Part 14
But what charming études are in op. 2 and op. 5! What a wealth of technical figures, what an imperative legato is demanded! and then, above all else, touch, euphony! To play Henselt with a hard, dry touch would be Hamlet with the melancholy Dane not in it. I remember reading in the preface to a book by Ehrlich (some études of his) that in the modern sense a beautiful touch was a drawback, for while it might be ever grateful to the ear, yet if it were not colored and modified to suit the exigencies of modern music it would simply be a hindrance. The writer quoted Thalberg as an example of a pianist with a beautiful touch, but invariably the same style of a singing touch. Liszt was instanced as a man whose singing touch lacked the fat, juicy cantabile quality, but whose tonal gamut was all comprehensive, and who could be tender, dramatic, poetic and classic at will; of course this is the modern ideal of piano playing--although the color business is a bit overdone, variety in tinting at the expense of good, solid brush work--yet we cannot dream of Henselt being played with a bad touch. Fancy mangling that delicious Bird Study by a “modern” dramatic touch! Fancy stroking rudely the plumage of this beautiful bird, and have it pant its little life away in your brutal grasp! I have heard pianists play this étude as if the bird were a roc, and they were throttling it Sindbad fashion for its fabulous egg. Ah, Vladimir Pachmann, how that little bird did sing under your coaxing touch! and how tenderly you put it away into its silvery cage when it had trilled its sweet pipe! You triple locked the cage, too, black bearded Pashaw that you were, by playing three chords in F sharp, mounting an octave at a time!
The Henselt studies should not precede those of Chopin; in fact, some of the Chopin studies could be sandwiched in with Clementi, Moscheles, if you study him, and Kessler. Chopin used the Moscheles prelude. But don’t fail to study Henselt. He will give you freedom, a capacity for stretching, a sweetness of style that no other writer possesses. Don’t believe that all the horde of peasants, clumsily footing their tunes, have come to stay. Form will prevail in the end, and Buffon said, the style is the man. Much later piano literature is rank, vulgar, uncultivated, and is altogether inferior to compositions of the grand classic school. It is all right to put the cart before the horse when you are backing, but there is no progress in the whole school of composerlings who trade only in the volks tunes of their native land. Grieg has been called the Northern Chopin. What a far fetched simile! The Grieg piano music was once delightfully fresh, and it still has a quaint ring, but what a small, restricted genre! He said all he had to say in his sonatas op. 7 and 8, for piano and piano and violin. To attempt to pad his Scotch-Scandinavian shoulders so as to fit the cloak of the great Pole is a silly sartorial scheme.
And a superb maker of style is Chopin! Grieg lacks style, lacks distinction--that is, a fine style--and while I love his concerto with its mosaic of melodies, yet I tire of the eternal yodel, the Scandinavian triolen that bobs up like a trade mark. His ballade in G minor shows more technical invention than the concerto.
What may one not say about the Chopin studies and preludes, the vade mecum of all good pianists who after they die go to heaven to study with Frederic, Bach fugues and his études! Burn every note of all other piano literature and a mine of wealth would still remain.
If you have a bad left hand with intractable fingers always remember that Bach will individualize those fingers, and that old Carl Czerny has written a set of studies for the development of the left hand (op. 399), which, if taken in moderation just after rising in the morning, will lead to limberness and legato. This is only a suggestive aside, however. Albert Venino has written an excellent Pedal School. Many improvements have been made in pedaling, and Mr. Venino has thoroughly handled his subject. Someone has called the pedal “the breath of the piano,” “its soul,” which is apposite.
For a light hand play some of Mendelssohn scherzos, but remember that, after all, not velocity but tonal discrimination is to be sought for. Read Kullak’s remarks appended to the F major étude of Chopin, op. 10. In the Chopin preludes, op. 28, one may discover many rich technical nuggets. If you long for variety while at this epoch you may dig out Theodore Doehler’s fearfully and wonderfully made concert studies and get a glimpse of the technic that delighted our fathers. Interlocked chords, trills, tremendous scale passages and vapid harmonies distinguish this style.
