But in its heart of hearts the ‘art’ song at its best remains an own cousin to the folk-song. This art, the mother of art and the fountain of youth to all arts that are senescent, takes what is typical, what is common to all men, casts it into a form which is intelligible to all men, and passes through a thousand pairs of lips and a thousand improvements until it is past the power of men further to perfect it. Its range of subject is as wide as life itself, only it chooses not what is individual and peculiar, but what is universal and typical. It has a matchless power for choosing the expressive detail and the dramatic moment. An emotion which shakes nations it can concentrate into a few burning lines. It is never conscious that it is great art; it takes no thought for the means; it is only interested in expressing its message as powerfully and as simply as possible. In doing this it hits upon the phrases that are at the foundation of our musical system, at the cadences which block in musical architecture upon the structure from which all conscious forms are derived. This popular art, as we have said, has revivified music again and again. It was the soul of the Lutheran chorale, which, the Papists sneeringly said, was the chief asset of the Reformation, since it furnished the sensuous form under which religion took its place in the hearts of the people. It is the foundation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music from beginning to end. And it is therefore the foundation of the work of Bach’s most famous son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, from whom the ‘art song’ takes its rise. In the fifties he published the several editions of his ‘Melodies’ to the spiritual songs of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert; these may be taken as the beginning of modern song. In his preface Bach shows the keenness of his understanding, stating in theory the problem which Schubert solved in practice. He says that he has endeavored to invent, in each case, the melody which will express the spirit of the whole poem, and not, as had been the custom, merely that which accords with the first stanza. In other words, he recognizes the incongruity of expecting one tune to express the varying moods of several dissimilar stanzas. His solution was to strike a general average among the stanzas and suit his tune to it. Schubert solved the problem by composing his music continuously to suit each stanza, line, and phrase--in other words, by establishing the _durchkomponiertes Lied_, the modern art song.