Part 3
When the fingers strike the keys the hammers strike the strings, the force of the stroke depending upon the force exerted by the player, this being the distinguishing merit of the pianoforte as compared with its precursors. Under the strings are a row of dampers, and as soon as a finger releases a key the corresponding damper springs into place against the vibrating strings, stops the vibrations, and the tone ceases. Thus the tone can be dampened immediately by raising the finger or prolonged by keeping the finger pressed down on the key. This is the device which enables the pianist to play _staccato_ or _legato_. The damper pedal, or loud pedal, checks the action of all the dampers and prolongs the tones even after the fingers have released the keys. The soft pedal brings the hammers nearer the strings, shortens the stroke and produces a softer tone. The simultaneous use of both pedals is a modern virtuoso effect and a very charming one, for the damper pedal prolongs the gentle tones produced by the use of the soft pedal. I believe Paderewski was the first of the great pianists who have visited this country, to employ this effect systematically, and that he was among the first composers to formally indicate the simultaneous employment of both pedals in passages in his compositions. There is a third pedal called the sustaining pedal, but I do not think it has proved as valuable an invention as was anticipated.
Within recent years there have been introduced mechanical pianofortes, which I may designate as pianolas, after the most popular instrument of their class. In my opinion, these instruments are destined to play an important part in the diffusion of musical knowledge, and it is senseless to underestimate this. There are thousands of people who have neither the time nor the dexterity to master the technique of the pianoforte, who nevertheless are people of genuine musical feeling, and who are enabled through the pianola to cultivate their taste for music. The device renders the music accurately; whether expressively or not depends, as with the pianoforte itself, upon the taste of the person who manipulates it.
Decorations That Do Not Beautify.
The pianoforte often is spoken of as an instrument of ugly appearance. This it emphatically is not. If the straight side of the grand is placed against the wall the side toward the room presents a graceful, sweeping curve, while the upright effectively breaks the straight line of the wall against which it stands. If the pianoforte is ugly, it is due to the so-called "ornaments" that are placed upon it--the knicknacks, framed pictures and other senseless things. To my mind, there is but one thing which it is permissible to place upon a pianoforte, a slender vase with a single flower, preferably a rose--the living symbol of the soul that waits to be awakened within the instrument.
Sheet music or bound books of music on top of a pianoforte are an abomination. If scattered about they look disorderly; if neatly arranged in portfolios, even worse, for they create the precise, orderly appearance of paths and mounds in a cemetery. Often, indeed, the pianoforte is a graveyard of musical hopes. Because of that, however, it need not be made to look like one.
Equally objectionable is the elaborately decorated or "period" pianoforte designed for rooms decorated in the style of some historical art period. A pianoforte has no business in a "period" room. If the person is rich enough to afford "period" rooms, he also can afford a music room, and the simpler this is, within the bounds of good taste, and the less there is in it besides the instrument itself, the better. The more proficient the pianist the less he cares for decoration and the more satisfied he is with the pianoforte turned out in the ordinary course of business by the high-class manufacturer. No--decorated pianofortes are for those who are too rich to be musical.
II
BACH'S SERVICE TO MUSIC
So important has been the role played by the pianoforte in the evolution of music that it is possible in these chapters on a pianoforte recital to give a general survey of the art, and thus prepare the reader to enjoy not only what he will hear at such a recital, but enable him to approach it with a more comprehensive knowledge than that would imply. This is one reason why I elected to lead with the chapters on the pianoforte instead of with those on the orchestra, as usually is done, because the orchestra is something "big." In point of fact, however, the pianoforte, so far as its influence is concerned, is quite as "big," if not, indeed, bigger than the orchestra; for often, in the evolution of music (as I pointed out in the previous chapter), this instrument, which is so sufficient in itself, has led the orchestra. In reviewing a pianoforte recital it therefore is quite possible to review many phases of musical history.
Take as an example a composition by Bach, one of the preludes and fugues from "The Well-Tempered Clavichord," with which a pianoforte recital is quite apt to open. The selection illustrates a whole epoch in music which Bach rounded off and brought alike to its climax and its close. You will be apt to find this fugue rather complicated and, I fear, somewhat unintelligible, and this makes it necessary for me to point out at once that in some respects music has had a curious development. A Wagner music-drama, a Richard Strauss tone poem, seem elaborate and complicated affairs compared with a Beethoven sonata or symphony. Yet even the most advanced work of a Wagner or Strauss is neither as complicated nor as elaborate as a fugue by that past master of his art, Johann Sebastian Bach, who, although he was born in 1685 and did not live beyond the middle of the following century, was so far ahead of his age that not even to this day has he fully come into his own. The result is that the early classicists, Haydn and Mozart, who belong in point of time to a later epoch, may more readily be reckoned as "old-fashioned" than Father Bach. When at a recital you listen to a fugue by Bach and find it hard and labored--many people regard it simply as a difficult species of finger exercises--you think that is because it is so very ancient, something in the same class with Greek or Sanscrit. In point of fact it is because in some respects it is so very modern.
