erly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the
reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on
the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the
warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the
Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the
Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible
transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that
one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian
key was formerly called the Phrygian, and _vice versa_. The fact is,
however, that the names have not changed--it is the ear which has
changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the
seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the
contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the
sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even
before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently
melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson,
indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of
tones"--an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of
nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this
tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key
especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan
declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.

Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the
conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more
simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-,
F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic
peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the
over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and
empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the
out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to
produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily
bread of our composers.

One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if
one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick
the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to
the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided
concerning the characters of the keys; in practic