The Virtuosos
Beethoven’s playing was naturalistic. In him there were no tricks of technique to be admired, no mere virtuosity to praise; but the hearers were stirred to their hearts. In this storm and stress, this whispering and listening, this awakening of the soul, they recognised an original naturalism of piano-playing, standing by the side of the naturalism of his creative art. Rhythm was the life of his playing. He thought out all technique with a view to rhythm. In the Berlin Library is a collection of Cramer’s Études, containing a series of annotations by Schindler, the well-known biographer of Beethoven. The expressions are so remarkable that the spirit of Beethoven has not unjustly been detected in them. Shedlock, in fact, has published them simply as Beethoven’s elucidations of Cramer, whose Études the Master is known to have prized exceedingly. In every Étude the melos, or latent melodic air, which lies at the base of the figurations, is brought into prominence, and the rhythmical presentation of these figurations is made as accurate as possible. The rest is for the most part left to the time, the diligence, and the ability of the player. Thus could a great creator look at Études. Of necessity he looked at them from a totally different point of view from the virtuoso pure and simple. He cared chiefly for the presentation of the idea, for the inwardness of the piece. Everything that was written down in concrete notes served to him but as a means for that expression, the mastery of which was the mastery of interpretation. From this point of view Beethoven would have written his “Klavierschule,” of which he often spoke in his latter years. With mere fingering and wrist action he would have had little indeed to do.
This great task was undertaken by a band of artists who must not be undervalued. They stood in the first rank of virtuosos. It is precisely at this time that technique first properly arises as an art; and their zeal in the attempt to solve the new problem was great indeed. They discover new possibilities of expression, they disclose new effects in the capacities of the pianoforte, and they reveal an inventive power in these new paths which offers the most surprising beauties. We must consider them from the right side, and never forget that the development of the piano could never have taken place so naturally and organically unless its technical advance had gone on in parallel lines with its spiritual progress.
I have here no other aim than to view things under a certain species aeternitatis. What was done by Bird, Bull, Couperin, or Pasquini, though to-day perhaps only one in a thousand piano-players knows their names, was of more importance than a Polacca of Kalkbrenner or an Étude of Ludwig Berger. We have a fixed horizon; what is not within it remains outside it. Lives of entire and rich content, sorrows and joys of extreme intensity, may sink into oblivion; they are in history a mere grain in the quicksand. It is useless to look up in my index the name of everybody who has composed a Rondo or given piano-lessons in Moscow. We must content ourselves with those who, by the great halting-places, have deserved a monument on the way: those only without whom history would offer a distinct blank.
A very great work is represented by the theoretical piano-schools, which followed one another at this time in close succession. If in the little book of Philip Emanuel Bach there was the beginning of a unifying system, on which the following age had only to build, yet, in the face of the most varying theories of the first half of our century, we can but recognise that piano-teaching, from mere excess of zeal, never succeeded in developing a genuine system. It has always been the tendency of the piano-teacher to keep in the past an ideal to worship, while with the present he has such a poor understanding that every new method of instruction makes a tabula rasa of the preceding method, begins all afresh, and allows the pupil salvation only according to its private judgment. Piano-study has never enjoyed the advantage possessed by other sciences, of building up from century to century, each upon the last. In theory it has remained a mere mosaic; and it has been saved only by practice.
It is practice also that gives a certain systematisation, not to the teaching, but to the history of teaching. All the separate workers at the great task, little as they admit the possibility of salvation outside their own creed, are yet driven forward by the stream of time and by the results of experience; and the law of averages brings about a clear advance apart from their personal agency. If we compare the systems of the eighteenth century, the schools of Philip Emanuel, of Marpurg, and that of Daniel Gottlob Türk, which closes this series, with the works of the epoch on which we have now entered, we see clearly how practice has marked out the path for theory, always reflecting upon itself, itself inducing its decomposition into its constituent à priori and empirical parts, and finally limiting itself to a mere application of experience.
The Pianoforte School which was written by Adam was a kind of pronunciamento of the Paris Conservatoire. This Conservatoire, founded in the midst of the troubles of the Revolution, ultimately gave French technique a position to which for a long time it had been a stranger. Adam’s principle is to put the “manieren” more on one side, and to avoid that too eager devotion to the teaching of general composition with which the books of the eighteenth century had been occupied. In its place he brings the study of touch more prominently forward. The day of the spinet is over; the hammer-clavier now dominates the world, and leads theorists to attempt methods of touch which may correspond to its possibilities of delicate expression. The pedals also begin to play their part. Adam recognises four pedals, of which one is our damper-raiser, and three serve for soft effects. Gradually they have been reduced to two, the damper-raiser and the so-called “soft” pedal.
A great opponent of all use of the pedal was Hummel. In our time it is no longer necessary to point out that the pedal, an integral part of the hammer-clavier, deserves not to be rejected, but simply to be treated on its own artistic lines. But Hummel stands, in his theoretic relations, so strongly on the foundations of tradition, that his attitude can excite no surprise. His “Ausführliche theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Pianofortespiel,” which appeared in 1828, is the crown of the united exertions of piano theory. This voluminous work, which gained with difficulty a circulation that it soon lost for ever, is a system, carried out into the minutest details, of all the technical capacities of the piano; so systematic, indeed, that here theory, by deductive methods, discovered effects which practice could not have attained alone. It is an unparalleled example of theoretic speculation, and yet really nothing more than the extension of Marpurg’s or Türk’s old-fashioned methods. These countless headings in capital letters, each describing a different class of “passage,” these numbered possibilities of fingering, these pedantic elucidations, beginning always from the first over again, are nothing but, as he calls them, an “Anweisung,” mere directions, abstraction from reflection outward. Any one who has mastered the first part has the second already at his fingers’ ends, but this master of dissection troubles himself not a whit on that point, and knows no economy in pupilage. He is opposed to learning by heart, since the fingers, he says, ought to find the keys without sight: so far is he from the modern view that only a complete mastery of a piece renders adequate interpretation possible. He troubles himself little about a science of touch. He introduces the “manieren”; but, contrary to the method of the eighteenth century, he makes the trill begin on the upper note. So far is a system of execution from his purpose that he can actually write as follows: “Runs and notes going upwards are executed crescendo, downwards diminuendo; but there are cases in which the composer intends the reverse, or that they should be played with even strength.” Hummel’s book is to-day a monument of misguided diligence, great in its patient calculation of permutations, but a dead curiosity.
The Brothers Pixis. 1800.
Engraved by Sintzenich after Schröder.
If, on the other hand, we look at Kalkbrenner’s Paris Pianoforte School, which he dedicated “to all the conservatoriums in Europe,” we see—with no heavy artillery—advances of all kinds which in part fill up the perspective of Adam. Where Hummel has ten main classes of fingered passages, he has only six; five-finger exercises for the unmoving hand; scales in all forms; thirds, sixths, and chord-forms; octaves with the wrist; trills; overlapping of the hands. In this there is more thrift, while there is no talk of absolute completeness. The “manieren” slowly cease to occupy important chapters; the pedals again come by their own; for Kalkbrenner as a Parisian hates the dry tone of the Vienna pianoforte. Execution also begins to receive a systematic treatment. Interesting references are made to punctuation in order to illustrate musical phraseology; conclusions on the tonic are a full stop; on the dominant a semicolon; while interrupted cadences are a note of exclamation. This is naive enough, but it is at any rate a beginning.
