Chapter I: Introduction Romanticism in Music (5)

Nor do the scholastic musicians of the time fail to pay this pioneer the eloquent tribute of misunderstanding him. Moscheles, a man of the old _régime_, writes, after hearing him play, "The harsh modulations which strike me disagreeably when I am playing his compositions no longer shock me, because he glides over them in a fairylike way with his delicate fingers." This comment is most significant. Moscheles found Chopin's modulations harsh because he played them with the punctilious accuracy, the absolute literalness, which is appropriate to the music of line, but not to the music of color. In rendering a Bach fugue we cannot get each tone too distinct, since it is sure to be a part of some melody, a clear perception of which is necessary to our appreciation of the design. But Chopin's polyphony is not Bach's polyphony, as is illustrated by the former's Prelude, opus 28, no. 1. Both the right- and the left-hand parts here are melodic; but if both are played with an equally salient touch, the conflicts between the voices become unpleasant. The proper way is to let the lower part sink into the background, giving merely a certain depth and opacity to the general impression; the two melodies are as it were on different planes, the lower one more remote and heard but dimly as through a slight haze. So it is everywhere in Chopin. To play him too distinctly is as fatal an error as to examine a charcoal sketch with a magnifying glass, or to bend over a canvas of Monet and peer curiously at each spot of paint. One must stand off, and half close one's eyes, until the details are lost in the masses. In a word, here is a new type of art, demanding a new mode of apperception. If a Bach fugue and a Mozart quartet are the steel engravings of music, Chopin's pieces are its impressionistic paintings and pastels.

But it is time to pass to some other phases of the extraordinary sensibility and unerring taste of Chopin, thus evidenced by his originality in technique, as they showed themselves in his everyday life and in the more intellectual aspects of his art. The chief events of his short career may be very summarily recounted. Born in Zelazowa-Wola, a small village in Poland, in 1809, he studied music in Warsaw, and at twenty-two established himself as a pianist and teacher in Paris, where he passed most of his life. In 1837 ill health, which soon developed into the pulmonary disease of which he died, compelled him to seek a warmer climate, and he passed the winter in the island of Majorca with George Sand, the eminent novelist, and her children. Thus began a connection which lasted for ten years, and which has given rise to endless discussion. The true inner history of this love-affair will probably never be known, as the evidence is fragmentary and distorted by prejudice. It is obvious, however, that neither the composer nor the novelist (whose real name was Madame Dudevant, but who had obtained a divorce from her husband before she met Chopin) was sufficiently unselfish to sustain permanently such a relation; nor were their temperaments fundamentally congenial. They separated in 1847. By this time Chopin's consumption was far advanced, and after two more years of extreme feebleness, complicated by poverty, he died at Paris, October 17, 1849.

In physique Chopin was slender and of middle height, fragile even before disease had wasted him, but supple and elastic; his hands and feet were small, his gestures varied and full of grace; with his pale, almost sallow, complexion, his long, fine, chestnut-brown hair, parted at one side, his high aquiline nose, limpid yet bright eyes, and sweet half-melancholy smile, he impressed Moscheles as "exactly like his music, tender and _schwärmerisch_."[25] Liszt says that the timbre of his voice was subdued, and that his movements had such a distinction and his manners such an impress of good society that one treated him unconsciously like a prince. In the matter of dress he was as fussy as a woman, sparing no pains (to the friends who served him in these affairs) to secure just the distinguished mean between the insignificant and the ostentatious. "I forgot," he writes from Nohant, George Sand's country estate, to his friend Fontana, "to ask you to order for me a hat from my Duport, in your street, Chaussée d'Antin. Let him give the hat of this year's shape, not too much exaggerated, for I do not know how you are dressing yourself just now.... Call at my tailor's, on the Boulevards, and order him to make me at once a pair of gray trousers--something respectable, not striped, but plain and elastic. Also a quiet black velvet waistcoat, but with very little and no loud pattern, something very quiet but very elegant. Should he not have the best velvet of this kind, let him make a quiet, fine silk waistcoat, but not too much open."

Another letter of the same time amply proves the truth of his biographer's statement that he had the "_coquetterie des appartements_." "Select wall-paper," he directs, "such as I had formerly, dove-color, only bright and glossy, for the two rooms, also dark green with not too broad stripes. For the anteroom something else, but still _respectable_. If there are any nicer and more fashionable papers that are to your liking, take them. I prefer the plain, unpretending, and neat ones to the shopkeeper's staring colors. Therefore pearl-color pleases me, for it is neither too loud nor does it look vulgar." In his later years, as health waned, the habit of luxury grew upon him. Near the end, just before leaving London for home, he writes another of his willing servitors, this time his friend Grzymala: "Please see that the sheets and pillows are quite dry, and cause fir-nuts to be bought; Madame Étienne is not to spare anything, so that I may warm myself when I arrive. I have written to D---- that he is to provide carpets and curtains. I shall pay the paper-hanger at once after my arrival. Tell Pleyel to send me a piano on Thursday; let it be closed and a nosegay of violets be bought, so that there may be a nice fragrance in the _salon_. I should like to find a little poesy in my rooms and in my bedroom, where in all probability I shall lie down for a long time."

