III
After Wagner, Brahms. After Chopin? Bülow once confessed that Brahms cured him of Wagner mania. To alter Browning—“Brahms is our music maker now.” Brahms, whose music was at one time as an undecipherable cryptogram!—Brahms now appeals to our finest culture. Without the melancholy tenderness of Chopin he has not altogether escaped the Weltschmerz, but his sadness is masculine, and he seldom if ever gives way to the hysterical complainings of the more feminine Pole. Brahms is a man, a dignified, mentally robust man, who feels deeply, who developed wonderful powers of self-control, and who drives the musical nail deeply when he hits it, as he sometimes does.
Could any styles be more at variance than Brahms’ and Chopin’s? Moscheles declared much of Chopin’s music unplayable, and it is a commonplace of the day to dismiss Brahms’ piano music as “unpianistic.” Brahms’ affinity to Schumann is marked; perhaps when the latter pronounced such favorable judgment of Brahms’ op. 1 he only acknowledged blood relationship. Brahms tells us different things, however; but as I intend dealing more with externals I will pass by any question of musical content. To the student of the somewhat florid Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg and Henselt school, the Schumann-Brahms technic must offer few attractions. Possibilities for personal display are rare—display of the glittering passage sort. Extensive scale work is seldom found in either composer, and old-fashioned ornamentation gladdens by its absence. Musically, the gain is immense; “pianistically” there is some loss. No more of those delicate, zephyr-like figures—no more sonorous and billowy arpeggio sweeps over the keyboard!
In a word, the finger virtuoso’s occupation is gone, and a mental virtuosity is needed. Heavy chordal work, arabesques that might have been moulded by a Michel Angelo, a cantilena that is polyphonic, not monophonic; ten voices instead of one—all this, is it not eminently modern, and yet Bachian? Schumann came from Bach, and Schumann is foster father to Brahms; but Bach and Beethoven blood also runs warmly in Johannes’ musical veins. Under which king will you serve? for you cannot serve two. Will you embrace the Scarlatti, Emanuel Bach, Mozart, Cramer, Chopin, Liszt school, or will you serve under the standards of Bach, Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms? Better let nature decide for you, and decide she does with such marked preferences that often I have attended piano recitals and wept silently because the “piano reciter” fondly believed he was versatile and attempted everything from Alkan to Zarembski. What a waste of vital force, what a waste of time!
I have, and value them as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt’s études, op. 1. The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written when Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured to modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not the Études d’Exécution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I exclaimed at Liszt’s cleverness. Never prolific in thematic invention, the great Hungarian has taken his op. 1 and dressed it up in the most bewildering technical fashion. He gave these studies appropriate names, and even to-day they require a tremendous technic to do them justice. The most remarkable of the set—the one in F minor (No. 10)—Liszt left nameless, and like a mighty peak it rears its head skyward, while about it cluster its more graceful fellows, Ricordanza, Feux-Follets, Harmonies du Soir, Chasse Neige, and Paysage. What a superb contribution to piano étude literature is Liszt’s! These twelve incomparable studies, the three very effective Études de Concert, the Paganini Studies, the Waldesrauschen, the Gnomenreigen, the Ab-Irato, the graceful Au Lac de Wallenstadt and Au Bord d’une Source, have they not developed tremendously the technical resources of the instrument? And to play them one must have fingers of steel, a brain on fire, a heart bubbling with chivalric grace and force. What a comet-like pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept Europe with fire and sword, who transformed the still, small voice of Chopin into a veritable hurricane! But we can’t imagine a Liszt without a Chopin preceding him.
Liszt lost, the piano would lose its most dashing cavalier, and his freedom, fantasy and fire are admirable correctives for the stilted platitudes of the Hummel, Czerny, Mendelssohn school. You can’t—as much as you may wish to—ignore Liszt’s technic. He got out of the piano an orchestral quality. He advanced by great wing strokes toward perfection, and not to include Liszt were to exclude color, sonority, richness of tinting and powerful dynamic contrasts.
