Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works / For the Use of Teachers, Players, and Music Clubs

by Edward Baxter Perry

There is an occasional brief suggestion of past strife and remembered trial, just sufficient to give enduring zest to the present, reposeful joy; but, as a whole, this last movement, with its constantly reiterated tender yet cheerful major melody, seems to sing over and over, with trifling variations of form, but untiring delight in its essential burden, the song of love’s completeness. A song without words it may be, but with a meaning passing words.

Beethoven: Music to “The Ruins of Athens”

This composition, or rather series of fragmentary musical sketches, containing some very original and telling movements, is wholly unknown to the American public, and unfamiliar to most musicians, except for the “Turkish Grand March,” the only number that has gained any considerable popularity. “The Ruins of Athens” is the name of a curious but very ingenious production for the stage, once quite popular in Germany—a sort of combination of the spectacular play, the musical melodrama and classical allegory, designated “A Dramatic Mask” by the author, a playwright of Vienna. It was written and produced at a time when the sympathies and interest of the Christian world were strongly enlisted for the Greeks in their gallant and desperate struggles for freedom from Turkish domination and oppression which ended successfully in 1829, after a contest of seven years.

The scene is laid in Athens, then practically in ruins. The characters, situations, and environment are all, of course, Greek. To this work Beethoven furnished the music, originally scored for orchestra, some numbers of which have since been transcribed for the piano. Of these, only two are of any real value or importance to the pianist.

Turkish Grand March

First, the “Turkish Grand March” referred to, written to accompany the march of the Turkish troops across the stage in one scene. Rubinstein, when in this country years ago, scored many of his greatest popular successes with his own effective arrangement of this number. It contains no great originality or musical depth, in fact is quite primitive in both content and structure, but is brilliant and pleasing, with a strongly marked, rhythmic swing and a shrill, strident melody which, in its intentional, bald simplicity, strongly suggests the rude but spirited martial music of a half-barbaric people, given by fife and drum. Its artistic effectiveness depends upon the skilful handling of an old but ever popular device, the audible illusion of approach and departure. The music, beginning with the softest possible pianissimo, swells in a gradual, almost imperceptible crescendo, to the heaviest obtainable triple forte, and then as gradually diminishes to double pianissimo, tapering off at last into silence; thus simulating the approach of marching troops from a distance nearer and nearer, till they pass across the stage in immediate proximity, and then their gradual receding till lost again in the distance. It is a device of which many composers have availed themselves, and makes great demands upon the player’s self-control and sense of proportion and gradation, as well as his command of the tonal resources of his instrument.

The Dance of the Dervishes

By far the most original of these numbers is “The Dance of the Dervishes,” the second one referred to. This brief but complete composition is full of striking originality and graphic realism. It is one in which Beethoven’s genius seems to have anticipated by half a century the pronounced modern trend toward descriptive or program music, and is as realistic a tone-painting as we might expect from the pen of Saint-Saëns, Wagner, or any of the recent writers. The dance was introduced into the play as an interesting local feature,—the dervishes being numerous in connection with the Turkish army,—and Beethoven naturally selected it as an effective subject for musical treatment. But, before speaking of their dancing as illustrated by Beethoven, it may be of sufficient historical interest to give a brief sketch of the dervishes themselves.

They developed as a sect or order from Mohammedanism after it was well established in the world. The name “dervishes,” which they assumed, comes from a Russian word which means “beggars from door to door.” The Arabic word which means the same thing is “fakirs.” So they are called dervishes or fakirs in different localities, but are the same body. They declared themselves Moslems, but their doctrines, in many respects, differed widely from those of Mohammed. Their beginnings are in obscurity, but they were a well-established order by the eleventh century. Their expressed beliefs, as we earliest come to know them, were chiefly and decidedly religious. They seemed to represent the spiritual and mystical side of Islam, having a philosophy much like that of the Hindus, and perhaps borrowed from them. Their central idea seemed to be that the soul is an emanation from God, and that man’s highest aim is to seek a total absorption in Him. Their various and strange rites and ceremonies seem only different ways by which they sought for union with the deity. In this way they claimed that they secured miraculous powers. At first they largely lived in convents, under rules and orders, giving themselves up to meditation and penance, observing the rules of poverty, abstinence from wine, and celibacy, in the higher classes. Their growth was rapid; but in time they largely fell away from their highest estate, ceased to be so strictly a religious body, broke up into various ranks and sub-orders, became more free from conventional rules, more nomadic, and more wild and fanatical; but their social and political influence ever increased, so that they have long been regarded as a dangerous element in the state. There are crowds of them all through the East that seem to belong to no society, wandering mendicants, and, though often skilled in trades, largely subsisting by professional jugglery, bigoted in their fantastic beliefs, and varying in their rites and strange ceremonies. And yet always and everywhere there is still some general adherence to the old appointed religious ways, a peculiar tie or affiliation with the distinctive body or sect, however differing in certain notions or modes of worship. The lowest devotee of them all claims that the dervishes or fakirs constitute a distinct body of religious believers in spite of all divisions and varieties in manifestation. They acknowledge no authority but that of their spiritual guides, as that of the Mahdi in the Soudan, where these fanatics have been so lately fighting the English. They agree also in not following the letter of the Koran, or the general teachings of its interpreters. As a whole body, in all its orders, all over the world, they seek, as an act of worship, to get into an ecstatic state. They do this in various ways: Sometimes by drinking hasheesh, but more generally by some physical or mental ways, and while under the excitement they perform astounding feats in jugglery or mysticism that really seem almost miraculous. We cannot stop to detail these different methods. One of them is the dance of a certain order which has received the name of the “dancing or whirling dervishes.”