The origins and evolution of the concept of musical genius have rarely been treated in reference works. The idea of musical genius grows and changes in close association with the evolution of music itself so that the history of the idea is inseparable from the history of music and the concept of the musician as it devel- oped from Greek antiquity.
The concept of the musician has changed throughout the history of Western civilization. Greek poets
endowed individual musicians with the magical power of affecting men and gods—Arion, Timotheus, and above all Orpheus are archetypes of the magic musi- cian. In all ancient civilizations music and magic are closely connected. But the Greek writers on music ignored the magical and slighted the practical aspects of music. Their customary definition of the musician is confined to his speculative, theoretical function.
Aristoxenos (ca. 354-300 B.C.) defines a musician as one who commands the “knowledge” of the science of music (Macran, pp. 95, 165). Aristides Quintilianus (probably fourth century B.C.), in Book I, Chapter 4 of his treatise on music, precedes the various definitions of music with the following statement: “Music is the science of melody (μέλοσ) and all elements having to do with melody” (Winnington-Ingram, p. 4)—a defini- tion easily understandable in the light of the purely melodic and rhythmic nature of Greek music, and echoed by Bacchius Senex (probably fourth century A.D.) almost word for word (Meibomius, p. 1).
II. BOETHIUS
Boethius (ca. A.D. 480-524), transmitter of ancient Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and theory of music to the Christian West, follows Greek tradition when, in the last chapter of Book I of his De institutione musica, he defines a musician as he “who masters the musical art not through mechanical exercise but after theoret- ical investigation through the power of speculation” (Friedlein, p. 224). Boethius admits the existence of two other kinds of musicians, performers and composers. To performers he denies any competence to judge and understand music because of the merely mechanical character of their work (quoniam famulantur), and because they bring no rational powers to bear on music but, on the contrary, are utterly devoid of the capacity for thought; the composers share the same fate because in composing they are not motivated by philosophical speculation, but by some natural instinct: non potius speculatione ac ratione, quam naturali quodam instinctu fertur ad carmen (Friedlein, p. 225).
The concept of the instinctus naturalis as the motivating force animating the composer is used by Boethius in a pejorative sense. A philosophy that places ratio at the head of all human faculties, that considers sensory experience as uncertain and as the source of error and illusion, cannot give anything but a low place to natural instinct. “It is much greater and nobler to know what one does than to do what one knows,” says Boethius (Friedlein, p. 224).
III. THE MEDIEVAL VIEW
The contempt for practice and the one-sided exalta- tion of theory flow from Boethius' treatise into the medieval philosophy of music and the arts. It is formalized in consigning the work of the practical musician, as of any other practicing artist, to the artes mechanicae rather than to the artes liberales. The mechanical arts, definable as those activities that need the human hand for their execution, were considered the province of the lower classes; the liberal arts, definable as those that need chiefly the human mind for their exercise, were the province of the free man. Farming, hunting, navigation, medicine were thrown together with painting and sculpture as mechanical arts, much to the distress of the artists. The distinction between mechanical and liberal arts goes back to classical antiquity, but the sharpness with which Boethius and, following him, most medieval writers on music downgrade the performing musician seems to express more a medieval than an ancient view. It is well conveyed in the famous jingle attributed to Guido of Arezzo (ca. 992-1050) that was quoted at least until late into the sixteenth century:
Musicorum et cantorum Magna est distantia. Isti dicunt, illi sciunt, Quae componit Musica, Nam qui facit, quod non sapit, Diffinitur bestia.
(“There is a vast difference between musicians and singers. The latter merely perform, whereas the former understand what makes music. For he who performs what he does not understand is a mere brute.”)
Boethius seems to have been the first to use the term quadrivium, joining music with the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Without these four disciplines the philosopher cannot find the truth. The mathematical arts or sciences were considered the most noble because they contained “the greater cer- tainties of the intellect”; the language arts of the trivium—grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric—were held to be of a lower order due to the implied reference to the senses and human emotions, from which spring deception and uncertainty.
Music, as taught at medieval universities, was accepted as a part of the quadrivium and constituted the theoretical consideration of an art whose every element—rhythm, melody, harmony—was reducible to mathematical proportions. The speculative character of the medieval concept of music is further reflected in Boethius' division of music into musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis—follow- ing ancient models—music of the spheres (macrocosm), the harmonious conjunction of body and soul (micro- cosm), and music properly speaking, the art of sound pro- duced on instruments, which includes the human voice, called instrumentum naturale (Johannes Affligemensis [Johannes Cotto], in his De musica cum tonario [ca.
1120]; Waesberghe [1950], p. 57). The distinction sur- vived at least into the Renaissance. Pietro Aron differentiates between stormento naturale, the voice, and stormento artificiale, the instrument properly speaking (Aron, Libro II, Opp. XI).
Although medieval writers on music held with surprising tenacity to Boethius' and Guido's views, they could not suppress occasional marvel at the natural talent of untrained musicians. Aribo Scholasticus (ca. 1070), one of the most original and independent medi- eval thinkers on music, proves Man's inborn gift for music by pointing to jongleurs who, though devoid of all knowledge in the art of music, joyfully sing popular songs, free of error, observing accurately the position of tones and semitones, and ending correctly on the appropriate final tones. While appearing to follow Guido's definition, Aribo expands it significantly, ex- pecting of the professional musician not only that he master the whole science of modes and intervals, but also that he know how to judge what is right, how to amend what is wrong, and how to compose perfect melodies himself (Waesberghe [1951], p. 46). Thus Aribo includes in his definition the composer, excluded in Boethius' definition of musicus. Moreover, in his scheme of things he creates a place even for the untutored musical talent by distinguishing between the natural and the professional musician (the chapter referred to is entitled De naturali musico et artificiali). The terminology is related to the distinction between musica artificialis et naturalis introduced by Regino of Prüm (d. 950); but musica naturalis was for the latter a vast concept encompassing the harmony of the spheres, the human voice, and the voices of animals, whereas musica artificialis was confined to the music thought out by human art and ingenuity and played on instruments (Pietzsch [1929], pp. 63-66). Aribo adds the new element of fresh and unprejudiced observation of musical performance, correct according to the canons of the art, although executed by illiterate jongleurs.
Boethius called the composer poëta, from the Greek ποιητής, originally meaning maker, producer, contriver, and later confined to the author of a poem. The term poeta for composer, revealing the unity of poem and melody, of word and tone in the medieval view, sur- vived into the Renaissance. But as early as the twelfth century we find the term compositor used by Johannes Affligemensis in the combination cantuum compositor (Waesberghe [1950], p. 119). The esteem of the com- poser increased in medieval writings to the degree that the compositional process was conceived to be rational rather than, as Boethius thought, prompted by natural instinct. Adherence to rules was taken to distinguish a good composition from a poor one, a good composer from a bad one. Odo of Cluny, tenth-century abbot, in his dialogue on music, has the master say: “A rule, certainly, is a general mandate of any art; thus things which are singular do not obey the rules of art” (Strunk, p. 115). A clearer subordination of individuality in art to rules is hard to find. “Any art,” says Johannes of Garlandia, “is a collection of many rules. The term art derives from the word arto, artas, which is the same as restringo, restringis, to restrict, because it limits us and constrains us lest we do otherwise than it teaches us” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 477).