Great difficulties were imposed on the left hand at times, followed by mere accompaniment figures, while the right hand flashed all over the keyboard. This is found in the Gottschalk technic, which is but a combination of the fulminating brilliancies of the French school. Single studies about this time might prove interesting.
Joseffy’s crystalline étude, At the Spring, is delightful in color and replete with exquisite touches. To play it pianissimo and prestissimo in a liquid, cool, caressing manner is a triumph of technic.
Ill-fated Carl Heyman has in his Elfenspiel given us a glimpse of his wondrous technic. Vogrich’s Staccato Étude is very effective. Ferdinand Hiller’s rhythmic studies are excellent, and Carl Baermann’s studies are solid, satisfying and sincerely musical. Golinelli, a Milan pianist, has left twelve studies which are practically obsolete, though the octave study is occasionally heard. In the set is one in C sharp minor with a glorious rolling bass, which is very effective.
Speidel has written an octave study, and speaking of rolling basses reminds us of that perennial favorite Die Loreley, by Hans Seeling, a talented young Bohemian pianist who died young (1828-62). His set of twelve studies contain some good things such as the Gnomentanz.
I don’t know much about Dreyschock’s études, except his Campanella, and somehow or other I don’t care to. You remember Heine’s remark about the “hellish spectacle” his performances presented?
Quite delightful individualities are the Scharwenkas and Moszkowski. Xaver Scharwenka’s preludes and studies are among the best things he has done, the concertos not excepted. The staccato étude is deservedly popular, and the E flat minor prelude and F sharp minor étude are models of their kind. The last named is evidently suggested by a figure in Chopin’s E minor concerto, first movement, and is well worked out. Philipp Scharwenka has also done good work. Moszkowski’s group of three studies is quite difficult; particularly the one in G flat. This latter smacks of artificiality. Nicode’s two studies are well made, and Dupont’s toccata in B is a very brilliant and grateful concert piece. Sgambati, the Italian pianist, has written some studies which are interesting for people who like Sgambati. They lack originality. Saint-Saëns’ six études are very valuable and incidentally very difficult, the rhythm study in particular.
In all this hurly-burly don’t forget your Kullak octave school, and if you really wish to disencumber your mind of all these extra studies I have been talking about, just throw overboard everybody but Bach, Cramer, Clementi, Chopin and Henselt. If you wish velocity coupled with lightness and suppleness of wrist, take up old Scarlatti.
III
After Wagner, Brahms. After Chopin? Bülow once confessed that Brahms cured him of Wagner mania. To alter Browning--“Brahms is our music maker now.” Brahms, whose music was at one time as an undecipherable cryptogram!--Brahms now appeals to our finest culture. Without the melancholy tenderness of Chopin he has not altogether escaped the Weltschmerz, but his sadness is masculine, and he seldom if ever gives way to the hysterical complainings of the more feminine Pole. Brahms is a man, a dignified, mentally robust man, who feels deeply, who developed wonderful powers of self-control, and who drives the musical nail deeply when he hits it, as he sometimes does.
Could any styles be more at variance than Brahms’ and Chopin’s? Moscheles declared much of Chopin’s music unplayable, and it is a commonplace of the day to dismiss Brahms’ piano music as “unpianistic.” Brahms’ affinity to Schumann is marked; perhaps when the latter pronounced such favorable judgment of Brahms’ op. 1 he only acknowledged blood relationship. Brahms tells us different things, however; but as I intend dealing more with externals I will pass by any question of musical content. To the student of the somewhat florid Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg and Henselt school, the Schumann-Brahms technic must offer few attractions. Possibilities for personal display are rare--display of the glittering passage sort. Extensive scale work is seldom found in either composer, and old-fashioned ornamentation gladdens by its absence. Musically, the gain is immense; “pianistically” there is some loss. No more of those delicate, zephyr-like figures--no more sonorous and billowy arpeggio sweeps over the keyboard!
