A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an adagio before the public in a concert hall.  Contemporary musical authors utter emphatic warnings against this experiment.  A sustained, seriously melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue composition is for the majority of our public.  People sought to be pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no adagio.  If one did attempt an adagio in a gallant style of composition the player first had to render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, gruppettos, pincements, battements, flattements, doubles, etc.  “In the adagio,” says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, “each note must be, as it were, caressed.”  In the execution of our heroic adagios it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated.  From the viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the sentimental, feminine adagio.  The adagios of Bach and Haendel are all of the masculine gender.  And then what a remarkable alteration of the musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century, the soft-as-butter adagios of the composers of the day all at once caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion!  At the same time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman acquired an ear for the adagio.  How very slightly as yet has the intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of literature been investigated.  The entire Siegwart is indeed nothing but a melting Pleyel adagio, translated into windy words.  A priceless passage in Siegwart treats of the adagio.  Siegwart and his school friend are playing one evening an adagio of Schwindl on the violin:  “And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax.  They laid down their violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing but ’excellent’—­and went to bed.”  The ear of the sentimental period, which had so suddenly become sensitive to the adagio, has never been so tersely branded!  From that time on there was a regular debauch of adagio beatitude.  In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in autograph albums that a bad man could not play an adagio, not to mention other florid trash of this sort.  Nevertheless, the moment when we acquired an ear for the adagio remains epoch-making in the history of culture.

It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us. [Illustration:  A VILLAGE FUNERAL From the Painting by Benjamin Vautier]