When not breathing blood and anarchy French popular music has a wonderful range: it is gallant, mocking, elegant, or full of absolute nonsense and frivolity. In fact, French music has always been so intensely national that it would have been impossible for England to have long borrowed it; and in the days of the Tudors we find English character beginning to explain itself in those admirable tunes and ballads which form a regular and successive declaration of English principles, with their sound piety, broad fun, perfect liberty of speech and capital eating and drinking. They have neither the wailing grief nor the boisterous merriment of Celtic music, and they lack entirely the monotonous tenderness of the Troubadours; but they are full of buoyant, daring independence, and have a certain _homeliness_ which strikes in a very powerful manner some chord in the Anglo-Saxon heart.
The cosmopolitan nature of the German speaks to all the world in his music. Of all national musics it is the grandest and the most developed: we see this in the position it gives to rhythms. National musics with undeveloped rhythms are the speech of people just awakening, while music that has them strongly marked and regularly introduced belongs to people of fully-matured energies. Only in the _Jodlers_ and _Landlers_ of the Tyrolese, Austrian and Swiss mountains is the original Teutonic iambic preserved in its purity. In all other German music every kind of rhythm is met with, no kind being predominant. For the musical language of Germany embraces not only the few octaves of passion, but the whole keyboard of existence. It has preludes, symphonies and sonatas for every phase of life. Nothing smaller than this range would suffice to express the multiform ideas of a people so thoughtful and cosmopolitan. And though by this universal sympathy German music may have lost a purely national life, it is a most sufficing compensation to have gained the power of expressing the ideas of a whole epoch.
Musical taste in America is in progress of formation. We have no national music: we have not even a decided preference for any style. We like Beethoven and Chopin, but we also like Rossini and Donizetti and delight in Lecocq and Sullivan. In no respect is the national pride so utterly forgotten as in music. We give to all schools a fair hearing. The great German masters are household words: the national music of every land is welcome. We have been learning to like Italian opera at an insane cost; we have kindly winked at the follies of opera-bouffe; probably nowhere in the world are the intellectual depths of a German symphony and the passionate declamation of an Italian recitative more thoroughly appreciated. This is the natural musical exposition of our complex and various life. This wondrous variety, which indicates possibilities not yet revealed, pleases us without being always clear to our feelings and intellect. Still, we shall not ask, with the Frenchman, "Sonate, que veux-tu?" We are satisfied with what the present affords, and what new masters shall appear or what new instruments be invented we know not. Always the epochs will have their own interpreter. One hundred years ago who had imagined a Weber or Steinway piano, that piece of furniture with a soul in it?