I
This Henri Herz was, between the years 1830 and 1835, the most celebrated pianist in Europe. He was Austrian by birth but in his youth was taken to Paris to study at the Conservatoire, and thereafter made Paris his home, and himself a Parisian.
Everywhere he played he was tremendously successful, whether in France, Germany, or playing duets with Moscheles or Cramer in London, or wandering over the continent of North America, and the islands near it. He had terriblement voyagé, as he himself said in the introduction to his most amusing book on his travels in America, Mes voyages. His technique was, of course, quite out of the ordinary; but so far as we may judge by his programs and by his compositions, he put it to no exalted purpose. It was the day of variations and of fantasias. Any time might serve for the former, and the virtuoso who was also a keen man of business, with an eye on the public before which he displayed himself and another on the publishers, generally made use of airs popular in whatever land he might chance to be making a present success. For example, among the publications of Henri Herz one finds variations on the favorite air, Le petit tambour, on the famous Irish air, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ on the Scotch air, ‘We’re a’ noddin’,’ on the old song beloved of our grandmothers in this country, ‘Gaily the Troubadour’; and La Parisienne, marche nationale, avec variations charactéristiques. He published an arrangement of the Marseillaise, an Austrian march, General Harrison’s quick-step, Empress Henrietta’s waltz, numerous sets of quadrilles and other dances. Perhaps we may never be sure how many of these publications he would have acknowledged. In Mes voyages he recounted how he found upon a piano in a music shop a certain ‘Mlle. Sontag’s Waltz’ published as one of his compositions. This was in the United States. The dealer in the shop told Herz that this of all his compositions had made him famous in the new country. Herz was about to protest that the music was none of his, but was prevented by the counsel of his manager Ulmann, a man very nearly as wily as the immortal P. T. Barnum, of whom, perhaps at bottom a congenial soul, Herz had much to tell.
Fantasias were usually constructed on airs from the favorite operas of the day. These, in the case of Herz, rarely amounted to more than a series of variations, preceded by an introduction, and concluded with a finale. Few showed much thought in structure, and indeed, such men as Herz, Thalberg, and Liszt, could, and were expected to, improvise such fantasias before the public.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that Herz’s elaborate fantasias and variations lack cleverness and a very genuine brilliance. An examination of many of them will prove to one even at this day, when all are nearly or quite forgotten, that Herz knew his piano astonishingly well. Let us look for a moment at the Variations brillantes, opus 105, on a favorite motive from Bellini’s Sonnambula. There is first an introduction. This is withal desperately commonplace. It suggests posturings, meaningless formalities, a whole technique of specious oratory. Yet it is a technique. The weakness in such music is that it is ready-made. There is no originality in it, nor any vitality. The eye discerns the stock figures of the virtuoso laid one after the other across the page. First, there are three measures of the chromatic scale, each measure running through the octave, so that the second repeats the first, and the third the second, with only the change of register. Moreover, each measure is phrased by itself, and at the beginning of each there is placed a mark of emphasis; so that there is not even an effect of rushing or roaring from bottom to top, but only one of movement from one point to another, like the leaping of the frog up the steep sides of the well of our algebra problems. The final leap to the pinnacle of high F, is worthy of the mountain goat.
This figure jumps its stages across our ears and out of sound. Then follows a welling up of emotion. The orator condescends. He is affably sentimental, will take us into his confidence, not without dignity, however. Listen to the strains of this immortal melody! Here a heart sings. What if it were Bellini’s heart, we now add upon our instrument a long tremulous sigh of our own.
Once more the opening phrases. Here again the directions read, capriccioso; and again the goat leaps up the scale from low F to high. But here follows a passage of trills, long trills on F, on G, on A, on B-flat, and so on, up and up to the highest of all F’s on the keyboard; while the left hand surges and falls back in broken chords of changing harmonies. Nothing could be more brilliantly effective. The concluding measures of the introduction play with long, light scales over a phrase or two of melody; and a long-drawn half-cadence, and a fermata, announce at last that the piece is about to begin.
The statement of the theme itself is perfectly simple. One notices the practically unvaried bass, the tum-tum of Hummel and Weber, and of the lesser virtuosi. The first variation is, however, a masterpiece in pianoforte style as far as the right hand is concerned. The mixture of double and single notes is technically almost worthy of Chopin. But the tum-tum bass perseveres and blights the whole. Still this variation has a bright sparkle, the line of the upper part has a flowing grace, and there is necessarily little of that repetition of one or two stereotyped figures which in longer works almost strangles the life in most music of the virtuoso type.