The same fastidiousness is discernible in his musical and intellectual tastes. Liszt says that he ranked Mozart above all other masters, "because Mozart condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the steps which separate refinement from vulgarity." "Yet," adds Liszt, "his sybaritism of purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in 'Don Giovanni' he discovered passages the presence of which we have heard him regret." Next to Mozart came Bach, whose works were the only music he carried with him to Majorca, and whose exquisitely lucid style exercised an important formative influence on his own. His pupil Mikuli says it was difficult to tell which of the two composers he loved better. Beethoven he accepted only with reservations. "Certain parts of Beethoven's works," says Liszt, "seemed to him too rudely fashioned. Their structure was too athletic to please him; their wraths seemed to him too violent." Mendelssohn he considered "common"; of Schumann's "Carnaval" he remarked that it was not music; Meyerbeer and Berlioz he heartily disliked, though for different reasons; Liszt, according to Niecks, he often found "guilty of making concessions to bad taste for the sake of success," a sin which he "viewed with the greatest indignation." On the other hand, he liked the music of Bellini and Rossini, on account of its southern suavity and grace.

Chopin took slight interest in philosophy and literature, and detested argument, whether political or religious. "Of universality" says Niecks, "there was not a trace in him;" and the composer Stephen Heller, himself a man of marked cultivation, pronounced him "uneducated." What little we do learn of his reading, however, is most characteristic. His friend Gavard, who read to him, in his last illness, out of Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique," remarks: "He valued very highly the finished form of that clear and concise language, and that so sure judgment on questions of taste. Thus, for instance, I remember that the article on taste was one of the last I read to him." The graphologist will supplement these bits of evidence with the testimony of his handwriting, inimitably neat and small. His manuscripts are marvels of penmanship: the notes like pin-points, the slurs mere filaments of spider's web, the stems painstakingly vertical, even the erasures ornamental latticework, so that the whole is as much a drawing as a writing.

The least pleasing of all the manifestations of Chopin's exquisiteness is seen in his social habits. Here his refinement, his shrinking aversion to all that was crude, ugly, or grotesque, his sybaritic love of ease and elegance, made of him an ultra-aristocrat, a _précieux_,--one is often tempted to say, in good round English, a "snob." Dazzled by the brilliance and poisoned by the perfume of those _salons_ to which his talent gave him access, his taste, so unerring in matters of art, failed to distinguish between the genuine aristocracy of mind and the spurious aristocracy of wealth and fashion. It is at once pathetic and exasperating to see such a genius, of whom an honest, simple man like Delacroix could say, "he was the most true artist I have met," anxiously striving to be borne aloft by that _haute volée_ which was so immeasurably beneath him, limiting his society to that small section of humankind which proudly styled itself "_le monde_," and dedicating his leisure and his compositions, not to brother artists, but to the baronesses, countesses, and princesses who gave him their half-patronizing homage.[26] In his letters one too frequently comes upon passages like this, from Vienna: I have pleased the nobility here exceedingly. As a proof I may mention the visit which Count Dietrichstein paid me on the stage," or this from Paris, on his first arrival: "I move in the highest society--among ambassadors, princes, and ministers."

There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of a _soirée_ at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous atmosphere with painful vividness under our very nostrils. "It was for passionate admirers," writes Madame de Girardin, "the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a _salon_, and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his melodious caprices. There were some twenty of us, sincere amateurs, true believers, and not a note was lost, not an intention was misunderstood; it was not a concert, it was intimate, serious music such as we love; he was not a virtuoso who comes and plays the air agreed up and then disappears; he was a beautiful talent, monopolized, worried, tormented, without consideration and scruples, whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs.... Madame So-and-so said, 'Please, play this pretty nocturne dedicated to Mdlle. Stirling.'--The nocturne which I called the dangerous one.--He smiled, and played the fatal nocturne. 'I,' said another lady, 'should like to hear once played by you this mazurka, so sad and so charming.' He smiled again, and played the delicious mazurka. The most profoundly artful among the ladies sought expedients to attain their ends: 'I am practising the grand sonata which commences [_sic_] with this beautiful funeral march,' and 'I should like to know the movement in which the finale ought to be played.' He smiled a little at the stratagem, and played the finale of the grand sonata."

Decidedly, there is too sickly a flavor of the boudoir about the _salons_ in which "this beautiful talent ... whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs" deigned to spend his time. We cannot wonder that in such a hothouse atmosphere the ugly weeds of his character throve almost as well as the delicate flowers, that under such long-continued coddling he grew vain, captious, pettily egotistical. It is distressing to note how much he is willing to ask of his friends Fontana and Grzymala, in the way of laborious and disagreeable commissions--errands to tailors, landlords, paper-hangers, and furniture-makers, and bickerings with publishers--and how he is content to repay them with a few perfunctory protestations of regard, nicely proportioned, in each case, to the magnitude of the favor exacted. Nor does he hesitate to speak slightingly, behind their backs, of such associates as Pleyel the publisher, Leo the banker, and even his fellow-countryman Matuszynski, at the same time that he is addressing them directly in the most cordial and even affectionate language. In short, it is impossible to deny that he was exacting, ungenerous, and disingenuous in his relations with comrades and friends.

