Chapter I: Introduction Romanticism in Music (4)

[8] H, it will be remembered, stands in German for the note B-natural, which makes the musical interval of a fifth with E.

[9] "Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, 1903-1906.

[10] "The Symphony since Beethoven," Eng. trans., p. 31.

[11] See the Adagio of the Quartet, opus 41, no. 1. The accompaniment is essentially a piano accompaniment, transcribed for 'cello and viola; but without the pedal it lacks fluidity.

[12] "Studies in Modern Music," First Series, Essay on Schumann, p. 213.

[13] Essay on Schubert, p. 98.

IV
FELIX MENDELSSOHN

IV
FELIX MENDELSSOHN

In studying the relations of a number of contemporary artists to the general tendency of their age it is interesting to note how, in spite of the influence exerted upon them all by prevailing conditions and available opportunities, each responds to the occasion in his own way, always maintaining, in the common enterprise, his own particular ideals, tastes, and methods. Despite all the schools and movements in the history of art, each artist remains himself. So it was in the period of romanticism. The romantic tendency was in the air--the tendency to subjectivism, to picturesqueness, to specialized expression, to a richly sensuous embodiment of ideas; but nevertheless, each individual composer approached music from his own standpoint, seized upon those elements in it for which he had a native affinity, and quietly ignored what did not attract him.

That Mendelssohn should have been a romanticist at all is a proof of the strength of the romantic tendency in his day; he seemed born rather for the severest, purest, most uncompromising classicism; and if he did, as a matter of fact, come to share the ideals of his age, it was in his own way and for his own ends. The crudities, the exaggerations, the morbid self-involution of the extreme phases of the movement, certainly never infected him. For this happy immunity he was indebted largely to the fortunate conditions of his life, both personal and artistic. Crudity is usually a result of narrowness of culture or of a deficiency in technique; and Mendelssohn grew up in a singularly refined domestic and social circle, and was a skilled musician before he was breeched. Exaggeration springs from a lack of taste; and Mendelssohn's taste, both by native endowment and by training, was consummate. Self-consciousness, whether blessed or baneful, is the child of suffering; how, then, should it come to one whose whole life was so protected, so guided, so lapped in material prosperity, family affection, and social respect?

Mendelssohn's life reads like the story of some fairy prince, beautiful, brave, and virtuous, who is rocked in his cradle by the gentle godmother, Good-fortune, who runs his race amid the plaudits of admiring friends, and who dies young, untarnished, and full of honors, as one loved by the gods. He never knew the squalor of poverty, the paralysis of drudgery, the bitterness of inaptitude, the dull ache of disappointment. In his bright, precocious childhood he was the idol of a wise father, a fond mother, brothers and sisters who shared his tastes and in some measure his abilities, and a circle of literary and artistic friends at the head of which was the aged Goethe. In later years he had all the advantages of university training, the best teachers in music, foreign travel, varied friendships, a happy marriage, and a fame extending to all corners of Europe. Appropriately indeed was he named Felix.

The influence of a long-established, carefully bred, and highly cultivated family played an important part in the formation of his personality. Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt blazed out suddenly, meteoric individuals, from respectable but obscure origins; but Mendelssohn was the last bright flower put forth by an ancient stock. Only as such can he be understood. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, an orthodox Jew of the old school and a self-made man, was a famous scholar in his day. He was prominent in the intellectual circles of Berlin in the middle of the eighteenth century, participated in a famous controversy with Lavater, was a friend of Lessing, and was the author of "Phædon, or the Immortality of the Soul," a work translated into all European languages. His son Abraham inherited his strong character and something of his mental power, without his genius. An independent thinker, an unusually wise and devoted father, he was yet singularly modest, and used to say that he began by being "the son of his father" and ended by being "the father of his son." He married Leah Solomon, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of Berlin. It was her brother, a man of some reputation as an art critic, who, turning Christian, adopted and induced Abraham Mendelssohn to adopt the name of Bartholdy, as a distinction from the branches of their families which retained the ancient faith. Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's sister, was also an unusual person. She had a genius for music second only to his, and would doubtless have become famous had it not been for her father's prejudice against a professional life for women. Some of the "Songs without Words" are of her composition, and her criticism was always eagerly welcomed by her brother. She married Hensel the painter, who added still further to the artistic interests and associations of the Mendelssohn family.[14]

In Felix's sixteenth year his father bought the mansion known as "Leipziger Strasse no. 3," in the suburbs of Berlin, which became the scene of a most idyllic family and social life. There were separate suites of apartments for the various groups of the clan, Fanny Hensel and her husband occupying one side, and her sister Rebecca and her husband, Edward Devrient, the other; there was a room suitable for theatrical performances, which were frequently given; there was a large garden, and in the middle of it a garden-house with a hall accommodating several hundred persons, in which informal musicales were arranged every Sunday afternoon. No pains were spared to grace the everyday life. "In the summer-houses," we read,[15] "writing materials were provided, and Felix edited a newspaper, called in the summer 'The Garden Times,' and in the winter 'The Snow and Tea Times.' To this all comers were invited to contribute, and the young people were joined in their fun by their elders, including such distinguished personages as Humboldt and Zelter." We can readily imagine that music was the constant accompaniment of all that went on; for not only did Felix and Fanny play the piano and compose, but Rebecca and her husband were singers, and Paul, the youngest of the family, was a good violoncellist. For the Sunday afternoon musicales Felix constantly wrote new things, of which the most important was the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," played before a crowded audience in the garden-house at the end of 1826.

