Part 2

Although German Protestantism found in Bach its musical expression, in him--the towering genius--was inevitably paramount that broad and lofty religion of pure art which, above credal differences, outpours its prayer and thanksgiving in the creation of the beautiful, and therefore the good and the true. Would anyone suppose the author of the Mass in B minor to be a dissenter from the Roman Catholic communion? As a noble vehicle of religious feeling, the Mass inspired Bach to a work surpassing all similar efforts of Roman Catholic composers; a work which, to every heart in tune with the sublime, is a revelation of the essence of undogmatic religion.

Whilst grave dignity well becomes a king, and whilst the voice and look of authority are rightfully his, we love to see him doff at times the insignia of his station, and eschew the pomp and ceremony of royal surroundings to enact a part identifying him with the human in the great common life of the world.

Even so we see the sovereign of the Fugue, the Mass, the Cantata and the «Passion,» unbending affably toward such lesser things as the Suite, the Partita and the a capella Motet. But, though condescending, Bach is nevertheless the king; hence these all acquire from his magnetic, uplifting presence, a consequence before unknown to any of their kind.

Bearing in mind the lives of such men as Sir Henry Irving, one hardly realizes that the play-actor of the Elizabethan Era had no more social status than the veriest mountebank. The German musical genius of Bach's day, and for long thereafter, was usually a mere retainer to some consequential petty prince, and, socially, only a degree higher than his master's lackey. But habit, sprung from a necessity which itself may have originated in a refinement and delicacy of organization inclining the musician rather to submit than to combat the coarse and selfish, had so accustomed the court composer to the rôle of servile dependent upon royal patronage, that he seldom realized to what degradation his anciently esteemed calling, that of the bard, had fallen.

But as for the masculinely self-assertive Bach, fortunately or unfortunately not often in touch with princes, he assumed no attitude of flattery toward his employers, the penurious and unjustly-exacting town authorities of Liepsic.

Lamentable indeed is the fact that Bach was forced by circumstances into what, to one of his capabilities, must have been the most dreary, routine drudgery. Imagine Handel leaving half-penned some sublime Chorus, to toil with a dull and refractory pupil who never by any means would attain to average musicianship.

To sensitive nerves, over-tensioned through sympathy with a high-wrought emotional nature which aspires and soars towards some beauty native to another sphere, such instant drop is comparable to that of the wounded bird checked in the moment of most buoyant flight. Beethoven would none of it for, because of his bachelorhood, he was independent; but with Bach, the good father of sons and daughters to the number of twenty, it was far otherwise. Toil he must and toil he did as cantor in the school and choir-master in the church.

To certain musicians far less endowed than was Bach, the act of teaching has been but semblance of labor, and, at times, the merest farce. Behold the modern, world-flattered, fashion-sought Virtuoso of the Pianoforte, accessible only to the highest aspirant to musical renown! Behold that awe-struck aspirant ushered into the presence of the august one! He listens to the embarrassed player, yes, he the lofty deigns to listen! Ah! but will he, the great Jove of modern music, look down in kindness from his Parnassus, or will he utterly blast with the lightning of his eyes, and dumfound with the angry thunders of his mouth? Who can tell? Surely none but the great Jove himself, for his pleasure or his displeasure, like that of the ancient deity, is but matter of caprice dependent wholly upon his present mood. How the conditions which hampered the life of Bach contrast with those favoring the musical celebrity of our day! But then, the world abounds with incongruities even to the placing of the beggar on the throne and the king on the dunghill.

The poet bards of long ago, the Ossians of the North and the Homers of the South, declaimed their epics of love and war to a harp accompaniment which often must have approached free improvisation. The complex recitative of Wagner, for example, the endless melody of his «Tristan and Isolde,» purports to be the attained ideal of those elder singers; but, between the bald freedom of the old and the luxuriant freedom of the new, have obtained what Wagner considered two grave, musical mistakes: first, the evolution of fixed form originating in the primitive dance tune and eventuating in the Bach Fugue, and, second, largely due to the labors of Bach, the individualizing of instrumental music apart from vocal music once deemed its indispensable auxiliary.

