Chapter IX: Liszt and the Present Time 271 (11)

In the same year, 1837, Liszt made a confession, in an essay written for the _Gazette Musicale_, which was the greatest flattery that ever the piano received from one of its masters. Liszt refuses to go nearer to the orchestra or to the opera. “My piano is to me what his boat is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay, more, it has been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice. Perhaps the secret tie which holds me so closely to it is a delusion; but I hold the piano very high. In my view it takes the first place in the hierarchy of instruments; it is the oftenest used and the widest spread.... In the circumference of its seven octaves it embraces the whole circumference of an orchestra; and a man’s ten fingers are enough to render the harmonies which in an orchestra are only brought out by the combination of hundreds of musicians.... We can give broken chords like the harp, long sustained notes like the wind, staccati and a thousand passages which before it seemed only possible to produce on this or that instrument.... The piano has on the one side the capacity of assimilation; the capacity of taking into itself the life of all (instruments); on the other it has its own life, its own growth, its individual development.... It is a microcosm, a micro-theus.... My highest ambition is to leave to piano players after me some useful instructions, the footprints of attained advance, in fact a work which may some day provide a worthy witness of the labour and study of my youth. I remember the greedy dog in La Fontaine, which let the juicy bone fall from its mouth in order to grasp a shadow. Let me gnaw in peace at my bone. The hour will come, perhaps all too soon, in which I shall lose myself and hunt after a monstrous intangible shadow.”

It is due in very great measure to the example of Paganini’s violin-playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil, created modern piano-playing. The world was struck dumb by the enchantment of the Genoese violinist; men did not trust their ears; something uncanny, inexplicable, ran with this demon of music through the halls. The wonder reached Liszt; he ventured on _his_ instrument to give sound to the unheard of: leaps which none before him had ventured to make, “disjunctions” which no one had hitherto thought could be acoustically united: deep tremolos of fifths, like a dozen kettle-drums, which rushed forth into wild chords; a polyphony which almost employed as a rhythmical element the overtones which destroy harmony; the utmost possible use of the seven octaves in chords set sharply one over another; resolutions of tied notes in unceasing octave graces with harmonies thrown in the midst; an employment hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fulness of tone-colour; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application of the tone-colours of different octaves for the coloration of the tone-effect; the entirely naturalistic use of the tremolo and the glissando; and above all a perfect systematization of the method of interlacing the hands, partly for the management of runs so as to bring out the colour, partly to gain a doubled power by the division, and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in the figures, a fulness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process of individualisation begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin. The three systems of notes, instead of two, appear more frequently; in fact the two hands appear for the most part to play a group of notes which seem to be conceived for three. And precisely by this means the two hands run inside and through one another, as if they were only a single tool of ten fingers. The music appears again to become a corporate unity of tone, as it had already once been in its first beginnings. But, it has now become, out of a universal music, a music for the piano. An historic mission is fulfilled.

Liszt invents a fingering for his purposes which has no other principle than that of the most absolute opportunism. Scales, struck by one finger, trills played with changing fingers, strenuous parallel octave passages, heavy fingering in order to drag out parts which otherwise glide too lightly--everywhere, in place of the academic rule, there is an attempt to grasp the effect of the moment, a moulding after the impulses of the expression. And thence arises a soul-giving power even down to the most trifling passing-note, until the man and the playing are one. Liszt did the miracles of a prophet in his recitals, tumultuous assemblies, in which it actually happened that the people did not stir from the place till one o’clock in the morning.

So early as 1839 he was able to venture on the first pure piano-recital ever given, after Moscheles had paved the way with his mixed piano-recital without orchestra. Not only could he fill up a whole evening with performances on this instrument alone; he was able to fill with his performances twenty-one evenings in the short space between December 27, 1841, and March 2, 1842. This was the brilliant period of his virtuoso-years; twenty-one recitals in Berlin within this short space! In the history of piano-playing they are festival weeks, holy days, in which by the greatest of all pianists a world-literature was made living on the keys, so that all Europe resounded. At that time we hear of a critic wondering how this marvellous man could actually improvise along with an orchestra! So little were people accustomed to playing by heart, which since Liszt’s time has become the universal rule.

Liszt’s innumerable compositions for the piano, which were first completely named in Ramann’s book, remind us again of the three types of artists of which we spoke above. We find in them Liszt the compiler, who makes use of the experiences of centuries; and we find Liszt the innovator, who points out new ways in motives which we might think were only seen in Wagner, in naturalisms which developed music, and in technical means of expression; but we do not find in him a composer of genius, who can hardly hold himself back from his inspirations, and who with unforced ease, creates new forms for the new ideas. We shall, as time advances, suffer less and less from illusions on this point. And Liszt himself was content to be an innovator without being a creator. He was a clever artist who knew his own limitations accurately. He invents a theme which is spirited, new, and characteristic; and when he has invented the theme he sits down and arranges it according to all the powers of technical expression; and varies it in forms whose technique is their content, so that technique and content become identical. This is the last effect of the Étude-principle, in which an idea finds, not its form, but its technical expression.

This special method of Liszt is preserved at its best in the twenty Rhapsodies. The Magyar _Dallok_ had appeared already as studies. But these Rhapsodies far surpass them in polish. Hungarian national airs, with their rushing rhythmical and unrhythmical _verve_, were here for the first time taken up into the circle of art, and supplied the motives from which he poured forth a pyrotechnic display of brilliant variations, whose technique has not a single useless note, and whose working-out is indescribably delicate and harmonically interesting. Nos. 2, 6, 9 (Pester Karneval), 12 (to Joachim), and 14 (to Bülow), are not unjustly preferred to the rest. No 14, with its astounding development from the funeral march to the joyous stretto, has remained one of the most marvellous piano-pieces on record. In it an unparalleled technique is revealed, while the piece is not thereby rendered hollow or superfluous.

