Chapter VIII: Pianoforte and Chamber Music of the Romantic Period (2)

This is the place to make mention of several writers for the piano whose works were of importance in their day and occasionally to-day appear upon concert programs. Stephen Heller,[96] slightly younger than Chopin, and, unlike the Pole, blessed with a long life, wrote in the light and graceful style which was much in vogue, yet generally with sufficient selective sense to avoid the vapid. About the same can be said for Adolph Henselt (1814-1889), whose étude, ‘If I Were a Bird,’ still haunts music conservatories. His vigorous concerto for piano is also frequently played. William Sterndale Bennett, who, after his student years in Leipzig, became Mendelssohn’s priest in England, wrote four concertos, a fantasia with orchestra, a trio, and a sonata in F minor. His work is impeccable in form, often fresh and charming in content, but without radical energy of purpose--precisely Mendelssohn’s list of qualities. Finally, we may mention Joachim Raff (1822-1882), writer of a concerto and a suite, besides a number of smaller pieces which show programmistic tendencies.

V

Liszt, the supreme virtuoso of the piano, is the Liszt who wrote about three-fourths of the compositions which bear his name. The other fourth, or perhaps a quarter share of the whole, comes from another Liszt, a great poet, who could feel the values of whole nations as Chopin could feel the values of individual souls. It is not a paradox to say that Liszt was so utterly master of the piano that he was a slave to it. With it he won a place for himself among counts and princesses, storming a national capital with twenty-four concerts at a single visit by way of variety between flirtations. Having so deeply in his being the pianistic formulas for conquering, it was inevitable that when he set out to do other tasks the pianistic formula conquered him. So it is, at least, in much of his music, which, with all its supreme pianistic skill, is sometimes pretty worthless music. Only, apart from this Liszt of the piano, there always stood that other Liszt--the one who, as he tells us in his book on gypsy music, slept in the open fields with the gypsies, studied and noted their tunes, and felt the great sweeps of nature as strongly as he felt the great sweeps of history. Both Liszts must be kept in mind if we would understand his piano works.

Liszt’s piano style was quite the opposite of Chopin’s. The Pole played for a few intimate friends; the Hungarian played for a vast auditorium. He had the sense of the crowd as few others have ever had it. His dazzling sweeps of arpeggios, of diatonic and chromatic runs, his thunderous chords, piling up on one another and repeated in violent succession, his unbelievable rapidity of finger movement, his way of having the whole seven octaves of the keyboard apparently under his fingers at once--in short, his way of making the pianoforte seem to be a whole orchestra--this was the Liszt who wrote the greater part of what we are about to summarize briefly.

Liszt’s piano style was not born ready made. Although he captured Paris as an infant prodigy when he first went there, he had an immense amount of maturing and developing to do. ‘It is due in great measure to the example of Paganini’s violin playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil, created modern piano playing,’ says Dr. Bie. ‘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 hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fullness of tone-color; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application of the tone-colors 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 color, partly to gain a doubled power by the division, and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in the figures, a fullness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process of individualization begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin.’

The earliest of Liszt’s published études, published in 1826, are now difficult to obtain. They were the public statement of his pianistic creed, the ultimatum, so to speak, of the most popular pianist of the day to all rivals. They seemed to represent the utmost of pianistic skill. Then, in 1832, came Paganini to Paris, and Liszt, with his customary justice toward others, recognized in him the supreme executant, and, what was more significant, the element of the true artist. Inevitably the experience reacted on his own art. He adapted six of Paganini’s violin caprices for piano, achieving a new ‘last word’ in pianoforte technique. These studies still hold their place in piano concerts, especially the picturesque ‘Campanella.’ In 1838 Liszt sought to mark the progress of his pianism to date by publishing a new arrangement of his earliest études, under the name of _Études d’exécution transcendante_. These, while primarily technical studies, are also the work of a creative artist. The _Mazeppa_ was a symphonic poem in germ (later becoming one in actuality). The _Harmonies du Soir_, experimenting with ‘atmospheric’ tone qualities on the piano, is an ancestor of the modern ‘impressionistic’ school. The _Étude Héroique_ foreshadows the _Tasso_ and _Les Préludes_. The significant thing in this is the way in which Liszt’s creative impulse grew out of his mastery of the piano.