In a word, the finger virtuoso’s occupation is gone, and a mental virtuosity is needed. Heavy chordal work, arabesques that might have been moulded by a Michel Angelo, a cantilena that is polyphonic, not monophonic; ten voices instead of one--all this, is it not eminently modern, and yet Bachian? Schumann came from Bach, and Schumann is foster father to Brahms; but Bach and Beethoven blood also runs warmly in Johannes’ musical veins. Under which king will you serve? for you cannot serve two. Will you embrace the Scarlatti, Emanuel Bach, Mozart, Cramer, Chopin, Liszt school, or will you serve under the standards of Bach, Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms? Better let nature decide for you, and decide she does with such marked preferences that often I have attended piano recitals and wept silently because the “piano reciter” fondly believed he was versatile and attempted everything from Alkan to Zarembski. What a waste of vital force, what a waste of time!
I have, and value them as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt’s études, op. 1. The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written when Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured to modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not the Études d’Exécution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I exclaimed at Liszt’s cleverness. Never prolific in thematic invention, the great Hungarian has taken his op. 1 and dressed it up in the most bewildering technical fashion. He gave these studies appropriate names, and even to-day they require a tremendous technic to do them justice. The most remarkable of the set--the one in F minor (No. 10)--Liszt left nameless, and like a mighty peak it rears its head skyward, while about it cluster its more graceful fellows, Ricordanza, Feux-Follets, Harmonies du Soir, Chasse Neige, and Paysage. What a superb contribution to piano étude literature is Liszt’s! These twelve incomparable studies, the three very effective Études de Concert, the Paganini Studies, the Waldesrauschen, the Gnomenreigen, the Ab-Irato, the graceful Au Lac de Wallenstadt and Au Bord d’une Source, have they not developed tremendously the technical resources of the instrument? And to play them one must have fingers of steel, a brain on fire, a heart bubbling with chivalric grace and force. What a comet-like pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept Europe with fire and sword, who transformed the still, small voice of Chopin into a veritable hurricane! But we can’t imagine a Liszt without a Chopin preceding him.
Liszt lost, the piano would lose its most dashing cavalier, and his freedom, fantasy and fire are admirable correctives for the stilted platitudes of the Hummel, Czerny, Mendelssohn school. You can’t--as much as you may wish to--ignore Liszt’s technic. He got out of the piano an orchestral quality. He advanced by great wing strokes toward perfection, and not to include Liszt were to exclude color, sonority, richness of tinting and powerful dynamic contrasts.
Liszt has had a great following; you can see how much he affected modern technic. Tausig felt his influence, and even Schumann, whose setting, however, of the Paganini études is far removed from Liszt’s. But Schumann certainly struck out a very original course when he composed his Études Symphoniques. Here a Liszt style is a bar to faithful interpretation. Music, music, music is wanted, with strong singing fingers and a wrist of iron--malleable iron. The toccata in C is an admirable example of not only Schumann’s but also of latter day technic.
As in Brahms’ polyphonic fingers, great discrimination of tone in chord passages is required here, and powers of stretching that tax most hands to their utmost.
Brahms has reared upon this Schumann technic a glorious structure, whose foundations--Bach-Schumann--are certainly not builded on sand. You may get a fair notion of the Brahms piano technic by playing the figure he gave Tausig for that great master’s Daily Studies, and also in his later fifty-one studies. Look at his wonderful variations--true studies; read the Paganini variations; are they not heaven storming? Brains, brains and Bach. His studies on studies are not too entertaining.
One is the rondo by Weber in his C major sonata, the so-called “mouvement perpétuel.” This has Brahms transcribed for the left hand, lifting the bass part into the treble. Anything more dispiriting I cannot imagine. It makes one feel as if the clock struck nineteen in the watches of the night. The étude in sixths on Chopin’s beautiful F minor étude in op. 25 is an attempt to dress an exquisite violet with a baggy suit of pepper-and-salt clothes. It is a gauche affair altogether, and I fancy the perpetrator was ashamed of himself, for, unlike Joseffy’s astounding transcription of Chopin’s G flat étude, Brahms’ study upon a study is utterly unklaviermassig.
Constantin von Sternberg tells a story about this F minor étude of Brahms-Chopin. When it first appeared Moszkowski was trying it over in the presence of the Scharwenkas and Von Sternberg. Not content with playing the right hand triplets in double-sixths, as Brahms had done, he transposed them to the left hand, went to work rather hesitatingly, saying, naturally enough: “Why not do it this way?”
