HOW TO APPRECIATE MUSIC

BY
GUSTAV KOBBÉ

Author of “Wagner’s Music-Dramas Analyzed,” etc.

New York

MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY

1912

Copyright, 1906, by
MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
New York

Published, October, 1906

Reprinted, February, 1908

Reprinted, September, 1908

Reprinted, May, 1912

THE PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

To the Memory of My Brother
PHILIP FERDINAND KOBBÉ

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CONTENTS

9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

HOW TO APPRECIATE A PIANOFORTE RECITAL

CHAPTER PAGE

I.—THE PIANOFORTE

Why the king of musical instruments—Music under one’s fingers—Can render anything in music—Liszt played the whole orchestra on the pianoforte—Fingers of a great virtuoso the ambassadors of his soul—Melody and accompaniment on one instrument—No intermediaries to mar effect—Paderewski’s playing of “Hark, Hark, the Lark”—Music’s debt to the pianoforte—Developed sonata form and gave it to orchestra—Richard Strauss on Beethoven’s pianistic orchestration—A boon to many famous composers, even to Wagner—Its lowly origin—Nine centuries to develop pianoforte from monochord—The monochord described—Joined to a keyboard—Poet’s amusing advice to his musical daughter—Clavichord developed from monochord—Its lack of power—Bebung, or balancement—The harpsichord—Originated in the cembalo of the Hungarian gypsy orchestra—Spinet and virginal—Pianoforte invented 10 by Cristofori, 1711—Exploited by Silbermann—Strings of twenty tons’ tension—Dampers and pedals—Paderewski’s use of both pedals—Mechanical pianofortes—Senseless decoration [29]

II.—BACH’S SERVICE TO MUSIC

Pianoforte so universal in character can give, through it, a general survey of the art of music—Bach illustrates an epoch—A Bach fugue more elaborate than a music-drama or tone poem—Bach more modern than Haydn or Mozart—His influence on modern music—Wagner unites the harmony of Beethoven with the polyphony of Bach—Melody, harmony and counterpoint defined and differentiated—Illustrated from the “Moonlight Sonata”—What a fugue is—The fugue and the virtuoso—Not “grateful” music for public performance—Daniel Gregory Mason’s tribute and reservation—What counterpoint lacks—Fails to give the player as much scope as modern music—Barrier to individuality of expression—The virtuoso’s mission—Creative as well as interpretive—Mr. Hanchett’s dictum—Music both a science and an art—Science versus feeling—Person may be very musical without being musical at all—The great composer bends science to art—That “ear for music”—Bach and the Weather Bureau—The 11 Bacon, not the Shakespeare, of music—What Wagner learned from Bach—Illustration from “Die Walküre”—W. J. Henderson’s anecdote—Wagner’s counterpoint emotional—Bach’s the language of an epoch; Wagner’s the language of liberated music—Bach in the recital hall—Rubinstein and Bach’s “Triple Concerto”—“The Well-Tempered Clavichord”—Meaning of “well-tempered”—A king’s tribute to Bach—Two hundred and forty-one years of Bachs [48]

III.—FROM FUGUE TO SONATA

Break in Bach’s influence—Mr. Parry on this hiatus in the evolution of music—Three periods of musical development—Rise of the harmonic, or “melodic,” school—Began with Domenico Scarlatti—The founder of modern pianoforte technique—Beginnings of the sonata form—Philipp Emanuel Bach and the sonata—Rise of the amateur—“The Contented Ear and Quickened Soul,” and other quaint titles—Changes in musical taste—Pianoforte has outgrown the music of Haydn and Mozart—Bach, Beethoven and Wagner the three great epoch-making figures in music—Beethoven and the epoch of the sonata—His slow development—Union of mind and heart in his work—His sonatas, however, no longer all-dominant in pianoforte music—Von 12 Bülow and D’Albert as Beethoven players—Incident at a Von Bülow Beethoven recital—Changes of taste in thirty years—The Beethoven sonatas too orchestric—The passing of the sonata [78]

IV.—DAWN OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

What a sonata is—How Beethoven enlarged the form—Illustrated in his Opus 2, No. 3, and in the “Moonlight Sonata”—The three Beethoven periods—In his last sonatas seems chafing under restraint of form—The sonata form reached its climax with Beethoven—Hampers modern composers—Lawrence Gilman on MacDowell’s “Keltic Sonata”—The first romantic composers—Weber—Schubert’s inexhaustible genius—Mendelssohn smooth, polished and harmless [100]

V.—CHOPIN, THE POET OF THE PIANOFORTE

An incomparable composer—Liszt’s definition of tempo rubato—The Wagner of the pianoforte—Clear melody and weird, entrancing harmonies—Racial traits—Friends in Paris—Liszt the first to recognize him—The Études—Vigor, passion, impetus—Von Bülow on the great C minor Étude—The Préludes—Schumann’s opinion of them—Rubinstein’s 13 playing of the Seventh Prélude—The Nocturnes—Chopin and Poe—The Waltzes—Liszt on the Mazurkas—The Polonaises—Chopin’s battle hymns—Other works—“A noble from head to foot”—Huneker on Chopin [115]

VI.—SCHUMANN, THE “INTIMATE”

A composer with an academic education—Pupil in pianoforte of Frederick Wieck—Strains a finger and abandons career as a virtuoso—Marries Clara Wieck—Afflicted with insanity—Attempts suicide—Dies in asylum—His music introspective and brooding—Poet, bourgeois and philosopher—Contributions to program music—“Carnaval” and “Kreisleriana”—Latter title explained—Really Schumanniana—Thoughts of his Clara—“Fantasie Pieces”—His compositions at first neglected [134]

VII.—LISZT, THE GIANT AMONG VIRTUOSOS

A youthful phenomenon—Refused at the Paris Conservatory—“Le petit Litz”—Inspired by Paganini—Episode with Countess D’Agoult—Court conductor at Weimar—Makes Weimar the musical Mecca of Germany—Produces “Lohengrin”—His “six Lives”—His pianoforte compositions—The 14 “Don Juan Fantasie”—“Hexameron”—“Années de Pèlerinage”—Progressive edition of the Études—Giant strides in virtuosity—History of the famous “Rhapsodies Hongroises”—Characterisation of his pianoforte music—A great composer, not a charlatan—Liszt as a virtuoso—His tribute to the pianoforte—A long and influential career—Played for Beethoven and died at “Parsifal” [142]

VIII.—WITH PADEREWSKI—A MODERN PIANIST ON TOUR

The most successful virtuoso ever heard here—$171,981.89 for one season—His opinion of the pianoforte—Perfect save for greater sustaining power of tone—Has four pianofortes on his tours—Duties of the “piano doctor”—How the instruments are cared for—Thawing out a pianoforte—Paderewski’s humor [155]

HOW TO APPRECIATE AN ORCHESTRAL CONCERT

IX.—DEVELOPMENT OF THE ORCHESTRA

Modern music at first vocal, and without instrumental accompaniment—Awkward instrumentation of the contrapuntists—Primitive 15 orchestration in Italy—The orchestra of Monteverde—Haydn the father of modern orchestral music—The Mozart symphonies—Beethoven establishes the modern orchestra—But few instruments added since—Greater richness due to subtler technique—Beethoven’s development of the orchestra traced in his symphonies—Greater technical demands on the players—Beethoven and Wagner—“Meistersinger” score has only three more instruments than the Fifth Symphony—Berlioz an orchestral juggler—Architectural music—Wagner, greatest of orchestral composers—Employs large orchestra not for noise, but for variety of expression—Richard Strauss’s tribute to Wagner—Wonderfully reserved in the use of his forces—Wagner’s scores the only advance worth mentioning since Berlioz [167]

X.—INSTRUMENTS OF THE ORCHESTRA

The orchestra an aggregation of instruments that should play as one—Wagner’s employment of orchestral groups illustrated by the Love motive in “Die Walküre” and the Walhalla motive—Division of the orchestra—The violin—Its varied capacity—The musical stage whisper of a hundred violins—The violins in the “Lohengrin” prelude—Modern 16 orchestral virtuosity—The sordine and its use—A pizzicato movement by Tschaikowski—The viola, violoncello and double bass—Dividing the string band—Examples from the scores of Wagner—Anecdote regarding the harp in “Rheingold”—The woodwind—The flute—The oboe in Schubert’s C major symphony—The English horn in “Tristan”—Beethoven’s use of the bassoon in the Fifth and Ninth symphonies—The clarinets in “Tannhäuser,” “Lohengrin,” and “Götterdämmerung”—Brass instruments and various illustrations of their employment—The trumpet in “Fidelio” and “Carmen”—The trombone group in “The Ring of the Nibelung”—The trombones in “The Magic Flute,” in Schubert’s C major symphony, and in the introduction to the third act of “Lohengrin”—The tubas in the Funeral March in “Götterdämmerung”—Richard Strauss’s apotheosis of the horn, and its importance in the Wagner scores—Tympani and cymbals—Mozart’s G minor symphony on twenty-two clarinets—Richard Strauss, on the future development of the orchestra [179]

XI.—CONCERNING SYMPHONIES

The classical period of music dominated by the symphony—Its esthetic purpose defined—A symphonic witticism—Some comment 17 on form in music—Divisions of the symphony established by Haydn—Artless grace and beauty of Mozart’s symphonies—Beethoven to the fore—Climaxes and rests—The Ninth Symphony—Schubert’s genius—Mendelssohn and Schumann—Liszt’s symphonies and symphonic poems—Other symphonists—Wagner not supposed to have been a purely orchestral composer, yet the greatest of all [197]

XII.—RICHARD STRAUSS AND HIS MUSIC

One of the most original and individual of composers—A student, not a copyist, of Wagner—Independent intellectual basis for his art—Originator of the tone poem—Unhampered by even the word “symphonic”—Means much to the musically elect—Not a juggler with the orchestra—A modern of moderns—Technical difficulties, but not impossibilities in his works—“Thus Spake Zarathustra” and other scores—Life and truth, not mere beauty, the burden of modern music—Huneker’s “Piper of Dreams”—“Zarathustra” and “A Hero’s Life” described—An intellectual force in music—“A Hero’s Life” Strauss’s “Meistersinger”—Tribute to Wagner in “Feuersnot”—Performances of Richard Strauss’s scores in America—His symphony in F minor (1883) had its first 18 performance anywhere, under Theodore Thomas—Straussiana—Boyhood anecdotes—Scribbled scores on schoolbook covers—Still at school when first symphony was played in public—Studied with Von Bülow—Married his Freihild—Ideals of the highest [207]

XIII.—A NOTE ON CHAMBER MUSIC [224]

HOW TO APPRECIATE VOCAL MUSIC

XIV.—SONGS AND SONG COMPOSERS

Strophic and “composed through”—Schubert the first song composer to require consideration; also the greatest—Early struggles—Too poor to buy music paper—Becomes a school-teacher—Impatient under drudgery—Publishers hold aloof—Fortune for a song, but not for him—History of “The Erlking”—How it was composed—Written down as fast as pen could travel—Tried over the same evening—The famous dissonances—As sung by Lilli Lehmann—Schubert only eighteen years old when he composed “The Erlking”—His marvelous fecundity—Died at thirty-one, yet wrote six hundred songs and many other works—Schumann’s individuality—Distinguished from Schubert—Not the same 19 proportion of great songs—The best composed during his wooing of Clara—Phases of Franz’s genius—Traces of his knowledge and admiration of Bach—Choice of keys—Objected to transpositions—Pitiable physical disabilities—Brahms a profound thinker in music—Jensen, Rubinstein, Grieg, Chopin, Wagner—Liszt one of the greatest of song composers—Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and others [231]

XV.—ORATORIO

An incongruous art form—Originated in Italy with San Filippo Neri—Scenery, action and even ballet in the early oratorio—The influence of German composers—Bach’s “Passion” music—Dramatic expression in Händel—Rockstro’s characterisation of—First performance of “The Messiah”—Haydn’s “Creation” and “Seasons”—Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” next to “The Messiah” in popularity—Dramatic episodes in the work—Gounod, Elgar and others [248]

XVI.—OPERA AND MUSIC-DRAMA

Origin of opera—Peri and the Florentines—Monteverde—Cavalli introduces vocal melody to relieve the monotony of recitative—Aria developed by Alessandro Scarlatti—Characteristics 20 of Italian opera from Scarlatti to Verdi—Gluck’s reforms—German and French opera—“Les Huguenots,” “Faust,” and “Carmen”—Comparative popularity of certain operas here—Far-reaching effects of Wagner’s theories—Their influence on the later Verdi and contemporary Italian composers—Wagner’s music-dramas—A music-drama not an opera—Form wholly original with Wagner—Gave impetus to folk-lore movement—Krehbiel’s “Studies in the Wagnerian Drama”—Wagner and anti-Wagner—Finck’s “Wagner and His Works”—Wagner a melodist—Examples—Unity a distinguishing trait of the music-drama—Wagner’s method illustrated by musical examples—The Curse Motive—The Siegfried, Nibelung, and Tarnhelm motives—Leading motives not mere labels—Their plasticity musically illustrated—The Siegfried horn call developed into the motive of Siegfried, the hero, and into the climax of the “Götterdämmerung” Funeral March—An illustration from “Tristan”—Wagner as a composer of absolute music—His scores the greatest achievement musical history, up to the present time, has to show [260]

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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INTRODUCTION

“Are you musical?”

“No; I neither play nor sing.”

Your answer shows a complete misunderstanding of the case. Because you neither play nor sing, it by no means follows that you are unmusical. If you love music and appreciate it, you may be more musical than many pianists or singers; and certainly you may become so.

This book is planned for the lover of music, for those who throng the concert and recital halls and the opera—those who have not followed music as a profession, and yet love it as an art; who may not play or sing, and yet are musical. Among these is an ever-growing number that “wants to know,” that no longer is satisfied simply with allowing music to play upon the senses and the emotions, but wants to understand why it does so.

To satisfy this natural desire which, with many, amounts to a craving or even a passion, and to do so in wholly untechnical language and in a manner that shall be intelligible to the average reader, is the purpose of this book. In carrying it out I have not neglected the personal side of music, but have endeavored to keep clearly before the eyes of the reader, and in 24 their proper sequence, the great names in musical history.

