History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

There seems so much that is contemptible in this technical school that it would almost appear, at least from the artistic point of view, to have lived in vain. And yet it was at this time that a form sprang into existence which, born from technical necessities, became a custom, and from a custom a style, and so emphatically a style that it was able to enter into effective rivalry with the older styles—the contrapuntal, the thematic, the leit-motif. We are still under its dominion. This form is the Étude.

The Étude was not the invention of the technists. It existed in germ in Bach; it half grew out of thematic; only the visual angle altered with time. In an invention or symphony of Bach a motive is treated according to the free laws of imitation; it is used up in all the voices, for all fingers. In a Prelude on some thematic ground-subject, in a fugue with its stern code of canonic succession, the same is the case: the motive is expended on itself. But between the broken chords of Bach’s C sharp Prelude and those of Chopin’s C sharp Étude there is a vast difference in the treatment. What in the one is used with a view to the motive is here expended with a view to the technique. Bach sets before him the artistic possibilities of the theme: Chopin the mechanical. Bach wrote many of his preludes with educational purposes; but he did not compose them with a sole view to their full practical value. As in theory the musical and the mechanical cannot be sharply severed, so the pieces are half for the purpose of supplying music, half means of instruction. The mechanical part was obliged first to emancipate itself before the conception of the Étude could be fully grasped. On the straight line leading from the old thematic to the Étude style, the conception of the motive altered itself. Motives were now found which could be arranged according to their technical productiveness. We see perhaps even the same motive, considered first contrapuntally or as a fixed idea, but afterwards according to its mechanical value.

There are motives whose interest lies in the size of the hand; or in the playing of a legato passage simultaneously with the chords in the same hand;[125] or again, contrary motion of chords in both hands has to be carried out; or, yet further, attention is paid to an easy gliding of the hand over great stretches; or finger-changing on the same key is the ground-idea. The piece may aim at cantabile or at the perfect legato in a fugato movement, or at the practice of octaves, pearl-like scales, pianissimo touch, the freedom of the left hand, a double melody, or any of the hundred technical possibilities. There are dry and insipid methods of thus working out academically a technical idea; but it is also possible to see in delicate and ingenious ways, slumbering germs of great fruitfulness in the technical motive, and to develop powers of unexpected beauty. The one way sees in a broken chord only the means of using it in major or minor modes, or in the seventh, or in some unusual successions, first for the right hand, then for the left, then for both, and perhaps finally with sustained notes. Theory is satisfied, a practical object provided, the academic conscience laid to rest. But the other way sees in the broken chords their elementary character, the germ of the Rheingold or of the Götterdämmerung. It permits them first to sound slightly, then to grow further and further, to assume a daemonic grandeur; like eternal signs, to stretch over the heavens and embrace the worlds. Thus, no less than the other, it presents all the nuances of major, minor, seventh, right, left, up and down; but it covers these technical variations so perfectly with the sense of the inner meaning that they become identified, and can never be separated: the technical and the characteristic content have, in the mind of a genius like this, involuntarily become a unity. Such a master, for example, takes the neat finger-changing on one note as the means for a rococo-sketch, the pianissimo leaps for a dance of the elves, the rolling passages in the left hand for the roar of the sea with elemental upper parts; the rhythmical varieties in left and right for graceful fetters of the dance; the scurrying glide over the black keys for a picture of homely pleasures. Here reveals itself the entire fruitfulness of the technical setting, which—who could believe it?—precisely by the limitation of the motive, approaches very near to characteristic art and realism of presentation. Here is a rich field opened to technical subjectivity. Personality is very variously displayed in the setting of a technical idea. Contrast with Clementi, who scarcely ever shows any specific sense of character in a motive, such a man as Hummel, who on theoretic grounds calculates out the utmost technical possibilities of a motive; or Czerny, who in a practical manner attains the same many-sidedness; or Cramer, who was the first to find his way back to music from technique; or Moscheles, Chopin, Schumann, who cannot think technique without feeling character.

Deep and mysterious is this connection between the Étude and its musical setting. Like the fugue the simplest Étude goes back to those elemental foundations which cannot fail of their impression, even if practically nothing is composed upon them. I hear some simple scale-étude of Bertini played, with the smooth harmonies on which it is built. There is nothing in the piece, no soul reveals itself to me, and yet there is a weird charm in these eternal ground-motives of all music, and in their tonics and dominants which are so to speak anchored in eternity. The dull man is soon wearied by them, but the sensitive man instantly responds. At this point the Étude sinks down to the great mother of all music: like the fugue it springs directly out of Nature. With the consciousness of character the Étude grows tuneful. In the studies of Moscheles, in the Symphonic Études of Schumann, in Chopin’s studies, art creates what Nature created. From the technical theme rises a certain spiritual aroma, reminding us of a tune, a scene, a landscape; the tune condenses itself in the return of the technical motive; it collects itself all the more narrowly and closely, in proportion as all contrasts and secondary tunes keep their distance. It is a spiritual melody, set in a firm frame, as condensed as neither the free fantasia form, nor the thematic sonata, nor the canonic fugue, had ever presented it. The tune is so concentrated that it cannot dispense with the frame, or it would fly to pieces. It has no capacity of transference; it prefers to exist as a fragment ready-made.

