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To make anything like a detailed analysis of the elaborate working out of the daylight motive with other subsidiary motives which now follows would be impossible here, and would only be of use to the student of composition. The music wanders through many keys, but C major is generally discernible as the centre round which the tonality oscillates.
It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck. After saying so much there remains the last tale of the book, still untouched.
For the last time, the old conceptions of tonality obtain in his music dramas. One feels throughout "Tristan und Isolde" the key of D-flat, throughout "Die Meistersinger" the key of C-major, throughout "Parsifal" the key of A-flat and its relative minor. Rhythms that had been used all through the classical period are worked by him into new patterns, and do service a last time.
It has been said that the feeling of tonality is a motor image or "form-quality" and that the image of the tonic persists throughout every sequence of tones in a melody. Now these are not only felt as having a certain relation to the tonic; that relation is an active one.
However charming for occasional surprise may be such a substitution, a continuous, pervading use cannot but destroy the essential beauty of harmony and the clear sense of tonality; moreover it is mechanical in process, devoid of poetic fancy, purely chaotic in effect. And yet we must praise in the French master a wonderful workmanship and a profound sincerity of sentiment.
That this, and not the elder Breughel's, is the original of the picture in Steven's L'Atelier is clear at the first glance, the warm tonality having been accurately reproduced and even the drawing of the tree branches, which differs much in the two museum pictures having conformed precisely to that in the copy by the younger Breughel.
In following a melody, the notes are able to belong together for us by virtue of the background of the tone to which they are related, and in terms of which they are heard. The tonality is indeed literally a "funded content," that is, a funded capital of relation. These are the general facts of tonality. But what is its meaning for the nature of music? Why should all notes be referred to one?
And the preceding discussion has wholly failed to make its point, if it is not now clear that the musical experience is an impression and not a judgment; that the feeling of tonality is not a judgment of tonality, and that though the aesthetic enjoyment of music extends only to those limits within which the feeling of tonality is active, that feeling is more likely than not to be quite unintelligible to the listener.
Yet considering the pitch and the tonality of the whole tale it is very difficult to imagine what else those two people could have found to say at that time and on that particular spot of the earth's surface. In the mood in which they both were, and given the exceptional state of their feelings, anything might have been said.
In Russia, as in every other country, it has had to be sought in the remote Steppes and far-off districts where foreign influences had never penetrated, and by a curious inverse process its harmonies, of course, transmitted orally, were the means of preserving the Byzantine Church tonality long after this "first cause" had accepted chromatic and enharmonic modulations.
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