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Music from the North. 167 |
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We have seen in Russia how serfdom aided music of combination in the church and in the palace. Reasoning from analogy, I am compelled to admit the fancy that this vassalage, or state of dependence, may have had something to do in giving German music one of its most distinctive features— that orchestral perfection which depends alike on sympathy and on discipline.
It may not only have been such adaptability as makes English sailors pre-eminent—such peculiarity of organisation as makes Irish singers bad timists, and French players so admirable in point of rhythm and accent, to which these dispositions for executing music of combination are to be ascribed; because, though German speech pervades a wide country, it is a country of many countries, peopled by many races. I thus cannot dismiss the fancy, that to the forms of a society in which despotism was not unaccompanied by encouragement, may be partly ascribed some of the forms of art, and partly the habits of life among those who, whether Northern or Southern, have too often fancied liberty to sanction unpunctuality, and sentiment as modifying sense of obligation.
But a germ of self-asserting nationality was in |
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