Had Mendelssohn not been surrounded, thanks to the wealth and cultivation of his parents, by this atmosphere of social friendliness and artistic charm, he might have had reason to regret the nervous sensibility he had inherited from them. The abnormal delicacy of constitution indicated by the fact that his grandfather, father, mother, and sister all died of cerebral paralysis took in him the form of such an excitability, physical, emotional, and mental, as would have brought much suffering upon a youth whose conditions of life had been less ideal. Extreme sensitiveness was the most radical trait of his character and temperament. His affection for his relatives was of passionate intensity; a slight misunderstanding or coolness would reduce him to tears, he could not work when his brother or sisters were ill, and the death of his sister Fanny was a shock from which he never recovered. His friendships were romantic in their ardor and in their exacting demands; he showed in them, indeed, the childish egotism of the oversensitive. "Write soon, and love me," he ends one of his letters; and a friend said of him, significantly, "He loved only in the measure that he was loved."[16] His brother-in-law, Devrient, in his reminiscences, says that when crossed or disappointed he sometimes lost all self-control, and in illustration tells the story of some theatricals planned for the silver-wedding celebration of his parents, for which he had written the music, and in which Devrient was to sing the principal part. At the last moment Devrient was summoned to sing at the Crown Prince's on the very evening appointed. With singular blindness to everything but his own plans, Mendelssohn begged him not to go, and when all were assembled began to talk incoherently, and in English. "The stern voice of his father," says Devrient, "at last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state." It was the same sensitiveness, doubtless, that underlay his vanity in regard to his work, and made indifference so intolerable to him. "The atmosphere of love and appreciation," says Devrient, "in which he had been nurtured was a condition of life to him; to receive his music with coldness or aversion was to be his enemy, and he was capable of denying genuine merit in any one who did so. A blunder in manners, or an expression that displeased him, could alienate him altogether."

But fortunately, at least for the moment, the cold winds of the outside world rarely invaded the quiet garden of art and friendship in which he passed his youth. Inside the barriers which his father's wealth and devotion, his mother's tender solicitude, and his sisters' comradeship and admiration reared about him, he composed, studied, and dreamed in idyllic peace. For variety there were conversations with men skilled in art and literature, studies in the classics and modern languages, harmless flirtations, letter-writing, water-color sketching, and tours in Italy and Switzerland. For recreation there were bowling, fencing, and swimming. And if the disagreeable could not be entirely eliminated, if there must be an occasional headache or fit of lassitude, or if, in spite of one's personal charm and graceful, lovable nature one's friends would not always take the trouble to understand one, then one could resort to a sort of Epicurean stoicism, refuse to attend to the painful and the annoying, and dwell insistently on all that was bright, gracious, and delightful.

Mendelssohn's earliest compositions reflect all the freshness and gaiety of his youthful nature, all the ease and charm of the circumstances in which it developed. From the first their technical skill is perfect; for Mendelssohn had had no distracting struggles for daily bread, like Schubert, no moiling in arid, uncongenial studies, like Schumann; he had been placed under the best masters, and had assimilated harmony, counterpoint, and fugue as unconsciously as most boys assimilate reading, writing, and arithmetic. What was even better, their style was entirely individual; for the spirit of Ariel had never before been incarnated in a musician--or, if it had been, it had smothered under impeding conditions. In the scherzo of the octet written at sixteen there are all the Mendelssohnian traits: fluent melodiousness, correct harmony, carefully polished detail, and an inimitable delicacy, finesse, and lightness of style. "The whole piece," wrote his sister Fanny, "is to be played staccato and pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and at the same time most insinuating and pleasing, one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aërial procession. At the end the first violin takes a flight with a featherlike lightness, and--all has vanished."[17] The last words are quoted from a stanza of the Walpurgis Night Dream in "Faust," of which it was Mendelssohn's intention to give a musical illustration:--

"The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist
Are lighted from above.
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds,
And all has vanished."

The same kind of intention was carried out even more brilliantly in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," of which it is not too high praise to say that it is worthy of its Shaksperian inspiration. In the immaterial dance of the violins and the strange calls of the trumpets and wood-wind instruments, as if from some cloudy No-man's-land, of this wonderful work, conceived by a genius and executed by a master only seventeen years old, a new type of music is born.

