A great opponent of all use of the pedal was Hummel. In our time it is no longer necessary to point out that the pedal, an integral part of the hammer-clavier, deserves not to be rejected, but simply to be treated on its own artistic lines. But Hummel stands, in his theoretic relations, so strongly on the foundations of tradition, that his attitude can excite no surprise. His “Ausführliche theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Pianofortespiel,” which appeared in 1828, is the crown of the united exertions of piano theory. This voluminous work, which gained with difficulty a circulation that it soon lost for ever, is a system, carried out into the minutest details, of all the technical capacities of the piano; so systematic, indeed, that here theory, by deductive methods, discovered effects which practice could not have attained alone. It is an unparalleled example of theoretic speculation, and yet really nothing more than the extension of Marpurg’s or Türk’s old-fashioned methods. These countless headings in capital letters, each describing a different class of “passage,” these numbered possibilities of fingering, these pedantic elucidations, beginning always from the first over again, are nothing but, as he calls them, an “Anweisung,” mere directions, abstraction from reflection outward. Any one who has mastered the first part has the second already at his fingers’ ends, but this master of dissection troubles himself not a whit on that point, and knows no economy in pupilage. He is opposed to learning by heart, since the fingers, he says, ought to find the keys without sight: so far is he from the modern view that only a complete mastery of a piece renders adequate interpretation possible. He troubles himself little about a science of touch. He introduces the “manieren”; but, contrary to the method of the eighteenth century, he makes the trill begin on the upper note. So far is a system of execution from his purpose that he can actually write as follows: “Runs and notes going upwards are executed crescendo, downwards diminuendo; but there are cases in which the composer intends the reverse, or that they should be played with even strength.” Hummel’s book is to-day a monument of misguided diligence, great in its patient calculation of permutations, but a dead curiosity.
The Brothers Pixis. 1800.
Engraved by Sintzenich after Schröder.
If, on the other hand, we look at Kalkbrenner’s Paris Pianoforte School, which he dedicated “to all the conservatoriums in Europe,” we see—with no heavy artillery—advances of all kinds which in part fill up the perspective of Adam. Where Hummel has ten main classes of fingered passages, he has only six; five-finger exercises for the unmoving hand; scales in all forms; thirds, sixths, and chord-forms; octaves with the wrist; trills; overlapping of the hands. In this there is more thrift, while there is no talk of absolute completeness. The “manieren” slowly cease to occupy important chapters; the pedals again come by their own; for Kalkbrenner as a Parisian hates the dry tone of the Vienna pianoforte. Execution also begins to receive a systematic treatment. Interesting references are made to punctuation in order to illustrate musical phraseology; conclusions on the tonic are a full stop; on the dominant a semicolon; while interrupted cadences are a note of exclamation. This is naive enough, but it is at any rate a beginning.
We are thus already standing at the point at which clavier theory decomposes itself into its elements. If Hummel was the great theoretician, Czerny was the great man of practice; a quite unique person, the hero of all piano-teachers, whose practical eye runs equally over all the possibilities of playing, and works them out in separate parts; the genius of the Étude. He it was who discovered the great secret that no separation of methods of fingering is of any avail in practice, but that the perfection of the fingers must be carried out solely on the basis of their mechanical gymnastic. It is useless to try to apply my five fingers to so many theoretically possible permutations; the important question is what practical use can be made of my fingers according to their physical structure. Czerny has no obsolete rules of practice, but a science of mechanism; thus taking the very opposite pole to Hummel. Piano-study, which with Couperin and Philip Emanuel was still a part of a musical training with just the necessary amount of mechanics, became with him primarily the gymnastic of the fingers with the addition of instruction in touch and execution. Long past are the times when the good old clavier was only used to “fill” the song, which was after all the essence of music. From music we have come to the fingers. A science of the fingers is constructed, and the fingers are trained as earlier only the throat was trained. Technique has remembered her own ways, and made the last first. The emancipation of finger-gymnastic was an epoch-marking point in the treatment of the piano, the desired answer of theory to practice, which for a long time had recognised the specific art of the piano. It was perhaps the last important stride in its emancipation when the results of practice were made the groundwork of instruction. Czerny, in his great Pianoforte School, his Opus 500, is almost entirely free from the à priori theory. He transfers mechanics to music. With good results he treats individual cases, as for example, when he appends to the beginning of passages a finger-exercise not given in the scale; he designs immediately to return to the usual fingering in order to arrive duly at the extreme notes with the extreme fingers, and to avoid unnecessary underpassing. It was reserved for a later time not merely to bring the note-material lying before us into harmony with economic fingering, but also to make execution, which with Czerny has but a loose dependence on the finger-exercise, re-act upon the fingers. Bülow, for example, is fond of unusual fingering, in which the execution forbids any too easy playing, and a too loose rendering is prevented by irregularities in the succession of the fingers.
The mechanics of the fingers formed the first part of piano-instruction; touch and execution were the second. Their importance as means to the mechanism of music was fully seen; and in the “Technical Studies” of Plaidy, or in Köhler’s “Methode für Klavierspiel und Musik” (1857), they are as exhaustively handled as before had been the “manieren” or the thorough-bass. The former contents himself with the simple terms, Legato, Staccato, Legatissimo, and Portamento; the latter gives a more mechanical division, always according to the use of the fore-arm, the finger-joints, the wrist, or the elbow. Neither is complete, neither supplies a systematic advance on the lines of his predecessors; and we should be astonished at these divergences if we set the numerous schools of these times, from a theoretical point of view, over against one another. Practically considered, however, they agree well enough. The holding of the hand as enjoined by Philip Emanuel Bach has remained on the whole unaltered down to the present day. With trifling differences, which concern the relation of the extreme fingers to the middle finger, and the profile of the back of the hand, Bach, Türk, Müller, Hummel, Logier, Kalkbrenner and the rest, are at one as to the support of the arm which carries the hand, and of the hand which carries the fingers as they descend. In Paris Logier constructed an instrument to hold the hand in practice, in shape like a bracket, which he named “chiroplast.” Kalkbrenner, in his “Guide-mains,” introduced some modifications on the chiroplast; but such mechanical contrivances gained no general acceptance. Logier’s speciality was his prefatory note that the finger must remain in continual touch with the key. With this was allied that special kind of sensuously charming touch which differentiated the Parisian school from the brilliant playing of the Viennese and the emotional style of the English. That carezzando, or stroking of the keys, was a favourite practice of Kalkbrenner and Kontski in Paris. To-day Risler remains perhaps alone in this school with his pure sensuous charm of touch.
If, in the whole great group of technical artists, which is bounded on the one side by Wölffl, Wanhal, Kozeluch, Eberl, in Mozart’s generation, and on the other by Thalberg and Liszt in ours, we should look for truly pre-eminent spirits, then we should have remaining Clementi, the father of all technique; Hummel, the inventor of the modern piano-exercise; and Czerny, the genius of teaching. But if we ask for the lines of the motion which runs through this epoch, we observe the victory of a virtuoso impulse, which goes back to Hummel, over a plainer and more intellectual tendency which has its rise in Clementi. The school of Clementi prefers the English pianoforte with its heavier but richer touch; that of Hummel the Viennese, with its lighter tone, which lends itself more easily to effects.
