How to Appreciate Music Part 5

But, you may ask, is there not in all sonatas this psychological inter-relations.h.i.+p of the several movements? Have we not been told again and again that there is?

Undoubtedly you, and others who have been misinformed by enthusiasts who are unable to hear music in anything that has been composed since Beethoven, have been told so. But the sonata, with a few exceptions like the "Moonlight," simply is a group usually of four movements, three long-ones with a shorter one between, and, save for their being in related keys, there is no temperamental relations.h.i.+p between the movements whatsoever, and to talk of there being such a thing is nonsense. I believe the time will come when virtuosos will not hesitate to lift single movements out of the Beethoven sonatas and place them on their programs and that there will be a sigh of relief from the public because it can hear a movement that still sounds fresh and modern without being obliged to listen to two or three others that do not. Heresy? Maybe. Galileo was accounted a heretic--yet the world moves and the musical world with it.

The Beethoven Periods.

Beethoven was an intellectual as well as a musical giant. He thought before he wrought. The division of his activity into three periods, in each of which he is supposed to have progressed further along the road of originality and greatness, is generally accepted. Nevertheless, it is an arbitrary one, especially as regards the pianoforte sonatas, since it has been seen that the first movement of one of his earliest works, the third sonata (Opus 2, No. 3), is one of his most original contributions to music, and one of the most strikingly developed movements in sonata form that he has given us. The period division which a.s.signs this sonata as well as the "Sonata Pathetique" to the first period is absurd. The fact is, that the works of the so-called first and second periods overlap; but there is a decided change in his style when we come to his third period which, in the pianoforte sonatas, begins with Opus 109. (The beginning of this period usually is a.s.signed to the sonata Opus 101, which seems to me too early.) Because here a restless spirit seems to be brooding over his work, it is thought by some that his mind and heart were warped by his misfortunes--his deafness, the ingrat.i.tude of a worthless nephew to whom he had been as a father, and other family and material troubles.

To me, however, Beethoven seems in these sonatas to be chafing more and more under the restraint of form and to be struggling to free himself from it, bending all his intellect to the task. Frankly, I do not think that in these last sonatas he achieved his purpose. He had outgrown the form he himself had perfected, and the thoughts which toward the last he endeavored to mould in it called for absolutely free and untrammeled development. He had become too great for it and, as a result, it cramped and hampered him in his latest utterances. It is my firm belief that had Beethoven come upon the scene fifty years later, he would not have composed a single sonata, but have revived the suite in modern style, as Schumann practically did in his "Carnaval," "Kreisleriana," and "Faschingschw.a.n.k aus Wien," or have created for the pianoforte something corresponding to the freely developed tone poems of Richard Strauss.

Because, however, Beethoven wrote thirty-two pianoforte sonatas and because he was for many years the all-dominating figure in the musical world, every great composer who came after him and composed for the pianoforte experimented with the sonata form, and always, be it noted, with less success and less importance to the real progress of music toward freedom of expression than when he followed his own inner impulse and wrote the mood pieces, the "music of intention," the subjective expressions of indicated thoughts and feelings, that were more consonant with the tendencies of the romantic period which followed Beethoven and for which he may be said to have paved the way.

For just as Bach brought the contrapuntal form to such perfection that those who came after him could not even begin where he left off, let alone surpa.s.s him, so Beethoven brought the sonata form to such perfection that no further advance in it was possible. No wonder therefore that the pianoforte sonatas of the romanticists are comparatively few in number and the least satisfactory of their works.

These composers seem to have written sonatas simply to show that they could write them and under a mistaken idea that length is a measure of greatness and that shorter pieces are minor achievements, whereas as much genius can be displayed in a nocturne as in a sonata.

Sonatas Now Old-fas.h.i.+oned.