Liszt has had a great following; you can see how much he affected modern technic. Tausig felt his influence, and even Schumann, whose setting, however, of the Paganini études is far removed from Liszt’s. But Schumann certainly struck out a very original course when he composed his Études Symphoniques. Here a Liszt style is a bar to faithful interpretation. Music, music, music is wanted, with strong singing fingers and a wrist of iron—malleable iron. The toccata in C is an admirable example of not only Schumann’s but also of latter day technic.
As in Brahms’ polyphonic fingers, great discrimination of tone in chord passages is required here, and powers of stretching that tax most hands to their utmost.
Brahms has reared upon this Schumann technic a glorious structure, whose foundations—Bach-Schumann—are certainly not builded on sand. You may get a fair notion of the Brahms piano technic by playing the figure he gave Tausig for that great master’s Daily Studies, and also in his later fifty-one studies. Look at his wonderful variations—true studies; read the Paganini variations; are they not heaven storming? Brains, brains and Bach. His studies on studies are not too entertaining.
One is the rondo by Weber in his C major sonata, the so-called “mouvement perpétuel.” This has Brahms transcribed for the left hand, lifting the bass part into the treble. Anything more dispiriting I cannot imagine. It makes one feel as if the clock struck nineteen in the watches of the night. The étude in sixths on Chopin’s beautiful F minor étude in op. 25 is an attempt to dress an exquisite violet with a baggy suit of pepper-and-salt clothes. It is a gauche affair altogether, and I fancy the perpetrator was ashamed of himself, for, unlike Joseffy’s astounding transcription of Chopin’s G flat étude, Brahms’ study upon a study is utterly unklaviermassig.
Constantin von Sternberg tells a story about this F minor étude of Brahms-Chopin. When it first appeared Moszkowski was trying it over in the presence of the Scharwenkas and Von Sternberg. Not content with playing the right hand triplets in double-sixths, as Brahms had done, he transposed them to the left hand, went to work rather hesitatingly, saying, naturally enough: “Why not do it this way?”
It out-Heroded Herod, and Xaver Scharwenka could stand it no longer; when Moszkowski stuck for a moment he strode up to the pianist, seized his nose and chin, opened his mouth, gazed in it, and then said in a slightly irritated voice: “That is the worst of these machines; they will get out of order sometimes.”
Bendel’s étude in double-sixths is a good study, evidently modelled after Chopin’s G sharp minor study. Zarembski has written a finger-breaker in B flat minor, and the two Von Schloezer studies are by no means easy studies, but there are technical heights yet to be explored. Charles V. Alkan, the Parisian pianist, has concocted, contrived and manufactured about twenty-seven studies, which almost reach the topmost technical notch, and are, to confess the truth, unmusical. They are the extreme outcome of the Liszt technic and consequently have only historical value. Don’t play them, for you can’t, which remark is both Celtic and convenient.
Rubinstein’s op. 23—his six études—cannot be lightly passed over. The first in F and the well-known staccato étude in C should be studied. He has also written two studies, both in the key of C, one of which is called Study on False Notes, and sometimes the Handball. They are all very “pianistic.” Strelezski’s five concert studies are very modern and require a cyclopean grip. Nos. 4 and 5 are the most musical. The same composer’s étude, The Wind, is an excellent study in unison. The valse étude is artificial.
You can play Balakireff’s Islamey, a fantasy Orientale, if you wish some muscle twisting.
No need of telling you of Tausig’s Daily Studies. No pianist should be without them. The Rosenthal-Schytte studies are rich in ideas, and Schytte has written some Vortrag studies that are excellent.
Among modern artistic studies Saint-Saëns’, and MacDowell’s are the best and most brilliant, and Godowsky has made some striking paraphrases of Chopin studies. A novelty are the Exercises Journalières preceded by a preface from the pen of Camille Saint-Saëns. Tausig thought of such a comprehensive scheme as this, and Kullak, in the third book of his octave school, puts it partially into execution. But it remains for Isidor Philipp to work the formula out to its utmost, and the result is a volume unique in the annals of piano literature and of surpassing value to pianist, teacher and pupil.
This volume, I have no hesitation in saying, is the most significant since the posthumous publication of Tausig’s Daily Studies. All pianists have felt the need of such a work, and in his dumb-thumb way Oscar Raif taught his pupils that the manner to master difficulties was to walk chromatically about the passages in question. At a blow Philipp demolishes thousands of technical studies.