We are thus already standing at the point at which clavier theory decomposes itself into its elements. If Hummel was the great theoretician, Czerny was the great man of practice; a quite unique person, the hero of all piano-teachers, whose practical eye runs equally over all the possibilities of playing, and works them out in separate parts; the genius of the Étude. He it was who discovered the great secret that no separation of methods of fingering is of any avail in practice, but that the perfection of the fingers must be carried out solely on the basis of their mechanical gymnastic. It is useless to try to apply my five fingers to so many theoretically possible permutations; the important question is what practical use can be made of my fingers according to their physical structure. Czerny has no obsolete rules of practice, but a science of mechanism; thus taking the very opposite pole to Hummel. Piano-study, which with Couperin and Philip Emanuel was still a part of a musical training with just the necessary amount of mechanics, became with him primarily the gymnastic of the fingers with the addition of instruction in touch and execution. Long past are the times when the good old clavier was only used to “fill” the song, which was after all the essence of music. From music we have come to the fingers. A science of the fingers is constructed, and the fingers are trained as earlier only the throat was trained. Technique has remembered her own ways, and made the last first. The emancipation of finger-gymnastic was an epoch-marking point in the treatment of the piano, the desired answer of theory to practice, which for a long time had recognised the specific art of the piano. It was perhaps the last important stride in its emancipation when the results of practice were made the groundwork of instruction. Czerny, in his great Pianoforte School, his Opus 500, is almost entirely free from the à priori theory. He transfers mechanics to music. With good results he treats individual cases, as for example, when he appends to the beginning of passages a finger-exercise not given in the scale; he designs immediately to return to the usual fingering in order to arrive duly at the extreme notes with the extreme fingers, and to avoid unnecessary underpassing. It was reserved for a later time not merely to bring the note-material lying before us into harmony with economic fingering, but also to make execution, which with Czerny has but a loose dependence on the finger-exercise, re-act upon the fingers. Bülow, for example, is fond of unusual fingering, in which the execution forbids any too easy playing, and a too loose rendering is prevented by irregularities in the succession of the fingers.
The mechanics of the fingers formed the first part of piano-instruction; touch and execution were the second. Their importance as means to the mechanism of music was fully seen; and in the “Technical Studies” of Plaidy, or in Köhler’s “Methode für Klavierspiel und Musik” (1857), they are as exhaustively handled as before had been the “manieren” or the thorough-bass. The former contents himself with the simple terms, Legato, Staccato, Legatissimo, and Portamento; the latter gives a more mechanical division, always according to the use of the fore-arm, the finger-joints, the wrist, or the elbow. Neither is complete, neither supplies a systematic advance on the lines of his predecessors; and we should be astonished at these divergences if we set the numerous schools of these times, from a theoretical point of view, over against one another. Practically considered, however, they agree well enough. The holding of the hand as enjoined by Philip Emanuel Bach has remained on the whole unaltered down to the present day. With trifling differences, which concern the relation of the extreme fingers to the middle finger, and the profile of the back of the hand, Bach, Türk, Müller, Hummel, Logier, Kalkbrenner and the rest, are at one as to the support of the arm which carries the hand, and of the hand which carries the fingers as they descend. In Paris Logier constructed an instrument to hold the hand in practice, in shape like a bracket, which he named “chiroplast.” Kalkbrenner, in his “Guide-mains,” introduced some modifications on the chiroplast; but such mechanical contrivances gained no general acceptance. Logier’s speciality was his prefatory note that the finger must remain in continual touch with the key. With this was allied that special kind of sensuously charming touch which differentiated the Parisian school from the brilliant playing of the Viennese and the emotional style of the English. That carezzando, or stroking of the keys, was a favourite practice of Kalkbrenner and Kontski in Paris. To-day Risler remains perhaps alone in this school with his pure sensuous charm of touch.
If, in the whole great group of technical artists, which is bounded on the one side by Wölffl, Wanhal, Kozeluch, Eberl, in Mozart’s generation, and on the other by Thalberg and Liszt in ours, we should look for truly pre-eminent spirits, then we should have remaining Clementi, the father of all technique; Hummel, the inventor of the modern piano-exercise; and Czerny, the genius of teaching. But if we ask for the lines of the motion which runs through this epoch, we observe the victory of a virtuoso impulse, which goes back to Hummel, over a plainer and more intellectual tendency which has its rise in Clementi. The school of Clementi prefers the English pianoforte with its heavier but richer touch; that of Hummel the Viennese, with its lighter tone, which lends itself more easily to effects.
Ludwig Berger. Pupil of Clementi; founder
of a widely influential piano-school at
Berlin. Lithograph by Wildt.
But it is not possible to draw a sharp line between the two groups. A Moscheles serves not less the spirit of Clementi than that of Hummel. The simplicity of Cramer, the counterpoint of Klengel, the plainness of Ludwig Berger, the intensity of Field, belong to the circle of Clementi’s influence. Berger’s pupils, Greulich, Heinrich Dorn, Wilhelm Taubert, Albert Löschhorn, whose studies still live, carry this style down to our own time. The teaching of Hummel lived on in Ferdinand Hiller, Benedict, Wilmers, Baake, Ernst Pauer, the Viennese Pixis. While Beethoven left behind him as actual pupils only the Archduke Rudolf and Ferdinand Ries, a respectable imitator, his temporary pupil Czerny passed over into the wake of Hummel, and brought the Viennese style to a final victory. Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Weber, Liszt, Thalberg, Döhler, Madame Oury, Madame Pleyel, Theodore Kullak, Pollini, of whom many belong externally to Clementi’s school, passed as apostles of Viennese technique to all lands from St Petersburg to London, from Paris to Milan.
Certain traditions of musical coteries and centres of instruction exhibit with this international character some more or less important local groups. In Prague men adored Tomaschek, the composer of Eclogues and Rhapsodies; Dionysius Weber, the first director of a Conservatorium there; and his successor Kittl. From Tomaschek’s school proceeded Alexander Dreyschock, the specialist of the left hand; Ignaz Tedesco, the “Hannibal of octaves”; and Schulhoff, the fashionable composer. In the middle of the century the Prague tradition was upheld by Proksch.
In Frankfort lived Vollweiler, who enjoyed a widespread renown as a teacher, and later went to St Petersburg; and Aloys Schmitt, whose delicate Études have been taken up by Bülow into his great collection of educational pieces.
Vienna alternates, but never loses in wealth. Berlin and St Petersburg as yet produced no fixed or permanent school. Leipzig takes its colour from the foundation of the Conservatorium with Mendelssohn and Moscheles and their fellow-citizen Schumann. England, from Clementi to Moscheles, imported a constant succession of Continental artists. The influence of the Conservatorium runs far and wide. A Strassburger named Hüllmandel, who took up his abode in Paris in 1776, had started clavier-instruction there. His pupil Jadin was director of the piano at the new Conservatoire. For forty-six years after 1797, Adam, whose name we remember because of his improved piano-school, carried on his labours in Paris. He was a tasteful professor, and brought the Parisian renown to its height. Kalkbrenner, the acrobat, succeeded him. Adam’s colleague, Pradher, was the teacher of those worst of fashionable composers, Herz, Hünten, Rosellen, shallowest and emptiest of musicians. Within the same walls was a Chopin!
The life of the great virtuosos is a reflection of the unrest inseparable from their calling. It is indeed no longer a life of adventure, as with Marchand and Froberger; there is method in the madness. The life of the executant, no less than the execution, has found its form. The concert-campaigns are the foundation; the warrior returns to his home at greater and greater intervals; until at last, when delight in recitals has waned along with the pliancy of the fingers, some resting-place or other is found—a share in a piano-manufactory or a steady round of instruction. During the campaigns instruction also takes a kind of locomotive form; devoted pupils follow the master, and leave him at fitting places, to pitch their tents there and make room for other peregrinating pupils. Or, on the other hand, pupils swarm from all parts of the earth to a place which the Master is always leaving, but to which he constantly returns—like the summer students of German universities—a type of professional existence of which Liszt’s Weimar period gives perhaps the most famous exemplification.
John Field, 1782-1837.
Steel engraving by C. Mayer.