Lawrence Gilman, one of our younger American critics, in his "Phases of Modern Music," a collection of essays, brief but containing a wealth of suggestion and breathing throughout the spirit of modernity, sums up the matter in speaking of Edward MacDowell's "Keltic Sonata": "I cannot help wis.h.i.+ng that he might contrive some expedient for doing away, so far as he himself is concerned, with the sonata form which he occasionally uses, rather inconsistently, as a vehicle for the expression of that vision and emotion that are in him; for, generally speaking, and in spite of the triumphant success of the 'Keltic,' Mr. MacDowell is less fortunate in his sonatas than in those freer and more elastically wrought tone poems in which he voices a mood or an experience with epigrammatic concision and directness. The 'Keltic' succeeds in spite of its form, ... though even here, and notwithstanding the freedom of manipulation, one feels that he would have worked to still finer ends in a more flexible and fluent form. He is never so compelling, so persuasively eloquent, as in those impressionistically conceived pieces in which he moulds his inspiration upon the events of an interior emotional program, rather than upon a musical formula necessarily arbitrary and anomalous." This applies to pianoforte music in general since Beethoven. Such I believe to be the consensus of opinion among the younger generation of critics, to whom, after all, the future belongs, as well as the opinion of those older critics who refuse to allow themselves to be pitchforked by their years into the ranks of the old fogies and who still hold themselves ever receptive to every new manifestation in music that is based on a union of mind and heart.

Unless otherwise specifically mentioned I have, in speaking of the sonata form, referred to it in connection with the pianoforte. But it also is the form employed for the symphony (which simply is a sonata for orchestra); for pianoforte trios, quartets and quintets; for string quartets and other branches of chamber music (which are sonatas written for the combination of instruments mentioned and such others as are employed in chamber music), and for concertos (which are sonatas for the combination of a solo instrument like the pianoforte, violin or violoncello, with orchestra). In these branches the sonata form has held its own more successfully than on the pianoforte, and for several extraneous reasons. In the symphony it is due largely to the greater variety that can be achieved through orchestral coloring; in chamber music largely to the somewhat super-refined and timorous taste of its devotees which would regard any startling innovation as highly indecorous; and in the concerto to the fact that a soloist who appears at an orchestral concert is supposed to play a concerto simply because the orchestra is there to play it with him, although he, as well as the audience, probably would find a group of solos far more effective. In fact I think that much of the applause which usually follows a great pianist's playing of a concerto is due not so much to the audience's enthusiasm over it as to the hope that he may be induced to come out and play something alone. So far as the symphony is concerned, it is liberating itself more and more from the sonata form and taking the direction indicated by Liszt in his symphonic poems and by Richard Strauss in his tone poems, the freest form of orchestral composition yet conceived.

The First Romantic Composers.

In music, as in other arts, periods overlap. We have seen that during Bach's life Scarlatti in Italy was laying the foundations of the harmonic system and shaping the outlines of the sonata form which was to develop through Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart and find its greatest master in Beethoven. Likewise, even while Beethoven was creating those works which are the glory of the cla.s.sical period, two of his contemporaries, Carl Maria von Weber, who died one year before him, and Franz Schubert, who survived him by only a year, were writing music which was destined to turn the art into new channels. Weber (1786-1826) is indeed regarded as the founder of the romantic school through his opera "Der Freischutz." It seems to me, however, that Schubert (1797-1828) contributed quite as much to the new movement through his songs, while the contributions of both to the pianoforte are important. Weber was a finished pianist, had an enormous reach (he could stretch a twelfth), and besides utilizing the facility thus afforded him to add to the brilliancy of pianoforte technique (as in his well-known "Concert Piece for Piano and Orchestra"), he deliberately, in some of his compositions, ignored the sonata form and wrote a "Momento Capriccioso," a "Polonaise," a "Rondo Brilliant," a "Polacca Brilliant" and the fascinating "Invitation to the Dance." The last, even in its original form and without the elaborations in Tausig's version of it, and the "Concert Piece" still are brilliant and effective numbers in the modern pianoforte repertoire. Considering the age in which they were composed, their freedom from pedantry is little short of marvelous.

Schubert's Pianoforte Music.