It is worthy of remark that in neither of these works is there the slightest trace of the turgidity so often observable in youthful productions. On the contrary, one of their most prominent traits is a cool dispassionateness, as of the deliberate, detached artist, remarkable in so young a man. The more one studies Mendelssohn's music the more one becomes convinced that this cool dispassionateness is one of his fundamental qualities. Everywhere it reveals itself--in the suavity of his melody, in the purity of his harmony, in the smooth fluency of his part-writing. Violence of contrast, dramatic trenchancy of expression, the overemphasis of hysterical eloquence, he punctiliously avoids; he is always clear, unperturbed, discreet, harmonious. The lavish sensuousness of Schubert, the impulsive sincerity of Schumann, are impossible if not distasteful to this Addisonian temperament; personal sentiment, self-revelation, the autobiographic appeal, he avoids as the purist in manners avoids a blush, an exclamation, or a grimace. If he is romantic in his love of the picturesque, in his sense of color, and in his fondness for literary motives, his emotional reticence is entirely classic. He is more observant than introspective, and his art is more pictorial than passionate.

Compare, for a moment, by way of illustration, the overtures "Manfred" and "Hebrides." Schumann's work is intensely human from the opening onslaught of syncopated chords to the final, deep-drawn sighs of the contrabasses. There is unassuagable desire in the melody so appropriately marked "In leidenschaftlichem Tempo," there is the very accent of a lover's longing in the beautiful Astarte theme. The music constantly rushes on into feverish excitement, only to expend its force and die away to tender sadness, whence in a moment it lashes itself again into new fury. From this so human world--

"Of infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn"--

Mendelssohn transports us, in his "Hebrides," to an island set in a boundless expanse of the sea, where we watch only the rise and fall of great billows and hear the long sigh of the wind and the cries of sea-birds. The fierce dissonances of Schumann, his ceaseless modulation, his never resting movement, give place to clear ethereal harmonies, to high, pure trumpet calls, poising violin melodies, and the thin note of the oboe suggesting infinite distance, and to an undulating movement like the ebb and flow of winds and waves. These two works are typical. If Schumann is incomparable in his insight into the storm and stress of the human heart, Mendelssohn is one of the greatest of landscape painters.

What is true of the "Hebrides Overture" is in greater or less degree true of all Mendelssohn's compositions which can be called really successful. They charm us not by their personal appeal, their introspective veracity, as Schumann's so constantly do, but precisely by their freedom from personal bias, their objective truth, their universal interest. When he makes us see the winds and waves of the "Hebrides Overture," the marching pilgrims of the "Italian Symphony," the dancing fairies of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, it is not as through a temperament, but as in the white light of pure imagination. It is such a view of the world as some visitant from another planet might get--some gentle, happily organized being, whose intelligence was unperturbed by human passions and undistorted by practical interests. It is the view rather of a Tennyson than of a Browning. "In the eyes of Mendelssohn," a keen observer has recorded, "there was none of that rapt dreaminess so often seen among men of genius in art. The gaze was rather external than internal; the eye had more outwardness than inwardness of expression." What is said here of the physical eye might with equal truth be applied to that mind's eye with which the artist envisages his work. Mendelssohn's attention, we feel, was never engaged with his own emotions, but played like a disembodied spirit about the impressions he was imagining. He himself is as elusive as the elves and fairies he so loved to depict. He is always behind his work rather than in it.

The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality, are fluency, grace, and elegance. His melody, lacking to an unusual degree the suggestion of impassioned utterance, is more decorative than expressive--a sort of tonal arabesque, often exquisitely wrought, but curiously unexciting. There is no boldness in the physiognomy of his tunes; they conform closely to the average type of traditional German melody; and their charm is due to the neatness and facility with which they follow the paths of least resistance. His harmony is solid and correct, but hardly ever unconventional; he prefers an authorized to a novel progression, values clearness above richness, and treats dissonances with the utmost circumspection. His attitude toward modulation is conservative. Certain of his works, such as the "Scotch Symphony," with its endless A-minor and D-minor, have justly been charged with monotony, so fond he is of hovering gently about among a few closely related keys. In polyphony his ideal is smoothness of progression. Those daring momentary collisions between different voices, each progressing independently, which give Bach's fabric such a stoutness, he shrinkingly avoids. His part-writing is almost too conciliatory, too considerate of the prejudices of the ear; the natural roughnesses are all ironed out or glossed over. In a word, whenever he has a choice between the original and the established, he chooses the latter; he is too urbane to risk startling his hearer, and prefers to ingratiate himself with familiar charms; but so deftly does he manage these that he constantly gives us the pleasure of recognizing "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