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) was the first to exhibit this form of virtuoso-life on the great scale. Born in Italy, he found a home in London through the support of a wealthy Englishman; but he was far from showing the sedentary character of a Bach, a Couperin, or a Beethoven. Virtuosity impels to travel, as composition keeps a man at home. The difference which we observed between the sensitive anchorite Bach and the cosmopolitan popularity-hunter Handel, appears again between Beethoven and these executants. Mozart was too many-sided, and besides he died too young, to become a universal teacher of the piano; but Clementi lived almost three generations, during which half Europe grouped itself round him and his pupils. Down to 1780 he was still “cembalist” at the London Italian opera; during the next ten years he undertook two great tours, one to Vienna, the other to Paris. Meanwhile he became partner in an English piano-firm, which failed, whereupon he founded one of his own along with Collard. He set out for St Petersburg with his pupil Field; left him there; but on the way gained two new pupils, Berger and Klengel, whom also he established in St Petersburg. On one of his tours at Berlin he married, only to lose his wife shortly after. In 1810 he made another circular tour through Vienna and Italy. He spent another whole winter in Leipzig, and married a second time. His last years, when the world had outgrown him, he spent quietly in London.
In the life of Hummel (1778-1837), the favourite pupil of Mozart, posts as kapellmeister with Esterhazy, in Stuttgart and in Weimar, with a longer, unattached residence at Vienna, regulated the varying domiciles at which he lived. Weimar, as a great resting place, enjoyed through him its first musical renown, which reached half through the period of Goethe. In the intervals he took his concert-tours to Dresden, Paris, Holland, Berlin, Belgium, England, Scotland, and St Petersburg. These, as far as the furloughs of a kapellmeister permitted, recurred with a certain regularity, till they gradually ceased entirely.
Marcelline Czartoryska, née Princess Radziwill, pupil of Czerny.
Engraved by Marchi.
Cramer (1771-1858) had two long stays in London, in the midst of which a sojourn at Paris occupied the years from 1832 to 1845. He found a secondary occupation in a London musical house, in which he was a partner from 1828 to 1842. Kalkbrenner (1784-1849), on the contrary, lived in Paris, but his residence there was interrupted by a nine years’ stay in London (1814-1823). He too had secondary interests. He was concerned with Logier in a company for the exploitation of the “Chiroplast,” and he had also a share in a piano-factory. Moscheles (1794-1870) had no business. His external life was made up of his youthful time in Vienna with Beethoven and Meyerbeer, his sensational Parisian recitals of 1820, his glorious stay in London from 1821 to 1846, and his professoriate at the Leipzig Conservatorium. At intervals, of course, he made Continental concert-tours.
Among all the great virtuosos and teachers only Czerny had a really fixed abode (1791-1857). As a boy of fifteen he was already a teacher in Vienna, and as such he died there; his tours also being few and far between.
Prince Louis Ferdinand.
Engraved by Geiger after Grassy.
But Czerny is in this respect an exception. Otherwise the international play of virtuosity led to an exchange and co-operation, to the mutual curiosity and desire to learn, which mark the concert-life of that age. Duet-playing by great executants, in private or in the concert-hall, is nothing unusual throughout this time. But the genuine interpreter does not as yet exist. The player has mostly a personal interest in the piece performed, and the friends assist at the christening. It is the time of the Hexameron. Exchange is often even too self-abnegatory. Moscheles composed for Cramer (with whom, as also with Ries and Kalkbrenner, he often played duets) a last movement for Cramer’s own sonata for two pianofortes. Later on he took the piece back again and tacked it on to his well-known piece, “Hommage à Haendel!” We need not then be surprised at such gruesome pasticcios as the programme of a London Philharmonic concert under Weber,[121] when were played the C sharp minor concerto of Ries, the E flat major of Beethoven, and the Hungarian Rondo of Pixis.
The two volumes of “Recollections of the life of Moscheles,” which his wife compiled from diaries and letters, give a clear view of the rich international concert-life of this age. Year by year we follow the kaleidoscopic existence of these artists, who see each other constantly and constantly part. Triumphs of virtuosity fill the winter seasons, followed by recreation in the country and preparations for an enlarged repertoire. The halls echo with jubilation and applause; and the audiences, especially the easily-kindled Viennese, are enthusiastic in their cheers. Music has become so popular and the compositions are so extraordinarily banal that it certainly did not often occur that they were rejected for shallowness—although, on the other hand, Kalkbrenner’s experience with a Beethoven symphony at a Paris Conservatoire concert was a sad warning to those who try to improve the public taste. The dilettantes push forward the more, the circle of instruction widens the cheaper and better the pianos become. They push themselves into rivalry with the artists in great concerts; as Moscheles relates of the celloist Sir William Curtis and the pianists Oom and Mrs Fleming. “I have to hear so much insipid music.” “Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde.” From professional piano-playing—and they often played at two places in an evening—the artists took recreation with the good temper which never failed in those years. The great singer Malibran would sit down to the piano and sing the Rataplan and the Spanish songs, to which she would imitate the guitar on the keyboard. Then she would imitate famous colleagues, and a Duchess greeting her, and a Lady So-and-so singing “Home Sweet Home” with the most cracked and nasal voice in the world. Thalberg would then take his seat and play Viennese songs and waltzes with “obligato snaps.” Moscheles himself would play with hand turned round, or with the fist; perhaps under the fist disguising the thumb, which in Moscheles’ peculiar way of playing used to take the thirds under the palm of the hand.
Marie Charlotte Antoine Josephe, Countess of Questenberg.
These players preferred to play their own compositions. The separation between composer and virtuoso was not yet complete. Of course, when Ferdinand Hiller in his “Life of an Artist” says that he had never heard either Hummel or Chopin, Thalberg or Moscheles, play a piece by another composer, his experience was at least unique. Moscheles, for example, even played Scarlatti on the old harpsichord. But, as a rule, they abode by the old custom, so far at least as amateurs were not concerned. These latter were in their instruction-books liberally provided with historical material.
Improvisation also flourished in concerts and soirées; and playing and composing, which in improvisation form a true union, can only with difficulty be severed in an age of creative virtuosos. Kalkbrenner composed while playing, and played while composing, so that no one could tell the difference between the two; and Czerny used to invent the necessary étude in the midst of the lesson. Thus it happened—a state of things unparalleled to-day—that the beloved duet-playing could be combined with the equally beloved improvisation—mutually contradictory as they appear. Moscheles speaks of an improvised duet with Mendelssohn. The latter played in the bass some English songs in ballad-style; the former interwove in the treble the scherzo of his friend’s A minor symphony.
Slight as was the advance yet made in division of labour between player and composer, there was equally little comprehensive division between the species of music. We do not hear of chamber-music evenings, pianoforte evenings, orchestral concerts. All was mingled in one; and chamber-music finds the same audience as the symphony. A piano-recital without orchestra was a rarity; and the concerto-form is almost de règle in all the greater performances. This is seen in the compositions of this period, which, as a rule, so far as they are specially adapted to public performance, were written for orchestral accompaniment. By their side were editions for private use, including the important orchestral portions. This concerto-piece could not greatly or permanently aid in the advance of a delicate or intimate piano-music. Through the rarity of special piano recitals it was not so easy to get pianos when they were wanted. In Frankfort there lived a well-known old lady who had absolutely the only piano store in the city. People had to praise her playing, to blow the trumpet of advertisement for her wares (they were Streicher’s), to court her and cringe to her in order to get an instrument for a concert.[122]
In 1837 Moscheles ventured to introduce piano-evenings without orchestra. This was an important step. But even yet the evening was not wholly devoted to the piano. A soprano or contralto filled the gap between one performance and the next. How long was it before the serious nature of a concert was universally acknowledged! Possibly here the production of dubious works of the performer’s own led to a low, acrobatic conception of the true state of affairs; and it was only the interpretation of good works by others, which were more serious, that saved taste from complete degeneration. The public gradually became quiet, and felt itself turned from educator into educated. The court ceases to take its supper during the playing;[123] the cantatrice no longer concludes her roulades with a smile worthy of the circus; and a singer is no longer hissed off the stage if he forgets to give his hand by way of thanks to his fair partner. Slowly it is realised that the concert is not a place for showing off, nor a mere form of social amusement, but a religious service.
