The ear of the eighteenth century preferred human voices whose timbre approached closest to the violin, the oboe or the ’cello, and considered that such were peculiarly fitted for lyric and dramatic expression.  The eunuch sings as if he had an oboe in his throat; it is much too harsh and lacking in brilliancy for our ear, which values incomparably higher the more brilliant, clearer timbre, corresponding to the tone of the flute, clarinet, or horn.  The favorite timbre of the eighteenth century compares with that of the nineteenth as dull oxidized gold does with that brightly polished.  The period of the Romanticists marks here too the turning-point of taste; Beethoven completed the emancipation of the above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony.  The modern treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord accelerated its victory at the same time.  It worked favorably for the external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules of counterpoint.  Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our brass bands and military music.  The earlier symphonies, since they were essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed instruments, now seem like darkened pictures.  Yet the symphonies have certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned.  The same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful.  In such symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument ensemble, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained with a simple distribution of the string parts.

The characterization of musical keys is very strange.  In different ages an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite color, has been attributed to each separate key.  In the eighteenth century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous key—­indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far as to call it tonum voluptuosum.  We, on the contrary, consider G-major particularly modest, naive, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even trivial.  Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy; five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly, magnificent, majestic.  D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us.  That is indeed a jump a dorio ad phrygium.