Part 12
The something inexplicable to Western imaginations in Chopin’s playing and music, which Liszt so elaborately explains with his definition of Zãl, is nothing but the hopeless antinomy of the East and the West. The touch of the Asiatic in Chopin, tempered by French blood and subjected to the attrition of Parisian drawing rooms, will never be quite clear to us. It peeps out in his mazourkas and in the savage splendor of his F sharp minor polonaise. It lurks in the C sharp minor nocturne and runs riot in the last C minor study. It is not the febrile rage of the Gaul nor the Berserker madness of the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon. It is something infinitely more desperate, more despairing. The pessimism of the East is in it, also its languorous and scented voluptuousness. His music, rich, exuberant, exhaling the scent of tuberose and honeysuckle, is too overpowering if transposed to the violin, voice or orchestra. It is so perfectly piano music that its very structure, as well as atmosphere, undergoes a change when taken away from that instrument. True it is that Chopin did not think so profoundly as Beethoven, but there are compensating clauses in his music. Its exquisite adaptability to the medium for which his music was created is no mean achievement, while the merging of matter and manner is so perfect as sometimes to put Beethoven in the shade.
The Chopin rubato is a fetish relentlessly worshipped by many amiable persons who fancy that it is something sweetly and poetically immoral. It is one of the many superstitions that obstinately clings to the name of Chopin. To play Bach’s music with more rubato and Chopin’s with less would be a boon.
Walter Pater has pronounced in his essay, The School of Giorgione, that music is the archetype of all the arts, the final court of appeal, that “it is the art of music which most completely realizes this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter.” Judged by this Chopin’s music--some of his music--is perfect. He says wonderful things in a wonderful way, and in his master eloquence his voice pierces the mist that hangs so heavily about the base of the Bach and Beethoven peaks. It is not always a sonorous voice, but it is singularly fine, sweet and penetrating. Chopin is a dreamer of dreams and not a bard, but when the sword leaps from the scabbard--O, the charm of its design! The ring of steel is the warrior’s, the voice is the voice of a man mad with patriotic passion, the shy, feminine soul is completely withdrawn. What a Chopin is this! Think of the A flat polonaise, the ones in C minor, in F sharp minor, and the fantaisie-polonaise, with its triumphant climacteric tutti! Where have fled the tender, confiding-morbid voices of the twilight, the opium-haunted twilight? A man panoplied in shining metallic armor, with closed casque, charges the enemy and routs it, while the song of triumph mounts deliriously to his brains. No! no! Chopin is not for the musical Young Person. He can be very terrible and mordant and he is not often tonic and cheering.
“It is the mistake of much popular criticism,” writes Pater, “to regard poetry, music and painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical qualities of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry. In this way the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true æsthetic criticism.”
This especially applies to Chopin. His music may not--despite its canonic classicism--conform to the standards of the art of Bach and Beethoven, but apart from its message its very externals are marvellous. Delicate in linear perspective, logical in architectonic, its color is its chief charm. Too much has been written of the Polish element in this music. Chopin is great despite his nationality. His is not map music, like Grieg’s. It is Polish and something more. He was first a musician and then a Pole. I suspect that too much patriotism is read into his music by impressionable writers. The Thaddeus of Warsaw pose is dead in literature, but it has survived in all its native pulchritude in the biographies of Chopin. Liszt is to blame for this in his sweet-caramel book about Chopin, a true Liszt rhapsody, which George Sand pronounced “un peu exubérante.” Let us once and for all rid ourselves of the dawdling poseur of Liszt, and on the other side avoid the neat, prim, rare-roast beef portrait drawn by Joseph Bennett. Karasowski, in a frantic endeavor to escape Liszt’s Camille of the keyboard, with his violets, his tears and tuberculosis, created a bull-necked athlete, who almost played Polish cricket and had aspirations toward the prize ring.
Chopin’s heroism was emotional, not muscular.
