IV
The quality of the musical taste which Chopin and in part Liszt were combatting is forcibly brought out in the ‘Recollections of the Life of Moscheles,’ as quoted by Dr. Bie.[95] ‘The halls echo with jubilations and applause,’ he says, ‘and the audiences, especially the easily kindled Viennese, are enthusiastic in their cheers; and music has become so popular and the compositions so banal that it seldom occurs to them to condemn shallowness. The dilettantes push forward, the circle of instruction widens the cheaper and better the pianos become. They push themselves into rivalry with the artists, in great concerts. 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 “obbligato snaps.” Moscheles himself would play with hand turned round, or with the fist, perhaps hiding the thumb under the fist. In Moscheles’ peculiar way of playing the thumb used to take the thirds under the palm of the hand.’
Frédéric Chopin
From a study by Delacroix
The piano recital of modern times was then unknown. It was not until 1838 that Liszt dared give a recital without the assistance of other artists, and it was not Liszt’s music so much as his overshadowing personality that made the feat possible then. Chopin, coming to Paris under excellent auspices, had little need to make a name for himself in the concert hall under these conditions, and, as we may imagine, had still less zest for it. He was chiefly in demand to play at private parties and aristocratic salons, where he frequently enough, no doubt, met with stupidity and lack of understanding, but where, at least, he was spared the noisy vulgarity of a musical vaudeville. Taking the best from his friends, and selecting the excellent from the atmosphere of the salons which he adorned, Chopin went on composing, living a life which offers little color to the biographer. By the time he had reached Paris in 1831 he had several masterpieces tucked away in his portfolio, but, though perfectly polished, they are of his weaker sentimental style. The more powerful Chopin, the Chopin of the polonaises, the ballades, the scherzos, and some of the preludes, was perhaps partly the result of the intimacy with George Sand, whose personality was of the domineering, masculine sort. But more probably it was just the development of an extraordinarily sensitive personality. At any rate, it was not long after his arrival in Paris that Chopin’s creative power had reached full vigor.
After that the chronology of the pieces counts for little. They can be examined by classes, and not by opus numbers, except for the posthumous pieces (following opus 65), which were withheld from publication during the composer’s life by his own wish, and were meant by him to be burned. They are, in almost every case, inferior to the works published during his lifetime. The works, grouped together, may be summed up as follows: over fifty mazurkas, fifteen waltzes, nearly as many polonaises, and certain other dances; nineteen nocturnes, twenty-five preludes, twenty-seven études, four ballades, four scherzos, five rondos, three impromptus, a berceuse, a barcarolle, three fantasias, three variations, four sonatas, two piano concertos, and a trio for piano and strings. All his works, then, except the Polish songs mentioned in the last chapter, are written primarily for the piano, a few having other instruments in combination or orchestral accompaniment, but the vast majority for piano alone.
The dances are highly variable in quality. Of the many mazurkas, some are almost negligible, while a few reveal Chopin’s use of the Polish folk-manner in high perfection. They are not a persistent part of modern concert programs. The waltzes, on the other hand, cannot be escaped; they are with us at every turn in modern life. Theorists have had fine battles over their musical value; some find in them the most perfect art of Chopin, and others regard them as mere glorified, superficial salon pieces. Certainly they concede more to mere outward display than do most of his compositions, and the themes sometimes border on the trivial. The posthumous waltzes are like Schubert’s in that they are apt to be thin in style with occasional rare beauties interspersed. Of the remaining waltzes, the most pretentious, such as the two in A flat, are extremely brilliant in design, offering to the executant, besides full opportunity for the display of dexterity, innumerable chances for nuance of effect (which are, of course, frequently abused, so that the dances become disjointed and specious caricatures of music). The waltz in A minor is far finer, containing the true emotional Chopin, by no means undignified in the dance form. No less fine is the hackneyed C-sharp minor waltz, in which the opportunities for legitimate refinement and variety of interpretation are infinite. These waltzes retain little of the feeling of the dance, despite the frequent buoyancy of their rhythm. Chopin was interested in emotional expression and extreme refinement of style; it mattered little to him by what name his piece might be called.
The Polonaises are a very different matter. Here we find a type of heroic expression which Liszt himself could not equal. The fine energy of the ‘Military’ polonaise in A major is universally known. The sound and fury of this piece is never cheap; it is the exuberant energy of genius. Even greater, if possible, are the polonaises in F sharp minor and in A flat major. No element in them falls below absolute genius. All of Liszt’s heroics never evoked from the piano such superb power. The sick and ‘pathological’ Chopin which is described to us in music primers is here hardly to be found—only here and there a touch of moody intensity, which is, however, never repressive. The Chopin of the waltzes and nocturnes would have been a man of weak and morbid refinement, all the more unhealthy because of his hypersensitive finesse. But, when we have added thereto the Chopin of the Polonaises, we have one of the two or three greatest, if not the very greatest, emotional poet of music. The Polonaises will stand forever as a protest against the supposition that Chopin’s soul was degenerate.
