In the treatment of the technical means of the piano-forte, he entirely wanders from the old methods. Moscheles, a great pianist in an age of great players, gave it up in despair, and confessed that he could not play Chopin's music. The latter teaches the fingers to serve his own artistic uses, without regard to the notions of the schools. It is said that M. Kalkbrenner advised Chopin to attend his classes at the Paris Conservatoire, that the latter might learn the proper fingering. Chopin answered his officious adviser by placing one of his own "Études" before him, and asking him to play it. The failure of the pompous professor was ludicrous, for the old-established technique utterly failed to do it justice. Chopin's end as a player was to faithfully interpret the poetry of his own composition. His genius as a composer taught him to make innovations in piano-forte effects. He was thus not only a great inventor as a composer, but as regards the technique of the piano-forte. He not only told new things well worth hearing which the world would not forget, but devised new ways of saying them, and it mattered but little to him whether his more forcible and passionate dialectic offended what Schumann calls musical Philistinism or no. Chopin formed a school of his own which was purely the outcome of his genius, though as Schumann, in the extract previously quoted, justly says: "He was molded by the deep poetic spirit of Beethoven, with whom form only had value as it expressed truthfully and beautifully symmetry of conception."
The forms of Chopin's compositions grew out of the keyboard of the piano, and their genre is so peculiar that it is nearly impracticable to transpose them for any other instrument. Some of the noted contemporary violinists have attempted to transpose a few of the Nocturnes and Études, but without success. Both Schumann and Liszt succeeded in adapting Paganini's most complex and difficult violin works for the piano-forte, but the compositions of Chopin are so essentially born to and of the one instrument that they can not be well suited to any other. The cast of the melody, the matchless beauty and swing of the rhythm, his ingenious treatment of harmony, and the chromatic changes and climaxes through which the motives are developed, make up a new chapter in the history of the piano-forte.
Liszt, in his life of Chopin, says of him: "His character was indeed not easily understood. A thousand subtile shades, mingling, crossing, contradicting, and disguising each other, rendered it almost undecipherable at first view; kind, courteous, affable, and almost of joyous manners, he would not suffer the secret convulsions which agitated him to be ever suspected. His works, concertos, waltzes, sonatas, ballades, polonaises, mazurkas, nocturnes, scherzi, all reflect a similar enigma in a most poetical and romantic form."
Chopin's moral nature was not cast in an heroic mold, and he lacked the robust intellectual marrow which is essential to the highest forms of genius in art as well as in literature and affairs, though it is not safe to believe that he was, as painted by George Sand and Liszt, a feeble youth, continually living at death's door in an atmosphere of moonshine and sentimentality. But there can be no question that the whole bent of Chopin's temperament and genius was melancholy, romantic, and poetic, and that frequently he gives us mere musical moods and reveries, instead of well-defined and well-developed ideas. His music perhaps loses nothing, for, if it misses something of the clear, inspiring, vigorous quality of other great composers, it has a subtile, dreamy, suggestive beauty all its own.
The personal life of Chopin was singularly interesting. His long and intimate connection with George Sand; the circumstances under which it was formed; the blissful idyl of the lovers in the isle of Majorca; the awakening from the dream, and the separation—these and other striking circumstances growing out of a close association with what was best in Parisian art and life, invest the career of the man, aside from his art, with more than common charm to the mind of the reader. Having touched on these phases of Chopin's life at some length in a previous volume of this series, we must reluctantly pass them by.
In closing this imperfect review of the Polish composer, it is enough to say that the present generation has more than sustained the judgment of his own as to the unique and wonderful beauty of his compositions. Hardly any concert programme is considered complete without one or more numbers selected from his works; and though there are but few pianists, even in a day when Chopin as a stylist has been a study, who can do his subtile and wonderful fancies justice, there is no composer for the piano-forte who so fascinates the musical mind.
THALBERG AND GOTTSCHALK.
Thalberg one of the Greatest of Executants.—Bather a Man of Remarkable Talents than of Genius.—Moscheles's Description of him.—The Illegitimate Son of an Austrian Prince.—Early Introduction to Musical Society in London and Vienna.—Beginning of his Career as a Virtuoso.—The Brilliancy of his Career.—Is appointed Court Pianist to the Emperor of Austria.—His Marriage.—Visits to America.—Thalborg's Artistic Idiosyncrasy.—Robert Schumann on his Playing.—His Appearance and Manner.—Characterization by George William Curtis.—Thalberg's Style and Worth as an Artist.—His Pianoforte Method, and Place as a Composer for the Piano.—Gott-schalk's Birth and Early Years.—He is sent to Paris for Instruction.—Successful Début and Public Concerts in Paris and Tour through the French Cities.—Friendship with Berlioz.—Concert Tour to Spain.—Romantic Experiences.—Berlioz on Gottschalk.—Reception of Gottschalk in America.—Criticism of his Style.—Remarkable Success of his Concerts.—His Visit to the West Indies, Mexico, and Central America.—Protracted Absence.—Gottschalk on Life in the Tropics.—Return to the United States.—Three Brilliant Musical Years.—Departure for South America.—Triumphant Procession through the Spanish-American Cities.—Death at Rio Janeiro.—Notes on Gottschalk as Man and Artist.
I.