Part 9

The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elegance. His melody, lacking to an unusual degree the suggestion of impassioned utterance, is more decorative than expressive--a sort of tonal arabesque, often exquisitely wrought, but curiously unexciting. There is no boldness in the physiognomy of his tunes; they conform closely to the average type of traditional German melody; and their charm is due to the neatness and facility with which they follow the paths of least resistance. His harmony is solid and correct, but hardly ever unconventional; he prefers an authorized to a novel progression, values clearness above richness, and treats dissonances with the utmost circumspection. His attitude toward modulation is conservative. Certain of his works, such as the "Scotch Symphony," with its endless A-minor and D-minor, have justly been charged with monotony, so fond he is of hovering gently about among a few closely related keys. In polyphony his ideal is smoothness of progression. Those daring momentary collisions between different voices, each progressing independently, which give Bach's fabric such a stoutness, he shrinkingly avoids. His part-writing is almost too conciliatory, too considerate of the prejudices of the ear; the natural roughnesses are all ironed out or glossed over. In a word, whenever he has a choice between the original and the established, he chooses the latter; he is too urbane to risk startling his hearer, and prefers to ingratiate himself with familiar charms; but so deftly does he manage these that he constantly gives us the pleasure of recognizing "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

In the matter of orchestration his delicate ear and fine taste made him a great master. His instinct for proper balance and fusion of timbres is unerring, he knows how to be sonorous without becoming opaque or blatant, and his scores abound in the purest, clearest, and freshest colors. Where shall we find a parallel for that ethereal shimmer of the violins in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or for the magical chord of the wood-wind that arrests it? or for the serene beauty of the violin melody, so airily poised, at the end of the same overture? or for the liquid coolness of the flutes, violins, and trumpets in the "Hebrides"? or for the elastic vitality of the violins at the opening of the "Italian Symphony"? Here, we cry with delight, is a master who can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their upper register, and trumpets playing _piano_, sound not like mere orchestral instruments, but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is largely due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores, never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have so fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of the sounds, how much to their skilful composition.[18] As an example may be cited the last page of the "Con moto moderato" movement in his "Italian Symphony," where the same motive is sounded first by horns and bassoons, then by trumpets and drums, then by flutes and oboes, all together building up the loveliest, most diaphanous fabric of tone.

Above all, he was raised quite above all petty personal considerations by his whole-souled enthusiasm for the great ancient masters. His efforts to educate popular taste by familiarity with classical works were as unremitting and as disinterested as Schumann's. He was the most active of all the champions of Bach, at that time so shamefully neglected. His performance of the great "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin, in March, 1829, the first since the composer's death in the middle of the eighteenth century, is one of the most important events in musical history; the significance of it, and of his other labors in behalf of Bach propaganda, to the entire subsequent progress of music, and especially to the romantic movement, of which Bach is one of the corner-stones, cannot be exaggerated.

Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial and expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain thinness of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind. His personality is tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun than a man. And hence it comes about that when, leaving his world of fairies, elves, visionary landscapes, and ethereal joys and sorrows, he tries to sound a fuller note of human pain and passion, he is felt to be out of his element. His style is too fluent, too suave, too insinuating and inoffensive, to embody tragic emotion. It lacks the rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional harshness and discordance even, of the natural human voice; its reading of life, in which there is ugliness, crudity, and violence as well as beauty, is too fastidiously expurgated. Which are the best of his piano works? Certainly not the "Songs without Words," with their facile melody, their monotonous rhythms and their cloyingly consonant harmony; nor the respectable, harmless, unexciting sonatas, cut from the same stuff, but by the yard instead of the square inch. Rather the "Variations Sérieuses" and the "Preludes and Fugues," in which there is some of the vigor of Bach, and the elusive immaterial whimsies, in the true Mendelssohn vein, such as the "Capriccio," opus 118, the scherzos, the "Spinning Song," the "E-minor Fantasie," and the "Rondo Capriccioso." Similarly, in the chamber music, it is the Canzonetta of the E-flat quartet, the scherzos of the trios, and the finale of the violin concerto, that most please us. As for the symphonies, even the noble adagio of the "Scotch" is just the least bit soporific; but the scherzo or the Scottish jig, and the fresh allegro vivace and stirring saltarello of the "Italian" are delightful. Mendelssohn gay and gracious is the best of company; Mendelssohn sentimental makes us "begin to loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too much."