Garlandia, the thirteenth-century theorist, speaks for a polyphonic art, in which the plain chant serves as cantus firmus, that is, as the basis over which the other voice or voices sing their counterpoints. The thirteenth century saw the emergence of polyphonic music that emancipated itself from dependence on the Gregorian chant. The conductus, set to freshly written texts of a spiritual, moral, or political nature, is the first form of polyphony in which all parts are written by the composer himself without the aid of a cantus firmus. At about 1260 Franco of Cologne described the com- position of a conductus as follows: “He who wishes to write a conduct ought first to invent as beautiful a melody as he can, then... use it as a tenor is used in writing discant” (Strunk, p. 155). Franco, in postu- lating invention first, then contrapuntal elaboration, doubtless follows Cicero's venerable division between invention, disposition, and elocution. His precepts are those of a craftsman, who, absorbed in producing a beautiful piece of work, is utterly unconcerned about the inner processes that lead to the work of art.
In a remarkable passage, Johannes Grocheo (ca. 1300) distinguishes between the composing of polyphony based on a cantus firmus and freely con- ceived polyphony, specifically between organum and motet on the one hand and the conductus on the other. The process of composing over a cantus firmus he calls ordinare; for the projection of free polyphony he re- serves the term componere:
But I say “order,” because in motets and organum the tenor comes from an old, pre-existent chant, but is subjected by the artificer to rhythmic mode and measure. And I say “compose,” because in the conductus the tenor is a totally new work and is subject to mode and duration according to the artificer's will
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 490).
Yet, even this fine and rare distinction does not amount to anything more than a recognition of two different procedures by one and the same craftsman. It does not mean recognition of two types of musician, or two types of creativity. But it does stress, for the first time in the theory of polyphonic music, the concept of the “new”—as yet without showing any overt preference for it.
IV. THE RENAISSANCE
It is not until the last quarter of the fifteenth century that this neutrality is abandoned. In the writings of Johannes Tinctoris, the Flemish composer and theorist who emigrated to Italy, the composer is defined as the creator of a “new” musical work: Compositor est alicuius novi cantus aeditor (Parrish, p. 14). Unques- tionably, there were musicians and connoisseurs in the Middle Ages who enjoyed novelty in musical composi- tion, for there was a constant, if slow-moving, stream of novelty from chant to sequence and rhymed offices, from Saint Martial's incipient polyphony to the masters of Notre Dame, from Perotinus to Machaut. But it would be hard to find a source of medieval theory stressing novelty or originality as the qualities that make a composer. Even though the fourteenth century spoke of an ars nova, Philippe de Vitry, in his treatise by that name, and Johannes de Muris, in his ars novae musicae, deal in a matter-of-fact manner with the notational signs of the new rhythmic language of the ars nova without a word of appreciation of the new art itself. Yet, the violent critique of the novus cantandi modus by Jacobus of Liège (ca. 1330) as cantandi lascivia curiositas, in which “the words are lost, the harmony of consonances is diminished, the value of the notes is changed, perfection is brought low, imperfec- tion is exalted, and measure is confounded” (Strunk, p. 190), furnishes eloquent proof that the new art was considerably more than a new notation.
This raises the question why the theorists of the ars nova were so reticent in their appraisal of the new art. The answer is that ideas change at a slower pace than practices—and this for two reasons: the extraor- dinary strength of tradition gives the stamp of approval to what is known and accepted; but the new has not only to fight for recognition, it has as yet to seek the rational and ideological basis for its existence. In the Middle Ages, where auctoritas—the authority of the ancients, of the Church Fathers, of tradition—was regarded as a pillar of the cultural edifice, it was doubly difficult for the new to assert itself. Interestingly enough, the ars nova sought to justify itself through studied alliance with the old. The new motet, even when displaying secular texts of amorous character in the vernacular in its lively upper voices, carried a Gregorian melody in the slow-moving tenor. The new many-voiced chansons adhered to the formal patterns of the old troubadour and trouvère songs.
In a situation where the artist himself does not dare to make a clean break with tradition, the theorist cannot be expected to come forward with a clear position and rationale of the “new.” This explains why it is the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries rather than the thirteenth and fourteenth that emphasize the importance of novelty, of newness in art. For it is this great period, the “Renaissance,” that witnesses the creation of a music new in most of its fundamental aspects—expansion of the tonal system, both external (increase of the tonal space) and internal (complete chromaticization of the scale), tuning, simultaneous instead of successive composition of parts in a harmonic complex, liberation of the composer's imagi- nation by freeing the polyphonic work of art from ties to cantus-firmus construction, expression of human affects replacing decoration of the divine service as the chief goal of music.
It takes an innovative epoch to develop an aesthetics in which innovation is made the touchstone of creativ- ity. When Tinctoris, in the proemium to his Propor- tionale musices, extols the Franco-Flemish composers and disparages the English, he uses the concept of innovation as a yardstick: “The French freshly invent new songs every day, whereas the English keep writing in one and the same style—surely a sign of a wretched talent” (quod miserrimi signum est ingenii; Lowinsky [1966], p. 133).
Even two generations later, while commenting on the preceding statement of Tinctoris, Sebald Heyden, writing in Germany—the pace of innovation being slower in the North than in Italy—felt he had to defend the new music against the reproach of novelty:
The fact that it is a new art and quite unknown to ancient Greeks does not render it less worthy of praise and admira- tion than any other arts, however ancient they may be.... What is that invention of the ancients with which the art of printing, thought out in our times, and by us Germans, could not contend in fame? Equally far be it that the novelty of our music be a reason to hold it in contempt rather than to praise it
(Heyden, Dedication).
With much greater confidence, and considerably deeper insight, Othmar Luscinius (Latinization of the German “Nachtigall”) confronts the question of the new and the old in his Musurgia (1536). A humanist, a friend of Conrad Peutinger, Erasmus, and Glareanus, expert in Greek and writing a polished Latin, but also a brilliant organist, Luscinius looks back at the music of 200 years earlier, examples of which he had studied. He exclaims:
O God, how cold these compositions are when compared to those of our day! Each epoch has its own laws, its own taste. And how strange that we find in matters of music a situation entirely different from that of the general state of the arts and letters: in the latter whatever comes closest to venerable antiquity receives most praise; in music, he who does not excel the past becomes the laughing stock of all
(Luscinius, pp. 97-98).
Luscinius cites a four-part setting of lines from the Song of Songs, Tota pulchra es amica mea, by a con-
temporaneous Dutch musician, Nicolaus Craen, “by Jove, a man of outstanding genius” (vir me Hercle praestantis ingenij). The work (printed in Petrucci's Motetti C of 1504 and not published since) breathes the air of freedom that characterizes more and more the music of the Renaissance. Instead of choosing the liturgical text Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula originalis non est in te, Craen goes back to the original text of the Bible, Tota pulchra es amica mea et macula non est in te. Instead of taking the continuation of this verse, he assembles his text freely from the lines of various chapters. The old technique of building a mu- sical edifice on the ground plan of a cantus firmus is abandoned. All four voices are freely invented by the composer with the manifest intent to echo the enthusi- astic voices of the lovers and to bring to life the emotional tone of the poem. Luscinius remarks with what felicity Craen neglected the precepts of the older generation, and how much praise he deserves for side- stepping the rules of the past. Indeed, no one ought to be censured for so doing, provided that it be done properly in every respect (si modo decenter ex omni parte fiet), that is, provided there is a sense of whole- ness, a sense of “style” to his enterprise.