In the more casual relations the same shortcomings revealed themselves in a malicious wit which was quite devoid of the magnanimity and exuberance of humor. His description of Thalberg, his rival as a virtuoso, is a little masterpiece of irony: "He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes potpourris on 'Masaniello,' plays the _forte_ and _piano_ with the pedal but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds." When Liszt, who in the consciousness of his splendor was inclined to patronize, volunteered to write a review of one of his concerts, he said, "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." To a wealthy Philistine who invited him to dinner, and as soon as the coffee was removed requested him to play, he responded sweetly, "Ah, but I have eaten so little!" Obviously Liszt is right in describing him as "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker."

But just as the sneer is physiologically the incipient uncovering of the teeth, in self-defence, of the animal at bay, so Chopin's sarcasms are the retaliations of a man constantly harassed, upon a dull and cruel world. He had to resort to innuendo because he was too fragile for rougher warfare. The needles of his wit had to be sharply pointed and dipped in venom, to make any impression on people accustomed to fight with sledge-hammers. All his weaknesses of character, indeed,--his malice, his extreme caution, his secretiveness, his vanity, even his snobbishness,--are in large measure but the necessary reflexes of inherent weaknesses of constitution, and may be explained, if not altogether condoned, as the normal reactions of a too sensitive nature, placed without protection in a sordid, difficult, phlegmatic world. Never, surely, was human being more delicately adjusted than Chopin to receive painful impressions at every point. His senses were so keen that as a child he cried at the mere sound of music; disease made him shrink from minute changes of temperature or slightly unfavorable conditions of weather, of which ordinary people are unconscious; imperious pride made him similarly susceptible to his social climate; and his high artistic ideal condemned him to constant disappointment even with his work. Peculiarly pathetic is the story of the last year of his life, when, unable to compose or to teach, almost penniless, and so weak that he had to be carried upstairs by his valet, he undertook an ill-fated concert tour in Scotland and England. It was a sad jest of destiny to bring this subtle artist, dying of consumption, into contact with a Manchester audience, in a large hall which his tone could not fill. He begged his friend Osborne not to be present--"My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective." Hueffer describes a similar scene in London, a Grand Polish Ball, at which "the people, hot from dancing, who went into the room where he played, were but little in the humor to pay attention, and anxious to return to their amusement. He was in the last stage of exhaustion, and the affair resulted in disappointment." It was an excusable bitterness with which, on the way back to Paris, pointing at the cattle by the wayside, he murmured "Ça a plus d'intelligence que les Anglais." But, alas! to a temperament, like his, too delicately strung, the whole world, always and everywhere, is somewhat British.

The single, but perhaps sufficing, good fortune in Chopin's in many ways unhappy lot was that he was able to find a refuge from the irritations, failures, and disappointments of everyday existence in artistic expression. However stubborn an aspect life presented to him, in art at least he was successful. The great law of compensation never wrought more subtly than when it made the very qualities which defeated him in the one realm the sources of his joyful conquest in the other. The keenness of sense which found in the hurly-burly of the world so many painful impressions, also discovered, as we have seen, wonderful new possibilities of tonal coloring in pianoforte music. The minute discrimination which made him unpleasantly conscious of all that was vulgar, crude, and ugly in human nature, also enabled him to winnow out unerringly, from his musical resources, all trite formulæ, all hackneyed conventional progressions, all threadbare adornments, and so to attain a marvellous individuality and distinction of style. The very exclusiveness which condemned the man to solitude, safeguarded the artist against dissipation of energy and futile eclecticisms of method. Finally, his ideal of perfection, a cruel autocrat to serve in a world so imperfect, proved the best of guides in the less refractory medium of art, and led him near to the verge of complete realization. In a word, the paradox of Chopin is that his fastidious taste--the radical, fundamental trait of his nature--plunges him, as a human being, into a jungle of distresses, but guides him, as a musician, to a mountain-top of commanding superiority.

The unfailing interest of the analysis of his music lies in the recognition, at every turn, of this fineness of nature, this mental and spiritual high-breeding, this exquisitely sensitive taste, and in the detection of the various kinds of excellence it produces. One easily traces it through several planes of achievement, in an ascending series. On the first and lowest plane it appears merely as an inimitable finesse in the execution of light, playful, and even frivolous designs: no one has brought so delicate and yet firm a touch, and so sure an instinct for dainty elegance of style, to the treatment of the _salon_-piece (a _genre_ for which we find perhaps the best parallel in the paintings of Watteau or the verses of Mr. Austin Dobson) as the Chopin of the waltzes, the mazurkas, many of the études and preludes, and even of the more old-fashioned concert fantasias and "_variations_ _brillantes_." Weber is as polished, but less subtle; Schubert is as spontaneous, but by no means so distinguished. Schumann exerts the same fascination, but with less ingratiation, less _politesse_; Liszt's musical garment is equally sparkling, but it is gemmed with rubies rather than with diamonds. The technical sources of Chopin's success in this _genre_ are his graceful, smoothly-moulded melodies, frequently recalling those of Bellini and other Italians, with whom he had much in common; his simple, transparent harmonies, built up always with an unfailing sense of tone-color; and his lambent, coruscating ornamentation, which always seems to effloresce spontaneously from the melody. In all these matters he is the supreme model of purity and felicity in this style.

