Figure XXIII.
Other similar passages are the "religioso" section in the sixth nocturne, and the middle section of the eleventh, both of which, in their ecclesiastical serenity and severity, take one back to Palestrina. And with all his diversity of vocabulary, Chopin never confuses his effects. He can pass from the extreme plainness of the fifth étude to the chromatic complexity of the sixth, without the least adulteration of either.
Why the works of a master so various yet always so elevated in style, animated by so high an ideal of what it is worth while to say, and of how it should be said, should be specially marked out for sentimentalization and degradation at the hands of performers too dull to divine their distinction, is one of the mysteries of perverse destiny. It is hard to see what justification can be found, either in the internal evidence of the works themselves or in the recorded opinions of their composer, by the misguided enthusiasts who drag out his lovely melodies into mawkish recitatives, break his chords into arpeggios, and vulgarize his tempo rubato into license of meter and confusion of rhythm. There is, to be sure, in much of his music, a subjective quality, an intimacy of mood, which gives the debauchee of sentiment an opportunity he does not find in abstract classic art. There are even a few instances, to give him countenance, of actual affectation, the tiresome posturing of the "dramatic" tone-poet, as in the pompous ending of the ninth nocturne and the theatrical opening of the third scherzo, where Chopin seems to borrow a gesture from his friend Liszt. But the entire object of the foregoing analysis will have been missed if it has not convinced the reader of the essential distinction, the superiority to all claptrap eloquence and feverish emotion, of Chopin's mind. He was not a man to strut and pose; he was too busy with an artistic ideal, too bent upon expressing a high vein of feeling in a faultless technical medium.
There is also plenty of documentary evidence to prove his abhorrence of all sickly sentiment, and of the messy technique it induces. Take, for example, the matter of the much discussed tempo rubato. Chopin regarded this as a sensitive adjustment of time values, a delicate elasticity or flexibility of pace—by no means as a departure from essential metrical accuracy. "The left hand," he said to his pupil Von Lenz, "is the conductor; it must not waver or lose ground; do with the right hand what you will and can." "He required adherence," says another pupil, "to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering and dragging, misplaced rubatos and exaggerated ritardandos. 'Je vous prie de vous asseoir,' he said on such an occasion, with gentle mockery." His aversion to melodramatic expressiveness, in which the artist surrenders himself weakly to a momentary excitement, may be inferred from his remark on Liszt's performance of a Beethoven sonata: "Must one, however, always speak so declamatorily (si declamatoirement)?" and from a comment on his own playing by Cramer, a pedant who, without entirely comprehending him, yet could not but discern the dignity of his art: "I do not understand him, but he plays beautifully and correctly, he does not give way to his passion like other young men." Finally, if Chopin had really been a mere voluptuary and sentimentalist, is it likely that he would have composed with such concentrated intensity of labor? "He shut himself up in his room for whole days," writes George Sand, "weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance."
No, Chopin may not be a giant like Bach, or Mozart, or Handel, or Beethoven, but he is a sincere and earnest artist, who feels vividly, and spares no pains to give his feelings worthy expression, and to attain a supreme plastic beauty. Above all, he is a man of the most delicate sensibility, the most discriminating taste, the most exacting ideal of artistic perfection. In leaving him, it is pleasant to attend less to the sufferings to which these qualities condemned him as a man, than to the achievements to which they led him as an artist. This shifting of emphasis is what he would himself have desired, for his aspirations and standards were æsthetic rather than ethical; he lived as he could, it was only in composing that his will was free and efficient; his very individuality takes definite shape only in the favoring medium of musical imagination and emotion. In that firmament of music he will continue to shine, a fixed star, not perhaps of the first magnitude, but giving a wondrously clear, white light, and, as he would have wished, in peerless solitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord" is an example of a work to which, since its beauty is largely one of line, the piano cannot do justice. See, for instance, Prelude IV, in C-sharp minor, in the first book, measures 4-7, inclusive. The tenor part, of a wonderful nobility, is concealed by the more rapidly moving, and therefore on the piano more sonorous, soprano. In order fully to bring it to our consciousness we must sing or otherwise reinforce it.
[21] Schumann reports of Chopin's playing of this étude: "It would be a mistake to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A-flat major chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come into greater prominence amid the chords, along with that principal cantilena."