Nothing characterizes more sharply the new respect for the artist and his work than the Renaissance theorist's habit of referring to a specific work by a specific composer. Glareanus, who printed in his Dodekachordon (1547) no fewer than 121 polyphonic compositions, exceeded all of his colleagues in this regard. Medieval theorists, on the other hand, rarely name composers or refer to specific works, save for the demonstration of notational practice. They seem hardly interested in a composition as a work of art marked by individual aesthetic traits. The new rank accorded to the creative artist in the scheme of things musical is also expressed in other ways. Tinctoris dedicated a treatise to the two composers he admired most, Ockeghem and Busnois (Coussemaker, IV, 16). In one of his tracts he called the former optimi ingenii compositor (Coussemaker, IV, 152). Even the musical performers, relegated before to the realm of artes mechanicae, now receive a new appreciation. Their virtuoso feats and their appeal to the emotions cause them to be listed by name and to have their art described in critical detail. Again, Tinctoris leads the way by dedicating one of his writings to a singer of the Papal Chapel (Coussemaker, IV, 41).
But one of the most interesting developments is the emergence of music critics from the ranks of the noble amateurs or the intellectual elite. Their critiques of the great performers of their time were often published in book form. Luigi Dentice, a Neapolitan nobleman (Dialoghi, 1553), and the Florentine mathematician Cosimo Bartoli (Ragionamenti accademici, 1567) have left us delightful samples of the beginnings of concert reviews—concerts, to be sure, given in the private circles of princes, popes, and academies (Lowinsky [1966], pp. 140-41).
The significance of these and other reports lies in the growing kinship between the composer and the performer of the Renaissance. The latter, following the example of the former, places his art more and more into the service of the expression of human affects. Many are the stories of the miraculous emotional effect made by great lutenists and clavecinists of the sixteenth century—stories that recall the ancient myths of Orpheus and Timotheus and that place the performer, held in contempt in the Middle Ages, closer and closer to the creative sphere by virtue of his personal, pas- sionate involvement and the resulting original inter- pretation of the music performed.
The art of singing and playing itself becomes the subject of theoretical interest; whole books appear on the singer's and player's art of improvising embellish- ments. Here is an area where the newly won freedom of the performer clashes with that of the composer, for few were the composers who enjoyed having their works “embellished.”
The emphasis on composer and performer indicates that the Renaissance returned music to the sense of the ear. Music, in the Middle Ages, was like a window through which the philosophical mind gazed at the universe to perceive its harmonious order. In the Renaissance it was in the first place an object of aes- thetic enjoyment. “The ear is the true teacher,” wrote Adrian Petit Coclico in 1552 (Bukofzer, fol. B2v). But Tinctoris already had taken the decisive step from the medieval emphasis on music as number to the new stress on music as sound when in one of his famous eight rules of counterpoint he said: “This, however, is in my opinion to be left entirely to the judgment of the ears” (Lowinsky [1965a], p. 365).
The realization of the individuality and originality of a composer leads quite logically to the downgrading of the rules and to a new appreciation of talent and inspiration. The Bolognese composer, choir director, and theorist Giovanni Spataro wrote to a Venetian musician in a letter of 5 April 1529:
The written rules can well teach the first rudiments of counterpoint, but they will not make the good composer, inasmuch as good composers are born just as are the poets. Therefore, one needs almost more divine help than the written rule; and this is apparent every day, because the good composers (through natural instinct and a certain manner of grace which can hardly be taught) bring at times
such turns and figures in counterpoint and harmony as are not demonstrated in any rule or percept of counterpoint
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 481).
Spataro transferred the aphorism “The poet is born, not made” (poeta nascitur non fit), which became so popular in the poetic theory of the Renaissance, to the composer. Characteristically, he uses the term instinto naturale to designate the irrational power in a great composer that guides him in the regions uncharted by rules. Whereas Boethius conceived of natural instinct as of a lower form of consciousness, Spataro opposes it to rational learning as a higher, and almost divine, form of awareness. In this he was preceded by Baldassare Castiglione, who in his Il Cortegiano (pub- lished 1528, completed 1514) has the Count uphold the independence of a great artist against Signor Federico's insistence on imitation of the great masters. The Count asks Federico. “Who should have been Homer's model, and whom did Boccaccio and Petrarch imitate?” and he goes on to say that the true master of these great writers was their genius and their own inborn judgment (Ma il lor vero maestro cred'io che fosse l'ingegno ed il lor proprio giudicio naturale). And he persuades Signor Federico to the point where the latter is willing to admit that, in the choice of genre, and the display of style and temperament, every artist should follow his own instinct (s'accommodi allo instinto suo proprio; Lowinsky [1964], p. 482 n. 74).
In the same vein, the Florentine music theorist Pietro Aron, a friend of Spataro who figures in the latter's correspondence, writes in his Lucidario (1545):
Experience teaches that some who have practiced the art of composition for a good part of their lives are surpassed by others who have been composing for a short time only. Wherefore one may believe that good composers are born and cannot be made through study and long practice but rather through heavenly influence and inclination: graces, to be sure, that heaven grants to few in large measure.... As we see that one and the same figure and form treated by different sculptors in marble or in other material has much more perfection in the one than in the other as their creators differ from one another in excellence, likewise, I say, it happens in this our harmonic faculty, which many of our composers possess. Each one of them knows the material, i.e. the musical intervals, and gives them a fitting harmonic form which differs in excellence, in sweetness and loveliness according to the composer's individual skill and natural grace
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 483).
Pietro Aron almost anticipates the brilliant formulation in which Giordano Bruno, in his Eroici furori (1585), condemns the pedantic makers and watchers of rules: “There are as many kinds of poetic rules as there are kinds of poets” (Thüme, p. 26). Bruno in turn comes close to Kant's definition of genius, which will be discussed below.
“Invention” and “originality” now become so essen- tial that Glareanus, in his Dodekachordon (1547), can pose the question: “Shall we not consider him who invented the melody of the Te Deum or the Pange lingua a greater genius than him who later composed a whole Mass on it?” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 479). Pur- suing this question, Glareanus says:
In both [the melodic inventor and the contrapuntist] this is to be ascribed more to the energies of genius, and to some natural and inborn talent than to craftsmanship. And this can be proved through those who never studied music, and nevertheless show a miraculous ability in inventing melodies, as is apparent in our vernacular [folk song], the Celtic [French] or the German; but also through those who are masters of counterpoint although they were often poorly taught—to say nothing of the other disciplines. From this it appears certain that neither is possible for a man unless he is born for it, or, as the people say, unless his mother gave it to him—which is just as true for the painters, the sculptors, and the preachers of the Divine Word (for about the poets there can be no doubt) and for all works dedicated to Minerva
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 479).
The word translated here as “genius” is the Latin ingenium. Edgar Zilsel has pointed out that the term ingenium as characterizing extraordinary inborn talent was unknown in the Middle Ages (Zilsel, pp. 251ff.). The word was used in many senses ranging from art and intrigues (see the Italian inganno) to legal docu- ment and instrument of war (“engineer”). Only in the Renaissance did it assume the meaning of outstanding talent; it was so used by Alberti, Leonardo, Aretino, and countless other writers of the period. However, the weight of Glareanus' statement rests not on the interpretation of ingenium, but on his distinction be- tween extraordinary natural talent and craftsmanship, and on his insistence that the former far exceeds the latter in importance.
