Chapter 4

The big saving, then, in the pianistic curriculum is the dropping of studies, finger and otherwise. To give him his due, Von Bülow--as a pianist strangely inimical to my taste--was among the first to boil down the number of etudes. He did this in his famous preface to the Cramer _Studies_. Nevertheless, his list is too long by half. Who plays Moscheles? Who cares for more than four or six of the Clementi, for a half dozen of the Cramer? I remember the consternation among certain teachers when Deppe and Raif, with his dumb thumb and blind fingers, abolished _all_ the classic piano studies. Teachers like Constantine von Sternberg do the same at this very hour, finding in the various technical figures of compositions all the technic necessary. This method is infinitely more trying to the teacher than the old-fashioned, easy-going ways. "Play me No. 22 for next time!" was the order, and in a soporific manner the pupil waded through all the studies of all the _Technikers_. Now the teacher must invent a new study for every new piece--with Bach on the side. Always Bach! Please remember that. B-a-c-h--Bach. Your daily bread, my children.

We no longer play Mozart in public--except Joseffy. I was struck recently by something Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler said in this matter of Mozart. Yes, Mozart is more difficult than Chopin, though not so difficult as Bach. Mozart is so naked and unafraid! You must touch the right key or forever afterward be condemned by your own blundering. Let me add here that I heard Fannie Bloomfield play the little sonata, wrongfully called _facile_, when she was a tiny, ox-eyed girl of six or seven. It was in Chicago in the seventies. Instead of asking for candy afterwards she begged me to read her some poetry of Shelley or something by Schopenhauer! Veritably a fabulous child!

Let me add three points to the foregoing statements: First, Joseffy has always been rather skeptical of too _few_ piano studies. His argument is that _endurance_ is also a prime factor of technic, and you cannot compass endurance without you endure prolonged finger drills. But as he has since composed--literally composed--the most extraordinary time-saving book of technical studies (_School of Advanced Piano Playing_), I suspect the great virtuoso has dropped from his list all the Heller, Hiller, Czerny, Haberbier, Cramer, Clementi and Moscheles. Certainly his Exercises--as he meekly christens them--are _multum in parvo_. They are my daily recreation.

The next point I would have you remember is this: The morning hours are golden. Never waste them, the first thing, never waste your sleep-freshened brain on mechanical finger exercise. Take up Bach, if you must unlimber your fingers and your wits. But even Bach should be kept for afternoon and evening. I shall never forget Moriz Rosenthal's amused visage when I, in the innocence of my eighteenth century soul, put this question to him: "When is the best time to study etudes?" "If you must study them at all, do so after your day's work is done. By your day's work I mean the mastery of the sonata or piece you are working at. When your brain is clear you can compass technical difficulties much better in the morning than the evening. Don't throw away those hours. Any time will do for gymnastics." Now there is something for stubborn teachers to put in their pipes and smoke.

My last injunction is purely a mechanical one. All the pianists I have heard with a beautiful tone--Thalberg, Henselt, Liszt, Tausig, Heller--yes, Stephen of the pretty studies--Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, Pachmann and Essipoff, sat _low_ before the keyboard. When you sit high and the wrists dip downward your tone will be dry, brittle, hard. Doubtless a few pianists with abnormal muscles have escaped this, for there was a time when octaves were played with stiff wrists and rapid _tempo_. Both things are an abomination, and the exception here does not prove the rule. Pianists like Rosenthal, Busoni, Friedheim, d'Albert, Von Bülow, _all the Great Germans_ (Germans are not born, but are made piano players), Carreño, Aus der Ohe, Krebs, Mehlig are or were artists with a hard tone. As for the much-vaunted Leschetizky method I can only say that I have heard but two of his pupils whose tone was _not_ hard and too brilliant. Paderewski was one of these. Paderewski confessed to me that he learned how to play billiards from Leschetizky, not piano; though, of course, he will deny this, as he is very loyal. The truth is that he learned more from Essipoff than from her then husband, the much-married Theodor Leschetizky.