The second variation is hopelessly commonplace. The melody, scarcely varied, is in octaves for the right hand, and the tum-tum for the left is changed to a rat-a-tat-tat-a-ta-tat. The raison d’être of the variation is the crossing of the right hand over the left in the second half of the first beat of every measure, in order to dive, as it were, into the deep accented note of the second beat. One cannot but think of the leap of children from some upper loft to a hay-filled mow beneath. Herz makes the right hand take such a flight here, over and over again. One laughs with the delight of a child, yet wherein lies the joy? Is it in the taking flight? The movement through the air? The ultimate shock of landing?
The virtuoso is not a child. He is a clever man who plays upon what is and ever will be the child in man,—his bump of wonder. And he does not strike it with music, but with movement. It is not the notes of his scales or of his runs, but the speed with which he accomplishes them. Here in this second variation is proof of the case in point. If in every measure the right hand, instead of taking its bold flight, were to glide only one half as far and quietly relieve the left hand of its accompanying chords of the second beat; and if the left hand, so set free, were to play that resounding low note which was the hay-mow to the right, but to the left is only a step downstairs, the musical effect and the musical value of the piece would remain quite unchanged. But Herz would not have played it so; for the reason that he wrote this variation merely to show his right hand and arm in free, sweeping movement through the air. Mark you, then: the great effect of this second variation is wholly one of movement. Not only is there no question of music; there is not even one of sound.
The third variation gives the theme to the left hand, and the right flies up the keyboard in arpeggios and down in scales, at a high rate of speed. From here the music expands freely into a sort of fantasia. Fundamentally there are still variations, but they are not cut off definitely from each other. Notice from here on, likewise, some excellent writing for the keyboard, something of an independent and melodious part for the left hand, brilliant chromatics, trills, and runs that drop in whirling circles, tremolos, filigree scales over smooth basses à la John Field. Then there is a Final in which the theme is broken up into a lilting, extremely rapid waltz, and in which the pianist is called upon to surmount difficulties of no trivial kind. The series comes to an end in a coda, which, like many a classical coda, swells big as the frog in the fable till it bursts.
These variations and all other variations of Herz are dead as the facile hand that wrote them. There is nothing of musical life in them, and consequently they never had a chance to prove themselves immortal. But the point is not the lack of musical value in these pieces, but the very striking presence of high technical skill. This, as found not only here but in his concertos and other compositions, is the gauge of his skill as a player, which by these signs was extraordinary. As a musician he may very well have been a charlatan, but as a virtuoso he was an adept. His universal success is, finally, proof that such a man was the man that the public most wanted to hear.
Another indication of the public taste at that time, which, be it remembered, was the time of Schumann and Chopin, is the fact that such variations and fantasias as Herz now composed on familiar airs from operas or household songs were, perhaps above all else, acceptable. This again must mean that the general audience was interested not in what we know as music, but in a movement of hands, arms, fingers, and incidentally sounds, upon a musical structure with which they had not to bother themselves. In other words one went to hear or to see what the player could do, not to listen to what he could express of his own emotion, or reveal of the emotional content of pianoforte music.
The pianoforte was, after all, a relatively new instrument. Though Clementi, Mozart and Beethoven had written for it, they had not forgotten that in the houses whither their music would find its way, there were likelier to be harpsichords than pianofortes. It was not until the time of Herz that the pianoforte had become familiar to the household touch of prosperous tradesmen and artisans. Here was created a new public, one which wished to relish its new possession, to prune itself beside the blazing glory in which it might now boast part-ownership.
There is an amusing passage in Von Lenz’s book[37] on the great virtuosos. It was written in connection with Tausig, almost twenty years after the death of Chopin. ‘His [Tausig’s] distinguishing characteristic was,’ he wrote, ‘that he never played for effect, but was always absorbed in the piece itself and its artistic interpretation. This objectivity the general public never understood; whenever serpents are strangled, it always wants to know just how big and dangerous they are, and judges of this by the performer’s behavior. The general public thinks that whatever appears easily surmounted, is not really difficult, and that son or daughter at home might do it just as well!’ The opera fantasias and variations of Herz, of Thalberg, and even of Liszt had the advantage, from the manager’s point of view, of making self-evident the bigness and dangerousness of the serpent; for, that which was added to the familiar tune was no less than fangs, coils, and fiery breath of the beast itself, which the knight of the piano both created and destroyed.