Glareanus' statement recalls Aribo's admiration for the musicus naturalis; it anticipates the romantic idea of the genius of folk song and folk singer as well as the modern system of the arts. It antedates by fifty odd years Jacobus Pontanus' poetics (1600) that con- tains “the most explicit comparison between poetry, painting, and music that I have been able to discover in Renaissance literature” (Kristeller, p. 517). In fact, Glareanus adds to painting, poetry, and music, dis- cussed by Pontanus, sculpture and eloquence. Glareanus' source of inspiration—considering that he, like Luscinius, knew Greek—was probably Plato's Ion in which Socrates is presented as speaking of precisely the same combination of arts: painting, sculpture,
music, poetry, all of which are related to Ion's profes- sion, the recitation of Homer, for which Glareanus substitutes eloquence in the divine service.
The stress on originality brings with it the apprecia- tion of individuality. A German publisher, Hieronymus Formschneider, in a print of three-part compositions of 1538, excuses the lack of author attributions with the remark that each of the composers has his own outstanding style easily recognized by the connoisseur. Theorists discuss the individual style of composers— again Glareanus leads his contemporaries in the sharp- ness of his critical judgment—and poets sing the praises of composers as creators of a recognizable personal idiom of expression.
One hears an echo of Glareanus' ideas in the dialogue on music, Solitaire second ou prose de la musique (1552), by the French poet and humanist, Pontus de Tyard:
... as poetry takes its source from natural talent and the inspiration of the sacred choir [of Muses] of Parnassus, so Music, too, requires natural gift, impelled by the same enthusiasm. It may take more talent to invent a single melodic turn of phrase for the expression of a conceit to write the “air” or the “theme” of a chanson, than to place two, three, or more counterpoints against a cantus firmus and to write what one calls figured music, or a finished composition (chose faite), though the latter requires more learning
(Tyard, p. 132).
As the sixteenth century progresses, the irrational aspect of the compositional process gains increasing attention. Spataro used the term instinctus naturalis to account for the marvelous inventiveness and originality of great composers. Other writers change this term to inclinatio naturalis. Hermann Finck, in a treatise published in 1556, which, significantly, stresses the importance of an expressive rendering of the text, reserves the title of musicus for the composer:
But only composers deserve that title. I consider those as composers who, as the learned agree, were carried to that field of study by natural inclination, and who cultivated their natural talent from tender youth on through art, practice, and varied and frequent exercises.... And if it is of importance in the other disciplines who your first teacher and mentor is, certainly in this art it is of greatest significance that he who by nature burns with a love of music use an experienced teacher and devote himself totally to imitating him
(Lowinsky [1964], pp. 487-88).
To early and rigorous training Finck adds three irrational elements in his characterization of the composer: natural talent, natural inclination, and en- thusiasm, for this is surely what he intends to convey with his expression, “by nature burning with a love of music.” And all three elements—talent, inclination, enthusiasm—carry the adjective naturalis or a natura. Not training and practice alone make the composer, but an inborn quality that cannot be rationally accounted for except as a gift of Nature.
What is translated here as enthusiasm is not what Plato had in mind when he spoke of the furor poeticus, a concept that has played a significant role in the literary criticism of the sixteenth century (Weinberg, I, Ch. VII). Finck's “enthusiasm” shares with Plato's furor poeticus the element of emotional intensity with which poet or musician embraces his chosen art, but what separates the two concepts of Finck and Plato is the element of rationality. Plato believes that once the poet is inspired—and without inspiration he has no invention—he is out of his senses and out of his mind. “For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 488). But the Renaissance theorist, however strongly he may stress irrational elements, never abandons the idea of a rational and practical mastery of the musical craft as an indispensa- ble basis for the work of genius. Indeed, Finck stresses the necessity for the young genius to grow up in the workshop of an older master, whose compositions he should take as models for his own.
This is apparent even in those formulations in which, finally, the instinctus naturalis and the inclinatio natu- ralis are elevated to the impetus naturalis. Lampadius, Protestant cantor in Lüneburg and author of a textbook on music published in 1537 (Compendium musices), describes the process of composition in these words:
As poets are stirred by a certain natural impulse to write their verses, holding in their minds the things that are to be described, so the composer must first contrive in his mind the best melodies and must weigh these judiciously, lest one single note vitiate the whole melody and tire his listeners. Then he must proceed to the working-out—that is, he must distribute the contrived melodies in a certain order, using those that seem most suitable
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 489).
We have here one of the earliest descriptions of the process of composition as we conceive it today. Lampadius distinguishes three phases: melodic inven- tion (the musician is stirred by some inward power), careful evaluation (the aesthetic judgment passes on the work of inspiration), and finally elaboration (the composer proceeds to work out the purified melodic ideas—he selects, he rejects, and he organizes). This is much the same working process as we will find described by Roger North and, more articulately, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Dedications and prefaces to sixteenth-century prints of music reflect the change of ideas. When the Parisian music publishers, Adrian Le Roy and Robert Ballard,
in the dedication of a print of motets by Orlando di Lasso of 1564, wished to pay tribute to the genius of the youthful composer, they called him a natura factus magis, quam disciplina institutus, “more a product of nature, than of professional training” (Van den Borren, p. 836).
Medieval theory does not admit that a composer may at times disregard rules with impunity, indeed that this may make him a better composer. This idea begins to take shape in Renaissance writings. We saw how Luscinius praised Nicolaus Craen for sidestepping the traditional rules. Zarlino, too, in his celebrated Institu- tioni harmoniche of 1558 (p. 235), states that poetic license is allowed to the composer as well as to the poet. “Poetic license” becomes an integral part of the concept of genius. It is not by chance that the most advanced definition of genius should occur in the treatise of a man claiming to have been a pupil of Josquin des Prez and to report the master's method of teaching, Adrian Petit Coclico's Compendium musices (1552). Josquin des Prez was to the Renaissance musician the very incarnation of musical genius. Here is what Coclico reports on Josquin's method:
Josquin did not consider everybody cut out for the study of composition; he decided that only those should be taught who were carried by a singular natural impetus to that most beautiful art, for he used to say that there exist so many lovely compositions that hardly one in a thousand could compose anything as good or better
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 491).
And again, when enumerating the requirements for the student of composition, Coclico lists in the first place the ability to improvise a counterpoint and in the second place
that he be led to composing by a... certain natural impetus so that neither food nor drink can please him before he has finished his musical work. For when the inner impetus urges in this way one can achieve more in one hour than otherwise in a whole month. Useless are composers who lack these singular raptures
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 492).
Coclico's ideas are formulated in a framework of decided opposition to the whole philosophy of medie- val theory. In a complete reversal of the medieval hierarchy of musicians Coclico pronounces as “kings of music” not the theorists but those who combine theory with practice, who understand thoroughly the art of composing, who know how to embellish a com- position and how to express all emotions in music.
The two ideas of music as expression and of musical genius go together historically and conceptually. The Renaissance theorists who come closest to the modern concept of genius are the same ones who stress the idea that music serves to express human emotions. Not only do these two concepts go hand in hand, they converge in their attitude towards “the rules.”
In transcending the rules, genius opens new vistas and music gains new dimensions of expressiveness. Any musical device, to reach the sphere of emphatic expression, must verge on the limits of the permissible or, indeed, pass beyond them. Any work of genius will, of course, transcend all ordinary limitations. Yet, the extraordinary and the impermissible need the ordinary and the permissible as background without which they lose their significance and their effect. This is why Zarlino advises the composer not to persist too long in the use of licenze, for he understands that a series of breaches of rules will never amount to a work of art. Genius knows how to endow the breaking of a rule with that same sense of necessity that the rule itself embodied; the disregard of convention is not the goal, but a by-product of his work.
