With very few exceptions, all the great composers have sought expression in chamber music at one time or another; and their compositions in this branch seem often to be the finest and the most intimate presentation of their genius. Haydn is commonly supposed to have found himself first in his string quartets. Mozart’s great quartets are almost unique among his compositions as an expression of his genius absolutely uninfluenced by external circumstances and occasion. None of Beethoven’s music is more profound nor more personal than his last quartets. Even among the works of the later composers, who might well have been seduced altogether away from these fine and exacting forms by the intoxicating glory of the orchestra, one finds chamber music of a rich and special value.
This special value consists in part in the refined and unfailing musical skill with which the composers have handled their slender material; but more in the quality of the music itself. The great works of chamber music, no matter how profound, speak in the language of intimacy. They show no signs of the need to impress or overwhelm an audience. Perhaps no truly great music does. But operas and even symphonies must be written with more or less consideration for external circumstances, whereas in the smaller forms, composers seem to be concerned only with the musical inspiration which they feel the desire to express. They speak to an audience of understanding friends, as it were, before whom they may reveal themselves without thought of the effectiveness of their speech. They seem in them to have consulted only their ideals. They have taken for granted the sympathetic attention of their audience.
The piano has always played a commanding rôle in the history of chamber music. From the early days when the harpsichord with its figured bass was the foundation for almost all music, both vocal and instrumental, few forms in chamber music have developed independently of it, or of the piano, its successor. The string quartet and a few combinations of wind instruments offer the only conspicuous exceptions. The mass of chamber music is made up of pianoforte trios, quartets, and quintets, of sonatas for pianoforte and various other instruments; and, indeed, the great part of pianoforte music is essentially chamber music.
It may perhaps seem strange to characterize as remarkably fine and intimate the music which has been written for an instrument often stigmatized as essentially unmusical. But the piano has attracted nearly all the great composers, many of whom were excellent pianists; and the music which they have written for it is indisputably of the highest and most lasting worth. There are many pianoforte sonatas which are all but symphonies, not only in breadth of form, but in depth of meaning. Some composers, notably Beethoven and Liszt, demanded of the piano the power of the orchestra. Yet on the whole the mass of pianoforte music remains chamber music.
The pianoforte style is an intricate style, and to be effective must be perfectly finished. The instrument sounds at its best in a small hall. In a large one its worst characteristics are likely to come all too clearly to the surface. And though it is in many ways the most powerful of all the instruments, truly beautiful playing does not call upon its limits of sound, but makes it a medium of fine and delicately shaded musical thought. To regard it as an instrument suited primarily to big and grandiose effects is grievously to misunderstand it, and is likely, furthermore, to make one overlook the possibilities of tone color which, though often denied it, it none the less possesses.
In order to study intelligently the mechanics, or, if you will, the art of touch upon the piano, and in order to comprehend the variety of tone-color which can be produced from it, one must recognize at the outset the fact that the piano is an instrument of percussion. Its sounds result from the blows of hammers upon taut metal strings. With the musical sound given out by these vibrating strings must inevitably be mixed the dull and unmusical sound of the blow that set them vibrating. The trained ear will detect not only the thud of the hammer against the string, but that of the finger against the key, and that of the key itself upon its base. The study of touch and tone upon the piano is the study of the combination and the control of these two elements of sound, the one musical, the other unmusical.
The pianist can acquire but relatively little control over the musical sounds of his instrument. He can make them soft and loud, but he cannot, as the violinist can, make a single tone grow from soft to loud and die away to soft again. The violinist or the singer both makes and controls tone, the one by his bow, the other by his breath; the pianist, in comparison with them, but makes tone. Having caused a string to vibrate by striking it through a key, he cannot even sustain these vibrations. They begin at once to weaken; the sound at once grows fainter. Therefore he has to make his effects with a volume of sounds which has been aptly said to be ever vanishing.
On the other hand, these sounds have more endurance than those of the xylophone, for example; and in their brief span of failing life the skillful pianist may work somewhat upon them according to his will. He may cut them exceedingly short by allowing the dampers to fall instantaneously upon the strings, thus stopping all vibrations. He may even prolong a few sounds, a chord let us say, by using the sustaining pedal. This lifts the dampers from all the strings, so that all vibrate in sympathy with the tones of the chord and reënforce them, so to speak. This may be done either at the moment the notes of the chord are struck, or considerably later, after they have begun appreciably to weaken. In the latter case the ear can detect the actual reënforcement of the failing sounds.
Moreover, the use of the pedal serves to affect somewhat the color of the sounds of the instrument. All differences in timbre depend on overtones; and if the pianist lifts all dampers from the strings by the pedals, he will hear the natural overtones of his chord brought into prominence by means of the sympathetic vibrations of other strings he has not struck. He can easily produce a mass of sound which strongly suggests the organ, in the tone color of which the shades of overtones are markably evident.
The study of such effects will lead him beyond the use of the pedal into some of the niceties of pianoforte touch. He will find himself able to suppress some overtones and bring out others by emphasizing a note here and there in a chord of many notes, especially in an arpeggio, and by slighting others. Such an emphasis, it is true, may give to a series of chords an internal polyphonic significance; but if not made too prominent, will tend rather to color the general sound than to make an effect of distinct drawing.