I am somewhat of a radical in my musical opinions, one of those persons of advanced views who does not lift his eyes reverentially heavenward every time the words “symphony” and “sonata” are mentioned. In fact, I am most in sympathy with the liberating tendencies of modern music, which lays more stress upon the expression of life and truth than upon the exact form in which these are sought to be expressed. Nevertheless, I am quite aware that only through the gradual development and expansion of forms that now may be growing obsolete has music achieved its emancipation from the tyranny of form. Therefore, while I would rather listen to a Wagner music-drama than to a Mozart opera, or might go to more trouble to hear a Richard Strauss tone poem than a Beethoven symphony, I am not such an unconscionable heretic as to be unaware of the great, the very great part played by the Mozart opera and the Beethoven symphony in the evolution of music, or their importance in the orderly and systematic study of the art. Indeed, I was brought up on “Don Giovanni,” the Fifth Symphony and the Sonatas before I brought myself up on Chopin, Liszt (for whom I have far greater admiration than most critics), and Wagner. Therefore, an ample portion of this book will be found devoted to the classical epoch and its great masters, especially its greatest master, Beethoven, and to the forms in which they worked. Nor do I think that these pages will be found written unsympathetically. But something is due the great body of music-lovers who, being told that they 25 must admire this, that and the other classical composer, because he is classical, find themselves at a loss and think themselves to blame because modern music makes a more vivid and deeper impression upon them. If they only knew it—they are in the right! But they have needed some one to tell them so.

“Advanced,” this book is. But plenty will be found in it regarding the sonata and the symphony, and, through the latter, the development of the orchestra; and orchestral instruments, their tone quality, scope and purpose are described and explained.

More, perhaps, than in any work with the same purpose, the great part played by the pianoforte in the evolution of music is here recognized, and I have availed myself of the opportunity to tell much of the story of that evolution in connection with this, the most popular of musical instruments, and its great masters. Why the greater freedom of technique and expression made possible by the modern instrument has caused the classical sonata to be superseded by the more romantic works of Chopin and others whose compositions are typically pianistic, and how these works differ in form and substance from those of the classicists, are among the many points made clear in these chapters.

The same care has been bestowed upon that portion of the book relating to vocal music—to songs, opera, music-drama and oratorio. In fact, the aim has been to equip the lover of music—that is, of good music of all kinds—with the knowledge which will enable him to enjoy far more than before either an orchestral concert, a piano or song recital, an opera or a music-drama—anything, 26 in fact, in music from Bach to Richard Strauss; to place everything before him from the standpoint of a writer who is himself a lover of music and who, although thoroughly in sympathy with the more advanced schools of the art, also appreciates the great masters of the past and is behind none in acknowledging what they contributed to make music what it is.

“Are you musical?”

“No; I neither play nor sing.”

But, if you can read and listen, there is no reason why you should not be more musical—a more genuine lover of music—than many of those whose musicianship lies merely in their fingers or vocal cords. Try!

Gustav Kobbé.

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HOW TO APPRECIATE A PIANOFORTE RECITAL

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I

THE PIANOFORTE

There must be practically on the part of every one who attends a pianoforte recital some degree of curiosity regarding the instrument itself. Therefore, it seems to me pertinent to institute at the very outset an inquiry into what the pianoforte is and how it became what it is—the most practical, most expressive and most universal of musical instruments, the instrument of the concert hall and of the intimate home circle. Knowledge of such things surely will enhance the enjoyment of a pianoforte recital—should be, in fact, a prerequisite to it.

The pianoforte is the most used and, for that very reason, perhaps, the most abused of musical instruments. Even its real name generally is denied it. Most people call it a piano, although piano is a musical term denoting a degree of sound, soft, gentle, low—the opposite of forte, which means strong and loud. The combination of the two terms in one word, pianoforte, signifies that the instrument is capable of being played both softly and loudly—both piano and forte. It was this capacity that distinguished it from its immediate precursors, the old-time harpsichords and clavichords. One of the first requirements in learning how to understand music is to learn to call things musical by their 30 right names. To speak of a pianoforte as a piano is one of our unjustifiable modern shortcuts of speech, a characteristic specimen of linguistic laziness and evidence of utter ignorance concerning the origin and character of the instrument.

If I were asked to express in a single phrase the importance of this instrument in the musical life of to-day I would say that the pianoforte is the orchestra of the home. Indeed, the title of the familiar song “What Is Home Without a Mother?” might, without any undue stretch of imagination, be changed to “What Is Home Without a Pianoforte?”—although, if you are working hard at your music and practicing scales and finger exercises several hours a day, it might be wiser not to ask your neighbor’s opinion on this point.

The King of Instruments.

“In households where there is no pianoforte we seem to breathe a foreign atmosphere,” says Oscar Bie, in his history of the instrument and its players; and he adds with perfect truth that it has become an essential part of our life, giving its form to our whole musical culture and stamping its characteristics upon our whole conception of music. Surely out of every ten musical persons, layman or professional, at least nine almost invariably have received their first introduction to music through the pianoforte and have derived the greater part of their musical knowledge from it. Even composers like Wagner and Meyerbeer, whose work is wholly associated with opera, had their first lessons in music on the pianoforte, and Meyerbeer achieved 31 brilliant triumphs as a concert pianist before he turned his attention to the operatic stage.

Of all musical instruments the pianoforte is the most intimate and at the same time the most public—“the favorite of the lonely mourner and of the solitary soul whose joy seeks expression” and the tie that unites the circle of family and friends. Yet it also thrills the great audience of the concert hall and rouses it to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. It is the king of instruments, and the reason for its supremacy is not far to seek. Weitzmann, the author of the first comprehensive account of the pianoforte and its literature, speaks of its ability “to lend living expression to all phases of emotion for which language lacks words”; its full, resonant tone; its volume vying with that of the orchestra; its command of every shade of sound from the gentlest pianissimo to the most powerful forte; and its mechanism, which permits of the most rapid runs and passages, and at the same time of sustained singing notes and phrases.

Music Under One’s Fingers.

But this is not all. There is an overture by Weber entitled “The Ruler of the Spirits.” Well, he who commands the row of white and black keys is ruler of the spirits of music. He has music, all that music can give, within the grasp of his two hands, under his ten fingers. The pianoforte can render anything in music. Besides music of its own, it can reproduce the orchestra or the voice with even greater fidelity than the finest engraving renders a painting; for only to the eyes 32 of one familiar with the painting does the engraving suggest the color scheme of the original, whereas, through certain nuances of technique that are more easily felt than described, the pianoforte virtuoso who is playing an arrangement of an orchestra composition can make his audience hear certain instruments of the orchestra—even such characteristic effects as the far-carrying pizzicato, or the rumbling of the double basses or their low growl; the hollow, reverberating percussions of the tympani; sustained notes on the horns; the majestic accents of trombones; the sharp shrill of piccolos; while some of the most effective pianoforte pieces are arrangements of songs.

Moreover, there are pianoforte compositions like the Hungarian rhapsodies of Liszt which, while conceived and carried out in the true spirit of the instrument (“pianistic,” as they say), yet suggest the tone colors of the orchestra without permitting these to obtrude themselves too much. This is one of the many services of Liszt, the giant of virtuosos and a giant among composers, to his art. It has been said that Liszt played the whole orchestra on the pianoforte. He did even more. He developed the technique of the instrument to such a point that the suggestion of many of the clang tints of the orchestra has become part of its heritage. This dual capacity of the pianoforte, the fact that it has a tone quality wholly peculiar to itself, so that when, for example, we are playing Chopin we never think of the orchestra, while at the same time it can take up into itself and reproduce, or at least suggest, the tone colors of other instruments, is one of its most remarkable characteristics.

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Quite as remarkable and as interesting and important is the circumstance that these tone tints are wholly dependent upon the player. There is nothing peculiar to the make of the strings, the sounding-board, the hammers, that tends to produce these effects. They are due wholly to the player’s subtle manipulation of the keys, so that we get the added thrill of the virtuoso’s personal magnetism. The pianoforte owes much of its popularity, much of its supremacy, to the fact that a player’s interpretation of a composition cannot be marred by any one but himself. It rests in his hands alone, whereas the conductor of an orchestra is dependent upon a hundred players, some of whom may have no more soul than so many wooden Indians. Even supposing a conductor to be gifted with a highly poetic and musically sensitive nature, it is impossible that so many men of varying degrees of temperament as go to make up an orchestra, and none of them probably a virtuoso of the highest rank, will be as sympathetically responsive to his baton as a pianoforte is to the fingers of a musical poet like Paderewski; for the fingers of a great virtuoso are the ambassadors of his soul.

Melody and Accompaniment on One Instrument.

This personal, one-man control of the instrument has been of inestimable value to the pianoforte in establishing itself in its present unassailable position. Moreover, in controlling it the pianist commands all the resources of music. With his two thumbs alone he can accomplish what no player upon any other instrument 34 in common use is capable of doing with all ten fingers. He can sound together the lowest and the highest notes in music, for all the notes of music as we know it simply await the pressure of the fingers upon the keys of the pianoforte. It is the one instrument capable of power as well as of sweetness and grace which places the whole range of harmony and counterpoint at the disposal of one player. A vocalist can sing an air, but can you imagine a vocalist singing through an entire programme without accompaniment? After half a dozen unaccompanied songs the singing even of the greatest prima donna would become monotonous for lack of harmony. The violin and violoncello, next to the pianoforte the most frequently heard instruments in the concert hall, labor under the same disadvantage as the singer. They are dependent upon the accompaniment of others.

The pianist, on the other hand, has the inestimable advantage of being able to play melody and accompaniment on one instrument at the same time—all in one. While singing with some of his fingers the tender melodic phrase of a Chopin nocturne, he completes with the others the exquisite weave of harmony, and reveals the musical fabric to us in all its beauty. Moreover, it is the pianist himself who does this, not some one else at his signal, which the intermediary possibly may not wholly understand. When Paderewski is at the pianoforte we hear Paderewski—not some one else of a less sensitive temperament whom he is directing with a baton. A poet is at the instrument and we hear the poet. A poet may be at the conductor’s desk—but in the orchestra that is required for the interpretation 35 of his musical conceptions poets usually are conspicuous by their absence. Even great singers suffer because their accompaniments are apt not to be as sensitive of temperament as they are; and it is a fact that the grace and beauty of Schubert’s “Hark, Hark, the Lark” never have been so fully revealed to me by a singer as by Paderewski’s playing of Liszt’s arrangement of the song, because the pianist is able to shade the accompaniment to the most delicate nuances of the melody. How delightful, too, it is to go through the pianoforte score of a Wagner music-drama and, as you play the wonderful music—all placed within the grasp of your ten fingers—watch the scenic pictures and the action pass in imagination before your eyes in your own music room without the defects inseparable from every public performance, because the success of a performance depends upon the co-operation of so many who do not co-operate. Yes, the pianoforte is the king of instruments because it is the most independent of instruments and because it makes him who plays upon it independent.

Music’s Debt to the Pianoforte.

It would be difficult to overestimate the debt that music owes to the pianoforte. Including for the present under this one name the various keyboard instruments from which it was developed, the sonata form had its first tentative beginnings upon it and was wrought out to perfection through it by a process of gradual evolution extending from Domenico Scarlatti through Bach’s son, Philipp Emanuel Bach, to Beethoven. As a symphony simply is a sonata for orchestra, 36 it follows that through the sonata and thus through the pianoforte the form in which the classical composers cast their greatest works was established. Richard Strauss, in his revision of Berlioz’s book on orchestration, even goes so far as to assert that Beethoven, and after him Schumann and Brahms, treated the orchestra pianistically; but the discussion of this point is better deferred until we take up the orchestra and orchestral music.

Here, however, it may be observed that in addition to its constant use as an instrument for the concert hall and the home, and for the delight of great audiences and the joy of the amateur player and his familiar circle, many of the great composers, even when writing orchestral works, have used the pianoforte for their first sketches, testing their harmonies on it, and often, no doubt, while groping over the keys in search of the psychical note, hit upon accidental improvements and new harmonies. Even Wagner, who understood the orchestra as none other ever has, employed the pianoforte in sketching out his ideas. “I went to my Erard and wrote out the passage as rapidly as if I had it by heart,” he writes from Venice to Mathilde Wesendonck, in relating to her the genesis of the great love duet in “Tristan und Isolde,” and I could quote other passages from my “Wagner and his Isolde,” which is based on the romantic passages in the lives of the composer and the woman who inspired his great music-drama, to show the frequency with which he made similar use of the universal musical instrument.

The pianoforte has in many other ways been a boon to some of the most famous composers. Many of them 37 were pianists, and by public performances of their own works materially accelerated the appreciation of their music. Mozart was a youthful prodigy, and later a virtuoso of the highest rank. Beethoven, before he was overtaken by deafness, introduced his own pianoforte compositions to the public and was the musical lion of the Viennese drawing-rooms. Mendelssohn was a pianist of the same smooth, affable, gentlemanly type as his music. Chopin was not a miscellaneous concert player—his nature was too shrinking; but at the Salon Pleyel in Paris he gave recitals to the musical élite, who in turn conveyed his ideas to the greater public. Schumann began his musical career as a virtuoso, but strained the fourth finger of his right hand in using a mechanical apparatus which he had devised for facilitating the practice of finger exercises. His wife, Clara Wieck, however, who was the most famous woman pianist of her time, substituted her fingers for his. Liszt literally hewed out the way for his works on the keyboard. Brahms was a pianist of solid, scholarly attainments. In fact, dig where you will in musical soil, you strike the roots of the pianoforte.

Its Lowly Origin.

It must not be supposed, however, that the instrument as we know it attained to its present supremacy except through a long process of evolution. One of the immediate precursors of the modern pianoforte was the harpsichord, a name suggesting that the instrument was a harp with a keyboard attachment, and such, in a general way, the pianoforte is. But the harp is 38 a very fully developed affair compared with the mean little apparatus in which lay and was discovered many centuries ago the first germ of the king among instruments. This was the monochord, and it has required about nine centuries for the evolution of an instrument consisting of a single string set in vibration by means of a keyboard attachment into the modern pianoforte. But do not be alarmed. I am not about to give a nine hundred years’ history of the pianoforte. Such detailed consideration would belong to a technical work on the manufacture of the instrument and would be out of place here. Something of its history should, however, be known to every one who wants to understand music, but I shall endeavor to be as brief and at the same time as clear as possible.

The monochord originally was used much as we use a tuning fork, to determine true musical pitch. If you take a short piece of string, tie one end of it fast, draw it taut and pluck it, its vibrations will sound a note. If you grasp the string and draw it taut from nearer to the point where it is tied, you shorten what is called the “node,” increase the number of vibrations and produce a higher note. The monochord in its simplest form consisted of a string drawn taut over an oblong box and tuned to a given pitch by means of a peg. Under the string and in contact with it was a bridge or fret that could be moved by hand along a graduated scale marked on the bottom of the box. By moving the bridge the node of the string could be shortened and the notes marked at corresponding points on the graduated scale produced. After a while, and in order to facilitate the study of the harmonious relationship between 39 different notes, three strings were added, each with its bridge and graduated scale.