A predominant part of Liszt’s earlier activity has in recent times passed into comparative insignificance. We are nowadays inclined to sneer at his pompous arrangements of everything from Beethoven symphonies and Bach preludes to the popular operas of the day. But these arrangements, by which his pianistic method chiefly became known, were equally important in their effect on pianism and on musical taste. The name and fame of Berlioz’s _Symphonie Fantastique_ went out among the nations chiefly through Liszt’s playing of his arrangement of it. Schubert’s songs, likewise, which one would suppose were possible only for the voice, were paraphrased by Liszt with such keen understanding of the melodic resources of the piano, and such pious regard for the intentions of Schubert, that Liszt’s piano was actually the chief apostle of Schubert’s vocal music through a great part of Europe. Liszt was similarly an apostle of Beethoven’s symphonies. It is eternally to his credit that Liszt, though in many ways an aristocrat in spirit, was never a musical snob; his paraphrases of Auber’s and Bellini’s operas showed as catholic a sense of beauty as his arrangements of Beethoven. He could bow to the popular demand for opera _potpourris_ without ever quite descending to the vulgar level of most pianists of his day, though coming perilously near it. His arrangements were always in some degree the work of a creative artist, who could select his themes and develop them into an artistic whole. They were equally the work of an interpretive artist, for they frequently revealed the true beauties and meanings of an opera better than the conductors and singers of the day did.

As Liszt travelled about the world on his triumphal tours, or sojourned in the company of the Countess d’Agoult in Switzerland, he sought to confide his impressions to his piano. These impressions were published in the two volumes of the ‘Years of Pilgrimage,’ poetic musical pictures in the idiom of pianistic virtuosity. The first of these pieces was written to picture the uprising of the workmen in Lyons, following the Paris revolution of 1830. Thereafter came impressions of every sort. The chapel of William Tell, the Lake of Wallenstein, the dances of Venice or Naples, the reading of Dante or of Petrarch’s sonnets--all gave him some musical emotion or picture which he sought to translate into terms of the piano. The musical value of these works is highly variable, but at their best, as in certain of the grandiose Petrarch sonnets, they equal the best of his symphonic poems. In these works, too, his experiments in radical harmony are frequent, and at times he completely anticipates the novel progressions of Debussy--whole-toned scale and all. Along with the ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ may be grouped certain other large compositions for the piano, such as the two ‘Legends’ of St. Francis, the six ‘Consolations,’ the brilliant polonaises, the fascinating ‘Spanish Rhapsody,’ and the grandiose _Funerailles_. All of these works are still frequently played by concert pianists.

The two grand concertos with orchestra--in E flat major and A major--are of dazzling technical brilliancy. In the second in particular the pianistic resource seems inexhaustible. The thematic material is in Liszt’s finest vein and the orchestral accompaniment is executed in the highest of colors. In the second, too, Liszt not only connects the movements, as was the fashion of the day, but completely fuses them, somewhat in the manner that a Futurist painter fuses the various parts of his picture. Scherzo, andante, and allegro enter when fancy ordains, lasting sometimes but a moment, and returning as they please. In the same way is constructed the superb pianoforte sonata in B minor, a glorious fantasy in Liszt’s most heroic style. It is commonly said that as a sonata this work is structurally weak; it would be truer to say that as a sonata it has no existence. It is the nobility of the work, in its contrapuntal and pianistic mastership, that carries conviction.