It is thus that the Étude fixes the form. It favours fixed and limited technical models, which fit mosaic-wise into each other. It is opposed to huge, Beethoven-like emotions and their expression; its horizon does not pass beyond two pages. It is still further removed from Bach’s method, which depended on plain thematic development; it loves the speedy and the limited, and confines itself entirely to the practical. It penetrates into all works in which technical brilliance gives a false impression of the contents, or in which the greatness of the contents only finds its last expression by technique.

The technical setting of the form, and the technical expression, pass over entirely into the consciousness of the time, and create new works in chamber-music, opera, and orchestra.

Compare the development of a sonata by Weber with that of one by Beethoven; for example, Weber’s fourth in E minor with Beethoven’s Op. 28—two sonatas which in original idea, a soft melodic tune, were not so unlike as they turned out to be. In Beethoven the first melody develops itself on a 3/4 rhythm, which begins and ends naturally; the second theme is an unforced contrast to the first; gradually figurations attach themselves, which are natural offshoots of them, intertwining themselves without losing their original dependence; all grows logically out of itself; the end is given in the beginning, and the progress in the variation. In Weber, on the contrary, each piece is carried through by itself: the whole is no organism but a mere pasticcio. The sensitive first subject is treated in its naked melodic beauty; a semiquaver passage is attached to it; a bald enharmonic study leads on to the second theme, which treats its soothing character from many sides; and only the “free” section brings the whole a little closer together. And we know how even in the best men of this period the great creative organism, in which every part conditions its own subordinate part, gives place to a mere isolation and to total want of system. In the concertos, after the traditional mutual compliments of orchestra and piano, the solo instrument starts, with surprising suddenness, on its passages, which are strung together from étude-pieces, selected haphazard. At the conventional places the curtain is withdrawn, and the whole glitter of technique is displayed. The harsh transitions, the quick returns, the jostling fugues, are not only a peculiarity, say, of Schumann—they are the style of the time. They are the framing style of a time which does not care for the want of restraint that attends great emotions.

Its preference is for constructive logic in detail. More genuine piano music than the Étude there cannot be. The essence of the piano has in it become music. Matter and aim here alone determine the form, which no longer speaks merely in a universal musical language.

The piano follows the lines of the time, which pursues technical purity in all things. In the representative arts certain styles were long seen to predominate, which for limited periods were indifferently transferred to all objects without respect to matter or aim. Renaissance, Gothic, antique, exhibit their churches, their tombs, their doors, their tables, their cupboards, their keys, whether they are bosses or reliefs, marbles or bronzes. In our century technique begins to speak its first word: a chair is to be a chair; a carpet shall be constructed with a view to the aim of carpets; a vase must speak in accordance with the material of vases; and painting must in the first instance be painting. A cupboard is not an entrance to a temple; a table leg not a statue. These are intrusions which art has not often experienced in its history. With music the case was not dissimilar. The fugal style ruled once so mightily that it drew church, dance, salon, fantasia, tune, all indifferently, under its sway. The good fugue was a good tune, and the best tune could only be expressed in contrapuntal form. Now, however, the emancipation had taken place. The organ no longer worked necessarily along with the piano, nor the song with the violin; and the orchestra became conscious of its power as a totality. What the Venetians had once timidly begun was now carried into actual fact; and the artistic form of the étude was the seal of this individualising process. The much-praised Paganini had no longer, like Corelli, to prompt the piano, as far as its content was concerned, from the violin outwardly. Paganini-études, by Schumann, were strict piano-pieces, which as far as form went borrowed nothing from Paganini, and in matter only a groundwork of notes. They strive towards the brilliancy of Paganini’s execution—that astonishing, spiritual technique, which aroused so wonderfully the emulation of a Liszt. And in turn there passed from the piano the brilliancy of a technique which inspired the orchestra to its own special triumphs. The “Queen Mab,” the “Mephistopheles,” the “Feuer-Zauber,” and the “Valkyries’ Ride” did not need to envy the piano. Yet without the fame of the Étude they would never have been so brilliant.