It was more or less of a nuisance, however, to continually shift four bridges to as many different points under the four strings. As an improvement upon this awkward arrangement some clever person conceived about the beginning of the tenth century, the idea of borrowing the keyboard from the organ and attaching it to the monochord. To the rear end of each key was attached an upright piece called a tangent. When the finger pressed upon a key the tangent struck one of the strings, set it in vibration, and at the same time, by contact, created a node which lasted as long as the key was kept down and the tangent remained pressed against the string. To increase the utility of the instrument by adding more strings and more keys was the next obvious step, and gradually the monochord ceased to be a mere technical apparatus for the determining of pitch and became an instrument on which professionals and amateurs could play with pleasure to themselves and others.

A Poet’s Advice to His Musical Daughter.

There has been preserved to us from about the year 1529 a reply made by the poet Pietro Bembo to his daughter Elena, who had written to him from the convent where she was being educated asking if she could have lessons upon the monochord, which seems to have been as popular in its day as its fully developed successor, the modern pianoforte, is now.

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“Touching thy request for permission to play upon the monochord,” begins Bembo’s quaint answer, “I reply that because of thy tender years thou canst not know that playing is an art for vain and frivolous women, whereas I would that thou shouldst be the most chaste and modest maiden alive. Besides, if thou wert to play badly it would cause thee little pleasure and no little shame. Yet in order to play well thou must needs give up from ten to twelve years to the exercise, without so much as thinking of aught else. How far this would benefit thee thou canst see for thyself without my telling thee. But thy schoolmates, if they desire thee to learn to play for their pleasure, tell them thou dost not care to have them laugh at thy mortification. Therefore, content thyself with the pursuit of the sciences and the practice of needlework.” These words of the poet Bembo to his daughter Elena—are they so wholly lacking in application to our own day? And I wonder—did or did not Elena learn to play the monochord? If not, it was because she lived a few centuries too soon. She would have had her own way to-day!

The Clavichord.

Monochord means “one string,” and the application of the term to the instrument after other strings had been added was a misnomer. The monochord on which Elena, to the evident distress of her distinguished parent, desired to play, really was a clavichord, which was derived directly from the primitive monochord.

If you will raise the lid of your pianoforte you will find that the strings become shorter from the bass up, 41 the lowest note being sounded by the longest, the highest note by the shortest string; for the longer the string the slower the vibrations and the deeper the sounds produced, and vice versa. This principle is so obvious that it seems as if it must have been applied to the clavichord almost immediately and a separate string provided for each key. But for many years the strings of the clavichord continued all of equal length, and three or four neighboring keys struck the same string, so that the contact of the upright tangent with the string not only set the latter in vibration but also served to form the node which produced the desired note. Not until after the clavichord had been in use several centuries, were its strings made of varying length and a separate string assigned to each key. These new clavichords were called bundfrei (fret-free or tangent-free) because the node of each string was determined by that string’s length and not by the contact of the tangent.

The clavichord retained the box shape of its prototype, the monochord. Originally it was portable and was set upon a table; later, however, was made, so to speak, to stand upon its own legs. In appearance it resembled our square pianofortes. It gave forth a sweet, gentle and decidedly pretty musical sound. It had a further admirable quality in its capacity for sustaining a tone, since by keeping the tangent pressed against the string the player was able to sustain the tone so long as the string continued to vibrate. Moreover, by holding down the key and at the same time making a gentle rocking motion with the finger he was able to produce a tremolo effect which German musicians 42 called Bebung (trembling), and the French balancement.

A defect of the clavichord was, however, its lack of power. This defect led to experiments which resulted in the construction of a keyboard instrument the strings of which, in response to the action of the keys, were set in vibration by jacks tipped with crow-quills or hard leather. The sound was much stronger than that of the clavichord. But the jacks twanged the strings with uniform power, “permitting a sharp outline, but no shading of the tones.”

The Harpsichord.

If you chance to be listening to a Hungarian band at a restaurant you may notice that one of the players has lying on a table before him an instrument with many strings strung very much like those of the pianoforte. It is played with two little mallets in the player’s hands, and produces the weird arpeggios and improvised runs characteristic of Hungarian gypsy music. It is a very old instrument called the cembalo. About the fifteenth century, it seems, some one devised a keyboard attachment with quills for this instrument, tipped the jacks with crow-quills, and called the result a clavicembalo (a cembalo with keys). This was the origin of the harpsichord, the name by which the clavicembalo soon became more generally known. Harpsichords were shaped somewhat like our grand pianofortes, but were much smaller. A spinet was a small harpsichord, and the virginal a still smaller one. Sometimes, indeed, virginals were made no larger than workboxes, 43 the instrument being taken out of the box and placed on a table before the player.

For the purposes of this book this very general survey of the precursors of the pianoforte seems sufficient. The clavichord and the instruments of the harpsichord (harpsichord, spinet, and virginal) class flourished alongside of each other, but the best musicians gave the preference to the clavichord because of its sweet tone and the delicately tremulous effect that could be produced upon it by the balancement. Experiments in pianoforte making were in progress already in Bach’s day, but he clung to the clavichord, as did his son, Philipp Emanuel Bach. Mozart was the first of the great masters to realize the value of the pianoforte and to aid materially in making it popular by using it for his public performances. And yet even then the clavichord, “that lonely, melancholy, unspeakably sweet instrument,” was not abandoned without lingering regret by the older musicians, and it still was to be found in occasional use as late as the beginning of the last century. How thoroughly modern the pianoforte is will be appreciated when it is said that a celebrated firm of English makers founded in 1730 did not begin to manufacture pianofortes until 1780 and continued the production of clavichords until 1793.

Piano and Forte.

Neither on the clavichord nor on the harpsichord could the player vary the strength of the tone which he produced, by the degree of force with which he struck the keys. Swells and pedals worked by the knees and 44 the feet were devised to overcome this difficulty, but “touch” as we understand it to-day was impossible with the instruments in which the degree of sound to be produced was not under the control of the player’s fingers. The clavichord was piano, the harpsichord was forte. Not until the invention of the hammer action, the substitution of hammers for tangents and quill-jacks, was an instrument possible in which whether the tone should be piano or forte depended upon the degree of strength with which the player struck the keys. This instrument was the first pianoforte. It was invented and so named in 1711 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, of Florence, and, although nearly two centuries have elapsed since then, the action used by many pianoforte manufacturers of to-day is in its essentials the same as that devised by this clever Italian. The invention frequently is ascribed to Gottfried Silbermann, a German (1683-1753). But the real situation is that Cristofori was the inventor, while Silbermann was the first successful manufacturer of the new instruments, from a business point of view. Time and improvements were required before they made their way, and how slow many professional musicians were in giving up the beloved clavichord for the pianoforte already has been pointed out. But the latter was bound to triumph in the end.

I shall not attempt to give a technical description of the mechanism of the pianoforte. But I should like to answer a few questions which may have suggested themselves to players who may not have cared to take their instruments apart and examine them, or have not been present when their tuners have taken off the 45 lid and exposed the strings and mechanism to view. The strings of the pianoforte are of steel wire, and their tension varies from twelve tons to nearly twenty. Those of the deepest bass are covered with copper wire. Eight or ten tones of the bass are produced by the vibration of these copper-wound strings. Above these, for about an octave and a half, the strings are in pairs, so that, the hammer striking them, there are two unison strings to a tone, simultaneously, and producing approximately twice as powerful a tone as if only one string had been set in vibration. The five remaining octaves have three strings to a tone.

All Depends on the Player.

When the fingers strike the keys the hammers strike the strings, the force of the stroke depending upon the force exerted by the player, this being the distinguishing merit of the pianoforte as compared with its precursors. Under the strings are a row of dampers, and as soon as a finger releases a key the corresponding damper springs into place against the vibrating strings, stops the vibrations, and the tone ceases. Thus the tone can be dampened immediately by raising the finger or prolonged by keeping the finger pressed down on the key. This is the device which enables the pianist to play staccato or legato. The damper pedal, or loud pedal, checks the action of all the dampers and prolongs the tones even after the fingers have released the keys. The soft pedal brings the hammers nearer the strings, shortens the stroke and produces a softer tone. The simultaneous use of both pedals is a modern 46 virtuoso effect and a very charming one, for the damper pedal prolongs the gentle tones produced by the use of the soft pedal. I believe Paderewski was the first of the great pianists who have visited this country, to employ this effect systematically, and that he was among the first composers to formally indicate the simultaneous employment of both pedals in passages in his compositions. There is a third pedal called the sustaining pedal, but I do not think it has proved as valuable an invention as was anticipated.

Within recent years there have been introduced mechanical pianofortes, which I may designate as pianolas, after the most popular instrument of their class. In my opinion, these instruments are destined to play an important part in the diffusion of musical knowledge, and it is senseless to underestimate this. There are thousands of people who have neither the time nor the dexterity to master the technique of the pianoforte, who nevertheless are people of genuine musical feeling, and who are enabled through the pianola to cultivate their taste for music. The device renders the music accurately; whether expressively or not depends, as with the pianoforte itself, upon the taste of the person who manipulates it.

Decorations That Do Not Beautify.

The pianoforte often is spoken of as an instrument of ugly appearance. This it emphatically is not. If the straight side of the grand is placed against the wall the side toward the room presents a graceful, sweeping curve, while the upright effectively breaks the straight 47 line of the wall against which it stands. If the pianoforte is ugly, it is due to the so-called “ornaments” that are placed upon it—the knicknacks, framed pictures and other senseless things. To my mind, there is but one thing which it is permissible to place upon a pianoforte, a slender vase with a single flower, preferably a rose—the living symbol of the soul that waits to be awakened within the instrument.

Sheet music or bound books of music on top of a pianoforte are an abomination. If scattered about they look disorderly; if neatly arranged in portfolios, even worse, for they create the precise, orderly appearance of paths and mounds in a cemetery. Often, indeed, the pianoforte is a graveyard of musical hopes. Because of that, however, it need not be made to look like one.

Equally objectionable is the elaborately decorated or “period” pianoforte designed for rooms decorated in the style of some historical art period. A pianoforte has no business in a “period” room. If the person is rich enough to afford “period” rooms, he also can afford a music room, and the simpler this is, within the bounds of good taste, and the less there is in it besides the instrument itself, the better. The more proficient the pianist the less he cares for decoration and the more satisfied he is with the pianoforte turned out in the ordinary course of business by the high-class manufacturer. No—decorated pianofortes are for those who are too rich to be musical.

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II

BACH’S SERVICE TO MUSIC

So important has been the rôle played by the pianoforte in the evolution of music that it is possible in these chapters on a pianoforte recital to give a general survey of the art, and thus prepare the reader to enjoy not only what he will hear at such a recital, but enable him to approach it with a more comprehensive knowledge than that would imply. This is one reason why I elected to lead with the chapters on the pianoforte instead of with those on the orchestra, as usually is done, because the orchestra is something “big.” In point of fact, however, the pianoforte, so far as its influence is concerned, is quite as “big,” if not, indeed, bigger than the orchestra; for often, in the evolution of music (as I pointed out in the previous chapter), this instrument, which is so sufficient in itself, has led the orchestra. In reviewing a pianoforte recital it therefore is quite possible to review many phases of musical history.

Take as an example a composition by Bach, one of the preludes and fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” with which a pianoforte recital is quite apt to open. The selection illustrates a whole epoch in music which Bach rounded off and brought alike to its climax and its close. You will be apt to find this 49 fugue rather complicated and, I fear, somewhat unintelligible, and this makes it necessary for me to point out at once that in some respects music has had a curious development. A Wagner music-drama, a Richard Strauss tone poem, seem elaborate and complicated affairs compared with a Beethoven sonata or symphony. Yet even the most advanced work of a Wagner or Strauss is neither as complicated nor as elaborate as a fugue by that past master of his art, Johann Sebastian Bach, who, although he was born in 1685 and did not live beyond the middle of the following century, was so far ahead of his age that not even to this day has he fully come into his own. The result is that the early classicists, Haydn and Mozart, who belong in point of time to a later epoch, may more readily be reckoned as “old-fashioned” than Father Bach. When at a recital you listen to a fugue by Bach and find it hard and labored—many people regard it simply as a difficult species of finger exercises—you think that is because it is so very ancient, something in the same class with Greek or Sanscrit. In point of fact it is because in some respects it is so very modern.

Were it not for the importance of preserving an orderly historical sequence in a book of this kind, and that Bach usually is found at the beginning of a recital program, it would be almost more practical, and certainly far easier, for the author to leave Bach until later. When you write of Mozart, or of Beethoven and the moderns, you can depend upon more or less familiarity with their works on the part of your readers, whereas, comparatively few laymen know much about Bach. They associate the name with all that is formal 50 and labored. Yet among my acquaintances is a young woman who was brought up in a very musical family, and who, having as a child heard her mother play the preludes and fugues of the “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” finds Bach as simple as the alphabet. But hers is a most exceptional case. The appreciation of Bach, as a rule, comes only with advanced age. My music teacher used to say to me: “You rave over Schubert and Wagner now, but when you get to be as old as I am you will go back to Father Bach.” While I cannot say that his prophecy has come true, while I still am ultra-modern in my musical predilections, my musical gods being Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss and, above all, Wagner, I should consider myself unfit to write this book if I failed to realize the debt modern music owes to Bach, and that the more modern the music the greater the debt.

Bach in Modern Music.

One of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the art—and a generalization like this is as much in place in discussing pianoforte music as elsewhere, because the instrument has had so much to do with the evolution of music—is the gap between Bach and modern music. While the following must not be taken too literally, it is true in general that Bach had little or no influence on the age that immediately came after him, the classical age of music, that age which we sum up in the names of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the age of the sonata and the symphony. The three masters mentioned probably would have developed and 51 composed much as they did had Bach never lived. But when a more modern composer, a romanticist like Wagner, wanted to enrich the means of musical expression handed down to him from the classical period, he reached back to Bach and combined Bach’s teeming counterpoint with the harmonic system which had been inherited from Beethoven. To understand just what this means, to appreciate the influence Bach has had upon modern music and why he had little or none on the classical composers, it is necessary for the reader to have at least a reasonably clear conception of what that counterpoint is and wherein it differs from harmony; for with Bach counterpoint reached its climax, and all the possibilities of the style having been exhausted by him, music of necessity took a turn in another direction under the classicists and developed harmonically instead of contrapuntally; so that it can be said that modern music derives its counterpoint from Bach, its harmony from Beethoven, and its combination of the two systems from Wagner.

