Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the B-flat Prelude and Fugue? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the B-flat minor Prelude? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.
I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience! But before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so freely, so profoundly, so poignantly.
Touching on his technics, I may say that they require of the pianist's fingers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is spiritual as well as material. The diligent daily study of Bach will form your style, your technics, better than all machines and finger exercises. But play him as if he were human, a contemporary and not a historical reminiscence. Yes, you may indulge in rubato. I would rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin. Play Bach as if he still composed—he does—and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of performance. He would alter all that if he were alive today.
I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print. The story was related to me by a pupil of Reinecke, and Reinecke got it from Mendelssohn. Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons, headed by the naughty Friedmann, resolved to play a joke on their good old father. Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the bellows-blower away, and started in to give the Master a surprise. They tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a long rope fastened to the outside knob they pulled the door open and shut, and of course the wind ran low. Johann Sebastian—who looked more like E. M. Bowman than E. M. B. himself—suddenly found himself clawing ivory. He rose and went softly to the rear. Discovering no blower, he investigated, and began to gently haul in the line. When it was all in several boys were at the end of it. Did he whip them? Not he. He locked the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade them blow. They did. Then the archangel of music went back to his bench and composed the famous Wedge fugue. How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is quaint enough. Let me end this exhortation by quoting some words of Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: "If you want music for your own and music's sake—look up to Bach. If you want music which is as absolutely full of meaning as an egg is full of meat—look up to Bach."
Look up to Bach. Sound advice. Profit by it.
XI
SCHUMANN: A VANISHING STAR
The missing meteors of November minded me of the musical reputations I have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into ineffectual twilight. Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age, one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn! Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified—the Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision. Schubert was a divinely awkward stammerer, and Liszt the brilliant centipede amongst virtuosi. They were rapturous days and we fed full upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshine and mush.