Speaking without bias, it should be said that although to Bach we justly render every encomium due unto one of the most gifted masters of music, we give with full knowledge that his art, notwithstanding its beauty and excellence, is but a facet of the gem whose all of resplendence these later days are privileged to behold. Probably the perfection of contrapuntal writing was to Bach the perfection, the entirety, of great music. He would doubtless have condemned as vague and discursive much in the pianoforte and orchestral works which characterized Beethoven's middle and last period.

How he would have regarded certain liberties in the harmonic progression may be surmised. Although Bach himself was in this respect something of an innovator, he must have deemed such divergence the justifiable limit of rule-breaking. Could he have looked forward to the chief exponent of the Classical School, he might have said, «This Beethoven goes too far, even to the deliberate employment of consecutive, perfect fifths in rash attempt to produce dubious effects. Besides, he abandons the native German domain of the Fugue and debouches upon a land whereof I know not, a strange land of questionable manners and customs.»

III

Monteverde in his day dared to introduce the unprepared seventh of the dominant triad; but, in boldness he was not alone. In fact, the development of polyphony from the wholly unembellished and quite faulty chord progressions of early mediæval music, has been but a series of innovations at first condemned, then suffered, and then adopted. The earliest polyphonic writers founded their music wholly on the ecclesiastical scales derived from the Greek modes, and approved by Ambrose and Gregory. With the single exception of the Ionic scale, identical with our scale of C major, these scales were defective chiefly in one essential, to wit: in place of the modern sharped seventh, they contained the flatted seventh. This error precluded the possibility of the characterizing major third of the dominant chord in both the major and the minor. Then again, the sounding of the flatted seventh, which in modern tonality indicates modulation to the subdominant key, suggested to the old contrapuntists a triad now deemed wholly foreign to the tonic. The resulting vagueness found remedy where one should least expect it, for, in their melodies, the popular writers of both song and dance were led instinctively to sharp the seventh, and otherwise reconstruct the six defective ecclesiastical scales.

The increasing use of accidentals in contrapuntal and sacred music, gradually evolved the chromatic scale, and led to the founding of a major and a minor scale on each of its twelve semitones. These twenty-four were now the basis of that grand and satisfying instrumental polyphony which Bach was to build in his «Well-tempered Clavichord.»

As late as the time of Carissimi, and for some years thereafter, polyphonic writers had not wholly cast off the spell of Ambrose and Gregory, for, whilst the seventh was now by universal usage sharped in the cadence, otherwhere still lingered a tendency to revert to the flatted seventh of the ecclesiastical scales.

At this juncture, the further development of polyphony, and, in fact, the further development of all great music, found in Bach that peculiar genius which it wholly needed. He became the masterly unifier of the harmonic and the polyphonic systems. With a correct idea of key relationship, he grouped the family of chords around the tonic and the dominant after the manner of to-day. At the same time, his unparalleled use of anticipations, suspensions and passing notes, produced an effect wonderfully rich in the stately sweep of his measures. Thus he prepared the way for the classical music of Beethoven, who, turning from strict polyphony to a style wherein his endowed emotional nature found wider and freer scope, became in turn an innovator in that he gave greater variety to the harmonic tissue by means of bold and before-unattempted modulations. Beethoven in turn prepared the way for Wagner who essayed to enlarge the number of related keys, besides carrying the art of modulation to before-unknown lengths, even to the limit of good taste: also by an exhaustive use of anticipations, suspensions, and passing notes, this latest master revealed the fullest development of the Bachian polyphony.

