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The concerti, the often flashy and tinselly pianoforte compositions of Liszt and Rubinstein were the immediate and surface result of that deeper sense of the instrument which arrived during the nineteenth century, and intoxicated folk with the piano timbres, and made them eager to hear its many voices in no matter how crude a form.
When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. But M. Rachmaninoff has not participated in this change of attitude. He is still content with music that toys with the pianoforte. And he writes concerti of the old type.
He, the troubled, nervous, modern man, wrote with fluency fugues and double fugues, chaconnes and passacaglie, concerti grossi and variations. He seemed to have mastered the secrets of the old composers, to be continuing their work, developing their thought and style. He excelled in the control of what appeared to be the technicalities of composition.
It is not that fugues and concerti in the olden style cannot be written to-day, that modern music and the antique forms are incompatible. It is that Reger was very little the artist. He mistook the material vesture for the spirit, thought that there were formulas for composition, royal roads to the heaven of Bach and Mozart.
And together with those rather gross piano-works the piece par excellence characteristic of the period, the brilliant piano-concerto with its prancing instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and ululation of the band, has lost in favor steadily. The modern men no longer write concerti.
But it was in 1602 that he published his "Cento concerti ecclesiastici a 1, a 2, a 3, e a 4 voci, con il basso continuo per sonar nell' organo." The basso continuo had been in use for some time before this. It appears in the score of Peri's Euridice as well as in the "Nuove Musiche" of Caccini.
The voice and instrumental partbooks were edited by Malvezzi, and published at Venice in 1591 under the title "Intermedii e concerti, fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze nelle nozze del Ferdinando Medici e Madama Cristiana di Lorena."
His impulse seems always a reflected thing, a desire to compete with some one on that person's terms. He writes fugues for organs and sonatas for violin solo under the influence of Bach, concerti grossi under the influence of Haendel, variations under that of Mozart, sonatas under that of Brahms. In vain one searches for a perfectly individual style throughout his works.
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