But the same punctilious taste which guided him so safely among the pitfalls of virtuosity and bravura soon led him beyond this entire scheme of art, which is, after all, based on the somewhat frivolous ideal of ostentation, up to the higher level of lyrical expression, based on quiet and deep personal feeling. The virtuoso was transformed into the poet. In the nocturnes, some of the études and preludes, portions even of the ballades and polonaises, and most strikingly of all in the slow movements of the concertos and sonatas, his object is no longer to dazzle his audience, but to portray subjective emotion, often of a profound earnestness and spiritual beauty. If in his early pieces he was the prestidigitator, the brother-in-art of Thalberg and Liszt, here he is the dreamer, the rhapsodist, and his nearest of kin is Robert Schumann. The largo of the B-minor Sonata is Schumannesque in its contemplativeness, its _innigkeit_, its marked note of mysticism; the funeral march in the B-flat minor Sonata equals that of the great quintet in poignancy and dignity, though it is a feminine version of what in the German composer we find expressed with more virile force. In the nocturnes the feminine quality is even more evident. Their tender beauty has a pallor, a fragility, almost an emaciation, which has often brought upon them the charge of morbidity. It is certain that in the pieces of this type Chopin has carried his fastidiousness a stage farther than in the display pieces, attaining an even greater distinction and a rarer individuality. The nocturnes and preludes, the larghettos of the two concertos, the largo of the Sonata in B-minor, and a few other things of the same sort constitute one of the few perfect manifestations of the romantic spirit in music.

There is still a third phase of Chopin's work, which some will probably consider as much higher than the lyrical phase as that is higher than the decorative. This may be called the heroic or epic phase, and is exemplified in the polonaises, the ballades, the Fantaisie, opus 49, the twelfth étude, the thirteenth nocturne, and the finale of the Sonata in B-minor.[27] A study of these works will open the eyes of any one who knows Chopin only through his virtuoso or lyrical pieces to the scope and many-sidedness of his genius. There is about them a largeness of utterance, a sustainment of mood, an intensity of emotion hardly ever degenerating into the hysterical or the sentimental, which it is strange to find in the graceful _salon_ writer, the delicate miniaturist. Yet this final quality, too, by which Chopin proves himself akin to Beethoven as well as to Thalberg and Schumann (an oddly assorted trio), is, like the others, due to his characteristic fineness of nature. It is the heroism of high breeding, the vigor of intelligence, the dignity of impeccable taste. It bespeaks a strength rather subtle than brutal--the strength of the mettlesome thoroughbred, not that of the stolid dray-horse. It is a spiritual superiority (like the technical and emotional superiority) born of distinction and nourished by exclusiveness. Even in the most virile of the polonaises, with the possible exception of the so-called "Military Polonaise," which is unique in its fresh, open-air athleticism, we feel that the power which surges through them is a nervous rather than a muscular power. Thus when he is heroic, no less than when he is gay or introspective, Chopin remains true to his slender, aquiline, subtle, aristocratic self.

It is interesting to examine the evolution of technique that went hand in hand with his growth in emotional earnestness. In the first place the Bellini-like tunefulness, illustrated in the theme of the Rondeau, opus 1, with its agile turns and trills and its skipping staccato movement, gives place in the maturer works to a freer, more chromatic, more impassioned and rhapsodic type of melody. It recrudesces, to be sure, here and there, as in the ninth nocturne, the larghetto of the E-minor concerto, the moderato cantabile of the "Fantaisie Impromptu"; for the languid southern luxuriousness was once for all a part of Chopin's temperament. But the deeper and more intimate the mood he is trying to express, the broader and less trammelled becomes his melodic curve. How sinuous the line, how gradual the climax, how deliberate the subsidence, of this theme from the fourteenth nocturne (_a_, in Figure XX):

(_a_)

(_b_)

Figure XX.

How majestically the phrases rise, tier on tier, in the chief melody of the Polonaise, opus 44! How nobly rhapsodical, how genially spontaneous and flexible, is the phraseology of the second theme in the allegro of the B-minor Sonata (_b_, in Figure XX)! Well may Mr. Edward Dannreuther call Chopin "the supreme master of elegiac melody."

In his greatest tunes Chopin indeed touches a point which few purely romantic writers ever reach. We have noted, from time to time, in the course of these studies, the tendency of all lyrical composers to build up their music out of a few short phrases many times repeated, like the patterns in a wall-paper; we have seen how Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn fell into this pitfall even in their orchestral works, which therefore, in comparison with Mozart's or Beethoven's, seem patchy, breathless, or monotonous. We have seen that melodies of "long breath" are conceivable only by minds of sufficient synthetic power to entwine many phrases, diverse in length, contour, and rhythm, into a single organism. Now Chopin, like the rest, writes only too often in the "wall-paper" style, as may be seen especially in the waltzes, mazurkas, and nocturnes. But at other times he shows a synthetic faculty rare among lyrists, by which he attains a noble breadth. Look, for example, at the passage marked "sostenuto" in the Grande Valse, opus 42, at the surging bass theme of the Polonaise, opus 40, no. 2, or at the second theme of the allegro of the B-flat minor Sonata, noting the sustained flight of the second eight measures of the tune. Better still, examine with some particularity, studying the diversity of the rhythmic figures employed, the two melodies in Figure XXI, one from the Ballade, opus 23, and one from the finale of the Sonata, opus 58. Mark the deliberation, the suspension of interest, of the sequence in measures 5-8 of the first, the exciting inevitability of the chromatic descending scale near the end of the second.[28] In such tunes as these, which are frequent in his later works, Chopin proves himself capable of the veritable "_longue haleine_" of the epic melodist.[29]