The traditional ‘sick’ Chopin is to be found ipsissimus in the Nocturnes, the most popular, with the waltzes, of his works. In such ones as those in E flat or G the sentiment is that of a lad suffering from puppy-love and gazing at the moon. From beginning to end there is scarcely a bar which could correspond to the feelings of a physically healthy man. Yet we must remember that this sort of sentiment was quite in the fashion of the time. Byron had created of himself a myth of introspective sorrow. Only a few decades before, the Werther of Goethe’s novel, committing suicide in his suit of buff and blue, was being imitated by love-sick swains among all the fashionable circles which sought to do the correct thing. Chateaubriand and Jean Paul had cast their morbid spell over fashionable society, and this spell was not likely to pass away from the hectic Paris of the thirties while there were such men as Byron and Heine to bind it afresh each year with some fascinating book of verse. From such an influence a highly sensitive man like Chopin could not be altogether free. There is something in every artistic nature which can respond sympathetically to the claims of the morbid, for the reason that the artist is a man to feel a wide variety of the sensations that pertain to humanity. No one of the great creative musicians of the time was quite free from this morbid strain; in the sensitive, retiring Chopin it came out in its most effeminate guise. But the point is, it did not represent the whole of the man, nor necessarily any essential part of him. It was the response of his nervous organism to certain of the influences to which he was subject. Chopin may have been physiologically decadent or psychologically morbid; it is hardly a question for musicians. But his music, taken as a whole, does not prove a nature that was positively unhealthy. Its persistent emphasis of sensuousness and emotion makes it doubtless a somewhat unhealthy influence on the nerves of children; but the same could be said of many of the phases of perfectly healthy adult life. And, whatever may be the verdict concerning Chopin, we must admire the manner in which he held his powerful emotional utterance within the firm restraint of his aristocratic sense of fitness. If he has sores, he never makes a vulgar display of them in public.
The Preludes have a bolder and profounder note. They are the treasure-house of his many ideas which, though coming from the best of his creative spirit, could not easily find a form or external purpose for themselves. We may imagine that they are the selected best of his improvisation on his own piano, late at night. Some of them, like the prelude in D flat major (the so-called ‘raindrop’ prelude) he worked out at length, with conscientious regard for form. Others, like that in A major, were just melodies which were too beautiful to lose but were seemingly complete just as they stood. The marvellous prelude in C-sharp minor is the ultimate glorification of improvisation with all the charm of willful fancy and aimlessness, and all the stimulation of a sensitive taste which could not endure having a single note out of place. The Preludes are complete and unique; a careful listener can hear the whole twenty-six successively and retain a distinct impression for each. This is the supreme test of style in a composer, and in sense of style no greater composer than Chopin ever lived.
The Études deserve their name in that they are technically difficult and that the performer who has mastered them has mastered a great deal of the fine art of the pianoforte. But they are the farthest possible from being études in the pedagogical sense. It is quite true that each presents some particular technical difficulty in piano playing, but the dominance of this technical feature springs rather from the composer’s sense of style than from any pedagogical intent. Certainly these pieces could not be more polished, or in most cases, more beautiful, whatever their name and purpose. They may be as emotional as anything of Chopin’s, as the ‘Revolutionary’ étude in C minor, which, tradition says, was written in 1831 when the composer received news of the fall of Warsaw before the invading Russians. The steady open arpeggio of the bass is supposed to represent the rumble of conflict, and the treble melody alternately the cries of rage of the combatants and the prayers of the dying. But for the most part the Études are pure grace and ‘pattern music,’ with always that morose or emotional under-current which creeps into all Chopin’s music. The peculiar virtue of the Études, apart from their interest for the technician, consists in their exquisite grace and freedom combined with perfection of formal pattern.
In the miscellaneous group of larger compositions, which includes the Ballades, the Scherzos, the Fantasias, the Sonatas, and the Concertos, we find some of Chopin’s greatest musical thoughts. The Ballades are the musical narration of some fanciful tale of love or adventure. Chopin supplied no ‘program,’ and it is probable that he had none in mind when he composed them. But they tease us out of thought, making us supply our own stories for the musical narration. They have the power of compelling the vision of long vistas of half-remembered experiences—the very mood of high romance. The Scherzos show Chopin’s genius playing in characteristic perfection. They are not the ‘fairy scherzos’ of Mendelssohn, but vivid emotional experiences, and Schumann could well say of the first, ‘How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?’ Though they seem to be wholly free and fantastical in form, they yet are related to the traditional scherzo, not only in their triple rhythm, but in the general disposition of musical material. Traces of the old two-part song form, in which most of the scherzos of Beethoven were written, are evident, and also of the third part, called the Trio. On the other hand, elaborate transitional passages from one part back to another conceal or enrich the older, simpler form, and in all four there is a coda of remarkable power and fire. The Fantasia in B minor, long and intricate, is one of the most profoundly moving of all Chopin’s works; it leaves the hearer panting for breath, as though he had waked up from an experience which had sapped the energy of his soul. As for the Sonatas and the Concertos, Chopin’s detractors have tried to deny them any particular merit—or any excellence except that of incidental beauties. The assertion will hardly stand. Chopin’s strength was not in large-scale architecture, nor in what we might call ‘formal form.’ But the sonatas and concertos have a way of charming the hearer and freeing his imagination in spite of faulty structure, and one sometimes feels that, had a few more of them been written, they would have created the very standards of form on which they are to be judged. The famous ‘Funeral March’ was interpolated as a slow movement of the B flat minor sonata, with which it is always heard. Liszt’s eulogy of this may seem vainly extravagant to our materialistic time, but it represents exactly what happens to any one foolish enough to try to put into words the emotions stirred up by this wonderful piece.
