English musical literature is to be commended neither for its abundance nor its excellence. And possibly this remark may admit of a wider application ; whence the same difficulty must attend all art history and criticism, in the fact of its being addressed to two very different classes of persons - the student and the general reader, - to both of whom it is next to impossible that the same matter and the same matter should ever be perfectly acceptable. From whatever cause, however, writers about music have contended with this difficulty with the least success, and indeed may be said to have exhibited, in the contest, a special proneness for 'falling between two stools to the ground.' Useless to the student from its want of technical exactness, musical history or criticism is too often distasteful also to the general reader from the absence of that literary charm in the vain struggle after which technical exactness has been lost...
We have before us a work much more after the model of Hawkins than of Burney ; a book without a line of fine writing in it ; abounding in information sometimes curious and always valuable, put before us in a simple straightforward manner, by two writers who have little in common save the important qualification of thorough knowledge of their subject. The Organ ; its History and Construction, is an honest book, and therefore a readable book - readable not only to the musical student what has a purpose in ascertaining what it contains, but readable to anyone for whom successful research and lucid explanation, in connexion with a subject of general interest, have any charm. For the organ is not brought before us in the pages of Dr. Rimbault and Mr. Hopkins in its poetical or pictureque aspect ; they leave its aesthetical influences where they found them, and abstain from all allusion to the dominion of the king of instruments over the heart of man. The organ with them is, for the time being, not so much the most 'noble,' as 'the most ingenious and complex of musical instruments.'
Lest the bulk of 'The Organ' - symbolizing as it does, in this respect, the instrument which it treats - should intimidate those who would attack a cube of smaller dimensions more courageously, it is right to say that the volume before use is not one book, but three - a trilogy, the two first parts of whic hhave no other connexion than a common subject ; while the third consists rather of matter supplementary to the second, and intended for reference, not consecutive reading. Indeed we see no particular reason why Dr. Rimbault's history and Mr. Hopkins's treatise should have been sent forth to the world in the same wrapper, seeing that they are books written with independent views and purposes, the modes of presenting and furthering which neither have nor demand anything in common... [(]We cannot help thinking that more extended researches in Continental musical literature would enable Dr. Rimbault to add greatly to the interest of the close of his memoir, in a second edition. Even the few facts collected by M. Fetis, especially respecting the Silbermann family, would have been new to many of Dr. Rimbault's readers, who, not sympathizing in the author's antiquarian predilictions, will wonder why, having disinterred such a mass of information about the builders of the middle ages, he has left them so ill informed about those of more recent date...[)]
The 'Comprehensive Treatise' of Mr. Hopkins, which forms the second part of, or rather the second work included in, the volume before us, is by far the most important attempt to describe the 'structure and capabilites' of the organ which has come under our notice... So far indeed has the theory or literature of organ-building been from keeping paces with the practice, that it has been thought worth while lately to put forth the worthy Benedictine's work in a new dress... Mr. Hopkins, well acquainted without doubt with the results of Dom Bedos' labours, has not felt himself bound to follow in his track ; seeing, as everybody must see, that the organ-building of the nineteenth century is a new art, and believing rightly that a new art demands a new method of exposition... Mr Hopkins sums up the arguments for and against 'even temperament,' and the present supposed 'high pitch of the musical scale,' as follows. His decision is so much the more to be respected as it will inevitably lay him open to the charge of insensibility to one of the principal (supposed) sources of musical enjoyment - variety of key : -
The probability is that neither temperament nor pitch, although both capable of exercising great influence, have so much to do with giving 'greater power of colouring to the musical art,' by means of the establishment of the so-called 'character of scale,' as the internal resources of the art itself. For since music has become a language, as well as a science and an art, composers have been enabled to express whatever they please, in any scale they please. They have drawn music of a given 'character,' and its opposite, from one and the same scale. Thus, if Handel selected the 'bold, vigourous, and commanding' scale of C major for the 'Horse and his Rider' chorus, he employed it with equal success also for his 'Dead March in Saul.' If Mendelssohn adopted the same scale, 'expressive of war and enterprise,' for his 'Military Duet,' he used it no less felicitously for his sweet and peaceful aria, 'O rest in the Lord.' If he fixed upon the scale of G minor, 'replete with melancholy,' for his most pathetic second movement in the instrumental introduction to the Lobgesang, he adopted the same 'meek and pensive scale' with equally perfect success also for two of his most vivacious 'scherzos,' those in the Otello and the Midsummer Night's Dream music. Weber selected the 'awfully dark and tragic' scale of D flat major for his inspiriting 'Invitation to the Dance.' But to whatever circumstances, or combination of circumstances, the distinction of scale observable on an equally tempered pianoforte or organ is to be ascribed, one thing is evident, - if the unequal temperament was felt to be insufficient for the purpose of church-organ accompaniment in the seventeenth century, as is evidenced by the unwaried attempts that were made to get rid of it, it cannot be sufficient in the nineteenth, now that the use of a far greater number of scales has become unavoidable from a variety of causes...