This composite structure of virtuosity carried to the extent of vapidity, and of interpretation carried into historical research, is reflected in the compositions of the period. On the one side the tradition was exactly carried on; people began to view the existing classical works—Mozart’s and Beethoven’s Sonatas, or all kinds of pieces by Scarlatti, Bach, and Handel, as material for study; they republished half-forgotten or badly edited authors like Scarlatti; they even wrote sonatas “in the style of Scarlatti”; they arranged for the piano great quantities of the most various chamber or orchestral music. Alongside of the historical tendency stands, as so often, the international. Spanish, Irish, Russian, Italian, Polish national airs and rhythms are taken en masse into the circle of salon music; the air swarms with Polonaises, Boleros, Gipsy airs, Ecossaises, Tarantelles. But this quite cosmopolitan music was stamped by a fade enthusiasm for beauty; and there is bound up with the pieces an empty sentimental greeting or a hypocritical reminiscence. The mythological titles of the seventeenth century, and the realistic ones of the eighteenth, yield to the sentimental ones[124] of the bourgeois empire. But never was this system of naming pieces on a lower level; and never did it so corrupt the taste of the believing multitude. Even to-day we are not yet freed from its traces. Then there are the “Hommages à Beethoven” or “à Händel” corresponding to the old “Tombeaux,” but with less sincerity of intention. Then there are the “Fire pieces”—a whole collection of dedications to fire brigades—the “Burning of Mariazell,” and the “Ruins of Wien Neustadt,” figure among the salon-music of Czerny. Then follow the geographical recollections—the innumerable souvenirs of all possible towns, rivers, mountains, and people, such as the “Souvenir de mon premier voyage,” “les Charmes de Paris,” “le Retour à Londres,” etc. By their side are genuine characteristic titles chiefly employed to gild the pill of the “study.” Most objectionable of all are the favourite opera-fantasias, which are specially in vogue in the Parisian school. These tear the airs almost from the very mouths of the singers, and the composer’s completed melodies from his work, and stuff the pot pourri with passages, figurations, and fragments of études, with spurious slow introductions and sentimental passages, so that finally absolutely nothing of the essence of the original airs is left. These are perhaps the worst examples of want of style and taste to be found in the history of art. Here the curse of popularity came home to roost; here was reached the extreme point, in the publicity of the concert and of society, which the clavier had to pass through since the development of the hammer-mechanism. Any harshness in an artistic work was sufficient to condemn it; invention was tabooed; smoothness and the tickling of the ear were the only law. What in Paris was done by Herz, Hünten, Karr, Rosellen, Kontski, and their fellows, made a great sensation, and quickly vanished. Hünten received for a moderate-sized work from fifteen hundred to two thousand francs; to-day he is banished even from the salon. Karr wrote to order hundreds of pieces; to-day no amateur knows a single one out of the huge mass. And the days in which Kontski’s “Reveil du lion” was put in the hands of pupils appear to be past for ever.
The interdependence of piano and opera was not merely external. In Paris the opera, with its world-ruling influence, not merely forms a musical centre to which everything gravitates; it is itself subjected to the great law of this period—the law of mosaic work and of the aim to please. In the thirties and forties the world had thus reached hollow ostentation in the grand opera, and in the comic opera mere ballet-dancing. “Where,” wrote Wagner at that time, “where has the grace of Méhul, of Isouard, of Boieldieu, and of the young Auber gone, chased out of sight by the abject quadrille rhythms, which to-day rattle through the theatre of the opera comique and keep everything else out?” What was seen there was like what was heard on the pianoforte—pointless situations, introduced for the sake of the “business,” tirades which seem to be closed with the smile of the acrobat when he has finished his trick—technique, and nothing but technique. A librettist like Scribe is loaded with commissions, surrounded by Parisian or foreign composers—even Wagner in his youth having once written to him. He understands how to manufacture the proper substratum for the musical triflings. Read from this point of view Auber’s later operas, as the “La Part du Diable,” or those overtures whose whole structure depends on the fact that they are skilfully adapted to dances; or that daub-work in the musical setting with the jaundiced transition passages, where a proper modulation would be almost out of place; or those boleros, which people sing in circumstances of the utmost grief, without being able to raise themselves to the height of the irony; or those étude colourations, introduced in the most indifferent places provided they pay, and developing themselves vigorously about a single vowel; or those scores, which are so miserably transparent that one can see the author first rapidly composing them at the piano and then putting in the instrumentation slap-dash. It is the first, and let us hope, the last time, that the piano reaches its hand to the opera—a most unfruitful elective affinity. Opera and piano are necessarily and essentially hostile. In the Paris of that day, when absolute music, as well that of Berlioz as that of Chopin, is still a modest retiring flower, the crowd ran after the gentle titillation of the opera, and the mass of piano music moves in the operatic humdrum path. Among the Parisians as among the Italians there was assuredly not an operatic composer who did not invent at the piano and transfer his inventions from the piano to the opera. Donizetti has left an interesting letter to his brother-in-law Vesselli, which was fastened as an inscription on his piano: “Do not sell this piano at any price, for it contains my whole artistic life from 1822 onwards. Its tone lingers in my ears. In it murmur Anna, Maria, Fausta, Lucia. Let it live as long as I live! I lived with it my years of hope, of wedded happiness, of loneliness. It heard my cries of joy, it saw my tears, my disenchantments, my honours. It shared with me my toils and the sweat of my brow. In it dwells my genius, every section of my path. It saw your father, your brother, all of us; we all have tortured it; it was a true comrade to us all, and may it always be a comrade to your daughter as a dowry of a thousand sad and happy thoughts.”
There seems so much that is contemptible in this technical school that it would almost appear, at least from the artistic point of view, to have lived in vain. And yet it was at this time that a form sprang into existence which, born from technical necessities, became a custom, and from a custom a style, and so emphatically a style that it was able to enter into effective rivalry with the older styles—the contrapuntal, the thematic, the leit-motif. We are still under its dominion. This form is the Étude.
The Étude was not the invention of the technists. It existed in germ in Bach; it half grew out of thematic; only the visual angle altered with time. In an invention or symphony of Bach a motive is treated according to the free laws of imitation; it is used up in all the voices, for all fingers. In a Prelude on some thematic ground-subject, in a fugue with its stern code of canonic succession, the same is the case: the motive is expended on itself. But between the broken chords of Bach’s C sharp Prelude and those of Chopin’s C sharp Étude there is a vast difference in the treatment. What in the one is used with a view to the motive is here expended with a view to the technique. Bach sets before him the artistic possibilities of the theme: Chopin the mechanical. Bach wrote many of his preludes with educational purposes; but he did not compose them with a sole view to their full practical value. As in theory the musical and the mechanical cannot be sharply severed, so the pieces are half for the purpose of supplying music, half means of instruction. The mechanical part was obliged first to emancipate itself before the conception of the Étude could be fully grasped. On the straight line leading from the old thematic to the Étude style, the conception of the motive altered itself. Motives were now found which could be arranged according to their technical productiveness. We see perhaps even the same motive, considered first contrapuntally or as a fixed idea, but afterwards according to its mechanical value.