The Renaissance is the first epoch in European intel- lectual history that recognized that neither observation of rules nor practice and experience suffice to make the good composer, that great composers will find felicitous turns and figures not demonstrated in any textbook, that there are artistic elements of manner and grace that defy definition, and that rules, teaching, practice, and experience are all superseded by the inborn talent, the ingenium of the individual, who is driven to his art by a natural impetus so strong that it overcomes hunger and thirst, so powerful that it may put the composer into a state of ecstasy, and that in such a state of heightened awareness and activity the composer's mind can achieve more than in long periods of ordinary work. For all this the composer, according to some writers, must enjoy divine help and heavenly inspiration.
The Renaissance drew a clear line of demarcation between craftsman and genius. Glareanus even goes so far as to elevate the nature of genius above that of talent—a question that occupied the attention of later thinkers a great deal. He already suggests the classical definition found in eighteenth-century writings by attributing greater ingenium to the inventor of new melodies than to the contrapuntal elaborator of a given melody. Invention and originality distinguish genius from talent. Talent imitates; genius assimilates and creates.
The Renaissance replaces the medieval definition of creation as making something out of nothing with the concept of creation as making something new, some- thing that the world had not seen or heard before, something fresh, original, personal. Nothing illuminates more sharply the heightened confidence of the Renais- sance writer in man's unlimited abilities than the belief that the artistic genius reaches up to God Himself,
sharing with Him in the joy of creation. Had not Julius Caesar Scaliger, in the opening chapter of his Poetices libri septem (1561), called the poet “another God” (alter Deus), and Shaftesbury later a “second maker”? No wonder, then, that the epithet divus, applied in the Middle Ages only to saints, was transferred by the secular urban society of the Renaissance to secular celebrities. Aretino appears to have been the first to use the term in a letter to “the divine Michelangelo” (Zilsel, pp. 276ff.). It is precisely in the same period that the term divinus enters into writings on music. In 1542 the Venetian Sylvestro Ganassi del Fontego speaks of the Flemish composer Nicolas Gombert, master of the choirboys in the Emperor's chapel, as huomo divino in tal professione (Lowinsky [1964], p. 484). And in the second part of the same work pub- lished one year later, he calls the chapel-master of San Marco in Venice, Adrian Willaert, nuovo Prometheo della celeste Armonia. The same Aretino who had called Michelangelo “divine” speaks in his Marescalco of Willaert as sforzo di natura, “miracle of nature” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 484). All of these expressions point to a concept of creativity based on the new ideas of originality and inventiveness. Insofar as Man is creative in this new sense he partakes of God's nature and may therefore properly be addressed as “divine.”
To the medieval mind such thought was blasphe- mous. “God alone creates,” pronounced Saint Thomas Aquinas; “no mortal being can create” (Summa Theo- logica)—a position that followed logically from his definition of creation as creare ex nihilo: “To create means to produce something out of nothing.” Earlier, Saint Augustine in his De Trinitate had maintained: Creatura non potest creare, “the creature cannot cre- ate” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 477).
The Renaissance is the first period in the history of music in which composers are viewed as individuals endowed with an extraordinary personal and psycho- logical constitution. The same agent who, in writing to Ercole of Ferrara about Isaac and Josquin, conceded that Josquin was the better composer, also remarked that as a person he was difficult, both in his relations with other musicians and with his patron, that he composed only when it pleased him and not when commanded. From Serafino dall'Aquila's sonnet of 1503 addressed to Josquin we know of the master's fits of melancholy and despair. We hear from Manlius not only of his outbursts of temper during rehearsals, from Glareanus the anecdotes of his witty musical responses to forgetful or demanding patrons, but also of his unending search for perfection that made him go over his compositions again and again, changing, polishing, refining (Osthoff, I). A picture emerges of an altogether original character, endowed with a strong tempera ment and a deep sense of obligation to his genius, an individual utterly unwilling and unable to compromise in matters of his art.
The anecdotes concerning Josquin and his noble patrons also suggest that a new relationship between artist and patron is in the making: here are the begin- nings of parity between the aristocracy of talent and the aristocracy of blood and rank. The incredibly fa- miliar tone of Orlando di Lasso's letters to his patron, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, with whom he drank, played, and joked, is an illustration of this new rela- tionship between an artist and a prince in the latter part of the century.
Carlo Gesualdo, finally, is a representative of the free artist. Born a prince, and hence economically and socially independent, he was in his own employ, as it were, accountable only to himself. The freedom of his style is a reflection of his independence as well as of the fierce and uncontrolled temperament that led to the well-known tragic events of his life.
Josquin, Lasso, Gesualdo, however different they were in character and as artists, share one essential quality: they are musical geniuses whose extraordinary gifts are matched by extraordinary personality; they exhibit immense strength of feeling, spontaneity, originality, independence as personalities and in their social relationships; they are great individuals, and each one of them was hailed in his time as the foremost representative of an expressive style of music. At the same time Josquin, Lasso, and Gesualdo conformed to the psychological image of the Renaissance concept of genius. The famous Problem XXX,1 of Aristotle—or Pseudo-Aristotle—begins with the question: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philoso- phy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?” (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, p. 18). Problem XXX,1 was well known in the Renaissance. It was taken up by Marsilio Ficino, celebrated for his attempt to reconcile Plato and Christianity. It was he who “gave shape to the idea of the melancholy man of genius and revealed it to the rest of Europe” (in his three books De vita triplici, 1482-89; Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, pp. 255ff.). And indeed, our three great composers fit surprisingly well into this picture: Josquin, the loner, the temperamental conductor, the ceaseless refiner of his works, writing when his inner voice compels him, a deep melancholic in life, and in his music a “specialist” in melancholy; Lasso and Gesualdo, preoccupied with the idea of Death in their work as no composers before them, the former suffering from a mental collapse two years before his death, the latter involved in the double murder of his wife and her lover, an event that cast an ineradicable shadow over his whole creative life (the murder took place
in 1590; the first publication of Gesualdo's music oc- curred in 1594).
A new personal style in music and a new image of the musician as a person different from the common run of people seem to emerge more or less simulta- neously. This appears from censures as well as from anecdotes about musicians that begin to circulate in the sixteenth century. Joachim Vadian, poet and humanist at the court of Maximilian I, in a eulogy (1517) of the composer and organist Paul Hofhaimer, criticized the musicians who “believe themselves to be lacking in genius, unless their demeanor is frivolous and dubious, and who act as if seized by Platonic madness” (Moser, p. 44). Antonfrancesco Doni, in his entertaining and witty dialogue on music (1544), expressed a view of the artistic personality that must have been current for some time in the literary circles of Italy: “Musicians, poets, painters, sculptors, and their like are all real people, attractive, and often cheerful, though at times eccentric when the fancy strikes them” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 486). Doni proceeds to tell humorous stories about the clash between artists and ignorant and presumptuous Philistines—plebei, as he calls them—stories that prove that the Renaissance created not only the image of the “artist,” but also its foil, that of the “Philistine.”
V. THE BAROQUE
The Renaissance created the concept of genius and determined the basic outlines of its evolution through baroque and classicism to romanticism. We have been told by a well-known music historian and Bach scholar:
It is characteristic of baroque mentality not to make the slightest fuss about a great artist's genius.... Nowhere... is there a hint of the select nature of the great artist or of the divine origin of his creative gifts. These are concepts created by romanticism. In Bach's time we find no talk of “depth of feeling,” “originality,” or “personal approach,” and certainly not of a composition expressing an attitude towards life and the world. These ideas lay outside the baroque world of thought
(Schering, pp. 85-86).
