Part 3

But if not with Beethoven himself, with whom did these so-called traditions originate? Was it with the first great public interpreters of his works, who introduced them to the world of concert-goers and so earned the right to have their readings respected? Who was the first, most enthusiastic, courageous, and efficient champion of Beethoven’s piano works? Who did most to introduce them to the concert audiences of Europe, to force for them first a hearing, then a reluctant recognition? Who first and oftenest dared to present Beethoven’s serious chamber music to the frivolous sensation-loving Parisians, and to risk his unprecedented popularity with them upon the venture? Who but Franz Liszt! For nearly two decades, during the whole of his phenomenal career as a virtuoso, the vast weight of his musical influence and example, the incalculable force of his fervid, magnetic personality, and his inexhaustible resources as an executant, were all brought to bear in behalf of his revered Beethoven, in the effort to render his best piano works familiar and popular with the European public. It is safe to say that during that period Liszt introduced more Beethoven sonatas to more people than all other pianists combined. He then established such traditions as there may be regarding the proper interpretation of these works; and surely no one who heard him play, no one who is even slightly familiar with his life, characteristics, and art ideals, will think for a moment of classing him with the conservative school, with the inflexible, puritanical adherents to cut-and-dried theories and the cold dead letter of the law as represented by the printed notes.

But we are told that precisely these printed notes and signs should be our only and all-sufficient guide. We are commanded to stick to the text and not to presume to take personal liberties with so sacred a thing as a Beethoven composition. I wonder if the advocates of this idea, which does so much credit to their bump of veneration and so little to their artistic insight, ever took the trouble to examine the text of these same Beethoven compositions in the earliest editions, as they came first from his own hand; and if so, whether they noticed the conspicuous absence of marks of expression. When they urge that Beethoven probably knew best how his works should be rendered and that we ought to follow exclusively and religiously his indications, do they know how very few and inadequate these were? So few, in fact, that if only those given by the composer are to be observed, even the most rigid of our sticklers for classical severity are guilty of the most flagrant breaches of their own rule. Are we then to suppose that Beethoven wished his music played without varying expression, on one dead monotonous level? Not at all; but simply to infer that, like many great composers, he felt such indications to be wholly unnecessary, and was far too impatient to stop for such mechanical details. To him his music was the vital utterance of the intense life within. The meaning and true delivery of each phrase were vividly, unmistakably self-evident, needing arbitrary marks of expression as little as a heart-felt declaration of love or outburst of grief. He rightly assumed that to be played at all as it should be, such music must first be felt, and that visible marks of expression would be as needless to the player with intuitive comprehension, as they would be useless to the player without it. Just as Chopin omitted the indication “tempo rubato” from all his later works, declaring that any one who had sense enough to play them at all would know that it was demanded without being told.

True, Beethoven’s works have been edited well-nigh to death since his time, but of course without his sanction or revision; and as no two editions agree, who shall decide which is infallible? And why, I ask, is not the audible interpretation at the piano of a Liszt, a Rubinstein, or a Paderewski just as likely to be legitimate as the printed interpretation of a Bülow or a Lebert? Has not one artist as good a right to his conception as another? And in heaven’s name what possible reason is there for assuming, in regard to an intensely emotional composer and player like Beethoven, that the coldly, stiffly scholastic reading of his works is more in accordance with his original intention than a more warm and subjective one?

Moreover, even if there were a complete, corrected, authorized edition of Beethoven, carefully revised by the composer himself, any one who has ever written out, proof-read, and finally published the simplest original composition knows well by experience how utterly impossible it is to indicate definitely, with our imperfect system of marking, just how each strain should be rendered. A general outline of the whole effect desired can be given; but try as we may, all the more delicate shades, the finer details of accent and inflection, must always be left to the taste, insight, and temperament of the individual performer; just as the intelligent reading of a poem depends upon much besides an observance of the punctuation marks. It is not within the limits of human ability to edit a single period of eight measures so perfectly that no variations or mistakes in the interpretation are possible.