There are motives whose interest lies in the size of the hand; or in the playing of a legato passage simultaneously with the chords in the same hand;[125] or again, contrary motion of chords in both hands has to be carried out; or, yet further, attention is paid to an easy gliding of the hand over great stretches; or finger-changing on the same key is the ground-idea. The piece may aim at cantabile or at the perfect legato in a fugato movement, or at the practice of octaves, pearl-like scales, pianissimo touch, the freedom of the left hand, a double melody, or any of the hundred technical possibilities. There are dry and insipid methods of thus working out academically a technical idea; but it is also possible to see in delicate and ingenious ways, slumbering germs of great fruitfulness in the technical motive, and to develop powers of unexpected beauty. The one way sees in a broken chord only the means of using it in major or minor modes, or in the seventh, or in some unusual successions, first for the right hand, then for the left, then for both, and perhaps finally with sustained notes. Theory is satisfied, a practical object provided, the academic conscience laid to rest. But the other way sees in the broken chords their elementary character, the germ of the Rheingold or of the Götterdämmerung. It permits them first to sound slightly, then to grow further and further, to assume a daemonic grandeur; like eternal signs, to stretch over the heavens and embrace the worlds. Thus, no less than the other, it presents all the nuances of major, minor, seventh, right, left, up and down; but it covers these technical variations so perfectly with the sense of the inner meaning that they become identified, and can never be separated: the technical and the characteristic content have, in the mind of a genius like this, involuntarily become a unity. Such a master, for example, takes the neat finger-changing on one note as the means for a rococo-sketch, the pianissimo leaps for a dance of the elves, the rolling passages in the left hand for the roar of the sea with elemental upper parts; the rhythmical varieties in left and right for graceful fetters of the dance; the scurrying glide over the black keys for a picture of homely pleasures. Here reveals itself the entire fruitfulness of the technical setting, which—who could believe it?—precisely by the limitation of the motive, approaches very near to characteristic art and realism of presentation. Here is a rich field opened to technical subjectivity. Personality is very variously displayed in the setting of a technical idea. Contrast with Clementi, who scarcely ever shows any specific sense of character in a motive, such a man as Hummel, who on theoretic grounds calculates out the utmost technical possibilities of a motive; or Czerny, who in a practical manner attains the same many-sidedness; or Cramer, who was the first to find his way back to music from technique; or Moscheles, Chopin, Schumann, who cannot think technique without feeling character.
Deep and mysterious is this connection between the Étude and its musical setting. Like the fugue the simplest Étude goes back to those elemental foundations which cannot fail of their impression, even if practically nothing is composed upon them. I hear some simple scale-étude of Bertini played, with the smooth harmonies on which it is built. There is nothing in the piece, no soul reveals itself to me, and yet there is a weird charm in these eternal ground-motives of all music, and in their tonics and dominants which are so to speak anchored in eternity. The dull man is soon wearied by them, but the sensitive man instantly responds. At this point the Étude sinks down to the great mother of all music: like the fugue it springs directly out of Nature. With the consciousness of character the Étude grows tuneful. In the studies of Moscheles, in the Symphonic Études of Schumann, in Chopin’s studies, art creates what Nature created. From the technical theme rises a certain spiritual aroma, reminding us of a tune, a scene, a landscape; the tune condenses itself in the return of the technical motive; it collects itself all the more narrowly and closely, in proportion as all contrasts and secondary tunes keep their distance. It is a spiritual melody, set in a firm frame, as condensed as neither the free fantasia form, nor the thematic sonata, nor the canonic fugue, had ever presented it. The tune is so concentrated that it cannot dispense with the frame, or it would fly to pieces. It has no capacity of transference; it prefers to exist as a fragment ready-made.
It is thus that the Étude fixes the form. It favours fixed and limited technical models, which fit mosaic-wise into each other. It is opposed to huge, Beethoven-like emotions and their expression; its horizon does not pass beyond two pages. It is still further removed from Bach’s method, which depended on plain thematic development; it loves the speedy and the limited, and confines itself entirely to the practical. It penetrates into all works in which technical brilliance gives a false impression of the contents, or in which the greatness of the contents only finds its last expression by technique.
The technical setting of the form, and the technical expression, pass over entirely into the consciousness of the time, and create new works in chamber-music, opera, and orchestra.
Compare the development of a sonata by Weber with that of one by Beethoven; for example, Weber’s fourth in E minor with Beethoven’s Op. 28—two sonatas which in original idea, a soft melodic tune, were not so unlike as they turned out to be. In Beethoven the first melody develops itself on a 3/4 rhythm, which begins and ends naturally; the second theme is an unforced contrast to the first; gradually figurations attach themselves, which are natural offshoots of them, intertwining themselves without losing their original dependence; all grows logically out of itself; the end is given in the beginning, and the progress in the variation. In Weber, on the contrary, each piece is carried through by itself: the whole is no organism but a mere pasticcio. The sensitive first subject is treated in its naked melodic beauty; a semiquaver passage is attached to it; a bald enharmonic study leads on to the second theme, which treats its soothing character from many sides; and only the “free” section brings the whole a little closer together. And we know how even in the best men of this period the great creative organism, in which every part conditions its own subordinate part, gives place to a mere isolation and to total want of system. In the concertos, after the traditional mutual compliments of orchestra and piano, the solo instrument starts, with surprising suddenness, on its passages, which are strung together from étude-pieces, selected haphazard. At the conventional places the curtain is withdrawn, and the whole glitter of technique is displayed. The harsh transitions, the quick returns, the jostling fugues, are not only a peculiarity, say, of Schumann—they are the style of the time. They are the framing style of a time which does not care for the want of restraint that attends great emotions.
Its preference is for constructive logic in detail. More genuine piano music than the Étude there cannot be. The essence of the piano has in it become music. Matter and aim here alone determine the form, which no longer speaks merely in a universal musical language.
The piano follows the lines of the time, which pursues technical purity in all things. In the representative arts certain styles were long seen to predominate, which for limited periods were indifferently transferred to all objects without respect to matter or aim. Renaissance, Gothic, antique, exhibit their churches, their tombs, their doors, their tables, their cupboards, their keys, whether they are bosses or reliefs, marbles or bronzes. In our century technique begins to speak its first word: a chair is to be a chair; a carpet shall be constructed with a view to the aim of carpets; a vase must speak in accordance with the material of vases; and painting must in the first instance be painting. A cupboard is not an entrance to a temple; a table leg not a statue. These are intrusions which art has not often experienced in its history. With music the case was not dissimilar. The fugal style ruled once so mightily that it drew church, dance, salon, fantasia, tune, all indifferently, under its sway. The good fugue was a good tune, and the best tune could only be expressed in contrapuntal form. Now, however, the emancipation had taken place. The organ no longer worked necessarily along with the piano, nor the song with the violin; and the orchestra became conscious of its power as a totality. What the Venetians had once timidly begun was now carried into actual fact; and the artistic form of the étude was the seal of this individualising process. The much-praised Paganini had no longer, like Corelli, to prompt the piano, as far as its content was concerned, from the violin outwardly. Paganini-études, by Schumann, were strict piano-pieces, which as far as form went borrowed nothing from Paganini, and in matter only a groundwork of notes. They strive towards the brilliancy of Paganini’s execution—that astonishing, spiritual technique, which aroused so wonderfully the emulation of a Liszt. And in turn there passed from the piano the brilliancy of a technique which inspired the orchestra to its own special triumphs. The “Queen Mab,” the “Mephistopheles,” the “Feuer-Zauber,” and the “Valkyries’ Ride” did not need to envy the piano. Yet without the fame of the Étude they would never have been so brilliant.
Clementi. Engraved by Neidl
after Hardy.
We are now coming nearer the personalities themselves. It is no long stride from the virtuosos to the romantic writers; the latter are only to be explained by reference to the former. We pass slowly from the domain of pure virtuosity to that of compositions of deeper meaning; from the realm of the teacher to that of the poet; from piano purism to the longing after poetic interdependence; from the noise of concerts to the intimate retirement of the home.