Schubert was not a virtuoso and pa.s.sed his life almost in obscurity, but we now recognize that, although he lived but thirty-one years, few composers wrought more lastingly than he. Of course, the proper place for an estimate of his genius is in the chapter on song, but as a pianoforte composer he is, even to this day, making his influence more and more felt. Living in Vienna, Beethoven's city, and a fervent admirer of that genius, it was natural that he should have composed sonatas, and there is a whole volume of them among his pianoforte works. Nevertheless, so original was his genius and so fertile, that, in addition to his numerous other works, he composed eight impromptus, among them the highly poetic one in G flat major (Opus 42, No. 2), usually called "The Elegy"; another in B flat major (Opus 142, No. 3), which is a theme with variations, some of them brilliant, others profoundly expressive; and the beautifully melodious one in A flat major; six dainty "Moments Musicals"; the exquisite little waltz melodies from which Liszt fas.h.i.+oned the "Soirees de Vienne"; the "Fantasia in G," from which the popular minuet is taken; and the broadly dramatic "Fantasia" on a theme from his song, "The Wanderer,"

for which Liszt wrote an orchestral obbligato, thus converting it into a highly effective and thoroughly modern fantasy for pianoforte and orchestra. These detached compositions are as eloquent in their appeal to-day as if they had been written during the last ten years instead of during the first quarter of the last century. They are melodious with the sustained melody that delights the modern ear. There is not, as in the sonata form or, for that matter, in all the cla.s.sical music that Schubert heard around him, the brief giving out of a theme, then an episode, then another brief theme and so on, all couched in the formulas in which the cla.s.sicists delighted, but instead of these postulates of formality, melody fully developed and wrought out by one who reveled in it and was willing that his hearers should revel in it as well. To distinguish between the cla.s.sicists and this early romantic composer, whose work survives in all its freshness and beauty to this day, it may be said that their music was thematic--based on the kind of themes that lent themselves to formal working out as prescribed by the sonata formula; whereas these detached pieces of Schubert are based on melodies--long-drawn-out melodies, if you wish, and be grateful that they are--that conjure up mood pictures and through their exquisite harmonization exhale the very fragrance of romanticism.

Naturally, the sonatas from his pen are more set. Nevertheless, so long as it seems that we must have sonatas on our recital programs, the neglect of those by Schubert is shameful. I am willing to stake his sonata No. 5, in A minor, against any sonata ever written, and from several of the sonatas single movements can be detached which I should think any pianist would be glad to add to his repertoire. Among these is the lithesome scherzo from the sonata No. 10, in B flat major, and the beautiful slow movement (Andante sostenuto) from the same work.

Schubert also wrote many valuable pianoforte duets, among them several sets of marches and polonaises and an elaborate and stirring "Divertiss.e.m.e.nt a l'Hongroise," which last seems to foreshadow the "Hungarian Rhapsodies" of Liszt. In these and the detached pianoforte solo pieces a special value lies in that they do not appear to have been composed as a protest against the sonata form, but spontaneously and without a thought on Schubert's part that he was doing anything in any way remarkable. They are expressions of musical feeling in the manner that appealed to him as most natural. The "Moments Musicals"

especially are little mood pieces and impressionistic sketches with here and there a bit of realism. Who, for example, is apt to forget Essipoff's playing of the third "Moment" in Hungarian style, with a long crescendo and diminuendo (the same effect used by Rubinstein, when he played his arrangement of the "Turkish March" from Beethoven's "Ruins of Athens"), so that it seemed as if a band of gypsies approached from afar, danced by, and vanished in the distance?

Thoroughly modern is Schubert, a most modern of the moderns, whether we listen to his original pianoforte compositions, or to the Schubert-Liszt waltzes, or "Hark, Hark, the Lark," "To Be Sung on the Water" (barcarolle) and other songs of his which have been arranged for the pianoforte by Liszt.

Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words."

