Busoni—prophet. Where Bauer is a priest, Hofmann a wonder-child, Bachaus a poet, Ganz an efficient, Paderewski a magician, and Samaroff a failure—Busoni is a prophet. His voice arrests the senses, throws a silence over them. At first, the world is obscured; later the last trace of it is gone. The song of the prophet vibrates through new spaces. Listening ones follow without restraint, so great is the magnetic pull of it; they follow, enchanted, through new spaces to new and miraculous realms of life, where music is more real than ivory or pine.
With one paragraph’s deference to the clay-members, let them be informed that Ferruccio Busoni is a composer and concert-pianist, almost fifty years old, who began his study and piano-practice at a most tender age, and who is now considered to be something of an artist—that is, when he isn’t off pursuing some new notion about quarter-tones, or his one hundred and thirteen new scales for the pianoforte. He has these aberrations. But then, musicians are crazy anyway. At a recent concert with the Chicago Symphony Mr. Busoni played one concerto by Saint-Saëns and another one which he himself composed. Incidentally, Mr. Busoni’s composition was based on North America. It is the least bit regrettable that we are so busy and hurried that Mr. Busoni could introduce us, through a work of art, to the country we hurry over. He played these works on an inferior piano and did several questionable things in his playing, such as let his wrist sag, etc. His personal friends insist that he hates to play the piano. Let the clay-members join the blessed minority in silent thanksgiving that he has hated it hard enough to have scornfully brushed aside the limitations of wood and wire, that his hatred is greater than a world of near-love.
On his recent appearance here, at the very start, Busoni passed above the norm of virtuosity in piano-manipulation, and the tonal explorations began. It was quite bewildering. The mob thought it was fine. The authorities had to admit that it was good. Young ladies considered it divine. Professional musicians—always self-appointed and astute critics—were prevented from indulging in their customary snap-judgments while the artist played, and were held, opinionless, to the music. The listeners who possessed not only sensitive ears but also receptive minds and fluent imaginations were swung clear of earth, were lifted into a region where no dead wall separated them from the strong voice of the prophet. He was saying tremendous things. He forced upon smaller minds the rush, the splendor, the glittering plunge of tones, such as they had never dreamed of before. He gave them the dream. And this was what the yet smaller and the very smallest minds, down between the dead walls, admired, but sanctioned grudgingly, as brilliant style. There were noisy hands and exclamations, as at a cock-fight. But the blessed minority heard and recognized the piano-playing of today, tomorrow, and the future. The instrument had at last shaken off the curse of apartment houses, and had come into its own.
Wilhelm Bachaus sings the fancies of a dreamy young poet; Paderewski thrills his audience whether he smiles or sulks at the keyboard; Bauer intones the affirmation of a lovely faith in tonal beauty; Godowsky presents necklaces of perfectly carven gems to the subtly responsive ones; these men and a few others justify their own uses of the pianoforte. They are strongly individual, and are not to be balanced, one against another. Ferruccio Busoni, however, would cast a shadow if he traveled earthward from his altitudes. He is solitary and unique. Others work up through human difficulties in order to perfect their means of expressing tonal ideals. Busoni takes their goal as a fresh starting-point, and tonal ideals become a further means, to voice the surge of strength which he essentially is, to express the resistless, flashing drive of the universe. His flying clusters of notes are the tail of a comet, of some swift participator in cosmic rhythms. The swirl of his music-fire is a glorious something for which the pianoforte must providentially have been created—a genuine offering to the vigilant keepers of Beauty.
Herman Schuchert.
Two Chicago Pianists
I have not heard all the young Chicago musicians play, but of those I have heard there are two who stand out as musicians and pianists instead of merely good players of the piano. They are Carol Robinson and James Whittaker.
Miss Robinson is an Illinois girl who came to Chicago to be Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler’s “artist pupil” (or something like that) and chief assistant. A year ago she was playing the piano efficiently; this year she is using that as a starting-point and proving that she has a real right to the instrument. She has a technical foundation that cannot fail her; it is already equal to practically all the tests she may need to put it to, and she uses it as surely and unconsciously as one uses his feet to walk with. Her playing at present has the clearness and innocence of a brook; if she can get something of the sea into her feeling she will be big. The music Carol Robinson gives is not so far the expression of some incredible longing to make the piano serve as an outlet. It is natural and beautiful—and absolutely untroubled. It is articulate and yet it has not acquired a meaning. It is without a hint of intensity. Carol Robinson has the most interesting part of the struggle before her—the part for which her genius for hard work is merely a preparation: what does she want to say through the piano?
James Whittaker’s music is very personal, very sensitive, very charming, and very marked by good taste. It is by far the most musical playing I have heard in Chicago. Mr. Whittaker went to Berlin to study and then to Paris, where he finished and became an ardent exponent of the French school. His technical equipment is not the perfect tool that Carol Robinson’s is; by which I don’t mean that it is at all inadequate, but somehow you feel that he is always conscious of the demands he puts upon it and that it sometimes leaves him unsatisfied. His theory is that most of the methods taught outside the French Conservatoire are “short cuts”; but his work suggests that he succeeds in spite of his theory. For he does succeed in the one great essential: in making music. His relation to the piano is a dedication, and his music is vibrant with feeling. His tone production is a pressure with a fine nervousness in it, and he has the real “pearl” quality in his scales. His Chopin is perhaps, as he himself says, a little “scientific.” His César Franck just misses being deep enough. He is at his best in quite modern French music, or in a thing like Grieg’s Cradle Song which he plays very, very beautifully. Brahms he doesn’t want to play, I imagine; but the breadth that Brahms requires and gives is the very quality that would make what James Whittaker has to say (and is saying very charmingly) a bigger and deeper thing.
M. C. A.