bois, / Oyez ma voix // Que tu es renommée / D'ětre tombeau nommée / D'un de qui l'univers / Chante les vers. Mais à bien nos campagnes / Fit voir les Soeurs compagnes, / Foulantes l'herbe aux sons / De ses chansons. / Car il fit à sa lyre / Si bons accords élire / Qu'il orne de ses chants / Nous et nos champs // Là, là, j'orrai d'Alcée / La lyre couronnée / Et Sappho, qui sur tous / Sonne plus doux. // Combien ceux qui entendent / Les odes qu'ils répandent / Se doivent réjouir / De les ouïr // La seule lyre douée / L'ennui des coeurs repousse, / Et va l'esprit flattant, / De l'écoutant“ This echo-poetry of the Renaissance (which is ultimately derived from the repetition of Narcissus’ words by Echo in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and which has been revived in modern times by Hugo and Banville), is only another of the many aspects of the poetry of world music. I shall mention here also the scene of Guarini's Pastor fido, IV, 8, where Echo (“o piuttosto Amor”) contradicts the loveless Silvio, and the monologue of Erasmus about the young scholar who receives advice from the echo about his studies. The echo, the “respond of Nature”, is also easily the impersonation of Love—originally, as we have seen, of divine, later of secular, love. It is interesting to see how Guarini, who represents Love as the primordial design of Nature, inserts some lines on the birds’ song of love which are conceived precisely in echo form: “Quanto il mondo ha di vago e di gentile / Opra è d'amore: amante è il cielo, amante / La Terra, amante il mare / Quell’ augellin che canta / Sì dolcemente, e lascivetto vola / Or dall'abete al faggio / Ed or dal faggio al mirto, / S'avesse umano spirto, / Direbbe: ardo d'amore, ardo d'amore; / Ed odi, appunto, Silvio, / Il suo dolce desío / Che gli responds: Ardo d'amore anch'io“ There is a double echo play here: Silvio, who does not love, should chime in with the love song of Nature: “Alfine amaogni cosa, / Se non tu, Silvio: e sarà Silvio solo / In cielo, in terra, in mare / Anima senza amore?” (i.e. a responseless soul). In Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, canto XI, where a Christian religious service is described with the familiar epic periphrases suited to the aesthetics of the time, the hymns of the believers (“alternando facean doppio concento”) are echoed by Nature in the form of the ancient Echo: “ne suonan le valli ime e profonde, / E gli alti colli e le spelonche loro, / E da ben mille parti Echo risponde; / E quasi par che boscareccio coro / Fra quegli antri si celi in quelle fronde; / Si chiaramente replicar s'udía / Or di Cristo il gran nome, or di Maria.”Google Scholar

66 Finney, Miss G. L., in her article “Chorus in ‘Samson Agonistes”’ (PMLA, LVIII, 653) explains the existence of the chorus in Milton's drama (while Corneille, in France, in the name of vraisemblance omitted it, seeing in it only the advantage it offered of furnishing songs to cover up the sounds of stage machinery being adjusted), by the interest which Milton took in music (“most poetry of the time—much of Milton's included—was thought in relation to music”), and by the association of the chorus with music. The Florentine circles which, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, revived the interest in Greek drama, had believed that this drama was sung in its entirety; in order to offer a modern parallel to this supposed Greek melodrama, they had to invent a new style which would emphasize the dramatic flavor of the words: this could no longer be the contrapuntal style which drowned out the words, but the recitative. Thus the new opera (of Rinuccini, Peri etc.) is born, in which pseudo-Greek reminiscences, the Renaissance pastoral, and the medieval mystère are strangely intertwined in order to celebrate the musical beauty of the world. One need only read Milton's statement, in his Reason of Church Government (quoted by Miss Finney): “ the Apocalypse of St. John is the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies”, in order to see how Milton projects back into Christian antiquity the modern musical tragedy or opera and makes again a synthesis of Hebrew (hallelujahs), Greek (symphonies) and the Christian elements.Google Scholar

