broken: Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg each developed in a par-
ticular musical environment, and their music is as much a result of their
having been born at a certain time and place as was Beethoven's or
Palestrina's.

Because of this close connection with the immediate past, the
discussions of the composers and styles of twentieth-century music will
be preceded by a short survey of the music of the nineteenth. Because
a comprehensive discussion of the nineteenth century is obviously
inappropriate to this book, the purpose of this survey is only to re-
acquaint the reader with the musical environment into which com-
posers of twentieth-century music were born and in which they
developed.

Nineteenth-century music extends from Beethoven to Wagner.
This period was, of course, the century of romanticism, and music, the
most romantic of all the arts, assumed a dominating position and ac-
quired a listening public far surpassing that which it had enjoyed in
earlier times. Instead of being associated almost entirely with church
or court, music became one of the most prized possessions of the new
middle class. People of the day performed music for their own pleasure
as never before, whether as amateur pianists playing the Songs Without
Words or four-hand arrangements of Mozart symphonies, or as parlor
singers rendering one of the hundreds of love songs that were pub-
lished at the time, or as members of a municipal chorus. For listeners,
too, an opportunity to hear symphonies and operas as well as glamor-
ous virtuosos was provided by the public concerts that, for the first
time, were given in large numbers.

Beethoven is the great figure towering over all nineteenth-century
music, and his influence was so enormous that it was felt by the most
distant of his followers. Both Wagner and Brahms, for instance, no
matter how different their ideals, could claim to be his heir. The
composer of music dramas looked to the last movement of the Ninth
Symphony as evidence that instrumental music needed words in order
to be truly expressive, while Brahms, who had actually been hailed as
the third "B," found it natural to write most of his works in Beethoven's
favorite modes of organization, the sonata and variation forms.

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