Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works
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Title: Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works
Author: Edward Baxter Perry
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSES OF PIANO WORKS ***
DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSES
OF PIANO WORKS
FOR THE USE OF TEACHERS,
PLAYERS, AND MUSIC CLUBS
BY
EDWARD BAXTER PERRY
PHILADELPHIA
THEODORE PRESSER CO.
LONDON, WEEKES & CO.
Copyright, 1902, by Theodore Presser
International Copyright
Printed in the United States of America
My Keys
I.
To no crag-crowning castle above the wild main,
To no bower of fair lady or villa in Spain;
To no deep, hidden vaults where the stored jewels shine,
Or the South’s ruddy sunlight is prisoned in wine;
To no gardens enchanted where nightingales sing,
And the flowers of all climes breathe perpetual spring:
To none of all these
They give access, my keys,
My magical ebon and ivory keys.
II.
But to temples sublime, where music is prayer,
To the bower of a goddess supernally fair;
To the crypts where the ages their mysteries keep,
Where the sorrows and joys of earth’s greatest ones sleep;
Where the wine of emotion a life’s thirst may still,
And the jewels of thought gleam to light at my will:
To more than all these
They give access, my keys,
My magical ebon and ivory keys.
III.
To bright dreams of the past in locked cells of the mind,
To the tombs of dead joys in their beauty enshrined;
To the chambers where love’s recollections are stored,
And the fanes where devotion’s best homage is poured;
To the cloudland of hope, where the dull mist of tears
As the rainbow of promise illumined appears;
To all these, when I please,
They give access, my keys,
My magical ebon and ivory keys.
Only an Interpreter
The world will still go on the very same
When the last feeble echo of my name
Has died from out men’s listless hearts and ears
These many years.
Its tides will roll, its suns will rise and set,
When mine, through twilight portals of regret,
Has passed to quench its pallid, parting light
In rayless night,
While o’er my place oblivion’s tide will sweep
To whelm my deeds in silence dark and deep,
The triumphs and the failures, ill and good,
Beneath its flood.
Then other, abler men will serve the Art
I strove to serve with singleness of heart;
Will wear her thorned laurels on the brow,
As I do now.
I shall not care to ask whose fame is first,
Or feel the fever of that burning thirst
To win her warmest smile, nor count the cost
Whate’er be lost.
As I have striven, they will strive to rise
To hopeless heights, where that elusive prize,
The unattainable ideal, gleams
Through waking dreams.
But I shall sleep, a sleep secure, profound,
Beyond the reach of blame, or plaudits’ sound;
And who stands high, who low, I shall not know:
’Tis better so.
For what the gain of all my toilsome years,
Of all my ceaseless struggles, secret tears?
My best, more brief than frailest summer flower,
Dies with the hour.
My most enduring triumphs swifter pass
Than fairy frost-wreaths from the window glass:
The master but of moments may not claim
A deathless name.
Mine but the task to lift, a little space,
The mystic veil from beauty’s radiant face
That other men may joy thereon to see,
Forgetting me.
Not mine the genius to create the forms
Which stand serenely strong, thro’ suns and storms,
While passing ages praise that power sublime
Defying time.
Mine but the transient service of a day,
Scant praise, too ready blame, and meager pay:
No matter, though with hunger at the heart
I did my part.
I dare not call my labor all in vain,
If I but voice anew one lofty strain:
The faithful echo of a noble thought
With good is fraught.
For some it cheers upon life’s weary road,
And some hearts lightens of their bitter load,
Which might have missed the message in the din
Of strife and sin.
My lavished life-blood warmed and woke again
The still, pale children of another’s brain,
Brimmed full the forms which else were cold,
Tho’ fair of mold.
And thro’ their lips my spirit spoke to men
Of higher hopes, of courage under pain,
Of worthy aspirations, fearless flight
To reach the light.
Then, soul of mine, content thee with thy fate,
Though noble niche of fame and guerdon great
Be not for thee: thy modest task was sweet
At beauty’s feet.
The Artist passes like a swift-blown breeze,
Or vapors floating up from summer seas;
But Art endures as long as life and love:
For her I strove.
Contents
PAGE
Introduction, 11
Esthetic versus Structural Analysis, 15
Sources of Information Concerning Musical Compositions, 23
Traditional Beethoven Playing, 32
Beethoven: The Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2, 45
Beethoven: Sonata Pathétique, Op. 13, 50
Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 26, 55
Beethoven: Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, 61
Beethoven: Sonata in C Major, Op. 53, 64
Beethoven: Sonata in E Minor, Op. 90, 68
Beethoven: Music to “The Ruins of Athens,” 72
Weber: Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65, 81
Weber: Rondo in E Flat, Op. 62, 86
Weber: Concertstück, in F Minor, Op. 79, 90
Weber-Kullak: Lützow’s Wilde Jagd, Op. 111, No. 4, 93
Schubert: (Impromptu in B Flat) Theme and Variations,
Op. 142, No. 3, 99
Emotion in Music, 105
Chopin: Sonata, B Flat, Op. 35, 113
The Chopin Ballades, 118
Chopin: Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23, 123
Chopin: Ballade in F Major, Op. 38, 130
Chopin: Ballade in A Flat, Op. 47, 137
Chopin: Polonaise, A Flat Major, Op. 53, 142
Chopin: Impromptu in A Flat, Op. 29, 147
Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66, 149
Chopin: Tarantelle, A Flat, Op. 43, 152
Chopin: Berceuse, Op. 57, 156
Chopin: Scherzo in B Flat Minor, Op. 31, 158
Chopin: Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15, 161
Chopin: Waltz, A Flat, Op. 42, 168
Chopin’s Nocturnes, 172
Chopin: Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9, No. 2, 174
Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 2, 176
Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 32, No. 1, 179
Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 1, 183
Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 2, 186
Chopin: Polish Songs, Transcribed for Piano by Franz Liszt, 191
Liszt: Poetic and Religious Harmonies, No. 3, Book 2, 194
Liszt: First Ballade, 199
Liszt: Second Ballade, 201
Transcriptions for the Piano by Liszt, 203
Wagner-Liszt: Spinning Song from “The Flying Dutchman,” 205
Wagner-Liszt: Tannhäuser March, 208
Wagner-Liszt: Abendstern, 209
Wagner-Liszt: Isolde’s Love Death, 210
Schubert-Liszt: Der Erlkönig, 213
Schubert-Liszt: Hark! Hark! the Lark, 216
Schubert-Liszt: Gretchen am Spinnrad, 217
Liszt: La Gondoliera, 219
The Music of the Gipsies and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, 222
Rubinstein: Barcarolle, G Major, 237
Rubinstein: Kamennoi-Ostrow, No. 22, 241
Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 46, 247
Grieg: An den Frühling, Op. 43, No. 6, 257
Grieg: Vöglein, Op. 43, No. 4, 260
Grieg: Berceuse, Op. 38, No. 1, 261
Grieg: The Bridal Procession, from “Aus dem Volksleben,”
Op. 19, No. 2, 264
Saint-Saëns: Le Rouet d’Omphale, 271
Saint-Saëns: Danse Macabre, 276
Counterparts among Poets and Musicians, 281
DESCRIPTIVE
ANALYSES OF
PIANO WORKS
Introduction
The material comprised in the following pages has been collected for use
in book form by the advice and at the earnest request of the publisher,
as well as of many musical friends, who express the belief that it is of
sufficient value and interest to merit a certain degree of permanency,
and will prove of practical aid to teachers and students of music. A
portion of it has already appeared in print in the program books of the
Derthick Musical Literary Society and in different musical journals; and
nearly all of it has been used at various times in my own Lecture
Recitals.