Philipp’s scheme is this: his collection is only for pianists who have a sound ordinary technic, say a technic which enables one to play the Beethoven sonatas of the first and second period, Clementi, Cramer, and of course Bach.
Philipp begins with extensive exercises, for extended harmonies are the keynote of modern piano music. Then follow studies for independence of the fingers, for the left hand alone, for scales, arpeggios, double notes, trills, octaves and chord playing, rhythmic studies and sundry studies that cannot be classified. These are all original, and are the result of the most independent researches. Conciseness is aimed at. They are reinforced by examples from Alkan to Willmers—the latter being the hero of the trill in the annals of piano playing.
Now, suppose you have each day an hour for technical study. You sit down before your keyboard; play one study for finger extension. Here is one on the first page—a terror, but a salutary one. Then take the example—it is from the F sharp minor prelude of Chopin. If you do not care for that there is the peroration of the E minor concerto of Chopin, the trill on B natural in the left hand. Alkan; Henselt (an example from the first study in op. 5 in C)—you can take your choice.
Now for independence of the fingers. Only two examples are given. If you master them you will have ten perfectly autonomous fingers. One is from a study by Alkan and the other from Saint-Saëns, op. 52. This latter is the famous study in A minor. It is invaluable.
Studies for the left hand: one example from the last movement of the Appassionata, you remember the figure in F minor. Others by Beethoven from concerto and variations. Chopin is represented by studies and extracts from the concertos, and a page is devoted to the G sharp minor section of the Revolutionary study, the Tristan and Isolde episode. Liszt, Georges Mathias, Brahms are all quoted with judgment.
Scales: Copious quotations from Chopin, Hummel, the A minor study of the former has a variant which gives the left hand employment. Liszt, Henselt, Rubinstein, the odd little chromatic episode in the last movement of the D minor concerto, and a finger-breaker by Henri Fissot, in which the thumb is treated to convict labor, as it deserves.
We have now reached the arpeggio section. After a lot of figures from which you may select your pattern for the day—notably the arpeggio of the dominant seventh, the most difficult and therefore the most valuable—you may indulge in examples from Beethoven, Chopin, Thalberg—the master of arpeggios—Delaborde, Rubinstein and Saint-Saëns.
Do not forget that these examples are selected from representative works, works that are played and are selected with rare skill and appreciation.
The double note chapter is admirable, although I notice M. Philipp clings to the Chopin fingering in chromatic double notes, the minor third, etcetera. The examples are from Beethoven, Hummel, Weber, Cramer, Chopin (the first chromatic scale in op. 25, No. 6); Schumann, Litolff, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Rubinstein, Delaborde, Alphonse Duvernoy, a valuable and ingenious study; Marmontel, and last, but by no means least, Philipp himself. One example of his is from a Bach fugue in D in double sixths!
The trill department—this sounds like the Bon Marché—contains examples from Beethoven, Chopin, Willmers, Doehler, Liszt, Brahms, a monstrous octave trill from the F sharp minor sonata, Duvernoy, Czerny and Liszt. It is as complete as possible.
The octave section contains more modern examples than Kullak. Saint-Saëns, Diémer, Rimski-Korsakoff and Tschaïkowsky are some of the moderns quoted.
Then follow rhythmical examples, skips, tremolo, a good example is from Thalberg’s beautiful and sadly neglected theme and variations in A minor, op. 45 and a lot of tangled tricks from the works of Lalo, D’Indy, Bernard, Pierné and other modern Frenchmen. I wish M. Philipp had quoted Thalberg’s famous tremolo study in C. It is the best of its class. But to be hypercritical before this ingenious catalogue would be impertinence, even ingratitude. From the maddening mass of classical and latter-day piano literature the editor has selected and fingered a most representative series of the difficulties of piano music. A few bars, at most a page, are given, and we do not wonder that Saint-Saëns called the work a vade mecum for pianists.
Not content with his gigantic task this astonishing Philipp has made another collection of studies for the left hand alone.
