Since the trumpet-notes of Bayreuth died away we have conducted our musical devotions on a smaller, more intimate scale. Already, beyond the concert hall, we see opening the private chamber, holiest of all, and the chamber music, which is to the music of the stage what etching is to painting. It is the old ebb and flow. As we passed from the single instrument to the orchestra, from Beethoven’s orchestra with its travail for expression to Wagner’s stage with its world-embracing aims, so we are now passing back from the stage to undiluted music first before thousands of listeners, then before hundreds only.
And now, if I had my way, I would bring the pianoforte before a small audience, say of ten persons, not in the concert hall but in the home, where the artist may give his little concerts, in the fitting hour of twilight, playing to a company every one of whom he knows. Under such circumstances, indeed, one can implicitly trust himself to the intimate character of the pianoforte. Then stream from it the sweet tones of the harp, then, like strings of pearls, come chains of roses from its notes, or Titanic forces seem to escape from it, and my soul lies wholly in the player’s finger-tips. Is it then that the piano is a contemptible instrument compared with the violin or the string-quartet? Do I then remember how it sings so hoarsely, and how its scales are so broken, and how the soul of its melody is so dead without the breath of the rising and falling tone?
Of course, if it expresses itself in the piano-concerto, on the podium of the orchestra, or even if it trusts itself, in trio or quartet, to the company of strings or wind, then it moves my compassion. A foreign atmosphere envelops it even if Beethoven’s concerto in E flat major is resounding; and a weakness haunts it, if in chamber music it alternates with the dominating melody of the singing violin. But when once the clang of the violin and of the Cor Anglais[1] has faded from our ears, and all comparison has been laid aside, then, and then only, the soul of the pianoforte rises before us. Every good thing must be considered per se apart from all comparison. Is it no good thing to have the whole material of tone before one’s ten fingers, to penetrate it, truly to penetrate it; to feel beneath one’s nerves all the subtleties of all music—the song, the dance, whispering, shrieking, weeping, laughter?—all, I mean, voiced in the tone of the pianoforte, the epic tone of this modern Cithara, which, in its own kind, embraces the lyrical nature of the violin and the dramatic nature of the orchestra? In such all-embracing power the piano is in the twilight chamber a strange and dear tale-teller, a Rhapsode for the intimate spirit, which can express itself in it by improvisation, and an archive for the historian to whom it unrolls the whole life of modern music in its universal speech from a point of view which gives us the whole in the average. Then only do I love the piano—then is it faithful, then noble, genuine, unique.
Queen Elizabeth of England is sitting in the afternoon at her spinet. She is thinking of the conversation which she has had this forenoon with Sir James Melville—a conversation which the latter has preserved for us in writing. He was in 1564 ambassador from Mary Stuart to Elizabeth. Elizabeth had asked him what was Mary’s style of dress, the colour of her hair, her figure, her way of life. “When Mary returns from the hunt,” he answered, “she gives herself up to historical reading or to music, for she is at home with lute and virginal.” “Does she play well?” asked Elizabeth. “For a queen, very well,” was the answer. And so, this afternoon, Elizabeth is sitting at the spinet, and playing Bird’s or Dr Bull’s Variations on popular airs. She plays from the very (or a similar) copy which to-day is marked in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge as Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book. She does not notice that Sir James and Lord Hunsdon are secretly listening. When suddenly she sees them standing behind her she stops playing. “I am not used,” she says, “to play before men; but when I am solitary, to shun melancholy.”
Fifty years before, Albert Dürer had given an illustration of Melancholy in his famous engraving. Melancholy, as dignified Depression, is sitting in the open air, surrounded by the implements for Manual Labour, Art and Science. It expressed the anticipated pain of the misfortune which lurks in the good fortune of knowledge and intelligence; the pain of the dawning Age of Wisdom, for which Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, had already shown a just contempt. In his St Jerome, Dürer represents the deliverance from Melancholy. St Jerome, in the contemporary engraving, is sitting quietly and contentedly at home, while the sun shines through the circular panes,[2] the papers, books and cushions being so neatly disposed around, and the lion so wonderfully sleeping beside him. But—in the corner stands his house-organ or spinet!
Something of the spirit of the St Jerome breathes through the Elizabethan music—a tone of the Volkslied, or of that intimate world-sense, alongside of the decaying mediæval counterpoint (decaying as the Gothic architecture was decaying) like scenes of popular life or of lyrical beauty, which display themselves chiefly in the drama, in the midst of scenes of historic ceremonial. Everyone has observed what a subtle sense for soft musical tones is revealed throughout Shakespeare’s plays. The Duke in Twelfth Night loves the Volkslied, the old song, “old and plain,” which “the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free maids that weave their thread with bones, do use to chant: it is silly sooth, and dallies with the innocence of love like the old age.” He heard it last night; he will hear it again to-day: “Methought it did relieve my passion much, More than light airs and recollected terms Of these most brisk and giddy-pacèd times.” And it is the fool who sings it to him—that typical figure of the love-thoughts and of the love-business of the people: the fool, who in every play has the largest store of old popular songs, and who in this very drama empties a very cornucopia of them. But Shakespeare’s holiest encomium on music is sung at night, in that idyllic scene at the close of the Merchant of Venice, between Lorenzo and Jessica. The moonlight sleeps upon the bank; the lovers sit in silence before Portia’s house and let the music steal upon their ears. “Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.” Lorenzo endeavours to cheer Jessica with the music. We can well believe that his impassioned words express the feelings of the poet himself, who has marked his Shylock, his Cassius, his Othello,[3] his Caliban, with the stain of a heedlessness of music:—
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
Portia enters the moonlit garden and hears the gentle tones, not knowing whence they come. She feels keenly the eternal magic of invisible music which lies pillowed in silence and night. The whole scene is a hymn on the infelt soul of musical self-centredness, wherein man finds his best self.