The book is merely a compilation of what have seemed the most
interesting and valuable results of my thought, reading, and research in
connection with my Lecture Recital work during the past twenty years.
In the intensely busy life of a concert pianist a systematic and
exhaustive study of the whole broad field of piano literature has been
utterly impossible. That would require the exclusive devotion of a
lifetime at least. My efforts have been necessarily confined strictly to
such compositions as came under my immediate attention in connection
with my own work as player.
The effect is a seemingly desultory and haphazard method in the study,
and an inadequacy and incoherency in the collective result, which no one
can possibly realize or deplore so fully as myself. Still the work is a
beginning, a first pioneer venture into a realm which I believe to be
not only new, but rich and important. I can only hope that the example
may prompt others, with more leisure and ability, to follow in the path
I have blazed, to more extensive explorations and more complete results.
Well-read musicians will find in these pages much that they have learned
before from various scattered sources. Naturally so. I have not
originated my facts or invented my legends. They are common property for
all who will but seek. I have merely collected, arranged, and, in many
instances, translated them into English. I claim no monopoly. On the
other hand, they may find some things they have not previously known. In
such cases I venture to suggest to the critically and incredulously
inclined, that this does not prove their inaccuracy, though some have
seemed to fancy that it did. Not to know a thing does not always
conclusively demonstrate that it is not so.
To the general reader let me say that this book represents the best
thought and effort of my professionally unoccupied hours during the past
twenty years. It comes to you with my heart in it, bringing the wish
that the material here collected may be to you as interesting and
helpful as it has been to me in the gathering. The actual writing has
mainly been done on trains, or in lonely hotel rooms far from books of
reference, or aids of any kind; so occasional inexactitudes of data or
detail are by no means improbable, when my only resource was the memory
of something read, or of personal conversation often years before. With
the limited time at my disposal, a detailed revision is not practicable,
and I therefore present the articles as originally written. Take and use
what seems of value, and the rest pass by.
The plan and purpose of the book rest simply upon the theory that the
true interpretation of music depends not only on the player’s possession
of a correct insight into the form and harmonic structure of a given
composition, but also on the fullest obtainable knowledge concerning the
circumstances and environment of its origin, and the conditions
governing the composer’s life at the time, as well as any historical or
legendary matter which may have served him as inspiration or suggestion.
My reason for now presenting it to the public is the same as that which
has caused me to devote my professional life exclusively to the Lecture
Recital—namely, because experience has proved to me that a knowledge of
the poetic and dramatic content of a musical work is of immense value to
the player in interpretation, and to the listener in comprehension and
enjoyment of any composition, and because, except in scattered
fragments, no information of just this character exists elsewhere in
print.
It being, as explained, impossible to make this collection of analyses
complete, or even approximately so, it has seemed wise to limit the
number here included to just fifty, so as to keep the book to a
convenient size. I have endeavored to select those covering as large a
range and variety as possible, with the view of making them as broadly
helpful and suggestive as may be.
It is my intention to continue my labors along this line so far as
strength and opportunity permit, in the faith that I can devote my
efforts to no more useful end.
_Edward Baxter Perry._
Esthetic versus Structural Analysis
It has been, and still is, the general custom among most musicians, when
called upon to analyze a composition for the enlightenment of students
or the public, or in the effort to broaden the interest in their art, to
think and speak solely of the _form_, the _structure_ of the work, to
treat it scientifically, anatomically—to dwell with sonorous unction
upon the technical names for its various divisions, to lay bare and
delightedly call attention to its neatly fashioned joints, to dilate
upon the beauty of its symmetrical proportions, and show how one part
fits into or is developed out of another—in brief, to explain more or
less intelligently the details of its mechanical construction, without a
hint or a thought as to why it was made at all, or why it should be
allowed to exist. With the specialist’s engrossing absorption in the
technicalities of his vocation, they expect others to share their
interest, and are surprised and indignant to find that they do not. They
forget that to the average hearer this learned dissertation upon primary
and secondary subjects, episodical passages, modulation to related and
unrelated keys, cadences, return of the first theme, etc., has about as
much meaning and importance as so much Sanskrit. It is well enough, so
far as it goes, in the classroom, where students are being trained for
specialists, and need that kind of information; but it is only one
side,—the mechanical side,—and the general public needs something
else; and even the student, however gifted, if he is to become more than
a mere technician, must have something else; for composition and
interpretation both have their mere technic, as much as keyboard
manipulation, which is, however, only the means, not the end.
Knowledge of and insight into musical form are necessary to the player,
but not to the listener, even for the highest artistic appreciation and
enjoyment, just as the knowledge of colors and their combination is
essential to the painter, but not to the beholder. The poet must
understand syntax and prosody, the technic of rhyme-making and
verse-formation; but how many of his readers could analyze correctly
from that standpoint the poem they so much enjoy, or give the scientific
names for the literary devices employed? Or how many of them would care
to hear it done, or be the better for it if they did? The public expects
results, not rules or formulas; effects, not explanations of stage
machinery; food and stimulus for the intellect, the emotions, the
imagination, not recipes of how they are prepared.
The value of esthetic analysis is undeniably great in rendering this
food and stimulus, contained in every good composition, more easily
accessible and more readily assimilated, by a judicious selection and
partial predigestion, so to speak, of the different artistic elements in
a given work, and a certain preparation of the listener to receive them.
This is, of course, especially true in the case of the young, and those
of more advanced years, to whom, owing to lack of training and
opportunity, musical forms of expression are somewhat unfamiliar; or, in
other words, those to whom the musical idiom is still more or less
strange. But there are also very many musicians of established position
who are sorely in need of something of the kind to awaken them to a
perception of other factors in musical art besides sensuous beauty and
the display of skill; to develop their imaginative and poetic faculties,
in which both their playing and theories prove them to be deficient; and
the more loudly they cry against it as useless and illegitimate, the
more palpably self-evident becomes their own crying need of it.
Esthetic analysis consists in grasping clearly the essential artistic
significance of a composition, its emotional or descriptive content,
either with or without the aid of definite knowledge concerning the
circumstances of its origin, and expressing it plainly in a few simple,
well-chosen words, comprehensible by the veriest child in music, whether
young or old in years, conveying in a direct, unmistakable, and concrete
form the same general impressions which the composition, through all its
elaborations and embellishments, all its manifold collateral
suggestions, is intended to convey, giving a skeleton, not of its form,
but of its subject-matter, so distinctly articulated that the most
untrained perceptions shall be able to recognize to what genus it
belongs.
