III
Keyboard music now tended more and more away from the old chorale and polyphonic style, in which eighteenth century music was ‘thought,’ toward a style which could take its rise from a keyed instrument with pedals. Weber and Schubert achieved only at times this complete freedom in their clavier music. It remained for Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin to reveal the peculiar richness of the piano. Their styles are widely differentiated, yet all truly pianistic and supplementary one to the other. The differences can be derived from the personalities and the outward lives of the three men. Schumann was the unrestrained enthusiast, who was prevented by an accident from becoming a practising virtuoso and was obliged to do his work in his work-room and his inner consciousness. Liszt was, above all, the man of the world, the man who loved to dominate people by his art and understood supremely well how to do it. Chopin was by nature too sensitive ever to be a public virtuoso; he reflected the Paris of the thirties in terms of the individual soul where Liszt reflected it in terms of the crowd. Each of them loved his piano ‘as an Arab his steed,’ in Liszt’s words. Hence Schumann’s music, while supremely pianistic, has little concern for outward effect, and was, in point of fact, slow in winning wide popularity. With an influential magazine and a virtuoso wife to preach and practise his music in the public ear, Schumann nevertheless had to see the more facile Mendelssohn win all the fame and outward success. Schumann’s reputation was for many years an ‘underground’ one. But he was too much a Romantic enthusiast to make any concessions to the superficial taste of the concert hall or drawing room, and continued writing music which sounded badly unless it was very well played, and even then rather austerely separated the sheep from the goats among its hearers. Schumann is, above all, the pianists’ pianist. The musical value and charm of his works is inextricably interwoven with the executant’s delight in mastering it.
Liszt is, of course, no less the technician than Schumann—in fact, much more completely the technician in his earlier years. But his was less the technique of pleasing the performer than of pleasing the audience. With a wizardry that has never been surpassed he hit upon those resources of the piano which would dazzle and overpower. Very frequently he adopts the too easy method of getting his effect, the crashing repeated chord and the superficial fireworks. None of Schumann’s technical difficulties are without their absolute musical value; all of Liszt’s, whether they convey the highest poetry or the utmost banality, are directed toward the applause of the crowd.
Chopin is much more than the elegant salon pianist, which is the part of him that most frequently conditions his external form. He was the sensitive harpstring of his time, translating all its outward passions into terms of the inward emotions. Where Schumann had fancy Chopin had sentiment or emotion. Chopin had little of Schumann’s vivid interest in experimenting in pianistic resources for their own sake. Even his Études are so preëminently musical, and have so little relation to a pianistic method, that they show little technical enthusiasm in the man. Chopin was interested in the technical possibilities of the piano only as a means of expressing his abounding sentiments and emotions. It is because he has so much to express and such a great variety of it that his music is of highest importance in the history of piano technique, and is probably the most subtly difficult of all pianoforte music. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there are twenty pianists who can play the Liszt studies to one who can play those of Chopin. The technical demands he makes upon his instrument are always just enough to present his musical message and no more. Though he was utterly and solely of the piano (as neither Schumann nor Liszt was) he had neither the executant nor the public specifically in mind when he composed.
Schumann’s first twenty-six published works (covering \ most of the decade from 1830 to 1840) were almost exclusively for the piano. From the beginning he showed his instinct for its technical possibilities. Opus 1, published in November, 1831, was a set of variations, the theme being the musical ‘spelling’ of the name of a woman friend of his, the ‘Countess Abegg,’ perhaps as much a product of the imagination as was the music itself. The variations show the crudities of dilettantism, as well as its enthusiasm and courage. They were far from being the formal mechanical variations of classical clavier music. No change of the theme but has a musical and expressive beauty apart from its technical ingenuity. Especially they reveal a vivid sense of what the piano could do as distinguished from what the clavichord or harpsichord could do. Much better was opus 2, the Papillons, or ‘Butterflies,’ which is still popular on concert programs. All that is typical of Schumann the pianist is to be found in some measure in this opus 2. For, besides the vivid joy they reveal in experimentation with pianistic effects, there is the fact that they came, by way of Schumann’s colorful imagination, out of literature. Here was romanticism going full tilt. From his earliest years Schumann had adored his Jean Paul. He had equally adored his piano. When he read the one he heard the other echoing. This was precisely the origin of the Papillons, as Schumann confessed in letters to his friends. The various dances of opus 2 are the portions of the masked dance of the conclusion of Jean Paul’s Flegeljahre—not as program music, nor even as pictorial music, but in the vaguest way the creation of the sensitive musician under the stimulus of literature. Schumann attached no especial value to the fanciful titles which he gave much of his piano music; in his later revisions of it he usually withdrew them altogether. He always insisted that the music and not the literature was the important thing in his music. The names which betitle his music were often afterthoughts. They were nearly always given in a playful spirit. The literary music of Schumann is not in the least music which expresses literature, but only music written by a sensitive musician under the creative stimulus of literature.
