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Tradedv in tke Art of Music The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures i 9 6 2 - i 9 6 3 T r a g e dy m t he A rt of M u s ic By LEO SCHRADE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 1964 © Copyright 1964 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-10444 Printed in the United States of America To Otto Kinkeldey, Nestor of American musicology, in admiration Preface The first of my duties to be discharged—with unfeigned feeling rather than eloquence—is the most pleasant of all: the duty of rendering my thanks to all those who have taken it upon themselves to invite me to Harvard University. The great honor which comes to the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry must not be measured in any other terms than those of obligation. And obligation to the Norton Chair accrues, indeed, from its illustrious tradition estab- lished by many a man of prodigious distinction. Fully conscious of the tradition I cannot say that my mind is at ease. Still less comfortable do I feel if I think that the tradition holds a further implication of burdensome renown, and one that does not seem to be commonly known. Hence I beg the favor of your attention for a brief story—and a story it is—with which to clarify what must appear as a baffling allusion. In a letter dated July 3, 1870, Jacob Burckhardt wrote Friedrich von Preen that he was greatly surprised to see his friend occupied with the study of the Cicerone, a book which Burckhardt completed at the age of 37 in 1855; he said at the time when he wrote the Cicerone, a time free of care and caution as it becomes the age of a young author, he did not expect that the book would be taken as seriously as it had been by many an excellent person ever since its ap- pearance; and then he continued: "Recently, an American came up to my room to develop a whole theory the starting Preface point of which he took from a passage in the Cicerone con- cerning the asymmetry of romanesque buildings. I had considerable trouble in making him understand how remote from art and art literature I was at the time." Who was the American visitor? Here we follow the story in accordance with the eminent Burckhardt scholar Werner Kaegi (Europäische Horizonte im Denken Jacob Burckhardts, Basel-Stuttgart, 1962, pp. 7Óf, iyof). It has been suggested that the visitor might have been Henry Adams, an early admirer of Burckhardt, who would seem to have reviewed the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in a brilliant article, "The Genesis of Modern Life," which appeared anonymously in the New York Herald of 1880. As a matter of fact, Henry Adams was in Europe and even in Switzerland in 1870, but not in Basel; and so the sugges- tion has been withdrawn. At all events, the visitor must have been a man not only familiar with the Cicerone, but also at least to a degree an adherent of Burckhardt's ideas. Now we read the following passage in the appendix to a famous book: "Few of the writers on the architecture of the Middle Ages refer to it," meaning the "irregularities of construction in Italian buildings of the Middle Ages." "Burckhardt, in his Cicerone" so the author continues, "attributes the irregularities to 'an indifference to mathe- matical exactness peculiar to the early Middle Ages', which seems to exclude the idea of a guiding aesthetic sentiment and an exquisite aesthetic result." The book has the title Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages. It appeared in 1880, and its author was Charles Eliot Norton. And Charles Eliot Norton went to Switzerland, not in 1870, but in 1869. Among the Norton papers, held by the viii / Preface Houghton Library, there are two letters, one written to James Russell Lowell dated June 14, 1869, the other to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dated June 17, 1869, and in both Norton mentions that on his extended journey undertaken for the sake of art studies he came from Eng- land, passed through Antwerp and along the Rhine, and stopped at Basel before reaching Vevey and his prolonged stay in Italy. It was not the first time that he had visited Basel. When still a young student, 23 years of age, he had communicated to his family, in a letter dated September 26, 1850, his impressions of the city, and in particular the fascination the tombstone of Erasmus with its inscription had for him. The most likely visitor whom Burckhardt referred to in his letter would appear to be Charles Eliot Norton; and an intriguing thought it is, indeed, if we imagine that through Burckhardt and Norton the University of Basel and this distinguished chair at Harvard University may well be linked together by a personal association which would be almost a century old. Last but not least, I wish to express my sincerest thanks: to the President and Fellows of Harvard College to whom I owe the honor of having been appointed to the Norton lectures; to the members of the Department of Music who made the sojourn in Cambridge most enjoyable; to Pro- fessor Laurence Wylie, acting Master, and Mrs. Wylie for the hospitality of Quincy House; to Professor William Alexander Jackson and the staff at the Houghton Library for the assistance given to my wife and myself in our search among the Norton papers; and to Mr. Wulf Arlt, Basel, who prepared the index. r , Leo Schrade June 1963 • ix