In the matter of orchestration his delicate ear and fine taste made him a great master. His instinct for proper balance and fusion of timbres is unerring, he knows how to be sonorous without becoming opaque or blatant, and his scores abound in the purest, clearest, and freshest colors. Where shall we find a parallel for that ethereal shimmer of the violins in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or for the magical chord of the wood-wind that arrests it? or for the serene beauty of the violin melody, so airily poised, at the end of the same overture? or for the liquid coolness of the flutes, violins, and trumpets in the "Hebrides"? or for the elastic vitality of the violins at the opening of the "Italian Symphony"? Here, we cry with delight, is a master who can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their upper register, and trumpets playing _piano_, sound not like mere orchestral instruments, but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is largely due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores, never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have so fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of the sounds, how much to their skilful composition.[18] As an example may be cited the last page of the "Con moto moderato" movement in his "Italian Symphony," where the same motive is sounded first by horns and bassoons, then by trumpets and drums, then by flutes and oboes, all together building up the loveliest, most diaphanous fabric of tone.

Figure XII.

An even more striking instance, remarkable both for the economy of the means employed and for the indescribable charm of the resultant effect, is the passage for violins and two flutes, in the "Pilgrim's March" of the same symphony.

Figure XIII.

Figure XIV.

As a master of pigments like Monet knows how to set on the canvas spots of pure color which merge only in the eye of the beholder, so Mendelssohn builds Æolian harmonies with a few pure tones that fill but never cloy our ears.

So long as Mendelssohn maintained his instinctive aloofness from human emotion, so long as, dwelling in his heaven of imagination, he painted delicate aquarelles of fairyland and romantic natural scenery, he was an incomparable master. In that rarefied atmosphere sentiments, like objects, were quite properly somewhat ghostly, tenuous, impalpable; the cheerful Mendelssohnian contentment sufficed for joy, the tender Mendelssohnian melancholy for sorrow. But as time went on it was perhaps inevitable that he, too, like Schubert and Schumann, and indeed all sincere romanticists, should strive to leave his fanciful boyish world behind him, and to express something of those deeper realities with which the years were making him acquainted. Accumulating experience may well have brought to the man of forty a distaste for the gracious insubstantiality which was entirely charming in the work of a youth of seventeen. But, unfortunately, a serious difficulty presented itself at this point.

From the outset a thoughtful observer might have doubted whether so artificially protected a life as that of Mendelssohn's youth would develop his character and genius, in the long run, so favorably as it at first promised to do. There is such a thing as a good fortune so unrelieved that, by removing the prick of adversity, the challenge of obstacles, the illumination of sympathy, it becomes in truth misfortune. This is the fate that seems to have overtaken Mendelssohn. The smile of Destiny, constant from his youth, became at last fixed and vacuous. As in his boyhood he had been the pet of his family, so in manhood he became, as conductor of the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipsic, and general dictator of musical affairs, the pet of a larger but still almost invariably indulgent circle. As his fame as a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist increased, the admiring audience widened until it comprised all Germany; and when in his last years he turned to oratorio writing he had England too at his feet. A wit has vividly pictured the atmosphere of adulation in which he lived in the remark: "Mendelssohn could not stick his head out of the window but some one would shout 'Hurrah!'"

The tendency of such an environment is to cramp the sympathies, smother the sense of humor, and intrench the petty pride of the most magnanimous of men; Mendelssohn was peculiarly at its mercy, because extreme sensitiveness inclined him to be wounded rather than enlightened by such adverse criticism as he got, because consciousness of real merit put him off his guard against the exaggerations of hero-worshippers, and because the innate bias of his mind was more toward a fastidious distinction than toward a rugged catholicity. Even in his youth his affections, as we have seen, were exclusive and jealous; and on the intellectual side a similar narrowness showed itself in a certain preciosity that we should call bigotry had it been less amiably expressed. That is a significant incident that Berlioz relates of his sojourn with Mendelssohn in Rome in their student days. "One evening," he says, "we were exploring together the Baths of Caracalla, debating the question of the merit or demerit of human actions, and their remuneration during this life. As I replied with some enormity, I know not what, to his entirely religious and orthodox opinions, his foot slipped, and down he rolled, with many scratches and contusions, in the ruins of a very hard staircase. 'Admire the divine justice,' said I, helping him to rise; 'it is I who blaspheme, and it is you who fall!' This impiety, accompanied with peals of laughter, appeared to him too much, it seemed; and, from that time, religious discussions were always avoided." The lack of plasticity here shown in a religious matter is also observable in his literary and musical opinions. Lampadius quotes his comment on Shelley's "Cenci": "No, it is too horrible! It is too abominable! I cannot read such a poem." Mr. Hadow tells how he "praised the treatment of the double-basses in Berlioz's Requiem, just as he afterwards told Wagner that 'a canonic answer in the second act of "Tannhauser" had given him pleasure,'" and remarks, "There was always a little touch of Atticus in Mendelssohn's relations to his fellow-composers."