The ‘Butterflies’ of opus 2 (Papillons) are by no means the flittering, showy butterflies common to salons of that day. They are free and fanciful dances, rich in harmonic and technical device, and rich especially in buoyant high spirits. The canons, the free melodic counterpoint, the recurrence of passages to give unity to the series, the broken or rolling chords, the spicy rhythmical devices, the blending of voices in a manner quite different from the polyphonic style of old, and the use of single anticipatory or suspended notes for changes of key—these gave evidence of what was to be the nature of Schumann’s contribution to piano literature.
From now on until 1839, when Schumann began to be absorbed in song writing, there appeared at leisurely intervals piano works from his study, few of which are anything short of creations of genius. In the Intermezzi his technical preoccupations were given fuller play; in the Davidsbündler Tänze our old friends ‘Florestan,’ ‘Eusebius,’ and ‘Meister Raro’ contribute pieces in their own special vein, all directed to the good cause of ‘making war on the Philistines’—in other words, asserting the claims of lovely music against those of mechanical music, and of technically scholarly music against those of sentimental salon music. Following this work came the Toccata, one of Schumann’s earliest serious works later revised—an amazing achievement in point of technical virtuosity, based on a deep knowledge of Bach and polyphonic procedure, yet revealing the new Schumann in every bar. It proved that the young revolutionist who was emphasizing musical beauty over musical learning was not doing so because he was technically unequipped.
He now wrote the Carnaval, perhaps the most popular of Schumann’s piano works, with Schumann’s friends, including Clara Wieck, Chopin, and Paganini, appearing among the ‘musical pictures.’ Schumann’s humor is growing more noisy, for in the last movement the whole group join in an abusive ‘march against the Philistines,’ to the tune of the old folk-song, ‘When Grandfather Married Grandmother.’ Why should an avowed revolutionist take as his patron theme a song which praises the good old times ‘when people knew naught of Ma’m’selle and Madame,’ and deprecates change? But the romanticists, especially of Schumann’s type, prided themselves on nothing more than their historical sense and their kinship with the past—especially the German past.
Next came more ambitious piano works, and interspersed among them the Phantasiestücke (‘Fantasy Pieces’), containing some of Schumann’s most characteristic numbers, and the brilliant ‘Symphonic Études,’ masterpieces one and all. And still later the ‘Novelettes,’ the Faschingsswank, the well-known ‘Scenes from Childhood,’ and the Kreisleriana. This group Schumann felt to be his finest work. It was taken, like the Papillons, from literature, this time E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales of the eccentric Kapellmeister Kreisler.
It is worth while to recall Hoffmann’s story, as an example of the sort of literature to which Schumann responded musically. In Dr. Bie’s words:[93] ‘The garden into which the author leads us is full of tone and song. The stranger comes up to the young squire and tells him of many distant and unknown lands, and strange men and animals; and his speech dies away into a wonderful tone, in which he expresses unknown and mysterious things, intelligibly, yet without words. But the castle maiden follows his enticements, and they meet every midnight at the old tree, none venturing to approach too near the strange melodies that sound therefrom. Then the castle maiden lies pierced through under the tree, and the lute is broken, but from her blood grow mosses of wonderful color over the stone, and the young Chrysostom hears the nightingale, which thereafter makes its nest and sings its song in the tree. At home his father is accompanying his old songs on the clavicymbal, and songs, mosses, and castle maiden are all fused in his mind into one. In the garden of tone and song all sorts of internal melodies rise in his heart, and the murmur of the words gives them their breath. He tries to set them to the clavier, but they refuse to come forth from their hiding places. He closes the instrument, and listens to see whether the songs will not now sound forth more clearly and brightly; for “I knew well that the tones must dwell there as if enchanted.” Out of a world like this floated all sorts of compositions in Schumann’s mind.... A thousand threads run from all sides into this intimate web in which the whole lyrical devotion of a musical soul is interwoven. The piano is the orchestra of the heart. The joys and sorrows which are expressed in these pieces were never put into form with more sovereign power. For the external form Bach gave the impulse; for the content, Hoffmann. The garlanded roses of the middle section of No. 1, the shimmering blossoms of the ‘inverted’ passage in the Langsamer of No. 2, the immeasurable depth of the emotions in the slow pieces (4 and 6), the bass unfettered by accent, in the last bars of No. 8, leading down to final whisperings, all are among the happiest of inspirations.’