Jean Kleczynski’s book is pedagogic and throws little light on the tradition of Chopin’s execution. The true Chopin tradition is lost. If he returned to-day and played in public we would not accept him. However, he builded better than he knew. His works are for stronger fingers than his.
Mr. Finck is an ardent worshipper at the shrine, and in the Willeby book, the latest of the Chopin lives, there is nothing new and there is much that is misleading, especially the arbitrary and half-baked judgments. The last étude of opus 25 is pronounced weak! It really is a masterpiece among masterpieces. Other critical blunders are not worth haggling over. The greater Chopin, the new Chopin that we Chopin idolaters believe will endure, is not the Chopin of the valses, of the nocturnes--interesting as they are--nor of the tricksy, impish mazourkas. We swear by the F minor fantasy, the barcarolle, the F sharp minor, the fantaisie-polonaises, including the one in E flat minor. We think that no more inspired pages have been written than the D minor, the F minor and the B flat minor preludes, and are speechless before the F minor ballade and the E flat minor scherzo--the one in the B flat minor sonata, and the C sharp minor scherzo. These, only to mention a few, are the quintessence of Chopinism; the rest are popular, banal and of historical interest only.
The real Chopin life has yet to be written, a life that shall embrace his moral and physical natures, that will not shirk his marked abnormalities of vision, of conduct, and will not bow down before that agreeable fetish of sawdust and molasses called “Frédéric Chopin,” created by silly sentimentalists and rose-leaf poets. Chopin, with all his imperfections full blown; Chopin, with his consummate genius for giving pain as well as taking pains; Chopin, the wonder-worker, is a fruitful and unexploited subject for the devout biographer.
V
A LISZT ÉTUDE
I
When Franz Liszt over fifty years age made some suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had all been foreshadowed in Clementi’s Gradus, and its intellectual resultant--the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had not been realized. Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpassingly sweet tones, was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the tone-problem.
The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole who used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies. But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin’s style he was, in the main, manly and unaffected. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end and not the means of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, was his trinity of gods.
Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at Leipsic’s doors and drove back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old-women professors--a respectable crowd that swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at the spirit. Poverty, obedience and chastity were the three obligatory vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic. To attain this triune perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull, musty precedent, and chaste of finger. What wonder, when the dashing young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged by the cotton of prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under; Chopin never competed but stood a slightly astonished spectator at the edge of the fray. He saw his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence, his polonaises were so many cleaving battle-axes and he had perforce to confess that all this noise, this carnage of tone, unnerved him, disgusted him; Liszt was a warrior; not he.
Schumann both by word and note did all he could for the cause and to-day, thanks to Franz Liszt and his followers--Tausig, Rubinstein, d’Albert, Rosenthal, Joseffy, and Paderewski, we can never retrace our footsteps. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a once powerful school, and not the representative of an existing method. There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style and modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the rococo-isms of the idealists, but as a school pure and simple it is of the past. We moderns are eclectic as the Byzantines. We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaption; hence the pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the foundation, the keynote of all is realism; a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and at times forces one to take lingering, retrospective glances. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep and we have many times viewed the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated, artistic frame. But the path was blazoned by the great Magyar and we may now explore with impunity the hitherto trackless region.
Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago principally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand, forearm and upper arm are now important factors in tone production where formerly the finger-tips were considered the end-all, the be-all of technique. The Viennese instruments certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and others in their styles, just as Clementi inaugurated the most startling reforms by writing a series of studies and then building a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety of touch--tone-color--the old pearly-passage, rapid, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished, for it was absorbed in the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and then Liszt forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Sonority, power, dynamic variety and a new manipulation of the pedals combined with a technique that included Bach part playing and the most sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard; these were some of the characteristics of the new school. In the giddiness produced by freely indulging in this heady new wine from old bottles an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the time fatal to pure scholarly interpretation. The classics were mangled by the young vandals who enlisted under Liszt’s victorious standard. “Color, only color, all the rest is but music” was the motto of these bold youths who had never heard of Paul Verlaine. But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its clangorous quality and when the last Liszt pupil gives his last recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig’s efforts to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has been toned down into more sober, grateful coloring. The scarlet vest of the romantic school has been outworn; the brutal brilliancies and orchestral effects of the realists are now viewed with mild amusement.
