Mezzotints in modern music /

by James Huneker

II

Frederic Chopin bequeathed to the world six solo scherzi. The four that comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor, published February, 1835; opus 31, in B flat minor, published December, 1837; opus 39, in C sharp minor, published October, 1840, and opus 54, in E major, published December, 1843. The other two are to be found in his second sonata, opus 35, and his third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are the finest evidences of Chopin’s originality, variety, power and delicacy. The scherzo is not his invention—Beethoven and Mendelssohn anticipated him—but he took the form, remodelled and filled it with a surprisingly novel content, although not altering its three-four measure. We feel the humor of the Beethoven scherzo, its swing, robustness and at times rude jollity. In Mendelssohn one enjoys the lightness, velocity and finish of his scherzando moods. They contain, strictly speaking, more of the truer scherzo idea than Chopin’s. Mendelssohn’s delicate sentiment of joyousness came from the early Italian masters of the piano. Rossini voiced this when he said, after hearing a capriccio of Felix the Feminine, “Ça sent de Scarlatti.” Yet the Mendelssohn piano pieces of this character are finely considered efforts, full of a certain gracious life and a surface skimming of sentiment, like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.

But we enter a terrible and a beautiful domain in the Chopin scherzi. Two only have the lightness of touch, clarity of atmosphere and sweet gayety of the veritable scherzo. The other four are fierce, grave, sardonic, demoniacal, ironic, passionate, fiery, hysterical and most melancholy. In some the moods are almost pathologic; in some enigmatic; in all, the moods are magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, can be described by no better or more commonplace a word than delightful. It is delightful, sunny music, and its swiftness, directness and sweep are compelling. The five preluding bars of half notes, unisono, at once strike the keynote of optimism and sweet faith. What follows is the ruffling of the tree-tops by warm south winds. The upward little flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar and in major thirds and fourths, has been boldly utilized by Saint-Saëns in the scherzo of his G minor piano concerto. The fanciful embroidery of the single finger passages is not opaque as in other of this master’s compositions. A sparkling, bubbling clarity, freedom, freshness, characterizes this scherzo so seldom heard in our concert rooms. In emotional content it is not deep; it lies well within the categories of the elegant and the capricious. It contains on its fourth page an episode in E which at first blush suggests the theme of the valse in A flat, opus 42, with its interminglement of duple and triple rhythms. The piu lento further on, in C sharp minor, has little sadness. It is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the wind-swept moorland. This scherzo in E is emphatically a mood of joyousness, as joyous as the witty, sensitive Pole ever allowed himself to be. Its coda is not so forceful as the usual Chopin coda, and there is a dazzling flutter of silvery scale at the end. It is a charming work. Closely allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo in the B minor sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial, though not ingenious. To me this scherzo savors somewhat of Weber. It might go on forever. The resolution is not intellectual—is purely one of tonality. The thought is tenuous; it is a light, highly embroidered relief after the first movement of the sonata. The trio in B is not particularly noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo and challenges Mendelssohn on his native heath. It must be considered as an intermezzo and also as a prelude to the lyric measures of the beautiful largo that follows.

We get on firm and familiar footing when the first page of the B flat minor scherzo is opened. Who has not heard with awe those arched questioning triplets which Chopin could never get his pupils to play sufficiently tombé? “It must be a charnel house,” he told De Lenz. These vaulted phrases have become banal. Alas! this scherzo, like the lovely A flat ballade, has been done to a cruel death. Yet how fresh, how vigorous, how abounding with sweetness and light when it falls from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem, “so tender, so bold, so as full of love as of scorn,” to quote Schumann. Has Chopin ever penned a more delicious song than the one in D flat, with its straying over the borderlands of G flat? It is the high noon of love, life and happiness; the dark bud of the introduction has burst into a perfect flowering, and what miracles of scent, color, shape we seize! The section in A has the quality of great art—great, questioning, but sane, noble art. It is serious to severity, and yet how penetrating in perfume!