In Clementi these signs appeared first. What he had to say was little; but what he had to teach was only the more in consequence. He collected, he tested, he drew out his experiences, and never willingly abandoned the historical attitude. This was the first recoil on the classical period. Clementi’s Studies were so fruitful that even a Beethoven was not unmoved by them; although of course there were many who opposed themselves to his speciality, the passages in thirds and sixths for one hand. Mozart hated this unrest; he aimed at a graceful and easy style. But the growth of technique soon shook off this old-fashioned rococo method; it aimed at universal conquest.
As Clementi still lives in what we may call his “grand-pupils,” so his Gradus ad Parnassum has remained the father of all Étude-works, often reprinted, often re-edited. It is easy to recognise in it its antiquated constituent parts. No principle of distinction is adopted between the fingering of diatonic and chromatic scales. In his directions Clementi begins his chromatics with E. The Études move in a peculiar middle region between compositions and exercises. Single Études, like the splendid Presto in F sharp minor, reach the heights of a Cramer (Simrock, 24). He even provides genuine fugues in order that the fugal style may also be practised. In one Étude (Simrock, 38) cantabile and triplets are mingled as exercises. Often again three pieces appear together as a suite—a patriarchal retention of old customs. Others again are mere dry and insipid instruction-exercises. We follow with pleasure the process by which fixed technical problems gained in content as time went on. For example, the change of finger on one key is in Clementi a mere tedious motive with three notes only (Simrock, 20). In Cramer (Pauer, 41 ff) is already perceived the charm which short held notes may introduce into this monotonous exercise; and the drollery which a change of fingers as the characteristic motive carries concealed in itself, gives the character to the piece. Chopin, in his well-known C major study (Op. 10, 7), gives us a good example of this scheme of fingering, which is carried out strictly, the alternation of thumb and first finger never being interfered with, even on the black keys, in spite of the various awkward chords that occur. Thus he gives perfect freedom to the piquant turns and droll character of the piece without to any extent spoiling its effectiveness as an Étude.
Over against the Gradus of Clementi, as a remarkable collection of the most varied pieces, stand certain smaller studies of a more defined physiognomy. The well-known “Préludes et Exercices” are written in all the keys, and keep on the whole to the scale-motive. The “Méthode du Pianoforte,” with its fifty lessons, collects all kinds of airs and old pieces, provided with marks of fingering—which, however, are very much behind those of Czerny. The book is noteworthy as one of the first important attempts to make use of already existing pieces, not the work of the collector, as material for studies. Very soon the sonatas of Beethoven appear in these collections, where they are arranged according to their difficulty. Here are Handel, Corelli, Mozart, Couperin, Scarlatti, Pleyel, Dussek, Haydn, Paradies, and the Bachs.
Clementi sowed his wild oats in a series of preludes and cadenzas which he published (Op. 19) under the title of “Characteristic Music.” These were written in the styles of certain masters and other famous clavier-teachers, such as Haydn, Kozeluch, Vanhall, Mozart, Sterkel, and Clementi himself. It was half a jest, and a very moderately successful one; but it is worth noticing as a sign of an interpretative and compiling tendency.
Among the hundred sonatas and sonatinas, for one or two players, which Clementi left behind, there is not a single one without interest or utility from the standpoint of instruction; but from that of content there is at most only one which can to-day attract us by its originality or genius. This is the so-called Dido sonata, dedicated to Cherubini; and even in it the genius is cold. In the other sonatas we see the body of a Beethoven without the soul. It is Scarlatti once again—trivial and soul-less; but unlike Scarlatti, who cut short what had a short life, it is pretentious in its eternal repetitions. It is a manufacture of music, nourished by the didactic spirit: compared with the full effects of Hummel it is an empty style.
J. N. Hummel.
Engraved by Fr. Wrenk (1766-1830), after the portrait by Catherine von Escherich
(beginning of 19th century)
The index to Cramer’s works does not look promising. The Variations, Impromptus, Rondos, Divertissements; the Victory of Kutusoff; the Two Styles, ancient and modern; the Rendezvous à la Chasse; un jour de Printemps; Hors d’œuvre, grande sonate dans le style de Clementi; or the combined composition, in the fashion of the time, by Cramer, Hummel, Kalkbrenner and Moscheles, of variations on Rule Britannia—all these are equally unattractive. The hundred and five sonatas are almost unknown. Cramer’s importance lies entirely in his Études, which have been frequently reprinted and arranged. Of the various editions the finest is Pauer’s English “édition de luxe,” which is adorned with a fine engraving of Cramer. Here he is all genius and sensibility. The somewhat highly-coloured nose, on which he himself used to jest, attracts no notice in the portrait. “It was Bacchus who put his thumb there,” he would say; “ce diable de Bacchus!” The whole delicate spirit of Cramer breathes in these Études, which to-day are unforgotten and unsurpassed in their kind. Their instructive value lies in the isolation of the technical exercise, which is made less exacting by skilful introduction of contrary motion at the proper point, while the most noble musical forms mount up from them. They are pieces full of character, and without titles, to be heartily reverenced. On the other hand “Cramer’s Pianoforte School,” which went through countless editions in his own time, has now become useless. The most noteworthy thing we find in it is a preface on preludes and codas, which, unlike Clementi’s, does not simply copy the approved models, but sets forth theoretically a series of “styles” in such improvisations, from the simplest chords to melodic development. In the period of public improvisations such instructions were not without their use. Preluding is still a “style” with us; codas we excuse ourselves. But in those days a player saw nothing out of place in the direct connection of such free inventions with the piece before him. And Cramer was still old-fashioned enough not to object to interweave with pieces of Mozart all kinds of flourishes—often, as Moscheles assures us, trivial indeed.
Over against Clementi, the genius of teaching, and Cramer, the genius of technique, stands Hummel as the inventor of the modern piano-exercise. Dussek had already, by his unusually full collection of exercises, accustomed the public ear to the new state of things; but Hummel brought the charm of the pianoforte and the effects of the seven octaves within the reach of all. What our amateurs, from the days of Chopin, know so well, that full and satisfying tone, that blazing colouration, is all in Hummel.
In his huge Piano School a combination in Hummel of the old master and the modern player is very visible. He systematises fingering into the following divisions: (1) advancing with simple finger-order in easy figure-successions; (2) passing the thumb under other fingers or other fingers over the thumb; (3) leaving out one or more fingers; (4) changing a finger with another on the same key; (5) stretches and leaps; (6) thumb and fourth finger on the black notes; (7) the passing of a long finger over a shorter, or of a short under a long; (8) change of different fingers on a key, with repeated or not repeated touch, and often the repeated use of the same finger on several keys; (9) alternation, interweaving, or crossing of the hands; and, finally (10), the legato style. A stupendous work indeed; and for every head of the fingering, for every technical possibility, a number of examples are introduced, with the completest calculation of permutations ever seen. There are in all two thousand two hundred examples, and more than a hundred exercises develop the possibilities of playing between C and G. Before every exercise stand the harmonic ground-chords. And thus comes to pass the great miracle, that by means of the utmost conceivable combinations, by means of the hundred chromatic subtleties, musical figures are formed which no composer had previously invented, and which lead on to sound-effects never before suspected. In the examples of an exercise-book lay undreamed-of novelties in piano-composition.
Hummel himself had a very modest opinion of his own compositions. He knew that he had made no advance in the path of Beethoven; and that no greatness was possible outside of it. “It was a serious moment for me,” he said once at Weimar to Ferdinand Hiller, “when Beethoven appeared. Was I to try to follow in the footsteps of such a genius? For a while I did not know what I stood on; but finally I said to myself that it was best to remain true to myself and my own nature.” With this determination Hummel founded the new, rich school of piano-playing, delighting in sound, and revelling in execution, in which even seriousness and passion are expressed with pomp and circumstance. Brilliancy has expelled grace, and the pompous the lightness of the dance.