There is another reason why the meaning of counterpoint should be explained and the difference between counterpoint and harmony be made clear to the reader now. Nearly all the early music, the music that preceded Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and that sometimes is to be found on recital programs, is contrapuntal—written in counterpoint. As I have said before, it would be much easier to start with the sonata form, with harmony instead of counterpoint, for of the two harmony is the simpler. But we must “face the music”—the music of the old contrapuntal composers—and 52 the best way to do this is to explain what harmony and counterpoint are and wherein they differ.

Harmony and Counterpoint.

A melody or theme is a rational progression of single tones. Here is the melody or theme with which Beethoven begins the familiar “Moonlight Sonata”:

Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”
[[Listen]]

It is a melody, but it does not constitute harmony, for harmony is the rational combination of several tones, as distinguished from the rational progression of single tones which constitute melody. But when Beethoven adds an accompaniment to his theme and it becomes:

Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”
[[Listen]]

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the passage also becomes harmony, since it is an example of the rational combination of several tones. As has often been pointed out in books on music, and probably often will have to be pointed out again, because as a mistake it is to be classed with the hardy perennials, melody is not harmony, but only a part of it. When, however, a composer conceives a theme or melody he usually does so with the purpose of combining it with an accompaniment that shall support it and throw it into bold and striking relief. Composers of the contrapuntal school, on the other hand, conceived a theme, not for the purpose of supporting it with an accompaniment, but in order to combine it with another or with several other equally important themes. That, in a general way, is the difference between harmony and counterpoint.

In harmony, then, or, more strictly speaking, in music composed according to the harmonic system, of which the “Moonlight Sonata” is a good example, the theme, the melody, stands out from the accompaniment, which is subordinate. Counterpoint, on the other hand, rests on the combination of several themes, each of equal importance. This is the reason why, when there is a fugue or other complicated contrapuntal work on the program of a pianoforte recital, the average listener is apt to find it dry and uninteresting. His ear readily can distinguish the themes of a sonata, which usually are heard one at a time and stand out clearly from the accompaniment, but it has not been trained to unravel the themes of the fugue as they travel along together. Counterpoint, the term being derived from the Latin contra punctum, which means point against point or 54 note against note, when complicated, as in a fugue, is about the most elaborate kind of music there is, and a person who is unable to grasp a fugue may console himself with the thought that, excepting for the elect, it is a pretty stiff dose to swallow at the very beginning of a recital.

There are, however, simpler pieces of counterpoint than a fugue. Sometimes, as in the charming little “Gavotte” by Padre Martini, which now and then figures among the lighter numbers on the programs of historical recitals, the contrapuntist combines a theme with itself, or, rather, “imitates” it, which is a simple form of the canon. Another form of canon is the round of which “Three Blind Mice” is a familiar example. How many people, when singing this, have realized that they were being initiated into that mysterious thing known as counterpoint? A comparatively simple form of counterpoint is well illustrated by a dapper little piece in Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” in which the spirited theme given out by the right hand answers itself a bar later in the left, an “imitation” which crops out again and again in the piece and gives it somewhat the character of a canon.

[[Listen]]

For any one who wishes to become acquainted with 55 Bach there is nothing better than these “Two-Part Inventions,” especially the fascinating little piece from which I have just quoted, compact, buoyant and gay, even “pert,” as I once heard a young girl characterize it; a perfect example of old Father Bach in moments of relaxation when he has laid aside his periwig and is amusing himself at his clavichord.

What a Fugue Is.

Bach’s fugues, and especially his “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the keys, form the climax of contrapuntal music. Goethe once said that “the history of the world is a mighty fugue in which the voice of nation after nation becomes audible.” This is a freely poetic definition of that highly complicated musical form, the fugue. Let me attempt to illustrate it in a different way.

Imagine that a composer who is an adept in counterpoint places four pianists at different pianofortes, and that he gives a different theme to each of them, or a theme to one and modified versions of it to the others. He starts the first pianist, after a few bars nods to the second to join in with his theme, and so on successively with the other two. It might be supposed that when the second player joins in, the two themes sounding together would make discord, which would be aggravated by the addition of the third and fourth. But, instead, they have been so conceived by the contrapuntist that they sound well together as they chase and answer each other, or run counter to and 56 parallel and enter into many different combinations, sometimes flowing along smoothly, at other times surging and striving, yet always, in the case of a truly great fugue, borne along by a momentum as inexorable as the march of Fate. Of course, it must not be supposed, because I have called four pianists into action in order to emphasize how distinct are these themes, which yet, when united, are found to blend together, that several players are required for the performance of a complicated piece of counterpoint like a fugue. What is demanded of the player is entire independence of the fingers, so that he can clearly differentiate between the themes and enable the hearer to distinguish them apart, even in their most complicated combinations. An edition of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavichord” by Bernardus Boekelman prints the themes in different colors, so that they are easy to trace through all their interweaving, and is interesting to study from.

The Fugue and the Virtuoso.

In his book, “Beethoven and His Forerunners,” Daniel Gregory Mason devotes a paragraph toward dispelling the mystery regarding the fugue that prevails with the public, and points out that “the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above; then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has 57 had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically asserted by the various voices in quick succession (stretto), and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end.”

Further along in the same book Mr. Mason has a page of apostrophe to the Bach fugues. When he characterizes them as “the first great independent monuments of pure music,” and refers to their “consummate beauty of structure,” he pays them an eminently just tribute. But when he speaks of the “profundity, poignancy and variety of feeling they express,” I am inclined to quote his own qualifying sentence from the next page of his book: “It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of the ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand.” The same is even more true of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The progress of music toward individual freedom of expression on the part of the composer, and equally so on the part of the interpreter, has been steady, and when, through the very perfection which Bach imparted to counterpoint, it ceased to attract composers as a means of expression because he had accomplished so much there was nothing more left for them to do along the same lines, the progress I have indicated received a great lift and stimulus.

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What Counterpoint Lacks.

The lack of highly personal expression in contrapuntal compositions explains why most concert-goers find them less attractive than modern music. The “D Minor Toccata and Fugue” or the “Chromatic Fantasie and Fugue” by Bach, even in the arrangements of Tausig and Liszt, on the program of a pianoforte recital, are tolerated because of the modern pieces that come later. Nine out of ten persons in the house would rather omit them. Why deny so obvious a fact, especially when it is easy enough to explain? To follow a contrapuntal composition intelligently requires a highly trained ear. Moreover, in such a work as a Bach fugue the individuality of the player is of less importance than in modern music. Yet a virtuoso’s individuality is the very thing that distinguishes him from other virtuosos and attracts the public to his concerts, while those of other players may be poorly attended. I firmly believe in personality of the virtuoso or singer or orchestral conductor, for in it lies the secret of individual interpretation, the reason why the performance of one person is fascinating or thrilling and that of another not. Modern music affords the player full scope to interpret it according to his own mood and fancy, to color it with his own personality, whereas contrapuntal music exists largely for itself alone. It is music for music’s sake, not for the sake of interpreting some mood, some feeling, or of painting in tone colors something quite outside of music. The player of counterpoint is restricted in his power of expression 59 by the very formulas of the science or art of the contrapuntist. We may marvel that Bach was able to move so freely within its restricted forms. But I think it true that it is far more interesting for a person even of only moderate proficiency as a player to work out, however awkwardly, a Bach fugue for himself on the pianoforte than to hear it played by some one else, however great; for, cheap and easy as it is to protest in high-sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.

The Mission of the Player.

We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the worshiper of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a snowball, who revels in counterpoint—the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the “composer’s intentions” and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much 60 from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.

While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making virtuosos—Paganini on the violin, Liszt on the piano. Within about the same period covered by the careers of these two there have been half a dozen or even more composers, each of whom marks an epoch in some phase of the art. “The interpretive artist,” says Henry G. Hanchett in his “Art of the Musician,” “deserves a place no whit beneath that of the composer. No two composers have influenced musical progress in America more strongly than have Anton Rubinstein by his playing, and Theodore Thomas, who was not a composer.”

Music as a Science.

But, to return to Bach and the other contrapuntists, music owes them an immense debt on the technical side. And right here, so universal are the deductions that can be drawn from the program of a pianoforte 61 recital, it should be pointed out that music differs from other arts in having for its basis a profound and complicated science, a science that concerns itself with the relations of the notes of the musical scale to each other. Upon this science are based alike the “coon song” and the Wagner music-drama. What is true of “Tristan” is true also of “Bedelia.” Each makes its draft upon the science of music; the music-drama, of course, in a far greater degree than the song. This science has its textbooks with their theorems and problems, like any other science, and theoretical musicians have produced learned and useful works on the subject which the great mass of laymen, many virtuosos, and indeed the average professional musician, may never have heard of, let alone have read. For a person not intuitively predisposed toward the subject would find the science of music as difficult to master as integral calculus; nor, in order to appreciate music, or even to interpret it, is it necessary to be versed in this science. A virtuoso can play a chord of the ninth, the listener can be thrilled by the virtuoso’s playing of the chord of the ninth, without either of them knowing that there is such a thing as the chord of the ninth.

Science versus Feeling.

In fact, the person who is so well versed in the science of music that he can mentally analyze a composition while listening to it is apt to be so absorbed in the mere process of technical analysis that he misses its esthetic, its emotional significance. Thus a person may 62 be very musical without being musical at all. He may have profound knowledge of music as a science and remain untouched by music as an art, just as a physicist may be an authority on the laws of light and color, yet stand unmoved before a great painting. With some people music is all science, with others all art, and I think the latter have the better of it. A musical genius is equipped both ways. The great composer employs the science of music as an aid in giving expression to his creative impulse. He makes science of service to the cause of art. Otherwise, while he might produce something that was absolutely correct, it would make no artistic appeal whatsoever. Thousands of symphonies have been composed, performed and forgotten. They were “well made,” constructed with scientific accuracy from beginning to end, but had no value as art; and music is a profound science applied to the production of a great art.

The composer, then, masters the science of music and bends it to his genius. If he is a great genius, he soon will discover that certain rules which his predecessors regarded as hard and fast, as inviolable, can be violated with impunity. He will discover new tone combinations, and thus enrich the science and make it serve the purposes of the art with greater efficiency than before he came upon the scene. And always the composers who have grown gray under the old system, the system upon which the new genius is grafting his new ideas, and the theorists and critics, who are slaves of tradition, will throw up their hands in horror and cry out that he is despoiling the art and robbing it of all that is sacred and beautiful, whereas he is adding to its scope 63 and potency. Did not even so broad-minded a composer as Schumann say, “The trouble with Wagner is that he is not a musician”? So far was Wagner ahead of his time! While the great composer nearly always begins where his predecessors left off, he is sure to outstrip them later on. Even so rugged a genius as Beethoven is somewhat under Mozart’s influence in his first works, and Wagner’s “Rienzi” is distinctly Meyerbeerian. But genius soon learns to soar with its own wings and to look down with indifference upon the little men who are discharging their shafts of envy, malice and ignorance.

That “Ear for Music.”

And while I am on the subject of the scientific musician versus the music lover, the pedant versus the innovator, I might as well refer to those people who have in a remarkable degree what is popularly known as “an ear for music,” and who are able to remember and to play “by ear” anything they hear played or sung, even if it is for the first time. This ear for music, again, is something quite different from scientific knowledge of music or from the emotional sensitiveness which makes the music-lover. It is a purely physical endowment, and may—in fact, usually does—exist without a corresponding degree of real feeling for music. It is, of course, a highly valuable adjunct to a genuine musical genius like a Mozart or a Schubert and to a genuine virtuoso. It is related of Von Bülow that his ear for music and his memory were so prodigious that once, while traveling in the cars, he read over the 64 printed pages of a new composition, and on arriving at his destination, played it, from memory, at his concert. William Mason, who studied with Liszt, witnessed his master perform a similar feat. The average untrained person with a musical ear, however, instead of being a genius, is apt to become a nuisance, playing all kinds of cheap music in and out of season—a sort of peripatetic pianola, without the advantage of being under control. Such persons, moreover, usually are born without a soft pedal.

Bach and the Weather Bureau.

This digression, which I have made in order to discuss the difference between music as a science and music as an art, a distinction which, I have pointed out, often is so marked that a person may be thoroughly equipped on the scientific side of music without being sensitive to its beauty as an art, seemed to me necessary at this stage. I am reminded by it of the distinction which Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his “Nature and Elements of Poetry,” so wittily draws between the indications of a storm as described by a poet and by the official prognostications of the Weather Bureau. Mr. Stedman quotes two stanzas:

And this stanza by a later balladist:

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All this impersonation and fancy is translated by the Weather Bureau into something like the following:

“An area of extreme low pressure is rapidly moving up the Atlantic Coast, with wind and rain. Storm-center now off Charleston, S. C. Wind N. E.; velocity, 54. Barometer, 29.6. The disturbance will reach New York on Wednesday, and proceed eastward to the Banks and Bay of St. Lawrence. Danger signals ordered for all North Atlantic ports.”

Far be it from me to imply that contrapuntal music in general or Bach in particular represents the Weather Bureau. None the less is it true that Bach appeals more strongly to the scientific musician than to the music-lover who seeks in music a secondary meaning—love, passion, grief; the mood awakened by the contemplation of a forest landscape with its murmuring foliage, a boundless prairie, or the unquiet sea.

The technical indebtedness of modern music to Bach is so immense, and the artistic probity of the man himself was so wonderful, for he worked calmly on, in spite of what was worse than opposition—neglect—that I think the tendency on the part of Bach enthusiasts, 66 while not overrating the importance of the influence he has had during the past fifty years or more, is to underrate others as compared with him. When critics declare that one virtuoso or another is not a great Bach player, are they not ignoring what is a simple fact—that no player can make the same appeal through Bach that it is possible for him to make through modern music, and that, as a rule, when a virtuoso, however good a musician he may be, places Bach on his program, he does so not from predilection, but as a tribute to one of the greatest names in musical history? It seems to me that the extreme Bach enthusiasts can be divided into two classes—musicians who are able to appreciate what he did for music on its technical side, and people who want to create the impression that they know more than they really do.

The Bacon, Not the Shakespeare, of Music.