The Hungarian Rhapsodies, perhaps Liszt’s most typical achievement, are universally known. They were the outcome of his visit to his native land in 1840, and of the notes he made at the time from the singing of the gypsies. His book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ is well worth reading for any who wish to know the real impulse behind the Rhapsodies. Liszt, beyond any of his time, understood the æsthetic and ethical import of folk-music, and knew how to place it at the foundation of all other music whatsoever. Without such an appreciation he could not have caught so accurately the distinctive features of Hungarian music and developed them through his fifteen rhapsodies without ever once losing the true flavor. In them the gypsy ‘snap,’ the dotted notes, the instrumental character, the extreme emphasis on rhythm, and the peculiar oriental scales become supremely expressive. Liszt is here, as he aspired to be, truly a national poet. The Lassan or slow movement of the second, and every note of the twelfth, the national hymn and funeral march which open the fourteenth, are a permanent part of our musical heritage. On the other hand, their real musical value is unhappily obscured by virtuoso display. They are, first and foremost, pieces for display, however much genuine life and virility the folk melodies and rhythms on which they are based may give them. As such they find their usual place at the end of concert programs, to suit the listener who is tired of really listening and desires only to be taken off his feet by pyrotechnics; as well as to furnish the player his final opportunity to dazzle and overpower.

VI

The romantic age produced many works in the quieter forms of chamber music, but, perhaps because these forms were quieter, was not at its best in them. Nearly all the German composers of the period, save Liszt, wrote quantities of such music. The string quartet was comparatively under a cloud after Schubert’s death, suffering a decline from his time on. But no quartets, save those of Beethoven, are finer than Schubert’s. He brought to them in full power his genius for melody. Moreover, he showed in them a genius for organization which he did not usually match in his other large works. In the best of his quartets he escaped the danger to which a lesser melodist would have succumbed--that of incontinently putting a chief melody into the first violin part and letting the remaining instruments serve as accompaniment In no musical type are all the voices so absolutely equal as in the string quartet; the composer who unduly stresses any one of the four is false to the peculiar genius of the form. But Schubert feels all the parts: he gives each its individuality, not in the close polyphonic manner of Bach, but in the melodist’s manner of writing each voice with an outline that is distinctive. In these works the prolixity which so often beset him is purged away; the musical standard is steadily maintained. The movements show steady development and coherence. The instruments are admirably treated with reference to their peculiar possibilities. Often the quartets are highly emotional and dramatic, though they never pass beyond the natural limitations of this peculiarly abstract type of music. In his search for color effects, too, Schubert frequently foreshadows the methods and feelings of modern composers, but these effects, such as the tremolo climax, are not false to the true nature of the instruments he is using. Some of Schubert’s chamber works still hold their place in undiminished popularity in concerts. A few make use of the melodies of some of his best songs, such as ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘Death and the Maiden,’ and _Sei mir gegrüsst_. The best are perhaps those in A minor, G major, and D minor. To these we must add the great C major quintet, which uses the melody of ‘The Trout’ in its last movement.

Contemporary with Schubert, and outliving him by a number of years was Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), whose quartets number as many as those of Mozart and Beethoven put together. The only one which still holds its place in concert programs is that in G minor, opus 27. His quartets have the personal faults and virtues of their composer, being somewhat tenuous and mannered, and inclined to stress solo virtuosity. Schumann’s early quartets, especially the three in opus 41, show him very nearly at his best. These, written in the early years of his married life, after a deliberate study of the quartets of Beethoven, are thoroughly workmanlike, and are eminently successful as experiments in direct and ‘aphoristic’ expression. They rank among the best in string quartet literature. Not so much can be said for those of Mendelssohn. They were, of course, immensely popular in their time. But, though their style is polished, their content is not creative in the finer sense. And, strangely enough, their composer frequently committed in them faults of taste in his use of the instruments. The best to be said of them, as of much of the rest of Mendelssohn’s music, is that they were of immense value in refining and deepening the musical taste of the time, when the greater works of every type were caviar to the general.

In addition to the quartets of the romantic period we should mention the vast quantity of chamber music written for various combinations of instruments. Spohr in particular was very prolific, and his combinations were sometimes highly unusual. For instance, he has to his credit a nonet, four double quartets, a ‘nocturne’ for wind and percussion instruments, a sextet for strings and a concerto for string quartet with orchestral accompaniment. Mendelssohn’s octet for strings, opus 22, is fresh and interesting, especially in the scherzo, where the composer is at his best. And, to follow the great trios (piano, violin, and 'cello) of Beethoven, we have two trios, D minor and C minor, by Mendelssohn, and three trios, in D minor, F major, and G minor, by Schumann, of which the first is the best. The later Schumann sonatas for violin show only too clearly the composer’s declining powers.