In the artificial air he was condemned to breathe, this pallor of intellectual anemia gradually became habitual. As a rare plant, kept always under glass, withers at a breeze which would invigorate the hardy weed so he could but shiver and shrink from those winds of impartial opinion which ruder natures inhale with zest. His youthful exquisiteness of taste thus grew peevish and fretful with advancing years. Too frequently we read of incidents like his studied coldness, throughout a long rehearsal, toward a favorite singer, and his curt explanation at the end: "Your curls provoke me, Fräulein Schloss. Wear your hair smooth; curls ought never to be black, but light brown or fair." Great, however, was the provocation. To set yourself a pace no mortal could maintain by writing the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture" at seventeen; to marry an angelic creature who agreed with your most casual word and kissed your hand when you improvised in public; to move among admiring friends, relatives, pupils, and acquaintances as a king might move in a never ending triumphal procession; to find all qualms you might feel from time to time as to the superiority of your work immediately drowned by the immemorial habit of passive self-acceptance; to see other men, with other ideals, winning a success which your universally recognized fair-mindedness would not let you deny,--all this might bring pangs of bitterness to a saint.

Perhaps this spiritual and professional exclusiveness, and the isolation it resulted in, did not really grow with the years, but only seems more anomalous in age, which should be mellow, than in naturally arrogant youth. Certainly there were not lacking many evidences of a more wholesome development, of a growth toward larger ideals, of cordial services to fellow-artists. True self-respect, a very different thing from narrow conceit, is shown in the following passage from a letter. "As time goes on I think more deeply and sincerely of that--to write only as I feel, to have less regard than ever to outward results, and when I have produced a piece that has flowed from my heart--whether it is afterwards to bring me fame, honors, orders, or snuff-boxes, does not concern me." A fine modesty prompts the confession: "All I have done appears to me somewhat miscellaneous.... I know what ought to be, and is not." And in spite of the reserve that always impeded his social efforts, there is plenty of evidence that he put himself to much trouble to help such brother musicians as Liszt, Berlioz, and Spohr to gain a hearing.[19]

Above all, he was raised quite above all petty personal considerations by his whole-souled enthusiasm for the great ancient masters. His efforts to educate popular taste by familiarity with classical works were as unremitting and as disinterested as Schumann's. He was the most active of all the champions of Bach, at that time so shamefully neglected. His performance of the great "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin, in March, 1829, the first since the composer's death in the middle of the eighteenth century, is one of the most important events in musical history; the significance of it, and of his other labors in behalf of Bach propaganda, to the entire subsequent progress of music, and especially to the romantic movement, of which Bach is one of the corner-stones, cannot be exaggerated.

Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial and expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain thinness of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind. His personality is tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun than a man. And hence it comes about that when, leaving his world of fairies, elves, visionary landscapes, and ethereal joys and sorrows, he tries to sound a fuller note of human pain and passion, he is felt to be out of his element. His style is too fluent, too suave, too insinuating and inoffensive, to embody tragic emotion. It lacks the rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional harshness and discordance even, of the natural human voice; its reading of life, in which there is ugliness, crudity, and violence as well as beauty, is too fastidiously expurgated. Which are the best of his piano works? Certainly not the "Songs without Words," with their facile melody, their monotonous rhythms and their cloyingly consonant harmony; nor the respectable, harmless, unexciting sonatas, cut from the same stuff, but by the yard instead of the square inch. Rather the "Variations Sérieuses" and the "Preludes and Fugues," in which there is some of the vigor of Bach, and the elusive immaterial whimsies, in the true Mendelssohn vein, such as the "Capriccio," opus 118, the scherzos, the "Spinning Song," the "E-minor Fantasie," and the "Rondo Capriccioso." Similarly, in the chamber music, it is the Canzonetta of the E-flat quartet, the scherzos of the trios, and the finale of the violin concerto, that most please us. As for the symphonies, even the noble adagio of the "Scotch" is just the least bit soporific; but the scherzo or the Scottish jig, and the fresh allegro vivace and stirring saltarello of the "Italian" are delightful. Mendelssohn gay and gracious is the best of company; Mendelssohn sentimental makes us "begin to loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too much."

The effeminate element in his work is probably chiefly responsible for the indifference, boredom, or distaste with which it is nowadays so often received. Since his romanticism was a matter of imagination rather than of passion, of fancy and delicate sentiment rather than of turbulent feeling, it is inevitably voted dull by a generation given over like ours to the pursuit of thrills, tolerant of any turgidity that can excite, and preferring intensity to clarity of emotion. He represents a mild, tentative, and restrained application of artistic principles that have been much more brilliantly and thoroughly illustrated by bolder spirits like Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, who have accordingly somewhat eclipsed him. His conservatism also made him retain many of the traditional formulæ and mannerisms of classicism, which have become repugnant to our less conventional age. The result is that it has become almost a fashion to sneer or to smile at his music. But it is conceivable that we err in one direction as much as his contemporaries did in the other. It may be that we call his art stale and vapid merely because our palates are jaded by over-indulgence in spices and condiments. Mendelssohn is undeniably, for the present, among the fallen gods; but whether a maturer and less sophisticated taste than our own may some day set him up again is a question we must be content to leave unanswered.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] See S. Hensel's "The Mendelssohn Family, from Letters and Journals," a fascinating book. English translation published in London, 1881.