His compilation is so complete that I must speak of it in detail. Indeed I could write much on this topic. I know so many students, so many able pianists who have gone through the valley of technical death in search of a path to Parnassus, that I hail these short cuts with joy. Remember I am of a band of admirable lunatics that played all the studies in the world when I was a young fellow! What ignorance, depraved and colossal, was it not?
Czerny, who is old fashioned in most of his studies, has nevertheless written some of the best studies for the left hand solo. He wrote them because no one else would. He looks in his pictures as if he might be that sort of a man.
Philipp the indefatigable has sifted Czerny, and the left hand is treated, not with arpeggiated contempt—most composers write as if this hand was only for accompanying purposes—but as if it were the companion and co-sharer of the throne of digital independence. All sorts—but not too many—of preparatory exercises are there, thanks to the ingenuity of the editor, who must be a teacher of the first magnitude. In addition to Czerny we get passages from Weber, right hand passages transposed, from Mendelssohn, Hummel, Schumann, the first page of the great Toccata in C, transpositions from Bach and Chopin, a big Kessler study, the first study in C of Chopin, the first study in A minor for the left hand—a pet idea of Joseffy’s—a transposition from the B flat minor prelude, a capital notion for velocity playing, another transposition of the A minor study in op. 25, hideously difficult. The same with the G sharp minor study, Godowsky has a version for concert performance, but this is for one hand only; the double sixth study in D flat, a Kreutzer violin caprice in octaves in E, a Kreutzer étude in octaves, and the F minor study of Chopin, op. 25, No. 2 in octaves.
The volume ends with a formidable version in octaves for left hand of the last movement of Chopin’s B flat minor sonata. This is truly a tour de force.
This clever Parisian has also written six new concert studies. The first is a double note arrangement of the D flat valse. Tausig, Rosenthal and Joseffy have done the same thing. But Philipp has written the trio in three clefs so as to render clear the contrapuntal figure over the melody, which figure is the first theme. His second study is the same valse written for the left hand, the accompaniment being transposed to the right. The third study is the F minor study in triplets of Chopin, most ingeniously transcribed for left hand. Brahms turned this study into forbidding thistles of double sixths. The fourth study is devoted to the G flat étude of Chopin, the one on the black keys. It is in double notes, fourths, sixths and octaves. Joseffy ten years ago anticipated Philipp.
For his fifth concert study I congratulate M. Philipp. He has taken Chopin’s first A minor study in op. 10 and turned it into a bombarding chord study, something after the manner of the sombre and powerful B minor octave study. The blind octave is the technical foundation of this transcription. It is very effective. The book closes with a magnificent paraphrase of Weber’s perpetual movement from the sonata in C. Brahms and others have transcribed this for the left hand. It is aptly dedicated to the master, a veritable master, Camille Saint-Saëns. I wish I could enlarge on the “pianistic” qualities of this piece. Oddly enough it suggests in a distant fashion Rubinstein’s C major study, he one d’Albert plays so masterfully. Philipp has made the changes in the most musicianly manner.
M. Philipp has credited to Theodore Ritter, now dead, the octave version of the rondo of Chopin’s E minor concerto. To Tausig belongs the honor. I wonder why he failed to quote the stunning étude in B flat minor by Franz Bendel? After Chopin’s it is the most valuable of all the studies for the playing of double sixths.
Not satisfied with making a unique volume of daily studies, he has out-Tausiged Tausig in the new Études d’Octaves. The studies are after Bach, Clementi, Cramer and Chopin, with original preludes by Dubois, Delaborde, Émile Bernard, Duvernoy, Gabriel Fauré, Matthias, Philipp, Pugno and Widor. I advise you to play Kullak upside down before you touch these new studies on studies—these towering Pelions piled on metacarpal Ossias.
Philipp begins with the E flat study of Clementi, the one in broken octaves; this he transforms to a repeated note exercise. The first two studies in the Gradus he makes octaves. So far nothing remarkable nor difficult. Then follows the B flat invention of Bach—in two voices—in octaves; the study in E by Cramer treated as a study in sustained tones, like the second section of Chopin’s great octave study in B minor. We begin to grow warm over Cramer’s first famous study in C, all bedeviled into chords and taken at the interesting metronomic tempo of 116 to the quarter notes. It sounds like a gale from Rubinstein.