67 It is remarkable that in German a certiren is attested in 1687 (cf. Schultz-Basler, s.v Konzert) in the meaning “to rival in playing music”: “Ist eine Concerten Art, da eine Stimm mit der andern gar annehmlich nach wenig Pausen certiret“ A Lat. iste putabat illum certare cum voce illius is translated in Luther's Tischreden, 4316 “[einem] in die stim fallen” Konzertieren (. und mit allerhand Instrumenten zugleich in einander zu musicieren) is first attested in German in 1619. As late as 1838 Hegel uses konzertieren in the meaning “to rival in a kind of musical dialogue” (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, p. 171): he compares the change of instruments in Mozart's symphonies to “ein dramatisches Koncertiren”, “eine Art von Dialog”, “ein Zwiegespräch des Klingens und Wiederklingens.”Google Scholar

68 So much, at least, is clear, that Cuervo cannot be right when he states, in his Diccionario de régimen, that Span. concertar must be kept separate from Lat. concertare, “to fight”, and should be considered a derivative of Span. cierto (= “to make sure”, cf. acertar), formed on the pattern of concordar, conformar. For, in either case, whether our concerto is based on the meaning of “harmonious striving” or of “contriving (a musical composition)”, we would have to do ultimately with concertare.Google Scholar

69 The meaning of Sp. concertar, in reference to music (of birds), appears to be slightly different in a passage from Barahona de Soto, Fabula de Acteón (quoted in Rodriguez Marín's edition of the Don Quijote, V, 255): “Por la suave armonía / Que le frecuencia confusa / De los pájaros hacía, / Parece que alguna musa / La concertaba y regía.” Here, the idea is rather “to put order into music”Google Scholar

70 I may add that I found concerto in Italian, used precisely of the angelic concert and coupled with armonia, in Tasso's dialogue, Il Rangone o vero de la Pace (1584): since Tasso, in his dialogue on Love of the preceding year, had defined love as “una quiete nel piacevole”, a divine repose in pleasance, his definition of “peace” is not surprising: in the dialogue on this subject, peace, which should emulate divine justice, and which, like justice, rests not on the unification of the discordant but on a unity pre-existant to multiplicity, is defined as “silence”: “perche di lei [of divine peace] non si può ragionar convenevolmente, si chiama convenevolmente silenzio. Questo è quell’ alto, quel profondo, quel dolce, quel divino silenzio nel quale tutte le ingiurie sono taciute e tutte dimenticate; questo è quel mirabile silenzio, tanto superiore ad ogni armonia, e ad ogni concerto che facciano gli angioli lodando il creatore, quanto la divina caligine è più luminosa del sole, e de le stelle, e d'ogni altra luce che sia nel cielo.” Silence is here superior to the angelic concert, as is the night sky, void of stars, to any particular constellation. Thus we find here the same connection for Italian concerto as we will find for Spanish concierto.Google Scholar

71 The idea of the descort still prevails in a romance of Lope de Vega, in which he protests against his enforced exile as he addresses his lute: “Aora vuelvo a templaros, / desconçertado ynstrumento, / que de una vez no se acavan / los muchos males que tengo. // Cantemos nuevas ystorias / de aquellos pesares viejos. // Ayuden cuerdas templadas / a un loco de penas cuerdo [pun with cuerda, ‘string'—cuerdo, ‘wise']’—Rev. hisp. LXV, 349. And the canción desesperada which Cervantes puts in the mouth of Grisóstomo, the suicide of love (Don Quijote, I, 14), is also a disguised descort which must contain the word family (des)concierto: the unfortunate poet proposes: “Haré que el mesmo infierno comunique / Al triste pecho mío un son doliente / Con que el uso común de mi voz tuerza / De la espantable voz irá el acento, / Y en él mezcladas [unharmoniously mixed], por mayor tormento, / Pedazos de las míseras / Escucha, pues, y presta atento oido, / No al concertado son, sino al ruido / Que de lo hondo de mi amargo pecho, / Por gusto mío sale y por tu despecho [then follows an enumeration of all the sounds of monstrous animals, summed up in the lines:] / Mezclados en un son, de tal manera / Que se confundan los sentidos todos” [and at the end of the song he invites Cerberus “Con otras mas quimeras y mil monstros / Lleven el doloroso contrapunto“]. The allusions to music run through the whole poem. A descort “après-la-lettre” has been composed, quite in the medieval manner involving the metaphorical use of musicological terms, by the seventeenth-century German poet Weckerlin, in his poem Musicalische lieb, of which I shall quote the first and last stanzas: “Meinen geist, mut, seel und herz / Amor mit klag, forcht und schmerz / Recht componieret; / In leid ändert sich mein scherz, / Angst mit mir accordieret / Ach, Herzlieb, thu doch mir, / Greifend den ton nach gebühr, / Nu moderieren; Und als dan will ich mit dir I schon tief gnug intonieren“ The mit dir intonieren is equivalent to “mit dir übereinstimmen”: this amorous musicology betrays its derivation from Romance models by the Romance loanwords; the baroque artificiality should not blind us to the fact that concepts—and conceits—of this poem are essentially medieval.Google Scholar