Were it not for the importance of preserving an orderly historical sequence in a book of this kind, and that Bach usually is found at the beginning of a recital program, it would be almost more practical, and certainly far easier, for the author to leave Bach until later. When you write of Mozart, or of Beethoven and the moderns, you can depend upon more or less familiarity with their works on the part of your readers, whereas, comparatively few laymen know much about Bach. They associate the name with all that is formal and labored. Yet among my acquaintances is a young woman who was brought up in a very musical family, and who, having as a child heard her mother play the preludes and fugues of the "Well-Tempered Clavichord," finds Bach as simple as the alphabet. But hers is a most exceptional case. The appreciation of Bach, as a rule, comes only with advanced age. My music teacher used to say to me: "You rave over Schubert and Wagner now, but when you get to be as old as I am you will go back to Father Bach." While I cannot say that his prophecy has come true, while I still am ultra-modern in my musical predilections, my musical gods being Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss and, above all, Wagner, I should consider myself unfit to write this book if I failed to realize the debt modern music owes to Bach, and that the more modern the music the greater the debt.
Bach in Modern Music.
One of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the art--and a generalization like this is as much in place in discussing pianoforte music as elsewhere, because the instrument has had so much to do with the evolution of music--is the gap between Bach and modern music. While the following must not be taken too literally, it is true in general that Bach had little or no influence on the age that immediately came after him, the classical age of music, that age which we sum up in the names of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the age of the sonata and the symphony. The three masters mentioned probably would have developed and composed much as they did had Bach never lived. But when a more modern composer, a romanticist like Wagner, wanted to enrich the means of musical expression handed down to him from the classical period, he reached back to Bach and combined Bach's teeming counterpoint with the harmonic system which had been inherited from Beethoven. To understand just what this means, to appreciate the influence Bach has had upon modern music and why he had little or none on the classical composers, it is necessary for the reader to have at least a reasonably clear conception of what that counterpoint is and wherein it differs from harmony; for with Bach counterpoint reached its climax, and all the possibilities of the style having been exhausted by him, music of necessity took a turn in another direction under the classicists and developed harmonically instead of contrapuntally; so that it can be said that modern music derives its counterpoint from Bach, its harmony from Beethoven, and its combination of the two systems from Wagner.
There is another reason why the meaning of counterpoint should be explained and the difference between counterpoint and harmony be made clear to the reader now. Nearly all the early music, the music that preceded Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and that sometimes is to be found on recital programs, is contrapuntal--written in counterpoint. As I have said before, it would be much easier to start with the sonata form, with harmony instead of counterpoint, for of the two harmony is the simpler. But we must "face the music"--the music of the old contrapuntal composers--and the best way to do this is to explain what harmony and counterpoint are and wherein they differ.
Harmony and Counterpoint.
A melody or theme is a rational progression of single tones. Here is the melody or theme with which Beethoven begins the familiar "Moonlight Sonata":
[Music illustration]
It is a melody, but it does not constitute harmony, for harmony is the rational combination of several tones, as distinguished from the rational progression of single tones which constitute melody. But when Beethoven adds an accompaniment to his theme and it becomes:
[Music illustration]
the passage also becomes harmony, since it is an example of the rational combination of several tones. As has often been pointed out in books on music, and probably often will have to be pointed out again, because as a mistake it is to be classed with the hardy perennials, melody is not harmony, but only a part of it. When, however, a composer conceives a theme or melody he usually does so with the purpose of combining it with an accompaniment that shall support it and throw it into bold and striking relief. Composers of the contrapuntal school, on the other hand, conceived a theme, not for the purpose of supporting it with an accompaniment, but in order to combine it with another or with several other equally important themes. That, in a general way, is the difference between harmony and counterpoint.
In harmony, then, or, more strictly speaking, in music composed according to the harmonic system, of which the "Moonlight Sonata" is a good example, the theme, the melody, stands out from the accompaniment, which is subordinate. Counterpoint, on the other hand, rests on the combination of several themes, each of equal importance. This is the reason why, when there is a fugue or other complicated contrapuntal work on the program of a pianoforte recital, the average listener is apt to find it dry and uninteresting. His ear readily can distinguish the themes of a sonata, which usually are heard one at a time and stand out clearly from the accompaniment, but it has not been trained to unravel the themes of the fugue as they travel along together. Counterpoint, the term being derived from the Latin _contra punctum_, which means point against point or note against note, when complicated, as in a fugue, is about the most elaborate kind of music there is, and a person who is unable to grasp a fugue may console himself with the thought that, excepting for the elect, it is a pretty stiff dose to swallow at the very beginning of a recital.
There are, however, simpler pieces of counterpoint than a fugue. Sometimes, as in the charming little "Gavotte" by Padre Martini, which now and then figures among the lighter numbers on the programs of historical recitals, the contrapuntist combines a theme with itself, or, rather, "imitates" it, which is a simple form of the canon. Another form of canon is the round of which "Three Blind Mice" is a familiar example. How many people, when singing this, have realized that they were being initiated into that mysterious thing known as counterpoint? A comparatively simple form of counterpoint is well illustrated by a dapper little piece in Bach's "Two-Part Inventions," in which the spirited theme given out by the right hand answers itself a bar later in the left, an "imitation" which crops out again and again in the piece and gives it somewhat the character of a canon.