Pachmann, once at a Dôhnányi recital in New York, called out in his accustomed frank fashion: "He sits too high." It was true. Dôhnányi's touch is as hard as steel. He sat _over_ the keyboard and played _down_ on the keys, thus striking them heavily, instead of pressing and moulding the tone. Pachmann's playing is a notable example of plastic beauty. He seems to dip his hands into musical liquid instead of touching inanimate ivory, and bone, wood, and wire. Remember this when you begin your day's work: Sit so that your hand is on a level with, never below, the keyboard; and don't waste your morning freshness on dull finger gymnastics! Have I talked you hoarse?

VIII

FOUR FAMOUS VIRTUOSOS

Such a month of dissipation! You must know that at my time of life I run down a bit every spring, and our family physician prescribed a course of scale exercises on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, and after that--New York, for Lenten recreation! Now, New York is not quiet, nor is it ever Lenten. A crowded town, huddled on an island far too small for its inconceivably uncivilized population, its inhabitants can never know the value of leisure or freedom from noise. Because he is always in a hurry a New York man fancies that he is intellectual. The consequences artistically are dire. New York boasts--yes, literally _boasts_--the biggest, noisiest, and poorest orchestra in the country. I refer to the Philharmonic Society, with its wretched wood-wind, its mediocre brass, and its aggregation of rasping strings. All the vaudeville and lightning-change conductors have not put this band on a level with the Boston, the Philadelphia, or the Chicago organizations. Nor does the opera please me much better. Noise, at the expense of music; quantity, instead of quality; all the _tempi_ distorted and _fortes_ exaggerated, so as to make effect. Effect, effect, effect! That is the ideal of New York conductors. This coarsening, cheapening, and magnification of details are resultants of the restless, uncomfortable, and soulless life of the much overrated Manhattan.

Naturally, I am a Philadelphian, and my strictures will be set down to old fogyism. But show me a noise-loving city and I will show you an inartistic one. Schopenhauer was right in this matter; insensibility to noise argues a less refined organism. And New York may spend a million of money on music every season, and still it is not a musical city. The opera is the least sign; opera is a social function--sometimes a circus, never a temple of art. The final, the infallible test is the maintenance of an orchestra. New York has no permanent orchestra; though there is an attempt to make of the New York Symphony Society a worthy rival to the Philadelphia and Boston orchestras. So much for my enjoyment in the larger forms of music--symphony, oratorio and opera.

But my visit was not without compensations. I attended piano concerts by Eugen d'Albert, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Rafael Joseffy. Pachmann I had heard earlier in the season in my own home city. So in one season I listened to four out of six of the world's greatest pianists. And it was very stimulating to both ears and memory. It also affords me an opportunity to preach for you a little sermon on Touch (Tone and Technic were the respective themes of my last two letters), which I have had in my mind for some time. Do not be alarmed. I say "sermon," but I mean nothing more than a comparison of modern methods of touch, as exemplified by the performances of the above four men, with the style of touch employed by the pianists of my generation: Thalberg, Liszt, Gottschalk, Tausig, Rubinstein, Von Bülow, Henselt, and a few others.

Pachmann is the same little wonder-worker that I knew when he studied many years ago in Vienna with Dachs. This same Dachs turned out some finished pupils, though his reputation, curiously enough, never equalled that of the over-puffed Leschetizky, or Epstein, or Anton Door, all teachers in the Austrian capital. I recall Anthony Stankowitch, now in Chicago, and Benno Schoenberger, now in London, as Dachs' pupils. Schoenberger has a touch of gold and a style almost as jeweled as Pachmann's--but more virile. It must not be forgotten that Pachmann has fine nerves--with such an exquisite touch, his organization must be of supernal delicacy--but little muscular vigor. Consider his narrow shoulders and slender arms--height of figure has nothing to do with muscular incompatibility; d'Albert is almost a dwarf, yet a colossus of strength. So let us call Pachmann, a survival of an older school, a charming school. Touch was the shibboleth of that school, not tone; and technic was often achieved at the expense of more spiritual qualities. The three most _beautiful_ touches of the piano of the nineteenth century were those of Chopin, Thalberg, and Henselt. Apart from any consideration of other gifts, these three men--a Pole, a Hebrew, and a German--possessed touches that sang and melted in your ears, ravished your ears. Finer in a vocal sense was Thalberg's touch than Liszt's; finer Henselt's than Thalberg's, because more euphonious, and nobler in tonal texture; and more poetic than either of these two was Chopin's ethereal touch. To-day Joseffy is the nearest approach we have to Chopin, Paderewski to Henselt, Pachmann to Thalberg--save in the matter of a robust _fortissimo_, which the tiny Russian virtuoso does not boast.