In view of these facts, I am bold enough to maintain that there is no such thing as an absolutely correct traditional rendering of any single Beethoven composition, one to be followed inflexibly. It might be said of Beethoven, and in fact of any great composer, as aptly as of Shakespeare, that he is always on the level of his readers. Those possessing neither natural nor acquired appreciation for the best music will find in Beethoven nothing but a series of unintelligible and more or less disagreeable noises, like Humboldt. Those who by nature, training, and habit of mind are fitted to perceive and enjoy only the physical and intellectual elements in tonal art,—its sensuous effect upon the ear, its rhythmic movement, its ingenious intricacies of structure and symmetry of form,—will seek and find, and, if they are players, will emphasize in Beethoven only these factors, and will vehemently protest that there is nothing else there, and that any attempt to find or to introduce anything else is presumptuous and morbid. But those to whom music is the artistic medium for the expression of the strongest, deepest, and best of human emotions, who demand that every strain shall come fresh and warm from the heart of the composer and speak directly and forcefully to the heart of the hearer; those to whom the brain, no less than the hand, is a servant to that higher, subtler ego we call the soul, and form and technic alike mere vehicles for soul utterance, will strive, with humble, self-abnegating fidelity, to read between the lines of the printed music that unwritten, unwritable spirit of their composer; will infuse for the moment their own pulsing, revivifying life into the symbolic forms until they glow with at least a faint suggestion of their original warmth and vitality, as when freshly born of the passion and the labor of genius. These alone can give us, in the light and truth of spiritual intuition, the only approximately _traditional Beethoven playing_.

BEETHOVEN 1770 1827

Beethoven: The Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2 (C Sharp Minor)

There is probably no composition for the piano of any real merit, by any writer, which is so universally known, at least by name, as this sonata. Every one has heard of it, read about it, and most persons are more or less familiar with the music, or at any rate with portions of it, especially the first movement, which is, technically, easy enough to be _executed_, in the literal sense, with the greatest facility by every school-girl.

According to strict requirements of the law of form it is, in reality, not a sonata at all, but a free fantasia, in three detached movements, of a very pronounced but widely diverse emotional character. There has been considerable questioning on the part of the public, and much discussion among musicians, as to the origin of its name, its relevancy to the music, and the true artistic significance of the work.

There is little, if any, suggestion of moonlight, or the mood usually associated with a moonlight scene, in any of the movements; but there are several more or less credited traditions concerning it afloat, legitimatizing the title and explaining its origin. Of these, the one that seems to the present writer most fully authenticated and best sustained by the content of the compositions as a whole is the following. It is given, not as a verified fact, but as a suggestive possibility, a legendary background in keeping with the work.

It is a well-known matter of history that, during his early struggles for existence in Vienna, while experiencing the inevitable period of probation, well named the “starvation epoch,” common to the lot of every creative artist, and the equally inevitable heritage of great genius, born fifty years in advance of its time,—lack of appreciation and scathing abuse from the self-constituted, self-satisfied foes of all progressive art, called critics,—Beethoven had the additional misfortune to fall deeply, but hopelessly, in love with a beautiful and brilliantly accomplished, though shallow, young heiress, of noble birth and lofty social position, Julie Guicciardi by name, who was, for a short time, one of his pupils. She is said to have returned his affection, but the union was, of course, under the then prevailing conditions, utterly impossible; and even if it could have taken place, would doubtless have proved most incompatible and uncongenial. She was a countess, accustomed to luxury and splendor; he an obscure musician fighting for the bare necessities of life, hardly higher in the social scale than her father’s valet and not so well paid. It was absurd; and blind Love had blundered once again in his marksmanship. Or was it an intentional, cruel shaft from the tricky little god? In any case, Beethoven was deeply smitten; and this unlucky passion darkened and saddened his life for many years, and is accountable for much of the somber tone which we find in his compositions of that period.

So much is fact. The story goes that one evening, when wandering in the outskirts of the city, on one of those long, solitary walks, which were his only relaxation, he chanced to pass an elegant suburban villa in which a gay social gathering was in progress. Some one was playing one of his recent compositions as he went by—a rare occurrence in those days. His attention was attracted and, half unconsciously, he stopped to listen—stopped, as luck would have it, in a full flood of moonlight, was recognized from within, and a laughing company of the guests, Julie among them, sallied out, surrounded and captured him, and fairly compelled him to come in and play for them. They insisted that he should improvise and should take for his theme the moonlight which had been the cause of his capture and their unexpected pleasure. The usually reticent, intractable, not to say morose, Beethoven at last consented—under who shall say what subtle spell of Julie’s voice and eyes?—and seated himself at the piano.

But those who are at all familiar with his music know that Beethoven was, except in a few rare instances, an emotional, not a realistic writer; a subjective, not an objective artist; reproducing not the scenes and circumstances of his environment or fancied situations, but the emotional impressions which they produced upon his own inner being, colored by his own personality and the mental conditions of the moment, often just the reverse of what might naturally have been expected. What he most keenly felt on this particular occasion was not the soft splendor of the summer night, or the opulent luxury and careless, superficial gaiety about him, but the bitter and cutting contrast which they afforded to his own struggling, sorrow-darkened, care-laden existence, full of disappointments and humiliations, of petty, sordid, yet unavoidable anxieties, with those twin vultures ever at his heart—a hopeless love, an unappreciated genius. The result was moonlight music in which no gleam of moonlight was reflected; only its somber shadow lying heavily and depressingly upon the stream of his emotions, which poured themselves out through the harmonies of this composition with an unconscious power and truth and a pathetic grandeur which have justly made it world-famous.