In reality, the first theoretician of opera, Giovanni Battista Doni (1594-1647), had already coined the classical formulation of the contrast between counter- point as a craft and dramatic music as the creation of genius:
Counterpoint requires art and exercise rather than natural inclination, since it consists of many rules and observations and is based on practice acquired by long use. But in dramatic music he who is wanting in natural disposition should not even try to undertake it. Never will he achieve perfection, even though he may arrive at mediocrity through long study and knowledge acquired thereby, things equally needed by those singularly privileged by Nature. The composer of dramatic music, therefore, must be very inven- tive and versatile, he must have a quick mind and a strong imagination: qualities that he has in common with the poet, wherefore it is said poetae nascuntur, Oratores fiunt, poets are born, orators are made. Thus we may compare to orators those composers who ordinarily take the cantus firmus or subject from others and, weaving over it an artful counter- point, draw various melodic lines from it, which often have something dry or labored, in that they lack a certain grace and naturalness, which is the true spice of melody. This is what today's musicians have noted in Soriano, who, while most experienced in counterpoint, never had talent to write beautiful and graceful melodies, wherefore he devoted him- self to the writing of canons and similar laborious composi- tions.... Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, on the other hand, who was truly born for music, and with a gift for musical expression, and who could clothe with his musical gifts any poetic subject, never attended, as far as one knows, to canons and similar labored exercises. Such should be, then, the genius of the good composer, particularly for that genre of musical compositions which should bring to life all inner affects of the soul with vivid expression
(Lowinsky [1964], pp. 338-39).
Doni could not have chosen apter personifications for his concepts of craftsman and genius than Pale- strina's disciple, Soriano—famous for his 110 canons over a Marian hymn—and the princely composer, Gesualdo, who, for the sake of truth of sentiment, broke every rule in the book.
In another passage Doni comments on the dilemma in which “modern” composers find themselves with regard to tradition:
One will think it was not permissible to depart from the rules left behind by the predecessors, another will be more daring and follow these modern composers like the Prince of Venosa, indeed he will spontaneously invent new things. This is why Monteverdi seeks more the dissonances, whereas Peri hardly departs from the conventional rules
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 340).
The stylistic separation between counterpoint and expressive music goes back to Monteverdi's famous distinction between the old and the new style or, as he phrased it, the prima and seconda prattica of the beginning of the seventeenth century. But Monteverdi had not yet said—perhaps he implied it—that it took less genius to write in the old style. He merely postu- lated greater liberty for the seconda prattica, the new expressive style of music.
If testimony is needed that concepts such as “depth of feeling,” or “composition as expressing an attitude towards life and the world” or the “divine origin of creative gifts” are indeed part of baroque mentality, a reading of Thomas Mace's Musick's Monument (1676) should provide it. Mace, a clerk at Trinity College in Cambridge, although no more than a fine craftsman
and mediocre composer, entertained the most sublime ideas of music, its power and origin:
Musick speaks so transcendently, and Communicates Its Notions so Intelligibly to the Internal, Intellectual, and Incomprehensible Faculties of the Soul; so far beyond all Language of Words, that I confess, and most solemnly affirm, I have been more Sensibly, Fervently, and Zealously Captivated, and drawn into Divine Raptures, and Contem- plations, by Those Unexpressible Rhetorical, Uncontroulable Perswasions, and Instructions of Musicks Divine Language, than ever yet I have been, by the best Verbal Rhetorick, that came from any Mans Mouth, either in Pulpit, or else- where.
Those Influences, which come along with It, may aptly be compar'd, to Emanations, Communications, or Distilla- tions, of some Sweet, and Heavenly Genius, or Spirit; Mystically, and Unapprehensibly (yet Effectually) Dispos- sessing the Soul, and Mind, of All Irregular Disturbing, and Unquiet Motions; and Stills, and Fills It, with Quietness, Joy, and Peace; Absolute Tranquility, and Unexpressible Satisfaction
(Lowinsky [1964], pp. 333-34).
Such raptures are not confined to the peculiar tem- perament of an eccentric musician, as one might think Mace to have been. One of the sturdiest, worldliest gentlemen of seventeenth-century England, a man of wealth, power, and fame, Samuel Pepys, discourses in a surprisingly similar vein about his musical experience. Having heard a concert of wind music for The Virgin Martyr, he wrote in his diary:
... [it] is so sweet that it ravished me, and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home, and at home, I was able to think of any thing, but remained all night transported
(Weiss, p. 64).
Another Englishman, Roger North (1653-1734), Attorney-General to James II, and one of a lengthy series of English amateur musicians and writers on music, insisted that
good musick must come from one by nature as well as art compleately made, who is arrived at a pitch to throw away the lumber of his rules and examples, and act upon the strength of his judgment, and knowledge of the subject matter itself, as if it had bin bred and born in him ab origine
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 332).
Anticipating Rousseau and later romantic writers, North saw music's finest jewel in melody, or as the English were wont to call it, “ayre,” of the invention of which he said:
But as for securing an Ayre, if it must be above the indiffer- ent, it is like securing witt in poetry, not to be done; and after all will be found to flow from a genius, and not without some accidents or rather felicitys of fancy, as well as sound judgment, to make it sublime
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 332).
The term génie is also part of the vocabulary of French musical theory of the baroque. De la Voye, in his Traité de musique (1656), after having dealt with elementary theory, counterpoint, and fugue, concludes his treatise with these words:
The other artifices of music, such as recitatives, echoes, the variety of movements, the order of cadences, the beauty of the melodies, the mixture of modes, the natural expression of the words and passions, they depend on the genius and the invention of the composer
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 332).
The greatest French theorist of music in the age of the baroque, Jean Philippe Rameau, was accused by the partisans of Jean Jacques Rousseau of nurturing the belief that the composer needed not genius but only the science of harmony. However, in his Traité de l'harmonie, published in Paris in 1722 when Rousseau was a boy of ten, Rameau speaks constantly of le génie et le goût. “There is a world of difference,” he observes, “between a music without fault and a perfect music” (Lowinsky [1964], pp. 329-30), and with this remark Rameau demolishes the notion of the artist as a crafts- man whose excellence can be measured by his success in following the rules of his craft. In speaking of mel- ody he remarks:
It is well-nigh impossible to give rules concerning it [melody], inasmuch as good taste has a greater part in it than anything else; thus we leave it to the happy geniuses to distinguish themselves in this genre on which the whole strength of sentiment depends
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 330).
As happens so often, the critics had not read what they criticized. Rameau defends the composer against the pedantic guardians of the rules who, he says, become deaf if you want to show them the good effect of freedom, license, and exception in a music composed apparently against the rules.
Nothing shows Rameau's appreciation of imagina- tion in the composer's work better than his plea for freedom in the writing of what is usually thought of as one of the strictest and most rational forms of music, the fugue, which he called
... an ornament of music which has only one principle, good taste; the very general rules governing it [the fugue] that we just outlined do not suffice in themselves to insure perfect success in it. The various feelings and events that one can express in music constantly produce novelties that cannot be reduced to rules
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 330, n. 29).
