Mezzotints in modern music /

by James Huneker

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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