The charming Spanish Rhapsody, the Chopin-like “Consolations,” the wonderfully impromptu-like “Apparitions” and “Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses,” that grand congeries of various differently arranged and differently put together Études and drawing-room pieces, the “Années de Pélerinage” (three volumes) with the Tarantelle, the Paganini Études with the Campanella, further collections of Études till we reach the Twelve Études d’exécution transcendente, the “Dream Nocturnes,” the “Mephisto Waltzes and Polkas,” the “Caprice Valses,” the “Chromatic Galop”--I will only refer to a few pieces which possess a special historic or artistic interest. In 1834, as his first romantic production, appeared the “Pensée des Morts,” in mixed time, _senza tempo_, with mottos from Lamartine, for whom, with Chateaubriand, he felt the highest literary admiration. In the same year came out “Lyon,” a realistic piece on the uprising of the Lyons working-classes, and one of the few piano-compositions relating to contemporary events. “Sposalizio” and “Il Penseroso” (1838, 1839) are notable as pieces inspired by the impressions of the representative arts, as the somewhat feeble “Fantasia quasi Sonata” (1837) arose from the perusal of Dante. The whole of these are romantic confessions in which the arts greet each other in friendly wise. In importance, however, they are far surpassed by the later piano works; above all by the five best original pieces, the Legends, the Concertos, and the B minor Sonata.

The Legends of 1866 are in honour of his patron saint, St Francis. The first shews him in an ecclesiastical theme, sweeping over the waves, which are represented by the usual variation. In the other he is preaching to the birds. It is a wonderful free impromptu, in which a church air is set over against the twitter of the birds, which is marked by masterly technique. The birds seem to be listening to the saint; their twittering seems likely to give way to his pious harmonies; but at the conclusion we see them again in a cheerfulness which leads on to a ravishing cry of birds. It is the most poetical piece that Liszt ever wrote for the piano.

The Sonata in B minor (1854) dedicated to Schumann, has one movement but many themes. Six motives of varied colouring are knitted into one web, which unfolds itself into a splendid picture. A royal brilliancy lies over the whole. More free and lively are the two single-movement Concertos. The one in A major has its characteristic line C sharp B C B, which is to be followed out into the cadenzas; a main theme with all kinds of subordinate themes, in a natural threefold quickening from slower reflective sections. The E flat major is constructed on the opposite model--its characteristic line is E flat, D, E flat; D E flat, D, D flat. This work is probably the most frequently heard of Liszt’s concerted pieces. It is more _giusto_ in essence, with slower by-themes--especially the beautiful Adagio with the Tristan-like motive and the Pastorale middle-section--swinging up in Bacchic style. On the return to the main theme all the motives alter into a more cheerful strain; the adagio gives way to a martial movement, and the Pastorale is taken up by the piano with increased ornamentation. In the place of the old formal scheme a psychological process had entered; an inward conversation of the piano with the orchestra and its instruments.

From the point of view of number, still greater than the original pieces are the arrangements, which embrace a whole world, from variations to complete transformations of themes, from the “Dance of the Dead” on the Cantus of the Dies Irae to the Rhapsodies, from his arrangements of Bach to his Paraphrases of Wagner, from the innumerable songs and waltzes of Schubert to the settings of Beethoven’s symphonies, and the symphonic poems of Liszt’s own. Here was a huge mass of material, which was transmitted spiritually and artistically to the public by means of the piano. And in the hither and thither of the arrangements we trace the most labyrinthine paths. Schubert’s Marches, for example, were first transcribed for four hands, then arranged for orchestra, and finally re-transcribed from the orchestral setting for the pianoforte. Liszt’s arrangements are no mere transcriptions; they are poetical re-settings, seen through the medium of the piano. He assimilates the composition before him into himself, and reproduces it on the piano as if he had conceived it, with all its special peculiarities, for the piano alone. Such things seemed often to be the very best expression of his genius. This great series begins with the transcriptions of Paganini’s Capriccios, and that of the “Symphonie fantastique” of Berlioz; and it reaches its height in the two-handed settings of Beethoven’s symphonies. The pieces have become genuine piano-compositions, in which a full score is reproduced by specific fulness of chord, and a sweeping chord by broken harmonies sustained by the pedal. The piano is no longer merely one pillar of the musical structure; it has become the architect of an art of its own. This art of its own becomes yet more visible when it deals, not with the transcription of ready-made works, but with paraphrases of given sections, which were to be released from their surroundings. Liszt made many operatic fantasias of this kind, and did not always utterly oppose the taste of the time, which did not object to dissolve a characteristic melody into flourishes, or to make a sad and trembling motive tower into unexpected heights. Of this his Tannhäuser March and his Don Giovanni Fantasia are proofs. But the rule, nevertheless, is that he never undertakes anything contrary to the character of the passage to be paraphrased, and that--as he does most successfully in the Rienzi Fantasia--he does not overlay the melody with cadenzas and ornamentations from without, but extracts them, as it were, from the substance of the piece itself.

Only those parts of the opera does he bind together in his paraphrase, which stand in an inward relation to each other. It is now entirely drawn from a leading idea, and is related to the earlier externally-connected operatic fantasia as the symphonic poem to the symphony.

