This orchestral (as opposed to pianistic) character of the Beethoven sonatas accounts for passages in them so awkwardly written for the instrument that they are difficult to master, and yet, when mastered, are not effective in proportion to their difficulty. Between enlarging the capacity of an instrument through the problems you give the player to solve and writing passages that are awkwardly conceived for it, and hence ineffectual after they have been mastered, there is a great difference. Chopin, Liszt and others pile Pelion on Ossa in their technical requirements of the pianist; but when he has surmounted them, he has climbed a mountain, and from its peak may watch the world at his feet. I think the orchestral character of much that Beethoven wrote for the pianoforte partly accounts for the fact that his sonatas no longer attract the great virtuosos as they formerly did and that the public no longer regards them as the final test of a pianist’s rank.
I speak so unreservedly because I have lived through the change of taste myself. By way of personal explanation I may be permitted to say, that while I am not a professional musician, music was so much a part of my life that I studied the pianoforte almost as assiduously as if I had intended becoming a public player, and that I was proficient enough to meet once a week with the first violinist and the first violoncellist of the New York Philharmonic Society for the practice of chamber music. If there is any one who should worship at the shrine of the sonata form, and especially at that of the Beethoven sonatas, it should be myself, for I was brought up on the form and those sonatas were my daily bread. When I went to the 98 Von Bülow Beethoven recitals it was with book in hand, to follow what he played note for note for purposes of study and assimilation. Those were years when, in the hours during which one seeks communion with one’s other self, the Beethoven sonatas were the medium of communication. But now—give me the men who emancipated themselves from a form that fettered the individuality of the pianoforte, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and the pianoforte scores of the Wagner music-dramas, which actually sound more pianistic than the sonatas of the classical period and in which it is a delight to plunge oneself and be borne along on a flood of free, exultant melody.
Nevertheless, the sonata has had a great part to play in the history and development of music and has played it nobly, and we must no more forget this than we should allow present-day hero worship to supplant the memory of the heroes who went before. The sonata is the firm and solid bridge over which music passed from the contrapuntal period to the romantic, and doubtless there still are some who prefer to linger on the bridge rather than cross it to the promised land to which it leads. Always there are conservatives who stand still and look back; and that these still should let their eyes rest longingly on the great master of the classical epoch, Beethoven, is, to say the least, comprehensible. One would have to be unresponsive indeed not to be thrilled by the story of his life—his force of character, his rugged personality, his determination in spite of one of the greatest misfortunes that could befall a musician, deafness; and the intellectual power which he displayed in bending a seemingly rigid art form to 99 his will and making it the receptacle of his inspiration.
Well may these considerations be borne in mind whenever a Beethoven sonata is on a pianoforte recital program. If it does not move us as profoundly as music more modern does, that is not because its composer was less deeply concerned with the problems of life than those who have come after him. For his time he was wonderfully “subjective,” drawing his inspiration from the heart, yet always preserving a sane mental poise. If to-day the sonatas of this great genius and splendid man seem to us less dramatic and emotional than they once did to audiences, it is because of the progress of music toward greater plasticity of expression and our conviction that such should be its mission.
IV
DAWN OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
All art begins with a groping after form, then attains form, and then emancipates itself from too great insistence upon rigidity of form without, however, reverting to its early formless condition. It was absolutely necessary to the establishment of music as an art that at some period or periods in its development it should “pull itself together” and focus itself in certain forms, and adhere to them somewhat rigidly and somewhat tenaciously until they had been perfected.