Bach’s greatest importance to music lies in his having treated it in the abstract and for itself alone, so that when he penned a work he did this not to bring home to the listener the significance of a certain mood or situation, but from pure delight in following out a musical problem to its most extreme development. Algebra makes mighty interesting study, but furnishes rather a poor subject for dramatic reading. This simile must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, and merely as illustrating in a general way my contention that Bach’s great service to music was technical and intellectual. He was the Bacon, not the Shakespeare, 67 of music, and the contrapuntal structure that he reared is to the art what the Baconian theorem is to logic. We can imagine the roamer in the field of higher mathematics suddenly becoming excited as he sees the end of the path leading to the solution of some complicated problem in full view. Thus there may be moments when even the cube root becomes emotional, the logarithmic theory a dissipation, and differential calculus an orgy. So, too, Bach put an enthusiasm into his work that often threatens to sweep the student off his intellectuals and make him regard a fugue as a scientifically constructed fairyland. Moreover, there are Bach pieces in which the counterpoint supports the purest kind of melody, like the air for the G string which Thomas arranged for his orchestra with all the strings, save the double basses, in unison, and played with an effect that never failed to secure a repeat and sometimes a double encore.

What Wagner Learned from Bach.

If we bear in mind that counterpoint is the artistic combination of several themes, each of equal or nearly equal importance, and that Bach was the greatest master of the contrapuntal school and forms its climax, we can, with a little thought, appreciate what his service has been to modern music. When Wagner devised his system of leading motives it was not for the purpose of employing them singly, like labels tacked onto each character, thing or symbol in the drama, but of combining them, welding them together, when occasion arose, in order to give musical significance and expression to each and every dramatic situation as the 68 story unfolded itself. A shining example of this is found in that wonderful last scene of “Die Walküre,” the so-called Magic Fire Scene. Wotan has said farewell to Brünnhilde; has thrown her into a profound slumber upon the rock; has surrounded her with a circle of magic flame which none but a hero may penetrate to awaken and win her. How is this scene treated in the score? In the higher register of the orchestra crackles and sparkles the Magic Fire Motive, the Slumber Motive gently rising and falling with the flames; while the superb Siegfried Motive (signifying that the yet unborn Siegfried is the hero destined to break through the fiery circle) resounds in the brass, and there also is a suggestion of the tender strains with which Wotan bade Brünnhilde farewell. The welding together of these four motives into one glorious whole of the highest dramatic significance is Wagnerian counterpoint—science employed in the service of art and with thrilling effect. Another passage from Wagner, the closing episode in the “Meistersinger” Vorspiel, often is quoted to show Wagner’s skill in the use of counterpoint, although he employs it so spontaneously that few people stop to consider how scientific his musical structure is. W. J. Henderson, in his capital book, “The Orchestra and Orchestral Music,” relates that on one occasion a professional musician was engaged in a discussion of Wagner in the corridor of the Metropolitan Opera House, while inside the orchestra was playing this “Meistersinger” Vorspiel.

“It is a pity,” said this wise man, in a condescending manner, “but Wagner knows absolutely nothing about counterpoint.”

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At that very instant the orchestra was singing five different melodies at once; and, as Anton Seidl was the conductor, they were all audible.

Wagner scores, in fact, teem with counterpoint, but counterpoint that palpitates, that thrills with emotion. Note that Mr. Henderson speaks of melodies. Wagner’s leading motives are melodies, sometimes very brief, but always expressive, and not, like the themes of the old contrapuntists, conceived mainly for the sake of being combined scientifically with other themes equally adaptable to that purpose. Counterpoint may be, and usually is, something very dry and formal. But from the crucible of the master magician, Richard Wagner, it flows a glowing, throbbing, pulsating stream of most precious metal.

The Language of an Epoch.

In the difference between the counterpoint of Bach and the counterpoint of Wagner lies the difference between two epochs separated by a long period of time. With Bach counterpoint was everything; with Wagner merely an incident. It will help us to a better understanding of music if we bear in mind that the two great composers of each epoch spoke in the music of that epoch. Thus Bach spoke in the language of counterpoint. His themes, however greatly they may vary among themselves, all bear the stamp of motives devised for the purpose of entering into formal combinations and of being developed according to the stringent rules of counterpoint. Beethoven’s are more individual, more 70 expressive of moods and emotions. Yet about them, too, there is something formal. They, too, are devised to be treated according to certain rules—to be molded into sonatas. But with Wagner we feel that music has thrown off the shackles of arbitrary form, of dry rule and rote. His motives suggest absolute freedom of expression and development, through previously undreamed-of wealth of harmony and contrapuntal combinations which are mere incidents, not the chief purpose of their being. Each represents some person, impulse or symbol in a drama; represents them with such eloquence and power that, once we know for what they stand, we need but hear them again or recall them to memory to have the corresponding episode in the music-drama in which they occur brought vividly before our eyes. Bach’s language was the language of the fugue; Beethoven’s the language of the sonata. Fugue and sonata are musical forms. Wagner spoke the language of no form. His language is that of the free, plastic, unfettered leading motive—the language of liberated music, of which he himself was the liberator!

Whether Wagner would have devised his system of leading motives without the wonderful structure of counterpoint left by Bach; whether Bach’s counterpoint, his combination of themes, suggested the system of leading motives to the greatest master of them all, we probably never shall know. The system, in its completeness, doubtless is Wagner’s own; but when he came to put it into practical effect he found the rich heritage left by Bach ready to hand. One of Wagner’s instructors in musical theory, and the one from whose teaching he himself declares he learned most, was Theodor 71 Weinlig, one of Bach’s successors as Cantor of the Thomasschule at Leipsic. Wagner quotes him as having said: “You may never find it necessary to compose a fugue, but the ability to do it often may stand you in good stead.” And the Cantor set him exercises in all varieties of counterpoint. There thus is presented the phenomenon of a composer who for nearly a century after his death had little or no influence on the course of music, suddenly becoming a potent force in its most modern development.

Bach in the Recital Hall.

Bach is so supreme in his own line that contrapuntal music, so far as the pianoforte is concerned, may be dismissed with him. Händel, too, it is true, was a master of the contrapuntal school, but he belongs to the chapter on oratorio. Bach’s pianoforte works in smaller form are the “Two-Part Inventions” already mentioned; the “Three-Part Inventions,” which go a step farther in contrapuntal treatment, and the “Partitas,” the six “French Suites” and the six “English Suites.”

These partitas and suites are the most graceful and charming efflorescence of the contrapuntal school, and much could be accomplished toward making Bach a popular composer if they figured more frequently on recital programs. They are made up of the dance forms of the day—allemandes, courants, bourrées, sarabandes, minuets, gavottes, gigues, with airs thrown in for good measure; the partitas and English suites furnished with more elaborate introductions, while the French suites begin with allemandes. Cheerful and even frisky as 72 some of the dance pieces in these compositions are, it must not be supposed that they were intended to be danced to when contrapuntally treated—no more than Chopin intended that people should glide through a ballroom to the music of his waltzes.

Besides “sonatas” for pianoforte with one or more other instruments, among them the six “Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin” (the term sonata as employed here must not be confused with the classical sonata form as developed by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), Bach composed concertos for from one to four pianofortes. Of these latter the one best known in this country is the so-called “Triple Concerto,” for three pianofortes with accompaniment of string quartet, which can at will be increased to a string orchestra. In 1873, during Rubinstein’s tour, I heard it played in New York, under Theodore Thomas’s direction, by Rubinstein, William Mason and Sebastian Bach Mills, and three years later by Mme. Annette Essipoff, Mr. Mason and Mr. Boscovitz. Mason, when he was studying under Liszt in Weimar in 1854, had performed it with two fellow-pupils, and Liszt had been very particular in regard to the manner in which they played the many embellishments (agréments) which were used in Bach’s time. Later, Mason found that whenever three pianists came together for the purpose of playing this concerto they were certain to disagree regarding “the agreements,” and usually wasted much time in discussing them, especially the mordent.

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Rubinstein and the “Triple Concerto.”

Accordingly, when Mason played the “Triple Concerto” with Rubinstein and Mills, he came to the rehearsal armed with a book by Friedrich Wilhelm Marburg, published in Berlin in 1765, and giving written examples of all the agréments. “I told Rubinstein about my ancient authority,” says Mr. Mason in his entertaining “Memories of a Musical Life,” “adding that we should be spared the tediousness of a discussion as to the manner of playing.

“‘Let me see the old book,’ said Rubinstein. Running over the leaves he came to the illustrations of the mordent. The moment his eyes fell upon them he exclaimed: ‘All wrong; here is the way I play it!’” And that ended the usefulness of “the old book” for that particular occasion, the other two pianists adopting, without comment, Rubinstein’s method, which Mr. Mason intimates was incorrect.

When, at the rehearsal with Essipoff, the mordent came up for discussion she exclaimed: “‘I cannot play these things; show me how they are done.’ After repeated trials, however,” records Mr. Mason, “she failed to get the knack of playing them, as indeed so many pianists do; so at the rehearsal she omitted them and left their performance to Boscovitz and me.”

“The Well-Tempered Clavichord.”

Bach’s monumental work for pianoforte, however, is “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” consisting of forty-eight preludes and fugues in all keys. I find much prevalent ignorance among amateurs regarding the 74 meaning of “well-tempered” as used in this title. I have heard people explain it by saying that when a pianist had mastered the book he was “tempered” like steel and ready for any difficulties that other music might present! I even have heard a rotund and affable person say that “The Well-Tempered Clavichord” was so entitled because when you listened to its preludes and fugues it smoothed out your temper and made you feel good-natured! In point of fact, the word is difficult to explain in untechnical language. It relates, however, to Bach’s method of tuning his clavichord—another boon which he conferred upon music. In general, the system may be explained by the statement that certain tone intervals, which theoretically are pure, practically result in harmonic discrepancies, which Bach’s “tempered” system corrected. In other words, slight and practically imperceptible inaccuracies are introduced in the tuning in order to counterbalance the greater faults which result when tuning is absolutely correct from a theoretical point of view; just as, in navigating the high northern waters, you are obliged to make allowance for variations of the compass. The system was not actually the invention of Bach, but he did so much to promote its adoption that it is associated with his name. Before it was adopted it was impossible to employ all the major and minor keys on clavichords and harpsichords, and on the pianofortes, just beginning to come into use. It became possible under the tempered system of tuning, and was illustrated by Bach in “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” each major and minor key being represented by a prelude and fugue.

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Besides the system of tuning in “equal temperament,” Bach modernized the technique of fingering by introducing the freer and more frequent employment of the hitherto neglected thumb and little finger. The services of this great man to music, therefore, were threefold. He left us his teeming counterpoint, upon which modern music draws so freely; he promoted the system of tuning in equal temperament; and he laid the foundation of modern pianoforte technique, and so of modern virtuosity.

A King’s Tribute to Bach.

Besides being a great composer, Bach’s traits as a man were most admirable. He was uncompromising in his convictions, sturdy, honest and upright. His fixedness of purpose is shown by an anecdote of his boyhood. In his tenth year he lost his parents and went to live with an elder brother, who was so jealous of his superior talents that he refused him the loan of a manuscript volume of music by composers of the day. Obtaining possession of it without his brother’s knowledge, Bach secretly copied it at night by moonlight, the task covering something like six months. His reward was to have it taken away by his brother, who accidentally discovered him playing from it. Fortunately, this brother died soon afterward, and Bach recovered his treasure.

While it is true that Bach remained unappreciated by the great mass of his contemporaries, there were exceptions, a notable one being the music-loving king, 76 Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose service the composer’s second son, Philipp Emanuel Bach, entered in 1746. At the king’s earnest urging, Philipp Emanuel induced his father to visit Potsdam the following year. The king, who had arranged a concert at the palace, was about to begin playing on the flute, when an officer entered and handed him a list of the strangers who had arrived at Potsdam. Glancing over it, Frederick discovered Bach’s name. “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “old Bach is here!” And nothing would do save that the master must be brought immediately into the royal presence, before he even had time to doff his traveling clothes.

The king had purchased several of the pianofortes recently constructed by Gottfried Silbermann and had them distributed throughout the palace. Bach and the assemblage went from room to room, the composer playing and improvising on the different instruments. Finally he asked the king to set him a fugue theme, and on this he extemporized in such masterly fashion that all who heard him, the king included, broke out into rounds of applause. On his return to Leipsic, Bach dedicated to Frederick the Great a work which he entitled “The Musical Sacrifice” (or offering), which he based upon the fugue theme the king had given him.

No other instance of musical heredity is comparable with that afforded by the Bach family. Dr. Theodore Baker, in his “Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,” gives a list of no less than twenty Bachs, all of the same line, whom he deems worthy of mention, and who covered a period ranging from 1604 to 1845, 77 when the great Bach’s grandson and last male descendant, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, died in Berlin. Thus for two hundred and forty-one years the Bach family was professionally active in music.

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III

FROM FUGUE TO SONATA

If a pianoforte recital which begins with a Bach fugue continues with a Beethoven sonata, it does not require a very discriminating ear to note the difference between the two. The Beethoven sonata is in a style so entirely distinct from that of the fugue, and sounds so wholly unlike it, that it seems as if Bach had exerted no influence whatsoever upon the greatest master of the period that followed his death. Although Haydn and Mozart were nearer Bach in point of time than Beethoven was, a sonata by either of them, if it chanced to be on the program, would show the same difference in style, the same radical departure from the works of the master of counterpoint, as the Beethoven sonata.

The question naturally suggests itself, did Bach’s influence cease with his death? And the fact that this question calls for an answer and that this answer leads to a general consideration of the interim between Bach and Beethoven, again shows how broad in its scope as an instrument is the pianoforte and how comprehensive in its application to music as a whole is the music of that instrument. Two works on a recital program furnish a legitimate basis for a discussion of two important periods in the development of music! 79 Who would have thought there was so much to a pianoforte recital?

“It would have been an eminently pardonable mistake for any intelligent musician to have fallen into, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, if he had concluded that Johann Sebastian Bach’s career was a failure, and that his influence upon the progress of his art amounted to the minimum conceivable. Indeed, the whole course of musical history in every branch went straight out of the sphere of his activity for a long while; his work ceased to have any significance to the generation which succeeded him, and his eloquence fell upon deaf ears. A few of his pupils went on writing music of the same type as his in a half-hearted way, and his own most distinguished son, Philipp Emanuel, adopted at least the artistic manner of working up his details and making the internal organization of his works alive with figure and rhythm. But even he, the sincerest composer of the following generation, was infected by the complacent, polite superficiality of his time; and he was forced, in accepting the harmonic principle of working in its Italian phase, to take with it some of the empty formulas and conventional tricks of speech which had become part of its being, and which sometimes seem to belie the genuineness of his utterances and put him somewhat out of touch with his whole-hearted father.”