The immense difficulties of Liszt’s compositions retarded their popularity for many years. Clara Schumann and Sophie Menter were amongst the first brave performers to introduce them into their repertoires. To-day they almost overburden the recitals, and include much of little value, which would hardly survive except as the _disjecta membra gigantis_. His influence was of a kind never seen before. He created a type of recital in which his imitators often copy the Master down to his very hair. His missionaries travelled over the whole world from the circle which he gathered round himself at Weimar in the summer months. Their ideal is his creation; the perfect, memoriter, technically and stylistically adjusted mastery of the great and many-sided piano literature, without regard for century or nation.

Liszt’s contemporaries in piano-virtuosity are almost forgotten. Their name vanishes like a dream. Others succeed in their place; generations press eagerly on each other’s heels. There was the wild and headstrong Mortier de Fontaine, who was the first to venture on playing Beethoven’s Op. 106 in public. Döhler, Dreyschock, Rosenhain, Jaell and his wife, Wilhelmina Clauss-Savardy, Sophie Menter, like her in objectivity, the more vigorous Annette Essipoff, afterwards the wife of Leschetizki, who now holds the very centre of piano-teaching in Vienna. In our time are Madame Carreño, so masculine in her convincing interpretations, and Clotilde Kleeberg, her opposite, so sympathetic and delicate, the truly womanly executant of Schumann and Chopin. Madame Essipoff was a pupil of Anton Rubinstein, from whom a by-stream ran out alongside of the world-embracing school of Liszt. Rubinstein’s and Bülow’s playing represented the difference which was bound to arise between the classical and the spiritual interpretation of piano-works. Rubinstein was the great subjective artist, who gave way entirely to the mood of the moment, and could rush on in an instant in such a way as to leave no room for the cool criticism of a later hour. But Bülow was the great objective artist, the teacher and unfolder of all mysteries, the unraveller of the knottiest points in Beethoven’s latest works, which he understood to their innermost details. In his playing the intellect had the gratification of clear-cut sharpness, while the heart retained the emotion long after the artist left the platform. Both artists were in their kind finished and complete, and both were of incalculable influence on whole generations. The impressionist Rubinstein and the draughtsman Bülow had each the technique which suited him. The one rushed and raved, and a slight want of polish was the natural result of his impressionist temperament; the other drew carefully the threads from the keys, occasionally showing them with a smile to his audience, while every tone and every tempo stood in ironbound firmness, and every line was there before it was drawn.

Rubinstein and Bülow were both interpretative natures. Rubinstein composed much, Bülow little; and Rubinstein’s compositions are hollow while Bülow’s are fragmentary. In their compositions the two men are at their worst; the pathos of Rubinstein became maudlin, and the severity of Bülow became simple harshness. The best that Bülow ever wrote for the piano was the piano-arrangement of Tristan, which is unparalleled in its expression of pain; but his best work of all was his annotations to Beethoven’s Sonatas and Variations. Rubinstein’s innumerable Dances and National Airs are played indeed, but they are practically forgotten; his Tarantelles, Serenades, Sonatas, Concertos, get nearer to sinking every year. Rubinstein’s experiences, his activity in St Petersburg, his final stay in a pension at Dresden, were rather external than internal changes. Later in his life he was able to spend more money on his gigantic plans. In a cycle of seven piano-recitals he undertook to give a complete picture of the historical development of his art. It is well known with what self-sacrifice he gave these recitals, and how nobly he followed the unique principle which great virtuosos should set before themselves, namely that those who have should pay for the art, in order that those who have not should receive it gratuitously. Bülow’s experiences, on the other hand, were internal. His change from Wagner to Brahms will be regarded by every student of great souls, not as a desertion of his colours, but as a mental phenomenon. In Bülow’s nature there was at bottom nothing in common with Wagner; and it may well be that he never saw Wagner except through the glasses of the concert, of execution, of display, not of the stage, or of sensuous perception. Bülow was not stage-bitten, nor was he even a man with a head full of the philosophy of the stage; he was a downright worker, a teacher, to whom indeed teaching came so natural that he for a considerable time gave lessons with Raff in Frankfort and Klindworth in Berlin. When he gave public recitals he did not, like Rubinstein, crowd a history of the piano into a few evenings. He took by preference a single author, like Beethoven, and played only the five last Sonatas, or he unfolded the whole of Beethoven historically in four evenings. He would have preferred to play every piece twice. Great draughtsman as he was, he hated all half-lights and colourations; he pointed his pencil very finely, and his paper was very white. If he laid his pencil down, it was only for a short time; and if he played any work, the composer was a made man. Over the variations of Tschaïkowski could be read, “Joué par M. Bülow dans ses concerts.”

Teacher and virtuoso--these mark great pianists into two groups, or at least into two temperaments; and it was this marked difference which was signalised by the appearance of Bülow and of Rubinstein. In all, the severance is perfected according to the natural aptitude and inner development. Of course over every virtuoso at a certain time there comes the wish to busy himself with teaching, but only in a small circle; but on the other hand we observe that the decision to follow the teaching profession is instantly taken by those artists who have no turn for publicity, or do not like to face the competition which to-day is more keen than ever. The extreme of the virtuoso type is seen in certain international geniuses, who continued rather the tradition of Thalberg than that of Liszt. Thalberg, in the fifties, like Henri Herz in the forties, toured in America and Brazil. Rubinstein also, in the sixties, visited America. The most travelled of all was the Irish pianist and composer Wallace, who, for the sake of his health, toured and gave concerts through Australia, New Zealand, India, South America, the United States and Mexico--long before Thalberg’s Brazilian journey. To-day a tour in America is almost a matter of course in the life of every virtuoso. Countries like France and Italy are shut off from a great international intercourse of this kind, since their concert-life, and especially their cultivation of the piano, has never duly unfolded itself. The opera is there all powerful. But England, as a hundred years ago, invites to her shores the great men of the Continent, and sends them back loaded with treasures. As London pianists Hartvigson, the pupil of Bülow, Borwick, and Dawson, stand in the front rank. Russia, formerly a colony of foreign emigrants, has now, by Anton Rubinstein’s foundations in St Petersburg, and by the like activity of his highly-esteemed brother Nicholas in Moscow, awaked to a noble concert-life, in which the rivalry of the two capitals is remarkably balanced. It was inevitable that in nearer and further states ever more numerous pupils of German or Parisian masters should settle and labour as teachers. In America, so early as the sixties and seventies, a great number of naturalised teachers was known, among whom Wolfsohn is perhaps most distinguished. His eighteen evenings of historically arranged piano-music, which he gave so early as 1877 in Chicago, are deservedly famous.

Tausig, the pupil of Liszt, who by his brilliant technique and his extraordinary sense for style was the wonder of his contemporaries, left behind him various good arrangements and compositions perhaps too obvious in their virtuosity. He was born in Warsaw and died at thirty. He would have meant to our time a teaching power of the first magnitude. The crown of piano-playing in our time has been won by Eugene d’Albert, born in 1864, a small man with giant power, a loveable person of astonishing artistic seriousness. He was a pupil of Liszt, and on him the mantle of Liszt has fallen in our generation. His greatest virtue is his classic temperament. In his memory rest safely stored the greatest works from Bach to Tausig. If he takes one out, he takes with it the sphere in which it stayed unspoilt--the style of its execution. The piece stands fast in its construction; not a phrase appears inorganic, not a rhythm accidental. The seriousness of Brahms’s Concertos, the murmuring of Chopin’s Berceuse, the Titanic power of his A minor Étude, the grace of Liszt’s Soirées de Vienne, the solemnity of Bach, move under his hand in the concert, without one taking the least from another. It is objectivity, but we do not cry out for subjectivity; it is personality, but we do not miss the _rapport_ with eternity.

Liszt’s pupils Reisenauer and Stavenhagen endeavoured on a similar ground to play a part as more general interpreters. But chance and change played them many tricks. Others, again, had and have their special excellencies. Paderewski, idolised in England and America, is the delicate, emotional, drawing-room player; Sauer, the bravura pianist; Siloti, the interpreter of Russian piano-music; Friedheim, the Liszt-player; Karl Heymann, the graceful. Barth, the pupil of Bülow, is severe; Rosenthal, an amazing technician; Ansorge, one of the most intellectual; Gabrilowitsch, who drives the horses of Rubinstein; Vladimir von Pachmann, with all his extravagancy, at least plays Chopin’s Mazurkas with absolute faithfulness to their national character; Busoni shows great passion; Lütschg has an extraordinarily strong wrist; the miraculous child Paula Szalit transposes fugues on the spot; Josef Hofmann, once an “infant prodigy,” is now an astonishingly individualistic artist; and Eduard Risler has an inimitable soft touch. Since the triumphs of Planté, indeed, Risler is the first French pianist to achieve a universal renown. He is a pupil of the eminent Parisian master Diémer. He has discovered those last delicate _nuances_ which lie precisely between tone and silence. His tones seem not to begin and not to cease; they are woven out of ethereal gossamer. While d’Albert plays with the whole upper body, seeks the keys and rivets them fast, breaks the sforzatos, and soothes the pianissimos; Risler is a statue at the piano, externally a Stoic; but his gliding and crossing fingers, so soon as they have struck the first chord, become the most sensitive agents of an emotional soul. Under Risler’s treatment the commonplace becomes a novelty. Out of Liszt’s sermon of St Francis to the birds he draws the last poetical breath; Beethoven he bathes in a warm brilliancy of his own; and, not to be charged with too much sweetness, he flings himself loose with the overture to the Meistersinger, so that we fancy the whole orchestra to be playing, and we have an assurance that it is not weakness, but an active artistic restraint which gives to his touch its never-to-be-forgotten delicate profundity.

Piano-playing, in such an unparalleled advance, became of necessity a profession, which at one time enticed to deceive, at another rewarded abundantly. It is a profession which on one side leads to royal wealth, on the other to that extreme of misery which is the half of all art. The collision, which in our age is inevitable between industry and art, revealed the terrible abysses which yawn between the claims of a profession and those of art. While in a Frankfort paper we can read advertisements in which a young lady teacher offers two piano lessons a week in return for the daily four o’clock coffee with the family, young Hofmann, at nine years of age, gave, in New York alone, within three months, thirty-five recitals, from which his impresario, out of a gross receipt of over twenty-five thousand pounds, took at least ten thousand for himself.

The piano has become an essential part of life. Those who cannot play it stand outside a great company which cultivates it as an engine of social and home intercourse. In households where there is no piano we seem to breathe a foreign atmosphere. To-day we need no longer explain the piano from the church or the theatre, from the ballet or the volkslied, from the artistic song or the violin; it has on the contrary become an active centre, which has given its form to our whole musical culture; nay, more, which has even given the stamp to our whole conception of music, not only in the minds of all amateurs, but in the minds of many professionals. Whether the young girl spends her time with Chopin’s E flat major Nocturne, or whether a false sentiment attaches itself to the “Maiden’s Prayer” or the “Cloister Bell”; whether the waltzes of Lanner delight a quiet mind or Strauss calls to the dance; whether the eager pupil plies her healthy sport in Cramer’s, Schmitt’s, or Czerny’s Studies, or the rising virtuoso exercises himself mechanically in scales after d’Albert’s fashion, while he simultaneously reads new notes, or as Henselt plays Bach while he reads his Bible; whether amateurs enjoy themselves with the piano-abstracts of operatic fragments; or whether artists like the Kapellmeisters Fischer and Sucher, offer those Fantasias from Wagner over which they have spent their lives; whether the professor allows himself the enjoyment of private piano-literature, or performs standard works before thousands in the concert hall;--all these are accidents of culture, they are phenomena which offer a picture of that intimate interdependence of music and actual life which has developed so fruitfully since the art ceased to be the private possession of a clique, and which has established it on an absolutely new foundation. Of course, the more general piano culture has become, the more has it been in turn used up as a profession, and the more easily were its wings fettered. Our chief men also have ceased to improvise during a recital. Only our “comic artists” do so at the present day. And of a power of magical improvisation, exercised in private such as Beethoven and Liszt so often displayed, we now hear less and less. The recitals, in great part, deal with the interpretation of known works, which often--like Beethoven’s E flat major concerto--are repeated _ad nauseam_. We have learning, we have playing, but we never see the enthusiasm which can be evoked by the stress of immediate creation. Piano-playing is a universal business even to the extremest limits of an amateurism which cannot strike a single chord instantaneously, nor dot a single note correctly. It is a long line from the little yawning schoolgirl, through the teacher running up and down stairs, to the virtuosos who play in the winter and give instruction in the summer. With excess of zeal comes sin. Nowhere in an art is a sin so often committed as in the choice of masters popular to-day. From false economy, musical culture, which is so profound and so difficult, is intrusted to the most incompetent, and fortunes are squandered in ruining the music in a child. In a paper once was to be read a somewhat humorous satire, entitled, “Directions for use,” in which the teachers were thus handled: “For beginners the choice of a master is recommended--there are masters at all prices--very good lessons can be had for sixpence; but masters with long hair charge three shillings and upwards--for male adults the choice of a mistress is recommended, because pleasure and love are thus excited together.”

In order to put a check on amateur teaching a movement has of late years been set on foot to forbid untried teachers to occupy any position. As yet, however, the movement wants legal enforcement. Kullack and Klauwell in Cologne, Breslaur in Berlin, publisher of the _Piano-teacher_ (a paper now twenty-one years old), have founded seminaries for intending teachers. In 1896, in Cologne, out of four hundred students only thirty received a diploma of teaching capacity--but no means at present exists of forbidding the others to teach. Consider the enormous crowds that pass out of our music-schools. An infinitesimal proportion may perhaps decide for a virtuoso career. Of the rest half remain amateur, the other half go in to the teaching profession. The overcrowding may easily be imagined. The largest music-school in the world, the English “Guildhall School” of Music, had till lately 140 professors, 42 teaching-rooms, 2700 students; and will shortly be enlarged till it has 69 rooms and 5000 students. I have made special inquiries at the Berlin Conservatorium of Klindworth and Scharwenka. My numbers are I think exact to a few figures. In 1895-6, out of 387 students, 41 men and 208 women took piano only; 8 men and 15 women took piano with some other subject. In 1896-7, out of 383 pupils, 40 men and 239 women learnt piano alone, and 4 men and 8 women learnt piano with something else. Of these 247 women, besides, about 43 are English or Americans. Since on the average we reckon two years for a course, there go from this school alone, every year, more than fifty women-teachers into the world. Some of them perhaps may win a doubtful testimonial in a dearly-bought Berlin concert; others, who aimed at virtuosity, may, after a pitiful experience, themselves sink into teachers. Of the frequency of piano-performances in concerts the following figures may give some notion. I have counted the more important Berlin concerts in nine weeks taken at random--159 in all. Among them are 58 piano-concerts, partly combined with performances on other instruments, partly interesting through the personality of the pianist; mere accompanying of songs being of course not reckoned.

The number of music-schools has increased specially in the capital cities. In France the Parisian High School has a great repute; in Russia the Moscow and St Petersburg Conservatoriums; in Belgium the Brussels Conservatoire, under the guidance of Dupont, who is also distinguished as the editor of old piano-works; in London the Royal Academy of Music [and the Royal College of Music]. In Germany we have in Frankfort the Hoch Conservatorium under Bernhard Scholz, and the Raff under Max Schwarz; Stuttgart has somewhat declined through the deaths of Lebert and Starck, the editors of the great Theoretical and Practical School; but Cologne has greatly gained in importance under Wüllner. In Leipzig under Mendelssohn, Moscheles and Plaidy, piano-playing took the first place; new technical devices like the pedal-clavier--that is, with organ pedals for the low notes--were freely admitted, as in our days the Janko-keyboard. But with the inevitable reaction, this school has decayed, and its importance in piano-art is not what it was. In Berlin the Royal “Hochschule” with Barth, Raif, Rudorff, and others, at its head, experienced a like fate. Private institutions have come to the front. Tausig’s School for higher piano-playing (1866-1870), was very distinguished. From it went Joseffy to New York and Robert Freund to Zürich. The New Academy, founded by Theodor Kullak, was also famous. It was afterwards replaced by another Institute founded by his son. The Stern Conservatorium, now directed by Gustav Holländer along with Jedliczka; the Klindworth, at which for a time Bülow and Moszkowski laboured; and that of Scharwenka, which, after Xaver Scharwenka’s departure for America, was for a time united with the Klindworth;--are known to all.

