This was written in 1839. If Balzac had lived a half-century, he would have painted full-length portraits of women who keep quiet neither in triumph nor in defeat; and at whose feet pedals, not men, register new emotional experiences—for the pedals of the piano are the soul of it. To be ashamed of one’s sex nowadays would be an insane confession wrung from some poor overworked creature, one to whom the French novelist might refuse even the name of woman. Females may deny the beauty of being born to wear petticoats; women, never. Indeed, the boot is now on the masculine leg. As the current phraseology runs, Woman has found herself. She has also found a panacea for irritated vanity and indigestion, at one time called in romances a broken heart. This prophylactic is art; and when it is used intelligently, misery flies forth from the window as music opens the door.
Once, for the sheer fun of it, I made an imaginary classification of music which various heroines of fiction preferred, or, rather, might prefer—for many of them are, as you know, tone-deaf. Mr. Howells remarked this years ago. But consider Clarissa Harlowe, or any of the immortal Jane’s brood—do they not all suggest musical possibilities? What a paper that would be to read before a mothers’ meeting on a sultry day in September!—The Musical Tastes of Fiction’s Heroines. And with what facile logic, the logic of numbers, a clever girl could unhorse her ruder opponents. The theme fascinates me; I am loath to leave it. Think of the year 1800! Beethoven had written some piano sonatas, but was not very well known abroad. In London town there were still harpsichords, and Scarlatti and Mozart. The modern grand piano was a dream that nestled in the later sonatas of Beethoven—and in the brain of their maker. Tone was not thought of; while a pearly touch, smooth scales, and crisp little rhythms were affected by such women as spared the time to practise from their social duties. The piano music of the eighteenth century was written for women, is woman’s music. All these virginals, spinets, clavecins, clavichords, harpsichords, are they not feminine? Are they not the musical rib plucked by an amiable fate from the side of the masculine church organ? Historical retrospects gall the mind at all times, but it may not be amiss to consider the century’s piano music which preceded ours. Out of the old dance suites burgeoned latter-day piano music. Those graceful writers of old Italy and old France made gay melodies, full of the artificial life of their time, of their surroundings. You catch glimpses of delicate faces, with patches, powdered heads, courtly struttings, and the sounds of courtly wooing. The stately minuetto, lively courantes, decorous allemandes, smooth sarabands, tripping gavottes and gigues,—all these, and many more with high-colored titles, enchanted our great-great-grandmothers. The more tragic note was not missing, either. They had L’Homicide and the Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger, caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked, en passant, that the keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s.
Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would hardly have appealed to the dreams of fair women, even had they been cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn, owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music, for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity, is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of Beethoven and his mighty thunderings.
Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of his growling tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion, Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse, Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short body out upon drawing-room couches.
It is not a pretty picture this, but is a characteristic. It must please latter-day pagans who flout the niceties of society. Not all the Beethoven sonatas were admired to the studying point. The early ones—mere exercises of a young athlete juggling with the weapons of his grandsire—alone called for commendation. Dedicated to Haydn, the first three did not excite the ire of critics or teachers. But as the man grew, as he felt, suffered, and knew, then his canvases began to excite fear and repulsion. “Why these gloomy tints, Herr van Beethoven?” they cried, and listened eagerly to his rivals, the Wölffls, the Gelineks, the Hummels. There is a modishness even in the art of writing for the piano, and Beethoven despised modishness, as would have Diana of the Ephesians the millinery of Lutetia. So he was neglected for a half-century, and the long-fingered, long-haired virtuosi overran Europe, with their variations, their fantasias, their trills, and their trickeries. From Hummel to Thalberg effect was their god, and before the shrine of the titillating, the ornamental and the suave, womankind prostrated herself, pouring out homage and gold—the latter provided by patient fathers and husbands. It was a carnage, a musical rout, and a superior warrior like Liszt trailed thousands of scalps after his chariots during triumphal tours. The mediæval dancing manias were as nothing when compared with the hysteria evoked by the new Pied Piper of Hungary. Chopin never had the physique, and Mendelssohn was too moral, to copy Liszt. These two men wrote lovely music, feminine music; while down in Vienna a young man named Schubert died, after writing incomparable songs and much beautiful piano music. His sonatas are not so feminine in texture as his musical Moments, impromptus and dances. This music is made for woman, with its intimate, tender feeling, its loose and variegated structure. Von Weber composed chivalric sonatas and that marvellous epitome of the dance, The Invitation. Schumann, broken in fingers through too curious experimentings, dreamed twilight music, which his gifted wife Clara interpreted to an incredulous world.
Since then the rest is history. Women virtuosi are as plentiful as the shining sands, beginning with Clara Schumann and ending with the prodigy of yesterday. Such thunderers as Sophie Menter and Teresa Carreño, women of iron will and great muscular power, and a subtle interpreter like Annette Essipoff, challenge men in their own sphere, and relatively hold their own. I say relatively; and now comes into view a serious question. It is this: Should women essay the music of all composers? The answer is in the affirmative, for who shall assert that a severe course of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms may result in aught else but good. But do women interpret all composers with equal success? The answer is here decidedly a negative one. Though I have heard Menter play Liszt’s rhapsodies with overwhelming brilliancy, though I have listened to Carreño in amazement as she crashed out Chopin’s F sharp minor polonaise on her Steinway, yet I know that the brawn and brain of this pair are exceptional. Half a dozen such do not appear during a century. Therefore big tonal effects, called orchestral by the critics, are usually not to be found in the performances of women. For that reason I enjoy the playing of women who are genuinely feminine in their style—Essipoff or Madame Zeisler. Smoothness, neatness, delicacy, brilliancy, and a certain grace are common enough. The average woman pianist is a hard student, and strives to achieve that which men easily accomplish. As a rule she has finger facility, a plentiful lack of rhythm, and no particular interpretative power—exactly the qualities of the average male pianist. When Maud Powell plays Bach or Beethoven on her violin we are amazed and say, “Why, this is virile!” When Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler delivers the scherzo from the Litolff concerto, we are surprised—not at her swiftness, ease, or delicacy, but at her nervous force and bravura—these latter being selfishly annexed by men as eminently masculine attributes. Are they? Certain feminine Wagner singers possess them, and in opera they are accepted as a matter of course. A genuine paradox, is it not?