It will be noticed that most of the piano works of Schumann which we have mentioned are series of short pieces. Some of the series, notably the Papillons, the Carnaval, and Kreisleriana, are held loosely together by a literary idea. The twenty little pieces which constitute the Carnaval have, moreover, an actual relation to each other, in that all of them contain much the same melodic intervals. Three typical sequences of intervals, which Schumann called ‘Sphinxes,’ are the groundwork of the Carnaval, but very subtly disguised. That Pierrot, Arlequin, the Valse Noble, Florestan, and Papillons are thus closely related is likely to escape even the careful listener; and these are perhaps the clearest examples. But this device of ‘Sphinxes,’ and other devices for uniting a long series of short pieces, really accomplish Schumann’s purpose. On the other hand, they never give to the works in question the broad design and the epic continuity of the classical sonata at its best. The Beethoven sonatas opus 101 and 110, for example, are carved out of one piece. The Schumann cycles are many jewels exquisitely matched and strung together. The skill in so putting them together was peculiarly his, and is the more striking in that each little piece is separately perfect.
In general, it may be said that Schumann was at his best when working on this plan. The power over large forms came to him only later, after most of his pianoforte music had been written. The two sonatas, one in F sharp and one in G minor, both belong to the early period; and both, in spite of most beautiful passages, are, from the standpoint of artistic perfection, unsatisfactory. In neither are form and content properly matched. Exception must be made, however, for the Fantasia in C major, opus 17. Here, what was uncertainty or insincerity becomes an heroic freedom by the depth of ideas and the power of imagination which so found expression. The result is a work of immeasurable grandeur, unique in pianoforte literature.
After his marriage to Clara Wieck Schumann gave most of his attention to music for voice and for orchestra. In this later life belongs the concerto for piano and orchestra. No large concert piece in all piano literature is more truly musical and less factitious; no large work of any period in the history of music shows more economy in the use of musical material and means. In it Schumann is as completely sincere as in his smaller pieces, and, in addition, reveals what came more into view in his later years—the fine reserve and even classic sense of fitness in the man.
Mendelssohn as piano composer is universally known by his ‘Songs Without Words,’ a title which he invented in accordance with the fashion of the time. Like all the rest of his music, these pieces are less highly regarded now than a few decades ago. Modern music has passed far beyond the romanticism of the first half of the last century, and the ‘Songs Without Words,’ with all their occasional charm, have no one quality in sufficient proportion to make them historical landmarks. They are never heard on concert programs; their chief use is still in the instruction of children. Their finish and fluidity would not plead very strongly for them if it were not for the occasional beauty of their melodies. They remain chiefly as an indication of the better dilettante taste of the time. And, as Mr. Krehbiel has pointed out,[94] we should give generous credit to the music which was engagingly simple and honest in a time when the taste was all for superficial brilliance.
But Mendelssohn as a writer for the pianoforte is at his best in the Scherzos, the so-called ‘Elf’ or ‘Kobold’ pieces, a type in which he is in his happiest and freshest mood. One of these is a ‘Battle of the Mice,’ ‘with tiny fanfares and dances, all kinds of squeaks, and runnings to and fro of a captivating grace.’ Another is the well-known ‘Rondo Capriccioso,’ one of his best. In these ‘fairy pieces’ Mendelssohn derives directly from Schubert and the Moments musicaux. In the heavier pianoforte forms Mendelssohn had great vogue in his day, and Berlioz tells jestingly how the pianos at the Conservatory started to play the Concerto in G minor at the very approach of a pupil, and how the hammers continued to jump even after the instrument was demolished.