VIII.—WITH PADEREWSKI—A MODERN PIANIST ON TOUR
The most successful virtuoso ever heard here—$171,981.89 for one season—His opinion of the pianoforte—Perfect save for greater sustaining power of tone—Has four pianofortes on his tours—Duties of the “piano doctor”—How the instruments are cared for—Thawing out a pianoforte—Paderewski’s humor [155]
HOW TO APPRECIATE AN ORCHESTRAL CONCERT
IX.—DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORCHESTRA
Modern music at first vocal, and without instrumental accompaniment—Awkward instrumentation of the contrapuntists—Primitive 15 orchestration in Italy—The orchestra of Monteverde—Haydn the father of modern orchestral music—The Mozart symphonies—Beethoven establishes the modern orchestra—But few instruments added since—Greater richness due to subtler technique—Beethoven’s development of the orchestra traced in his symphonies—Greater technical demands on the players—Beethoven and Wagner—“Meistersinger” score has only three more instruments than the Fifth Symphony—Berlioz an orchestral juggler—Architectural music—Wagner, greatest of orchestral composers—Employs large orchestra not for noise, but for variety of expression—Richard Strauss’s tribute to Wagner—Wonderfully reserved in the use of his forces—Wagner’s scores the only advance worth mentioning since Berlioz [167]
X.—INSTRUMENTS OF THE ORCHESTRA
The orchestra an aggregation of instruments that should play as one—Wagner’s employment of orchestral groups illustrated by the Love motive in “Die Walküre” and the Walhalla motive—Division of the orchestra—The violin—Its varied capacity—The musical stage whisper of a hundred violins—The violins in the “Lohengrin” prelude—Modern 16 orchestral virtuosity—The sordine and its use—A pizzicato movement by Tschaikowski—The viola, violoncello and double bass—Dividing the string band—Examples from the scores of Wagner—Anecdote regarding the harp in “Rheingold”—The woodwind—The flute—The oboe in Schubert’s C major symphony—The English horn in “Tristan”—Beethoven’s use of the bassoon in the Fifth and Ninth symphonies—The clarinets in “Tannhäuser,” “Lohengrin,” and “Götterdämmerung”—Brass instruments and various illustrations of their employment—The trumpet in “Fidelio” and “Carmen”—The trombone group in “The Ring of the Nibelung”—The trombones in “The Magic Flute,” in Schubert’s C major symphony, and in the introduction to the third act of “Lohengrin”—The tubas in the Funeral March in “Götterdämmerung”—Richard Strauss’s apotheosis of the horn, and its importance in the Wagner scores—Tympani and cymbals—Mozart’s G minor symphony on twenty-two clarinets—Richard Strauss, on the future development of the orchestra [179]
XI.—CONCERNING SYMPHONIES
The classical period of music dominated by the symphony—Its esthetic purpose defined—A symphonic witticism—Some comment 17 on form in music—Divisions of the symphony established by Haydn—Artless grace and beauty of Mozart’s symphonies—Beethoven to the fore—Climaxes and rests—The Ninth Symphony—Schubert’s genius—Mendelssohn and Schumann—Liszt’s symphonies and symphonic poems—Other symphonists—Wagner not supposed to have been a purely orchestral composer, yet the greatest of all [197]
XII.—RICHARD STRAUSS AND HIS MUSIC