(_a_)

(_b_)

Figure XXI.

A second technical result of the gradual deepening of Chopin's ideal of expression was a wonderful development of his harmonic sense. In the works of his prime he is one of the greatest of all masters of expressive harmony. His originality in modulation and enharmonic transition, his employment of chromatic progressions cheek by jowl with passages based on the old diatonic modes of the Polish folk-music, his daring use of consecutive fifths and other such bugbears of the scholastic, entitle him to a high place among the pioneers of modern methods. He constantly surprises us with premonitions of Liszt, Wagner, the French and Russian composers of to-day, and even Richard Strauss. Thus, for instance, the opening of the great Polonaise-Fantaisie, with its constantly shifting tonality, its groping bass, its murky, mysterious minor-ninth and diminished-seventh chords, seems like a page from "Tristan"; the series of kaleidoscopic modulations, marked "stretto," near the end of the fourth ballade, recall Tschaïkowsky in one of his most reckless moods; and we must go to César Franck to find a parallel for the lapsing chromatic dominant-seventh chords of the twenty-first mazurka.

Figure XXII.

Nor does Chopin make the mistake, so fatal to some modern writers, of surfeiting our ears on these complexities until they become apathetic. His taste is too sensitive for that. Scarcely are we launched on an admiring study of his harmonic intricacies (which it must be confessed became in his latest pieces, as Mr. Niecks suggests, almost too fine-spun) before we are arrested by some fascinating bit of utter simplicity and bell-like clarity. How grateful, after the ominous harmonics at the beginning of the Polonaise, opus 26, no. 2, in the lower register, the restless seventh chords of the principal tune, and the clanging dissonances above the pedal-point on F at the middle of the first section--how grateful, after all this clamor and stridency, are the triads and dominant sevenths of the Meno mosso (see Figure XXII). It is as if some bright band of pilgrims marched, to the clear peal of trumpets, out of the dust and blood of a battlefield. Exquisitely beautiful, again, is the celestial purity of those chords, transparent and colorless as crystal, which are introduced near the beginning of the second impromptu:--

Figure XXIII.

Other similar passages are the "religioso" section in the sixth nocturne, and the middle section of the eleventh, both of which, in their ecclesiastical serenity and severity, take one back to Palestrina. And with all his diversity of vocabulary, Chopin never confuses his effects. He can pass from the extreme plainness of the fifth étude to the chromatic complexity of the sixth, without the least adulteration of either.

Why the works of a master so various yet always so elevated in style, animated by so high an ideal of what it is worth while to say, and of how it should be said, should be specially marked out for sentimentalization and degradation at the hands of performers too dull to divine their distinction, is one of the mysteries of perverse destiny. It is hard to see what justification can be found, either in the internal evidence of the works themselves or in the recorded opinions of their composer, by the misguided enthusiasts who drag out his lovely melodies into mawkish recitatives, break his chords into arpeggios, and vulgarize his _tempo rubato_ into license of meter and confusion of rhythm. There is, to be sure, in much of his music, a subjective quality, an intimacy of mood, which gives the debauchee of sentiment an opportunity he does not find in abstract classic art. There are even a few instances, to give him countenance, of actual affectation, the tiresome posturing of the "dramatic" tone-poet, as in the pompous ending of the ninth nocturne and the theatrical opening of the third scherzo, where Chopin seems to borrow a gesture from his friend Liszt. But the entire object of the foregoing analysis will have been missed if it has not convinced the reader of the essential distinction, the superiority to all claptrap eloquence and feverish emotion, of Chopin's mind. He was not a man to strut and pose; he was too busy with an artistic ideal, too bent upon expressing a high vein of feeling in a faultless technical medium.

There is also plenty of documentary evidence to prove his abhorrence of all sickly sentiment, and of the messy technique it induces. Take, for example, the matter of the much discussed _tempo rubato_. Chopin regarded this as a sensitive adjustment of time values, a delicate elasticity or flexibility of pace--by no means as a departure from essential metrical accuracy. "The left hand," he said to his pupil Von Lenz, "is the conductor; it must not waver or lose ground; do with the right hand what you will and can." "He required adherence," says another pupil, "to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering and dragging, misplaced _rubatos_ and exaggerated _ritardandos_. 'Je vous prie de vous asseoir,' he said on such an occasion, with gentle mockery." His aversion to melodramatic expressiveness, in which the artist surrenders himself weakly to a momentary excitement, may be inferred from his remark on Liszt's performance of a Beethoven sonata: "Must one, however, always speak so declamatorily (_si declamatoirement_)?" and from a comment on his own playing by Cramer, a pedant who, without entirely comprehending him, yet could not but discern the dignity of his art: "I do not understand him, but he plays beautifully and correctly, he does not give way to his passion like other young men." Finally, if Chopin had really been a mere voluptuary and sentimentalist, is it likely that he would have composed with such concentrated intensity of labor? "He shut himself up in his room for whole days," writes George Sand, "weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance."