After Chopin, Thalberg, and Henselt, the orchestral school had its sway--it still has. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein set the pace for all latter-day piano playing. And while it may sound presumptuous, I am inclined to think that their successors are not far behind them in the matter of tonal volume. If Liszt or Tausig, or, for that matter, Rubinstein, produced more clangor from their instruments than Eugen d'Albert, then my aural memory is at fault. My recollection of Liszt is a vivid one: to me he was iron; Tausig, steel; Rubinstein, gold. This metallic classification is not intended to praise gold at the expense of steel, or iron to the detriment of gold. It is merely my way of describing the adamantine qualities of Liszt and Tausig--two magnetic mountains of the kind told of in _Sinbad, the Sailor_, to which was attracted whatever came within their radius. And Rubinstein--what a man, what an artist, what a _heart!_ As Joseffy once put it, Rubinstein's was not a pianist's touch, but the mellow tone of a French horn!

Rosenthal's art probably matches Tausig's in technic and tone. Paderewski, who has broadened and developed amazingly during ten years, has many of Henselt's traits--and I am sure he never heard the elder pianist. But he belongs to that group: tonal euphony, supple technic, a caressing manner, and a perfect control of self. Remember, I am speaking of the Henselt who played for a few friends, not the frightened, semi-limp pianist who emerged at long intervals before the public. Paderewski is thrice as poetic as Henselt--who in the matter of emotional depth seldom attempted any more than the delineation of the suave and elegant, though he often played Weber with glorious fire and brilliancy.

At this moment it is hard to say where Paderewski will end. I beg to differ from Mr. Edward Baxter Perry, who once declared that the Polish virtuoso played at his previous season no different from his earlier visits. The Paderewski of 1902 and 1905 is very unlike the Paderewski of 1891. His style more nearly approximates Rubinstein's _plus_ the refinement of the Henselt school. He has sacrificed certain qualities. That was inevitable. All great art is achieved at the expense--either by suppression or enlargement--of something precious. Paderewski pounds more; nor is he always letter perfect; but do not forget that pounding from Paderewski is not the same as pounding from Tom, Dick, and Harry. And, like Rubinstein, his spilled notes are more valuable than other pianist's scrupulously played ones. In reality, after carefully watching the career of this remarkable man, I have reached the conclusion that he is passing through a transition period in his "pianism." Tired of his old, subdued, poetic manner; tired of being called a _salon_ pianist by--yes, Oskar Bie said so in his book on the pianoforte; and in the same chapter wrote of the fire and fury of Gabrilowitsch ("he drives the horses of Rubinstein," said Bie; he must have meant "ponies!")--critics, Paderewski began to study the grand manner. He may achieve it, for his endurance is phenomenal. Any pianist who could do what I heard him do in New York--give eight encores after an exhausting program--may well lay claim to the possession of the grand manner. His tone is still forced; you hear the _chug_ of the suffering wires; but who cares for details--when the general performance is on so exalted a plane? And his touch is absolutely luscious in cantabile.

With d'Albert our interest is, nowadays, cerebral. When he was a youth he upset Weimar with his volcanic performances. Rumor said that he came naturally by his superb gifts (the Tausig legend is still believed in Germany). Now his indifference to his medium of expression does not prevent him from lavishing upon the interpretation of masterpieces the most intellectual brain since Von Bülow's--and _entre nous_, ten times the musical equipment. D'Albert plays Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as no one else on this globe--and he matches Paderewski in his merciless abuse of the keyboard. Either a new instrument, capable of sustaining the ferocious attacks upon it, must be fabricated, or else there must be a return to older styles.