This passage from one of the most admirably thought-out books on music I know, Sir Hubert Parry’s “Evolution of the Art of Music,” is no exaggeration. 80 For many years after Bach’s death, for nearly a century in fact, his influence was but little felt. And yet so aptly does the development of art adjust itself to human needs and aspirations, the very neglect into which Bach fell turned music into certain channels from which it derived the greater freedom of expression essential to its progress and gave it the tinge of romanticism which is the essence of modern music.

The greatness of Johann Sebastian Bach, on the technical side at least, now is so universally acknowledged, and professional musicians understand so well what their art owes to him, we are apt to think of him as the only musician of his day, whereas his significance was but little appreciated by his contemporaries. There were, in fact, other composers actively working on other lines and turning music in the direction it was destined to follow immediately after Bach’s death—and for its own ultimate good, be it observed. The simple fact is, that pure counterpoint culminated in Bach. What he accomplished was so stupendous that his successors could not keep up with him. They became exhausted before they even were prepared to begin where he left off. And yet the reaction from Bach was, as I have indicated, absolutely necessary to the further progress of music.

The scheme of musical development which the reader should bear in mind if he desires to understand music, and to arrive at that understanding with some kind of system in his progress, was briefly as follows:

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Three Periods of Musical Development.

First we have counterpoint, the welding together of several themes each of equal importance. This style of composition culminated in Bach. Its most elaborate form of expression was the fugue; but it also employed the canon and impressed into its service certain minor forms like the allemande, courant, chaçonne, gavotte, saraband, gigue, and minuet.

Next, after Bach music began to develop according to the harmonic system, or, if I may be permitted for the sake of clarity to use an expression which technically is incorrect, according to the melodic system. That is, instead of combining several themes, composers took one theme or melody and supported it with an accompaniment so that the melody stood out in clear relief. This first decided melodic development covers the classical period, the period after Bach to Beethoven, and its highest form of expression was the sonata, which in the orchestra became the symphony.

The romantic period comes after Beethoven. This, to characterize it by the readiest means, by something external, something the eye can see, is the “single piece” period, the period in which the impromptu of Schubert, the song without words of Mendelssohn, the nocturne of Chopin, the novelette of Schumann, takes the place of the sonata, which consists of a group of pieces or movements. Composers begin to find a too exacting insistence upon correctness of form irritating. Expression becomes of more importance than form, which is promptly violated if it interferes with the composer’s trend of thought or feeling. Pieces are 82 written in certain moods, and their melody is developed so as to follow and give full expression to the mood in which it is conceived. New harmonies are fearlessly invoked for the same purpose. Everything centres in the idea that music exists not as an accessory to form, but for the free expression of emotion. In his useful and handy “Dictionary of Musical Terms,” Theodore Baker defines a nocturne as a title for a piano piece “of a dreamily romantic or sentimental character, but lacking a distinctive form.” When we see the title “Sonata” over a composition we think of form. When we see the title “Nocturne” we think of mood, not manner. The title arouses within us, by anticipation, the very feeling, the very mood, the very emotional condition which the composer is seeking to express. The form in which he seeks to express it is wholly a secondary matter. A composition is a sonata because it follows a certain formal development. It is a nocturne because it is “dreamily romantic or sentimental.” In no better way, perhaps, could the difference between the classical period of music and the romantic period which set in after Beethoven be explained. The romanticist is no more hampered by form than the writer of poetry or fiction is by facts. Form dominates feeling in classical music, feeling dominates form in romantic music.

We still are and, happily, ever shall remain in the romantic period. The greatest of all romanticists and, up to the present time, the greatest of all composers is Richard Wagner, whose genius will be appreciated more and more as years go by until, as may be the case, a still greater one will arise; although as dramatic 83 literature culminated in Shakespeare, so music may have found its greatest master for all time in Wagner. Wagner, of course, was not a composer for the pianoforte, but when he reached back and to the fuller harmony inherited from Beethoven added the counterpoint of Bach, thus combining the two great systems of composition, he indicated the only method of progress possible for music of all kinds.

Rise of the Melodic School.

It must not be supposed that the melodic school which came in after Bach and which, so far as the classical form of the sonata is concerned, culminated in Beethoven, was the mushroom growth of a night. So much has been said of Bach that a person unfamiliar with the history of music might draw the erroneous conclusion that Bach was the only composer worth mentioning before the classical period and Germany the only country in which music had flourished. On the contrary, Bach was the climax of a school to which several countries had each contributed its share, partly vocal, partly instrumental. Palestrina’s name naturally comes to mind as representative of the early period of Italian church music; there also was the “Belgian Orpheus,” Orlandus Lassus (or Lasso), the greatest composer of the Flemish school; and England had its Gibbons and other madrigal composers. Their music was vocal and requires to be considered more thoroughly under the head of vocal music, but it also was contrapuntal and played its part in the general development of the art before Bach came upon the scene. Of 84 course, there also was instrumental music in counterpoint before Bach’s day. There is “Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book,” a manuscript collection of music made either during her reign or shortly afterward and containing pieces for the virginal by Tallis, Bird, Giles, Dr. John Bull and others, including also the madrigalist, Gibbons. The Englishman, Henry Purcell (1658-1695); the Frenchman, François Couperin (1668-1733), who wrote a harpsichord method; the Germans, Hans Leo von Hasler (1564-1612) and Froberger; and the Italian, Frescobaldi—these were some among many composers of counterpoint more or less noted in their day.

Bach, however, brought the art of counterpoint to perfection, so that, so far as it is concerned, he neither required nor even so much as left room for a successor. It may not be pertinent to the argument, yet it may well be questioned whether, had the classical trio, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, endeavored to carry on the contrapuntal school, they would not, in spite of their genius, have relegated music to a more primitive state than it occupied when Bach died. It seems a fortunate circumstance to me that Bach’s son appears to have realized his inferiority to his father and that, in consequence, he turned from counterpoint to the development of harmony—the working out of a clearly defined theme or melody supported by accompaniment.

Counterpoint is said to be polyphonic, a term composed of two Greek words signifying many-voiced, the combination in music of several parts or themes. Opposed to it is homophonic, or single-voiced, music, in which one melody or part is supported by an accompaniment. 85 Italy, with its genius for the sensuous and emotional in music, already had developed a school of melodic music, and to this Philipp Emanuel Bach turned for a model. In Italy the pianoforte, through its employment for the freer harmonic support of dramatic solo singing in opera, an art form that is indigenous to Italy, gradually had emancipated itself there from counterpoint and acquired a style of its own. Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1644), a famous Italian pianoforte and organ virtuoso, whose first organ recital in St. Peter’s, Rome, is said to have attracted an audience of thirty thousand, and whose mantle fell upon his two most renowned pupils, the German, Johann Jacob Froberger, and the Italian, Bernardo Pasquini, not only experimented with our modern keys, seeking to replace with them the old ecclesiastical modes in which Palestrina wrote, but also simplified the method of notation. For even what seems to us so simple a matter as the five-line staff is the result of slow evolution.

Scarlatti’s Importance as Composer and Virtuoso.

The Italian genius who gave the greatest impulse to the progress of pianoforte music and who, for his day, immensely improved the technique of pianoforte playing, was Domenico Scarlatti (1683-1757), the famous son of a famous father, Alessandro Scarlatti, the leading dramatic composer of his time. Domenico Scarlatti interests us especially because he is the only one of the early Italians whose work retains an appreciable foothold on modern recital programs. Von Bülow edited selections from his works, and I recall from personal 86 experience, because I was at the concert, the delight with which some of these were received the first time Von Bülow played them on his initial visit to this country during the season of 1875-76. Amateurs on the outlook for something new (even though it was very old) took up Scarlatti, and this early Italian’s suddenly acquired popularity was comparable with the “run” on the Rachmaninoff “Prelude” when it was played here by Siloti many years later.

Scarlatti has been called the founder of modern pianoforte technique. Although he composed for the harpsichord, he understood the instrument so thoroughly and what he wrote for it accords so well with its genius, that by unconscious anticipation it also was adapted to the genius of the modern pianoforte. It still is pianistic; more pianistic and more suitable to the modern repertoire than a good deal of music by greater men who lived considerably later. I should say, for example, that Scarlatti’s name is found more frequently on pianoforte recital programs than Mozart’s, although Mozart was incomparably the greater genius. But there is about Scarlatti’s music such a quaint and primitive charm that one always listens to it with the zest of a discoverer, whereas Mozart’s pianoforte music, although more modern, just misses being modern enough. This clever Italian gives us the early beginnings of the sonata form. He merely lisps in sonata accents, it is true, but his lisp is as fascinating as the ingenuous prattle of an attractive child. His best, known work, “The Cat’s Fugue,” the subject of which is said to have been suggested to him by a cat gliding over the keyboard, is indeed contrapuntal. But even 87 this is a movement in a sonata, and the characteristic of his works as a whole is the fact that in most of them he developed and worked out a melody or theme, and that he established the fundamental outlines of the sonata form.

Comparatively few laymen have more than a vague idea of what is meant by sonata form. To them a sonata simply is a composition consisting of several movements, usually four, three of them of considerable length, with a shorter one (a minuet or scherzo) between the first and second or the second and fourth. A sonata, however, must have one of its movements (and generally it will be found to be the first) written in a certain form. Regarding the Scarlatti sonatas, suffice it to say here that with him the form still is in its primitive simplicity. For example, the true sonata movement as we now understand it employs two themes, the second contrasting with the first. As a rule, Scarlatti is content with one theme. It is the peculiar merit of Philipp Emanuel Bach that he introduced a second theme into his sonatas, or suggested it by striking modulations when he employed only one theme, and thus paved the way for its further elaboration by Joseph Haydn. Mozart elaborated the form still further, and then came Beethoven, with whom the classical period reached its climax and whose sonatas for all practical purposes have completely superseded those of his forerunners.

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Rise of the Amateur.

Characteristic of the period of transition from Bach to Beethoven, from the fugue to the sonata, was the development of popular interest in music. Scarlatti begins a brief introduction to a collection of thirty of his pianoforte pieces which were published in 1746, by addressing the “amateur or professor, whoever you be.” Significant in this is the inclusion of, in fact the seeming preference given to the amateur. Music of the counterpoint variety had been music for the church, the court and the professional. Now, with the development of the freer harmonic or melodic system, it was growing more in touch with the people. During Philipp Emanuel Bach’s life the increase of popular interest in music was remarkable. The titles that began to appear on compositions show that composers were reaching out for a larger public. Bie quotes some of them: “Cecilia Playing on the Pianoforte and Satisfying the Hearing”; “The Busy Muse Clio”; “Pianoforte Practice for the Delight of Mind and Ear, in Six Easy Galanterie Parties Adapted to Modern Taste, Composed Chiefly for Young Ladies”; “The Contented Ear and the Quickened Soul”; while Philipp Emanuel Bach inscribes some of his pieces as “easy” or “for ladies.” Evidently the “young person” figured as extensively in the calculations of musical composers then as she does now in those of the publishers of fiction. Musical periodicals sprang up like mushrooms—“Musical Miscellany,” “Floral Garnerings for Pianoforte Amateurs,” “New Music Journal for Encouragement and Entertainment in Solitude at the Pianoforte for the 89 Skilled and Unskilled,” such were some of the titles. These periodicals often went the way of most periodical flesh and in the customary brief period, but they show a quickened public interest in music—the “contented ear and the quickened soul,” so to speak.

Changes in Musical Taste.

If I dismiss Philipp Emanuel Bach rather curtly and, in this portion of the book at least, do the same with Haydn and Mozart, this is not because I fail to appreciate their importance in musical history, but because they have failed to retain their hold on the modern pianoforte repertoire. The simple fact is that the pianoforte as an instrument has outgrown their music. We can get more out of it than they gave it. If we bear in mind that the pianoforte, as well as music itself, has developed, it will aid us in understanding why so much music, once considered far in advance of its time and even revolutionary, has so soon become antiquated. Why ignore facts? Some examples of primitive music still survive because they charm us with their quaintness. But the classical period is retiring more and more into the shadow of history. Whatever importance Haydn and Mozart may possess for the student, their pianoforte music, so far as practical program-making is concerned, is to-day a negligible quantity. I remember the time when, as a pupil, I pored with breathless interest over the pages of Mozart’s “Sonata in A Minor” and his “Fantasy and Sonata in C Minor.” But to-day, when I read in a book published about twenty-five years ago that Mozart indulged in harmonies, 90 chord progressions and modulations, “sometimes considered of doubtful propriety even now” and “quite as harshly censured as are to-day the similar licenses of free-thinking composers”—I wonder where they are. For his own day, nevertheless, Mozart was an innovator, as every genius is; for it is through those daring deviations of genius from established rule and tradition, which contemporaries regard as unjustifiable license, that art progresses. This should be borne in mind by those who were intolerant toward the opponents of Wagner, yet now are guilty of a similar solecism in proclaiming Richard Strauss a charlatan.

Assuming that the modern pianoforte pupil is but indifferently nourished on the Mozart pabulum, let me add that this composer also was a virtuoso, and by his choice of the pianoforte over the clavichord did much toward making the modern instrument more popular. He also developed the sonata form so that Beethoven found it ready moulded for his genius. In fact the sonata form as we know it is so much a Mozart creation that Mr. Hanchett, in his “Art of the Musician,” suggests calling the sonata movement proper a mozarta—a suggestion which I presume will never be adopted.

Beethoven and the Epoch of the Sonata.

In the history of music there are three figures that easily tower above the rest. Each represents an era. They are Bach, who stands for counterpoint, the epoch of the fugue; Beethoven, who represents the epoch of the sonata; Wagner, who represents the epoch of the 91 music-drama. The first two summed up in themselves certain art forms which others had originated. Bach’s root goes back to Palestrina, Beethoven’s to Scarlatti. Wagner presents the phenomenon of being both the germ and the full fruition of the art form for which he stands. It is conceivable that the work of these men will at some time fall into desuetude, for in art all things are possible, and the classical period seems to be losing its grip on music more and more every day and we ourselves may live to see the sonata movement become obsolete. It certainly is having less and less vogue, and a composer who now writes a sonata with undeviating allegiance to its classical outlines, deliberately invites neglect, because the listener no longer cares to have his faculties of appreciation restricted by too rigid insistence upon form, preferring that genius should have the utmost latitude and be absolutely untrammeled in giving expression to what it has to say. Nevertheless, music always will bear the impress of these three master minds, just as our language, although we do not speak in blank verse, always will bear the impress of Shakespeare. “I don’t think much of that play,” exclaimed the countryman, after hearing “Hamlet” for the first time. “It’s all made up of quotations!” Equally familiar, not to say colloquial, are certain musical phrases, certain modulations, which have come down to us from the masters.

Although Beethoven no longer is the all-dominant figure in the musical world that he was fifty years ago, and it requires a performance of the “Ninth Symphony” given under specially significant circumstances (such as the conducting of a Felix Weingartner) to attract 92 as many to a concert hall as would be drawn by an ordinary Wagner program, I trust I shall know how to appreciate his importance to the development of musical art and approach him with the reverence that is his due. Like all great men who sum up an epoch, he found certain things ready to hand. The Frenchman, Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), “the creator of the modern system of harmony,” had published his “Nouveau Système de Musique Théorique”; the sonata movement from its tentative beginnings under Scarlatti had been developed through Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart into a definite art form awaiting the final test of a great genius—which Beethoven proved to be.

Beethoven’s Slow Development.

I already have pointed out that while pianoforte and orchestra have developed side by side, the general belief that the pianoforte merely has been the handmaiden of the orchestra is a mistaken one. On the contrary, until the end of the classical period, at least, the pianoforte was the pioneer. It has blazed the way for the orchestra and led it, instead of bringing up the rear. Thus the sonata form was developed by the pianoforte and then was handed over by that instrument to the orchestra under the name of symphony, which, the reader should bear in mind, simply is a sonata written for orchestra instead of for the pianoforte. Even Beethoven, before he composed his first symphony, which is his Opus 21, tested his mastery of the form and his ideas regarding certain further developments in it, by 93 first composing thirteen pianoforte sonatas, including the familiar “Pathétique,” which used to be to concert programs what Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” is now—the cheval de battaille, on which pianists pranced up and down before the ranks of their astonished audiences and unfortunate amateurs sought to retain their equilibrium.

This experimentation, this comparatively slow development, was characteristic of Beethoven; is, in fact, characteristic of every genius who works from the soul outward. “Like most artists whose spur is more in themselves than in natural artistic facilities, he was very slow to come to any artistic achievement,” writes Sir Hubert Parry. “It is almost a law of things that men whose artistic personality is very strong, and who touch the world by the greatness and the power of their expression, come to maturity comparatively late, and sometimes grow greater all through their lives—so it was with Bach, Gluck, Beethoven and Wagner—while men whose aims are more purely artistic and whose main spur is facility of diction, come to the point of production early and do not grow much afterward. Such composers as Mozart and Mendelssohn succeeded in expressing themselves brilliantly at a very early age; but their technical facility was out of proportion to their individuality and their force of human nature, and therefore there is no such surprising difference between the work of their later years and the work of their childhood as there is in the case of Beethoven and Wagner.”

In writing sonatas Haydn and Mozart had been satisfied with grace of outward form and a smooth and 94 pretty flow of melody within that form. Beethoven was a man of intellectual force as well as of musical genius. He applied his intellect to enlarging the sonata form, his musical genius to supplying it with contents worthy of the greater opportunities he himself had created for it. There is a wonderful union of mind and heart in Beethoven’s work. The sonata form, as perfected by him, is a monument to his genius. It remains to this day the flower of the classical period.

The Passing of the Sonata.

Nevertheless, the Beethoven sonatas no longer retain the place of pre-eminence once accorded them on pianoforte recital programs. When Von Bülow was in this country during the season of 1875-76 he frequently gave concerts at which he played only Beethoven sonatas. I doubt if any of the great pianists of to-day could now awaken as much public interest by such programs as Von Bülow did. I remember the concert at which, among others of the Beethoven sonatas, this virtuoso played Opus 106 (“Grosse Sonata für das Hammerklavier”). After he had played through part of the first movement he became restless, and from time to time peered over the keyboard and into the instrument as if something were wrong with it. Finally he broke off in the middle of the movement, rose from his seat and walked off the stage. When he reappeared, he had with him an attendant from the firm of manufacturers whose pianofortes he used, and together they fussed over the instrument for a while, before the attendant made his exit and the irate little pianist began 95 the sonata all over again. We considered the mishap that gave us opportunity to hear him play so much of the work twice, a piece of great good luck for us. Would we so consider it now?

Von Bülow has passed into musical history as a great Beethoven player, and such he undoubtedly was. I doubt, however, if he was a greater Beethoven player than several living pianists. Some seasons ago Eugène d’Albert played a Beethoven program. His performance did not evoke the enthusiasm he anticipated. In fact there were intimations in the comments on his performance that he was not as great a Beethoven player as he thought he was. Personally, and having a very clear recollection of Von Bülow’s Beethoven recitals, because I attended every one he gave in New York, and in my mind’s eye can see him sitting at the pianoforte, bending away over, with his ear almost to the keyboard, I think d’Albert played his Beethoven program quite as well. What had happened, however, was this: A little matter of thirty years had passed and with it the classical period and its efflorescence, the sonata form, had faded by just so much, and by just so much no longer was considered by the public the crucial test of a pianist’s musicianship. Incidentally it is worth noting that the public usually is far ahead of the profession and of the majority of critics in appreciating new tendencies in music and in realizing what is passing away; and the same thing probably prevails in other arts.

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Orchestral Instead of Pianistic.

I am aware that Beethoven was a pianist of the first rank and that within the limitations of the sonata form he developed the capacity of the pianoforte. I also have read Richard Strauss’s opinion, in his edition of Berlioz’s work on instrumentation, that Beethoven treated the orchestra pianistically. Nevertheless, from the modern viewpoint the essential fault of the sonata, Beethoven’s sonatas included, seems to me to be that it is too orchestral and not sufficiently claviermässig (pianistic) in character; not sufficiently adapted to the genius of the pianoforte as we know it to-day. It is possible that for the times in which they were composed, the sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were most pianistic. But as music has become more and more an intimate phase of life, and as our most intimate instrument, the instrument of the household, is the pianoforte, we understand its capacity for the intimate expression of moods and fancies, the lights and shadows of life, as it never was understood before. The modern lover of music, if I may judge his standpoint from my own, feels that while the sonatas of the masters I have named were written for the pianoforte, they were thought out for orchestra, and that even a Beethoven sonata is an engraving for pianoforte of a symphony for orchestra. He composed nine symphonies and thirty-two sonatas. If he had written his nine symphonies for pianoforte, we would have had nine more sonatas. If he had composed his sonatas for orchestra, we would have had thirty-two more symphonies.

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This orchestral (as opposed to pianistic) character of the Beethoven sonatas accounts for passages in them so awkwardly written for the instrument that they are difficult to master, and yet, when mastered, are not effective in proportion to their difficulty. Between enlarging the capacity of an instrument through the problems you give the player to solve and writing passages that are awkwardly conceived for it, and hence ineffectual after they have been mastered, there is a great difference. Chopin, Liszt and others pile Pelion on Ossa in their technical requirements of the pianist; but when he has surmounted them, he has climbed a mountain, and from its peak may watch the world at his feet. I think the orchestral character of much that Beethoven wrote for the pianoforte partly accounts for the fact that his sonatas no longer attract the great virtuosos as they formerly did and that the public no longer regards them as the final test of a pianist’s rank.

I speak so unreservedly because I have lived through the change of taste myself. By way of personal explanation I may be permitted to say, that while I am not a professional musician, music was so much a part of my life that I studied the pianoforte almost as assiduously as if I had intended becoming a public player, and that I was proficient enough to meet once a week with the first violinist and the first violoncellist of the New York Philharmonic Society for the practice of chamber music. If there is any one who should worship at the shrine of the sonata form, and especially at that of the Beethoven sonatas, it should be myself, for I was brought up on the form and those sonatas were my daily bread. When I went to the 98 Von Bülow Beethoven recitals it was with book in hand, to follow what he played note for note for purposes of study and assimilation. Those were years when, in the hours during which one seeks communion with one’s other self, the Beethoven sonatas were the medium of communication. But now—give me the men who emancipated themselves from a form that fettered the individuality of the pianoforte, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and the pianoforte scores of the Wagner music-dramas, which actually sound more pianistic than the sonatas of the classical period and in which it is a delight to plunge oneself and be borne along on a flood of free, exultant melody.

Nevertheless, the sonata has had a great part to play in the history and development of music and has played it nobly, and we must no more forget this than we should allow present-day hero worship to supplant the memory of the heroes who went before. The sonata is the firm and solid bridge over which music passed from the contrapuntal period to the romantic, and doubtless there still are some who prefer to linger on the bridge rather than cross it to the promised land to which it leads. Always there are conservatives who stand still and look back; and that these still should let their eyes rest longingly on the great master of the classical epoch, Beethoven, is, to say the least, comprehensible. One would have to be unresponsive indeed not to be thrilled by the story of his life—his force of character, his rugged personality, his determination in spite of one of the greatest misfortunes that could befall a musician, deafness; and the intellectual power which he displayed in bending a seemingly rigid art form to 99 his will and making it the receptacle of his inspiration.

Well may these considerations be borne in mind whenever a Beethoven sonata is on a pianoforte recital program. If it does not move us as profoundly as music more modern does, that is not because its composer was less deeply concerned with the problems of life than those who have come after him. For his time he was wonderfully “subjective,” drawing his inspiration from the heart, yet always preserving a sane mental poise. If to-day the sonatas of this great genius and splendid man seem to us less dramatic and emotional than they once did to audiences, it is because of the progress of music toward greater plasticity of expression and our conviction that such should be its mission.

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IV

DAWN OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

All art begins with a groping after form, then attains form, and then emancipates itself from too great insistence upon rigidity of form without, however, reverting to its early formless condition. It was absolutely necessary to the establishment of music as an art that at some period or periods in its development it should “pull itself together” and focus itself in certain forms, and adhere to them somewhat rigidly and somewhat tenaciously until they had been perfected.

Without saying so in as many words, I have sought, in speaking of the sonata, to let the modern lover of music know that if he does not like sonatas he need not be ashamed of that fact. A few minutes ago and before writing this sentence, I left my desk and going to the pianoforte, played through Beethoven’s “Sonata Pathétique.” It used to be a thrilling experience to play it or to hear it played. To-day the Grave which introduces the first movement still seemed portentous, the individual themes throughout the work had lost none of their beauty. And yet the effect produced in earlier years by this sonata as a whole was lacking. I shall not say that it sounded pedantic, for I dislike to apply that word to anything that sprang from the heart 101 and brain of a genius like Beethoven’s, but there was a feeling of restraint about it—the restraint of set form, the restraint of pathos patterned to measure, which is incompatible with our modern notions of absolute freedom of expression in music. Moreover, there is ample evidence that Beethoven himself chafed under the restraint of the sonata form and constantly strove to make it more elastic and more yielding to his inspiration.

What a Sonata Is.

The sonata form (that is to say, the movement from which the sonata derives its name) consists of three main divisions and can easily be studied by securing the Bülow and Lebert edition of the Beethoven sonatas in Schirmer’s library, in which the various divisions and subdivisions are indicated as they occur in the music. The first division (sometimes with a slow introduction like the Grave of the “Sonata Pathétique”) may be called the exposition. It consists of the main theme in the key of the piece, a connecting episode, a second theme in a related key and contrasting with the first, and a concluding passage. As a rule the exposition is repeated—an extremely artificial proceeding, since there is no esthetic or psychological reason for it.

After the exposition comes the second division, the development or “working out,” a treatment of both themes with much figuration and imitation, generally called the “free fantasia” and consisting “chiefly of a free development of motives taken from the first part” (Baker). This leads into the third division, which is 102 a restatement of the first, excepting that the second theme, instead of being in a related key, is, like the main theme, in the tonic.

How Beethoven Enlarged the Form.

This is the form of the sonata movement which was handed down to Beethoven by Haydn and Mozart. It very soon became apparent that the greatest genius of the classical period found it too limited for his inspiration. In his third sonata (Opus 2, No. 3) he makes several innovations that, for their day, are most daring. Following the first episode after the main theme, he introduces a second episode with which he leads into the second theme. Then using a variant of the first episode as a connection he leads over to a third, a closing theme. In fact, the material of the second episode is so thematic that I see no reason why he should not be said to use four themes in the exposition instead of the customary two. In the free fantasia he insistently reiterates the main theme, practically ignoring the others, thus familiarizing the listener with it and making it as welcome as an old friend when the third division ushers it in again.

Instead of closing the movement at the end of the usual third division, as his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart, did, Beethoven introduces what is one of the most important innovations grafted by him upon the sonata form—a coda with a cadenza. I can imagine that this movement made his contemporaries look dubious and shake their heads. It must have seemed to them originality strained to the point of eccentricity 103 and more bizarre than effective. As we look back upon it, after this long lapse of time, it must be reckoned a most brilliant achievement in the direction of freer form, and from this point of view—please bear in mind the reservation—its creator not only never surpassed it, but frequently fell behind it.

One of the movements of this sonata is a scherzo. Beethoven is the creator of this style of movement. It is much less formal than the minuet which Haydn introduced into the sonata. This especial scherzo has a trio which in the broad sweep of its arpeggios is as modern sounding as anything Beethoven wrote for the pianoforte.

His “Moonlight Sonata.”

There are other sonatas by Beethoven that indicate efforts on his part to be less trammeled by considerations of form. Regard as an example the “Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia,” Opus 27, No. 2, generally, and by no means inaptly, called the “Moonlight Sonata.” This begins with the broad and beautiful slow movement, with its sustained melody, a poem of profound pathos in musical accents. It is followed by an Allegretto, “une fleur entre deux abîmes” (a flower ’twixt two abysses) Liszt called it; and then comes the concluding movement, a Presto agitato, which is one of Beethoven’s most impassioned creations. There are only three movements, and the usual sequence is inverted, for the last of the three is the Sonata movement. At the end of the Adagio sostenuto and at the end of the Allegretto as well, is the direction “attacca subito il sequente,” indicating 104 that the following movement is to be attacked at once and denoting an inner relationship, a psychological connection between the three movements. Throughout the work the themes are of extraordinary beauty and expressiveness even for a Beethoven and the whole is a genuine drama of human life and experience. This impression is produced not only by the very evident psychological connection between the movements, but by the manner in which the composer holds on to his themes, developing them through bar after bar as if he himself appreciated their beauty and were reluctant to let go of them and introduce new material. The entire first movement, practically a song without words of the most exquisite poignancy, is built on a single motive with a brief episode which is more like an improvisation than a set part of a movement; while the last movement consists of four eloquent themes with only the merest suggestion of connecting episodes. The working out in the last movement is almost wholly a persistent iteration of the second theme. This persistent dwelling upon theme and the psychological relation between the different movements make this “Moonlight Sonata” to me the most modern sounding of Beethoven’s pianoforte works, although when mere structural greatness is considered, most critics will incline to rank it lower than the “Sonata Appassionata” and the four last sonatas, Op. 106 and 109-11. Undoubtedly, however, it is the most “temperamental” of his sonatas—and herein again the most modern. My one quarrel with Von Bülow is that he made it so popular by his frequent playing of it and his exceptionally poetic interpretation 105 of it, that the great virtuosos shun it, very much as they shun the sixth Chopin waltz (Mme. Dudevant’s dog chasing its own tail), because it is played by every pianoforte pupil of every girls’ boarding school everywhere.