No, Chopin may not be a giant like Bach, or Mozart, or Handel, or Beethoven, but he is a sincere and earnest artist, who feels vividly, and spares no pains to give his feelings worthy expression, and to attain a supreme plastic beauty. Above all, he is a man of the most delicate sensibility, the most discriminating taste, the most exacting ideal of artistic perfection. In leaving him, it is pleasant to attend less to the sufferings to which these qualities condemned him as a man, than to the achievements to which they led him as an artist. This shifting of emphasis is what he would himself have desired, for his aspirations and standards were æsthetic rather than ethical; he lived as he could, it was only in composing that his will was free and efficient; his very individuality takes definite shape only in the favoring medium of musical imagination and emotion. In that firmament of music he will continue to shine, a fixed star, not perhaps of the first magnitude, but giving a wondrously clear, white light, and, as he would have wished, in peerless solitude.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord" is an example of a work to which, since its beauty is largely one of line, the piano cannot do justice. See, for instance, Prelude IV, in C-sharp minor, in the first book, measures 4-7, inclusive. The tenor part, of a wonderful nobility, is concealed by the more rapidly moving, and therefore on the piano more sonorous, soprano. In order fully to bring it to our consciousness we must sing or otherwise reinforce it.

[21] Schumann reports of Chopin's playing of this étude: "It would be a mistake to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A-flat major chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come into greater prominence amid the chords, along with that principal cantilena."

[22] Of course, the amount of dissonance acceptable is not a fixed quantity, but increases as the perceptive power of the ear develops.

[23] More daringly, because the lower the pitch of a dissonant tone, the greater the number of its audible harmonics, and hence the greater the degree of its obscuration of the harmony. Even a consonance, such as the major third, sounds "muddy" when placed in the lower register. Readers interested in this matter should consult some convenient handbook of acoustics, such as Broadhouse's "The Student's Helmholtz," on the subjects of harmonics or partial tones, sympathetic vibration, etc., and Mr. Arthur Whiting's "Pedal Studies," for a highly suggestive discussion of color in piano music.

[24] It is, however, interesting to note that, lavish as Chopin's use of the pedal seems when compared to the general practice of his time, the fondness for the turbid and cloudy colors produced by commingled dissonances has grown so rapidly that to-day we prefer sometimes even more pedal than he gives us. In the Ballade, opus 52, during that brilliant passage which debouches into the simple chords in B-flat major, modern taste would prefer a continuous pedal through six measures, instead of through only three, as Chopin has directed. We should also blur the eleventh Étude more recklessly than he does, and many other instances will occur to the reader.

[25] _Schwärmerisch_--visionary, imaginative, dreamy.

[26] Three of his pieces are dedicated to baronesses, nine to countesses, and four to princesses.

[27] It is noteworthy that most of these compositions bear opus numbers higher than 40, and belong to the last decade of the composer's life.

[28] Cf. also the subsequent, even more extended, treatment in the sequel.

[29] It may be asked why, possessing this enviable _longue haleine_, Chopin did not turn it to better advantage in writing his sonatas and concertos, which are structurally not satisfactory examples of their types. In answer it may be suggested (1) that in the concertos he was hampered by the orchestra, his technique being essentially pianistic; and (2) that his melodies, however broad in scope, are generally lyrical in character, and hence not adapted to symphonic treatment. With his characteristic caution, however, he used these most extended forms but sparingly; and in the more rhapsodic long forms, such as the polonaises and ballades on a large scale, he is highly successful.

VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ

VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ

Not many years ago three Americans, coming, late one afternoon, in the course of a walking tour in northern France, to the little cathedral town of Beauvais, found its ordinarily quiet air filled with tumult, bustle, and confusion. The streets, gay with colored bunting and venders' booths, were thronged with crowds of merrymakers; the hum of insatiable conversation was everywhere; no rooms were to be had at the hotels, and their dining rooms were preëmpted by crowds of men in uniform, engaged in an endless round of toasts and speeches. Beauvais was, in a word, the scene of a "Grande Fête des Pompiers," or Firemen's Festival. The firemen of all the surrounding country had assembled there, had taken possession of the town, and had surrendered themselves to conviviality and joy. It was a spectacle interesting from many points of view; but the fancy of the American observers was most of all struck by certain long strips of bunting which spanned the streets at intervals, bearing in large letters the legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir." This, it seemed to them, was the note in this motley symphony most perfectly, inimitably, and deliciously French. These festive firemen, in the midst of their jollifications, did not forget for a moment that it was their proud privilege to stand before the world, so long as cognac allowed them to stand at all, as the honored victims of duty. One hardly knew whether to smile at their ingenuousness, or to thrill in sympathy with their emotion, which, however theatrical, was perfectly sincere; on consideration one did both.

