I
By far the most interesting and generally the most significant developments in pianoforte music since the time of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt are those which have taken place in France. Not only have the French composers greatly enriched the literature for the instrument with compositions that have a value beyond that which fashion temporarily lends them; they have refreshed it as well with new ideas of harmony, and effects, which if they are not essentially new, are newly extended and applied.
There is still to be observed in France, it is true, a very considerable loyalty in a group of composers to the style of Chopin, or even more, to that of Liszt, and a general dependence upon German ideas of music which have for a century past been so preponderant in the world as to be considered international. The admirable works of Camille Saint-Saëns are the result of such a loyalty. He is a great master of the pianoforte style, endowed, moreover, with a fine sense of form and a fine imagination. Everything he has written is finished with care, clear-cut and indisputably effective. There is no piece of music more grateful from the point of view of the pianist than the second of his five concertos, that in G minor. This is not only because the treatment of the solo instrument is clear and brilliant, but because the themes are worthy of the treatment and of the broad form which they are made to fill. The writing for the orchestra, moreover, is not less perfect than that for the pianoforte. But inasmuch as the harmonies are a familiar inheritance from the past, and the style an adaptation of an inherited technique, the work signalizes not an advance in music, but the successful maintenance of an already high standard. The spirit of it is less emotional and sentimental than that of other concertos, and more witty and epigrammatic. Hence it holds a special place as well as a high one, from which it is hard to think that any change of fashion will ever remove it.
The short pieces of Cécile Chaminade, Paul Lacombe, François Thomé, Benjamin Godard, and Paul Wachs may be mentioned in passing as having won a measure of success.
But the works of another group or two of French composers show an originality that was at first so startling as to enrage conservative critics. It is owing to them that pianoforte music seems to have entered upon a new course of life. One finds the stirring of new movements in Paris even before the time of Chopin’s arrival there, due very clearly to the French spirit. Berlioz is growing more and more to a huge stature in the eyes of historians. The figure of his countryman and acquaintance, Charles-Valentin Alkan, is more obscure, but he represents the same spirit at work in the special branch of pianoforte music. If his compositions have not had great influence, they none the less give an early example of the working towards independence of a French pianoforte music.
Alkan (1813-88) was admired as a player and as a composer by both Chopin and Liszt, and Bülow still later held him in high esteem. An effort is now under way, encouraged by Isadore Philip, and others, to draw his compositions from the obscurity into which they have fallen. They are surprisingly numerous and in many ways astonishing. They include a great number of transcriptions, of études and of pieces of extraordinary realism. His harmonies and melodies suggest Berlioz, with whom he is being more and more compared. They have often a quality that is in a sense bare. They are unusual without connoting a rich world of the unexplored. They hint rather at a deliberate attack upon the old than at the youth of a new system. The general flow of his harmonies, for example, is familiar. Only now and then does something unusual obtrude itself with a sort of harshness. Notice, for example, the chromatic movement of the doubled inner voice in the cantabile section of the short piece ‛Le tambour bat aux champs.’ Notice, too, the strange starkness of harmonies in the paraphrase Super flumina Babylonis.
Technically Alkan stands between Chopin and Liszt, and in this regard his music is very exacting. He demands an equal skill in both hands. Of the three studies published as opus 76, the first is for the left hand alone, with long passages of rapid tremolo like that one finds in the first of Liszt’s Paganini transcriptions. The second is for the right hand alone, demanding an unrestricted movement of the arm in long arpeggios and extremely wide chords. Finally the third is a long piece in unison from beginning to end, far more awkward and more difficult than the last movement of Chopin’s sonata in B-flat minor. The three studies opus 15, Dans le genre pathétique, are veritably huge works. Of these the second, Le vent, is already well known as one of the effective concert pieces of the new era. The first and last have the strange titles of Aime-moi and Morte. Twelve études in minor keys were published as opus 39. One finds again extraordinary titles, such as Rythme molossique, Scherzo diabolico, and Le festin d’Europe. All are exceedingly difficult. Some, like the first, are both startling and interesting as music. There is a more or less famous study in perpetual motion for the right hand which was given the title Le chemin de fer, extremely rapid, difficult, and effective.
The titles throughout all his music are original. Some are easily understood. ‘The Wind’ and the ‘Railroad’ for instance are fully explained by the music. In fact the realism of the latter does not stop with movement. There is to be heard even the pounding of wheels, the puffing and the whistle of the engine. But what is the meaning of others, of Neige et lave, Ma chère liberté and Ma chère servitude, Salut, cendre du pauvre, Fais dodo and J’étais endormie, mais mon cœur reveillait? On the whole these fantastic titles suggest less the union of music with poetry or self-conscious sentiment than a sort of rational, positive realism. There is little in the music that is vague or sensuous. Most of it is objective rather than imaginative. He has neither the fire of Liszt, nor the emotion of Chopin, and his compositions are both spiritually and technically independent of theirs. He was a terrific worker and he lived apart from men. Marmontel wrote of him with great respect and some affection. Oskar Bie thinks of him as a misanthrope. One can hardly speak of misanthropic music; yet the quality which distinguishes Alkan’s music is something the quality of an implacable irony. It is strong stuff, and is likely to prove more logical in itself than any appreciation or disparagement of it can be made.
CËSAR FRANCK