72 Very often birds appear in poetry, particularly in Provençal poetry, as musicians peacefully competing to express the mirth of Spring; in such a connection our “concert” is implicit. Compare the lines from Camoëns: “Vi ja das altas aves a harmonia, / que até duros penedos convidaba / a algum suave modo de alegria” and the following Lope passage from Barlaán y Josafat, appendix to Act III (ed. Montesinos): “Aqui sin libros quiero / Entretener los días / En la diversidad de sus colores. / Qué concetos mejores / Que ver sus diferencias / Y fǎbricas hermosas, / Y entre flores y rosas / De las aves las dulces competencias? / Todo a su Autor alaba / Y nunca el hombre de alabarle acaba,” mistranslated by Vossler (Poesie der Einsamkeit in Spanien, I, 119) who failed to grasp our topos of the “concert” and to convey to us the impetus of philosophical thought, the conceptual content of Lope's poem (cf. the self-definition of this poetry and the allusion to its conceptual character by the word concetos—both “concept” and “conceit”—which is suppressed in Vossler's translation).Google Scholar

73 How often does it not occur in the night scenes of Lope's dramas that music resounds as a reminder, however faint, of the eternal laws of Providence; in the last act of El caballero de Olmedo, for example, the hero, at midnight, hears a peasant sing a song about him, a song predicting his death—which, in fact, occurs soon after. On hearing the song, Don Alonso is immediately aware that this is a warning from Heaven; but he fails to heed this message, and, as he dies, blames himself for having disregarded the avisos del cielo. While, in these cases, the connection: music—night—laws of Providence is preserved, other dramatic passages insist on the totality of the world expressed by music: In Calderón's La vida es I, 5, there is again a concert, but this time mixed with birds’ songs, rivers, trumpets, drums and salvoes: “Bien al ver los excelentes / Rayos, que fueron cometas, / Mezclan salvas diferentes. / Las cajas y las trompetas, / Los pájaros y las fuentes: / Siendo con música igual, / Y con maravilla suma, / Unos clarines de pluma / Y otras aves de metal; / Y así os saludan, / Coma á su reina las balas, / Los pájaros como Aurora, /Las trompetas como á Palas / Ylas flores como á Flora.” This courtly compliment to a lady called Estrella is evidently built on the pattern of the world concert: the appearance of a heavenly (celestial) star (which could be Our Lady: salve, regina stella maris) is greeted by music composed of (“mixed”, as with the Greeks) the music of Nature and of Man (the latter including the most modern music of salvoes—but salvoes are salve's), música igual which is the result of a loving rivalry (a “concert”) between unequal instruments (salvas differentes). The characteristic conceits of Calderón are due to the synaesthetic devices typical of baroque art: the exchange of forms between those beings which are devoted to the one common purpose (the birds are musical instruments with feathers, the bullets birds of metal), as well as the manifold aspects of the one being who is praised by this music (Estrella becomes Aurora, Pallas and Flora, according to the praise bestowed on her in the songs of the birds, the salvoes, the perfume of the flowers; Krenkel's com mentary has nothing to say about this passage except: “C. braucht wilkürlich lateinische u griechische Götternamen nebeneinander”; but there is as little arbitrariness in the fusing of the two classic worlds as there is in the fusing of the cosmos). I had pointed in Roman. Stil- und Literaturstud. II, 202, to the “statisch vor uns auf gerichteten Gesamtkunstwerk der Welt”, but I had not at that time recognized the musical character of this static Calderonian world harmony which Tieck must have sensed, since he calls the Spanish poet (quoted l.c. p. 195): “O Calderon, du hier schon Gottheit-trunken, Herold der Wonne, Cherub nun im Chore”—and static the Calderonian world harmony is, not only because the world appears to be directed by stable laws, and the chants and re-sponds could as well resound in Antiquity as in Calderon's times, but also because these are in fact basically unaltered: the chants and responds of Pythagoras and Ambrose. The completeness of the world is always suggested by the Calderonian world harmony: thus when one of the “musicians” in the concert