THE GRAND MANNER IN PIANOFORTE PLAYING
Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory, and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters mundane.
Whosoever heard the lion-like velvet paws of Anton Rubinstein caress the keyboard shall never forget the music. He is the greatest pianist in my long and varied list. Think of his delivery of the theme at the opening of Beethoven's G major concerto; or in that last page of Chopin's Barcarolle. It was no longer the piano tone, but the sound of distant waters and horns from elf-land. A mountain of fire blown skyward, when the elemental in his profoundly passionate temperament broke loose, he could roar betimes as gently as a dove. Yet, when I last heard him in Paris, the few remaining pupils of Chopin declared that he was brutal in his treatment of their master. He played Rubinstein, not Chopin, said Georges Mathias to me. Mathias knew, for he had heard the divine Frédéric play. Nevertheless, Rubinstein played Chopin, the greater and the miniature, as no one before or since.
To each generation its music-making. The "grand manner" in piano-playing has almost vanished. A few artists still live who illustrate this manner; you may count them on the fingers of one hand. Rosenthal, D'Albert, Carreño, Friedheim—Reisenaur had the gift, too—how many others? Paderewski I heard play in Leipsic in 1912 at a Gewandhaus concert under the baton of the greatest living conductor, Arthur Nikisch, and I can vouch for the plangent tone quality and the poetic reading he displayed in his performance of that old war-horse, the F minor concerto of Chopin. Furthermore, my admiration of Paderewski's gift as a composer was considerably increased after hearing his Polish symphony interpreted by Nikisch. How far away we were from Manru. Joseffy, who looked upon Paderewski, as a rare personality, told me that the Polish Fantasy for piano and orchestra puzzled him because of its seeming simplicity in figuration. "Only the composer," enthusiastically exclaimed Joseffy, "could have made it so wonderful."
But the grand manner, has it become too artificial, too rhetorical? It has gone out of fashion with the eloquence of the old histrions, probably because of the rarity of its exponents; also because it no longer appeals to a matter-of-fact public. Liszt was the first. He was dithyrambic. He was a volcano; Thalberg—his one-time rival—possessed all the smooth and icy perfections of Nesselrode pudding. Liszt in reality never had but two rivals close to his throne; Karl Tausig, the Pole, and Anton Rubinstein, the Russian. Von Bülow was all intellect; his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Brahms were cerebral, not emotional. He had the temperament of the pedant. I first heard him in Philadelphia in 1876 at the Academy of Music. He introduced the Tschaikovsky B flat minor concerto, with B. J. Lang directing the orchestra, a quite superfluous proceeding, as Von Bülow gave the cues from the keyboard and distinctly cursed the conductor, the band, the composition, and his own existence, as befitted a disciple of Schopenhauer. Oh! he could be fiery enough, though in his playing of the Romantics the fervent note was absent; but his rhythmic attack was crisp and irresistible. You need only recall the pungency of his reading of Beethoven's Scherzo in the Sonata Opus 31, No. 3. It was staccato as a hail-storm. Two years later, in Paris, I heard the same concerto played by Nicholas Rubinstein at the Trocadéro (Exposition, 1878), the very man who had first flouted the work so rudely that Tschaikovsky, deeply offended, changed the dedication to Von Bülow.
Anton Rubinstein displayed the grand manner. His style was a compound of tiger's blood and honey. Notwithstanding the gossip about his "false notes" (he wrote a Study on False Notes, as if in derision), he was, with Tausig and Liszt, a supreme stylist. He was not always in practice and most of the music he wrote for his numerous tours was composed in haste and repented of at leisure. It is now almost negligible. The D minor concerto reminds one of a much-traversed railroad-station. But Rubinstein the virtuoso! It was in 1873 I heard him, but I was too young to understand him. Fifteen years later, or thereabouts, he gave his Seven Historical Recitals in Paris and I attended the series, not once, but twice. He played many composers, but for me he seemed to be playing the Book of Job, the Apocalypse, and the Scarlet Sarafan. He had a ductile tone like a golden French horn—Joseffy's comparison—and the power and passion of the man have never been equalled. Neither Tausig nor Liszt did I hear, worse luck, but there were plenty of witnesses to tell me of the differences. Liszt, it seems, when at his best, was both Rubinstein and Tausig combined, with Von Bülow thrown in. Anton Rubinstein played every school with consummate skill, from the iron certitudes of Bach's polyphony to the magic murmurs of Chopin and the romantic rustling in the moonlit garden of Schumann. Beethoven, too, he interpreted with intellectual and emotional vigour. Yet this magnificent Calmuck—he wasn't of course, though he had Asiatic features—grew weary of his instrument, as did Liszt, and fought the stars in their courses by composing. But his name is writ in ivory, and not in enduring music.
