The ambiguities of our title were deliberately intended to be provocative. I have forgotten whether, when I originally planned this title, I referred to public virtues and private vices or the other way around. It makes little difference either way. But when I use the terminology of morality, I am applying it to values of scientific investigation and artistic endeavor. I do not mean to apply moral values to any works of art. Attempts from Plato onward to ascribe such values to art have been distinguished mainly by their ineptitude.

First let us have a look at some constant themes in the nineteenth-century background that determined much twentieth-century treatment of old music. With the nineteenth century, an unprecedented awareness of history and of documents came to the Western world. This coincided with a vast increase in communication with other parts of the world, and produced an eclecticism that is the natural result of widespread contacts and acquaintances in historical time and geographical space. But most striking in this background are certain antitheses. The eighteenth-century antithesis between the life of reason and the life of sentiment leads to a conflict all through the nineteenth century between rational social planning and Romantic individualism, and, in a way, to the contrast between the results of the Industrial Revolution and the revival of handcrafts. The notion of progress that dominated the last half of the nineteenth century is almost always counterbalanced by a nostalgia for the past. All of this we can easily connect with the coming revival of early music.

Also important is the enormous influence of science, of so-called scientific thinking, and the inroads it has made ever since the mid-nineteenth century on social, psychological, and artistic values, and most especially its influence on history, with its habits of precise demonstrable documentation and distrust of subjectivity and intuition.

Another element in the picture is the increasing over-ripeness of Romanticism at the end of the century, and the feeling of living in a “Spätzeitalter”—in a late age—that in the 1920s comes to a head in the books of Spengler.