Aside from genius, a composer, according to Rameau, also needs good taste. With le goût another irrational element enters our discussion, one that can- not be measured, prescribed, or fixed in rules. Yet it is to some extent rational—and in that regard typically French—in that it resides in aesthetic judgment rather
than in emotion, an essential attribute of genius in German and Italian writings. The irrational concept of empathy, the dramatic composer's ability to put himself in the place of his characters and re-create them in tones by the sheer force of sympathetic imagi- nation—and Rameau was a composer of opera him- self—is already a part of Rameau's aesthetics. At the end of Chapter 20, Book Two, on the propriety of harmony, he says:
For the rest, a good musician must surrender himself to all the characters that he wishes to depict, and, like a skilful comedian, put himself in the place of the speaker, imagine himself in the localities where the events to be represented occur, and take part in them as much as those most involved in them, be a good orator, at least within himself, feel when the voice should rise or fall more or less, so as to shape his melody, harmony, modulation, and motion accordingly
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 331).
VI. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND THE BEGINNINGS OF ROMANTICISM
No statement on musical genius had a more profound impact on the world of art and letters than the article on génie by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique (1768)—the first dictionary of music to deal with the concept. Because of its seminal significance, the entire article follows in translation:
Don't ask, young artist, “what is genius?” Either you have it—then you feel it yourself, or you don't—then you will never know it. The genius of the musician subjects the entire Universe to his art. He paints all pictures through tones; he lends eloquence even to silence. He renders the ideas through sentiments, sentiments through accents, and the passions he expresses he awakens [also] in his listener's heart. Pleasure, through him, taken on new charms; pain rendered in musical sighs wrests cries [from the listener]. He burns incessantly, but never consumes himself. He expresses with warmth frost and ice. Even when he paints the horrors of Death, he carries in his soul this feeling for Life that never abandons him, and that he communicates to hearts made to feel it. But alas, he does not speak to those who don't carry his seed within themselves and his miracles escape those who cannot imitate them. Do you wish to know whether a spark of this devouring fire animates you? Hasten then, fly to Naples, listen there to the masterworks of Leo, of Durante, of Jommelli, of Pergolesi. If your eyes fill with tears, if you feel your heart beat, if shivers run down your spine, if breath-taking raptures choke you, then take [a libretto by] Metastasio and go to work: his genius will kindle yours; you will create at his example. That is what makes the genius—and the tears of others will soon repay you for the tears that your masters elicited from you. But should the charms of this great artist leave you cold, should you experience neither delirium nor delight, should you find that which transports only “nice,” do you then dare ask what is genius? Vulgar man, don't profane this sublime word. What would it matter to you if you knew it? You would not know how to feel it. Go home and write—French music
(Lowinsky [1964], pp. 326-27).
It is easy to see why poets, musicians, and aestheticians were stirred by Rousseau's concept of genius. This was not an ordinary dictionary article; this was a dithyrambic ode, every word of which echoed Rousseau's own intense musical experiences in the Venetian opera houses during his days as secretary to the French Embassy in Venice.
Creative activity engendered by enthusiasm, fire, imagination, and above all, by the ability to feel, and feel passionately—all of these essential elements in the romantic concept of genius hail from Rousseau. Rameau's careful balance between craft and inspira- tion, rules and good taste, technical mastery and genius, is scornfully thrown aside by Rousseau in exchange for a one-sided emphasis on emotion and empathy. Being himself the very model of an untutored genius given to passionate outbursts of tears, he would never have dared to set his own hand to composing libretto and music of his operetta, le Devin du village (1752), without the profound conviction that feeling, more than anything else, is needed to create music that goes to the heart. “A student of three months could write the 'Devin'”—Rousseau said later—“whereas a learned composer would find it hard to embark upon a course of such decided simplicity” (Lowinsky [1965b], p. 201).
One element is conspicuously absent in Rousseau's definition of genius: musical originality. Rousseau was primarily a man of letters; as a musician he was decid- edly an amateur. Music was for him a means to enhance the emotional appeal of the spoken word, of the drama. This agreed with his belief (Essai sur l'origine des langues, 1753) that in the beginning word and tone, speech and melody, were one. Nor were his democratic convictions that led him to espouse a style of folk song-like simplicity designed to foster appreciation of musical originality.
Thus we find ourselves facing the paradox that the eighteenth-century apostle of feeling could think of genius without the attribute of originality—indeed, it is in “imitating” Metastasio that a musician becomes a genius—whereas the century's most detached and rational thinker, Kant, conceived of originality as the chief attribute of genius.
Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft), calls genius “the talent (natural gift) that gives the rules to art” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 328). This is an ingenious, indeed, an elegant definition in its studied avoidance of opposition between rule and inspiration, talent and genius. Kant succeeds, never- theless, in making a sound distinction between them,
especially as he goes on to say that genius “is a talent to create that which escapes all definite rules: it is not natural skill for what can be learned according to any rule; hence, originality must be its first attribute. ... Everyone agrees that genius must be opposed completely to the spirit of imitation” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 328). Thus Kant manages to avoid the emphasis on emotion that was contrary to the nature of his analytical mind, and yet to stay basically within the framework of thought of his time. It has been remarked (Serauky, p. 162) that there is an irreconcilable contra- diction between Kant's definition of genius as rejecting “the spirit of imitation” and his belief that music is the art of imitation of human emotion—an idea current throughout the eighteenth century and developed par- ticularly by Charles Batteux in his Traité des beaux arts, réduits à un même principe (1746). Kant uses the term in two meanings: imitation of one artist by an- other in a specific artistic medium, and imitation as a re-creation of human emotions in tones. There is no contradiction between these two ideas. Notwith- standing his emphasis on originality, Kant did not escape the criticism of the emerging romantic move- ment led by Herder, who printed excerpts from Kant's definition of genius together with devastatingly sarcas- tic glosses.
The eighteenth-century literary movement of Sturm und Drang was keenly interested in the nature of genius in general and of musical genius in particular. All of its exponents were fired by Rousseau's ideas. Christian Friedrich Schubart, poet, musician, keyboard player, famous for his improvisations, philosopher, imprisoned for his ideas as a free thinker, wrote in his essay Vom musikalischen Genie words reminiscent of Rousseau's:
Musical genius is rooted in the heart and receives its im- pressions through the ear.... All musical geniuses are self-taught, for the fire that animates them carries them away irresistibly to seek their own flight orbit [Flugbahn]. The Bachs, a Galuppi, Jommelli, Gluck, and Mozart excelled already in childhood through the most significant products of their spirit. Musical harmony lay in their soul and they soon threw away the crutch of art
(Lowinsky [1964], p. 326).
But unlike Rousseau, Schubart added: “Nevertheless, no musical genius can reach perfection without culti- vation and training. Art must perfect what Nature sketched in the raw” (Lowinsky [1964], p. 326).
Schubart, in his Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1784-85), eulogizes Rousseau, his ideas on music, and his Dictionnaire de musique. Rousseau's inspiration also hovers over Johann Gottfried von Herder's essay “Von Musik” in which Fontenelle's “Que me veux-tu, Sonate?”—the opera composer's defiance of “mere” instrumental music, of “academic” art—made famous by Rousseau's enthusiastic approval, is quoted without indication of its source.