is mentioned, the others are ipso facto associated; in El Mágico prodigioso, II, 850, the beloved woman is (statically) composed of sun, brook, rose, carnation, snow, bird etc. (i.e. she is a microcosmos reflecting the macrocosmos); the bird is described as “veloz cítara de pluma / Al órgano de cristal”; the “cristal organ” being the brook on whose bank the bird sings (Krenkel quotes as parallels [from Ni amor se libra de amor]: “el cristal cuya asonancia [!], / Tal vez instrumento á quien / Trastos de oro y lazos de ambar / Son las quijas”; [from Polifemo y Circe]: “ desta apacible fuente, / Que es á la solfa de la primavera [the troubadour motif] / Instrumento sonoro / Con cuer- das de cristal y trastes de oro”); the carnation “en breve cielo es estrella de coral”, i.e. it is a microcosmic star contributing its coral color to the microcosmos of the Lady. In the great monologue, Segismundo, following an Augustinian trend of thought, compares man to the other creatures and, in his enumeration of the different realms, says of the brook [La vida es I, 1550]: “Nace el arroyo, culebra / Que entre flores se desata, / Y apénas, sierpe de plata, / Entre las flores se quiebra, / Cuando músico celebra / De las flores la piedad, / Que le da la majestad / Del campo abierto á su huida”; here the one word músico places the brook once more within the concert of Nature, from which man seems to have been exiled; and this music is in praise of the piedad, of the love of the flowers: music— grace—Nature are again intertwined. (As Curtius, Rom. Forsch. L, 89 and I myself, Neuphil. Mitt. XXXIX, 369, have stated, Calderón, in his theoretical treatise on painting, subordinates music to painting; the Renaissance art par excellence which had to please a playwright: “a no menos acordes cláusulas [que la Música] le suspende la Pintura con las ventajas que lleva el sentido de la vista al del oido“; nevertheless the musical references in h plays are neither fewer nor less important than are the pictorial ones.)Google Scholar

74 We saw in Calderón a “concert” (asonancia, solfa) given by the brook: with Góngo we have the same concert, called, in the classical manner, concento (this word, which is correctly translated by Damaso Alonso as “concertada harmonía”, occurs, according to the same critic, much later [in 1606] in Góngora than does armonía [which appears already 1584]; the same temporal relation may be seen in the contemporary dictionaries: 1616 vs. 570; these dates indicate the growing tendency in Góngora toward linguistic sophistica-ion): Soledades, I, 349: “el ya arroyo, ahora manso: / merced de la hermosura que ha hospedado, / efectos, si no, del concento / que, en las lucientes de marfil clavijas, / as duras cuerdas de las negras guijas / hicieron a su curso acelerado” (I accept the explanation given by Dámaso Alonso in note 16 of his 2nd edition, rather than that implied by his translation): the brook is a stringed instrument plucked by the black pebbles, and the ivory clavijas are the limbs of the mountain girls bathing in the brook (cf. 550: the concento of the sirenas de los montes i.e. of the mountain girls; 885: the concento cristalino of a fountain; 705: la dulce de las aves armonía; 270: la métrica harmonía of a rustic concert; 591: the músicas hojas of a tree—musical, as Alonso explains, because of the wind which stirs them, or of the nightingales which nest in them—evidently a parallel to the músico arroyo of Cervantes). We see the brook and the birds engaged in a concert in the Soledad segunda, 1. 350: “Rompía el agua en las menudas piedras, / cristalina sonante era tiorba, / y las confusamente acordes verdes aves / muchas eran, y muchas veces nueve / aladas musas, que—de pluma leve / su oculta lira corva— / metros inciertos sí, pero süaves, / en idiomas cantan diferentes“—the concordious strife of the birds rivalling with the Muses is probably at the bottom of such a highly traditional, but conceptistically developed picture. From all these examples we can draw the conclusion that the “con-ceptismo” of both Góngora and Calderón is in our cases a deliberate attempt to establish connections (audible, visual and mental) between the manifold participants in the world concert: the world cithara is ever at hand, into which any transient phenomenon in Nature may be transformed (brook, pebbles, bathing women, birds).Google Scholar