Like most of his contemporaries he composed at the piano, making pencil-notes the while. But he heard it as though he were his own audience. “When I sit at the piano,” he said, “I am standing at the same time in yonder corner as a listener, and what does not appeal to me there is not written.” This was not Beethoven’s method. Such a conscious striving after effect was not consistent with absolute sincerity. The concerto was the mainspring of Hummel’s creativeness. The innumerable concertos and concert-fantasias take the first rank among Hummel’s works. They appeared also with quartet-accompaniment, and also with a second piano, or arranged for one piano. He wrote, unlike Clementi, far more concerto-pieces than sonatas. All kinds of Variations, Rondos, Capriccios, and “Amusements,” gratified his publishers. He wrote dances in the profusion characteristic of the time. The Sonata in A flat for two pianos is precisely in harmony with the age. It is only in the second half of the century that original works of this kind begin to lose vogue, while the duet confines itself to the drawing-room. The Duet attained its highest point in Schubert.
Hummel in his later years.
From a steel engraving by C. Mayer.
Hummel’s works bristle with sound-effects. We observe many full chords, as in the orchestra, when all the groups of single instruments are employed in full harmony. The treble of the instrument is for the first time properly used in the grand style, a noble contrast to the melodic, burlesque, dæmonic, firework style of Steibelt and the rest. We meet the genuine pianoforte charm of sharp chromatic successions, where a Bacchanalian tumult of colour appears to sound a rattling fire of sensuous effects. Even modulations are conceived from the side of technical effectiveness; and chromatic insertions or sudden third-passages, charming us in the vigorous voice of the piano, are of common occurrence. The various registers of the piano, the bass, the middle, and the treble, are applied to surprising effects; a note of one register suddenly thrown into the other gives a colour of its own. Passages rapidly gliding through the various registers give a glittering spectrum. Take, for example, such a development as that of the second solo conclusion in the last movement of the A minor concerto. Here, starting at the con dolcezza, we find the pianoforte bringing into play most of the effective methods of the concerto style. The simply-harmonised cantabile, for the solo instrument alone; the repetition of the melodic phrases by the clarinet, etc., with an arpeggio accompaniment on the pianoforte; the ornamentation of the phrase by delicate scale-passages; the closing lines of bravura for the right hand; the showy chromatic scales, accented by superimposed thirds on the first of every group of four semiquavers; the sequences of semiquavers descending chromatically; the string of shakes for both hands which introduce the final point d’orgue (four bars in strict tempo); all these are commonplaces of Hummel’s style, and are of interest as an illustration of the fashionable music of the time.
A Canonic Impromptu, by J. N. Hummel,
from the original edition of his Pianoforte School.
The concerto pieces of Hummel stand in respect of intrinsic value below the solo pieces. His great concerto fantasia, “Oberon’s Magic Horn,” is a banal piece of bravura with artistic references to Oberon. The part of it demanding most execution is the great storm with its thunder and lightning on the piano—a somewhat different performance from the tame storm in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. But the solo pieces also are of unequal merit. Fashionable compositions, like the Polonaise “La Bella Capricciosa,” which was then eagerly heard, are no longer tolerated. Hummel at his best, as we know him in his immortal Sextet, lives in certain delicate turns, such as are common enough in Wagner’s earlier operas, but were then a style of the time, making use of the melody both of Mozart and of modern days. The better Hummel is also seen in certain Schumann-like movements, full of fire and feeling, such as the fresh pulsating Scherzo “all’antico” of Sonata Op. 106, or the concluding movement of Fantasia Op. 18. Perhaps the Bagatelles (Op. 107) are his most interesting clavier-piece. Even to-day they show no sign of age; there is not a dead note in them. In them the pupil of Mozart is seen in the dainty melodic lines, such as an Audran has revived in our day; but the forerunner of Liszt is equally visible. In the last Bagatelle, the “Rondo all’Ongarese,” he stands precisely between the two epochs. The true spirit of nationality, as Dussek so happily applied it in his sonatas, mingles with classical reminiscences, as the concluding phrase clearly shows. Fugato episodes, derived from tradition, are interwoven with surprising anticipations of that method of variation which works by diatonic movement—a method very familiar to us from Liszt’s Rhapsodies. Hummel then is a kind of Janus.
Czerny. Lithograph by Kriehuber, 1833.
Much more simple was Czerny, king among teachers, whose life and work were taken up with the enforcement of one great principle. Every piece must be played in that manner which is most natural and applicable to the case in hand, and which is fixed partly by the notes before us and partly by the execution. His genius for teaching was so cultivated that in a moment he could devise the right study for a student who exhibited any defect. How precisely he worked in such matters a glance at his “Higher Steps in Virtuosity” will show. The themes of the Études in the third volume are called: (1) seven notes against two or three; (2) five against three; (3) five against three in another manner; (4) passing of the fingers over the thumb; (5) passing under of the thumb with a quick alternation of the stretching and retraction of the fingers; (6) motion of certain fingers while the others remain stationary; (7) broken octaves legato. This is not the grammar of Hummel with its theoretical chess-play of possibilities; it is the method of Toussaint-Langenscheidt, which invents its exercises from the data of experience. In the great Piano School the exercises are always continued in the course of the instruction. The scales are recommended for daily preliminary practice, and duet-playing is drawn into the circle of regular exercise. It is, of course, impossible to review the whole enormous crowd of his works. In addition to the numerous general practice-pieces, which appeared in manifold combinations, there are the special pieces also: the school of velocity, of legato and staccato, of ornaments, of the left hand, of fugue-playing, of virtuoso-performance; the art of preluding, the introduction to fantasia playing, octave-studies, the practice of the full common chord and of the chord of the seventh in broken figures; and everything besides. It is a mighty arsenal of mechanical appliances. His works are numbered up to Op. 856; but all except the Studies are lost in oblivion; they are mere hack-work. Even the greater Studies are, in musical value, inferior to Cramer’s. Czerny’s great collections from previous masters are the work of a practical historian. Such are the arrangement of the Wohltemperiertes Klavier, the edition of Scarlatti, the arrangements of Beethoven, Mozart, or Mendelssohn for two or four hands; and the innumerable selections of the most brilliant passages from the works of masters from Scarlatti and Bach to Thalberg and Liszt. His practical History of Piano-playing—the first that ever appeared—was thrown into a didactic form and appended to the great “Art of Execution.” Every composer is treated from the point of view of playing, under six heads. Clementi is to be played with a steady hand, firm touch and tone, distinct and flowing execution, precise declamation; Cramer and Dussek cantabilmente, without glaring effects, with gentle legato and the due use of the pedal; Mozart with less pedal, clearly, staccato, with spirit and vigour; Beethoven and Ries characteristically, passionately, melodiously, with a view to the tout ensemble; Hummel, Meyerbeer, and Moscheles brilliantly, rapidly, and gracefully, with definition in the proper parts, and intelligent but elegant declamation. Thalberg, Liszt, and Chopin, the great innovators, form a class apart. Czerny’s astonishing genius for instruction embraces the whole field of the clavier, with a many-sided capacity that seems almost more than human. A greater teacher there never was than he. He gathers all into his net, even the works of his own pupils; he practises everything, even setting it for three or four pianos; he arranges everything, even isolated passages of great masters; he composes everything, even penny variations and Chinese rondos.