[Music illustration]
For any one who wishes to become acquainted with Bach there is nothing better than these "Two-Part Inventions," especially the fascinating little piece from which I have just quoted, compact, buoyant and gay, even "pert," as I once heard a young girl characterize it; a perfect example of old Father Bach in moments of relaxation when he has laid aside his periwig and is amusing himself at his clavichord.
What a Fugue Is.
Bach's fugues, and especially his "Well-Tempered Clavichord," forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the keys, form the climax of contrapuntal music. Goethe once said that "the history of the world is a mighty fugue in which the voice of nation after nation becomes audible." This is a freely poetic definition of that highly complicated musical form, the fugue. Let me attempt to illustrate it in a different way.
Imagine that a composer who is an adept in counterpoint places four pianists at different pianofortes, and that he gives a different theme to each of them, or a theme to one and modified versions of it to the others. He starts the first pianist, after a few bars nods to the second to join in with his theme, and so on successively with the other two. It might be supposed that when the second player joins in, the two themes sounding together would make discord, which would be aggravated by the addition of the third and fourth. But, instead, they have been so conceived by the contrapuntist that they sound well together as they chase and answer each other, or run counter to and parallel and enter into many different combinations, sometimes flowing along smoothly, at other times surging and striving, yet always, in the case of a truly great fugue, borne along by a momentum as inexorable as the march of Fate. Of course, it must not be supposed, because I have called four pianists into action in order to emphasize how distinct are these themes, which yet, when united, are found to blend together, that several players are required for the performance of a complicated piece of counterpoint like a fugue. What is demanded of the player is entire independence of the fingers, so that he can clearly differentiate between the themes and enable the hearer to distinguish them apart, even in their most complicated combinations. An edition of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavichord" by Bernardus Boekelman prints the themes in different colors, so that they are easy to trace through all their interweaving, and is interesting to study from.
The Fugue and the Virtuoso.
In his book, "Beethoven and His Forerunners," Daniel Gregory Mason devotes a paragraph toward dispelling the mystery regarding the fugue that prevails with the public, and points out that "the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above; then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically asserted by the various voices in quick succession (_stretto_), and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end."
Further along in the same book Mr. Mason has a page of apostrophe to the Bach fugues. When he characterizes them as "the first great independent monuments of pure music," and refers to their "consummate beauty of structure," he pays them an eminently just tribute. But when he speaks of the "profundity, poignancy and variety of feeling they express," I am inclined to quote his own qualifying sentence from the next page of his book: "It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of the ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand." The same is even more true of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The progress of music toward individual freedom of expression on the part of the composer, and equally so on the part of the interpreter, has been steady, and when, through the very perfection which Bach imparted to counterpoint, it ceased to attract composers as a means of expression because he had accomplished so much there was nothing more left for them to do along the same lines, the progress I have indicated received a great lift and stimulus.
What Counterpoint Lacks.
The lack of highly personal expression in contrapuntal compositions explains why most concert-goers find them less attractive than modern music. The "D Minor Toccata and Fugue" or the "Chromatic Fantasie and Fugue" by Bach, even in the arrangements of Tausig and Liszt, on the program of a pianoforte recital, are tolerated because of the modern pieces that come later. Nine out of ten persons in the house would rather omit them. Why deny so obvious a fact, especially when it is easy enough to explain? To follow a contrapuntal composition intelligently requires a highly trained ear. Moreover, in such a work as a Bach fugue the individuality of the player is of less importance than in modern music. Yet a virtuoso's individuality is the very thing that distinguishes him from other virtuosos and attracts the public to his concerts, while those of other players may be poorly attended. I firmly believe in personality of the virtuoso or singer or orchestral conductor, for in it lies the secret of individual interpretation, the reason why the performance of one person is fascinating or thrilling and that of another not. Modern music affords the player full scope to interpret it according to his own mood and fancy, to color it with his own personality, whereas contrapuntal music exists largely for itself alone. It is music for music's sake, not for the sake of interpreting some mood, some feeling, or of painting in tone colors something quite outside of music. The player of counterpoint is restricted in his power of expression by the very formulas of the science or art of the contrapuntist. We may marvel that Bach was able to move so freely within its restricted forms. But I think it true that it is far more interesting for a person even of only moderate proficiency as a player to work out, however awkwardly, a Bach fugue for himself on the pianoforte than to hear it played by some one else, however great; for, cheap and easy as it is to protest in high-sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.
The Mission of the Player.
We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the worshiper of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a snowball, who revels in counterpoint--the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the "composer's intentions" and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.
While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making virtuosos--Paganini on the violin, Liszt on the piano. Within about the same period covered by the careers of these two there have been half a dozen or even more composers, each of whom marks an epoch in some phase of the art. "The interpretive artist," says Henry G. Hanchett in his "Art of the Musician," "deserves a place no whit beneath that of the composer. No two composers have influenced musical progress in America more strongly than have Anton Rubinstein by his _playing_, and Theodore Thomas, who was not a composer."
Music as a Science.