75 It has not yet, to my knowledge, been pointed out that there is a similar passage in Fénelon's Télémaque, book 7, which, evidently, is in no way influenced by Cervantes: the Phoenician Adoam has a magnificent meal served to Télémaque and Mentor, after which “tous les plaisirs dont on pouvoit jouir” are enjoyed by the guests: perfumes, flute-playing, singing, dancing. The singer Architoas, whose name reminds us of Archytas, by means of “les doux accords de sa voix et de sa lyre, dignes d'ětre entendus à la table des dieux et de ravir les oreilles d'Apollon měme”, attracts, Orpheus-like, the Tritons, Nereids and the sea-monsters: “De temps en temps les trompettes faisoient retentir l'onde jusqu'aux rivages éloignés. Le silence de la nuit, le calme de la mer, la lumière tremblante de la lune répandue sur la face des ondes, le sombre azur du ciel semé de brillantes étoiles, servoient à rendre ce spectacle encore plus beau.” Since the whole epic of the preceptor Fénelon is destined to warn the young duke of Bourgogne of “plaisirs qui vous amollissent”, Télémaque is shown hesitating before the pleasure of music; he is encouraged, however, by Mentor, who himself outdoes Architoas in a religious song (of his own): “Mentor chanta ces vérités d'un ton si religieux et si sublime, que toute l'assemblée crut ětre transportée au plus haut de l'Olympe, à la face de Juppiter”, he is declared by the assembly to be “Apollo himself” And then the host Adoam is asked to tell about the primitive people of Baetica and “l'aimable simplicité du monde naissant.” In contrast to the scene of Cervantes, the emphasis here is on “solemn”, religious music, which, as is so often true in the 17th century, is didactically opposed to worldly effeminating music. But, just as in Don Quijote, so, in the Télémaque, we have the ensemble of starry night, silence, beauty, music—d the Golden Age of primitivism. In Fénelon there still appears a faint reflection of orld Music, e.g. in the description of the Elysian Fields (book XIV); of the immortal, ood and virtuous beings he says: “Je ne sais quoi de divin coule sans cesse au travers de leurs coeurs, comme un torrent de la divinité měme qui s'unit à eux; ils voient, ils goǔtent, ils sont heureux, et sentent qu'ils le seront toujours. Ils chantent tous ensemble les louanges des dieux, et ils ne font tous ensemble qu'une seule voix, une seule pensée, un seul coeur: une měme félicité fait comme un flux et reflux dans ces ǎmes unies.” This is a Christian (Ambrosian) musical atmosphere transferred to the pagan Elysium; it is even imbued with the mystical flavor of Fénelon's contemporary and friend Mme. Guyon (le torrent de la divinité recalls her Torrents spirituels, 1683).Google Scholar