In Kalkbrenner we see the lowest type of the time. Externally a fine gentleman and artistic man of the world, he is inwardly hollow and vapid. It is hard even to give an idea of this extreme emptiness; but it is well illustrated in such a piece as the “Charmes de Berlin.” This great virtuoso won his triumphs in the worst kinds of salon-music as well as with all sorts of Études, Concertos, and Sonatas. Le Rêve, Le Fou, La Solitude, Dernières Pensées Musicales, La Mélancolie et La Gaité, La Brigantine, are some of these detestable compositions. But his opera fantasias touch the very nadir. Here a sort of sanction is given to an utter want of taste. After largo introductions, full of feeling, he slices favourite melodies into passages, till the contour of the air is utterly destroyed, and the commonest cadenzas are flung higgledy-piggledy into their artistic forms, and so we rush off into a sweep-dance. The fantasia, once the freest outcome of the musical soul, becomes a wretched conglomeration of fragments of Études. Kalkbrenner once remarked, as Ferdinand Hiller tells us, “Ze Tance is a tream, a referie; it begins with lofe, passion, despair, and it ends wid a military march.” The story is true enough.
Lithograph by Eichens, after Vogel, 1825.
To imagine that with Weber we already pass over into the fairy-land of romance is, alas, a mistake. He would doubtless have made the transit had not an early death overtaken him in the midst of the uprising of genius that began in 1820. But, as it is, his piano music belongs to the technically rich but spiritually empty style of the time. If he did not still live as operatic composer and orchestral poet, his piano-compositions would be forgotten. His technique, successful as it was, is never so rich as that of the majority of the virtuosos of his time. It is not hard to perceive that he recurs again and again to certain motives. The ornamentation which was earlier called “Anschlag”—the preparatory striking of the under and over note before the main note, which is seen brilliantly exemplified in the Rondo in E flat major—the S-curves of the melody, which are a simple re-arrangement of this “anschlag”—the “pizzicato” notes over embellishing or broken accompaniments—held notes over struck chords—broken combinations of three notes, ranging themselves chain-like after one another—these are his somewhat limited repertoire. In the Polonaises in E flat major and in E major, in numerous operatic variations, in Écossaises and popular national dances, he pays his tribute to the time. But there is no local colouring in the variations on the Russian “Schöne Minka,” or on a Gipsy song. Dussek and Hummel were in this point his superiors. The intellectual themes, like the second of the C major concerto, show the greatness of Weber as behind a mask. The favourite concerto Op. 79, if judged by a severe standard, is only a fashionable if very clever and successful mosaic of neat Études with the requisite melody. The daintiest mosaic piece, the March, is given to orchestra alone, as if Weber had felt compelled to enter his proper abode. Liszt perceived this when he played in the concerto, and played the tutti brilliantly with the instruments, and thus exhibited a remarkable tour de force. The four sonatas, often utterly trivial, are in the main a congeries which perishes by its eclecticism. As with all his contemporaries, the first movements, those touchstones of the inner meaning, are the weakest. The subjects are thin, the framework is that of the drawing-room; and the other movements have a higher stylistic value. The powerful rhythm of the second movement in the C major, the excellent minuet-scherzo, the stirring perpetuum mobile as last movement are admirable single ideas. But the importance rises only slowly; the fourth sonata has, not inner meaning, but a certain majesty. Yet what is this romance, this octave-scherzo with its rapid waltz-trio, this masquerade of elves, to Chopin, to Schumann, or even to Mendelssohn? Weber’s most popular piece is also his purest—the Invitation to the Dance. It is a pot-pourri, such as the age loved; and the very title is à la mode. But the conception of forming the introductory adagio as a dialogue, the brilliant advance from the ravishing waltz to Bacchanalian tumult the pure and not virtuoso-like colouring, which rests on this happy invention, raise the work far above all that is merely fashionable.
Moscheles in his youth.
The true man of the transition is Moscheles—double-souled, with his concessions to modishness on the one side, and on the other his wealth of invention and his musical intensity. He was born out of due time. He ought to have left virtuosity behind him, in order to be able to give full play to his characteristic, not undramatic, and broad-lined art. To-day he is almost forgotten; no opera, as in Weber’s case, preserved his fame to our times. But his works more than repay study; if our pianists would once again take up his C major concerto, they would be amazed.
Moscheles, later, 1859.
In his youth he composed Variations on the Alexander March, with which he was compelled, much against his will, when a ripe composer, to dazzle the world. It was one of the most popular of concert pieces. It is not true that in later years he altered his style and wrote more soberly. His very sober Melancholy Sonata (Op. 49), written fairly early, in one movement, with its charming accompaniment figure, reminds us of the Parsifal tremoli. And on the other hand, a later work, the Danish, Scotch, and Irish Fantasias (this latter on the Last Rose of Summer), are pot-pourris in full modish style. What would the Virginal Book composers of English and Scotch folk-songs have said to these variations? In order to avoid the fashionable appearance, several movements are even written in various tempi, as in a sonata. In his A flat minor Ballade, on the contrary, he has with astonishing dramatic force struck the legendary tone in a free and genuine manner, in a sort of romantic rondo.
Moscheles, who was the first master to arrange for piano an orchestral score by another writer (that of the Fidelio, by commission from Beethoven), was unable to escape the operatic rechauffées of the time. His speciality was the putting together of different operatic airs, which formed the favourite repertoire of a singer. He wrote such fantasias on the favourite pieces of Pasta, Henriette Sonntag, Jenny Lind, and Malibran. They are commonplace enough. Yet this same Malibran, after her sudden death, he honoured in an “Hommage,” which was one of his finest pieces. There is in it an unearthly power of invention, a dramatic life, as if drawn from the stage; spirit breathes in every bar; and the interest is sustained to the final sorrowfully rising cross-passages, which strangely forebode the longings of Tristan for the sea.
He wrote many drawing-room pieces, which bore the usual significant titles—Charmes de Paris, La Tenerezza, Jadis et aujourd’hui, la Petite Babillarde. Similar titles he superscribed to his Études, such as his three Allegri di Bravura and his characteristic Studies (Op. 95). Among the former are La Forza and Il Capriccio; among the latter are Juno, Terpsichore, Moonlight at Sea, Dream, and Anguish. In these the seeker after mode will be disappointed. They are pieces worthy of Schumann in power of form; half exercises, half characteristic pieces, reaching that height of technique where air and étude unite in the closest bonds. The work which Cramer began has reached the height of artistic achievement. For here, where meet knowledge, technical sense of form, and poetic conception, the peculiar musical vein of the age is found. The fugal “Widerspruch” [contradiction] is an artistic construction that stands alone; “Anguish” is a penetrating tuneful picture, which once more reminds us of Wagner; it is a foretaste of Siegmund’s flight or of the Valkyrie Prologue.
The untitled Études Op. 70, which rank as his best work, stand out as the forerunners of the Studies Op. 95. There is the same delicate characteristic sense; they are a gallery of tone pictures, among which the twelfth Étude in B flat minor is never to be forgotten. It is a Night-Piece in the style of Schumann. But all is calculated for human fingers, not for those of Liszt, like Op. 95. And here we feel patiently after the essential nature of the musical Étude. We observe the inner relation between mechanical and spiritual motion. Expression and difficulty grow alongside; the straining of the fingers is involuntarily the straining of the soul; their smooth gliding is the gliding of emotion, and the stress of mind is loosened in the muscles of the fingers as they move over the keys. It is thus that the irreconcilable at last meet.
Parisian and London Pianists at the beginning of the 19th century.
L. Adam. Kalkbrenner. Cramer.
[121] Weber conducted the Philharmonic in 1826, in which year he died.
[122] This sort of thing is by no means without example in our own time. The difficulty is very commonly solved in English towns even of the size of Frankfort, by having pianos sent from London.
[123] But the best bred evening party still (in London at least) shouts at the top of its voice when it “hears a master play.” See “Punch,” and Du Maurier, passim. A striking illustration of the vulgarity of modern manners.
[124] The author means “Pearls of the Ocean,” “Fairy Revels,” “Convent Bells,” and such like.
[125] It is convenient to refer these descriptions to Chopin’s Studies, though of course they can be paralleled elsewhere. Cf. Chopin’s Studies in C, in A minor, in F, etc.
Waltz by Schubert. Berlin Royal Bibliothek.