Of course, when it is possible, as it is in many cases, to obtain and
give reliable data concerning the conception and birth of a musical
work, the actual historical or traditional material, or the personal
experience, which furnished its inspiration, the impulse which led to
its creation, it is of great assistance and value; and this is
especially so when the work is distinctly descriptive of external scenes
or human actions. For example, take the Schubert-Liszt “Erlkönig.” Here
the elements embodied are those of tempest and gloom, of shuddering
terror, of eager pursuit and panic-stricken flight, ending in sudden,
surprised despair. These may be vaguely felt by the listener when the
piece is played, with varying intensity according to his musical
susceptibility; but if the legend of the “Erlkönig,” or “Elf-king,” is
narrated and attention directly called to the various descriptive
features of the work,—the gallop of the horse, the rush and roar of the
tempest through the depths of the Black Forest, the seductive insistence
and relentless pursuit of the elf-king, the father’s mad flight, the
shriek of the child, and the final tragic ending, all so distinctly
suggested in the music,—the impression is intensified tenfold, rendered
more precise and definite; and the undefined sensations produced by the
music are focused at once into a positive, complete, artistic effect.
Who can doubt that this is an infinite gain to the listener and to art?
Again, take an instance selected from a large number of compositions
which are purely emotional, with no kind of realistic reference to
nature or action, the Revolutionary Etude, by Chopin, Opus 10, No. 12.
The emotional elements here expressed are fierce indignation, vain but
desperate struggle, wrathful despair. These are easily recognized by the
trained esthetic sense. Indeed, the work cannot be properly rendered by
one who does not feel them in playing it; and they can be eloquently
described in a general way by one possessing a little gift of language
and some imagination; but many persons find it hard to grasp abstract
emotions without a definite assignable cause for them, and are
incalculably aided if told that the study was written as the expression
of Chopin’s feelings, and those of every Polish patriot, on receipt of
the news that Warsaw had been taken and sacked by the Russians.
Where such data cannot be found concerning a composition, one can make
the content of a work fairly clear by means of description, of analogy
and comparison, by the use of poetic metaphor and simile, by little
imaginative word-pictures, embodying the same general impression; by any
means, in short,—any and all are legitimate,—which will produce the
desired result, namely: to concentrate the attention of the student or
the listener on the most important elements in a composition, to show
him what to listen for and what to expect; to prepare him fully to
receive and respond to the proper impression, to tune up his esthetic
nature to the required key, so it may re-echo the harmonious
soul-utterances of the Master, as the horn-player breathes through his
instrument before using it, to warm it, to bring it up to pitch, to put
it in the right vibratory condition.
The plan of esthetic analysis, in more or less complete form, was used
by nearly all of the great teachers, such as Liszt, Kullak, Frau
Schumann, and others, and was a very important factor in their
instruction. It was used by all the great writers on music who were at
the same time eminent musicians, like Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn,
Mozart, Wagner, Berlioz, Ehrlich, and many more. Surely, with such
examples as precedents, not to mention other good and sufficient
grounds, we may feel safe in pursuing it to the best of our ability, in
print, in the teaching-room, in the concert-hall, whenever and wherever
it will contribute to the increase of general musical interest and
intelligence, in spite of the outcries of the so-called “purists,” who
see and would have us see in musical art only sensuous beauty and the
perfection of form, with possibly the addition of, as they might put it,
a certain ethereal, spiritual, indefinable something, too sacred to be
talked about, too transcendental to be expressed in language, too lofty
and pure to be degraded to the level of human speech.
Who, I ask, are the sentimentalists—they, or we who believe that music,
like every other art, is _expression_, the embodying of human
experiences, than which there is no grander or loftier theme on this
earth? Trust me, it is not music nor its subject-matter that is
nebulous, indistinct, hazy; but the mental conceptions of too many who
deal with it.
If art is _expression_, as estheticians agree, and music is an art, as
we claim, then it must express something; and, given sufficient
intelligence, training, and insight, that something—the vital essence
of every good composition—can be stated in words. Not always
adequately, I grant, but at least intelligibly, as a key to the fuller,
more complex expression of the music; serving precisely like the
synopsis to an opera, or the descriptive catalogue in a picture gallery.
This is the aim and substance of esthetic analysis.
Musicians are many who see in their mistress
But physical beauty of “color” and “form,”
Who hear in her voice but a sensuous sweetness,
No thrill of the heart that is living and warm.
They judge of her worth by “perfection of outline,”
“Proportion of parts” as they blend in the whole,
“Symmetrical structure,” and “finish of detail”;
They see but the body—ignoring the soul.
She speaks, but they seem not to master her meaning,
They catch but the “rhythmical ring of the phrase.”
She sings, but they dream not a message is borne on
The breath of the sigh, while its “cadence” they praise.
Her saddest laments are “melodious minors”
To them, and her jests are but “notes marked staccato”;
Her tenderest pleadings but “themes well developed,”
Her rage—but “a climax of chords animato.”
In vain she endeavors to rouse their perceptions
By touching their brows with her soul-stirring hand
They measure her fingers, their fairness admire,
Declare her “divine,” but will not understand.
Away with such worthless and sense-prompted service;
Forgetting the goddess, to worship the shrine;
Forgetting the bride, to admire her costume,
Her garments that glitter, and jewels that shine:
And give us the artists of true inspiration,
Whose insight is clear, and whose brains comprehend,
To interpret the silver-tongued message of music
That speaks to the heart, like the voice of a friend;
That wakens the soul to the joys that are higher
And purer than all that the senses can give,
That teaches the language of lofty endeavor,
And hints of a life that ’twere worthy to live!
For music is Art, and all Art is expression,
The “beauty of form” but embodies the thought,
Imprisons one ray of that wisdom supernal
Which Genius to sense-blinded mortals has brought.
Then give us the artist whose selfless devotion
To Art and her service is earnest and true,
To read us the mystical meaning of music;
Musicians are many, but artists are few.
Sources of Information Concerning Musical Compositions
During my professional career I have received scores of letters from
musical persons all over the country, asking for the name of the book or
books from which I derive the information, anecdote, and poetic
suggestion, concerning the compositions used in my Lecture Recitals,
particularly the points bearing upon the descriptive and emotional
significance of such compositions. All realize the importance and value
of this phase of interpretative work, and many are anxious to introduce
it in their teaching or public performances; but all alike, myself not
excepted, find the sources of such information scanty and difficult of
access.
