Chapter VI: Part 6

The something inexplicable to Western imaginations in Chopin’s playing and music, which Liszt so elaborately explains with his definition of Zãl, is nothing but the hopeless antinomy of the East and the West. The touch of the Asiatic in Chopin, tempered by French blood and subjected to the attrition of Parisian drawing rooms, will never be quite clear to us. It peeps out in his mazourkas and in the savage splendor of his F sharp minor polonaise. It lurks in the C sharp minor nocturne and runs riot in the last C minor study. It is not the febrile rage of the Gaul nor the Berserker madness of the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon. It is something infinitely more desperate, more despairing. The pessimism of the East is in it, also its languorous and scented voluptuousness. His music, rich, exuberant, exhaling the scent of tuberose and honeysuckle, is too overpowering if transposed to the violin, voice or orchestra. It is so perfectly piano music that its very structure, as well as atmosphere, undergoes a change when taken away from that instrument. True it is that Chopin did not think so profoundly as Beethoven, but there are compensating clauses in his music. Its exquisite adaptability to the medium for which his music was created is no mean achievement, while the merging of matter and manner is so perfect as sometimes to put Beethoven in the shade.

The Chopin rubato is a fetish relentlessly worshipped by many amiable persons who fancy that it is something sweetly and poetically immoral. It is one of the many superstitions that obstinately clings to the name of Chopin. To play Bach’s music with more rubato and Chopin’s with less would be a boon.

Walter Pater has pronounced in his essay, The School of Giorgione, that music is the archetype of all the arts, the final court of appeal, that “it is the art of music which most completely realizes this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter.” Judged by this Chopin’s music--some of his music--is perfect. He says wonderful things in a wonderful way, and in his master eloquence his voice pierces the mist that hangs so heavily about the base of the Bach and Beethoven peaks. It is not always a sonorous voice, but it is singularly fine, sweet and penetrating. Chopin is a dreamer of dreams and not a bard, but when the sword leaps from the scabbard--O, the charm of its design! The ring of steel is the warrior’s, the voice is the voice of a man mad with patriotic passion, the shy, feminine soul is completely withdrawn. What a Chopin is this! Think of the A flat polonaise, the ones in C minor, in F sharp minor, and the fantaisie-polonaise, with its triumphant climacteric tutti! Where have fled the tender, confiding-morbid voices of the twilight, the opium-haunted twilight? A man panoplied in shining metallic armor, with closed casque, charges the enemy and routs it, while the song of triumph mounts deliriously to his brains. No! no! Chopin is not for the musical Young Person. He can be very terrible and mordant and he is not often tonic and cheering.

“It is the mistake of much popular criticism,” writes Pater, “to regard poetry, music and painting--all the various products of art--as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought supplemented by certain technical qualities of color in painting, of sound in music, of rhythmical words in poetry. In this way the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle--that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind--is the beginning of all true æsthetic criticism.”

This especially applies to Chopin. His music may not--despite its canonic classicism--conform to the standards of the art of Bach and Beethoven, but apart from its message its very externals are marvellous. Delicate in linear perspective, logical in architectonic, its color is its chief charm. Too much has been written of the Polish element in this music. Chopin is great despite his nationality. His is not map music, like Grieg’s. It is Polish and something more. He was first a musician and then a Pole. I suspect that too much patriotism is read into his music by impressionable writers. The Thaddeus of Warsaw pose is dead in literature, but it has survived in all its native pulchritude in the biographies of Chopin. Liszt is to blame for this in his sweet-caramel book about Chopin, a true Liszt rhapsody, which George Sand pronounced “un peu exubérante.” Let us once and for all rid ourselves of the dawdling poseur of Liszt, and on the other side avoid the neat, prim, rare-roast beef portrait drawn by Joseph Bennett. Karasowski, in a frantic endeavor to escape Liszt’s Camille of the keyboard, with his violets, his tears and tuberculosis, created a bull-necked athlete, who almost played Polish cricket and had aspirations toward the prize ring.

Chopin’s heroism was emotional, not muscular.

Jean Kleczynski’s book is pedagogic and throws little light on the tradition of Chopin’s execution. The true Chopin tradition is lost. If he returned to-day and played in public we would not accept him. However, he builded better than he knew. His works are for stronger fingers than his.

Mr. Finck is an ardent worshipper at the shrine, and in the Willeby book, the latest of the Chopin lives, there is nothing new and there is much that is misleading, especially the arbitrary and half-baked judgments. The last étude of opus 25 is pronounced weak! It really is a masterpiece among masterpieces. Other critical blunders are not worth haggling over. The greater Chopin, the new Chopin that we Chopin idolaters believe will endure, is not the Chopin of the valses, of the nocturnes--interesting as they are--nor of the tricksy, impish mazourkas. We swear by the F minor fantasy, the barcarolle, the F sharp minor, the fantaisie-polonaises, including the one in E flat minor. We think that no more inspired pages have been written than the D minor, the F minor and the B flat minor preludes, and are speechless before the F minor ballade and the E flat minor scherzo--the one in the B flat minor sonata, and the C sharp minor scherzo. These, only to mention a few, are the quintessence of Chopinism; the rest are popular, banal and of historical interest only.

The real Chopin life has yet to be written, a life that shall embrace his moral and physical natures, that will not shirk his marked abnormalities of vision, of conduct, and will not bow down before that agreeable fetish of sawdust and molasses called “Frédéric Chopin,” created by silly sentimentalists and rose-leaf poets. Chopin, with all his imperfections full blown; Chopin, with his consummate genius for giving pain as well as taking pains; Chopin, the wonder-worker, is a fruitful and unexploited subject for the devout biographer.

V

A LISZT ÉTUDE

I

When Franz Liszt over fifty years age made some suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had all been foreshadowed in Clementi’s Gradus, and its intellectual resultant--the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had not been realized. Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpassingly sweet tones, was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the tone-problem.

The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole who used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies. But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin’s style he was, in the main, manly and unaffected. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end and not the means of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, was his trinity of gods.

Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at Leipsic’s doors and drove back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old-women professors--a respectable crowd that swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at the spirit. Poverty, obedience and chastity were the three obligatory vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic. To attain this triune perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull, musty precedent, and chaste of finger. What wonder, when the dashing young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged by the cotton of prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under; Chopin never competed but stood a slightly astonished spectator at the edge of the fray. He saw his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence, his polonaises were so many cleaving battle-axes and he had perforce to confess that all this noise, this carnage of tone, unnerved him, disgusted him; Liszt was a warrior; not he.

Schumann both by word and note did all he could for the cause and to-day, thanks to Franz Liszt and his followers--Tausig, Rubinstein, d’Albert, Rosenthal, Joseffy, and Paderewski, we can never retrace our footsteps. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a once powerful school, and not the representative of an existing method. There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style and modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the rococo-isms of the idealists, but as a school pure and simple it is of the past. We moderns are eclectic as the Byzantines. We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaption; hence the pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the foundation, the keynote of all is realism; a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and at times forces one to take lingering, retrospective glances. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep and we have many times viewed the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated, artistic frame. But the path was blazoned by the great Magyar and we may now explore with impunity the hitherto trackless region.

Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago principally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand, forearm and upper arm are now important factors in tone production where formerly the finger-tips were considered the end-all, the be-all of technique. The Viennese instruments certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and others in their styles, just as Clementi inaugurated the most startling reforms by writing a series of studies and then building a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety of touch--tone-color--the old pearly-passage, rapid, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished, for it was absorbed in the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and then Liszt forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Sonority, power, dynamic variety and a new manipulation of the pedals combined with a technique that included Bach part playing and the most sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard; these were some of the characteristics of the new school. In the giddiness produced by freely indulging in this heady new wine from old bottles an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the time fatal to pure scholarly interpretation. The classics were mangled by the young vandals who enlisted under Liszt’s victorious standard. “Color, only color, all the rest is but music” was the motto of these bold youths who had never heard of Paul Verlaine. But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its clangorous quality and when the last Liszt pupil gives his last recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig’s efforts to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has been toned down into more sober, grateful coloring. The scarlet vest of the romantic school has been outworn; the brutal brilliancies and orchestral effects of the realists are now viewed with mild amusement.

We are beginning to comprehend the possibilities of the instrument and--of ourselves. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as Donizetti or Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is almost as obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. Bold is the man who plays one in public. Realism beyond a certain point in piano playing, is dangerous. We are in a transition period. With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The new was preached in piano music by Johannes Brahms whose music suggests a continuation of Beethoven’s last period, with an agreeable amalgam of Schumann and Bach. The gray is in fashion; red is tabooed. The drunken, tattered gypsy who dances with bell and cymbalum accompaniment in the Lisztian rhapsody is just tolerated. He is too strong for our polite nostrils. The Brahms rhapsodies say more; they deal not with externals but with soul states. The glitter is absent, brilliancy is lacking but there is a fulness of emotional life, a depth and eloquence of utterance that makes Liszt’s tinsel ridiculous. To this new school, not wholly realistic yet certainly not idealistic in its aims, is piano playing and composing drifting. It may be the decadence--perhaps an artistic Götterdämmerung.

The nuance in piano playing is ruler. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy is present, but the nuance is necessary--not alone the nuance of tone but of expression. Infinite shadings are to be found where before were but the forte, the piano and the mezzo forte. Joseffy taught America the nuance just as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of tone. As Paul Verlaine, the French poet, cried: “Pas la couleur rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est littérature.”

II

“The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young.”

This sentence, charmingly phrased as it is charming in sentiment, could be uttered by no other than Camille Saint-Saëns. He wrote of Liszt and, as the natural son of the Hungarian composer, musically speaking, he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most critics; his adoration is perfectly excusable, for to him Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of classical form only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the romantic. They all came from Berlioz; Saint-Saëns’ violent protest to the contrary; only this much may be urged in the latter’s favor: a great movement like the romantic movement in music, painting and literature appeared simultaneously in a half dozen places. It was in the air, and catching. Goethe dismissed the whole movement in his usual Jovian fashion, saying to Eckermann: “They all come from Châteaubriand,” and this is a sound criticism for, in the writings of the author of The Genius of Christianity and Atala may be found the germ-plasm of all the artistic disorder; the fierce color, the bizarrerie, the morbid extravagance, the introspective analysis--which in Amiel’s case amounted almost to mania. Stendhal was the unwilling St. John of the movement that captivated the powerful imagination of Franz Liszt, as it later caused the orphic utterances of Richard Wagner.

Saint-Saëns sets great store on Liszt’s original compositions, and I am sure when all the brilliant, empty operatic paraphrases and Hungarian rhapsodies are forgotten, the true Liszt will shine more brightly. How cheap and tinkling are these piano rhapsodies, and how the old bones do rattle! We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz variations and Kalkbrenner’s fantasias but the next generation will laugh at us for tolerating Liszt’s rhapsodies when Brahms has written three such wonderful examples. Technically the Liszt arrangements are excellent finger pieces. You may “show off” with them and make much noise and a reputation for virtuosity that would be shattered if a Bach fugue were selected as a test. One Chopin mazourka contains more music than all of Liszt’s rhapsodies, which are but overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt’s pompous, affected introductions, spun-out scales and transcendental technical feats are all foreign to the wild, native simplicity of Hungarian folk-music.

I need not speak of Liszt’s admirable transcriptions of songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz, nor of his own original songs nor yet of his three concertos for piano. All these are witnesses to the man’s geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish to speak only of the compositions for piano solo composed by Liszt, Ferencz of Raiding, Hungaria. Many I salute with the Eljen of patriotic enthusiasm, and I particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his knowledge of the études--those wonderful continuations of the Chopin études--of his acquaintance with the Années de Pèlerinage, of the Valse Oubliée, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the nocturnes, of the F sharp impromptu, of Ab-Irato--that étude of which most pianists never heard--of the Apparitions, of the Legendes, of the Ballades, of the mazourka in A major, of the Elegies, of the Harmonies Poétiques, of the Concerto Patetico à la Burmeister, of many other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory--as Philip Hale would say--a half dozen piano composers at this fag-end of the century.

The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B minor sonata was one of those compositions that played itself, it lay so beautifully for the hand; and while I have not encountered many self-playing B minor sonatas nor even many pianists who can attack the work in a manner commensurate with its content, I am thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of the great pianist’s remark. To me no work of Liszt, with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie which masquerades in H moll as a sonata. Agreeing with Mr. Krehbiel and Mr. Henderson, who declare that they cannot find a trace of a sonata in the organic structure of this composition, and also with those who declare this work to be an amplification of the old obsolete form and that Liszt has simply taken Beethoven’s latest sonata period as a starting point and made a plunge for futurity--agreeing absolutely with these warring factions, and thus choking off the contingency of an interesting argument, I repeat that I find the B minor sonata of Liszt most fascinating music.

What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It certainly stirs the blood--it is intense and it is complex. The opening bars are so truly Lisztian.

The gloom, the harmonic haze out of which emerges that bold theme in octaves, the leap from the G to the A sharp--how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own! Power there is--sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E flat concerto which is mocking, cynical, but tremendous. How incisively the composer taps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking Ds! What follows is like a drama enacted in the nether-world. Is there really a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, better than Liszt? Berlioz had the gift, so had Raff, so has Saint-Saëns, but thin, sharp flames hover about the brass, wood and shrieking strings of Liszt’s orchestra. The chorale, which is usually the meat of a Liszt composition, soon appears and proclaims the composer’s religious belief in powerful accents, and we are swept away in conviction until after that burst in C, when comes the insincerity of it in the following harmonic sequences. Then it is not real heart-whole belief, and after the faint return of the opening motive, appears the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment which engenders the notion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix, he was before a woman. He dearly loves to blend piety and passion in the most mystically-amorous fashion, and in this sonata with the cantando espressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for pyx and reredos.

But the rustle of silken attire is in every bar; sensuous imagery, faint perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah, naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy chorales and tonsures, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody and in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress; wilt thou allow her to make away with thy resolutions? Vade retro, Sathanas! and it is done; the bold utterance so triumphantly proclaimed at the outset is sounded with chordal pomp and power. The hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and so this ruddy, moving picture with its swirl of intoxicating colors goes kaleidoscopically on. Again the devil tempts this musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major, and he momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is heard again and if its orthodoxy is in spots faulty, it serves its purpose, for the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic disease, is short-winded. Another flank movement of the “ewig Weibliche,” this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him and in the triolen of the bass, frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.

All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendor. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the conqueror, Liszt the magnificent, is stamped on every octave. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the earth tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from this cyclopean fist! Then follow a few bars of that very Beethoven-like andante, a moving return of the early themes, and silently the first lento descends to the subterranean depths whence it emerged; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor contains all of Liszt’s strength and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long, it is full of nobility, a drastic intellectuality and sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a prominent place in the repertory of piano music, were folly.

It is not my intention to claim your consideration for the rest of Liszt’s original compositions. In the Années de Pèlerinage, redolent of Virgilian meadows, with soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious than the étude Au Bord d’une Source? It is exquisitely idyllic. Surely in those years of pilgrimage Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the French salon or Continental concert platform.

Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian patterned after the noblest things of nature. In the atmosphere of salons of the Papal Court and the public, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character.

Oh, I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord! Pooh! if he had not had to cut and run to sanctuary to escape two women we should never have heard of Liszt the Abbé!

One penalty of genius is its pursuit by glossaries and gibes. Liszt was no exception. Like Maeterlinck and Ibsen, he has had many things read into his music; mysticism not being forgotten. Perhaps the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the usual pleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any distinguished man, not in a book.

The Mephisto Valse from Lenau’s Faust, in addition to its biting, broad humor and Satanic suggestiveness, contains one of the most voluptuous episodes outside of a score by Wagner. That halting languorous syncopated, valse-like theme in D flat is marvellously expressive, and the poco allegretto seems to have struck the fancy of Wagner, who did not hesitate to appropriate from his esteemed father-in-law when the notion struck him.

He certainly considered Kundry Liszt-wise before fabricating her motif for Parsifal. In the hands of a capable pianist the Mephisto Valse can be made very effective. The twelve great études should be on the desk of every student of advanced technique. So should the Waldesrauschen and Gnomenreigen and I cannot sufficiently praise the three beautiful Études de Concert. The ballades and legendes are becoming favorites at recitals. The polonaise in E, when compared to the less familiar one in C minor, seems banal. Liszt’s life was a sequence of triumphs, his sympathies were boundless, he appreciated and even appropriated Chopin, he unearthed Schumann’s piano music, he materially aided Wagner and discovered Robert Franz; yet he had time for himself and his spiritual nature was never quite submerged. I wish however that he had not manufactured the rhapsodies and the Liszt pupil!

VI

THE ROYAL ROAD TO PARNASSUS

I

Many years ago a certain young man of o’erweening ambition, with a good piano hand and a scorn for the beaten path, conceived the Gargantuan idea that by playing _all_ the études written for the piano he could arrive at perfection by a short cut and thus make up for lost time. He was eighteen years old when he began the experiment and at twenty-two he abandoned his task, a crippled, a sadder, a wiser man.

The young man browsed on études by Bach, Czerny, Loeschorn, Berens, Prudent, Ravina, Marmontel, Planté, Jensen, Von Sternberg, Kullak, Jadassohn, Germer, Reinecke, Riemann, Mason, Löw, Schmidt, Duvernoy, Doering, Hünten, Lebert and Stark, A. E. Müller (caprices), Plaidy, Bruno, Zwintscher, Klengel (canons), Raff, Heller, Bendel, Neupert, Eggeling, Ehrlich, Lavallée, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Rheinberger, Alkan, Fétis, Ferd, Ries, Isador Seiss, Arthur Foote, Anton Strelezki, Carl Baermann, Petersilyea, Krauss, D’Abelli, Golinelli, Berger, Kalkbrenner, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, Dreyschock, Moscheles, Doehler, Carl Heyman, Hans Seeling, Clementi, Thalberg, Cramer, Chopin, Sgambati, Liszt, Hiller, Brassin, Paradies (toccata), Hasert, Faelten, Vogt, J. C. Kessler, Moszkowski, Henselt, the Scharwenkas, Rubinstein, Joseffy, Dupont, Herz, Köhler, Speidel, Tausig, Schytte-Rosenthal, Von Schlözer, Schuett, Haberbier, Nicodé, Ketten, Pixis, Litolff, Charles Mayer, Balakireff, MacDowell, Leopold De Meyer, Ernst Pauer, Le Couppey, Vogrich, Deppe, Raif, Leschetizky, Nowakowski, Paderewski, Barth, Zichy, Philipp, Rosenthal and lots of names not to be recalled.

And about the same delightful chronological order as the above was observed in the order of study.

What could have been the result of such a titanic struggle with such wildernesses of notes? What could have been the result upon the cerebral powers of the young man after such a Brobdingnagian warfare against muscles and marks?

Alas, there was no result. How could there have been?

And music, what became of music in all this turmoil of technics? Naturally it went begging, and in after years the young man, observing how many young people, ambitious and talented, were pursuing the same false track, determined to think the thing out, and first went about it by asking well-known authorities, and finally formulated the question this way: What études are absolutely necessary for a mastery of the keyboard?

Since the days of Carl Czerny--God bless his old toccata in C!--instruction books, commonly known as methods, began to appear. How many I do not propose to tell you. You all know Moscheles and Fétis, the Kalkbrenner, the Henri Herz, Lebert and Stark and Richardson (founded on Dreyschock). That they have fallen into disuse is only natural. They were for the most part bulky, contained a large amount of useless material, and did not cover the ground; often being reflections of a one-sided virtuosity. Then up sprang an army of études. Countless hosts of notes, marshalled into the most fantastic figures, hurled themselves at varying velocities and rhythms on the piano studying world. Dire were the results. Schools arose and camps within camps. There were those in the land that developed the left hand at the expense of the right and the other way about. Trill and double-note specialists abounded, and one could study octaves here and ornaments there, stiffness at Stuttgart, flabbiness with Deppe, and yet no man could truthfully swear that his was the rightful, the unique method.

Suddenly in this quagmire of doubt and dumb keyboards arose a still small voice, but the voice of a mighty man. This is what the voice said:

“There is but one god in technic, Bach, and Clementi is his prophet.”

Thus spake Carl Tausig, and left behind him an imperishable edition of Clementi!

It was Tausig’s opinion that Clementi and Chopin alone have provided studies that perfectly fulfil their intention. It was Tausig’s habit to make use of them before all others, in the school for the higher development of piano playing of which he was the head. He also used them himself. Furthermore he asserted that by means of those studies Clementi made known and accessible the entire piano literature from Bach, who requires special study, to Beethoven, just as Chopin and Liszt completed the scale of dazzling virtuosity.

The Gradus was one great barrier--a mighty one, indeed--against the influx of barren, mechanical or nonsensical études for the piano. Just read the incomplete list above, and does not your head wither as a fired scroll at the prospect of studying such a vast array of notes? Then came Von Bülow with his Cramer edition, and another step was taken in the boiling down movement. Moreover the clever Hans took the reins in his hands, and practically said in his preface to the Cramer edition: “Here is _my_ list; take and study it. You will then become a pianist--if you have talent.” Here is his list:

Lebert and Stark--abomination of angular desolation; Aloys Schmitt exercises, with a touch of Heller to give flavor and flesh to the old dry bones; Cramer (Bülow), St. Heller, op. 46 and 47; Czerny daily exercises, and the school of legato and staccato; Tausig’s Clementi; Moscheles, op. 70; Henselt, op. 2 and 5, and as a bridge Haberbier’s Études Poésies; Moscheles, op. 95, characteristic studies; Chopin, ops. 10 and 25, glorious music; Liszt studies, Rubinstein studies, and finally, as a “topper,” C. V. Alkan with Theodor Kullak’s octave studies on the side.

Now this list is not bad, but it is nearly twenty-five years since it was made, and in this quintessentializing age, a quarter of a century means many revolutions in taste and technic. Condense, condense is the cry, and thereupon rose Oscar Raif, who might be called the Richard Wagner of piano pedagogues, for with one wave of his wand he would banish all études, substituting in their stead music, and music only. Pick out the difficulties of a composition for slow practice, said Mr. Raif, and you will save time and wear and tear on the nerves.

Raif made a step in piano pedagogy, nihilistic though it seemed, and to-day we have those remarkable daily studies of Isidor Phillip, which are a practical demonstration of Raif’s theory.

Then came forward a few reasoning men who said: “Why not skeletonize the whole system of technic, giving it in pure, powerful but small doses to the student?” With this idea Plaidy, Zwintscher, Mason and Mathews, Germer, Louis Koehler and Riemann have published volumes literally epitomizing the technics of the piano. Dr. William Mason in his Touch and Technic further diversifies this bald material by making the pupil attack it with varying touches, rhythms and velocities. Albert R. Parsons, in his valuable Synthetic Method, makes miracles of music commonplaces for the tender, plastic mind of childhood. But all these, while training the mind and muscles, do not fringe upon the problem the young man attempted to solve. That problem related to studies only. His hand was supposed to be placed--in a word--to be posed.

He incidentally found that Heinrich Germer’s Technics or Mason’s Touch and Technic were sufficient to form the fingers, wrist, forearm and upper arm; that on a Virgil clavier every technical problem of the flat keyboard could be satisfactorily worked out, and then arose the question: What studies are absolutely essential to the pianist who wishes to go to the technical boundaries of the flat keyboard?

Technics alone would not do, for you do not get figures that flow nor the sequence of musical ideas, nor musical endurance, not to mention style and phrasing. No one work on technic blends all these requisites. Piano studies cannot be absolutely discarded without a serious loss; one loses the suavity and simplicity of Cramer, a true pendant of Mozart; the indispensable technics and foundational tone and touch of Clementi, a true forerunner of Beethoven, and then what a loss to piano literature would be the destruction of the studies of Chopin, Liszt and Rubinstein!

No; there lurks an element of truth in the claims of all these worthy thinkers, experimenters and seekers after the truth. Our young man, who was somewhat of an experimental psychologist, knew this, and earnestly sought for the keystone of the arch, the arcanum of the system, and after weary years of travail found it in Bach--great, good, glorious, godlike Johann Sebastian Bach, in whose music floats the past, present and future of the tone art. Mighty Bach, who could fashion a tiny prelude for a child’s sweet fingers, a Leonardo da Vinci among composers, as Beethoven is their Michel Angelo, Mozart their Raphael.

With the starting point of the first preludes and exercises of Bach the young groper found that he had his feet, or rather his hands, on terra firma, and proceeded with the two and three part inventions and the suites, English and French, and the great forty-eight preludes and fugues in the Well Tempered Clavichord, not forgetting the beautiful A minor fugue with its few bars of prelude.

Before the Clavichord is reached the pupil’s hand is ready for Cramer, and some of these beautiful music pieces, many poetical in the extreme, may be given. What could follow Cramer more fitly than Clementi, Tausig’s Clementi? A great teacher as well as a great virtuoso, Tausig pinned his faith to these studies, and so does that other great virtuoso. Bach was also Chopin’s daily bread.

In Clementi one may discern all the seeds of modern piano music, and studying him gives a nobility of tone, freedom of style and a surety of finger that may be found in no other collection. Tausig compressed Clementi into twenty-nine examples, which may with discrimination be reduced to fifteen for practical use. The same may be said of Bülow’s Cramer, not much more than half being really necessary.

Bülow’s trinity of Bs--Bach, Beethoven and Brahms--may be paralleled in the literature of piano studies by a trinity of Cs--Cramer, Clementi and Chopin. And that leads to the great question, How is that ugly gap, that break, to be bridged between Clementi and Chopin? Bülow attempts to supply the bridge by a compound of Moscheles, Henselt and Haberbier, which is obviously tedious, and in one case--Henselt--puts the cart before the horse.

I believe the gap can be safely crossed by using the two very valuable Hummel concertos in A and B minor, for between Chopin--the early Chopin--and Hummel there is a certain resemblance. Some of Hummel’s passage work, for example, is singularly like Chopin’s juvenile style, and Chopin, as everyone knows, was extremely fond of the Hummel concertos. Of course the resemblance is an external one; spiritually there is no kinship between the sleek pianist of Weimar and the genius of Warsaw.

Yet pieces and concertos do not quite serve the purpose, and may the Fates and Joseffy pardon me for the blasphemy, but I fear I do not appreciate the much vaunted Moscheles studies. To be sure, they are fat, healthy, indeed, almost buxom, but they lack just a pinch of that Attic salt which conserves Cramer and Clementi. Understand, I do not mean to speak irreverently of Moscheles. I think that his G minor concerto is the greatest conservatory concerto ever written, and his various Hommages for two dry pianists serve the agreeable purpose of driving a man to politics. I wish merely to estimate the op. 70, 95 and 51 from the viewpoint of a utilitarian.

There is nothing in op. 70 that has not been done far better by contemporaries of the composer. For instance, the double note study is weak when compared with that best of all double note studies, Czerny’s toccata in C. En passant, that is one of the most remarkable special studies ever written, and is certainly number one in the famous trio of double-note études, the other two being the Schumann toccata and Chopin’s G sharp minor study. Include by all means the Czerny toccata in your list, and get the Moszkowski edition, which is remarkable for nothing except that it omits the celebrated misprint at the close of the original edition.

There are studies by Kalkbrenner noticeable for their virtuoso character. Ries, too, has done some good work, notably the first of the set in the Peters’ edition. Then there is Edmund Neupert. His hundred daily exercises are really original, and contain new technical, figures, and his études in the Edition Peters are charming. They suggest Grieg, but a more virile, masterful Grieg.

Take the Thalberg studies; how infinitely more “pianistic” and poetic than the respectable Moscheles! I know that it is the fashion of the day to sneer at Thalberg and his machine-made fantaisies, but we should not be blind to the beauties of his Art of Singing on the Piano, his études, op. 26, one of them in C, a tremolo study, being more useful than Gottschalk’s famous Tremolo, not forgetting the op. 45, a very pretty theme in repeated notes.

Thalberg has written music that cannot be passed over by any fair-minded teacher or pupil. Another objection to Moscheles is that he is already old-fashioned. His style is rococo, his ornamentation trite and much of his work stale. Study him if you will; a half dozen of his études will suffice; but do not imagine that he prepares the hand for Henselt or Chopin, as Von Bülow so fondly fancied.

There is one man might be suggested--a composer who is as much forgotten as Steibelt, who wrote a Storm for the piano, and thought that he was as good a man as Beethoven. Have you ever heard of Joseph Christoph Kessler?

It is difficult to discover much about him, except that Chopin dedicated the German edition of his preludes, op. 28, “à Monsieur J. C. Kessler.” This same Kessler was born in Augsburg in 1800; he studied philosophy as well as music at Vienna, and at Lemberg in the house of his patron, Count Potocki, he composed his op. 20, twenty-four studies, dedicated to J. N. Hummel. Kessler was a brilliant pianist, met Chopin at Warsaw, and later dedicated to him his twenty-four preludes, op. 31. He was highly thought of by Kalkbrenner, and Fétis, and Moscheles incorporated some of his études in their Method of Methods. In 1835 Kessler attracted Schumann’s attention, and that great critic said that the pianist had good stuff in him. “Mann von geist und sogar poetischem geist,” he wrote, but somehow his music fell into disuse and is hardly ever heard. Fancy a pianist playing a Kessler étude in concert, yet that is what Franz Liszt did, and though the studies themselves hardly warrant a concert hearing, there is much that is brilliant, effective and eminently solid in many of them.

Kessler died at Vienna, January 13, 1872.

Let us examine more closely these studies. In four books, published by Haslinger, they are too bulky, besides being fingered badly. Out of the twenty-four there are ten well worthy of study. The rest are old-fashioned. Book I., No. 1, is in C and is a melody in broken chords that is peculiarly trying to the fourth finger. The stretches are modern and the study is very useful. No. 2, in A minor, is an excellent approach to all interlocking figures occurring in modern piano music. This, too, is very valuable. No. 3 I can recommend, for it is a melody in chord skips. No. 4 is very useful for the development of the left hand. No. 5 is confusing on account of hand crossing, and it could be dispensed with, while No. 6 serves the same purpose as No. 4. If you can play Nos. 4 and 6 of Kessler you need not fear the C minor or C sharp minor studies of Chopin, wherein the left hand plays such an important part.

Book II. has a study--No. 8--in octaves which might be profitable but I shall not emphasize its importance, for the Kullak octave school should never be absent from your piano rack. No. 10, however--a unisono study--is very good and is a foundation study for effects of this sort. It might be practised before attacking the last movement of the B flat minor sonata of Chopin.

But that about comprises all of value in the volume. Book III. has little to commend--a study, No. 13, same stiff, nasty figures for alternate hands; No. 15, for the wrist, excellent as preparation for Rubinstein’s staccato étude, and No. 18, some Chopin-like figuration for the right hand. Book IV. contains but three studies: No. 20 for left-hand culture. No. 21 for stretches and a facile thumb, and No. 24, a very stiff study, which is bound to strengthen the weaker fingers of the hand. Look at these Kessler studies, or, better still, study a dozen of them, and you will find the bridge between Clementi and Chopin, and a very satisfactory bridge at that; for to the solidity of Clementi, Kessler has added a modern technical spirit. One year’s experience with Kessler would make you drop your goody-goody Moscheles, or at least play him for the historical interest only.

Naturally every pupil cannot be mentally pinioned to the same round of studies. There are many charming studies before Cramer; for instance Heller; try Eggeling and Riemann as preparatory to Bach, Jadassohn’s scholarly preludes and fugues with a canon on every page, and in the C sharp minor prelude and fugue you will find much good, honest music.

Then there are lots of pretty special studies. William Mason’s Étude Romanza is a scale study wherein music and muscle are happily blended; Schuett’s graceful Étude Mignonne, Raff’s La Fileuse, Haberbier’s poetical studies, especially the one in D; Isador Seiss’ very musical preludes, in which the left hand plays an important part; Ludwig Berger’s interesting studies, and a delightful étude of Constantin Von Sternberg in F, which I heartily commend. Ravina, Jensen and many, many others have written études for which a light wrist, facile fingers and agreeable style are a necessity, but could all be easily dispensed with. We must not forget a little volume called Rhythmical Problems, by Heinrich Germer, of great value to teacher and pupil alike, for therein may be found a solution of many criss-cross rhythmic difficulties. Adolph Carpé’s work on Phrasing and Accentuation in Piano Playing, attacks the rhythmical problem in the boldest and most practical fashion.

Works of special character, like Kullak’s Art of Touch and Ehrlich’s Touch and Technic, should be read by the enterprising amateur.

We have now reached the boundaries of the Chopin studies, that delightful region where the technic-worn student discerns from afar the glorious colors, the strangely plumaged birds, the exquisite sparkle of falling waters, the odors so grateful to nostrils forced to inhale Czerny, Clementi and Cramer. O, what an inviting vista! Yet it is not all a paradise of roses; flinty is the road over which the musical pilgrim toils, and while his eye eagerly covets joyous sights, his feet and fingers often bleed. But how easily that pain is endured, for is not the Mount of Parnassus in sight, and does not every turn of the road disclose fresh beauties?

II

Some have expostulated regarding the admission of Henselt into the Pantheon of pianists--as if we were self-constituted keepers of its key--and the assertion was made that Henselt’s day was past, his études--of course with one exception, the Bird Study,--useless for technical purposes, and his music, generally rococo. There is a certain amount of unpalatable truth in all this that jars on one, but nevertheless I refuse to give up my belief in the Henselt études or even in the somewhat artificial and overladen F minor concerto.

This is an eminently realistic period in piano literature. The brutal directness of the epoch is mirrored in contemporary music, and with the introduction of national color the art is losing much of its old, well-bred grace, elegance and aristocratic repose. Norwegian, Russian, Bohemian, Finnish, Danish peasant themes have all the vitality of peasants and all their clumsiness, too. When I listen to this sort of music I see two stout apple-cheeked Bauern facing each other and furiously, after the manner of tillers of the soil. Such company seems odd and out of place when introduced into the drawing room. But with the Henselt, how different! how much at home in palaces he is! His refined, polished speech is never conventional, nor does he tear passion to tatters, after the approved modern manner. A high-bred man of the world, raffiné a bit, blasé, but true to the core--a poet and a musician. No, Henselt must not go, for who may replace him? His gentle, elegiac nature, his chivalry, his devotion to the loved one are distinctively individual. His nights are moonlit, his nightingales sing, but not in the morbid, sultry-fashion of Chopin; even his despair in the Verlorne Heimath is subdued. It is the despair of a man who eats truffles and drinks Chateau Yquem while his heart is breaking. But there is a note of genuineness that is lacking, say, in Mendelssohn, who played Ariel behind many musical masks. Henselt is never the hypocrite; he is franker than the Hebraic Felix, whose scherzino nature peeps forth in solemn oratorio, mocking its owner’s efforts at conventional worship. Henselt is a dreamer with one eye open; he never quite forsakes the real for the ideal.

But what charming études are in op. 2 and op. 5! What a wealth of technical figures, what an imperative legato is demanded! and then, above all else, touch, euphony! To play Henselt with a hard, dry touch would be Hamlet with the melancholy Dane not in it. I remember reading in the preface to a book by Ehrlich (some études of his) that in the modern sense a beautiful touch was a drawback, for while it might be ever grateful to the ear, yet if it were not colored and modified to suit the exigencies of modern music it would simply be a hindrance. The writer quoted Thalberg as an example of a pianist with a beautiful touch, but invariably the same style of a singing touch. Liszt was instanced as a man whose singing touch lacked the fat, juicy cantabile quality, but whose tonal gamut was all comprehensive, and who could be tender, dramatic, poetic and classic at will; of course this is the modern ideal of piano playing--although the color business is a bit overdone, variety in tinting at the expense of good, solid brush work--yet we cannot dream of Henselt being played with a bad touch. Fancy mangling that delicious Bird Study by a “modern” dramatic touch! Fancy stroking rudely the plumage of this beautiful bird, and have it pant its little life away in your brutal grasp! I have heard pianists play this étude as if the bird were a roc, and they were throttling it Sindbad fashion for its fabulous egg. Ah, Vladimir Pachmann, how that little bird did sing under your coaxing touch! and how tenderly you put it away into its silvery cage when it had trilled its sweet pipe! You triple locked the cage, too, black bearded Pashaw that you were, by playing three chords in F sharp, mounting an octave at a time!

The Henselt studies should not precede those of Chopin; in fact, some of the Chopin studies could be sandwiched in with Clementi, Moscheles, if you study him, and Kessler. Chopin used the Moscheles prelude. But don’t fail to study Henselt. He will give you freedom, a capacity for stretching, a sweetness of style that no other writer possesses. Don’t believe that all the horde of peasants, clumsily footing their tunes, have come to stay. Form will prevail in the end, and Buffon said, the style is the man. Much later piano literature is rank, vulgar, uncultivated, and is altogether inferior to compositions of the grand classic school. It is all right to put the cart before the horse when you are backing, but there is no progress in the whole school of composerlings who trade only in the volks tunes of their native land. Grieg has been called the Northern Chopin. What a far fetched simile! The Grieg piano music was once delightfully fresh, and it still has a quaint ring, but what a small, restricted genre! He said all he had to say in his sonatas op. 7 and 8, for piano and piano and violin. To attempt to pad his Scotch-Scandinavian shoulders so as to fit the cloak of the great Pole is a silly sartorial scheme.

And a superb maker of style is Chopin! Grieg lacks style, lacks distinction--that is, a fine style--and while I love his concerto with its mosaic of melodies, yet I tire of the eternal yodel, the Scandinavian triolen that bobs up like a trade mark. His ballade in G minor shows more technical invention than the concerto.

What may one not say about the Chopin studies and preludes, the vade mecum of all good pianists who after they die go to heaven to study with Frederic, Bach fugues and his études! Burn every note of all other piano literature and a mine of wealth would still remain.

If you have a bad left hand with intractable fingers always remember that Bach will individualize those fingers, and that old Carl Czerny has written a set of studies for the development of the left hand (op. 399), which, if taken in moderation just after rising in the morning, will lead to limberness and legato. This is only a suggestive aside, however. Albert Venino has written an excellent Pedal School. Many improvements have been made in pedaling, and Mr. Venino has thoroughly handled his subject. Someone has called the pedal “the breath of the piano,” “its soul,” which is apposite.

For a light hand play some of Mendelssohn scherzos, but remember that, after all, not velocity but tonal discrimination is to be sought for. Read Kullak’s remarks appended to the F major étude of Chopin, op. 10. In the Chopin preludes, op. 28, one may discover many rich technical nuggets. If you long for variety while at this epoch you may dig out Theodore Doehler’s fearfully and wonderfully made concert studies and get a glimpse of the technic that delighted our fathers. Interlocked chords, trills, tremendous scale passages and vapid harmonies distinguish this style.

Great difficulties were imposed on the left hand at times, followed by mere accompaniment figures, while the right hand flashed all over the keyboard. This is found in the Gottschalk technic, which is but a combination of the fulminating brilliancies of the French school. Single studies about this time might prove interesting.

Joseffy’s crystalline étude, At the Spring, is delightful in color and replete with exquisite touches. To play it pianissimo and prestissimo in a liquid, cool, caressing manner is a triumph of technic.

Ill-fated Carl Heyman has in his Elfenspiel given us a glimpse of his wondrous technic. Vogrich’s Staccato Étude is very effective. Ferdinand Hiller’s rhythmic studies are excellent, and Carl Baermann’s studies are solid, satisfying and sincerely musical. Golinelli, a Milan pianist, has left twelve studies which are practically obsolete, though the octave study is occasionally heard. In the set is one in C sharp minor with a glorious rolling bass, which is very effective.

Speidel has written an octave study, and speaking of rolling basses reminds us of that perennial favorite Die Loreley, by Hans Seeling, a talented young Bohemian pianist who died young (1828-62). His set of twelve studies contain some good things such as the Gnomentanz.

I don’t know much about Dreyschock’s études, except his Campanella, and somehow or other I don’t care to. You remember Heine’s remark about the “hellish spectacle” his performances presented?

Quite delightful individualities are the Scharwenkas and Moszkowski. Xaver Scharwenka’s preludes and studies are among the best things he has done, the concertos not excepted. The staccato étude is deservedly popular, and the E flat minor prelude and F sharp minor étude are models of their kind. The last named is evidently suggested by a figure in Chopin’s E minor concerto, first movement, and is well worked out. Philipp Scharwenka has also done good work. Moszkowski’s group of three studies is quite difficult; particularly the one in G flat. This latter smacks of artificiality. Nicode’s two studies are well made, and Dupont’s toccata in B is a very brilliant and grateful concert piece. Sgambati, the Italian pianist, has written some studies which are interesting for people who like Sgambati. They lack originality. Saint-Saëns’ six études are very valuable and incidentally very difficult, the rhythm study in particular.