How little of true foresight comes to the eyes of the sage! How incommensurable that foresight with his great and far looking back! How much of riddle his prophesying touches not and his dying leaves unsolved! Bach knew nothing of the Classicism of Beethoven, who, in turn, knew nothing of the Romanticism of Schumann and Chopin; and what knew these of the latest art-interblendings of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss? Can there be other musical riddles worth the solving? If so, what are they; and who their solver? For answer, ask the average musician of to-morrow; but not the authorities of to-day.

The career of Bach, the composer, covered a period of about forty-five years, in fact, a period longer by thirteen years than the entire life of Schubert; a period longer by nine years than the life of Mozart; longer by six years than the life of Mendelssohn; and longer by five years than the lives of Chopin and Von Weber. And yet Handel and Haydn exceeded by something like ten years, and Verdi by nearly twenty years, the extended term of Bach's productivity.

Notwithstanding the fatal catastrophe which terminated the promise of the poet Shelley; notwithstanding the hard conditions which cramped and well-nigh thwarted the divinely-endowed Mozart, misplaced as a bird of Paradise caged in an Arctic clime, it can with truth be said that however short the earthly years allotted to men of genius, they, in most instances, have, as by Divine ordering, given to the world their best.

When we have known the genius through his works, those heart-resemblances, those mind-born counterparts of his inner self, we would contact the outer man, and discover in facial and bodily expression some token of that which flesh has clothed. Denied this, we turn to sculptured or painted likeness of such as Johann Sebastian Bach.

In vain we search his pictured face for hint of the vacillating or the superficial. Every feature and every lineament is indicative of massive, self-centered power dependent only as man is dependent, being but mortal. In that face is much of clinging to the mind's self-imposed task; something too of downright obstinacy, as also in the sturdy form which, like post or pillar, would say, «I stand! turn and resist me not!»

Behold him the progenitor of many children after the flesh, and many, many sprung from his teeming and tireless brain! Behold him, the musical athlete, challenging virtuosity to trial of skill and endurance, while he himself rejoices like the swift and strong runner sure of his lead in the race!

Behold him deferential, but not obsequious, the admired and sought of a monarch and the chief comer to the palace of Potsdam! Behold him, unflattered by the attentions of royalty and court, wending back to Liepsic, and his humble cantorship with its meagre stipend! Behold his reverent return to the old Lutheran Church of Saint Thomas and the well-remembered organ where with praiseful notes he often had sought and found a greater than Frederic, or any earthly potentate!

Between the death of Bach and the present time, more than one hundred and fifty years have intervened. Years indeed memorable; years of unparalleled activity and change in the musical world; years of greater enrichment of its repertory than were all preceding them. Those one hundred and fifty years have given us the perfected beauties of Italian, French and German Opera. They have produced for us Haydn and his great contemporaries and near successors. From them is that priceless heritage, the Mendelssohn Oratorios. They have brought to our charmed ears the lyric songs of Schubert and Schumann, and the unique and wholly adapted tone-poetry of Chopin, composer par excellence for that instrument of which the clavichord was the humble precursor. Those years have enlarged the orchestra by introducing many new and telling instruments, also they have developed its technique and otherwise elevated it to the virtuoso demands of our most modern composers. Nevertheless, the music of Bach is nothing belittled by the vast sum total of subsequent achievement, nor grows it useless like a garment cast aside because no longer of fashionable cut and color. And yet that music was underestimated and much neglected in Bach's lifetime, and, afterwards for a long period, almost forgotten, until, through the efforts of Mendelssohn and Franz and the Bach society, it was rescued from the possibility of a fate like that of many an ancient writing for which the regretful world has vainly sought.

Bach was the famed virtuoso of an era when far less than modern skill was necessary for the manipulation of the organ and the clavichord, and yet his works are to-day surprisingly well adapted to the technical needs of the advanced student. Those for clavichord are musically adequate in the programmes of the modern concert hall, whilst the «Preludes and Fugues,» and also the Toccatas, are the delight and ambition of good organists throughout the world.