The first movement expresses unmingled sadness, but without any weakness of vain complaint; a calm, candid, but hopeless recognition of the inevitable.

The second seems to be an attempt at a lighter, more cheerful strain, a fleeting recollection of his ostensible theme; but it is only partially successful and very brief, and is followed by a reaction into a mood far more intense and darkly fierce than the first.

The last movement is full of indignant protest, of passionate rebellion, with occasional bursts of fiery defiance. In it we see the strong soul, surging like the waves of a mighty sea against the rocky borders of fate, striving desperately to break through or over them, and returning again and again to the fruitless attempt, with a courage only equaled by its futility. It is the Titan Beethoven battling with the gods of destiny.

It is, of course, unlikely, even impossible, that this improvisation,—the tradition being true,—was precisely the music of the Moonlight Sonata in its present form. It could but furnish the themes, outlines, and moods of the various movements, subsequently developed into the composition so widely known and admired.

Beethoven: Sonata Pathétique, Op. 13

With the exception, perhaps, of the “Moonlight,” this work is the best known to the world at large, and the one most frequently attempted by ambitious students of the Beethoven sonatas. Its familiar title was not bestowed by Beethoven himself, but by some publishers later, and seems to me inaptly chosen; in fact, not at all justly applicable to the composition as a whole. It was probably suggested partly by the minor key, but mainly by the second movement, which is gravely pathetic in mood. As a whole the work is far too strong, intense, and dramatic to warrant the name. _Sonata Tragica_ would have been better. I have not been able to find any authority for attributing to it definite descriptive significance in the objective sense. It is the forceful expression of a pronounced emotional condition, or rather, sequence of experiences, embodied with all the fervent glow and impetuous power of early manhood, yet with the precision and finish of maturity. Every measure is replete with intense feeling as well as intrinsic beauty. There is not a superfluous note or a meaningless embellishment in it from beginning to end; not an ounce of sawdust stuffing to fill out the defective contours of a stereotyped form—which, alas! is not true of many of Beethoven’s piano works; and, all in all, it seems to the present writer to be the most musically interesting and evenly sustained composition for the piano from Beethoven’s pen.

The broad, impressive introduction marked _grave_ is full of strength and somber majesty. It is gloomily grand rather than pathetic, like the epitome of some stern fatalist’s philosophy of life, and reminds one of Swinburne’s lines:

“More dark than a dead world’s tomb, More high than the sheer dawn’s gate, More deep than the wide sea’s womb, Fate.”

The first subject of the allegro movement is anything but pathetic. It is full of fire, energy, and restless striving; of fierce conflict and desperate endeavor; of the defiant pride of genius exulting in the unequal combat with the world’s stony indifference, and the inimical conditions of life.

The second theme is warmer and more nearly approaches the lyric vein. It is half pleading, half argumentative in tone, strikingly suggestive of the mood so common to young but gifted souls, in the bitterness of their first pained surprise at the cruel contrast between the ideal and the actual in life. It seems to strive to reason with unreasoning and unreasonable facts, and to touch the heart of a heartless fate with its tender pleading. The continually reiterated embellishments upon the melody notes here should be given distinctly as a _mordente_, with marked accent on the last of the three tones in every case, not played as a triplet with accent on the first, as is so often done, and even so indicated in many standard editions, thus materially weakening the effect of the passage, rendering it trivial and characterless as well as out of keeping with the general mood. This is what Kullak used to call “the lazy way” of playing it. The striking contrast between the first and second subjects should be maintained throughout, with greatest possible distinctness, and the closing chords must be given boldly, defiantly, like a challenge proudly flung to all the powers of darkness, to fate, no matter how adverse.

With the second movement comes a radical change of mood. The first impetuous vigor has been expended in the struggle; the first joy of combat and self-reliant consciousness of strength have ebbed away like a receding tide, leaving the soul exhausted, discouraged, but not despairing. There is a moment of truce in life’s battle, a moment of calm, though sad reflection; a moment in which to contemplate the impassable gulf between the heaven-piercing heights of ambition and the petty levels of possible human achievement, in which to dream, not of victory and happiness,—those are among the unattainable ideals,—but of rest and sweet forgetfulness, and to say with Tennyson—

“What profit do we have to war with evil? Let us alone.”

