Handel’s clavier-pieces are written in an extravagantly popular style. His suites, which moreover embrace not dance-forms only; his capriccios, variations and fantasias, flow like futile “water-music.” They are brilliant without being difficult, and entertaining without being suggestive. There is no colour on the sky of their landscapes; no tempest lashes their trees. We roll in our coaches on well-macadamised roads, the melody of the wheels reminding us meanwhile of this or that well-worn turn in the operas or oratorios. Seldom is a halt necessary in order to look at the view. Perhaps we may stop a moment longer than usual at those frequent singing sarabands in the popular style, at the charming salon-gigues (especially the long one in G minor), the genuine virtuoso’s Tarantella, or at the better F sharp minor suite with its short free prelude, staccato largo, insinuating fugue and dramatic gigue. Perhaps, also, the fugue with its three beats from the E minor Prelude may please us; but there is a something which the whole fails to give us. It is an acquaintance—not a personal intimacy.
Quite other is the impression produced by the “galant” music of Philip Emanuel Bach. While his elder brother Friedemann stands somewhat nearer to Sebastian in kind, and actually wrote pieces, like the C minor fugue, of which the old man need not have been ashamed, Philip Emanuel, with greater decision and also with greater significance, pursued a different path. It is as if fate had marked out this difference. Sebastian Bach held Friedemann as the cleverer musician; but he frittered his life away. Philip was first set to study jurisprudence, and out of the painstaking lawyer grew the sober and energetic composer. The life of Philip was as simple as his father’s. In 1740, at the age of twenty-six, he went to the court of Frederick the Great, where he worked as royal cembalist and accompanist. In 1767 he went to Hamburg, and died there in 1788. He does not seem to have been able to agree with the King; and it is likely enough that he felt and worked more freely in Hamburg. Berlin was always having trouble with its people. Had Philip Emanuel stayed there, Berlin would have been the greatest centre of piano-playing in Germany, and its walls would have been associated with lasting memories of the ancestors of modern musical forms. Had Mozart, in later years, accepted the offer of Frederick William II. of a position as chief Kapellmeister with the extraordinary salary of three thousand thalers, Berlin would have been enabled to absorb a little of the musical life of Vienna. Or, later still, if the Academy of Singing had been given to Mendelssohn (who was a candidate), rather than to Rungenhagen, the intoxicating glory of Leipzig, which lasted for a time, would have been transferred to the banks of the Spree. But the spirit of Zelter remained over Berlin.
In 1753 Philip Emanuel published at his own expense his “Essay on the true Method of playing the Clavier.” This was the most copious work on clavier technique that had yet appeared. It was at the same time the sufficient apology for the technique of the thumb, which has become the ground-work of our fingering. When the extreme importance of the thumb had at last been recognised, it was not hard to investigate systematically the places of its application. The main rules were necessarily that, in ascending, the thumb of the right hand is put after one or more black keys, and the thumb of the left hand in descending, and vice versa. The setting of the thumb on the black keys themselves must be avoided, and the passing over of one finger by another, which earlier had been the main feature in scale passages, was now abandoned. The whole art was built on the thumb, which passed under in the right place. This work of Philip Emanuel, which gives special attention to the legato, may be called a panegyric on the thumb. In this clear insight, as well as in the arrangement of his exercises, which begin with scales and chords, preferring the unison practice of the two hands, and advancing slowly to easy pieces, his work is still one of our most modern exercise-books. We might guess that in this diligent application of his thumb-technique to scales and broken chords, Philip Emanuel places in the forefront of his exercises certain scale figures which to-day could not correspond to the most pressing necessities of the piano-player. We should expect them to be a mere training of the hand, and no preparation for the real difficulties which appear in actual literature. A glance at the works of any great master will show us, however, that such is not the case. These very scales, chain-passages, and broken chords, which are the material of teaching, are also the figures of free composition. Some fashionable composers may have employed them extravagantly, because they were at the fingers’ ends of the players, but the most independent writers must use them, because they are, from the very nature of the clavier, the most fruitful in effect and most harmonious in sound. The old disruption of musical material into short passages of four or five notes was now antiquated. Performers practised the whole scale and the chord. And since Philip Emanuel carried through this natural training with methodical clearness, his teaching has been fruitful, and has not run merely alongside of the literature. In his book we can clearly see how the clavier has contributed not least to the formation of modern secular musical perception. In this its equal temperament, which was so urgently necessary, and its complete presentation of the tone-material, which so to speak we have only to read off, have largely aided.