First, let me say frankly that there is no such book, or collection of
books. My own meager stock of available material in this line has been
laboriously collected, without definite method, and at first without
distinct purpose, during many years of extensive miscellaneous reading
in English, French, and German; supplemented by a rather wide
acquaintance among musicians and composers, and the life-long habit of
seizing and magnifying the poetic or dramatic bearing and import of
every scene, situation, and anecdote. If asked to enumerate the sources
from which points of value concerning musical works can be derived, I
should answer that they are three, not all equally promising, but from
each of which I myself have obtained help, and all of which I should try
before deserting the field. These are:
First, and perhaps the most important, reading. Second, a large
acquaintance among musicians, and frequent conversations with them on
musical subjects. Third, an intuitive perception, partly inborn and
partly acquired, of the analogies between musical ideas, on the one
hand, and the experiences of life and the emotions of the human soul, on
the other. I will now elaborate each of these a little, to make my
meaning more clear.
While there is no book in which information concerning the meaning of
musical compositions is collected and classified for convenient
reference, such information is scattered thinly and unevenly throughout
all literatures,—a grain here, a nugget there, like gold through the
secret veins of the earth,—and can be had only by much digging and
careful sifting. Now and again you come upon a single volume, like a
rich though limited pocket of precious ore, and rejoice with exceeding
gladness at the discovery of a treasure. But unfortunately, there is
usually nothing in the appearance or nature of such a book to indicate
to the seeker before perusal that this treasure is within, or to
distinguish it from scores of barren volumes. And the very item of which
he may be in search is very likely not here to be found; so he must turn
again to the quest, which is much like seeking a needle in a hay-mow, or
a pearl somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Musical histories, biographies, and essays—what is usually termed
distinctly musical literature—by no means exhibit the only productive
soil, though they are certainly the most fruitful, and should be first
turned to, because nearest at hand. Poetry, fiction, travels, personal
reminiscences, in short every department of literature, from the
philosophy of Schopenhauer to the novels of George Sand, must be made to
contribute what it can to the stock of general and comprehensive
knowledge, which is our ambition. I instance these two authors, because,
while neither of them wrote a single work which would be found embraced
in a catalogue of musical literature, the metaphysical speculations of
Schopenhauer are known to have had great influence upon Wagner’s
personality, and through that, of course, upon his music; while in some
of the characteristics of George Sand will be found the key to certain
of Chopin’s moods, and their musical expression. But even where no such
relation between author and composer can be traced, I deem one could
rarely read a good literary work, chosen at random, without chancing
upon some item of interest or information, which would prove directly or
indirectly of value to the professional musician in his life-work. And
this is entirely apart from the general broadening, developing, and
maturing influence of good reading upon the mind and imagination, which
may be added to the more direct benefit sought, forming a background of
esthetic suggestion and perception, against which the beauties of
tone-pictures stand forth with enhanced power and heightened color.
I know of no better plan to suggest to those striving for an intelligent
comprehension of the composer’s meaning in his great works than much and
careful reading of the best books in all departments, and the more
varied and comprehensive their scope the better. In the search for
enlightenment concerning any one particular composition, I should advise
the student to begin with works, if such exist, from the pen of the
composer himself, followed by biographies and all essays, criticisms,
and dissertations upon his compositions which are in print. If these
fail to give information, he should proceed to read as much as possible
regarding the composer’s country and contemporaries, and concerning any
and all subjects in which he has become aware, by the study of his life,
that the master was interested. The chances are that he will come upon
something of aid or value before finishing this task. Still very often
the quest will and must be in vain, because about many musical works
there exists absolutely no information in print.
I can perhaps better indicate the course to be pursued by giving some
illustrations in my own experience. The following will serve: During a
trip in New York State I was asked whether Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” suite was
founded upon any legend or story, and if so, what. Though familiar with
the composition in question, I had never played it myself, nor given it
any particular attention, and in point of fact was as ignorant on the
subject as my interrogator, and obliged to confess as much. This was
before the composition had become familiar in this country and before
the drama on which it is founded had been translated into English.
Being, however, convinced, from the names attached to different parts of
the suite, of the probability of its foundation upon some literary or
historic subject, I determined to investigate. I first read several
biographical sketches of Grieg, but found no special mention of the
“Peer Gynt” suite; then everything I could secure on the subject of
Norwegian music in general and Grieg’s compositions in particular,
without avail. As I knew Grieg to be, with the possible exception of
Chopin, the most intensely national and patriotic of all composers, I
inferred that if he had taken any legend or story as the basis of this
work, it was undoubtedly Norwegian in character. I read, therefore,
several articles on the history of Norway, the Norsemen, and the
Norwegian language and literature, watching carefully for the name of
Peer Gynt, but in vain. I next undertook some of the _sagas_ or ancient
Norse traditions, with the same result. Having exhausted my resources in
this direction, I began to investigate modern Norwegian literature.
Here, of course, I encountered, in large type, the names of Björnson and
Ibsen, and almost at the outset I found among the works of the latter
the versified drama of “Peer Gynt,” and my search was at an end. Having
procured a German translation of this drama, I found scenes and
characters to correspond exactly with those which figure in Grieg’s
music, and a reference in the preface to an orchestral suite, by this
composer, founded upon “Peer Gynt.”
Now had I been as well informed as I recommend all my readers to be, I
should have known at the outset of this Norwegian drama, and been at
once upon the right track. But being only familiar with those prose
dramas of Ibsen which have been translated into English, I was obliged
to undertake all this extra labor, to ascertain a single fact; which
only proves once again, that the more the musician’s memory is stored
with miscellaneous facts and ideas, even such as do not seem to have any
connection with music, the lighter and more successful will be his
labors in his profession.
The second main source of information concerning musical works is found
among musicians themselves. There is a vast amount of tradition,
suggestion, and knowledge appertaining to the masterpieces in this art,
which has never got into print, and lives only by passing from mouth to
mouth, much as the early legends of all countries were orally handed
down among minstrels and skalds from generation to generation. Every
great interpreter and every great composer becomes, with the passage of
years of a long and active life, a vast and valuable storehouse of all
sorts of hints, facts, and ideas on the subject of various compositions,
which usually die with him, except such portions as have been orally
transmitted to pupils and associates. In this respect the late Theodor
Kullak was worth any three men I have ever known, and those of his
pupils who had tastes and interests similar to his own, and were of
retentive memory, have all derived from him no mean portion of their
material. To cull from every musician and musically informed person all
the odds and ends of information in his possession is a valuable, though
perhaps selfish habit. And here let me emphasize to all students the
importance of not allowing the memory to get into that very prevalent
bad habit of refusing to retain anything which is not presented in print
to the organ of vision. The ear is as good a road to the brain as the
eye, and every one should possess the faculty of acquiring information
from conversations, lessons, and lectures, as readily as from books.
The third resource of the seeker after truth of this nature is to be
found within himself. The musician should early accustom himself to
grasp clearly the essential essence, the vital principle, of an artistic
moment, a dramatic situation. For some such moment, mood, or situation,
however vague or veiled, underlies every true art work; and unless the
performer can perceive and comprehend this inner germ of meaning clearly
enough to express it intelligibly, though it may be crudely, in his own
words, he will find that many a hint has been lost upon him, and many a
bit of knowledge, that might have been his, has escaped him. This is not
a musical faculty merely; it is a mental peculiarity. Every person,
whatever his profession, should train himself to catch, as quickly and
clearly as may be, the real drift of a book, of an argument, of a chain
of circumstances, of a political situation, of history, of character,
and to place his finger instinctively upon the germ upon which all else
centers.