Something of the quandary of these American observers of the very Gallic firemen of Beauvais must perhaps always be experienced by the Anglo-Saxon who tries to understand the French attitude toward life or art, so essentially different are the two types of temperament. It is hard for the stolid, matter-of-fact, insensitive, self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon, singly set upon his business, indifferent to what the world may think of him, to comprehend the subtleties and indirections of the Gaul, who conceives personal conduct as an actor conceives a rôle, spares no pains or labor to do justice to his part, and feeds on the applause or starves on the indifference of his audience. To your Englishman or American such an ideal seems trivial, artificial. His sense of humor, a faculty in which it must be confessed that the French, for all their wit, are deficient, seizes at once upon the incongruities that must always exist between an ordinary human life and a histrionically conceived rôle, and in his amusement he often fails to do justice to the intelligence, imagination, and courage that may be brought into play by such a dramatic exercise. Possibly to a higher point of view his own attitude, which he likes to call "practical," and which less friendly critics sometimes call stupid, might seem essentially no better than the playful chivalry of his fellow.

Such thoughts as these are bound to occur to the candid critic of that singular man, that quintessential Frenchman, Hector Berlioz. On first acquaintance he seems a creature of postures and pretence, grandiloquent, artificial, specious. He resorts to any means to make an impression, keeps his name before the public by journalism, by social eccentricities, by Byronic love-affairs, by all manner of ingenious indirect advertising, thrives only in the smile of the public, and writes much less to express an inner conception of beauty than to dazzle, startle, and stun. He seems to make a religion of idiosyncrasy, and to shrink from nothing but the natural. He lives, speaks, writes, composes, only in the interest of his carefully laid plot to be unprecedented. But then, as one studies him more, one begins to find admirable traits under this fantastic exterior. However artificial his ideal may be, he brings a most vivid and many-sided intelligence to its service; in spite of the opposition to the world in which his excessive individuality places him, his stock of good-nature and of half-ironical, half-kindly wit is inexhaustible; and if he does not worship at an orthodox shrine, he can suffer, and endure, and strive, like a true martyr. And so Berlioz's critic, like the Americans at Beauvais, finally decides to smile at and at the same time to admire him.

Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La Côte St. André, a small town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world when, in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent him to become a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the study of medicine for that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash, resolve, worthy of a born dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were all external forces clearly in league to keep him in the beaten path, but his vocation for music was as yet far from obvious. He played only the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his knowledge of harmony was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his autobiography that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he found a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a moment the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they might give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when the young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into unquenchable flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.

He introduced himself to Lesueur, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength of it became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the aged Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that he should write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous refusal. He did not hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a friend as a means of producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he had written. And all this time he was raising obstacles for himself by his enthusiastic impulsiveness and his utter lack of tact and worldly discretion. The story of his first meeting with Cherubini, a man of far-reaching influence as the director of the Conservatoire, will serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and formal precisian, had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers at the Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this world by finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous figure with a pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then arose an angry altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter to eject the offending student, and a lively chase among the desks. Berlioz, reaching the door, only stopped to announce to the enraged Cherubini that he was "soon coming back to study Gluck again." He did so; but he never conciliated the ill-will of his powerful enemy, who from that day lost no opportunity to frustrate his ambitions.

It was indeed his failure to win one of the Conservatoire prizes, which lost for him the countenance of his parents and plunged him into many misfortunes. His mother at this time threw him off entirely, in anger for which there was much justification; his father, more patient, allowed him a period of probation, after which, if he could not show himself a successful musician, he was to return to the study of medicine. Thus put upon his mettle, he rented a closet of a room up five flights of stairs, lived on bread, raisins, prunes, and dates, and eked out his allowance by taking pupils on the guitar and the flute, and in solfeggio. In this way he even managed to pay half of his debt to the friend who had helped him produce his mass. But alas! this man, as careless and devoid of tact as Berlioz himself, then wrote to the father the story of the loan, requesting a payment in full. Who can wonder that Dr. Berlioz, his toleration at last exhausted, upon paying the balance of the debt cut off entirely the allowance? Not even then, however, would Berlioz accept defeat, but, getting a post as chorus singer in one of the small theatres, continued the struggle to attain the prize on which so much depended. Could he but gain the _Prix de Rome_, he would be assured an annuity of three thousand francs for five years, the first two to be spent in the French Academy at Rome, the third in Germany, and the last two at home: he would be free to study and compose at leisure, he could show the world and his parents what was in him.

