CHAPTER VIII
HERZ, THALBERG, AND LISZT
The career of Henri Herz, his compositions and his style; virtuosity and sensationalism; means of effect—Sigismund Thalberg: his playing; the ‘Moses’ fantasia, etc.; relation of Herz and Thalberg to the public—Franz Liszt: his personality and its influence; his playing; his expansion of pianoforte technique; difficulties of his music estimated—Liszt’s compositions: transcriptions; fantasia on Don Giovanni—Realistic pieces, Années de pèlerinage—Absolute music: sonata in B minor; Hungarian Rhapsodies; Conclusion.
There is no doubt that Chopin was one of the greatest players of his day. In some respects he was probably the greatest, for it is hard to believe that he could have been matched in delicacy, in beauties of veiled harmony and melody, and in poetry. Yet as far as playing was concerned his life was spent virtually in retirement; and this was, as we have hinted in the preceding chapter, bitter to him. It was not easy for him, we may be sure, to hear from the outer world the echoes of uproarious applause raised to greet one battling virtuoso after another. These men strode like conquering heroes over the earth. The years Chopin spent in Paris were the very hey-day of the virtuosi. He was excluded from such public triumphs as they enjoyed, partly because he was too nervous and too sensitive to endure contact with great audiences, partly because he lacked physical strength, and partly, also, because to the general taste at that time his style of playing and his music were too fine to be palatable. Mendelssohn wondered whether or not Herz was prejudiced when he said that the Parisians could understand and appreciate nothing but variations.
HENRI HERZ
I
This Henri Herz was, between the years 1830 and 1835, the most celebrated pianist in Europe. He was Austrian by birth but in his youth was taken to Paris to study at the Conservatoire, and thereafter made Paris his home, and himself a Parisian.
Everywhere he played he was tremendously successful, whether in France, Germany, or playing duets with Moscheles or Cramer in London, or wandering over the continent of North America, and the islands near it. He had terriblement voyagé, as he himself said in the introduction to his most amusing book on his travels in America, Mes voyages. His technique was, of course, quite out of the ordinary; but so far as we may judge by his programs and by his compositions, he put it to no exalted purpose. It was the day of variations and of fantasias. Any time might serve for the former, and the virtuoso who was also a keen man of business, with an eye on the public before which he displayed himself and another on the publishers, generally made use of airs popular in whatever land he might chance to be making a present success. For example, among the publications of Henri Herz one finds variations on the favorite air, Le petit tambour, on the famous Irish air, ‘The Last Rose of Summer,’ on the Scotch air, ‘We’re a’ noddin’,’ on the old song beloved of our grandmothers in this country, ‘Gaily the Troubadour’; and La Parisienne, marche nationale, avec variations charactéristiques. He published an arrangement of the Marseillaise, an Austrian march, General Harrison’s quick-step, Empress Henrietta’s waltz, numerous sets of quadrilles and other dances. Perhaps we may never be sure how many of these publications he would have acknowledged. In Mes voyages he recounted how he found upon a piano in a music shop a certain ‘Mlle. Sontag’s Waltz’ published as one of his compositions. This was in the United States. The dealer in the shop told Herz that this of all his compositions had made him famous in the new country. Herz was about to protest that the music was none of his, but was prevented by the counsel of his manager Ulmann, a man very nearly as wily as the immortal P. T. Barnum, of whom, perhaps at bottom a congenial soul, Herz had much to tell.
Fantasias were usually constructed on airs from the favorite operas of the day. These, in the case of Herz, rarely amounted to more than a series of variations, preceded by an introduction, and concluded with a finale. Few showed much thought in structure, and indeed, such men as Herz, Thalberg, and Liszt, could, and were expected to, improvise such fantasias before the public.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that Herz’s elaborate fantasias and variations lack cleverness and a very genuine brilliance. An examination of many of them will prove to one even at this day, when all are nearly or quite forgotten, that Herz knew his piano astonishingly well. Let us look for a moment at the Variations brillantes, opus 105, on a favorite motive from Bellini’s Sonnambula. There is first an introduction. This is withal desperately commonplace. It suggests posturings, meaningless formalities, a whole technique of specious oratory. Yet it is a technique. The weakness in such music is that it is ready-made. There is no originality in it, nor any vitality. The eye discerns the stock figures of the virtuoso laid one after the other across the page. First, there are three measures of the chromatic scale, each measure running through the octave, so that the second repeats the first, and the third the second, with only the change of register. Moreover, each measure is phrased by itself, and at the beginning of each there is placed a mark of emphasis; so that there is not even an effect of rushing or roaring from bottom to top, but only one of movement from one point to another, like the leaping of the frog up the steep sides of the well of our algebra problems. The final leap to the pinnacle of high F, is worthy of the mountain goat.
This figure jumps its stages across our ears and out of sound. Then follows a welling up of emotion. The orator condescends. He is affably sentimental, will take us into his confidence, not without dignity, however. Listen to the strains of this immortal melody! Here a heart sings. What if it were Bellini’s heart, we now add upon our instrument a long tremulous sigh of our own.