FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating pretty widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is determined largely by the technical conditions under which it develops. We all know that one style is appropriate to engraving, another to oil-painting, and still another to pastel work; we recognize that the prose-writer and the versifier must use different vocabularies. Musical critics, however, whether from ignorance or from a disposition to involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of sentiment, have for the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our primitive notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best sing, or instruments best play. We have to reach largely without their aid the conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or painting, the kind of body available to a composition determines in no small degree the sort of spirit which is to inhabit it.
The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the sixteenth century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which at that time was firmly entrenched by tradition—the ecclesiastical choir of mixed voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the necessity of making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for the various groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies were restricted by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice; his harmony, in the interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept simple and transparent. When, somewhat later, the organ came into vogue, it suggested certain modifications of style, splendidly realized by J. S. Bach. The natural capacities of the hands on the keyboard tended to focus attention quite as much on the chord as on the separate strands of melody, and the massive effects of chord-patterns began to vie in importance with the more polyphonic traits. At the same time harmony was free to become much more complex, since pipes cannot sing out of tune, and the mechanically even tone, free from the vibrato and incapable of the accentuation of voices, made feasible a grand impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's fugues. A little later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and Beethoven, ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his work on the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed and wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive by motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic extension of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same time the marvelous expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly utilized: on the emotional side music became more than ever before profound, impassioned, mystical, and poignant.
As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical individualities the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the orchestra, so Chopin is in large measure a resultant of the peculiar qualities of the most influential of modern instruments, the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed an important rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert and Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar dialect it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors can it be said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and the orchestra not existed, his art would still have been essentially what it was. Indeed, his work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage between the artistic impulses of a sensitive human organism and the peculiar potentialities of a special instrument that it can be properly understood only through a study of both.
The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its tones. The tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in duration only by the air capacity of the lungs, those of bowed string instruments can be held indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as long as the air pressure is maintained in the bellows. The vibrations of a piano string, on the contrary, are at their maximum only during the moment in which it is struck by the hammer operated by pressing the key, and from that moment gradually decrease, giving forth a sound constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is struck, the player's control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice but either to wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this reason the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate harmonies of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The long notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of their physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention, and so lose their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic passages, which depend for their effect on the leisurely succession of dissonances and their resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer from the discontinuity of the piano tone. The indifference, or even insensibility, to the beauty of pure line, which characterizes so much of our modern musical taste, is probably in large measure due to the prevalence of an instrument so little suited to exhibit it.[20]