The man Johann Sebastian Bach; how much might be said of him, the kind husband and father, the good and respected citizen, the devout follower of Luther, the foremost among contemporary virtuosi, the faithful music-master in the school, the conscientious precentor in the church, the unobtrusive genius touched not by the infirmities of noble minds. Surely much more might be said in way of encomium than here undertaken.

The composer, Johann Sebastian Bach; how much more might be said of his works than in these meagre pages; how much more in way of analysis; but such is not our object.

As for praise, in the performance of those works we are heart to heart with the living Bach, the immortal one, the deathless part of whom speaks from every full and satisfying measure their meed of praise, wherefore the musical world, even the modern musical world, listens and approves.

But to what shall we liken his works? With what shall they be compared? Surely with the mighty, the steadfast, the undecaying! They are comparable with those man-builded mountains of stone resting forever upon the floor of the Nile Valley. Yes, they are in very truth the Pyramids of Music, and Bach with Cyclopean hand has quarried them, block by block from the enduring substance of the cliffs, and he has fitted each to other with that accuracy of judgment, precision of workmanship, and grandeur of conception, which characterized the architect-builders of Old Egypt; those whose models were the indestructible upbuildings of God, even the ancient and everlasting hills.

FREDERIC CHOPIN

FREDERIC CHOPIN

I

The measure of a man is the measure of his impress upon the world, not solely and of necessity the world of his day, but, in fact, the world of all days henceforth to be. Should we define that impress as something outwardly apparent like his doing who delves in the mine, or ploughs in the field, the statement is inadequate and even false. Our world is a manifold condition wherein, as one ascends, things material eventuate in things mental and things spiritual.

This globe, vast and teeming with life; this total of mundane consciousness, is, in its imponderable aspect, subdivided into many and diverse worlds, each wholly sphered, each sufficing for its adapted dwellers.

What a variety of living! Behold the world of the Musician, bright and beautiful as a loka of the Buddhist heaven! a flexible world close-touching and almost blending with that of the Artist or the Poet. Behold the world of the Philosopher which, like the world of the Astronomer, seems to its denizen but an islet in the ocean of mind-baffling immensity. Quite apart from these revolves the solid and well-defined, but somewhat narrow, world of the man of mercantile pursuits, and more remote, under monotonous skies, the dull world of the unthinking, drear as a desert save here and there some little turf of almost withered green.

However, the world of the Musician claims our attention; let us look with his eyes; hear with his ears; understand with his intuitions. All else shut out, his world is subdivisible: within it is discovered another. Lured on by the shine of golden wings, and the delicate cantabile of angel voices ineffably sweet and pure, we enter where dwells the soul of a true tone-poet, the soul of Frederic Chopin.

In Chopin, the subject of this study, the blood of two nations met and mingled. The France of his father, and the Poland of his mother, could each with equal justice claim him as its own. Chopin was born in the vicinity of Warsaw, on March 1, 1809, and in the capital city of the Grand Duchy, created by Napoleon, he was educated musically until the age of twelve, an age when the average musician enters upon his pupilage. Then it was deemed best by his professors that he be left to the self-development of his unique individuality.

Naturally our precocious child, our future composer _sui generis_, was now the pet of the aristocracy; the plaything of that class which, as a whole, not only in Warsaw, but also in pretty much the world over, lived, as now it lives, to be amused and served by those who, in a land of democratic opportunities, would soon be its acknowledged superiors.

For an artist wholly unique, a smoothing and polishing to the many exactions of polite society is an undertaking questionable indeed. To come into outward conformity with mere convention is to imperil the freedom of his inner individuality. The actual effect of such a course on the genius of Chopin cannot be determined; that it survived the ordeal is proof enough of its virility and tenacity of purpose.

