Hanslick's standard.
When Congreve wrote that "music hath charms to soothe the savage
breast," did he not mean to imply that educated people are not
affected by it? Take the case, for instance, of that old barbarian,
Joseph Haydn, and note how he was affected by the "Creation" when he
heard it sung. "One moment," he said to Griesinger, "I was as cold as
ice, and the next I seemed on fire, and more than once I feared I
should have a stroke." Another "savage," Cherubini, when he heard a
Haydn symphony for the first time, was so greatly excited by it that
it forcibly moved him from his seat. "He trembled all over, his eyes
grew dim, and this condition continued long after the symphony was
ended. Then came the reaction. His eyes filled with tears, and from
that instant the direction of his work was decided." (Nohl.)
Similar incidents might be quoted from the biographies of almost all
the great composers. Berlioz, in his essay on Music, after referring
to the story of Alexander the Great, who fell into a delirium at the
accents of Timotheus, and the story of the Danish King Eric, "whom
certain songs made so furious that he killed some of his best
servants," dwells on the inconsistency of Rousseau, who, while
ridiculing the accounts of the wonders worked by ancient music,
nevertheless, "seems in other places to give them enough credence to
place that ancient art, which we hardly know at all, and which he
himself knew no better than the rest of us, far above the art of our
own day.
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