76 The history of the French word-family concert (concerter) is clear: the word, in the meaning “(to put in) agreement”, came to France from Italy in the sixteenth century, as Pasquier states (also to England, 1598: “to concert and agree”). Latin may have contributed its share: Michel de Tours’ translation of Suetonius contains a concerter which clearly means “to vie” (“les musicians, cest à savoir ceux qui concertaient et contendoient à l'honneur”). The idea of World Harmony is perhaps latent in a passage from D'Aubigné (Tragiques, II, 289): “La discorde couppa le concert des mignons [of Henri III], / Et le vice croissant entre les campagnons / Brisa l'orde amitié, mesme par les ordures, / Et l'impure union par les choses impures” [here we have an ironic description of a world in reverse: the concert des mignons is a parody of concord, “friendship” and “pure union”]. In the seventeenth century it is the idea of “agreement” that prevails: Bossuet: “Ce qu'un sage général doit le mieux connaǐtre, c'est ses soldats et ses chefs. Car de là vient ce parfait concert qui fait agir les armées comme un seul corps“ [= a well-tempered body]; “Tout cela est l'effet du secret concert que vous avez mis entre nos volontés et les mouvements de nos corps”; Corneille: “Mais j'aurois souhaité qu'en cette occasion / L'amour concertǎt [“harmonise”] mieux avec l'ambition” We may see the influence on concert of the rationalistic and voluntaristic trend of the French seventeenth century: “elle est concertée en sa contenance”; “faire qch. de concert“; “Le Cardinal de Retz est tous les jours en concert et en cabale [!]” (Littré, Cayrou). The mechanics of the century brings about concerter une machine, “to devise”; and une machine bien concertée could easily be déconcertée: Fénelon: “La transpiration, facilitée ou diminuée, déconcerte ou rétablit toute la machine du corps“; Bossuet: “Que verrons-nous dans notre mort que des esprits qui s'épuisent, que des ressorts qui se démontent et se déconcertent“ [a Ciceronian sequel of prefixes]; La Bruyère: “La raison est déconcertée par le désordre de la machine” (passage cited by Cayrou). Because of this emphasis on “regularity”, concert(er) suggests the contrary of “chance”; thus Bossuet, at the end of his Discours sur l'histoire universelle, proclaims: “C'est ainsi que Dieu règne sur tous les peuples. Ne parlons plus de hasard ni de fortune. Ce qui est hasard à l'égard de nos conseils incertains est un dessein concerté dans un conseil plus haut, c'est-à-dire dans ce conseil éternel qui renferme toutes les causes et tous les effets dans un měme ordre.” It is not difficult to find passages throughout the seventeenth century in which the meaning “musical concert” is imminent; cf. for example the lines of Boileau (Sat. VI, 23): “Tandis que dans les airs les nuës émuës, / D'un funèbre concert font retentir les nuës, / Et se mělant au bruit de la grěle et des vents, / Pour honorer les morts, font mourir les vivants”; here, however, the chimes offer not a concert in the modern sense, but rather “concert their bells” with Nature: an echo of World Harmony as reflected by the chimes. And, with Rotrou (St. Genět, IV, 5: “Sans interruption de vos sacrés concerts / A son avènement tous les cieux sont ouverts”) as well as with Molière (Les amants magnifiques [intermède]: “Allons tous au-devant de ces divinités / Et rendons par nos chants hommage à leurs beautés / Redoublons nos concerts / et faisons retentir dans le vague des airs / Notre réjouissance “) and Racine (Esther, III, 2: “Les compagnes d'Esther s'avancent vers ce lieu, / Sans doute leur concert va commencer la fěte”), the word concert refers to vocal music, to choirs. It should be noted that when the music master of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme (II, 4) advises him to follow the mode of offering a concert at home once a week, the term used in reference to this technical concert (as late as 1670) is concert de musique (as in Cotgrave); thus it is clear that we would not be entitled to translate, in the passages just cited, the simple concert by “concert” There is a scene in Fénelon's Télémaque, Book I, where, after a meal with the nymph Calypso, four young nymphs, accompanied by the lute, sing to Télémaque of mythical subjects and of his father (in imitation of the scene in the Odyssey where, at the table of the Phaeacians, a bard sings to Odysseus of the hero's own exploits); the Grands écrivains edition (I, 20) comments on the passage: “On notera encore ici la manière dont Fénelon modernise les données d'Homère. Dans Homère, le chant du poète est une monodie, qu'il accompagne lui-měme de sa lyre; Fénelon présente au duc de Bourgogne un ‘concert', semblable à ceux qu'il a pu entendre lui-měme dans les divertissements de cour: il est composé de quatre chanteuses, chantant en quatuor ou l'une après l'autre, et soutenues par un accompagnement instrumental” In the text, however, the word concert is not used: either in order to respect the ancient décor, or because the term was not yet sufficiently current.Google Scholar

