The Nocturnes—with the silken web of the D flat major in their midst—are the high songs of melody which Chopin nowhere else has framed with such entrancing aspiration or such broad exclamatory sighs. But the dances are the high songs of rhythm, to which never yet was so intellectual a homage paid. The Polonaises have the galant and knightly features of the old Polish nobility; and Chopin’s head rears itself in them more proudly than one would have expected from his feminine nature. But the Mazurkas are bourgeois little joys, half bathed in sorrow, half crushing their pain in the jubilation of the rhythm—an unparalleled series of intellectual inspirations. In the Waltzes we have only a higher kind of Mazurkas, with less of the national spirit, like Poles in the Parisian drawing-room. The slow Waltz in A minor, not without reason, was dearest to Chopin’s own heart.
Chopin’s playing was the rapture of his contemporaries. All agree that his individuality could only be made intelligible by himself. How long did Moscheles torment himself with the remarkable harmonic transitions which he found in Chopin’s compositions! But when he heard the master himself, all doubt vanished; what had seemed violent now became self-intelligible. Chopin’s playing was dainty and airy; his fingers seemed to glide sideways, as if all technique were a glissando; even the Forte was in him not an absolute but a relative forte—relative, that is, to the gentle voice of the rest; and it rises, the older he grew, so much the less by force than by a subtle play of touch. All execution has made way for a certain free extempore poesy; the rubato softens the harshness of bar-accent. Liszt’s definition of the rubato is well known—“You see that tree; its leaves move to and fro in the wind and follow the gentlest motion of the air; but its trunk stands there, immovable in its form.” Chopin seems never to have carried the rubato so far that this trunk itself would have stirred. Once already had a player arisen who cultivated this graceful and airy kind of execution. Field, a Scot by birth, Clementi’s pupil, a pale and dreamy man, had anticipated the delicate breadth of Chopin’s touch; and the world had been enraptured with his melancholy renderings by means of apparently motionless hands. Alongside of not very important sonatas, concertos, and rondos, he had published a series of song-like pieces, which he called “Nocturnes,” and in which he put to special use his longing melodies, his dreamy portamenti, his rose-chains of airy colourations. Compared with Chopin’s Nocturnes, these must necessarily appear pale and even monotonous; but in his whole essence, in the form of his pieces, and the delicacy of his touch, Field was a prelude to Chopin—as Dussek or Louis Ferdinand were in their kind. When Chopin once played before Alexander Klengel, Clementi’s pupil, the latter was strongly reminded of Field. And when Chopin, after his arrival in Paris, conceived the idea of taking further lessons under Kalkbrenner, whose delicate playing he admired above everything, the latter likewise thought that the style reminded him of Cramer, but the playing of Field. “Were you Field’s pupil?” he asked. Chopin’s true teacher, the forgotten Elsner of Warsaw, had had no share in it. Chopin had formed his own playing, as he formed his own style. In early years he had a mania for width of stretch, and even invented a device for stretching the fingers. The experiment was fortunately more successful than Schumann’s attempt to increase the independence of the fingers by means of a sling. The difference is noteworthy: Chopin aimed at a richer impression of voluptuous fullness in the chords; Schumann at increased independence of part playing.
Chopin, as a sensitive artist, laid special stress on the kind of instrument he used. In his youth he would only willingly play on Graf’s pianos; in Paris only on those of Pleyel, whose silvern muffled tone was specially attractive to him. In those of Erard he thought the tone too insistent. “If I am in a bad humour I play an Erard, and easily find there the tone ready-made. But if I am in the humour, and strong enough to make my own tone, I use a Pleyel.” The fingering, also, he regulates for himself. For the sake of a better execution he never objects to put his thumb on a black key in suitable places, or to glide with one finger over two keys, or to let longer fingers pass over the shorter without using the thumb. In his Études he has expressly written marks for many such naturalistic fingerings.