Like the practical “schools,” the theoretical have also become innumerable. I take as a few of the most important works the following: Adolph Kullak’s “Aesthetic of Piano-playing,” re-edited by Bischoff, a unique and profound work on the theory of the art, as a hundred years’ experience and the careful observations of the author have enlarged it; Hugo Riemann’s “Comparative Theoretical and Practical Piano School, presenting system, method, and materials, in a historic and organic connection”; and, among the innumerable “schools” and volumes of exercises, the various thoughtful works of Germer. Two main principles have come to occupy the first place in the newest school-practice. First, the systematic carrying out--not merely of a musical mechanic of the hand, but its thorough gymnastic. This was the natural advance, which carried yet further the teaching of Czerny. The hand is adapted for piano-playing--as in the systems of Thilo, Virgil, and others--by gymnastics of the fingers, and stretching of the muscles. Thus a great part of the gymnastic cultivation is got over before actual musical practice begins. In this work the dumb keyboards, which to-day are constructed with great delicacy, have borne a great part. They now admit of legato playing and of different degrees of strength in touch.

The second great principle is to take into account in instruction the peculiarities of the pupil’s hand. It stands to reason that the same exercises will not do for all hands. One hand demands this, the other that. This method is carried out with the utmost precision by the greatest of teachers, Leschetizky. A similar principle prevails in modern teaching of singing. We no longer endeavour to base voice-cultivation on the universal vowel A, but on that vowel which comes most natural to the organ of the pupil.

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The arrangement of the keys is the sacred tradition of centuries. It presents the tone-system, as it were, lengthways, and is the natural expression of a melodic musical concept. The separation of the black and the white keys has been introduced in accordance with a certain theoretical principle, which allows the difference of position in our scales over the black and white keys to appear somewhat complicated. Our keyboards are constructed entirely on the C major scale; the tones outside this scale are thrown into the black keys, and thus appear in a subordinate position: thus all other scales have a strange form and often a somewhat difficult fingering. But since the seventeenth century our conception of music has gradually, from melodic, become harmonic; we hear vertically as well as horizontally; we hear the beauty of all chords as sounded together, and, unconsciously, we fill in the harmonies to every melody we hear. It would have been natural if the keyed instruments had adapted themselves to this altered musical conception, and had resigned the original conception of the scale to make way for harmonic conveniences. Nothing, however, is slower to be reached than the determination to revolutionise from the foundation a technique adopted in the schools, since no one is willing to make the sudden break with the old and the sudden start with the new.

Attempts had already been made to break the monopoly of the C major scale, and to form a regular chromatic scale of twelve similar keys. In our own day Paul von Janko has improved this system by repeating every regular chromatic series three times in terrace-style one above another, so that not only wider stretches, but also, without much movement of the hand, a surprising control of full chords and of rapid passages is attained. The tones are thus brought more narrowly together as the monopoly of the C major key is destroyed; and the result betokens a decisive advance in the conception of modern music. This conception still embodies a compromise between the old scale-keyboard and an arrangement of the keys, which, founded on harmonic ideas, has promise for the future. Janko’s keyboard is slowly gaining converts. Great houses, like those of Ibach, Duysen, Kaps, and Blüthner, are taking it up. Hausmann in Berlin, and Wendling in Leipzig, are the chief supporters of the scheme. In America we hear stories of remarkable results. Only by the development of such a new keyboard, which will have to answer the demands of the modern conception of music, will it be possible to draw new tone-effects from the piano. Its utmost capacities, in its present form, have been exhausted, it would seem, by Liszt.

Meanwhile the construction of the instruments has advanced to an unexampled perfection. It is only a hundred years since Stein began his laborious attempts on the new pianoforte. To-day a network of factories is spread over the whole world, in which innumerable faultless instruments are made, which put to use all the results of experience in the treatment of wood and wires. The modern pianos have already attained so completely the ideal of the hammer-mechanism that we are beginning to hark back to the forgotten tones of the cembalo. In Paris these aims have their strongest support in Diémer, who plays his Couperin on clavecins, and at the same time wins new renown for the oboe d’amour and the viol da gamba in the chamber-concert. Already quill-claviers are being more frequently constructed, and the reaction against the predominance of the pianoforte finds its satisfaction in their sweet and thrilling sounds.

It is impossible to review all the piano-factories of both hemispheres, or to register all their innovations. I must content myself with mentioning the system of “overstringing,” invented simultaneously by several persons; the felting of the hammers, introduced by Pape; the third pedal of Steinway which holds on single tones without affecting the others; the use of a cast-iron frame and of cast-steel strings; and the vertical stringing of the upright “cottage” piano, which is developed out of older forms. Bechstein’s factory in Berlin stands at the head of German manufacture; but there are also Duysen, Blüthner, Schiedmayer, Irmler, Westermayer, Kaps, Ibach, and innumerable others; Bösendorfer in Vienna, Knabe in Baltimore, and Steinway in New York, who have succeeded to the renown of Chickering; besides the many other older-established firms. Bechstein, so fundamentally sound; and Steinway, with his patent fulness of tone, are the two rivals for the laurel at the end of the century.