We are beginning to comprehend the possibilities of the instrument and--of ourselves. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as Donizetti or Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is almost as obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. Bold is the man who plays one in public. Realism beyond a certain point in piano playing, is dangerous. We are in a transition period. With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The new was preached in piano music by Johannes Brahms whose music suggests a continuation of Beethoven’s last period, with an agreeable amalgam of Schumann and Bach. The gray is in fashion; red is tabooed. The drunken, tattered gypsy who dances with bell and cymbalum accompaniment in the Lisztian rhapsody is just tolerated. He is too strong for our polite nostrils. The Brahms rhapsodies say more; they deal not with externals but with soul states. The glitter is absent, brilliancy is lacking but there is a fulness of emotional life, a depth and eloquence of utterance that makes Liszt’s tinsel ridiculous. To this new school, not wholly realistic yet certainly not idealistic in its aims, is piano playing and composing drifting. It may be the decadence--perhaps an artistic Götterdämmerung.
The nuance in piano playing is ruler. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy is present, but the nuance is necessary--not alone the nuance of tone but of expression. Infinite shadings are to be found where before were but the forte, the piano and the mezzo forte. Joseffy taught America the nuance just as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of tone. As Paul Verlaine, the French poet, cried: “Pas la couleur rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est littérature.”
II
“The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young.”
This sentence, charmingly phrased as it is charming in sentiment, could be uttered by no other than Camille Saint-Saëns. He wrote of Liszt and, as the natural son of the Hungarian composer, musically speaking, he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most critics; his adoration is perfectly excusable, for to him Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of classical form only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the romantic. They all came from Berlioz; Saint-Saëns’ violent protest to the contrary; only this much may be urged in the latter’s favor: a great movement like the romantic movement in music, painting and literature appeared simultaneously in a half dozen places. It was in the air, and catching. Goethe dismissed the whole movement in his usual Jovian fashion, saying to Eckermann: “They all come from Châteaubriand,” and this is a sound criticism for, in the writings of the author of The Genius of Christianity and Atala may be found the germ-plasm of all the artistic disorder; the fierce color, the bizarrerie, the morbid extravagance, the introspective analysis--which in Amiel’s case amounted almost to mania. Stendhal was the unwilling St. John of the movement that captivated the powerful imagination of Franz Liszt, as it later caused the orphic utterances of Richard Wagner.
Saint-Saëns sets great store on Liszt’s original compositions, and I am sure when all the brilliant, empty operatic paraphrases and Hungarian rhapsodies are forgotten, the true Liszt will shine more brightly. How cheap and tinkling are these piano rhapsodies, and how the old bones do rattle! We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz variations and Kalkbrenner’s fantasias but the next generation will laugh at us for tolerating Liszt’s rhapsodies when Brahms has written three such wonderful examples. Technically the Liszt arrangements are excellent finger pieces. You may “show off” with them and make much noise and a reputation for virtuosity that would be shattered if a Bach fugue were selected as a test. One Chopin mazourka contains more music than all of Liszt’s rhapsodies, which are but overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt’s pompous, affected introductions, spun-out scales and transcendental technical feats are all foreign to the wild, native simplicity of Hungarian folk-music.