77 The worldliness to which the concert had descended in his time is well-expressed by Goethe in Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, where his mystic protagonist tells of Latin a cappella chants, evidently concerti with four or eight voices, sung as a “solemn music” (to express “eine feierliche Stimmung”): “Ich hatte bisher nur den frommen Gesang gekannt, in welchem gute Seelen oft mit heiserer Kehle, wie die Waldvögelein, Gott zu loben glauben, weil sie sich selbst eine angenehme Empfindung machen; dann die eitle Musik des Konzerts, in denen man allenfalls zur Bewunderung eines Talents, selten aber auch nur zu einem vorübergehenden Vergnügen hingerissen wird. Nun vernahm ich eine Musik, aus dem tiefsten Sinne der trefflichsten menschlichen Naturen entsprungen, die durch bestimmte und geübte Organe in harmonischer Einheit wieder zum tiefsten besten Sinn des Menschen sprach und ihn wirklich in diesem Augenblick seine Gottähnlichkeit lebhaft empfinden liess.” We find here the Augustinian opposition of artistic music to the music of well-meaning but untutored nature, but there has developed in the 18th cent. a third variety: the vain virtuosoship displayed in worldly concerts.Google Scholar

78 What has become of the concerts of the starry sky in that period of demusicalization—as we must dub the eighteenth century—can be seen in Kant who writes (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788): “Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir Beide darf ich mir nicht als in Dunkelheiten verhüllt, oder im Überschwenglichen ausser meinem Gesichtskreise suchen und bloss vermuten; ich sehe sie vor mir und verknüpfe sie unmittelbar mit dem Bewusstsein meiner Existenz ” And Kant goes on to say that just as this sidereal world has been explained, not by superstitious astrology, but by mathematics (he is evidently thinking of Newton), so the moral world should keep free from superstition and Überschwenglichkeit, by separating, as in chemistry, the rational from the empirical: “science is the narrow door which leads to philosophy” The visible (sidereal) cosmos and the invisible (equalized with, i.e. narrowed down to, the moral world) are accessible only to analytical science, not to the synthetic conscience of universal World Music.Google Scholar

79 The same is true of the metaphor “the concert of the birds”: what was primary has become secondary. A poem found in a textbook for German grade schools plays, with a a certain préciosité, on the theme: “Konzert ist heute angesagt [!] / Im frischen grünen Wald; / Die Musikanten stimmen [!] schon, / Hei, wie es lustig hallt! / Das musiziert und jubiliert, / Das schmettert und das schallt “[there follow stanzas on the different oird-musicians].Google Scholar

80 “Musical” is thus loosely used for “harmonious” The classical painter Holanda, a friend of Michel Angelo, applied the term desmúsico to the Flemish and German painting which emphasizes (in landscapes) “the accidental, the national and the exterior” (Borinski)—thereby establishing the arbitrary equation “harmonious = classical” and overlooking the “musical”, the Stimmung which permeates precisely the Northern school of painting. “Music” as a synonym of “harmony” and “blissfulness” is attested in several German Baroque writers in whom a Romance influence made itself felt: Schulz-Baseler quote the following passage from Guarinonius, Die Greuel der Verwüstung menschlichen Geschlechts (1610): “und sie das schöne mittel und so fürtreffliche Musik verloren”; Albertinus Aegidius, Lucifers königreich und Seelengejaidt (1616): “Wie Nebuchodonosor in seiner glori und music in ein unvernünftiges Tier verkehrt ward” In the lines from the Viaje del Parnaso in which Cervantes describes his own poetry: (“Que a las cosas que tienen de imposibles / siempre mi pluma se ha mostrado esquiva; / las que tienen vislumbre de posibles, / de dulces, de suaves y de ciertas / explican mis borrones apacibles / Nunca a disparidad abre las puertas / mi corto ingenio, y hállalas contino / de par en par la consonancia abiertas”) as well as in those from Persiles y Segismunda, where he postulates verisimilitude for a story to the extent “que a despecho y pesar de la mentira, que hace disonancia en el entendimiento, forme una verdadera armonía“, we find the musical terms used in exact correspondence with this same ideal of proportion and clarity. He seems to think (as may be gathered from the epithets dulces, suaves, ciertas) that deviation from the objectively, rationally possible, from the “likely”, interrupts the quasi-musical flow of a tale. Cervantes starts from a classical aesthetic doctrine, though his aesthetic practice is often baroque.—His classical approach is borne out also by his attitude to music which is revealed in Don Quijote, II, 26, where the protagonist and the puppeteer give the following advice to the boy whose rǒle it is to accompany the puppet-show with a story which he himself has put into words: seguid vuestra historia línea recta, y no os metáis en las curvas ó transversales Muchacho, no te metas en dibujos sigue tu canto llano, y no te metas en contrapuntos, que se suelen quebrar de sotiles Llaneza, muchacho: no te encumbres, que todo afectación es mala” Contrapuntal adornments are here “affectation” That armonía means to Cervantes simply “order” (with no implication of music) may be seen from the passage of the Don Quijote (I, 36) in which he describes a rowdy tavern scene: the brawling confusion caused by the protagonist's mad fancies, the sensuousness of the Asturian maid Maritornes, and the jealousy of the mule-driver, the sleepy fisticuffs of Sancho and the final misguided judgment of the innkeeper—all this is ironically summed up as toda aquella armonía.Google Scholar