There is an occasional hint of the volcanic fires of passion, slumbering beneath this surface calm of a spirit sent to earth, but not broken, gathering its forces for a fresh uprising. But as a whole it is tranquilly thoughtful, gravely introspective, and should be rendered with great deliberation and profound earnestness.

The last movement is hardly up to the standard of the other two, either musically or emotionally. Still it is interesting, symmetrically made, and not devoid of depth and intensity. It is perhaps a logical conclusion to the work, if we regard the whole as a sort of tone-poem on life. With most of us in youth, our boundless courage and aspiration lead us to dare all things and believe in the possibility of all things; to hurl ourselves into the fight with destiny, with the limitless presumption of untried powers and unwarrantable hopes. Later comes a period of depression and discouragement, in which nothing seems worth effort, so far do realities fall below our expectations. Then, if we are reasonable, we learn, at last, to adapt ourselves in a measure to things as they are, to content ourselves in some wise with the flowers, since the stars are out of reach, and to measure achievement relatively, not by the standard of our first glorious, ever-to-be-regretted ambitions, but of the possible, the partial and imperfect, under the limitations of inflexible earthly conditions; and we quench our soul’s thirst as best we may with the meager, mingled draught of bitter-sweet that life offers.

This movement is light, rapid, and would be cheerful but for its minor key and its undertone of plaintive sadness. It seems like an attempt to take a brighter view of life, but is still shadowed by past experiences,—a touching gaiety dimmed by the mist of recent tears,—and this is, perhaps unintentionally, the most nearly pathetic of the three movements. It should be given with life and warmth, and, despite the pedants, with a free use of the rubato, but not with extreme velocity.

Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 26

This sonata, like the “Moonlight” and several others in the collection of Beethoven’s piano work bearing this name, is not cast in the usual sonata mold; in fact, it is not a sonata at all, according to the modern technical application of the term. But as the name sonata was originally derived from the Italian verb _sonare_, to sound, or, in musical parlance, to cause to sound, to play upon a musical instrument, and was used to designate any piece of instrumental music whatsoever, in distinction from that which was intended to be sung, it is perhaps as correctly employed in this connection as in any other.

The first movement of this work consists of a simple, beautiful, melodious, noble lyric theme, followed by five strongly contrasted and strikingly characteristic variations, and an exquisitely tender and expressive little coda.

The _theme and variations_, not only in this, but in every case where the form is well wrought out, is a musical illustration of the natural, logical process of evolution. The simple, vital germ of thought or feeling, inherent in the theme, as the life principle inheres in the germ of wheat, is seen to expand gradually and develop through the successive variations into new and changing forms of ever-increasing beauty and suggestiveness until every latent possibility of expression has been matured and exhausted, and the idea has been presented to us in every practicable light and from every attainable standpoint; just as the gradual growth and ripening of the wheat, subjected to nature’s infinite variety of conditions and her ceaseless alternation of day and night, cold and heat, sun and rain, calm and storm, present to us daily some change of form and hue, some new phase of its progressive existence, until complete maturity is reached and its utmost limit of development attained.

A still better analogy may be drawn from human experience itself, from the constant modification and development of a given character, subjected to the shifting vicissitudes and changeful, often conflicting influences of daily life. It is interesting and helpful, in studying or listening to any work in the _theme and variation_ form, to conceive of the theme as symbolizing a definite personality, as of hero or heroine in a narrative, a personality clearly marked, but undeveloped, distinct to the mind of the composer, and which the performer or hearer should endeavor to grasp with equal definiteness. Each variation may then represent some varying phase of life, some different experience or influence, or emotional condition, bearing upon this typified personality. The peculiar mood and suggestive characteristics of each variation must be clearly perceived and strongly emphasized, and its due relation to the whole work preserved, while the underlying, all-pervading theme must be kept intelligibly recognizable through all its most capricious and widely contrasting modifications, to give purpose and continuity to the whole; just as the strongly marked individuality of a well-drawn character is traceable through all the manifold vicissitudes of life and may be counted on to follow out its own inherent laws of evolution, no matter what the circumstances or conditions to which it may be subjected.

Let us, in the case of this sonata, conceive of the first simple theme as suggesting, through the subtle symbolism of tone effects, the character of our hero, gravely tender, calmly resolute, nobly, warmly, generously affectionate, with much of innate strength, tempered by gentleness and latent passion, refined by ideality.

In the first variation life presents itself to him as a serious but interesting and agreeable problem, possessing the charm of mystery. He investigates, speculates, reflects, lingers fascinated upon the threshold of the shadowy unknown, enjoys the vague delight of its dim but inviting perspective.