The special character of Chopin’s method, which in this literature created an epoch, consisted in an effective use of three voices. Of course it is not meant that he constantly writes strictly in three parts; quite on the other hand, he has made a quite unique use of the unison in the B flat minor Sonata, in the fourteenth and eighteenth Preludes, and in the second movement of the F minor Concerto; and there are plenty of examples in him of the simple accompaniment of a simple melody. But the peculiar charm of his technique begins only in the parallel application of three voices (I am not using this term in the contrapuntal sense), in the laying alongside of three motived systems, three musical thoughts, three principal paths. In the Berceuse, for example, upon the heels of the one voice over the accompaniment treads instantly a second, and the threefold combination of accompaniment and two overparts is carried through in all possible variations. The two overparts are no less present in several passages, which appear on paper merely as zigzag runs, which bind together continuously the two melodic lines. In favourable cases, as in the boldly accented chords toward the conclusion of the B flat minor Scherzo, this peculiar line-counterpoint is carried to an extreme. The fusion of unfusable things in melody, rhythm, and harmony is the new synthesis by means of which this art advances. The charm of certain melodies of Chopin is increased by their taking up intervals foreign to the key, which affect us half with Eastern, half with ecclesiastical associations, but on closer inspection these are seen to be merely due to the collision of two melodic lines.[132] There are, for example, resolutions of suspensions, which are postponed for the moment; the main melody of the First Ballade, the whispering second Intermezzo of the famous B flat major Mazurka, the D in the C sharp minor Nocturne, the A in the B minor Prelude, are instances. It is a rubato of melody: a musical, not a rhythmical rubato. If a section of a Mazurka in Op. 30, 3 is repeated pianissimo, it does not shock us, if certain notes already played reappear a semitone lower, precisely as if the dynamic weakening had a musical weakening as its result. It is an effect of intellectual naturalistic charm. Everywhere the straight line is by preference avoided. Suspensions (retardations) are boldly prolonged at the conclusion of a bar, as in the B flat major Mazurka or in the stretto of the G minor Ballade. The melodies wind themselves round invisible axles, and the fioriture play in turn round the supports of the melodies. The time is ignored, incommensurable passages can only be worked in by the feel, triplets and duplets are mingled with each other, or a wonderful pseudo-rhythm, as in the F major theme of the A flat major Ballade, makes us waver pleasantly between two time-emotions. There is constantly a combination, by the two independent hands, or by the independent movement of an upper or under group of fingers in one hand: this is the extreme attainment of artistic finger-mechanism on a harmonic instrument.
The sensuous charm of sound in Chopin’s music rests essentially on this use of the individualisation of the fingers. Formerly the fingers had only been tools, which rendered on the piano the general many-voiced piece. Now, however, a music had arisen from the essence of the fingers which was quite peculiar to the piano. The pedal held the dissected music again together. The left hand continues its own melodic lines under the right, as we find in the E minor Prelude, in the C sharp minor Étude, in the middle movement of the C sharp minor Polonaise, and the Scherzo of the B flat minor Sonata, in the F sharp major Impromptu, in the G minor Ballade, in the A flat major Waltz (Op. 34, 1), or in so many Études with characteristic full figuration in the left hand. Or in passages which run swiftly enough to allow this little acoustic deception to grow into a charm, the two melodic passages or one melody unite with their retardation notes into those zig-zag contours which became Chopin’s distinguishing mark. There is a long spirited series from the first Hummel-like pieces in the E minor Concerto, through the ethereal sounds in the middle movement of the third Scherzo, to the B minor Scherzo which forms its wild main movement entirely by means of this mannerism. The concluding trills of the concertos, the arpeggios of wide chords; the ornamentations in the middle of the chords, take a share in the using-up of the polyphony for sound effects; until at last we meet the threefold or fourfold web in the concluding sections of the Barcarolle.
We have, in these last phrases of Chopin been reminded of the influences of Bach, and in fact, the extreme individualisation of the fingers leads us of necessity back to Bach, in whose works the fingers are called upon to perform the last possibilities of many-voiced music. Throughout it all Chopin knew that Bach is nature in music. When he was practising for his recitals, he played, not Chopin but Bach.
[The English pianist and composer, William Sterndale Bennett, contemporary and friend of Mendelssohn, equally popular as a musician both in Germany and his own country, demands notice in this place. If England has not succeeded in forming a definite musical style for itself in the nineteenth century, at least it can take credit for having possessed one composer who may be called “unique” in the true sense of the word. As far as his powers extended, Sterndale Bennett achieved the highest distinction. There is no one like him—his pianoforte music (on which alone he can afford to take his stand) ranks quite by itself in expression, character, and technical difficulty. Those who class him with Mendelssohn look merely on the surface, and show themselves incapable of making a worthy distinction.
Sterndale Bennett’s music is never weak, although for the most part cast in a delicate mould. On the other hand, he seems to have felt that the “grand” style was out of his reach, and that it was no part of his business to act the strong man. Accordingly, he seldom shows any inclination to venture too high a flight. This alone suffices to distinguish him from Mendelssohn.
Probably most pianists, when speaking of Sterndale Bennett, would naturally think first of the Three Sketches (Op. 10, Nos. 1, 2, 3), “The Lake,” “The Millstream,” and “The Fountain.” And it would be difficult to better this as a specimen list—the first as a perfect expression of natural tranquillity, the second as an example of Sterndale Bennett’s peculiar technical difficulties, and the last as a complete imitative picture.
The “Six Studies” (Op. 11) are quite characteristic. Their musical value is very evident to the hearer; it is only the player who can appreciate the perfection of execution they demand. No. 3, in B flat, is the gem of the set. No. 6, the octave study in G minor, approaches real power in the first section. The cantabile second subject is an exemplification of the quite inimitable style of the composer. Amongst other miscellaneous pieces the following must be named—the Fantasia in A, Op. 16, dedicated to Schumann, especially the first movement, with its lovely melody on arpeggiando accompaniment—the Caprice in E (with orchestra), Op. 22, an excellent proof of Sterndale Bennett’s mastery of the “concerto” manner—the Rondo piacevole in E, Op. 25, where one notes the wonderful grace of the first subject, the expressive power of the second.