The case is dissimilar with his treatment of the “manieren.”[102] On their employment he writes as follows: “No man, assuredly, hath doubted concerning the necessity of ‘manieren.’ We can observe it herefrom, that we meet them everywhere in great abundance. Everywhere are they indispensable, if one considers their use. They hang the notes together, and give them life; they give them, if it be necessary, a particular energy and weight; they make them pleasing and therefore awaken a peculiar attention; they assist to make clear what is their meaning, which may be sorrowful or glad or otherwise disposed, as it pleaseth, yet do they contribute of their own thereto; they give a notable part of opportunity and material to the true execution; a moderate composition can by them be aided, as without them the best air is empty and monotonous, and the plainest meaning must appear throughout obscure.” This is a judgment which surprises us in a man so intelligent and advanced as Philip Emanuel. He has not yet perceived that ornamentations were in his time only the relics of an earlier style. An appoggiatura, which takes away half or two-thirds of its note, and thus becomes a mere melodious retardation, or a double-shake which completely disintegrates its note, and requires to be expressed by an antiquated stenographic mark, is already a mere fossil in a period which gives such independence to the melody. It is not the notes which then appear which are fossil, but their arrangement as decorations. What had originally been truly decoration, in the heyday of figuration, had, in the course of the eighteenth century, long become an emancipated melodic phrase. The idea of the retardation, which earlier veiled itself under the name of appoggiatura with suspended main-note, was not allowed to step in openly; and the doppelschlag[103] or the trill could say plainly what they were, without masquerading as modest satellites of some main-note or other. Had Philip Emanuel but had the courage to discard the old signs, and to hear the customary ornamentations as independent music, he would have been able to spare himself much dead weight, to avoid much confusion, and to get rid of the trammels of many dead traditions, which have come down even to our day. He has in his book exhibited a stirring knowledge and an individual treatment of the “manners”; yet he was forced to maintain an arbitrary distinction between the “manners” and the other figurations, although between the turn and any other melodious line-curve there is no longer any essential difference whatever. He has not been able to introduce any system into the relation of the appoggiatura with its note; and, because he saw that the effect of the appoggiatura could be produced equally well without the little note, he has been obliged to take refuge in the sentence: “The appoggiaturas are partly written like other notes and thrown into the bar, and partly specially indicated by small notes; while the larger ones keep their full value to the eye, although in practice they lose something of it.” At this point he should have been able to see that a system of “manieren” as such was no longer possible.
From indications given by Philip Emanuel, it would seem that in these matters he was deliberately behind his time. He bemoans that the well-known marks in clavier-pieces were already beginning to be strange, and points to the careful way in which the French had always put in their marks. He delights as a rule in setting up the French as the masters of the clavier-exercise, and is vexed that people had an “evil prejudice” against their pieces, “which yet,” he says, “have always been a good school for clavier-players, forasmuch as this nation, by the smoothness and neatness of its playing, hath marked itself off specially from others.” Philip Emanuel’s love for the French is a very important point to keep in mind in appraising his works. Not only did he find in them the only great precedents for his “galant” style; he has also expressly continued the method of Couperin and Rameau by transcriptions, in the French manner and the French language. Nay, his endeavour, in his sonatas and rondos, to construct stiffer forms with reprises, appears as a mere continuation of the French rondo; and, however Italian the musical form may be, in more than one of his pieces, we inevitably think of the “Cyclopes” of Rameau. Possibly his whole book was suggested by Couperin’s “L’Art de toucher le clavecin,” and respect for this French tradition has hindered him from revolutionising the “manieren,” which still had their justification in France, so thoroughly as he did revolutionise the finger-exercise. It is thus very amusing to see how he himself challenges comparison with Couperin. He calls him “a teacher formerly so profound,” referring of course to the “manieren.” The “formerly,” of course, implies that Couperin had not yet learnt the thumb method, and had been too fond of changing the fingers on one note. In point of ornamentation it was he that was conventional; and in point of fingering—why, old Sebastian, lately dead, stood between him and Couperin.