And that fixed star in the pianistic firmament, one who refuses to descend to earth and please the groundlings--Rafael Joseffy--is for me the most satisfying of all the pianists. Never any excess of emotional display; never silly sentimentalizings, but a lofty, detached style, impeccable technic, tone as beautiful as starlight--yes, Joseffy is the enchanter who wins me with his disdainful spells. I heard him play the Chopin E minor and the Liszt A major concertos; also a brace of encores. Perfection! The Liszt was not so brilliant as Reisenauer; but--again within its frame--perfection! The Chopin was as Chopin would have had it given in 1840. And there were refinements of tone-color undreamed of even by Chopin. Paderewski is Paderewski--and Joseffy is perfection. Paderewski is the most eclectic of the four pianists I have taken for my text; Joseffy the most subtly poetic; D'Albert the most profound and intellectually significant, and Pachmann--well, Vladimir is the _enfant terrible_ of the quartet, a whimsical, fantastic charmer, an apparition with rare talents, and an interpreter of the Lesser Chopin (always the _great_ Chopin) without a peer. Let us be happy that we are vouchsafed the pleasure of hearing four such artists.

IX

THE INFLUENCE OF DADDY LISZT

Have you read Thoreau's _Walden_ with its smell of the woods and its ozone-permeated pages? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring under the delusion that they are developing their individuality. Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays among musicians! They have been admonished so often in print and private that their ignorance is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these ambitious ladies and gentlemen rush off to the booksellers, to libraries, and literally gorge themselves with the "ologies" and "isms" of the day. Lord, Lord, how I enjoy meeting them at a musicale! There they sit, cocked and primed for a verbal encounter, waiting to knock the literary chip off their neighbor's shoulder.

"Have you read"--begins some one and the chattering begins, _furioso_. "Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,"--"Tolstoi's _What is Art?_ certainly, he ought to be electrocuted"--"Nordau! isn't he terrible?" And the cacophonous conversational symphony rages, and when it is spent, the man who asked the question finishes:

"Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in the _Kölnische Zeitung?_" and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards him whilst murmurs arise, "What an uncultured man! To talk 'shop' like a regular musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program--I mean plots for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England, begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.

Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He had read everything before he was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to parse a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_. The Weimar crew all imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose--came towards me. He wore a monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_.

"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us. I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an outrageous manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats. When Liszt left me--we studied together with Czerny--they trooped after him, their garments ballooning in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was the devotion of a pet ape.

I mention this because I have never met a Liszt pupil since without recalling that day in Weimar. And when one plays I close my eyes and hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding, treacherous technic. Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch. The old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, "Don't copy my touch; it's spoiled." He had for so many years pounded and punched the keyboard that his tactile sensibility--isn't that your new-fangled expression?--had vanished. His "orchestral" playing was one of those pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe, and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons. I remember well that Liszt, who was first and foremost a melodramatic actor, had a habit of striding to the instrument, sitting down in a magnificent manner and uplifting his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories. He was a master hypnotist, and like John L. Sullivan he had his adversary--the audience--conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific, his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for a barn-floor!

Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied. In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris, Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage. He wrote articles about himself in the musical papers--a practice that his disciples have not failed to emulate--and in an article on Thalberg displayed his bad taste in abusing what he could not imitate. Oh yes, Liszt was a great thief. His piano music--I mean his so-called original music--is nothing but Chopin and brandy. His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed from Paganini, and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped himself to its hair. So in his piano music we find a conglomeration of other men's ideas, other men's figures. When he wrote for orchestra the hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz. I never could quite see Liszt. He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious Pole got rid of him and then he strung after Wagner. I do not mean that Liszt was without merit, but I do assert that he should have left the piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.

Let us consider some of his compositions.

Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not, however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through the _Lucia_ fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before she mounts her bicycle.

And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the _Don Juan_ of Liszt and the _Don Juan_ of Thalberg! See which is the more musical, the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies, bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thing he could lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the _Tannhäuser_ overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors, appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy.