History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

The two volumes of “Recollections of the life of Moscheles,” which his wife compiled from diaries and letters, give a clear view of the rich international concert-life of this age. Year by year we follow the kaleidoscopic existence of these artists, who see each other constantly and constantly part. Triumphs of virtuosity fill the winter seasons, followed by recreation in the country and preparations for an enlarged repertoire. The halls echo with jubilation and applause; and the audiences, especially the easily-kindled Viennese, are enthusiastic in their cheers. Music has become so popular and the compositions are so extraordinarily banal that it certainly did not often occur that they were rejected for shallowness—although, on the other hand, Kalkbrenner’s experience with a Beethoven symphony at a Paris Conservatoire concert was a sad warning to those who try to improve the public taste. The dilettantes push forward the more, the circle of instruction widens the cheaper and better the pianos become. They push themselves into rivalry with the artists in great concerts; as Moscheles relates of the celloist Sir William Curtis and the pianists Oom and Mrs Fleming. “I have to hear so much insipid music.” “Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde.” From professional piano-playing—and they often played at two places in an evening—the artists took recreation with the good temper which never failed in those years. The great singer Malibran would sit down to the piano and sing the Rataplan and the Spanish songs, to which she would imitate the guitar on the keyboard. Then she would imitate famous colleagues, and a Duchess greeting her, and a Lady So-and-so singing “Home Sweet Home” with the most cracked and nasal voice in the world. Thalberg would then take his seat and play Viennese songs and waltzes with “obligato snaps.” Moscheles himself would play with hand turned round, or with the fist; perhaps under the fist disguising the thumb, which in Moscheles’ peculiar way of playing used to take the thirds under the palm of the hand.

Marie Charlotte Antoine Josephe, Countess of Questenberg.

These players preferred to play their own compositions. The separation between composer and virtuoso was not yet complete. Of course, when Ferdinand Hiller in his “Life of an Artist” says that he had never heard either Hummel or Chopin, Thalberg or Moscheles, play a piece by another composer, his experience was at least unique. Moscheles, for example, even played Scarlatti on the old harpsichord. But, as a rule, they abode by the old custom, so far at least as amateurs were not concerned. These latter were in their instruction-books liberally provided with historical material.

Improvisation also flourished in concerts and soirées; and playing and composing, which in improvisation form a true union, can only with difficulty be severed in an age of creative virtuosos. Kalkbrenner composed while playing, and played while composing, so that no one could tell the difference between the two; and Czerny used to invent the necessary étude in the midst of the lesson. Thus it happened—a state of things unparalleled to-day—that the beloved duet-playing could be combined with the equally beloved improvisation—mutually contradictory as they appear. Moscheles speaks of an improvised duet with Mendelssohn. The latter played in the bass some English songs in ballad-style; the former interwove in the treble the scherzo of his friend’s A minor symphony.

Slight as was the advance yet made in division of labour between player and composer, there was equally little comprehensive division between the species of music. We do not hear of chamber-music evenings, pianoforte evenings, orchestral concerts. All was mingled in one; and chamber-music finds the same audience as the symphony. A piano-recital without orchestra was a rarity; and the concerto-form is almost de règle in all the greater performances. This is seen in the compositions of this period, which, as a rule, so far as they are specially adapted to public performance, were written for orchestral accompaniment. By their side were editions for private use, including the important orchestral portions. This concerto-piece could not greatly or permanently aid in the advance of a delicate or intimate piano-music. Through the rarity of special piano recitals it was not so easy to get pianos when they were wanted. In Frankfort there lived a well-known old lady who had absolutely the only piano store in the city. People had to praise her playing, to blow the trumpet of advertisement for her wares (they were Streicher’s), to court her and cringe to her in order to get an instrument for a concert.[122]

In 1837 Moscheles ventured to introduce piano-evenings without orchestra. This was an important step. But even yet the evening was not wholly devoted to the piano. A soprano or contralto filled the gap between one performance and the next. How long was it before the serious nature of a concert was universally acknowledged! Possibly here the production of dubious works of the performer’s own led to a low, acrobatic conception of the true state of affairs; and it was only the interpretation of good works by others, which were more serious, that saved taste from complete degeneration. The public gradually became quiet, and felt itself turned from educator into educated. The court ceases to take its supper during the playing;[123] the cantatrice no longer concludes her roulades with a smile worthy of the circus; and a singer is no longer hissed off the stage if he forgets to give his hand by way of thanks to his fair partner. Slowly it is realised that the concert is not a place for showing off, nor a mere form of social amusement, but a religious service.