“Fantasia-making without strict tempo,” says Philip Emanuel in one place of the Essay, “seems in the main to be specially adapted for the expression of the emotions, because every kind of barring brings with it a certain constraint.” In this verdict and in its application lies for us to-day, viewed externally, the greatest surprise which Philip Emanuel offers us. He has, as a matter of fact, written many fantasias which are almost designed without bars, and thus very logically give expression to the character of improvisation which they bear. They are great recitatives full of reflective melodies, of linked staccati, of sounding broken chords, which the player, when moved, knows how to unfold. They were the last free specimens of the unfettered forms of the older time.
Not only in these fantasias, but as a rule in his whole creative energy, especially in the Hamburg period, Philip Emanuel exhibits that extempore humour and freedom, which has at all times given to clavier-pieces their greatest charm. He has sufficient invention to be rarely at a loss; and the pieces from his earlier “Württemberger Sonaten,” which are still more contrapuntal than the later, or from the later six volumes “Für Kenner und Liebhaber,”[104] have all that variety and multiplicity in unity which was also a feature of the collections of John Sebastian. But the desire for caprice works in him more strongly than the fulness of invention. He is untiring in pulling a melody humorously to pieces, in surprises of pause or in remarkable transitions. Occasionally his language positively dances, and it is hard to be certain whether it is intentional distortion—a cloak for poverty—or the genuine caprice of the moment which leads him after the charms of eccentricity. In any case he belongs to those rare and subtle natures which in a moment give us the genuine artistic touch of brotherhood.
Even in his harmonies his freedom is clearly noticeable. He does not object to write separate movements in different keys, which he often connects by direct transitions. The third Sonata in the “Kenner und Liebhaber” stands in the first movement in B minor, in the second in G minor, and in the third in B minor once more. The fifth Sonata, which is set in F major, begins quietly with a phrase in C minor. In the first Rondo of volume V. we find the chord of the seventh (G, E, B, C sharp), set at the key-deciding place, in B minor; a chord at which some of our best memories of Wagner are revived. For such things he was severely censured by his comrades in the profession.
As to his melody, it is as delightful as is to be expected from “galant” music, and from that only. At one time it shows a charming sentimentalism, in which the stronger use of retardations has its share, now it is frisky and playful, toying with itself; in both cases anticipating Mozart. Specially characteristic of the author are numerous melodic phrases, the like of which have played an important part down to our own time. Philip Emanuel used them with the greatest depth and penetration in the F sharp minor movement of the A major sonata (No. IV. in Kenner und Liebhaber, vol. i). In all these points he manifests his independence; and in spite of his study of the French, it is but seldom that, as in the “Siciliana” of one of his sonatas in the “Musikalisches Allerley,” we catch an echo of a phrase from Couperin.
Like all the “galants,” he wrote much. A considerable number of his works were printed in his own time in the magazines or separately. Among these the sonatas to Frederick the Great to Charles Eugene of Württemberg, to Amalie of Prussia, and the “Kenner und Liebhaber,” take the first place. But yet more remained unprinted. Prosniz has counted four hundred and twenty of his clavier pieces, of which two hundred and fifty were printed. There is no modern comprehensive edition of his works, but the “Kenner und Liebhaber” has been very beautifully reissued by Krebs in the Berlin Academy collection of original editions. Apart from the first volume these are written exclusively for pianoforte.