We find, then, that the tone has risen most emphatically since the appearance of the Romanticists; in the days of the Classical School it remained the same for the greatest length of time.  The latter was the period of the most moderate artistic expression.  At present, on the contrary, we thirst for shriller and shriller tones, higher and higher singing.  Even though every violin treble-string snaps and every singer’s throat becomes exhausted before its time, we go on forcing the tone higher from decade to decade.

The entirely reversed relation of church-pitch to concert-pitch, which has taken place in the course of time, appears noteworthy in this connection.  Even in the eighteenth century, church-pitch was much higher than concert-pitch, and surely for a reason far deeper than the mere wish to save tin on the organ pipes.  For the old masters used church music for the portrayal of strong emotions, and on this account they needed the shriller pitch.  Bach is much more shrilly and characteristically dramatic in his church cantatas than contemporary masters of Italian opera.  Chamber and theatrical music, for which the lower, milder, more agreeable orchestral tone was chosen, was played, for the most part, only with the semblance of emotion.  When Gluck and Mozart transported tragedy from the church to the stage and concert hall, concert-pitch naturally had to assume the role of church-pitch, and thus the former has in fact gradually become higher than the latter.

There is still another fact connected with this.  Haendel’s operas seem to us concert-like; the arias of Bach’s church cantatas often appear operatic.  Many numbers of these cantatas would disturb us today in church; on the other hand we consider them exquisite religious parlor music—­which they were far from being in Bach’s day.  We are no longer such a vehemently excitable generation religiously as to be able to endure Bach’s music to its full extent in church; on the other hand, as individuals, in the family, in society we are infinitely more vehemently excitable and much higher tuned spiritually as well than were those of the eighteenth century; we want Bach in the concert hall and in the parlor.  The pious and yet forcible leader of St. Thomas’ Choir has been made a parlor musician by us and for us—­but for his own generation he was not one.

In the last hundred years the compass of pitch of almost all instruments has been considerably enlarged in the treble.  The high registers in which every ordinary violinist must be able to play nowadays would in those days have seemed too break-neck for the foremost virtuosos.  Men themselves were not tuned high enough to take pleasure in such poignant chirping.  The flute of the seventeenth century was a fourth lower than that of the eighteenth.  In the flute and the piccolo of the nineteenth century we have again risen a third, yes, an entire octave above the eighteenth century!  Our great-grandfathers called the bass flute flauto d’amore, the alto oboe, oboe d’amore, a bass viol, viola d’amore, because their ear found preferably in the deep middle tones the character of the tender, the sweet, and the languishing.  Now we can scarcely play on the violin or wind instrument a love melody which does not rise two or three octaves above the normal.