I
A Grand Piano underneath the Bough,
A Gramophone, a Chinese Gong, and Thou
Trying to sing an Anthem off the Key—
Oh, Paradise were Wilderness enow!
—Wallace Irwin.
To the girl who plays Chopin! This sounds like a toast, and a cynic would certainly add: “May her pretty fingers ne’er touch ivory again!” But it is not a health that I wish to propose, nor yet an exhortation. My notion is to put the question boldly: Can women play Chopin? Before the rigor of such a query the hardiest-souled male must retire abashed, or write with the usual masculine brutality and lack of finesse. Chopin is the favorite composer of women; Chopin rules the soul of the girl, and to Chopin is addressed a particular form of worship. This consists of inarticulate gasps, irregular sighs, and the glance which is called psychic. To girls of eighteen or thereabouts Chopin is a religion—a sentimental one. Sympathetic medical men diagnose the symptoms and declare them Chopinitis. We have, many of us, suffered severely from it; most musical and unmusical people do. Chopin is in the emotional curriculum of every woman who plays the piano; therefore it shocks one if this question be posed: Can women play Chopin?
Let us be scientific, let us be profound, and let us quote rows of horrid, forbidding figures. I am now proposing a little journey into the misty mid-region of Womanology, for the need of proving my somewhat oblique case. It is crab-wise, this progression, but it may serve. The Nineteenth Century some years ago contained an article on woman’s brain by Alexander Sutherland. Written in fullest accord with the aims and ideals of the new woman, the author is yet forced to confess that “the male brain has an advantage of about 10 per cent in weight,” and adds that “it is a difference which certainly affords some little foundation for a very ancient belief,” said belief being the inferiority of the female intellect to the male intellect. But he proves that 90 per cent of women are the equals of 90 per cent of men. And in the very beginning of his short study he demonstrates that the neurons on the cortex of the brain are quite as numerous in women as in men, and that these neurons “are the instruments of mental energy.”
Mere brain weight, then, seems to prove nothing. It is the activity of the neurons which determines the quality of brain power. Music is denied a place among the more intellectual arts by many great thinkers. Whether this is just or not, considering the vast claims of Bach and Beethoven, I will not say, but one thing is certain: in Chopin emotional sensibility predominates, and as women are supposed to be more emotional than their mates, ergo they should play Chopin better. But are they more emotional? Lombroso, who has measured the sighs of sentimental girls, and weighed her tears, says no. In an extraordinary series of public experiments, conducted at Turin, the learned Italian found that woman as compared with man was deficient in tactile sensibility; that she did not record impressions, whether optical, aural, or sensory, as rapidly or with such clear definition as did man. I admit this sounds discouraging, and is enough to give pause to the upward flight of the sex, if that flight is to be tested by scientific analysis. But what is all this testing, weighing, and measuring when faced by the spectacle of a glorious winged creature which sails away on victorious pinions with plumage unruffled by Lombroso and his laboratory logic?
A genuine féministe, one who gently felt the female pulse of his century and suavely waved the patient aside, was the late Ernest Renan. If ever a man should have had exalted ideals of womanhood, he was that man. His sister Henriette was his life companion, a veritable staff to him in his erudite studies, and when she died, he withered, or, rather, grew fat and spiritually flabby. Yet this most subtly feminine of men had the ingratitude to write: “There is no doubt whatever that at the present time feminine instincts occupy more space in the general physiognomy of the world than they did formerly. The world is more exclusively preoccupied just now with frivolities that formerly were looked upon as the exclusive property of women. Instead of asking men for great achievements, bold enterprises, and heroic labors, the women ask them for riches only, to satisfy a vulgar taste. The general movement of the world has put itself at the service of the instincts of woman, not those splendid instincts through which they display more clearly than men can, perhaps, the divine ideal of our nature, but the lower instincts which form the least noble portion of her vocation.” This was written in 1855. What would Renan have written in the twentieth century?
We have now laboriously collated the opinions of three men—Sutherland on the brain, Lombroso on the sensibility, and Renan on the moral nature of woman. The general tenor of these three messages is hardly as hopeful as the new woman could desire. Let us leave the chill topic in all its frozen splendor and turn to the latter part of my question—Chopin. What is Chopin playing?
That Chopin was a Pole who went from Warsaw to Paris, there won fame, the love of George Sand, misery, and a sad death are facts that even schoolgirls lisp. The pianist-composer belongs to the stock figures of musical fiction. He was slender, had consumption, slim, long fingers, played vaporous moon-haunted music, and after his desertion by Sand coughed himself off the contemporary canvas in the most genteel and romantic manner. I like to recall George Moore’s description of Robert Louis Stevenson: “I think of Mr. Stevenson,” he wrote in his Confessions, “as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad flowers with pale weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window and scratching thereon certain exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.” The piano was Chopin’s window, and upon it he traced arabesques, tender and heroic, sorrowful and capricious. All this is Chopin romantically conventionalized by artist-biographers and associates. The real man, as nearly as we dare describe a real man—was of a gentle, slightly acid temper, and of a refined nature, who had a talent for playing the piano that was without parallel, and a positive genius in composition. His life was stupid, if compared with an actor’s or a sailor’s, and was devoid of public incident. We can see him giving a few piano lessons to prim, chaperoned misses of the Boulevard Saint-Germain before each noon; in the afternoons making calls or studying; in the evening at the opera for an hour, later in the enchanted circle of countesses who listened to his weaving music, and afterward a space for breathing at a fashionable café before retiring. Public appearances were rare; this aristocrat loved not the larger world and its democratic criticisms. His was a temperament prone to self-coddling. Only to the favored few did he reveal the richness of his inner life. That he suffered intensely from petty annoyances before which the ordinary man would hunch his shoulders was but the result of a hyperæsthetic delicacy. An æolian harp! you cry, and the simile is a happy one. But no wind harp has ever discoursed such music as Chopin’s piano.
And then there is the national element, perhaps the most fascinating of all the fibres of his many-colored soul. Chopin was Polish, he loved Poland madly, yet Chopin never laid down his music to take up arms for his native land, fight or die for, as did his countrywoman Emilia Plater. Being infinitely more feminine than any woman, Chopin sang his dreams, his disillusions, into his music, and put his fiery patriotism into his polonaises. His range is not so wide as Beethoven’s; but it is quite as intense. His mazurkas, valses, nocturnes, studies, preludes, impromptus, scherzos, ballades, polonaises, fantaisies, variations, concertos, cradle-song, barcarolle, sonatas, and various dances are the most intimate music written for any instrument. A lyric poet, he touched us to the core, and with exquisite tentacles drew our soul to his. He is dead, yet a vital musical force to-day. To play Chopin one must have acute sensibilities, a versatility of mood, a perfect mechanism, the heart of a woman and the brain of a man. He is not all elegant languors and melancholy simperings. A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of colorings; supreme musicianship—Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin, sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death. Does this sound like mocking at the impossible? All this and much more that is subtle and indescribable are needed to interpret Chopin. And now do you see that I am right when I declare that most women play his music mechanically?
Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large. Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff, Joseffy, Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom. There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three are, as all musical artists should be, feminine in their delicacy of temperament.
Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight, in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt Chopin at all?
Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the majority of men!