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By Root 5658 0

the work of younger composers that the formal structures of the classical era were becoming blurred and sentimentalised by the approach of the age of Romanticism. No composer had ever won such world-wide popularity as Rossini in the decade after 1810. The dazzlingly catchy themes from Rossini's operas, as his hero-worshipping biographer Stendhal observed, were hailed from New York to St Petersburg, from Buenos Aires to Sydney. Yet no one was more keenly aware that this signalled a profound shift taking place in the nature of contemporary music than Beethoven, as when he observed in 1824 that, `in this age of Rossini, true music has little welcome'. 2

In his novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann describes the narrator and his friends attending a lecture by a wise old music teacher, who plays and expounds to them the closing arietta of Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111. They are deeply moved. When he has completed the final bars he bangs shut the piano, pronouncing `thus ends the sonata'; by which he means not just that this particu lar sonata in C Minor is concluded but sonata form in general, and all that it represented. The classical age in music, which had plumbed the heights and depths of the human spirit like nothing else, was over (apart from the glorious sunset of Beethoven's own final works before his death in 1827, and the magical twilight of Schubert, who died the following year).

Suddenly music changed, even more dramatically than storytelling. However gifted composers such as Berlioz and Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, Brahms and Verdi might be, their music was no longer shaped by that instinctive harmony between conscious and unconscious which had raised the works of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to such a transcendent perfection. The direct contact with the Self had been lost. The mould was broken. The ego had intruded. And with it came all the cloudy sentimentality, the disintegration of form, the sensational striving for effect which we associate with the age of Romanticism.

There could be no neater image of the difference between the power of true imagination and the artifice of fantasy than Berlioz's comment, in a letter to Wagner, `I can only paint the moon when I see her at the bottom of a well'. Beethoven had not just believed in the divine power of the Self as the centre of his inspiration. He experienced it so directly he had no need to paint its reflection in a well. The difference between Beethoven and his successors, one might jokingly observe, was that Beethoven believed in God, Brahms believed in Beethoven and Wagner believed in Wagner. But in this declension we can also see the essence of what was happening in the nineteenth century to Western man's relationship with the instinctive totality of the Self.

Outwardly, the most obvious contrast between the civilisation of the nineteenth century and that of the century which preceded it lay in the astonishing transformation produced by the industrial revolution. The coming of the age of steam power and the machine, factory-based mass-production, the railways and the telegraph bridging distances with unimaginable speed, was suddenly carrying humanity much further from a state of nature than ever before. With this came an unprecedented sense that civilisation was moving forwards and upwards: that belief in `progress' which was reinforced by the new doctrine of evolution. People came to see history as a long climb out of the darkness of mankind's primitive, superstitious past into the glorious light of modern nineteenth-century civilisation.

Yet, even as this materially triumphant age cut them off from nature and the past to an unprecedented degree, so they hankered for the lost certainties of a vanished time when their ancestors had been able to enjoy the sense of an unshakeable spiritual centre and transcendent dimension to life. Few aspects of the nineteenth century were more remarkable than the extraordinary revival of interest in the imagery of the Middle Ages. At the very time when Western civilisation was making such dramatic material advances,