It out-Heroded Herod, and Xaver Scharwenka could stand it no longer; when Moszkowski stuck for a moment he strode up to the pianist, seized his nose and chin, opened his mouth, gazed in it, and then said in a slightly irritated voice: “That is the worst of these machines; they _will_ get out of order sometimes.”
Bendel’s étude in double-sixths is a good study, evidently modelled after Chopin’s G sharp minor study. Zarembski has written a finger-breaker in B flat minor, and the two Von Schloezer studies are by no means easy studies, but there are technical heights yet to be explored. Charles V. Alkan, the Parisian pianist, has concocted, contrived and manufactured about twenty-seven studies, which almost reach the topmost technical notch, and are, to confess the truth, unmusical. They are the extreme outcome of the Liszt technic and consequently have only historical value. Don’t play them, for you can’t, which remark is both Celtic and convenient.
Rubinstein’s op. 23--his six études--cannot be lightly passed over. The first in F and the well-known staccato étude in C should be studied. He has also written two studies, both in the key of C, one of which is called Study on False Notes, and sometimes the Handball. They are all very “pianistic.” Strelezski’s five concert studies are very modern and require a cyclopean grip. Nos. 4 and 5 are the most musical. The same composer’s étude, The Wind, is an excellent study in unison. The valse étude is artificial.
You can play Balakireff’s Islamey, a fantasy Orientale, if you wish some muscle twisting.
No need of telling you of Tausig’s Daily Studies. No pianist should be without them. The Rosenthal-Schytte studies are rich in ideas, and Schytte has written some Vortrag studies that are excellent.
Among modern artistic studies Saint-Saëns’, and MacDowell’s are the best and most brilliant, and Godowsky has made some striking paraphrases of Chopin studies. A novelty are the Exercises Journalières preceded by a preface from the pen of Camille Saint-Saëns. Tausig thought of such a comprehensive scheme as this, and Kullak, in the third book of his octave school, puts it partially into execution. But it remains for Isidor Philipp to work the formula out to its utmost, and the result is a volume unique in the annals of piano literature and of surpassing value to pianist, teacher and pupil.
This volume, I have no hesitation in saying, is the most significant since the posthumous publication of Tausig’s Daily Studies. All pianists have felt the need of such a work, and in his dumb-thumb way Oscar Raif taught his pupils that the manner to master difficulties was to walk chromatically about the passages in question. At a blow Philipp demolishes thousands of technical studies.
Philipp’s scheme is this: his collection is only for pianists who have a sound ordinary technic, say a technic which enables one to play the Beethoven sonatas of the first and second period, Clementi, Cramer, and of course Bach.
Philipp begins with extensive exercises, for extended harmonies are the keynote of modern piano music. Then follow studies for independence of the fingers, for the left hand alone, for scales, arpeggios, double notes, trills, octaves and chord playing, rhythmic studies and sundry studies that cannot be classified. These are all original, and are the result of the most independent researches. Conciseness is aimed at. They are reinforced by examples from Alkan to Willmers--the latter being the hero of the trill in the annals of piano playing.
Now, suppose you have each day an hour for technical study. You sit down before your keyboard; play one study for finger extension. Here is one on the first page--a terror, but a salutary one. Then take the example--it is from the F sharp minor prelude of Chopin. If you do not care for that there is the peroration of the E minor concerto of Chopin, the trill on B natural in the left hand. Alkan; Henselt (an example from the first study in op. 5 in C)--you can take your choice.
Now for independence of the fingers. Only two examples are given. If you master them you will have ten perfectly autonomous fingers. One is from a study by Alkan and the other from Saint-Saëns, op. 52. This latter is the famous study in A minor. It is invaluable.
Studies for the left hand: one example from the last movement of the Appassionata, you remember the figure in F minor. Others by Beethoven from concerto and variations. Chopin is represented by studies and extracts from the concertos, and a page is devoted to the G sharp minor section of the Revolutionary study, the Tristan and Isolde episode. Liszt, Georges Mathias, Brahms are all quoted with judgment.