The muscular conformation of a woman’s arm militates against her throwing a stone as far as a man; it also operates adversely in modern piano-playing, where the triceps muscles are a necessity for a broad, sonorous tone. I have considered the pros and cons of emotional intensity in writing of woman as a Chopin player, and shall not again traverse that barren and ungrateful region. The intellect remains to be discussed. Are women intellectual in the interpretative sense? Yes. Without hesitation I answer this question, for music, apart from the creative side, is a feminine art, and one in which woman’s intuitions lead her many leagues toward success. That women have as yet—you mark my use of a future contingency!—that women have as yet exhibited powers of interpretation as keen, as original, or even on a par with men, I am not prepared to say. Illuminative in Bach or Beethoven they are not, though delightfully poetic in Schumann and Chopin. I have never heard a woman play the Hammer-Klavier Sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven with force, lucidity, or imaginative lift.
Enfin: The lesson of the years seems to be that women can play anything written for the piano, and play it well. In all the music of the eighteenth century, in the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven, in Hummel, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn, some of Schumann, some of Chopin, a goodly portion of Liszt, all of Field, Heller, Hiller, Moszkowski, Grieg, Scharwenka, and a moiety of Brahms,—all these composers have been essayed with success. Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichord should be the bread and butter of a woman’s musical menu; it should begin and end her day. One may quote Balzac again—that dear Princesse de Cadignan, sometimes called Madame la Duchesse Maufrigneuse, “Women know how to give to their words a peculiar saintliness; they communicate to them I know not what of vibration, which extends the sense of their ideas and lends them profundity; if later, their charmed auditor no longer recalls what they have said, the object has been completely attained, which is the proper quality of eloquence.” And of this species of eloquence is a woman’s playing of Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. It is often charming; but is it ever great, spiritual, moving art?
The woman question—is it not one to be shunned? I mean the question, not the theme itself, though one may recommend Laura Marholm’s volumes. Frau Marholm is a Scandinavian, and Northern women must have been bound with iron social gyves, to judge by the quality of their protestant literature. Ibsen, Björnson, even Strindberg—whose erratic pendulum swings to the other extreme—are full of the heady polemics of sex. Sex—why, one sickens of the subject after reading problem plays and novels. To all American women between the ages of eighteen and eighty I say study Laura Marholm’s Studies in the Psychology of Woman. The dissatisfied ones, those who really believe all they read, may perhaps realize how much better off is The Unquiet Sex—this capital phrase is of Helen Watterson Moody’s coining—in America. Little wonder that there is a woman movement in Europe. For its psychology read Marholm. Best of all, here is a woman telling us secrets, secrets not to be captured by men watchful of the Sphinx that Defies. And it is a sad corrective for masculine presumption, masculine vanity. We are only tolerated. Some of us have known that for years; here it is elevated to the dignity of a psychological system. These long-haired, soft-eyed animals, as Guy de Maupassant described them, are our true critics weighing us ever in scales that are mortifyingly candid, excusing us if they love us, but after all only tolerating us, allowing the lords of creation to kneel in humble attitudes at the shrine and rewarded at the end by—toleration. And if this is the case on the Continent, where the equality of women is as yet a half-hatched idea, how is it in America, where she is queen, queen from kitchen to palace? I think Mrs. Marholm herself would be amazed, and mayhap after five years’ residence here would write a book about the Wrongs of Man. Her Six Famous Women betrays the writer’s keenness of vision, the Studies reveal breadth of idea and judgments. She does not belong to the “Shrieking Sisterhood.” She is a woman, a defender of home and family. I assure you I enjoyed her book far better than Zola’s Fecondité—that most miraculously dull and moral tract. Tolstoy is the remote parent of both books, though Marholm has her own feminine point of attack. No man may hope to understand women as does a woman. It was Zangwill, I think, who said that all women writers are of value—do they not tell us the secrets of their sex? This is hardly polite, but it is true. When the “messages” of George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté have grown stale from usage—all truths breed rust after a time—their unconscious self-portraitures will preserve them from those giant moths, the critics.
The Marholm knows better than any envious male the limitations of woman as artist, politician, and writer. In the admirable study of Mrs. Besant she writes: “She has always possessed the wholly feminine capacity of assimilating the most varied and incompatible mental food, without disturbance or indigestion, and of giving it forth with a certain accuracy; her brain was like a photographic plate upon which the exposed picture is clearly and mechanically printed. These characteristics, the quick perception and exact repetition, are frequently praised by professors who examine feminine students, and many have declared that in eagerness for knowledge and ability to acquire it, women excel men. It is undeniable that in these characteristics they excel most men; it would be a pity if most men excelled them, for these characteristics rest upon the lesser power and capacity for original thought, independent selection, and deeper affinity to the appropriate idea; they depend upon a mechanical instead of an organic process.”