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the musical idol of his day and now correspondingly neglected, contributed to the romantic movement his "Songs Without Words," short pieces for the pianoforte and aptly named because their sustained melody clearly defined against a purposely subordinated accompaniment gives them the character of songs, in the popular meaning of the word. Mendelssohn was a fluent, gentlemanly composer, whose music was readily understood and therefore attained immediate popularity. But the very qualities that made it popular--its smoothness and polish and its rather commonplace harmlessness--have caused it to lose caste. The "Songs Without Words," however, still occupy a place in the music master's curriculum, forming a graceful and easily crossed bridge from cla.s.sical to romantic music. I can remember still, when, as a lad, I received from my music teacher my first Mendelssohn "Song Without Words," the G minor barcarolle, how it seemed to open up a new world of music to me. Many of these compositions, which are unique in their way, still will be found to possess much merit. That they are polished little pieces and poetic in feeling almost goes without saying. The "Spring Song" may be one of the most hackneyed of pianoforte pieces and the same may be true of the "Spinning Song," but it is equally true that the former is as graceful and charming as the latter is brilliant and showy. A tender and expressive little lyric is the one in F major (No. 22), which Joseffy frequently used as an encore and played with exquisite effect.

A group of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words" is never out of place on a pianist's program. At least half a dozen of them, I think, are apt to survive the vicissitudes of many years to come. Mendelssohn wrote three sonatas, a "Sonata Ecossaies" (Scotch), several capriccios and other pieces for the pianoforte, besides two pianoforte concertos, of which the one in G minor is the stock selection of conservatory pupils at their graduation exercises and later at their debut. With it they shoot the musical chutes.

V

CHOPIN, THE POET OF THE PIANOFORTE

I must ask the reader still to imagine that he is at a pianoforte recital, although I frankly admit that I have been guilty of many digressions, so that it must appear to him as if he had been whisked from Mendelssohn Hall up to Carnegie Hall, then down to the Metropolitan Opera House and back to Mendelssohn Hall again.

This, however, as I have sought to make clear before, is due to the universality of the pianoforte as an instrument and to the comprehensiveness of pianoforte music, which in itself ill.u.s.trates in great part the development of the art.

At this point, then, of our imaginary pianoforte recital there is likely to be a group of compositions by Chopin; and the larger the group, or the more groups by this composer on the program, the better satisfied the audience is apt to be. Baker calls Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) the "incomparable composer for the pianoforte." But he was more. He was an incomparable composer from every point of view, great, unique, a tone poet, as well as the first composer who searched the very soul of the instrument for which he specialized. Extraordinary as is his significance for that instrument, his influence extends through it into other realms of music, and his art is making itself felt to this day in orchestra, opera and music-drama as well as in pianoforte music. For he was an innovator in form, an intrepid adventurer in harmony and a sublime singer of melody.

Tempo Rubato.

Before the pianist whose recital we are supposed to be attending will have played many bars of the first piece in the Chopin group, the individuality of this composer will become apparent. Melody will pervade the recital hall like the fragrance of flowers. At the same time there will be an iridescence not noticeable in any of the music that preceded Chopin, and produced as if by cascades of jewels--those remarkable ornamental notes which yet are not ornamental, but, in spite of all their light and shade, and their play of changeable colors, part of the great undercurrent of melody itself. Here we have then, nearly at the very outset of the first Chopin piece, the famous _tempo rubato_, so-called, which has been explained in various ways, but which with Chopin really means that while the rhythm goes calmly on with one hand, the other weaves a veil of iridescent notes around the melodic idea. Liszt expressed it exactly when he said: "You see that tree? Its leaves move to and fro in the wind and follow the gentle motion of the air; but its trunk stands there immovable in its form." Or the _tempo rubato_ is like a shower of petals from a tree in full bloom; the firm outline of the tree, its foliage are there, while we see the delicately tinted blossoms falling from the branches and filling the air with color and fragrance; or like the myriad shafts from the facets of a jewel, piercing in all directions while the jewel itself remains immovable, the centre of its own rays; or like the crisp ripple on a river, while the stream itself flows on in majesty; or, in one or two pa.s.sages when Chopin becomes a cynic, like the twaddle of critics while the person they criticise calmly goes about his mission.

The Soul of the Pianoforte.