The power to feel instinctively the real mood and meaning of a musical
composition is by no means confined to the musical profession; indeed,
is often strongly marked in those ignorant of the very rudiments of the
art. I remember once playing to a rough old trapper, of the early
pioneer days in Wisconsin, who had drifted back to civilization to “die
in camp,” as he expressed it, the Revolutionary Etude of Chopin, Op. 10,
No. 12, already cited in illustration, written on receipt of the
knowledge that Warsaw had been taken and sacked by the Russians. “What
does it mean?” I asked when it was finished. He sprang from his chair in
great excitement. “Mean?” he said; “it means cyclone in the big woods!
Indian onslaught! White men all killed, but die hard!” His
interpretation, I need not say, was not historically correct, but for
all artistic purposes it was just as good, though expressed in the rough
backwoods imagery familiar to him. He caught the tone of rage and
conflict, of desperate struggle and dark despair, which sounds in every
line, and he had truly understood the composition, to the shame of many
a well-educated musician, whose comment would probably have been, “How
difficult that left hand part is! De Pachmann plays it much faster, and
with such a beautiful pianissimo!”
This particular study is simply a vivid mood picture. It is not in any
sense what is called descriptive or program music; yet it has a distinct
meaning which can be more or less adequately expressed in words, for the
aid of those who do not readily grasp its expression. I wish to
reiterate here what I have before stated, that I would not be understood
to hold that all music has or should have some story connected with it.
I merely believe that every worthy composition is the musical setting of
some scene, incident, mood, idea, or emotion. Long practice in
perceiving and grasping what may be termed the “internal evidence” of
the music itself will develop, in the musician, a susceptibility to such
impressions, which will often lead him to a knowledge elsewhere sought
in vain, and greatly lessen his labors in arriving at knowledge
elsewhere to be found.
I have now thrown all the light in my power upon the _modus operandi_ of
obtaining information and ideas relating to musical compositions, and
have, I think, demonstrated the difficulty of such an undertaking. For
my own Lecture Recital programs I often select works about which I
happen to be well informed, and have more than once spent an entire
summer in reading and research concerning others which I wished to
include. It will be seen from the nature of the case, that because one
possesses full information in regard to a certain ballade or polonaise,
it by no means establishes a certainty, as is sometimes inferred, that
he will be equally enlightened concerning all others. There never was
and never will be any one man who can furnish information on the subject
of all compositions, and it is equally impossible that any glossary or
cyclopedia will ever be compiled which can refer the student to books
containing points in regard to any musical work one may chance to be
practising, or wish to perform.
Traditional Beethoven Playing
How often of late years we hear this expression: Will some one who
claims to know kindly tell us what it means? For one, I confess myself,
after a decade of careful, thoughtful investigation, utterly unable to
find out. We hear one pianist extolled as a wonderful Beethoven player,
as a safe, legitimate, trustworthy champion of the good old classical
traditions; and another equally eminent artist condemned as wholly
unworthy to lift for the public the veil of awe and deep mystery
enshrouding the sublimities of this grandest of tone-Titans. The late
von Bülow, for instance, was well-nigh universally conceded to be the
representative Beethoven player of the age, for no better reasons, so
far as I can discover, than that he was generally admitted to be a
failure in the presentation of most works of the modern school, and that
cold, calculating, cynical intellectuality was the predominant feature
of his personality and his musical work, which made him the driest, most
unideal, uninteresting pianist of his generation, in spite of his
phenomenal technic, memory, and mental power.
On the other hand, Paderewski, with all his infinitely magnetic
personality, his incomparable beauty of tone and coloring, his blended
nobility and refinement of conception, is decried as a perverter of
taste, a destroyer of traditions and precedents, because, forsooth, he
plays Beethoven too warmly, too emotionally, too subjectively.
_De grace, messieurs_, what does it all signify? Are we then to accept
perforce as final, in spite of our better instincts, the dictum of the
long since petrified Leipsic School, which holds technic of the hand and
head, not only as the supreme, but as the sole element in musical
art—which relegates all emotion and its expression to the despised
limbo of sickly sentimentality, and which epitomizes its highest
encomium of an artist in the words “He allows himself no
liberties”—that is to say, he plays merely the notes, with the
faultless precision and soulless monotony of a machine? Is this, then,
_traditional_ playing of Beethoven, or any other composer? Is it art at
all? If there is any such thing as an authentic, authoritative musical
standard concerning any given composition, upon what does or should it
rest? Surely either upon the way its composer rendered it, or desired it
rendered, if that can be ascertained, or upon the way it was given by
its first great public interpreter. Let us examine the scanty available
data concerning Beethoven’s piano works from this point of view. How did
Beethoven himself play his own works?
This question reminds one of the century-old dispute among scholars as
to the propriety of the so-called English pronunciation of Latin, an
absurdity on the face of it. Fancy talking of the English pronunciation
of French or German! Of course, we do not know and have no means of
learning exactly how the old Latins did pronounce their language in all
the niceties of detail, but one thing we do know with absolute
certainty, and that is that they did not Anglicize it, for the one good
reason that our language did not come into existence until centuries
after the Latin tongue was dead. Similarly, as there is no one now
living who can remember and tell us just how Beethoven did play any
given sonata, and as, unfortunately, the phonograph was not then
invented to preserve for us the incalculably precious records of his
interpretations, we have no means of ascertaining just what his
conceptions were, even supposing they had been twice alike, which they
probably were not. But this we may be sure of, beyond a question or a
doubt: He did not play them according to von Bülow. Furthermore, there
is no ground for believing that his performances were at all such as the
conservative sticklers for classic traditions insist that our renditions
of Beethoven must be to-day. We know this from a study of the life and
characteristics of the man, from the internal evidence of his works, and
from the reports given us by his contemporaries of his manner of playing
them and their effect upon the hearer.
Beethoven was preëminently a romanticist, in the content, if not always
in the form of his works; a man of pronounced, self-loyal individuality
and intense subjectivity, who wrote, and consequently must have played,
as he felt, and not in accordance with prescribed rules and formulas; a
man who can reply without immodesty when criticized for breaking a
preëstablished law of harmony, “I do it,” with the calm confidence in
the divine right of genius to self-utterance in its own chosen way which
always accompanies true greatness and has been the infallible compass of
progress in all ages. The man who was the fearless, outspoken champion
of artistic sincerity and profound earnestness, whose scorn of shallow,
pedantic formulas was as uncompromising as it was irrepressible, whose
watchword was universality of content, who believed that music could and
should be made to express every phase of human emotion, who could
venture on the unheard-of innovation of beginning a sonata with a
pathetic adagio, and introducing a chorus into the last movement of a
symphony, in open defiance of all established tradition, who was
repeatedly accused by the critics of his day of being unable to write a
correct fugue or sonata, and whose music was declared to be that of a
madman by leading musicians even as late as the beginning of our
century—this is surely not the man whose artistic personality can be
fairly represented by a purely intellectual, stiffly precise, though
never so scholarly reading of his printed scores. How is that better
than the bloodless plaster casts of the living, breathing children of
his genius? The printed symbols represent audible sounds and the sounds
symbolize emotions. The mere sounds with the emotions left out are no
more Beethoven’s music than the printed notes if never made audible.