The excursion in C sharp minor is an awakening of the wondering dream, but it is balanced; it is healthy. No suggestion of the pallid morbidities of the other Chopin. And how supremely welded is the style with the subject! What masterly writing and it lies in the very heart of the piano! A hundred generations may not improve on these pages. Then, fearful that he has dwelt too long upon the idea, Chopin breaks away into the key of E, and one of those bursts into clear sky follows. After the repetition comes the working-out section, and, while ingenious and effective, it is always in the development that he is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of Beethoven, Chopin had not. He cannot survey his material from all points. He is a great composer, but he is also a great pianist. He nursed his themes with wonderful constructive frugality; the instrument often checked his imagination. There is a logic in this exposition, but it is piano logic and not always music logic. A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous urge of the early pages force us to feel happy when the first triplet figure returns. The coda is brilliantly strong. This scherzo will remain the favored one. It is not cryptic and repellent like the two in B minor and C sharp minor, and is a perennial joy to pupil and public alike.

We now trench upon a sacred and not often explored territory of the Chopin music. The scherzo in E flat minor is one of the most powerful of the six. To play it effectively one needs breadth of style, a heroic spirit and fingers and wrists of steel. The tremendous crescendo in one bar taxes the strength of most pianists. The composition has something elemental about it. It is true storm music, and the whistling of the wind in the chromatic successions of chords of the sixth has an eerie effect on one’s nerves. None of the Chopin scherzi stir me as this one. There is menacing gloom in the second bar, and the rush and grandeur of the movement take my breath away. The blissful song in G flat is not uninterrupted bliss. There is a threatening undercurrent, as if the howling tempest might return; it does, and how originally Chopin manages this! The descending octaves, which seem to carry us to the mouth of hell, are burst in upon by the first stormy theme, and again we are madly projected through space, a victim of the elements. Defiance, satanic pride, the majesty of the microcosm, a spiritual challenge to fate are all here. The lulling, lovely lines of the piu lento steal in again and the curtain rings down on a great picture of passion and pain.

Chopin’s first scherzo in B minor bears an early opus number. It is his twentieth work—the most sombre, yet the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzi. It is in his most ironic, yet most reckless, vein; Chopin throwing himself to the very winds of remorse. A terrible mood, a Manfred mood, a torturing mood. A soul-shriek from the first chord to the last, with one dream inclosed within its gates of brass, it reminds one of the struggles of an imprisoned soul beating with wounded palms its prison door. It is the unhappiest, the most riotous of Chopin’s works and suffers from prolixity. Its keynote is too tense for the da capos marked by the composer, and unsuited for latter-day taste. Some virtuosi play this scherzo without the repeats, and the piece gains greatly. It is so harsh, so drastic, that the wondrous melody in B, with its lapping, lilting tenths—“the sweet slumber of the moonlight on the hills”—after the tragic strain, comes like a benediction. This scherzo has almost had a special message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, was afflicted with weak health, was slender of frame, but his spirit was brave as the lion’s. Both men could write terrible things, even though they could not compass them. The sense of impotence, of stifled longings, fills this scherzo with inarticulate moans and bewailings. What a life tragedy is the opus 20!

The arabesque-like figure after the eight bar introduction—muted bars some of them, as was Chopin’s wont—has a certain spiritual likeness to the principal figure in the C sharp minor fantaisie-impromptu. But instead of the ductile triplets, as in the bass of the impromptu, we divide the figure in the scherzo between the two hands, and the harshness of the mood is emphasized by the anticipatory chord in the left hand. The vitality of the first page of this scherzo is marvellous. The questioning chords at the close of the section are as imaginative as any passages Chopin ever wrote. The half notes E and the up-leaping appogiatura are also evidences of his originality in minor details. These occur just before the modulation into the lyric theme in B and with a slight change just at the dash into the coda. The second section, an agitato, contains some knotty harmonic problems. But they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony. Bold here is Chopin to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the very gate of heaven, but the surge and thunder waxes, wanes, wastes itself; the soul has stormed itself to slumber. The molto piu lento of this scherzo is, by consent, one of Chopin’s masterpieces. It is written in the richly colored, luscious key of B major. It is so fragrant, so replete with woven enchantment, that the air becomes divinely dense. With broken tenths, Chopin produces subtle effects. It is all a miracle of tender beauty, and is like some old world Armida’s garden, when time was young and men and women lived to love and not to sorrow. It is only comparable to the B major episode in the B minor étude or to the Tuberose nocturne of the same key. Mark how the composer returns to his first savage mood! It is a picture of contrasted violence. But beware of the da capo. It grows wearisome. Far better repeat the first section only and attack the coda—the finest coda ever made by the master. I know nothing of his that can equal its boldness, its electrifying ride across country, its almost barbaric impetuosity. The heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar must not blind one’s rhythmical sense to the second beat in the left hand, which is likewise accented. This produces a mixed rhythm that greatly adds to the general murkiness and despair of the finale. Those daring chordal dissonances, so logical, so effective, how they must have agitated and scratched the nerves of Chopin’s contemporaries! And they must be vigorously insisted upon; no veiled half lights, for the worst is over; the ships are burned; nothing remains but the awful catastrophe. To his death goes this musical Childe Roland, and the dark tower crumbles and creation crumbles at the close. The scherzo ends in chaos, overwhelming, supreme!