What you will notice about these compositions of Chopin--and I say "these compositions" deliberately, although I have not named any (for it makes no difference what pieces of his are on the program, the effect will be the same)--is the fact that in none of them is there the slightest suggestion of anything but pianoforte music. Chopin's great achievement so far as the pianoforte is concerned is the fact that he liberated it completely from orchestral and choral influences, and made it an instrument sufficient unto itself, brought it into its own in all its beauty of tone and expression and enlarged its capacity; sought out its soul and reproduced it in tone, as no other composer had done before him or has done since. The recognition of the true piano tone seems to have been instinctive with him. It appears in his earliest works. Nothing he ever wrote suggests orchestra or voice.

For the beautiful singing quality he brings out in much of his music is a singing quality which belongs to the n.o.ble instrument to which he devoted himself. Not once while listening to a Chopin composition do you think to yourself, as you do so often with cla.s.sical works, like the Beethoven sonatas, "How well this would sound on the orchestra!"

Yet Chopin is as sonorous, as pa.s.sionate, as pleading, as melancholy and as rich in effect, although he is played only on the black and white keys of the pianoforte, as if he were given forth by a hundred instrumentalists, so thoroughly did he understand the instrument for which he wrote. He was the Wagner of the pianoforte.

A Clear Melodic Line.

What you will notice, too, about his music is the general distinctness of his melody. There may be times, as in some of his arabesque compositions, like the "F Minor etude," when the effect is slightly blurred. But this is done purposely, and as a rule there will be found a clear melodic line running through everything he wrote. Combined with this melody are weird, exquisite, entrancing harmonies, and those showers of _tempo rubato_ notes which glitter like a veil of mist in the sunlight and yet, although a veil, allow you to see what is beneath it, like a delicate fabric which seems rather to emphasize and reveal the very things it is intended to conceal.

Chopin was a Pole. He had the melancholy of his race, but also its _verve_. Profoundly affected by his country's sorrow, he also had its haughty spirit. In Paris, where he spent the most significant years of his life, he was surrounded by the aristocracy of his own country who were in exile, and by the aristocracy of the arts. Liszt speaks of an evening at his salon where he met, besides some of the Polish aristocrats, people like Heinrich Heine, Meyerbeer, Delacroix, Nourrit, the tenor, and Bellini. Chopin admired Bellini's music, its clear and beautiful melodiousness, and I myself think that Chopin's melody often has Italian characteristics, although it is combined with harmony that is German in its seriousness, but wholly Chopinesque in all its essentials. In those numerous groups of ornamental, or rather semi-ornamental, notes, so many of them chromatic, and all of them usually designated by the technical term "pa.s.sing notes," signifying that they are merely incidental to the melody and to the harmonic structure, there are nevertheless many that have far greater importance than if they were merely "pa.s.sing." It is in bringing out this significance by slight accelerations and r.e.t.a.r.ds, by allowing a few of them to flash out here while the others remain slightly veiled, that the inspired Chopin player shows his true conception of what the composer meant by _tempo rubato_.

It was Liszt, afterward the first to recognize Wagner, who was the first to recognize Chopin. It was Liszt also who introduced him to George Sand (Mme. Dudevant), the great pa.s.sion of his life. Chopin was the friend of many women. They adored his poetic nature, and there is much in his music that is effeminate, delicate and sensitive; but altogether too much has been made of this side of his art, and of certain morbid pieces like some of the Nocturnes. The affair with George Sand was not only a pa.s.sion, but was a tragedy, and like all such tragedies it left on his music the imprint of something deeper and greater than mere delicacy and morbidity. Then, too, we have to count with his patriotism and his sympathy with his struggling country, and there is much more of the virile and heroic in his music than either the average virtuoso or the average listener allows for.

The etudes.

