The Concerto Develops
The Concerto. By Abraham Veinus. (Cassell. 165.)
I'EtE cult of form for form's sake in music is an aberration by which musicologists are much more likely to be afflicted than Musicians. Symphony, sonata or concerto forms are not ready-made moulds into which a composer has merely to pour his music and Ee sure of seeing it come out in the right shape, like a cake from e oven ; on the contrary, these forms are fluid, not seatic, develop- , g all the time by a regular process of evolution. And every modi- pcation, every enlargement, of the form has been determined solely y the individual requirements and-tastes of composers themselves, which have varied from age to age. Another factor, of course, has been the steady development in the technique of composition and tin the nature and extent of the actual physical resources, instrumental or otherwise, which have been increasingly available.to composers us one generation has been succeeded by another.
All this can be observed and studied to great advantage in the
in volution of the particular musical form which Mr Veinus has selected or analysis this book, which seems to me an important contribu- -on to musical literature. While evidently the product of a scholarly
ind, the book is brilliantly written. Mr. Veinus carries his learning
lightly, and, in tracing the development of the concerto form from its beginnings in the sixteenth century down to the present day, manages somehow to invest his story with some of the dramatic qualities inherent in the nature of the form he is describing. For the basic idea of the concerto springs from the notion of contrast, if not of conflict, exemplified in the pitting of one musical force against another. At first this was done, as in the Concerto Grosso of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by dividing the instru- mental body into two choirs, as it were, consisting of the main mass of strings (the grosso) on the one hand, and a smaller group, usually in three parts, with only one player to each part, on the other, which was known as the concertino. Herein, clearly, lay the germ of the modern, romantic as well as classic, concerto where one solo player is pitted against the orchestra. Mr. Veinus rightly recognises the im- portance of the eighteenth-century Italians—Corelli, Tartini, Vivaldi and Geminiani—in bringing about the gradual transformation of the concerto idea which fructified still further in the hands of J. S. Bach, until first Mozart and then Beethoven made it a vehicle for some of their noblest inspirations. The pages devoted to Mozart are among the best in the book. Mr. Veinus says that Mozart "possessed the genuine classic spirit," which he then defines admirably as "a well- rounded and minutely complete acquaintance with the diversity of emotion which engages a human being in the making of great music, as well as a total technical control and a. total technical daring in the projection of a varied and profound imagination." ,
An interesting point.which the author stresses during his survey of post-classical developments in concerto form, from Brahms to Tchaikovsky, and from Liszt to Prokofiev, is that, in contrast to the eighteenth century, when "the work of extending the technical capaci- ties of an instrument was done by the composer-virtuoso," today "advances .in technique, such as they are, have become very nearly the exclusive concern of composers. Thus we look towards Stravin- sky's piano-writing, not towards Horowitz's piano-playing, for a new conception of the instrument's capacities. . . . New demands on the violinist's technique come from, the Schonberg violin concerto, not from the performances and arrangements of a Heifetz or a Kreisler. The practitioner has little interest in such questions ; the creator fortunately has."
The swing-over from virtuoso- to composer-supremacy is, of course, in keeping with the contemporary spirit, and has only really been accomplished during the last half-century. But the reign of the composer-virtuoso, of which Mozart is perhaps the supreme example, in the eighteenth century was nothing Like so pernicious as the reign of the virtuoso in his own right which produced such ghastly results in the nineteenth century, because then virtuosity was an end in itself, completely divorced from creative or interpretative ability. At least in the modern concerto we have got away from all that, the tendency today being rather to write in the sinfonia concert ante style where soloist and orchestra compete on equal terms.
The volume is well indexed and contains a useful discography, listing recordings of a great many of the concertos mentioned. In- accuracies are rare, but there are two on page 291 where Honegger's nationality is given as Belgian, instead of Swiss, and Krenek's as German, instead of Austrian of Czech descent. Trivial slips, no doubt, but they should be corrected in the next impression.
Rotto H. MYERS.
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