History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

Viennese pianoforte players about 1800.
Eberl. Gelinek. Wölffl.

The Virtuosos

Beethoven’s playing was naturalistic. In him there were no tricks of technique to be admired, no mere virtuosity to praise; but the hearers were stirred to their hearts. In this storm and stress, this whispering and listening, this awakening of the soul, they recognised an original naturalism of piano-playing, standing by the side of the naturalism of his creative art. Rhythm was the life of his playing. He thought out all technique with a view to rhythm. In the Berlin Library is a collection of Cramer’s Études, containing a series of annotations by Schindler, the well-known biographer of Beethoven. The expressions are so remarkable that the spirit of Beethoven has not unjustly been detected in them. Shedlock, in fact, has published them simply as Beethoven’s elucidations of Cramer, whose Études the Master is known to have prized exceedingly. In every Étude the melos, or latent melodic air, which lies at the base of the figurations, is brought into prominence, and the rhythmical presentation of these figurations is made as accurate as possible. The rest is for the most part left to the time, the diligence, and the ability of the player. Thus could a great creator look at Études. Of necessity he looked at them from a totally different point of view from the virtuoso pure and simple. He cared chiefly for the presentation of the idea, for the inwardness of the piece. Everything that was written down in concrete notes served to him but as a means for that expression, the mastery of which was the mastery of interpretation. From this point of view Beethoven would have written his “Klavierschule,” of which he often spoke in his latter years. With mere fingering and wrist action he would have had little indeed to do.

This great task was undertaken by a band of artists who must not be undervalued. They stood in the first rank of virtuosos. It is precisely at this time that technique first properly arises as an art; and their zeal in the attempt to solve the new problem was great indeed. They discover new possibilities of expression, they disclose new effects in the capacities of the pianoforte, and they reveal an inventive power in these new paths which offers the most surprising beauties. We must consider them from the right side, and never forget that the development of the piano could never have taken place so naturally and organically unless its technical advance had gone on in parallel lines with its spiritual progress.

I have here no other aim than to view things under a certain species aeternitatis. What was done by Bird, Bull, Couperin, or Pasquini, though to-day perhaps only one in a thousand piano-players knows their names, was of more importance than a Polacca of Kalkbrenner or an Étude of Ludwig Berger. We have a fixed horizon; what is not within it remains outside it. Lives of entire and rich content, sorrows and joys of extreme intensity, may sink into oblivion; they are in history a mere grain in the quicksand. It is useless to look up in my index the name of everybody who has composed a Rondo or given piano-lessons in Moscow. We must content ourselves with those who, by the great halting-places, have deserved a monument on the way: those only without whom history would offer a distinct blank.

A very great work is represented by the theoretical piano-schools, which followed one another at this time in close succession. If in the little book of Philip Emanuel Bach there was the beginning of a unifying system, on which the following age had only to build, yet, in the face of the most varying theories of the first half of our century, we can but recognise that piano-teaching, from mere excess of zeal, never succeeded in developing a genuine system. It has always been the tendency of the piano-teacher to keep in the past an ideal to worship, while with the present he has such a poor understanding that every new method of instruction makes a tabula rasa of the preceding method, begins all afresh, and allows the pupil salvation only according to its private judgment. Piano-study has never enjoyed the advantage possessed by other sciences, of building up from century to century, each upon the last. In theory it has remained a mere mosaic; and it has been saved only by practice.

It is practice also that gives a certain systematisation, not to the teaching, but to the history of teaching. All the separate workers at the great task, little as they admit the possibility of salvation outside their own creed, are yet driven forward by the stream of time and by the results of experience; and the law of averages brings about a clear advance apart from their personal agency. If we compare the systems of the eighteenth century, the schools of Philip Emanuel, of Marpurg, and that of Daniel Gottlob Türk, which closes this series, with the works of the epoch on which we have now entered, we see clearly how practice has marked out the path for theory, always reflecting upon itself, itself inducing its decomposition into its constituent à priori and empirical parts, and finally limiting itself to a mere application of experience.

The Pianoforte School which was written by Adam was a kind of pronunciamento of the Paris Conservatoire. This Conservatoire, founded in the midst of the troubles of the Revolution, ultimately gave French technique a position to which for a long time it had been a stranger. Adam’s principle is to put the “manieren” more on one side, and to avoid that too eager devotion to the teaching of general composition with which the books of the eighteenth century had been occupied. In its place he brings the study of touch more prominently forward. The day of the spinet is over; the hammer-clavier now dominates the world, and leads theorists to attempt methods of touch which may correspond to its possibilities of delicate expression. The pedals also begin to play their part. Adam recognises four pedals, of which one is our damper-raiser, and three serve for soft effects. Gradually they have been reduced to two, the damper-raiser and the so-called “soft” pedal.