Sometimes, when listening to his music, I ask
myself: "Why is it that this, which must be of German origin, seems to
be part of all of us, to have been designed for us all?"
Beethoven, too, like Mozart, is a man without a country. As the one
manipulates his joyous, soft, serene rhythms, the other throbs and
trembles with obscure meanings and pathetic, heartrending laments, the
source of which lies hidden as at the bottom of some mine.
He is a Segismund who complains against the gods and against his fate in
a tongue which knows no national accent. A day will come when the
negroes of Timbuktu will listen to Mozart's and Beethoven's music and
feel that it belongs to them, as truly as it ever did to the citizens of
Munich or of Vienna.
THE FOLK SONG
The folk song lies at the opposite pole from universal music. It is
music which smacks most of the soil whereon it has been produced. By its
very nature it is intelligible at all times to all persons in the
locality, if only because music is not an intellectual art; it deals in
rhythms, it does not deal in ideas. But beyond the fact of its
intelligibility, music possesses different attractions for different
people. The folk song preserves to us the very savour of the country in
which we were born; it recalls the air, the climate that we breathed and
knew.
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