Striving for Freedom.

In addition to what I have said of this sonata, it was an immense gain for greater freedom of form, and it is to be regretted that it is a more or less isolated instance and that Beethoven did not adopt it as a standard in shaping his remaining sonatas. Its most valuable attribute from the modern point of view is a characteristic to which I already have called attention several times—the fact that its several movements stand in psychological relation to one another; that there is such real soul or temperamental connection between them, that it would be doing actual violence to the work as a whole if any one movement were to be played without the others or if their sequence were to be inverted.

But, you may ask, is there not in all sonatas this psychological inter-relationship of the several movements? Have we not been told again and again that there is?

Undoubtedly you, and others who have been misinformed by enthusiasts who are unable to hear music in anything that has been composed since Beethoven, have been told so. But the sonata, with a few exceptions like the “Moonlight,” simply is a group usually of four movements, three long-ones with a shorter one between, and, save for their being in related keys, there is no temperamental relationship between the movements 106 whatsoever, and to talk of there being such a thing is nonsense. I believe the time will come when virtuosos will not hesitate to lift single movements out of the Beethoven sonatas and place them on their programs and that there will be a sigh of relief from the public because it can hear a movement that still sounds fresh and modern without being obliged to listen to two or three others that do not. Heresy? Maybe. Galileo was accounted a heretic—yet the world moves and the musical world with it.

The Beethoven Periods.

Beethoven was an intellectual as well as a musical giant. He thought before he wrought. The division of his activity into three periods, in each of which he is supposed to have progressed further along the road of originality and greatness, is generally accepted. Nevertheless, it is an arbitrary one, especially as regards the pianoforte sonatas, since it has been seen that the first movement of one of his earliest works, the third sonata (Opus 2, No. 3), is one of his most original contributions to music, and one of the most strikingly developed movements in sonata form that he has given us. The period division which assigns this sonata as well as the “Sonata Pathétique” to the first period is absurd. The fact is, that the works of the so-called first and second periods overlap; but there is a decided change in his style when we come to his third period which, in the pianoforte sonatas, begins with Opus 109. (The beginning of this period usually is assigned to the sonata 107 Opus 101, which seems to me too early.) Because here a restless spirit seems to be brooding over his work, it is thought by some that his mind and heart were warped by his misfortunes—his deafness, the ingratitude of a worthless nephew to whom he had been as a father, and other family and material troubles. To me, however, Beethoven seems in these sonatas to be chafing more and more under the restraint of form and to be struggling to free himself from it, bending all his intellect to the task. Frankly, I do not think that in these last sonatas he achieved his purpose. He had outgrown the form he himself had perfected, and the thoughts which toward the last he endeavored to mould in it called for absolutely free and untrammeled development. He had become too great for it and, as a result, it cramped and hampered him in his latest utterances. It is my firm belief that had Beethoven come upon the scene fifty years later, he would not have composed a single sonata, but have revived the suite in modern style, as Schumann practically did in his “Carnaval,” “Kreisleriana,” and “Faschingschwank aus Wien,” or have created for the pianoforte something corresponding to the freely developed tone poems of Richard Strauss.

Because, however, Beethoven wrote thirty-two pianoforte sonatas and because he was for many years the all-dominating figure in the musical world, every great composer who came after him and composed for the pianoforte experimented with the sonata form, and always, be it noted, with less success and less importance to the real progress of music toward freedom of expression than when he followed his own inner impulse 108 and wrote the mood pieces, the “music of intention,” the subjective expressions of indicated thoughts and feelings, that were more consonant with the tendencies of the romantic period which followed Beethoven and for which he may be said to have paved the way. For just as Bach brought the contrapuntal form to such perfection that those who came after him could not even begin where he left off, let alone surpass him, so Beethoven brought the sonata form to such perfection that no further advance in it was possible. No wonder therefore that the pianoforte sonatas of the romanticists are comparatively few in number and the least satisfactory of their works. These composers seem to have written sonatas simply to show that they could write them and under a mistaken idea that length is a measure of greatness and that shorter pieces are minor achievements, whereas as much genius can be displayed in a nocturne as in a sonata.

Sonatas Now Old-fashioned.

Lawrence Gilman, one of our younger American critics, in his “Phases of Modern Music,” a collection of essays, brief but containing a wealth of suggestion and breathing throughout the spirit of modernity, sums up the matter in speaking of Edward MacDowell’s “Keltic Sonata”: “I cannot help wishing that he might contrive some expedient for doing away, so far as he himself is concerned, with the sonata form which he occasionally uses, rather inconsistently, as a vehicle for the expression of that vision and emotion that are in him; for, generally speaking, and in spite of 109 the triumphant success of the ‘Keltic,’ Mr. MacDowell is less fortunate in his sonatas than in those freer and more elastically wrought tone poems in which he voices a mood or an experience with epigrammatic concision and directness. The ‘Keltic’ succeeds in spite of its form, ... though even here, and notwithstanding the freedom of manipulation, one feels that he would have worked to still finer ends in a more flexible and fluent form. He is never so compelling, so persuasively eloquent, as in those impressionistically conceived pieces in which he moulds his inspiration upon the events of an interior emotional program, rather than upon a musical formula necessarily arbitrary and anomalous.” This applies to pianoforte music in general since Beethoven. Such I believe to be the consensus of opinion among the younger generation of critics, to whom, after all, the future belongs, as well as the opinion of those older critics who refuse to allow themselves to be pitchforked by their years into the ranks of the old fogies and who still hold themselves ever receptive to every new manifestation in music that is based on a union of mind and heart.

Unless otherwise specifically mentioned I have, in speaking of the sonata form, referred to it in connection with the pianoforte. But it also is the form employed for the symphony (which simply is a sonata for orchestra); for pianoforte trios, quartets and quintets; for string quartets and other branches of chamber music (which are sonatas written for the combination of instruments mentioned and such others as are employed in chamber music), and for concertos (which are sonatas for the combination of a 110 solo instrument like the pianoforte, violin or violoncello, with orchestra). In these branches the sonata form has held its own more successfully than on the pianoforte, and for several extraneous reasons. In the symphony it is due largely to the greater variety that can be achieved through orchestral coloring; in chamber music largely to the somewhat super-refined and timorous taste of its devotees which would regard any startling innovation as highly indecorous; and in the concerto to the fact that a soloist who appears at an orchestral concert is supposed to play a concerto simply because the orchestra is there to play it with him, although he, as well as the audience, probably would find a group of solos far more effective. In fact I think that much of the applause which usually follows a great pianist’s playing of a concerto is due not so much to the audience’s enthusiasm over it as to the hope that he may be induced to come out and play something alone. So far as the symphony is concerned, it is liberating itself more and more from the sonata form and taking the direction indicated by Liszt in his symphonic poems and by Richard Strauss in his tone poems, the freest form of orchestral composition yet conceived.

The First Romantic Composers.

In music, as in other arts, periods overlap. We have seen that during Bach’s life Scarlatti in Italy was laying the foundations of the harmonic system and shaping the outlines of the sonata form which was to develop through Philipp Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart and find its greatest master in Beethoven. Likewise, 111 even while Beethoven was creating those works which are the glory of the classical period, two of his contemporaries, Carl Maria von Weber, who died one year before him, and Franz Schubert, who survived him by only a year, were writing music which was destined to turn the art into new channels. Weber (1786-1826) is indeed regarded as the founder of the romantic school through his opera “Der Freischütz.” It seems to me, however, that Schubert (1797-1828) contributed quite as much to the new movement through his songs, while the contributions of both to the pianoforte are important. Weber was a finished pianist, had an enormous reach (he could stretch a twelfth), and besides utilizing the facility thus afforded him to add to the brilliancy of pianoforte technique (as in his well-known “Concert Piece for Piano and Orchestra”), he deliberately, in some of his compositions, ignored the sonata form and wrote a “Momento Capriccioso,” a “Polonaise,” a “Rondo Brilliant,” a “Polacca Brilliant” and the fascinating “Invitation to the Dance.” The last, even in its original form and without the elaborations in Tausig’s version of it, and the “Concert Piece” still are brilliant and effective numbers in the modern pianoforte repertoire. Considering the age in which they were composed, their freedom from pedantry is little short of marvelous.

Schubert’s Pianoforte Music.

Schubert was not a virtuoso and passed his life almost in obscurity, but we now recognize that, although he lived but thirty-one years, few composers wrought 112 more lastingly than he. Of course, the proper place for an estimate of his genius is in the chapter on song, but as a pianoforte composer he is, even to this day, making his influence more and more felt. Living in Vienna, Beethoven’s city, and a fervent admirer of that genius, it was natural that he should have composed sonatas, and there is a whole volume of them among his pianoforte works. Nevertheless, so original was his genius and so fertile, that, in addition to his numerous other works, he composed eight impromptus, among them the highly poetic one in G flat major (Opus 42, No. 2), usually called “The Elegy”; another in B flat major (Opus 142, No. 3), which is a theme with variations, some of them brilliant, others profoundly expressive; and the beautifully melodious one in A flat major; six dainty “Moments Musicals”; the exquisite little waltz melodies from which Liszt fashioned the “Soirées de Vienne”; the “Fantasia in G,” from which the popular minuet is taken; and the broadly dramatic “Fantasia” on a theme from his song, “The Wanderer,” for which Liszt wrote an orchestral obbligato, thus converting it into a highly effective and thoroughly modern fantasy for pianoforte and orchestra. These detached compositions are as eloquent in their appeal to-day as if they had been written during the last ten years instead of during the first quarter of the last century. They are melodious with the sustained melody that delights the modern ear. There is not, as in the sonata form or, for that matter, in all the classical music that Schubert heard around him, the brief giving out of a theme, then an episode, then another brief theme and so on, all couched in the formulas in which the classicists delighted, 113 but instead of these postulates of formality, melody fully developed and wrought out by one who reveled in it and was willing that his hearers should revel in it as well. To distinguish between the classicists and this early romantic composer, whose work survives in all its freshness and beauty to this day, it may be said that their music was thematic—based on the kind of themes that lent themselves to formal working out as prescribed by the sonata formula; whereas these detached pieces of Schubert are based on melodies—long-drawn-out melodies, if you wish, and be grateful that they are—that conjure up mood pictures and through their exquisite harmonization exhale the very fragrance of romanticism.

Naturally, the sonatas from his pen are more set. Nevertheless, so long as it seems that we must have sonatas on our recital programs, the neglect of those by Schubert is shameful. I am willing to stake his sonata No. 5, in A minor, against any sonata ever written, and from several of the sonatas single movements can be detached which I should think any pianist would be glad to add to his repertoire. Among these is the lithesome scherzo from the sonata No. 10, in B flat major, and the beautiful slow movement (Andante sostenuto) from the same work.

Schubert also wrote many valuable pianoforte duets, among them several sets of marches and polonaises and an elaborate and stirring “Divertissement à l’Hongroise,” which last seems to foreshadow the “Hungarian Rhapsodies” of Liszt. In these and the detached pianoforte solo pieces a special value lies in that they do not appear to have been 114 composed as a protest against the sonata form, but spontaneously and without a thought on Schubert’s part that he was doing anything in any way remarkable. They are expressions of musical feeling in the manner that appealed to him as most natural. The “Moments Musicals” especially are little mood pieces and impressionistic sketches with here and there a bit of realism. Who, for example, is apt to forget Essipoff’s playing of the third “Moment” in Hungarian style, with a long crescendo and diminuendo (the same effect used by Rubinstein, when he played his arrangement of the “Turkish March” from Beethoven’s “Ruins of Athens”), so that it seemed as if a band of gypsies approached from afar, danced by, and vanished in the distance? Thoroughly modern is Schubert, a most modern of the moderns, whether we listen to his original pianoforte compositions, or to the Schubert-Liszt waltzes, or “Hark, Hark, the Lark,” “To Be Sung on the Water” (barcarolle) and other songs of his which have been arranged for the pianoforte by Liszt.

Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words.”

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the musical idol of his day and now correspondingly neglected, contributed to the romantic movement his “Songs Without Words,” short pieces for the pianoforte and aptly named because their sustained melody clearly defined against a purposely subordinated accompaniment gives them the character of songs, in the popular meaning of the word. Mendelssohn was a fluent, gentlemanly composer, whose music was readily understood and therefore attained 115 immediate popularity. But the very qualities that made it popular—its smoothness and polish and its rather commonplace harmlessness—have caused it to lose caste. The “Songs Without Words,” however, still occupy a place in the music master’s curriculum, forming a graceful and easily crossed bridge from classical to romantic music. I can remember still, when, as a lad, I received from my music teacher my first Mendelssohn “Song Without Words,” the G minor barcarolle, how it seemed to open up a new world of music to me. Many of these compositions, which are unique in their way, still will be found to possess much merit. That they are polished little pieces and poetic in feeling almost goes without saying. The “Spring Song” may be one of the most hackneyed of pianoforte pieces and the same may be true of the “Spinning Song,” but it is equally true that the former is as graceful and charming as the latter is brilliant and showy. A tender and expressive little lyric is the one in F major (No. 22), which Joseffy frequently used as an encore and played with exquisite effect. A group of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” is never out of place on a pianist’s program. At least half a dozen of them, I think, are apt to survive the vicissitudes of many years to come. Mendelssohn wrote three sonatas, a “Sonata Ecossaies” (Scotch), several capriccios and other pieces for the pianoforte, besides two pianoforte concertos, of which the one in G minor is the stock selection of conservatory pupils at their graduation exercises and later at their début. With it they shoot the musical chutes.

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