[15] "Mendelssohn," by S. S. Stratton, p. 40.

[16] Compare what is said of Chopin at page 231.

[17] "The Mendelssohn Family," p. 131.

[18] Compare the remarks on Schumann's scoring, at page 139.

[19] See the story of the banquet he tendered to Liszt in Leipsic, in Lampadius' "Life," p. 167.

V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating pretty widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is determined largely by the technical conditions under which it develops. We all know that one style is appropriate to engraving, another to oil-painting, and still another to pastel work; we recognize that the prose-writer and the versifier must use different vocabularies. Musical critics, however, whether from ignorance or from a disposition to involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of sentiment, have for the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our primitive notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best sing, or instruments best play. We have to reach largely without their aid the conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or painting, the kind of body available to a composition determines in no small degree the sort of spirit which is to inhabit it.

The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the sixteenth century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which at that time was firmly entrenched by tradition--the ecclesiastical choir of mixed voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the necessity of making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for the various groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies were restricted by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice; his harmony, in the interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept simple and transparent. When, somewhat later, the organ came into vogue, it suggested certain modifications of style, splendidly realized by J. S. Bach. The natural capacities of the hands on the keyboard tended to focus attention quite as much on the chord as on the separate strands of melody, and the massive effects of chord-patterns began to vie in importance with the more polyphonic traits. At the same time harmony was free to become much more complex, since pipes cannot sing out of tune, and the mechanically even tone, free from the _vibrato_ and incapable of the accentuation of voices, made feasible a grand impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's fugues. A little later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and Beethoven, ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his work on the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed and wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive by motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic extension of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same time the marvelous expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly utilized: on the emotional side music became more than ever before profound, impassioned, mystical, and poignant.

As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical individualities the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the orchestra, so Chopin is in large measure a resultant of the peculiar qualities of the most influential of modern instruments, the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed an important rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert and Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar dialect it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors can it be said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and the orchestra not existed, his art would still have been essentially what it was. Indeed, his work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage between the artistic impulses of a sensitive human organism and the peculiar potentialities of a special instrument that it can be properly understood only through a study of both.

The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its tones. The tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in duration only by the air capacity of the lungs, those of bowed string instruments can be held indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as long as the air pressure is maintained in the bellows. The vibrations of a piano string, on the contrary, are at their maximum only during the moment in which it is struck by the hammer operated by pressing the key, and from that moment gradually decrease, giving forth a sound constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is struck, the player's control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice but either to wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this reason the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate harmonies of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The long notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of their physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention, and so lose their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic passages, which depend for their effect on the leisurely succession of dissonances and their resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer from the discontinuity of the piano tone. The indifference, or even insensibility, to the beauty of pure line, which characterizes so much of our modern musical taste, is probably in large measure due to the prevalence of an instrument so little suited to exhibit it.[20]

At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic defect by modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that if the tones would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over and over again as rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract evanescence. An early application of this principle is the use, by Bach and other clavichordists, of trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a means of keeping long melody-notes audible. A more important one is the breaking up of chords into figures of short notes in the accompaniments of Haydn and Mozart, a device which soon became so indispensable that a glance at any modern piano score will discover hundreds of such groups of short notes, which are nothing but chords played piecemeal in order to make them sound.

(_a_) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.

(_b_) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.

(_c_) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.

(_d_) CHOPIN: Nocturne, Op. 53, No. 2.

Figure XV.

A melody in the right hand, accompanied by these broken chords in the left--this soon became the normal texture of music intended for the piano.