Henry Engelhard Steinway, born in Brunswick, began, in the fifties, his New York business in very small circumstances. A three-storied house was the factory, and one piano a week was the output. In 1859, however, the firm was in a position to build a great establishment, which now, after several enlargements, covers more than four acres. The output advanced with giant strides: numerous patents were taken out for the improvement of the resonance and the fulness of tone: in 1872 the Emperor Alexander bought the twenty-five thousandth piano, and in 1883 Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild of Vienna bought the fifty thousandth. Besides the factory, the firm possesses in Astoria great estates, the timber of which covers not less than a hundred and fifty acres. There they have their yards, saw-mills, turning-mills, foundries, metal-workshops, and mechanical wood-bending and carving apparatus. The parts are sent from Astoria to New York to be fitted together. When completed, the pianos are exhibited in Steinway Hall (14th Street) with a view to sale. More than ninety thousand have been completed up to date, of which a large proportion has been transmitted to Europe through the London and Hamburg branches.

Bechstein has adopted a similar division of his work. He has two factories, the one in the suburbs, for the preparation of the parts and the drying of the wood, the other in the town for the fitting together of the pieces. This latter is in close connection with the shop. Karl Bechstein, like Steinway, began in the fifties on a very small scale, and in 1860 founded his great house in Johannisstrasse. In 1880 he acquired the first portion of the suburban estate, on which to-day four factories stand. The victorious brilliancy of modern ingenuity is to be seen in the whole establishment. The probation through which the wood has to pass in the yards, then in the dry-rooms, in the store-cellars, and finally when sized in the store-houses of the factories, before it can be used, is a grand guarantee of its suitability. Two important rooms are devoted to steam-power. The one is the planing-room, where sides and lid are planed together by machines of such extraordinary power that the shavings hum about under centrifugal force, and are carried off by an exhaust apparatus. The other is the foundry, where all the metal work is carried on, from the boring of the cast frame to the preparation of the screws. Next, in the upper storeys, in the more distant factories, begins the process of fitting the piano together from the rough parts. The action is provided by a separate factory, the Nürnberg wires are spun, the walls of the grand pianos are glued together in from twelve to twenty thicknesses, the frame is bronzed, the wood inlaid, the ornaments put on, every tiny screw, every spindle is touched up with rare attention, till the instrument gains its speech, and is tested, for the last refinements, in separate rooms. Since the completion of the last building, they reckon on a yearly output of not less than three thousand five hundred pianos, on which eight hundred workers are employed. The proportion of grands to cottages is as three to four, a proof of the enormous popularity of the cottage, for which as a piece of furniture it is so easy to find room, but which, even in its best specimens, can never give to the musician the fulness of tone and the resonance of a grand. The demand for Bechsteins is greater than their factories can meet. It is remarkable that half of them go to England and the English colonies through the London branches; while Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, and South America, share the other half. In a business of such magnitude it is no mere ostentation to record these figures, which simply supply the necessary statistics of the general trade.

So long as the piano was merely an instrument for more or less gifted musicians, it was unnecessary to consider the question which to-day, when it has become a general means of social pleasure, stands in the foreground--namely its treatment as a piece of furniture. The “square” instrument has only certain parts, particularly the lower extremities, in which the style of the time could be expressed. The legs and the feet were, in the time of the Ruckers, _baroque_; as in the time of the Streichers they adopted the style of the Empire, and in our day that of the Renaissance. The rest of the body was fixed in its main lines by the given natural forms; and has altered very little in architectural relations in the course of centuries. The piano was in the fortunate position, even in the times when as yet little attention was paid to constructive logic, of being a construction, which, from its very aim, gained the most beautiful form. With its gracefully-bending walls, and its natural and yet characteristic shape, the grand piano, in many furnishing schemes of the insipid fifties or the glaring eighties, in many a jerry-built and cheaply appointed house, stood as the single solid and carefully wrought article in the place. The cottage, on the other hand, which too often is meant to be nothing but a piece of furniture, and which with its encasing wood-walls offers only too much opportunity to fashionable taste, has sunk deep into the domestic style, and even to-day has hardly freed itself from these false influences. It would seem that the cottage piano was invented in 1739 by the priest Don Domenico of Mela in Gagliano. Only at the commencement of this century did it begin to spread on this side of the Alps. It offered a grand field for dubious artistic experiments. Now it was treated merely as a sideboard, now as an Egyptian pyramid, now as an altar with figurative paintings, now as the _corpus vile_ for all kinds of marqueterie-experiments. I know only one cottage piano that expresses its essence in characteristic style, and develops its form without grimaces: this is the “English” type, plain and unadorned, introduced into the trade by Bechstein, a principal feature of which is that the legs are continued above the keyboard in a very graceful style, as candle-brackets.

When the grand piano is used as an object for decoration, the result is usually unsatisfactory. The contradiction between its plain form and gaudy ornamentation becomes very marked. Earlier ages saw clearly that the walls of the piano and its lid are best left plain, and adorned with paintings. But to-day the cases are more frequent in which specially magnificent pianos are so carefully fitted up with plastic ornamentation in all styles with pillars, reliefs, and other descriptions of carving, that one can only smile at the waste of labour. In the over-rich rococo adornment, which was presented by a piano built by Bechstein some time ago for the Empress Frederick for a particular apartment, a trained eye can to-day find no pleasure. More tolerable are the splendid grands, richly adorned with paintings, in which, in Germany, Max Koch is chiefly concerned. The Wagner piano for the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, or the Rheingold piano, both by Bechstein, are also worth noticing. The latter has the daughters of the Rhine for legs, a waving ornamentation on the walls, and carved bulrushes on the lid; it is one of the most interesting monster-pianos built in our time. In England Alma Tadema is the piano-painter most in request. For Henry Marquand of New York he prepared an instrument, adorned with precious stones and with painting, which was priced at £15,000. His own piano is also extraordinary. The ornamentation chosen is in the style of mediæval mosaics, with expensive surface ornamentations. Under the lid are framed and adorned parchment strips, on which Liszt, Tschaïkowski, Gounod, and others, inscribed their names. This was appraised at £2500. A piano built in London for Carmen Sylva had ivory legs. Perhaps a varied ebony and ivory ornamentation, which springs from the appearance of the keys, taking advantage of the splendid surface provided by these materials, would be more promising than any kind of rococo or Gothic design. Ivory is still in strong demand for pianos. Ninety thousand instruments are yearly issued from the hundred and seventy London houses; and these take ten thousand tusks.