Scudo said that when Sigismund Thalberg played, his scales were like perfectly strung pearls falling on scarlet velvet; with Liszt the pearls had become red hot. This extravagant image is of value. We have gone back to the Thalbergian pearls, for too much passion in piano-playing is voted bad taste to-day. Nuance, then colour, and ripe conception. Technique for technique's sake is no longer a desideratum; furthermore, as Felix Leifels wittily remarked: "No one plays the piano badly"; just as no one acts Hamlet disreputably. Mr. Leifels, as a veteran contrabassist and at present manager of the Philharmonic Society, ought to be an authority on the subject; the old Philharmonic has had all the pianists, from H. C. Timm, in 1844—a Hummel concerto—to Thalberg and Rubinstein, Joseffy, Paderewski, and Josef Hofmann. Truly the standard of virtuosity is higher than it was a quarter of a century ago. Girls give recitals with programmes that are staggering. The Chopin concertos now occupy the position, technically speaking, of the Hummel and Mendelssohn concertos. Every one plays Chopin as a matter of course, and, with a few exceptions horribly. Yes, Mr. Leifels is right; no one plays the piano badly, yet new Rubinsteins do not materialise.
The year of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876, was a memorable one for visiting pianists. I heard not only Hans von Bülow, but also two beautiful women, one at the apex of her artistic career, Annette Essipoff (or Essipowa) and Teresa Carreño, just starting on her triumphal road to fame. Essipowa was later the wife of Leschetizky—maybe she was married then—and she was the most poetic of all women pianists that I have heard. Clara Schumann was as musical, but she was aged when I listened to her. Essipowa played Chopin as only a Russian can. They are all Slavs, these Poles and Russians, and no other nation, except the Hungarian, interpret Chopin. Probably the greatest German virtuoso was Adolf Henselt, Bavarian-born, though a resident of Petrograd. He had a Chopin-like temperament and played that master's music so well that Schumann called him the "German Chopin." Essipowa, I need hardly tell you, communicated no little of her gracious charm to Paderewski. He learned more from her plastic style than from all the precepts of Leschetizky.
On a hot night in 1876, and in old Association Hall, I first saw and heard Teresa (then Teresita) Carreño. I say "saw" advisedly, for she was a blooming girl, and at the time shared the distinction with Adelaide Neilson and Mrs. Scott-Siddons of being one of the three most beautiful women on the stage. Carreño, still vital, still handsome, and still the conquering artist, till her death last spring, was in that far-away day fresh from Venezuela, a pupil of Gottschalk and Anton Rubinstein. She wore a scarlet gown, as fiery as her playing, and when I wish to recall her I close my eyes and straightway as if in a scarlet mist I see her, hear her; for her playing has always been scarlet to me, as Rubinstein's is golden, and Joseffy's silvery.
The French group I have heard, beginning with Theodore Ritter, who came to New York in company with Carlotta Patti; Planté—still living and over eighty, so I have been told by M. Phillipp; Saint-Saëns, whom I first saw and heard at the Trocadéro, Paris, with his pupil, Montigny-Remaury; Clotilde Kleeberg, Diémer, Risler; the venerable Georges Mathias, a pupil of Chopin; Raoul Pugno, who was veritably a pugnacious pianist, Cécile Chaminade, Marie Jaell, and her corpulent husband, Alfred Jaell.