As we have hinted, the world of the Musician, unlike that of the severely practical man, has no fixed diameter; elastic, it widens at his will; at the bidding of his sympathies it stretches until co-extensive with the globe. Thus it gathers into its circumference every land where live and labor his brethren in the art. And so we find our youthful composer looking beyond the limits of his Warsaw, looking and longing for physical contact with that with which his heart was already in rapport; Dresden and Prague and Berlin, but chiefly Vienna the renowned, the rich and glorious with the memories and bequeathings of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert. There could be heard, in its unfading loveliness, the «Freischütz» of Weber in whom Romanticism first wakened like a rose at dawn. There such pianists as Czerny and Hummel would discover to Chopin his failings, or prove his merits to be all his own. And then, far off as the horizon of his daydreams, upgrew the sumptuous city on the Seine, the siren city sweet of voice and fair of form; the heartless, hope-wrecking city beneath whose mocking eye the unheard Wagner in after years must chafe and struggle and starve and almost cease to be.

Chopin was instinctively and wholly a romanticist. Though deemed ultra by many a contemporary critic, to us he stands revealed the great tone-poet of the piano; the Keats, or rather the Shelley of musicians; the inimitable modern from whom the groping and straining virtuoso-producers of to-day have much retrograded.

As a pianoforte writer, Chopin has only Beethoven as compeer, but each in his way is supreme. The supremacy of Beethoven is that of the symphonist in whose brain the orchestra sounds ever a multitudinous variety of tone color. The piano was his dearest friend, the orchestra his great heart's love not to be shut out, not to be forgotten, because of friendship's closest, warmest hour; and so the orchestra would crowd and cramp itself in the piano. On the other hand, his chosen instrument was to Chopin his all of abiding friendship and passionate, absorbing love, and every height and every deep of his being is therein contained; his every unclouded gem, set in ornate and exquisite workmanship, his every matched and strung pearl, finds there a golden casket. Chopin made of his Erard, or his Pleyel, a novel instrument. No longer of uniform tint, its tone colors were yet unlike those from the orchestral blending of wood and metal and string.

Ere long our composer-virtuoso has met and measured many of his renowned contemporaries, and, by fair comparison, he knows to a nicety his own status; already he anticipates the acclaim of a just future. Such seership is necessary to the man of genius. Foreknowledge is his saving rock amidst the merciless seas of ridicule. Clinging to that stay, he awaits the spent fury of the storm, the lulling of winds, the leveling of waves.

For the sake of comparison let us, from the vantage ground of this present, glance at the chief musical celebrities contacted by Chopin in the years of his youthful activity. Thalberg, smooth and faultless executant, delight of the dilettante and the superficial amateur, was throwing off a series of showy but withal empty transcriptions of which his «Mosè in Egitto» may be held the best. As a moulder of musicians, notably Liszt, and as a developer of technique, the hardworking Czerny was proving of immense value, but as a composer he was too diligent, not waiting for that inspiration which cannot be forced. Of Hummel, much over-rated in those days, the best thing sayable is that he influenced the shaping of Chopin's concertos, the least faulty of his larger works. Moscheles, the tutor of Mendelssohn, was a musician much esteemed by Chopin who deemed it a privilege to play the bass to the composer's treble in his chief pianoforte works. Unlike certain of our modern pianists, Kalkbrenner was no muscular virtuoso venting his rage upon the keyboard. He was, on the contrary, a performer of refinement and precision; one who could claim certain excellencies akin to those of Chopin. But alas for human vanity! his great show pieces, the cause of much self-gratulation, have vanished from every concert repertory and every musical collection save that of the antiquary. Mendelssohn, despite his eminence, had the backward-looking eye; much in his matter had already been sung and played, but not with the grace and charm of that accomplished scholar. And yet is the «Elijah» a triumph, a thing enduring, an epitome of all his powers. Oak-ribbed, wealth-laden voyager on the sea of Time, how bravely it breasts the waves that long have whelmed the wrecks of mediocre talent and seeming genius and empty pretence! Schumann, discoverer of the genius of Chopin, was a musician and thinker, an ever-broadening cosmopolitan, a radical in the van of æsthetic progress and, inevitably, the soul of the new musical romanticism.