The first great merit of Chopin was that he carried to its logical extreme this system of counteracting the piano's defective sonority. The great advance made by him is shown even in the brief quotations of Figure XV. The Mozart example is rudimentary--the device at its lowest terms. In the Beethoven passage the chords are placed too low; they sound muddy, opaque, inelastic. In the Schubert passage the sonority is better, but the figures are so arranged as to be very difficult to play, on account of the wide jump the hand has to make at the middle of each measure. Chopin, on the other hand, avoids muddiness by clustering his harmony fairly high (about the region of middle C), at the same time gets a sufficient bass for his chords, which he is able to do by covering a great deal of ground in each figure, and in spite of the wide space traversed on the keyboard respects the comfort of the player by not requiring any sudden leaps. It is furthermore worthy of note that by introducing two tones foreign to the harmony (the fourth and the sixteenth) he gains a richness of sound lacking in the other examples. We get here, however, but the merest inkling of the inexhaustible ingenuity with which he manages this matter of "figuration," or the ornamental disintegration of chords. In order really to appreciate it we should have to examine those nocturnes, say, like the second, third, seventh, and eighth, in which with the left hand unaided he supplies a good firm bass and an intricate texture of accompaniment; we should have to study those pieces, such as the first, fifth, and eighth of the Études, opus 10, and the Prelude, opus 28, no. 23, in which it is the right hand that, racing back and forth over the keyboard, fills in the chinks of the harmony as a painter "stipples" an even tint with an infinite number of tiny brush-strokes; we should have to analyze in detail such a masterpiece as the Étude in A-flat major, opus 25, no. 1, in which it is both hands that weave together a diaphanous web of sound, while the outer fingers of one sing the tune, and those of the other the bass.[21]

Chopin's negative merit of minimizing the disadvantages of his instrument is, however, very intimately connected with a more positive skill in utilizing its peculiar advantages, in order to understand which we shall have to revert for a moment to our examination of the mechanism of the piano. The most characteristic feature of this mechanism--a feature so vital that it has been called the soul of the piano, and so unique that no other instrument except the harp presents a parallel to it--is the damper pedal, generally known by the inaccurate and misleading name of "the loud pedal." Its function is to raise all the dampers which control the vibrations of the strings, leaving them free to respond to any impulse they may receive. It thus secures two important results.

In the first place, it counteracts the non-sustainment of single tones by fusing a great many such individual tones, separately produced, into one impression. It will readily be seen, for instance, how indispensable is the pedal to the intended effect of the broken chords of Figure XV: only through its coöperation do they become worthy equivalents, in the piano idiom, of what the organ or voices would present in the form of sustained chords in long notes. Moreover, every tone sounded on the piano, with the pedal down, is reinforced, through what is known as sympathetic vibration, by many other tones not sounded by the hands at all. For, since every tone produced by a piano string is in reality, as proved by scientific analysis, by no means simple, but a complex of many elements known as "partial tones," and since any elastic body capable of producing a given tone will actually produce it, through sympathetic vibration, whenever the tone is already being otherwise sounded in its vicinity, it will readily be understood that all the partial tones set going by striking a piano key will, if the dampers are, by means of the pedal, kept from interfering, start into activity whatever strings are tuned to their respective pitches. Thus the pedal turns the entire body of strings into one vast Æolian harp, ready to take up, reëcho, and multiply the slightest breath of sound produced through the keyboard.

Some idea of the extraordinary enrichment of timbre or tone-quality which accrues to the piano through the sympathetic vibration made possible by the pedal may be gained by striking a single key, say middle C, first without, then with, the pedal. The first tone stands out hard and angular, like a leafless tree in a desert; the second is liquid, murmurous, palpitant, its outlines softened as a landscape is softened by a misty atmosphere. When a chord rather than a single key is struck, the effect is, of course, multiplied in direct proportion to the number of its constituent tones. The hard nucleus of the impression is clothed in a soft web of subordinate sounds, the result of sympathetic vibration. Suppose, for example, we play the chord of four whole notes in Figure XVI. If at the same time we free the strings by pressing the pedal, we shall summon from them an attendant train of ghostly "harmonics" for each of the four, represented in the figure by quarter-notes. These auxiliary tones, to be sure, will be exceedingly faint and individually indistinguishable, but they will nevertheless give to the impression that curious mellowness, depth, or liquidity (one calls vainly on the divers experiences of other senses to describe it) which is one of the fundamental charms of the piano tone.

Figure XVI.

The second important result of the damper pedal is a still greater richness of tone which it enables composers to attain by artificially pushing still farther the fusion of many single tones which is illustrated on the plane of nature by the foregoing examples. The student of harmony will observe that though most of the "harmonics," written in quarter-notes, of Figure XVI, are consonant to the fundamental chord, and thus enrich without obscuring it, there are several, notably the G-sharp, which, being foreign to the chord, tend slightly to blur its clarity. These dissonant harmonics are, however, so faint that their effect is practically nil. But if the composer, acting on the hint they give him, introduces into his chords similar foreign tones, sounded more distinctly by the hands, he at once imparts to the harmony a curious opacity and thickness which it is almost impossible to describe, but which affords a pleasant contrast to the uniform clearness of purely consonant chords. The fourth and the sixteenth notes in the bit of Chopin already cited (Figure XV) illustrate this device. The effect of such dissonant tones may be likened to the effect of mixtures and body-colors in painting; they afford relief from the monotony of consonance just as those afford relief from the monotony of the pure colors. They provide the musical picture with chiaroscuro and atmosphere, softening the sharpness of its lines, spreading over it, so to speak, a delicate translucent haze. Used to excess, of course, they make a mere smutch, a meaningless, chaotic daub; the music reverts to primitive noise; the nice point is to use them just enough to gain depth, solidity, light and shade, without blackening and confusing the whole impression.[22]

Now Chopin is one of the supreme masters in the coloristic use of the dissonance. His nocturnes, especially the first, seventh, eighth, and fourteenth, may fairly be said to inaugurate by this means a new era in music, comparable in many respects to the era of impressionism in painting. Their tremulous, vaporous harmonies seem to come from no common piano, but from some wind-swept Æolian harp. Take, for instance, such a passage as the following, at the end of the third nocturne:--

Figure XVII.