I think it was Tausig who first taught his pupils to use the interlocked octaves at the close instead of the chromatic scale in unison. I suppose Liszt did it before anyone else; he always thought of such things, even if the composer did not. I doubt not but that Chopin would have objected to the innovation, although it seems admissible. After the furious Hercules-vein of the coda, to finish with a chromatic scale sounds tame and ineffectual.

Even though the sneer, the peevishness and fretfulness of a restless, unhappy, sick-brained man disturb it, the C sharp minor scherzo is yet the most dramatic, the most finely moulded of the six. It is capricious to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with scorn, if such an extravagant figure is permissible. It is all extravagance, fire and fury, but it signifies something. Just a word about the tempo. Nearly all the scherzi are marked presto, but it should be remembered that it is the presto of Chopin’s day, and, above all, of Chopin’s piano action. The action of the pianos of his time, especially of the Pleyel piano, was superlatively light and elastic. The Chopin tempi should be moderated, as Theodore Kullak has so often insisted. You lose in ponderability and dignity by adopting the swift, old-fashioned time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a presto—a comfortable presto, the scherzo in E must be played presto; also the one in E flat; but where the thought takes on a graver hue, where majesty of utterance or nobility of phrase are to be considered, moderate your pulses, I conjure you, master pianists. The C sharp minor scherzo is an especial sufferer from a too hurried speed. The architectonics are consequently blurred, details jumbled and the indescribable power of the piece lost. And if you start out with such a fiery presto, where will you get your contrast of speed in the coda, which should be fairly shot out from your finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann and start in with a prestissimo possible and follow with still more of a prestissimo? You remember his sonata? Try a presto by all means, but remember the heavier tone mass of the modern piano. This scherzo is a massive composition, yet full of fitful starts and surprises. The bits of chorale in the trio are hugely Chopin as to fioritura and harmonic basis. More than all the others this one reminds you of some pulse-stirring drama. It is audacious and declamatory. Even in the meno mosso it never tarries, and the coda is built of one of those familiar figures cumulative in effect through repetition and all written eminently for the instrument. The scherzo in C sharp minor is grotesque; it is original. It has affinities with the darkling conceptions of Poe, Coleridge, Hoffman, and is Heine-like in its bitter irony. It is like some fantastic, sombre pile of disordered farouche architecture, and about it hovers perpetual night and the unspeakable and despairing things that live in the night. It is a tale from Poe’s “iron bound, melancholy volume of the magi,” and on its face is written the word Spleen. Chopin might have said with Poe: “Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of Spleen, the river and the lilies and the wind and the forest and the heavens and the thunder and the sighs of the water lilies. And they became accursed and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven—and the thunder died away—and the lightning did not flash—and the clouds hung motionless—and the waters sunk to their level and remained—and the trees ceased to rock—and the water lilies sighed no more—and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed, and the characters were Spleen.”

All this was told in the dreary region in Lybia by the borders of the Zaïre, where the waters have a sickly and saffron hue. But Poe wrote the word Silence, which I have changed to Spleen. Three of the Chopin scherzi are the very outpourings of a soul charged with the spiritual spleen of this age of disillusionment.