Of his own playing, we are told that it lacked finish and precision, but
never warmth and intensity; that, like his nature, it was stormy,
impetuous, impulsive, at times even almost brutal in its rough strength
and fierce energy; that he often sacrificed tone quality and even
accuracy in his complete abandonment to the torrent of his emotions, but
never failed to stir to their profoundest depths the hearts of his
hearers. Is this the man, this hero of musical democracy, this giant
embodiment of the Titanic forces of primitive Nature, this shaggy-maned
lion, with the great, warm, keenly sentient human heart, whose nearest
prototype among modern players is Rubinstein; is this the man with whom
originated the severely classical school, the cold, prim, stately
interpretations which we are told to reverence as traditional, in which
the head is everything, the heart nothing—form all-important, and
feeling a deplorable weakness? It is impossible, incredible!
I honestly believe that if Beethoven himself could revisit the world and
appear _incognito_ in the concert-halls of our musical centers to give
us an ideal, authoritative rendition of his great works, one-half of his
audience and nine-tenths of his critics would hold up their hands in
holy horror at his untraditional and un-Beethoven-like readings, and
would declare that while he was an interesting and magnetic artist, and
an enjoyable player of the lighter, more emotional modern school, his
renderings of the revered classics were dangerously perverting to the
public taste and could not be sufficiently condemned.
But if not with Beethoven himself, with whom did these so-called
traditions originate? Was it with the first great public interpreters of
his works, who introduced them to the world of concert-goers and so
earned the right to have their readings respected? Who was the first,
most enthusiastic, courageous, and efficient champion of Beethoven’s
piano works? Who did most to introduce them to the concert audiences of
Europe, to force for them first a hearing, then a reluctant recognition?
Who first and oftenest dared to present Beethoven’s serious chamber
music to the frivolous sensation-loving Parisians, and to risk his
unprecedented popularity with them upon the venture? Who but Franz
Liszt! For nearly two decades, during the whole of his phenomenal career
as a virtuoso, the vast weight of his musical influence and example, the
incalculable force of his fervid, magnetic personality, and his
inexhaustible resources as an executant, were all brought to bear in
behalf of his revered Beethoven, in the effort to render his best piano
works familiar and popular with the European public. It is safe to say
that during that period Liszt introduced more Beethoven sonatas to more
people than all other pianists combined. He then established such
traditions as there may be regarding the proper interpretation of these
works; and surely no one who heard him play, no one who is even slightly
familiar with his life, characteristics, and art ideals, will think for
a moment of classing him with the conservative school, with the
inflexible, puritanical adherents to cut-and-dried theories and the cold
dead letter of the law as represented by the printed notes.
But we are told that precisely these printed notes and signs should be
our only and all-sufficient guide. We are commanded to stick to the text
and not to presume to take personal liberties with so sacred a thing as
a Beethoven composition. I wonder if the advocates of this idea, which
does so much credit to their bump of veneration and so little to their
artistic insight, ever took the trouble to examine the text of these
same Beethoven compositions in the earliest editions, as they came first
from his own hand; and if so, whether they noticed the conspicuous
absence of marks of expression. When they urge that Beethoven probably
knew best how his works should be rendered and that we ought to follow
exclusively and religiously his indications, do they know how very few
and inadequate these were? So few, in fact, that if only those given by
the composer are to be observed, even the most rigid of our sticklers
for classical severity are guilty of the most flagrant breaches of their
own rule. Are we then to suppose that Beethoven wished his music played
without varying expression, on one dead monotonous level? Not at all;
but simply to infer that, like many great composers, he felt such
indications to be wholly unnecessary, and was far too impatient to stop
for such mechanical details. To him his music was the vital utterance of
the intense life within. The meaning and true delivery of each phrase
were vividly, unmistakably self-evident, needing arbitrary marks of
expression as little as a heart-felt declaration of love or outburst of
grief. He rightly assumed that to be played at all as it should be, such
music must first be felt, and that visible marks of expression would be
as needless to the player with intuitive comprehension, as they would be
useless to the player without it. Just as Chopin omitted the indication
“tempo rubato” from all his later works, declaring that any one who had
sense enough to play them at all would know that it was demanded without
being told.
True, Beethoven’s works have been edited well-nigh to death since his
time, but of course without his sanction or revision; and as no two
editions agree, who shall decide which is infallible? And why, I ask, is
not the audible interpretation at the piano of a Liszt, a Rubinstein, or
a Paderewski just as likely to be legitimate as the printed
interpretation of a Bülow or a Lebert? Has not one artist as good a
right to his conception as another? And in heaven’s name what possible
reason is there for assuming, in regard to an intensely emotional
composer and player like Beethoven, that the coldly, stiffly scholastic
reading of his works is more in accordance with his original intention
than a more warm and subjective one?
Moreover, even if there were a complete, corrected, authorized edition
of Beethoven, carefully revised by the composer himself, any one who has
ever written out, proof-read, and finally published the simplest
original composition knows well by experience how utterly impossible it
is to indicate definitely, with our imperfect system of marking, just
how each strain should be rendered. A general outline of the whole
effect desired can be given; but try as we may, all the more delicate
shades, the finer details of accent and inflection, must always be left
to the taste, insight, and temperament of the individual performer; just
as the intelligent reading of a poem depends upon much besides an
observance of the punctuation marks. It is not within the limits of
human ability to edit a single period of eight measures so perfectly
that no variations or mistakes in the interpretation are possible.
In view of these facts, I am bold enough to maintain that there is no
such thing as an absolutely correct traditional rendering of any single
Beethoven composition, one to be followed inflexibly. It might be said
of Beethoven, and in fact of any great composer, as aptly as of
Shakespeare, that he is always on the level of his readers. Those
possessing neither natural nor acquired appreciation for the best music
will find in Beethoven nothing but a series of unintelligible and more
or less disagreeable noises, like Humboldt. Those who by nature,
training, and habit of mind are fitted to perceive and enjoy only the
physical and intellectual elements in tonal art,—its sensuous effect
upon the ear, its rhythmic movement, its ingenious intricacies of
structure and symmetry of form,—will seek and find, and, if they are
players, will emphasize in Beethoven only these factors, and will
vehemently protest that there is nothing else there, and that any
attempt to find or to introduce anything else is presumptuous and
morbid. But those to whom music is the artistic medium for the
expression of the strongest, deepest, and best of human emotions, who
demand that every strain shall come fresh and warm from the heart of the
composer and speak directly and forcefully to the heart of the hearer;
those to whom the brain, no less than the hand, is a servant to that
higher, subtler ego we call the soul, and form and technic alike mere
vehicles for soul utterance, will strive, with humble, self-abnegating
fidelity, to read between the lines of the printed music that unwritten,
unwritable spirit of their composer; will infuse for the moment their
own pulsing, revivifying life into the symbolic forms until they glow
with at least a faint suggestion of their original warmth and vitality,
as when freshly born of the passion and the labor of genius. These alone
can give us, in the light and truth of spiritual intuition, the only
approximately _traditional Beethoven playing_.