The romantic period was naturally the time for great pianoforte concertos. Weber, in his two concertos, in C and E flat, and in his _Concertstück_ for piano and orchestra, foreshadowed the spirit of great concertos that followed, though his technique was still one of transition. Mendelssohn’s concerto in G minor was for years the most popular of show pieces in conservatories, though it has since largely dropped out of use. (His _Capriccio_, however, is still familiar and beautiful.) But the great concerto of the period, and one of the great ones of all time, was Schumann’s in A minor. This was originally written as a solo piece of moderate length, but broadened into a concerto of three distinct though joined movements, each representing the best of Schumann’s genius. No concerto ever conceded less to mere display, or maintained a more even standard of musical excellence. And to-day, though the technical brilliance is somewhat dimmed by comparison with more modern works, the idealistic sincerity of the lovely concerto speaks with unlessened vigor. Numerous other concertos for pianoforte were composed and were popular in the period we are discussing, but most of them have dropped out of use, except for the instruction of conservatory students. Among them we may mention the concerto in F minor by Adolph Henselt (1814-1889), one of the famous virtuosos of the time, whose work is exceedingly pianistic, elaborate and graceful, but somewhat pedantic and lacking in force; that in A flat by John Field (1782-1837); that in C sharp minor by Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838); that in F minor by Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875); that in F sharp minor by Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885), a famous virtuoso of the time, who was closely identified with the work and activities of some of the greatest composers; and that in G minor by Joachim Raff (1822-1882). Chopin’s two concertos, composed in his earliest years of creative activity, are uneven, but in parts reveal the genius of their composer and justly maintain their somewhat limited popularity in modern concerts.

Ludwig Spohr, whom Rupert Hughes calls one of ‘the first of second-best composers,’ was a virtuoso of the violin, and it is chiefly through his writing for that instrument that he retains what position he has in modern times. He first became known as a violinist and constantly showed his predilection for the instrument in his writings. In his day he seemed a dazzling genius, with his eleven operas, his nine symphonies, and his great oratorio ‘The Last Judgment.’ Yet these have hardly more than a historical value to-day--except for the quiet pleasure they can give the student who takes the trouble to examine the scores. It is as a composer for the violin that Spohr continues to speak with some authority. His seventeen concertos still enter largely into the training of young violin virtuosos, and figure to a considerable though diminishing extent in concerts. As a master of the violin Spohr represents the old school. His bowing, when he played, was conservative. He drew from his instrument a broad singing quality of tone. All his writing shows his intimacy with the instrument of his personal triumphs. It has been said that ‘everything turned to a concerto at his touch.’ His style, however, was not lurid, but rather delicate and nuanced. Presently he was eclipsed by Paganini,[97] a genius who was half charlatan, who stopped short of no trick with his instrument provided it might procure applause. Spohr could see nothing but the trickster in this man who thrilled Liszt and who has left several pieces which are to-day in constant use and are not scorned by the best of musicians. Spohr, however, had an individuality which could not blend with that of the meteoric virtuoso. In some respects he is extraordinarily modern. His harmony was continually striving for peculiar and colorful effects. He was addicted, in a mild way, to program music, and gave titles to much of his music, such as the ‘Seasons’ symphony. But his genius always stopped short of the epoch-making quality of supreme creativeness.

In violin literature we must mention one more work, one which has never been surpassed in beauty of workmanship and which remains one of the great things of its kind in all music. This is Mendelssohn’s concerto. It is, outside of the concert overtures, the one work of his which has not sunk materially in the eyes of musicians since its first years. Its themes, though not robust, are of the very highest beauty. Its technical qualities make it one of the best beloved of works to violinists. And its unmatchable polish and balance of architecture make it a constant joy to concert audiences.

H. K. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[93] Oskar Bie: ‘A History of the Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players,’ Chap. VIII.

[94] ‘The Pianoforte and Its Music,’ Chap. X.

[95] ‘The Pianoforte and Pianoforte Players,’ Chap. VII.

[96] B. Pesth, 1814; d. Paris, 1888.

[97] Niccolò Paganini, the greatest of all violin virtuosi, was born in 1782 in Genoa, and died, 1840, in Nizza.