Rousseau is also the indubitable inspiration for the romantic poet, composer, pianist, conductor, and music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann and his conception of the nature of musical creation:
To touch us, to move us mightily, the artist himself must be deeply affected in his own heart. Effective composition is nothing but the art of capturing with a higher strength, and fixing in the hieroglyphs of tones [the notes], what was received in the mind's unconscious ecstasis. If a young artist asks how to write an effective opera, we can answer only: read the poem, concentrate on it with all the power of your spirit, enter with all the might of your fancy into all phases of the action. You live in its personages; you yourself are the tyrant, the hero, the beloved; you feel the pain and the raptures of love, the shame, the fear, the horror, yes, Death's nameless agony, the transfiguration of blissful joy. You rage, you storm, you hope, you despair; the blood flows through your veins, your pulse beats more violently. In the fire of enthusiasm that inflames your heart, tones, melodies, harmonies ignite, and the poem pours out of your soul in the wonderful language of music.... Technical training, through study of harmony in the works of the great masters, and your own writing bring it about that you perceive your inner music more and more clearly; no melody, no modula- tion, no instrument escapes you, and thus you receive, together with the effect, also the means which you now, like spirits subject to your power, detain in the magic lines of your score. To be sure, all this amounts to saying: take care, my good friend, to be a very musical genius. The rest will come by itself. But thus it is, and not otherwise
(Lowinsky [1964], pp. 323-24).
Musical creation as the volcanic eruption of a glow- ing soul in the grip of ecstatic revelation, technical study as the magical means to summon the spirits of the art: this indeed is a truly romantic concept.
Whereas one will have difficulty finding an entry on “genius” in modern musical dictionaries, it occurs in nineteenth-century dictionaries such as Peter Lichtenthal's Dizionario e bibliografia della musica (1826) or in August Gathy's Musikalisches Conversa- tions-Lexikon (2nd ed., 1840). Neither offers a history of the concept, but both define it in terms derived from Rousseau. Gathy, in addition, shows the influence of the romantic writer Jean Paul, in whose writings we come to the final inversion of the medieval hierarchy of values. Boethius saw the highest human faculty in ratio, the lowest in instinctus naturalis, with which he credited the composer. In Jean Paul's Vorschule der Aesthetik (1804; 2nd ed., 1813) the “unconscious” is the great motivating power of the creative artist (Das Mächtigste im Dichter... ist gerade das Unbewusste).
Genius is guided by “divine instinct”—a term picked up by Gathy. Each artist has his own specific “organ,” the painter the eye, the musician the ear; “the supremacy of one organ and one force, for example in Mozart, operates with the blindness and assurance of the instinct” (Miller, pp. 55-67). The divine instinct speaks more clearly, more forcefully in the genius; it is he who gives us the view of the whole—talent can provide only views of details.
Jean Paul defines the limits of talent versus genius; it remained for Richard Wagner, in DieMeistersinger von Nürnberg (1867), to create the immortal double image of genius and craftsman: Walter is an ideal- ization of genius, Beckmesser a caricature of the craftsman. Walter personifies the artist whose creativity rests on inspiration, and whose inspiration springs from an imaginative mind and a generous and sensitive heart, open to love and enthusiasm. Beckmesser's art rests on the pedantic observation of timeworn rules. His pedantry is at home in a small, petty, scheming mind, equally incapable of noble emotions and of the flight of fancy. Between these two extremes stands Hans Sachs, his roots in the world of the mastersingers, but his heart and mind open to Walter's freely inspired art, in which, he confessed,
No rule would fit, and yet no error could I find (Kein Regel wollte da passen, und war doch kein Fehler drin, Act II).
The opposition between conventional rule and fresh inspiration, the idea that the genius, unlike the mere craftsman, can transcend rules without committing errors and that in so doing he can make new revela- tions, is a leitmotif in the history of the concept of musical genius.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who had turned from an ardent admirer to a bitter critic of Wagner, restored the bal- ance between inspiration and rational judgment when he wrote the ironic words (Menschliches Allzumensch- liches, 1878):
The artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration, as if the idea of the work of art, of poetry, the fundamental idea of a philosophy shone down from heaven as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker pro- duces continuously good, mediocre, and bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects as one can see now from Beethoven's sketchbooks where he appears to have slowly developed the most beautiful melodies and to have selected them, as it were, from many diverse starts.... All great artists and thinkers were great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, order- ing
(Gast, p. 163).
Nietzsche wrote these words only a few years after Gustave Nottebohm had published his Beethoveniana (1872), the first thorough presentation and discussion of Beethoven's sketches. No wonder they impressed Nietzsche. For if ever there was a representative of musical genius, it was Beethoven, both as a man and as an artist. As a man he was strong and sensitive, gentle and irascible, generous and passionate, proud, suspicious, love-seeking, frankly eccentric, and without compromise in matters of art and of honor; as an artist, he was creator of a new world of spirit and form, in which passionate utterance was contained by the most severe discipline of form, a novel dynamic form that derived its inner laws from the new spirit of untram- meled freedom of artistic expression. “There is no rule that may not be broken for the sake of greater beauty,” he once wrote.
Yet, the sketches revealed the titanic struggle that this great master fought for the ultimate realization of his ideas, which often began in a conventional, if not banal, form to grow by degrees—at times it took as many as thirty sketches—into exquisite original thoughts. It was Nietzsche who, following Beethoven's example, discovered an element of musical genius often overlooked by writers from the Renaissance through romanticism: endless patience and infinite striving (Streben) or effort. One of the few writers remarking upon this was Glareanus, when he spoke about Josquin des Prez. And, indeed, there is a peculiar affinity be- tween the personalities and the creative characteristics of the great genius of the fifteenth century who came out of the Middle Ages and moved toward the new world of the Renaissance, and the composer of the eighteenth century who moved from classicism to romanticism, creating in the process a musical amalgam of an utterly unique character (Grout, p. 183).
It remained for our own time not only to make light of the whole idea of genius, both past and present (Ricci, pp. 80 and 83), but also to replace feeling, imagination, planning, and aesthetic principle with mathematical formulas, computers, and “chance.” The inherent paradox of this modern approach to composi- tion lies in this: whereas aesthetic principles have been abandoned in the process of composition, the results are presented to modern audiences having no other possible approach to the understanding of music than one based on aesthetic perception. This unresolved contradiction of modern music contains in itself the seeds of its own necessary destruction. Either music is to be heard, and then it must proceed from principles of perception and aesthetics; or it proceeds from merely intellectual and mathematical principles or chance, and then it makes no sense to present as sounding form what was not experienced as sound and
form. Once this dilemma has been resolved, musical genius will return to the artistic scene and move from its present underground to the center of the stage in an affirmation of faith in the possibility of choice, decision, and creation. The musician alone cannot do it. The whole age will have to reconquer faith in the humanity of Man and in the individuality of his art.
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Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are by the author of the article.
EDWARD E. LOWINSKY
[See also Creativity in Art; Empathy; Genius; Music as a Divine Art; Pythagorean Harmony.]
What is a musical genius?
Current Western definitions of musical genius tend to include certain key capabilities, for example tech- nical mastery, virtuosity, emotional depth, integrity, originality, understanding and transcendence. Some commentators also include exceptional memory and precociousness in this list.
What is an expert musician called?
Also Called. Academic Researcher, Music Historian, Ethnomusicologist, Music Theorist. A musicologist is an expert in music as a subject of scholarly research.
Why are some people musical geniuses?
Some people are born with greater aptitude, and they develop skill on a musical instrument much faster than do others and rise to higher stages of advancement. Studies have been conducted on both musical ability and musical inability, revealing strong genetic components to each.
Was Prince considered a musical genius?
Prince was a 'genius,' say musicians who played with him. Genius. Master. Those are the words often used to describe Prince by several musicians who had the good fortunate to share a stage or studio with him.