Suum Cuique; Essays in Music (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ... SIGNS OF A NEW UPLIFT IN ITALY'S MUSICAL LIFE (From the "Sammelbdnde" of the I.M.G., 1900) A "new uplift" naturally presupposes a degradation. In fact, Italy, in point of musical culture, no longer marches in the van among enlightened nations, but ranks after Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, France, England, the United States, Norway, Russia, and other civilized states. I do not now propose to survey the cause of this degradation along broad historical lines; but some few side-lights must be thrown upon it, the better to illuminate the contrast between past and present. The decline in Italy's musical standing antedates the beginning of the nineteenth century. Grotesque as it may sound, its symptoms appeared and multiplied precisely during the period of the Italian hegemony, as a phenomenon attendant on the mighty development of the Opera in the seicento, and yet more in the settecento; more especially from the time in which the opera no longer served exclusively as a pastime for gentlefolk, but began--in 1637, at Venice--to become a popular spectacle. True, at that same time both the song and instrumental chamber-music in all their varieties shared in the general upward movement; but in the course of time they found it increasingly difficult to compete in popularity with the opera. No wonder; for they were more intimate in their effects and too engrossing in their demands on the hearer. At least, in comparison with the opera, which gradually degenerated into a "show" for ear and eye. The ever-growing host of Musical Academies, of which every hamlet could finally boast two or three, could do little to mend matters. Although toward the end of the sixteenth century they were really promotive of musical progress--let me recall, for instance, the "invention" ...