The subject prescribed for the competition in 1826 was the death of Orpheus, on which he proceeded to wreak himself with an ardor we can well imagine. The result was that his bacchanal scene was pronounced unplayable by the mediocre pianist provided to play the pieces to the jury. Berlioz was furious--and most of all, characteristically, at the injustice done his orchestration. "The piano," he cries, "at once reduces all composers to the same level, and places the clever, profound, ingenious instrumentalist on the same platform with the ignorant dunce who knows nothing of this branch of his art. The piano is a guillotine, and severs the head of noble or of churl with the same impartial indifference." As the time of the next trial approached, Berlioz with his usual impolitic frankness made such a nuisance of himself, by criticising in a loud voice, from the pit of the opera house, the liberties taken with the scores of the great masters, that he was debarred altogether by the scandalized authorities. In 1828, missing the first prize by two votes, one of them Cherubini's, he obtained the second prize, consisting of a laurel wreath, a not very valuable gold medal, and a free pass to the opera-house. Still invincible, he prepared himself to storm once more the pedantry of the judges; he did his best, but, in the words of Boïeldieu, "they found his best too good," and in 1829 the prize was not awarded at all. It was not until 1830 that, at last learning by experience, he wrote his cantata of "Sardanapalus" in the dryest and most conservative style he could compass, leaving out altogether the conflagration scene, which might have proved unplayable, and at any rate would have disturbed the tranquillity of the judges. Discretion won the day; the prize was awarded him, and he was free to depart for Rome, and to finish his cantata to his own satisfaction, which we may be sure he lost no time in doing.

In the meantime, as if these struggles were not enough to engage all his energies, he had been busy playing the first scene of that love-tragedy, or melodrama, or farce--one hardly knows what to call it--which ended by joining him in uneasy and brief wedlock with Henriette Smithson, an Irish actress. It is hard to tell how far the throes of his very Gallic heart were genuine, how far they were manufactured by his susceptible fancy, his literary imagination, and his keen sense for dramatic effect. There is ever about Berlioz a trace of the little boy playing pirate chief; he goes through life with something of that youthful ecstasy of make-believe; and when he tells us of his passions for Mdlles. S----, R----, and M----, when he enumerates his thrills, commemorates his tears, and confides his plans for capture, flight, suicide, or double murder, we wonder whether he really felt all this, or is merely convinced, as a poet and journalist, that he ought thus to have acted.

It was in 1827 that Berlioz first beheld his future wife, who was acting Shakespeare at the Odéon in a troupe of English players. Of the effect of her Juliet upon him he writes, "After the third act, hardly breathing, in pain as if a hand of iron were squeezing at my heart, I said to myself, with the fullest conviction: 'Ah! I am lost.'" Did he make any attempt to meet the lady whose beauty and genius had so singularly affected him? Not he; such a course would have been painfully commonplace, a terrible descent from poetry to prose. He followed her about with gaunt eyes and dishevelled mien, so that, believing him mad, she asked her friends for protection. He lost himself in melancholy revery, he roamed about the streets at night, in such despair that on one occasion Liszt and Chopin followed him, fearing he might kill himself. Then he rallied his forces in a great resolve; he would win his indifferent mistress by his art; he would give a concert of his own works, and she should hear it. "I will show her," he cried, forgetting in his enthusiasm that she had no ear for music, "that I too am an artist." After heroic labors and economies (for it was at this time that he was supporting himself by singing in the theatre chorus, and he had to work sixteen hours a day copying instrumental parts), after endless struggles with his conductor, who did not understand the music, and with Cherubini, who refused him the only available concert hall, he succeeded in bringing off the concert, only to find that Miss Smithson did not hear of it at all. Shortly afterward she left France for some years.

Disconsolate, Berlioz turned for comfort to a certain Mademoiselle Mooke, to whom he became engaged in 1830, soon after winning the _Prix de Rome_. This affair, however, went little more smoothly than the other, for hardly had he arrived in Italy before he received a letter from Madame Mooke, informing him that her daughter had married M. Pleyel. His rôle was thus suddenly changed to that of the abandoned lover, thirsting for revenge; and it must be conceded that he entered upon it with his usual artistic enthusiasm. "Two tears of rage started from my eyes, and my mind was made up on the spot. I meant to fly to Paris, where I had two guilty women and one innocent man"--one sees that magnanimity was a part of the rôle--"to kill without mercy. As for killing myself afterwards, you can well believe that that was indispensable." Behold him, then, in Florence, supplying himself with two double-barrelled pistols, "two vials of refreshment, such as laudanum and strychnine," and, as a disguise, the entire costume of a lady's-maid--no less--dress, bonnet, green veil, and all. Behold him hesitating but one moment, just long enough to write upon the unfinished score of the Ball Scene in his "Symphonie Fantastique" directions as to how, if the work is played "in his absence," the flute part may be doubled with the clarinets and horns. Behold him, after this lucid interval, travelling to Genoa, where he either attempts suicide by drowning or falls into the water and is fished out by bystanders--his account is somewhat ambiguous--and where he buys a second lady's-maid's costume, having absent-mindedly left the first one in the coach. And then, with his arrival at Nice, he feels that he has done his duty by the part of the wronged lover, he feels that it would be a pity to deprive the world of his still unwritten compositions; youth pleads the charm of life, the beauty of the Italian landscape, and prudence suggests a brief note to the director of the Academy at Rome, providing for a possible return to the fold. "I stop in Nice a whole month, wandering through the orange groves, diving in the sea, sleeping on the mountain heaths.... I live wholly alone, and write the overture to 'King Lear.' I sing, I believe in God. Convalescence has set in." "It is thus," he ingenuously concludes his account of this episode, "that I passed in Nice the twenty happiest days of my life."