BEETHOVEN
1770 1827
Beethoven: The Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2 (C Sharp Minor)
There is probably no composition for the piano of any real merit, by any
writer, which is so universally known, at least by name, as this sonata.
Every one has heard of it, read about it, and most persons are more or
less familiar with the music, or at any rate with portions of it,
especially the first movement, which is, technically, easy enough to be
_executed_, in the literal sense, with the greatest facility by every
school-girl.
According to strict requirements of the law of form it is, in reality,
not a sonata at all, but a free fantasia, in three detached movements,
of a very pronounced but widely diverse emotional character. There has
been considerable questioning on the part of the public, and much
discussion among musicians, as to the origin of its name, its relevancy
to the music, and the true artistic significance of the work.
There is little, if any, suggestion of moonlight, or the mood usually
associated with a moonlight scene, in any of the movements; but there
are several more or less credited traditions concerning it afloat,
legitimatizing the title and explaining its origin. Of these, the one
that seems to the present writer most fully authenticated and best
sustained by the content of the compositions as a whole is the
following. It is given, not as a verified fact, but as a suggestive
possibility, a legendary background in keeping with the work.
It is a well-known matter of history that, during his early struggles
for existence in Vienna, while experiencing the inevitable period of
probation, well named the “starvation epoch,” common to the lot of every
creative artist, and the equally inevitable heritage of great genius,
born fifty years in advance of its time,—lack of appreciation and
scathing abuse from the self-constituted, self-satisfied foes of all
progressive art, called critics,—Beethoven had the additional
misfortune to fall deeply, but hopelessly, in love with a beautiful and
brilliantly accomplished, though shallow, young heiress, of noble birth
and lofty social position, Julie Guicciardi by name, who was, for a
short time, one of his pupils. She is said to have returned his
affection, but the union was, of course, under the then prevailing
conditions, utterly impossible; and even if it could have taken place,
would doubtless have proved most incompatible and uncongenial. She was a
countess, accustomed to luxury and splendor; he an obscure musician
fighting for the bare necessities of life, hardly higher in the social
scale than her father’s valet and not so well paid. It was absurd; and
blind Love had blundered once again in his marksmanship. Or was it an
intentional, cruel shaft from the tricky little god? In any case,
Beethoven was deeply smitten; and this unlucky passion darkened and
saddened his life for many years, and is accountable for much of the
somber tone which we find in his compositions of that period.
So much is fact. The story goes that one evening, when wandering in the
outskirts of the city, on one of those long, solitary walks, which were
his only relaxation, he chanced to pass an elegant suburban villa in
which a gay social gathering was in progress. Some one was playing one
of his recent compositions as he went by—a rare occurrence in those
days. His attention was attracted and, half unconsciously, he stopped to
listen—stopped, as luck would have it, in a full flood of moonlight,
was recognized from within, and a laughing company of the guests, Julie
among them, sallied out, surrounded and captured him, and fairly
compelled him to come in and play for them. They insisted that he should
improvise and should take for his theme the moonlight which had been the
cause of his capture and their unexpected pleasure. The usually
reticent, intractable, not to say morose, Beethoven at last
consented—under who shall say what subtle spell of Julie’s voice and
eyes?—and seated himself at the piano.
But those who are at all familiar with his music know that Beethoven
was, except in a few rare instances, an emotional, not a realistic
writer; a subjective, not an objective artist; reproducing not the
scenes and circumstances of his environment or fancied situations, but
the emotional impressions which they produced upon his own inner being,
colored by his own personality and the mental conditions of the moment,
often just the reverse of what might naturally have been expected. What
he most keenly felt on this particular occasion was not the soft
splendor of the summer night, or the opulent luxury and careless,
superficial gaiety about him, but the bitter and cutting contrast which
they afforded to his own struggling, sorrow-darkened, care-laden
existence, full of disappointments and humiliations, of petty, sordid,
yet unavoidable anxieties, with those twin vultures ever at his heart—a
hopeless love, an unappreciated genius. The result was moonlight music
in which no gleam of moonlight was reflected; only its somber shadow
lying heavily and depressingly upon the stream of his emotions, which
poured themselves out through the harmonies of this composition with an
unconscious power and truth and a pathetic grandeur which have justly
made it world-famous.
The first movement expresses unmingled sadness, but without any weakness
of vain complaint; a calm, candid, but hopeless recognition of the
inevitable.
The second seems to be an attempt at a lighter, more cheerful strain, a
fleeting recollection of his ostensible theme; but it is only partially
successful and very brief, and is followed by a reaction into a mood far
more intense and darkly fierce than the first.
The last movement is full of indignant protest, of passionate rebellion,
with occasional bursts of fiery defiance. In it we see the strong soul,
surging like the waves of a mighty sea against the rocky borders of
fate, striving desperately to break through or over them, and returning
again and again to the fruitless attempt, with a courage only equaled by
its futility. It is the Titan Beethoven battling with the gods of
destiny.
It is, of course, unlikely, even impossible, that this
improvisation,—the tradition being true,—was precisely the music of
the Moonlight Sonata in its present form. It could but furnish the
themes, outlines, and moods of the various movements, subsequently
developed into the composition so widely known and admired.
Beethoven: Sonata Pathétique, Op. 13
With the exception, perhaps, of the “Moonlight,” this work is the best
known to the world at large, and the one most frequently attempted by
ambitious students of the Beethoven sonatas. Its familiar title was not
bestowed by Beethoven himself, but by some publishers later, and seems
to me inaptly chosen; in fact, not at all justly applicable to the
composition as a whole. It was probably suggested partly by the minor
key, but mainly by the second movement, which is gravely pathetic in
mood. As a whole the work is far too strong, intense, and dramatic to
warrant the name. _Sonata Tragica_ would have been better. I have not
been able to find any authority for attributing to it definite
descriptive significance in the objective sense. It is the forceful
expression of a pronounced emotional condition, or rather, sequence of
experiences, embodied with all the fervent glow and impetuous power of
early manhood, yet with the precision and finish of maturity. Every
measure is replete with intense feeling as well as intrinsic beauty.
There is not a superfluous note or a meaningless embellishment in it
from beginning to end; not an ounce of sawdust stuffing to fill out the
defective contours of a stereotyped form—which, alas! is not true of
many of Beethoven’s piano works; and, all in all, it seems to the
present writer to be the most musically interesting and evenly sustained
composition for the piano from Beethoven’s pen.