I need not speak of Liszt’s admirable transcriptions of songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz, nor of his own original songs nor yet of his three concertos for piano. All these are witnesses to the man’s geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish to speak only of the compositions for piano solo composed by Liszt, Ferencz of Raiding, Hungaria. Many I salute with the Eljen of patriotic enthusiasm, and I particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his knowledge of the études--those wonderful continuations of the Chopin études--of his acquaintance with the Années de Pèlerinage, of the Valse Oubliée, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the nocturnes, of the F sharp impromptu, of Ab-Irato--that étude of which most pianists never heard--of the Apparitions, of the Legendes, of the Ballades, of the mazourka in A major, of the Elegies, of the Harmonies Poétiques, of the Concerto Patetico à la Burmeister, of many other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory--as Philip Hale would say--a half dozen piano composers at this fag-end of the century.
The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B minor sonata was one of those compositions that played itself, it lay so beautifully for the hand; and while I have not encountered many self-playing B minor sonatas nor even many pianists who can attack the work in a manner commensurate with its content, I am thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of the great pianist’s remark. To me no work of Liszt, with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie which masquerades in H moll as a sonata. Agreeing with Mr. Krehbiel and Mr. Henderson, who declare that they cannot find a trace of a sonata in the organic structure of this composition, and also with those who declare this work to be an amplification of the old obsolete form and that Liszt has simply taken Beethoven’s latest sonata period as a starting point and made a plunge for futurity--agreeing absolutely with these warring factions, and thus choking off the contingency of an interesting argument, I repeat that I find the B minor sonata of Liszt most fascinating music.
What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It certainly stirs the blood--it is intense and it is complex. The opening bars are so truly Lisztian.
The gloom, the harmonic haze out of which emerges that bold theme in octaves, the leap from the G to the A sharp--how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own! Power there is--sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E flat concerto which is mocking, cynical, but tremendous. How incisively the composer taps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking Ds! What follows is like a drama enacted in the nether-world. Is there really a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, better than Liszt? Berlioz had the gift, so had Raff, so has Saint-Saëns, but thin, sharp flames hover about the brass, wood and shrieking strings of Liszt’s orchestra. The chorale, which is usually the meat of a Liszt composition, soon appears and proclaims the composer’s religious belief in powerful accents, and we are swept away in conviction until after that burst in C, when comes the insincerity of it in the following harmonic sequences. Then it is not real heart-whole belief, and after the faint return of the opening motive, appears the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment which engenders the notion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix, he was before a woman. He dearly loves to blend piety and passion in the most mystically-amorous fashion, and in this sonata with the cantando espressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for pyx and reredos.
But the rustle of silken attire is in every bar; sensuous imagery, faint perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah, naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy chorales and tonsures, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody and in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress; wilt thou allow her to make away with thy resolutions? Vade retro, Sathanas! and it is done; the bold utterance so triumphantly proclaimed at the outset is sounded with chordal pomp and power. The hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and so this ruddy, moving picture with its swirl of intoxicating colors goes kaleidoscopically on. Again the devil tempts this musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major, and he momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is heard again and if its orthodoxy is in spots faulty, it serves its purpose, for the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic disease, is short-winded. Another flank movement of the “ewig Weibliche,” this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him and in the triolen of the bass, frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendor. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the conqueror, Liszt the magnificent, is stamped on every octave. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the earth tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from this cyclopean fist! Then follow a few bars of that very Beethoven-like andante, a moving return of the early themes, and silently the first lento descends to the subterranean depths whence it emerged; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor contains all of Liszt’s strength and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long, it is full of nobility, a drastic intellectuality and sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a prominent place in the repertory of piano music, were folly.
It is not my intention to claim your consideration for the rest of Liszt’s original compositions. In the Années de Pèlerinage, redolent of Virgilian meadows, with soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious than the étude Au Bord d’une Source? It is exquisitely idyllic. Surely in those years of pilgrimage Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the French salon or Continental concert platform.
Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian patterned after the noblest things of nature. In the atmosphere of salons of the Papal Court and the public, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character.
Oh, I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord! Pooh! if he had not had to cut and run to sanctuary to escape two women we should never have heard of Liszt the Abbé!