Expression supreme.
Czerny, who was a pupil of Beethoven, has preserved a fuller account of that great composer's art as a player than we have of any of his predecessors. He describes his technique as tremendous, better than that of any virtuoso of his day. He was remarkably deft in connecting the full chords, in which he delighted, without the use of the pedal. His manner at the instrument was composed and quiet. He sat erect, without movement of the upper body, and only when his deafness compelled him to do so, in order to hear his own music, did he contract a habit of leaning forward. With an evident appreciation of the necessities of old-time music he had a great admiration for clean fingering, especially in fugue playing, and he objected to the use of Cramer's studies in the instruction of his nephew by Czerny because they led to what he called a "sticky" style of play, and failed to bring out crisp staccatos and a light touch. But it was upon expression that he insisted most of all when he taught.
Music and emotion.
More than anyone else it was Beethoven who brought music back to the purpose which it had in its first rude state, when it sprang unvolitionally from the heart and lips of primitive man. It became again a vehicle for the feelings. As such it was accepted by the romantic composers to whom he belongs as father, seer, and prophet, quite as intimately as he belongs to the classicists by reason of his adherence to form as an essential in music. To his contemporaries he appears as an image-breaker, but to the clearer vision of to-day he stands an unshakable barrier to lawless iconoclasm. Says Sir George Grove, quoting Mr. Edward Dannreuther, in the passages within the inverted commas:
Beethoven a Romanticist.
"That he was no wild radical altering for the mere pleasure of alteration, or in the mere search for originality, is evident from the length of time during which he abstained from publishing, or even composing works of pretension, and from the likeness which his early works possess to those of his predecessors. He began naturally with the forms which were in use in his days, and his alteration of them grew very gradually with the necessities of his expression. The form of the sonata is 'the transparent veil through which Beethoven seems to have looked at all music.' And the good points of that form he retained to the last—the 'triune symmetry of exposition, illustration, and repetition,' which that admirable method allowed and enforced—but he permitted himself a much greater liberty than his predecessors had done in the relationship of the keys of the different movements, and parts of movements, and in the proportion of the clauses and sections with which he built them up. In other words, he was less bound by the forms and musical rules, and more swayed by the thought which he had to express, and the directions which that thought took in his mind."
Schumann and Chopin.
It is scarcely to be wondered at that when men like Schumann and Chopin felt the full force of the new evangel which Beethoven had preached, they proceeded to carry the formal side of poetic expression, its vehicle, into regions unthought of before their time. The few old forms had now to give way to a large variety. In their work they proceeded from points that were far apart—Schumann's was literary, Chopin's political. In one respect the lists of their pieces which appear most frequently on recital programmes seem to hark back to the suites of two centuries ago—they are sets of short compositions grouped, either by the composer (as is the case with Schumann) or by the performer (as is the case with Chopin in the hands of Mr. Paderewski). Such fantastic musical miniatures as Schumann's "Carnaval" and "Papillons" are eminently characteristic of the composer's intellectual and emotional nature, which in his university days had fallen under the spell of literary romanticism.
Jean Paul's influence.
Schumann's inspirations.