Scales: Copious quotations from Chopin, Hummel, the A minor study of the former has a variant which gives the left hand employment. Liszt, Henselt, Rubinstein, the odd little chromatic episode in the last movement of the D minor concerto, and a finger-breaker by Henri Fissot, in which the thumb is treated to convict labor, as it deserves.
We have now reached the arpeggio section. After a lot of figures from which you may select your pattern for the day--notably the arpeggio of the dominant seventh, the most difficult and therefore the most valuable--you may indulge in examples from Beethoven, Chopin, Thalberg--the master of arpeggios--Delaborde, Rubinstein and Saint-Saëns.
Do not forget that these examples are selected from representative works, works that are played and are selected with rare skill and appreciation.
The double note chapter is admirable, although I notice M. Philipp clings to the Chopin fingering in chromatic double notes, the minor third, etcetera. The examples are from Beethoven, Hummel, Weber, Cramer, Chopin (the first chromatic scale in op. 25, No. 6); Schumann, Litolff, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Rubinstein, Delaborde, Alphonse Duvernoy, a valuable and ingenious study; Marmontel, and last, but by no means least, Philipp himself. One example of his is from a Bach fugue in D in double sixths!
The trill department--this sounds like the Bon Marché--contains examples from Beethoven, Chopin, Willmers, Doehler, Liszt, Brahms, a monstrous octave trill from the F sharp minor sonata, Duvernoy, Czerny and Liszt. It is as complete as possible.
The octave section contains more modern examples than Kullak. Saint-Saëns, Diémer, Rimski-Korsakoff and Tschaïkowsky are some of the moderns quoted.
Then follow rhythmical examples, skips, tremolo, a good example is from Thalberg’s beautiful and sadly neglected theme and variations in A minor, op. 45 and a lot of tangled tricks from the works of Lalo, D’Indy, Bernard, Pierné and other modern Frenchmen. I wish M. Philipp had quoted Thalberg’s famous tremolo study in C. It is the best of its class. But to be hypercritical before this ingenious catalogue would be impertinence, even ingratitude. From the maddening mass of classical and latter-day piano literature the editor has selected and fingered a most representative series of the difficulties of piano music. A few bars, at most a page, are given, and we do not wonder that Saint-Saëns called the work a vade mecum for pianists.
Not content with his gigantic task this astonishing Philipp has made another collection of studies for the left hand alone.
His compilation is so complete that I must speak of it in detail. Indeed I could write much on this topic. I know so many students, so many able pianists who have gone through the valley of technical death in search of a path to Parnassus, that I hail these short cuts with joy. Remember I am of a band of admirable lunatics that played all the studies in the world when I was a young fellow! What ignorance, depraved and colossal, was it not?
Czerny, who is old fashioned in most of his studies, has nevertheless written some of the best studies for the left hand solo. He wrote them because no one else would. He looks in his pictures as if he might be that sort of a man.
Philipp the indefatigable has sifted Czerny, and the left hand is treated, not with arpeggiated contempt--most composers write as if this hand was only for accompanying purposes--but as if it were the companion and co-sharer of the throne of digital independence. All sorts--but not too many--of preparatory exercises are there, thanks to the ingenuity of the editor, who must be a teacher of the first magnitude. In addition to Czerny we get passages from Weber, right hand passages transposed, from Mendelssohn, Hummel, Schumann, the first page of the great Toccata in C, transpositions from Bach and Chopin, a big Kessler study, the first study in C of Chopin, the first study in A minor for the left hand--a pet idea of Joseffy’s--a transposition from the B flat minor prelude, a capital notion for velocity playing, another transposition of the A minor study in op. 25, hideously difficult. The same with the G sharp minor study, Godowsky has a version for concert performance, but this is for one hand only; the double sixth study in D flat, a Kreutzer violin caprice in octaves in E, a Kreutzer étude in octaves, and the F minor study of Chopin, op. 25, No. 2 in octaves.
The volume ends with a formidable version in octaves for left hand of the last movement of Chopin’s B flat minor sonata. This is truly a tour de force.