Here it is as if, after placing on his canvas the two main chords of the cadence, dominant and tonic, he took, while the colors were still wet, a brush, and with the softest imaginable touch drew it across the entire face of the picture. The grace-notes, most of which, it will be noted, are dissonant to the main harmony, are no more meant to be heard individually than the spots of paint in a Monet are meant to be seen individually; they are a running of the colors, blurring the otherwise too bald outline. Chopin's scores are full of these delicate veilings and obscurations. In a majority of cases they are produced, as in this instance, by the right hand, above a clear harmony in the lower register. But sometimes, more daringly,[23] he assigns the web of dissonance to the left hand, in the middle register or even in the bass, thus gaining an extraordinary lurid gorgeousness of coloring. The passage in the third ballade, beginning at the change of signature to four sharps (Figure XVIII), is an instance.

And later

Figure XVIII.

Or again, as in the "Meno mosso" of the Scherzo, opus 39, both hands first deliver bold, clear chords, and then weave a shimmer of light above them. In all such cases, it is obvious that the dissonances in question do not belong to the essential melodic and harmonic lines of the composition; they are, as Mr. Hadow says, "effects of superficies, not effects of substance," and may be compared to those local blurs made by a draughtsman's stump in a charcoal sketch, or, as before suggested, to those surprisingly rich mixed tints produced in impressionistic paintings by a multitude of minute brush-strokes.

The at first sight very elaborate modulations of Chopin which have provoked so much discussion are but a further application of the same principle. They are really not modulations at all, in the classic sense of transitions from one key to another having a structural value, but rather amplifications of the groups of grace-notes that constantly embroider the tunes. Their function is sensuous rather than structural, and we might describe them by coining the word "grace-chords." Of the twelfth measure of the second nocturne, for example, Mr. Hadow well says that "when we see it on paper it seems to consist of a rapid series of remote and recondite modulations, but when we hear it played ... we feel that there is only one real modulation, and that the rest of the passage is an iridescent play of color." Another striking instance is the following measure in the "Polonaise-Fantaisie," a composition in which effects of this sort abound.

Figure XIX.

The pedantic scholiast would say that the composer here modulated, with startling speed, through the keys of B-flat, C, D, and A-minor; but all that the mind grasps is the two chords at the beginnings of the measures, connected by a gorgeous pageant of inarticulate sound. The sketch is being rubbed with the draughtsman's stump again, this time with even finer temerity and more splendid result than before.

It is a lesson in the meaning of that much-abused word "originality" to observe that Chopin arrived at all these novel effects, which differentiate his style so strikingly from those of the conservatives and the virtuosos of his day, simply by discerning through a superior sensitiveness, and working out with a matchless skill, the peculiar potentialities of the medium at his hand. Realizing as no one else had done that the piano compensates for its inability to bring out the beauties of pure line (due to the non-sustainment of single tones), by the wealth of color made available through the pedal's fusion of many tones, both consonant and dissonant, in one composite impression, he shrewdly arranged his campaign accordingly. He adjusted all his technical resources, both as a composer and as a pianist, in the interests of the greatest possible transfusion and intermixture of impressions. This is the secret of his harmonic scheme, so chromatic and full of dissonance; of his lavish melodic embroidery; of his _tempo rubato_, by which the outline of meter itself, so arithmetical and inexorable, is gently relaxed; of his curious soft, light touch, which seemed to glide over rather than strike the keys--"so insinuating and gossamer a touch," says an ear-witness, "that the crudest and most chromatic harmonies floated away under his hand, indistinct yet not unpleasing"; and this is the secret of his lavish use of the damper pedal, equalled, among his contemporaries, only by that of Schumann.[24]

The unprecedented individuality of the style he thus developed profoundly impressed all observers. "In the marvellous art of carrying and modulating the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off," says Marmontel in his "Pianistes Célébres," "Chopin was entirely himself. He had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which only he knew the secret." "Imagine," writes Schumann in the _New Journal of Music_, "an Æolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly singing higher part were always audible, and you have an approximate idea of his playing." Liszt's testimony is that he "imprinted on all his pieces one knows not what nameless color, what vague appearance, what pulsations akin to vibration," and that "his modulations were velvety and iridescent as the robe of a salamander."