This composite structure of virtuosity carried to the extent of vapidity, and of interpretation carried into historical research, is reflected in the compositions of the period. On the one side the tradition was exactly carried on; people began to view the existing classical works—Mozart’s and Beethoven’s Sonatas, or all kinds of pieces by Scarlatti, Bach, and Handel, as material for study; they republished half-forgotten or badly edited authors like Scarlatti; they even wrote sonatas “in the style of Scarlatti”; they arranged for the piano great quantities of the most various chamber or orchestral music. Alongside of the historical tendency stands, as so often, the international. Spanish, Irish, Russian, Italian, Polish national airs and rhythms are taken en masse into the circle of salon music; the air swarms with Polonaises, Boleros, Gipsy airs, Ecossaises, Tarantelles. But this quite cosmopolitan music was stamped by a fade enthusiasm for beauty; and there is bound up with the pieces an empty sentimental greeting or a hypocritical reminiscence. The mythological titles of the seventeenth century, and the realistic ones of the eighteenth, yield to the sentimental ones[124] of the bourgeois empire. But never was this system of naming pieces on a lower level; and never did it so corrupt the taste of the believing multitude. Even to-day we are not yet freed from its traces. Then there are the “Hommages à Beethoven” or “à Händel” corresponding to the old “Tombeaux,” but with less sincerity of intention. Then there are the “Fire pieces”—a whole collection of dedications to fire brigades—the “Burning of Mariazell,” and the “Ruins of Wien Neustadt,” figure among the salon-music of Czerny. Then follow the geographical recollections—the innumerable souvenirs of all possible towns, rivers, mountains, and people, such as the “Souvenir de mon premier voyage,” “les Charmes de Paris,” “le Retour à Londres,” etc. By their side are genuine characteristic titles chiefly employed to gild the pill of the “study.” Most objectionable of all are the favourite opera-fantasias, which are specially in vogue in the Parisian school. These tear the airs almost from the very mouths of the singers, and the composer’s completed melodies from his work, and stuff the pot pourri with passages, figurations, and fragments of études, with spurious slow introductions and sentimental passages, so that finally absolutely nothing of the essence of the original airs is left. These are perhaps the worst examples of want of style and taste to be found in the history of art. Here the curse of popularity came home to roost; here was reached the extreme point, in the publicity of the concert and of society, which the clavier had to pass through since the development of the hammer-mechanism. Any harshness in an artistic work was sufficient to condemn it; invention was tabooed; smoothness and the tickling of the ear were the only law. What in Paris was done by Herz, Hünten, Karr, Rosellen, Kontski, and their fellows, made a great sensation, and quickly vanished. Hünten received for a moderate-sized work from fifteen hundred to two thousand francs; to-day he is banished even from the salon. Karr wrote to order hundreds of pieces; to-day no amateur knows a single one out of the huge mass. And the days in which Kontski’s “Reveil du lion” was put in the hands of pupils appear to be past for ever.

The interdependence of piano and opera was not merely external. In Paris the opera, with its world-ruling influence, not merely forms a musical centre to which everything gravitates; it is itself subjected to the great law of this period—the law of mosaic work and of the aim to please. In the thirties and forties the world had thus reached hollow ostentation in the grand opera, and in the comic opera mere ballet-dancing. “Where,” wrote Wagner at that time, “where has the grace of Méhul, of Isouard, of Boieldieu, and of the young Auber gone, chased out of sight by the abject quadrille rhythms, which to-day rattle through the theatre of the opera comique and keep everything else out?” What was seen there was like what was heard on the pianoforte—pointless situations, introduced for the sake of the “business,” tirades which seem to be closed with the smile of the acrobat when he has finished his trick—technique, and nothing but technique. A librettist like Scribe is loaded with commissions, surrounded by Parisian or foreign composers—even Wagner in his youth having once written to him. He understands how to manufacture the proper substratum for the musical triflings. Read from this point of view Auber’s later operas, as the “La Part du Diable,” or those overtures whose whole structure depends on the fact that they are skilfully adapted to dances; or that daub-work in the musical setting with the jaundiced transition passages, where a proper modulation would be almost out of place; or those boleros, which people sing in circumstances of the utmost grief, without being able to raise themselves to the height of the irony; or those étude colourations, introduced in the most indifferent places provided they pay, and developing themselves vigorously about a single vowel; or those scores, which are so miserably transparent that one can see the author first rapidly composing them at the piano and then putting in the instrumentation slap-dash. It is the first, and let us hope, the last time, that the piano reaches its hand to the opera—a most unfruitful elective affinity. Opera and piano are necessarily and essentially hostile. In the Paris of that day, when absolute music, as well that of Berlioz as that of Chopin, is still a modest retiring flower, the crowd ran after the gentle titillation of the opera, and the mass of piano music moves in the operatic humdrum path. Among the Parisians as among the Italians there was assuredly not an operatic composer who did not invent at the piano and transfer his inventions from the piano to the opera. Donizetti has left an interesting letter to his brother-in-law Vesselli, which was fastened as an inscription on his piano: “Do not sell this piano at any price, for it contains my whole artistic life from 1822 onwards. Its tone lingers in my ears. In it murmur Anna, Maria, Fausta, Lucia. Let it live as long as I live! I lived with it my years of hope, of wedded happiness, of loneliness. It heard my cries of joy, it saw my tears, my disenchantments, my honours. It shared with me my toils and the sweat of my brow. In it dwells my genius, every section of my path. It saw your father, your brother, all of us; we all have tortured it; it was a true comrade to us all, and may it always be a comrade to your daughter as a dowry of a thousand sad and happy thoughts.”