81 Hans Pfitzner, in accordance with his German romantic aversion against progress art—an aversion shared by the Thomas Mann of 1920 (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen) represents, in his opera, Palestrina, the master of the Mass rather in the light of a conservtive who preserved medieval figurai music against the political will of Counter Reformati councils while younger disciples were endorsing enthusiastically the modern artistic dev opments. The feeling of this German conservative pre-war artist is full of pessimis resignation and nostalgia, which, projected into the past, makes Palestrina's work appe rather as an end than as a beginning of Church Massart. But there is one highly effecti scene, in the first act of the opera, which portrays on the stage (as Browning had do in a poem, Abt Vogler)—the influence of religious world harmony on the artist himse no better description can be offered than that given in the words of Thomas Mann: “S [the predecessors seen by Palestrina in a vision] schwinden, aus Not und Finsternis schi er Einsame nach oben, da schwingt die Engelsstimme sich erschütternd im Kyrie empor ie Gnadenstunde des Müden bricht an, er neigt sein Ohr zum Schattenmunde der verstor enen Geliebten, die Lichtgründe öffnen sich, die unendlichen Chöre brechen aus in das loria in excelsis, zu allen ihren Harfen singen sie ihm Vollendung und Frieden” This is ndeed “ein wahres Festspiel zu Ehren schmerzhaften Künstlertums und eine Apotheose er Musik”Google Scholar

82 The same title is borne by a work inaccessible to me: Georgius Fr. Venetius, Minorianae familiae: De harmonia mundi cantica tria (Venice 1525), translated into French by uy La Febre de la Boderie, L'Harmonie du Monde divisé en trois cantiques“ (Paris 1578).Google Scholar

83 On this synesthetics is based our modern feeling, prompted especially by Bach, that nusic is comparable to architecture: hence the architectural similes in Browning's Abt ogler, and Goethe's reverse conception of architecture as “frozen music”Google Scholar

84 Ibid.: “Seine Haltung zur Sphärenharmonie ist mit der Fludds sehr nahe verwandt. Es ist ein vollständiges Sammelsurium alter musikalischer Mythen, was Kircher hier bietet, vorwiegend ins Anekdotische verzerrt und oft stark entstellt und widerspruchsvoll; selbst die ‘harmonische Disposition der Climaten’ nach Vitruv und die Harmonie des menschlichen Leibes—im Anschluss an Dürer—fehlt nicht. Gott heisst immer wieder ‘der ewige Archimusicus', dessen harmonische Wunderwerke ‘wir bis auf den heutigen Tag mit Verwunderung anhören müssen.’ Die sechs Tagewerke werden, sogar auch in einer Abbildung, den sechs Hauptregistern einer Orgel verglichen, wobei z.B. von den Gestirnen und ihren Umläufen als von ‘harmonischen Melodien’ gesprochen wird, ‘so unter dem grossen Zeitconsono und dissono, das ist, dem Tageslicht und Nachtschatten verborgen gelegen’ Paul Friedländer has quoted to me the final prayer of the Musurgia Universalis (1650): “O magna Harmonia, qui omnia in mundo numero, pondere et mensura disponis, dispone animae meae monochordon juxta divinae voluntatis beneplacitum”; here the biblical and Augustinian words clearly point toward Stimmung. Here we should mention also the Aeolian Harp whose inventor is Athanasius Kircher. Romantic poetry has perpetuated this musical instrument on which Nature herself seems to play without any intervention of man.Google Scholar