Three Great Epoch-Makers in Music

by Edward Clarence Farnsworth

The master of the mechanical difficulties of Bach and Clementi, must encounter others quite different in the Etudes of Chopin. The mind of such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming through certain of them. His muscles tire in the midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole pages. His fingers, trained to anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds everywhere in Chopin, compels the pianist of our day to conquer them.

But, more important than the mechanical, there is in Chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. It informed his playing with an ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet lives, a tradition of the old Paris days.

Unlike Shakespeare and Beethoven, the Pole was not privileged to sound the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the gifted of every nation. It cannot be denied that for the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the stiletto, the Italian temperament is alone adequate. It is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of Hungarian music, the blood of the Magyars must surge from the heart to the finger tips.

These examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the Chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered by the Slav genius. Of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the Polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to art.

In her own eyes the Amazonian Sand towered a genius in every way superior to the sickly and effeminate-mannered Chopin, but she attained not to the duty of a great novelist. No permanent types have sprung from her ambitious and busy pen. Those fretting, fuming, shadow-chasing Byronic heroes and heroines have lived their mortal days, and discriminating Time denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of the man she abandoned.

Chopin's career as composer ends with the Sand affair. Of what followed little remains to be told. An unimportant visit to London and Edinburgh where broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to brilliant artistic success. A few friendships formed, a few old ones cemented, then back to Paris which first he entered a sojourner. Yes, back to Paris, the gay and frivolous and cynical Paris, that dances to the waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad receiving of the tomb.

And now at last the untimely end. He who had blended the sheen of stars with the rainbow mist of waterfalls; he who had swung the forging hammer, and rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of Vulcan; he who had prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the angry, the plaintive, the whispering wind; he who had outridden the ocean's fury, and slept on the polished breast of mountain lakes; he, the Endymion of melancholy groves beloved of Luna; he, the portrayer of battles dread with the doings of conquering foes, was himself to yield, leaving for our musical heritage the gloom and glory of his works.

Let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and the applauding crowd greeting the advent of the young Polish virtuoso. Yes, let us draw near, but not to the dazzling salon and yonder listening group, the elite of fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the Erard. Let us draw nearer than these; nearer than the studio of the composer, and the wrapt company of the inner circle: Sand and Hiller and Heine and Meyerbeer and Delacroix and Liszt, who himself has described the scene. Ah, let us, with hushed hearts and noiseless foot-fall, approach and enter, for this is the place of parting where human angels neglect no ministration of love and soothing song as a finished life sinks, like the master's diminuendo, to waken and swell and rush and thunder, filled with the vigor of immortal day.

Far from the charm of English vales and meadows; far from the skylark and the cloud he saw and loved above their freshening green; afar from all the sweet allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the English Shelley, where the blue of Italy is bending o'er the ruined olden, and the risen new whose ancient and eternal name is Rome. And close beside, where Winter spreads the flowers of northern June, is lying Adonais, poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful Keats whom Beauty, in the guise of Death, drew to her own enamoured breast.

Walled from the covetous human waves, safe from the encroaching human tide, Père la Chaise, a mass of bloom and verdure, lies asleep while the Parisian metropolis roars and surges on. Of all the multitudes here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for never a branch is moaning, never a breeze, for Polish liberty; and never a bird is inspired by such sad, sweet threnody; and never a strip of Polish sky, clear, or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sorrow, is bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. Amidst the dead of every high and noble calling, the dead whose deeds enhance the fame of France, that alien's dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer because of Poland and her greatest bard.