Ever since composers began to write easier pieces the demand for pianos has been greater. The market has of course been well supplied. In 1896 appeared over 2500 “books”[134] of piano solos, 2000 songs with piano accompaniment, more than 250 books of duets, and 300 pieces for piano and violin. Among these figure many new editions of old works, which to-day form a literature by themselves. The arrangement of historical material, as it gives its character to the calling of the modern pianist, is also reflected in it. We have excellent editions, like the Berlin “Original Texts” (Urtexte), “Bischoff’s Bach,” published by Steingräber, “Klindworth’s Chopin,” published by Bote and Bock, “Bischoff and Neitzel’s Schumann,” “Bülow’s Beethoven’s Sonatas.” Breitkopf and Härtel have extended their Popular Library over the widest area. They have arranged their piano-publications into a uniform piano-library, which soon will embrace 10,000 numbers. Nay, the “Moonlight Sonata” is already to be purchased for a penny. And yet we must confess that really beautiful editions of bibliographical value are not to be found. An edition in artistic binding, on thick paper, in elegant engraving, following the best original copy, with none of those instructive but unornamental marks of fingering or phrasing, and at the same time well adapted for opening out without injury, and calculated for perfect typographical pictures on every page--why is there no such edition of Beethoven, when people can be found who will pay ten or twelve thousand pounds for a piano?

Where the historic tendency is so well marked, creativeness has degenerated. Since the middle of the century plenty of good sound stuff has been written for the piano; but it must be confessed that piano-music has shown no tendency to strike out a new path. No commanding or revolutionary personality, like Schumann, Chopin, or Liszt, has arisen. Almost all modern production is but the popularisation of Liszt, or a respectable mean between Chopin and Schumann.

Ferdinand Hiller began the endless succession of these eclectic musicians. But the last of the solid old style was Alkan, a solitary, eccentric, misanthropic, but withal interesting old man. He was born in Paris in 1813, and remained there. He was one of the many pupils of Zimmermann, that modest but most influential teacher. Alkan’s pieces were highly esteemed by Bülow, who gave him a place in his list of Étude-masters. In his works, which are chiefly Études and Preludes, there speaks a Berlioz, with an elemental and realistic power. He stands in his kind half-way between Chopin and Liszt. Some pieces, like the highly original Op. 39, 1, do not easily fade out of the memory. The seventh of the twelve Études, dedicated to Fétis, is a remarkably significant Chopin-like Ballade in Berlioz’ style, with kettle-drum rolls, and other most peculiar harmonic and orchestral effects. In the “Allegro Barbaro” of the fifth Étude he gives full play to his propensity to exotic phrases of foreign colouring. He works with uncanny, lengthy unisons, or with cutting climbing ninths. An out-and-out romantic, he delights not merely to rush into the middle of his pieces with explanatory words--“Mors” is one of these--but he has hit upon the most original titles that ever an association of ideas led a composer to adopt: “Pseudo-naïveté,” “Fais Dodo,” “Heraclitus and Democritus,” “Railroad,” “Odi profanum vulgus,” “Morituri te salutant.” To play his pieces is as difficult as to construe the Talmud.

A constant succession of romantic writers of Études or small pieces stretches from that era to our own. First stands the intellectual Volkmann; next, the somewhat too dainty Kirchner, a regular album-writer, who went so far in his admiration for Schumann as to publish “New Davidsbündler” and “The New Florestan and Eusebius.” Adolf Henselt, who lived at St Petersburg, practised an extraordinary longdrawn legato technique. He is still esteemed for his tolerable F minor Concerto, and for his second and fifth Études, especially the well-known “Si oiseau j’étais.” Stephen Heller, who lived in Paris, wrote a hundred and forty-nine works, almost exclusively for the piano. He is a combination of Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and water; but we light occasionally on passages of some inspiration. His well-known Saltarellos and Tarantelles, his effective “Forellen” (Trout) Fantasia, and his excellent “Danses Bois,” are in the taste of the time. More important was his pretty idea, in the Freischütz Studies, of uniting operatic motives and étude-practice in an organic and poetic combination.

The lesser Romantics and Romanticists were meanwhile working diligently in Paris. A group of successful piano-composers of this class reaches down to our own day. The chief names are Fauré, Widor, Vincent d’Indy, Chabrier, César Franck, Dubois, Cécile Chaminade, Paul Lacombe. The drawing-room romance, which in Chaminade unfortunately tends too often to shallowness, exhibits often a Mendelssohnian classicism, of which dainty specimens are given in Lacombe’s Toccatina, and in the Toccata of Chaminade herself. The literature for two pianos is well illustrated in Chabrier’s Romantic Waltzes, which are unusually spirited. César Franck’s symphonic variations, serious and academic, and St Saens’ Concertos, more interesting in their effective technique than in content, stand out from the mass of orchestral piano-work.