These contrasts in his music can readily be recognized when a great pianist makes up the Chopin group on his program from the etudes, which are among the greatest compositions of all times, whether we consider them as pianoforte music or as music in general. They touch the soul in many places, and in many and varied ways, and they reflect the alternate delicacy and daintiness of his genius as well as its vigor and n.o.bility. Suppose, for the sake of a brilliant beginning, the virtuoso chooses to start off with the fifth, the so-called "etude on Black Keys," and flashes it in our eyes, making the pianoforte play the part of a mirror held in the sunlight. This gives us one side of Chopin's music, its brilliancy; and it is noticeable that while the tempo of the piece is given as _vivace_, the style in which it is to be played is indicated by the direction _brillante_.

If the pianist continues with the third etude, we shall hear one of the most tender and beautiful melodies that Chopin ever composed. Let him follow this with number thirteen, the one in A flat major, and we are reminded of what Schumann said, in his review of this book of etudes, in which he speaks of the A flat major as "an aeolian harp, possessed of all the musical scales, the hand of the artist causing them all to intermingle in many varieties of fantastic embellishment, yet in such a way as to leave everywhere audible a deep fundamental tone and a soft continuously singing upper voice."

Schumann heard Chopin himself play this etude, and he says that whoever will play it in the way described will get the correct idea of Chopin's performance. "But it would be an error to think that Chopin permitted every one of the small notes to be distinctly heard. It was rather an undulation of the A flat major chord here and there thrown aloft anew by the pedal. Throughout all the harmonies one always heard in great tones a wondrous melody, while once only in the middle of the piece, besides that chief song, a tenor voice became prominent in the midst of the chords. After the etude, a feeling came over one as of having seen in a dream a beatific picture which, when half awake, one would gladly recall."

Vigor, Pa.s.sion, and Impetus.

If now the pianist wishes to show by contrast Chopin in his full vigor, pa.s.sionate and impetuous, let him take the great C Minor etude, the twelfth, _Allegro con fuoco_. "Great in outline, pride, force and velocity, it never relaxes its grim grip from the first shrill dissonance to the overwhelming chordal close," says Huneker, adding that "this end rings out like the crack of creation." It is supposed to be an expression of the alternating wrath and despair with which Chopin received the tidings of the taking of Warsaw by the Russians in September, 1831, for it was shortly after this that the etude was composed. No wonder, to quote again from Huneker, that "all sweeps along in tornadic pa.s.sion."

A pianist hardly can go amiss in making his selection from the twenty-seven etudes, for the contrasts which he can effect are obvious, and there is among these compositions not one which has not its special merits. There is the tenth, of which Von Bulow said whoever could play it in a really finished manner might congratulate himself on having climbed to the highest point of the pianist's Parna.s.sus, and that the whole repertory of music for the pianoforte does not contain a study of perpetual motion so full of genius and fancy as this especial one is universally acknowledged to be, excepting, possibly, Liszt's "Feux Follets." Then there is number nineteen in C sharp minor, like a nocturne with the melody in the left hand, with the right hand answering as a flute would a 'cello. For contrast take number twenty-one, the so-called "b.u.t.terfly etude"--a wretched misnomer, because a pianist gifted with true musical clairvoyance can work up such a gust of pa.s.sion in this etude that any b.u.t.terfly would be swept away as if by a hurricane. Nor, in order to accomplish this, is it necessary to make such a bravura piece of the etude as so many pianists ignorantly do. We have, too, the "Winter Wind etude," in A minor, Opus 25, number eleven--the twenty-third in the collection as usually published--planned on a grand scale and carried out in a manner equal to the plan.

Von Bulow calls attention to the fact that, with all its sonorousness, "the greatest fullness of sound imaginable," it nowhere trespa.s.ses upon the domain of the orchestra, but remains pianoforte music in the strictest sense of the word. "To Chopin," says Von Bulow, in referring to this etude, "is due the honor and credit of having set fast the boundary between piano and orchestral music which, through other composers of the romantic school, especially Robert Schumann, has been defaced and blotted out, to the prejudice and damage of both species."

While agreeing with Von Bulow that Chopin was the great liberator of the pianoforte, I cannot agree with the exception he takes to the music of Robert Schumann. If he had referred back to the unpianistic cla.s.sical sonata form, he would have been more accurate.

The Preludes.