Chopin, as we have said, played little in public. He said the public scared him. When he did play people were wont to complain that he could not be heard. They were used to the bombastic tone of Kalkbrenner. Chopin might have remedied this defect and made a successful concert performer out of himself, but his physical strength was always delicate and his artistic conscience, moreover, unwilling to permit forcing or grossness; so he continued to play too ‘softly.’ The explanation was his delicate finger touch, coming entirely from the knuckles except where detached chords were to be taken, when the wrists, of course, came into play. Those who were so fortunate as really to hear Chopin’s playing had ecstasies of delight over this pearly touch, which made runs and florid decorations sound marvellously liquid and flute-like. No other performer before the public could do this. Chopin’s pupils were in this respect never more than pupils.
People complained, on hearing Chopin’s music played by others, that it had no rhythm, that it was all rubato. The inaccuracy of this was evident when Chopin played his own compositions. For the melody, the ornament, of the right hand might be rubato as it pleased, but beneath it was a steady, almost mechanical operation of the left hand. It was a part of Chopin’s conscious method, and it is said he used a metronome in practising. The point is worth emphasizing because of the way it illuminates Chopin’s fine sense of self-control and fitness.
No technical method was ever more accurately suited to its task than Chopin’s. He grew up in the atmosphere of the piano, and ‘thought piano’ when composing music. He then drew on this and that piano resource until, by the time he had ended his short life, he had revealed the greater part of its potential musical possibilities—and always in what he had needed in the business of expressing his musical thoughts. With him the piano became utterly freed from the last traces of the tyranny of the polyphonic and chorale styles. But he supplied a polyphony of his own, the strangest, eeriest thing imaginable. It was the combination of two or three melodies, widely different and very beautiful, sometimes with the harmonic accompaniment added, sometimes with the harmony rising magically out of the counterpoint, but always in a new manner that was utterly pianistic. Chopin carried to its extreme the widely broken chord, as in the accompaniment to the major section of the ‘Funeral March.’
But it was in the art of delicate figuration (borrowed in the first place from Hummel) that Chopin was perhaps most himself. This, with Chopin, can be contained within no formula, can be described by no technical language. It was inexhaustible; it was eternally fluid, yet eternally appropriate. It somehow fused the utmost propriety of mood with the utmost grace of pattern. Even when it is most abundant, as in the F sharp major nocturne, it never seems exaggerated or in bad taste.
Harmonically Chopin was an innovator, at times a radical one. Here, again, he seemed to appropriate what he needed for the matter in hand, and exhibit no experimental interest in what remained. His free changes of key are graceful rather than sensuous, as with Schubert, and, when the modulation grows out of quasi-extemporaneous embellishment, as in the C sharp minor prelude, it melts with an ease that seems to come quite from the world of Bach. The later mazurkas anticipate the progressive harmonies of Wagner.
Much of his manner of playing, as well as the notion of the nocturne, Chopin got from the Scotchman, Field, who had fascinated European concert halls with his dreaming, quiet performance, and with the free melody of the nocturne genre which he had invented. From Hummel, as we have said, Chopin borrowed his embellishment, and from Cramer he chose many of the fundamentals of pianistic style. From the Italians (Italian opera included) he received his taste for long-drawn, succulent melody; in the composer of ‘Norma’ we see a poor relation of the aristocratic Pole. Thus from second and third-rate sources Chopin borrowed or took what he needed. He was surrounded by first-rate men, but dominated by none. He took what he wanted where he found it, but only what he wanted. He was constantly selecting—and rejecting. Therein he was the aristocrat.
This is the place to make mention of several writers for the piano whose works were of importance in their day and occasionally to-day appear upon concert programs. Stephen Heller,[96] slightly younger than Chopin, and, unlike the Pole, blessed with a long life, wrote in the light and graceful style which was much in vogue, yet generally with sufficient selective sense to avoid the vapid. About the same can be said for Adolph Henselt (1814-1889), whose étude, ‘If I Were a Bird,’ still haunts music conservatories. His vigorous concerto for piano is also frequently played. William Sterndale Bennett, who, after his student years in Leipzig, became Mendelssohn’s priest in England, wrote four concertos, a fantasia with orchestra, a trio, and a sonata in F minor. His work is impeccable in form, often fresh and charming in content, but without radical energy of purpose—precisely Mendelssohn’s list of qualities. Finally, we may mention Joachim Raff (1822-1882), writer of a concerto and a suite, besides a number of smaller pieces which show programmistic tendencies.