The effeminate element in his work is probably chiefly responsible for the indifference, boredom, or distaste with which it is nowadays so often received. Since his romanticism was a matter of imagination rather than of passion, of fancy and delicate sentiment rather than of turbulent feeling, it is inevitably voted dull by a generation given over like ours to the pursuit of thrills, tolerant of any turgidity that can excite, and preferring intensity to clarity of emotion. He represents a mild, tentative, and restrained application of artistic principles that have been much more brilliantly and thoroughly illustrated by bolder spirits like Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, who have accordingly somewhat eclipsed him. His conservatism also made him retain many of the traditional formulæ and mannerisms of classicism, which have become repugnant to our less conventional age. The result is that it has become almost a fashion to sneer or to smile at his music. But it is conceivable that we err in one direction as much as his contemporaries did in the other. It may be that we call his art stale and vapid merely because our palates are jaded by over-indulgence in spices and condiments. Mendelssohn is undeniably, for the present, among the fallen gods; but whether a maturer and less sophisticated taste than our own may some day set him up again is a question we must be content to leave unanswered.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] See S. Hensel's "The Mendelssohn Family, from Letters and Journals," a fascinating book. English translation published in London, 1881.

[15] "Mendelssohn," by S. S. Stratton, p. 40.

[16] Compare what is said of Chopin at page 231.

[17] "The Mendelssohn Family," p. 131.

[18] Compare the remarks on Schumann's scoring, at page 139.

[19] See the story of the banquet he tendered to Liszt in Leipsic, in Lampadius' "Life," p. 167.

V FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

V FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating pretty widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is determined largely by the technical conditions under which it develops. We all know that one style is appropriate to engraving, another to oil-painting, and still another to pastel work; we recognize that the prose-writer and the versifier must use different vocabularies. Musical critics, however, whether from ignorance or from a disposition to involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of sentiment, have for the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our primitive notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best sing, or instruments best play. We have to reach largely without their aid the conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or painting, the kind of body available to a composition determines in no small degree the sort of spirit which is to inhabit it.

The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the sixteenth century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which at that time was firmly entrenched by tradition--the ecclesiastical choir of mixed voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the necessity of making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for the various groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies were restricted by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice; his harmony, in the interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept simple and transparent. When, somewhat later, the organ came into vogue, it suggested certain modifications of style, splendidly realized by J. S. Bach. The natural capacities of the hands on the keyboard tended to focus attention quite as much on the chord as on the separate strands of melody, and the massive effects of chord-patterns began to vie in importance with the more polyphonic traits. At the same time harmony was free to become much more complex, since pipes cannot sing out of tune, and the mechanically even tone, free from the _vibrato_ and incapable of the accentuation of voices, made feasible a grand impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's fugues. A little later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and Beethoven, ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his work on the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed and wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive by motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic extension of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same time the marvelous expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly utilized: on the emotional side music became more than ever before profound, impassioned, mystical, and poignant.

As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical individualities the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the orchestra, so Chopin is in large measure a resultant of the peculiar qualities of the most influential of modern instruments, the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed an important rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert and Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar dialect it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors can it be said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and the orchestra not existed, his art would still have been essentially what it was. Indeed, his work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage between the artistic impulses of a sensitive human organism and the peculiar potentialities of a special instrument that it can be properly understood only through a study of both.

The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its tones. The tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in duration only by the air capacity of the lungs, those of bowed string instruments can be held indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as long as the air pressure is maintained in the bellows. The vibrations of a piano string, on the contrary, are at their maximum only during the moment in which it is struck by the hammer operated by pressing the key, and from that moment gradually decrease, giving forth a sound constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is struck, the player's control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice but either to wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this reason the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate harmonies of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The long notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of their physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention, and so lose their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic passages, which depend for their effect on the leisurely succession of dissonances and their resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer from the discontinuity of the piano tone. The indifference, or even insensibility, to the beauty of pure line, which characterizes so much of our modern musical taste, is probably in large measure due to the prevalence of an instrument so little suited to exhibit it.[20]

At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic defect by modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that if the tones would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over and over again as rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract evanescence. An early application of this principle is the use, by Bach and other clavichordists, of trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a means of keeping long melody-notes audible. A more important one is the breaking up of chords into figures of short notes in the accompaniments of Haydn and Mozart, a device which soon became so indispensable that a glance at any modern piano score will discover hundreds of such groups of short notes, which are nothing but chords played piecemeal in order to make them sound.