As all flesh is grass, so all difficult piano studies become food for the virtuoso. Brahms in a moment of heavy jocundity made night and Chopin hideous with the study in F minor by forcing the sweet, coy, maidenly triplets to immature coquetting with rude and crackling double sixths. Philipp is too polite, too Gallic to attempt such sport, so he gives the étude in unison octaves. It is a good study, but one prefers the original.
Cramer’s left hand study in D minor is treated to octaves, and so the A minor study of Chopin in op. 10 is worked up magnificently and is really worth the while to play as well as to practice—a distinction you will observe. But more momentous matter follows. I expected that I should see the day when Weber’s so-called Perpetual Motion—the rondo in C—would be played in octaves by children, but I little dreamed of the daring of the latter-day pianist. The tenth study in this book is in interlocked octaves, after the manner of Tausig, and is in the key of B flat minor. Can you guess on what it is built? No less a theme than the last movement of the B flat minor sonata of Chopin, and it is a presto. Tausig is reported to have said that the movement reminded him of the wind sighing over the grave of the beloved, and Joseffy told me that Tausig could play it in octaves.
Like all legends of the sort, you treasure it and grow reverend, but when you see these octaves on the printed page you shudder. Where will technic end? It is worse than Brahms in his stupendous Paganini studies. In a study by Paderewski, The Desert, may be found just such toying with the gigantic, the ineffable. Philipp, with his precise, practical mind, pins his miracles to the paper, and while we curiously study the huge wings of this phenomenal bird we are not attracted. The study is written for a dozen living pianists at the utmost.
Henselt has written some studies which he calls Master Studies for Piano. They are really studies for virtuosi, and should be severely left alone by any but finished pianists. Carlyle Petersilyea once made a sort of technical variante on Chopin’s study in sixths in op. 25. Henselt goes upon the principle that pianists grow weary of playing a piece in the same manner; that the fingers become indolent from the fatal facility which follows upon many performances of a composition. So he takes up the familiar difficulty and views it from another rhythmical point of view. He distorts, perverts, alters, and almost roots up from the harmonic and rhythmic soil, the figuration, and believes that with a new aspect, a fresh difficulty, that you will return refreshed in finger and mentally invigorated to the normal version. And the great pianist and pedagogue has accomplished his task with a vengeance.
There are 167 examples; some make you shudder, some cause a smile, all command respect for the agility of the paraphrase, the downright cleverness of the changes. When you have thoroughly mastered the Philipp Daily Studies—which will be never—I commend these Henselt perversions. But may God preserve you from dallying too long in these curious and repulsive pastures, for can you imagine anything more horrible than a pianist assailed in the full glare of a public performance by a Henselt version and unable to resist the temptation!
Some of the perversions are worthy of the consideration of a musical Lombroso. There is the G flat study of Chopin, The Butterfly; Henselt has lots of fun with the piece, and his humor peeps out at the close, for instead of the epigrammatic ending—alas! so seldom adhered to by foolish pianists—he makes an elaborate run and delays the end, a delicate and satiric commentary on the ambitious pounder who will insist on bowling all over the keyboard before he lets go the key.
Chopin is liberally paraphrased, and the version of the E minor valse is fit for concert performance, so brilliant and effective is it. There are examples from Beethoven, Henselt—he has mocked his own Bird Study—Hummel, Mendelssohn, Weber, Cramer, Liszt, Raff, Schumann and Moscheles. Yet one coyly suggests these studies. They are apt to hoist the pianist with his own petard.
I once asked Rosenthal what finger exercises or studies he employed to build up that extraordinary mechanism of his. He startled me by replying “none.” Then he explained that he picked out the difficulties of a composition and made new combinations of them. Every rope has its weak spot and in every composition there is the one difficulty that will not down. Master it and you are technically master of all you survey. The whole question may be summed up this way: study a few Cramer, a few Clementi études for elegance and endurance, avoid daily studies except those few that by experience you discover limber up your wrist and fingers. Play the Chopin études, daily, also the preludes, for the rest trust to God and Bach. Bach is the bread of the pianist’s life; always play him that your musical days may be long in the land.