The broad, impressive introduction marked _grave_ is full of strength
and somber majesty. It is gloomily grand rather than pathetic, like the
epitome of some stern fatalist’s philosophy of life, and reminds one of
Swinburne’s lines:
“More dark than a dead world’s tomb,
More high than the sheer dawn’s gate,
More deep than the wide sea’s womb,
Fate.”
The first subject of the allegro movement is anything but pathetic. It
is full of fire, energy, and restless striving; of fierce conflict and
desperate endeavor; of the defiant pride of genius exulting in the
unequal combat with the world’s stony indifference, and the inimical
conditions of life.
The second theme is warmer and more nearly approaches the lyric vein. It
is half pleading, half argumentative in tone, strikingly suggestive of
the mood so common to young but gifted souls, in the bitterness of their
first pained surprise at the cruel contrast between the ideal and the
actual in life. It seems to strive to reason with unreasoning and
unreasonable facts, and to touch the heart of a heartless fate with its
tender pleading. The continually reiterated embellishments upon the
melody notes here should be given distinctly as a _mordente_, with
marked accent on the last of the three tones in every case, not played
as a triplet with accent on the first, as is so often done, and even so
indicated in many standard editions, thus materially weakening the
effect of the passage, rendering it trivial and characterless as well as
out of keeping with the general mood. This is what Kullak used to call
“the lazy way” of playing it. The striking contrast between the first
and second subjects should be maintained throughout, with greatest
possible distinctness, and the closing chords must be given boldly,
defiantly, like a challenge proudly flung to all the powers of darkness,
to fate, no matter how adverse.
With the second movement comes a radical change of mood. The first
impetuous vigor has been expended in the struggle; the first joy of
combat and self-reliant consciousness of strength have ebbed away like a
receding tide, leaving the soul exhausted, discouraged, but not
despairing. There is a moment of truce in life’s battle, a moment of
calm, though sad reflection; a moment in which to contemplate the
impassable gulf between the heaven-piercing heights of ambition and the
petty levels of possible human achievement, in which to dream, not of
victory and happiness,—those are among the unattainable ideals,—but of
rest and sweet forgetfulness, and to say with Tennyson—
“What profit do we have to war with evil?
Let us alone.”
There is an occasional hint of the volcanic fires of passion, slumbering
beneath this surface calm of a spirit sent to earth, but not broken,
gathering its forces for a fresh uprising. But as a whole it is
tranquilly thoughtful, gravely introspective, and should be rendered
with great deliberation and profound earnestness.
The last movement is hardly up to the standard of the other two, either
musically or emotionally. Still it is interesting, symmetrically made,
and not devoid of depth and intensity. It is perhaps a logical
conclusion to the work, if we regard the whole as a sort of tone-poem on
life. With most of us in youth, our boundless courage and aspiration
lead us to dare all things and believe in the possibility of all things;
to hurl ourselves into the fight with destiny, with the limitless
presumption of untried powers and unwarrantable hopes. Later comes a
period of depression and discouragement, in which nothing seems worth
effort, so far do realities fall below our expectations. Then, if we are
reasonable, we learn, at last, to adapt ourselves in a measure to things
as they are, to content ourselves in some wise with the flowers, since
the stars are out of reach, and to measure achievement relatively, not
by the standard of our first glorious, ever-to-be-regretted ambitions,
but of the possible, the partial and imperfect, under the limitations of
inflexible earthly conditions; and we quench our soul’s thirst as best
we may with the meager, mingled draught of bitter-sweet that life
offers.
This movement is light, rapid, and would be cheerful but for its minor
key and its undertone of plaintive sadness. It seems like an attempt to
take a brighter view of life, but is still shadowed by past
experiences,—a touching gaiety dimmed by the mist of recent tears,—and
this is, perhaps unintentionally, the most nearly pathetic of the three
movements. It should be given with life and warmth, and, despite the
pedants, with a free use of the rubato, but not with extreme velocity.
Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 26
This sonata, like the “Moonlight” and several others in the collection
of Beethoven’s piano work bearing this name, is not cast in the usual
sonata mold; in fact, it is not a sonata at all, according to the modern
technical application of the term. But as the name sonata was originally
derived from the Italian verb _sonare_, to sound, or, in musical
parlance, to cause to sound, to play upon a musical instrument, and was
used to designate any piece of instrumental music whatsoever, in
distinction from that which was intended to be sung, it is perhaps as
correctly employed in this connection as in any other.
The first movement of this work consists of a simple, beautiful,
melodious, noble lyric theme, followed by five strongly contrasted and
strikingly characteristic variations, and an exquisitely tender and
expressive little coda.
The _theme and variations_, not only in this, but in every case where
the form is well wrought out, is a musical illustration of the natural,
logical process of evolution. The simple, vital germ of thought or
feeling, inherent in the theme, as the life principle inheres in the
germ of wheat, is seen to expand gradually and develop through the
successive variations into new and changing forms of ever-increasing
beauty and suggestiveness until every latent possibility of expression
has been matured and exhausted, and the idea has been presented to us in
every practicable light and from every attainable standpoint; just as
the gradual growth and ripening of the wheat, subjected to nature’s
infinite variety of conditions and her ceaseless alternation of day and
night, cold and heat, sun and rain, calm and storm, present to us daily
some change of form and hue, some new phase of its progressive
existence, until complete maturity is reached and its utmost limit of
development attained.
A still better analogy may be drawn from human experience itself, from
the constant modification and development of a given character,
subjected to the shifting vicissitudes and changeful, often conflicting
influences of daily life. It is interesting and helpful, in studying or
listening to any work in the _theme and variation_ form, to conceive of
the theme as symbolizing a definite personality, as of hero or heroine
in a narrative, a personality clearly marked, but undeveloped, distinct
to the mind of the composer, and which the performer or hearer should
endeavor to grasp with equal definiteness. Each variation may then
represent some varying phase of life, some different experience or
influence, or emotional condition, bearing upon this typified
personality. The peculiar mood and suggestive characteristics of each
variation must be clearly perceived and strongly emphasized, and its due
relation to the whole work preserved, while the underlying,
all-pervading theme must be kept intelligibly recognizable through all
its most capricious and widely contrasting modifications, to give
purpose and continuity to the whole; just as the strongly marked
individuality of a well-drawn character is traceable through all the
manifold vicissitudes of life and may be counted on to follow out its
own inherent laws of evolution, no matter what the circumstances or
conditions to which it may be subjected.
Let us, in the case of this sonata, conceive of the first simple theme
as suggesting, through the subtle symbolism of tone effects, the
character of our hero, gravely tender, calmly resolute, nobly, warmly,
generously affectionate, with much of innate strength, tempered by
gentleness and latent passion, refined by ideality.
In the first variation life presents itself to him as a serious but
interesting and agreeable problem, possessing the charm of mystery. He
investigates, speculates, reflects, lingers fascinated upon the
threshold of the shadowy unknown, enjoys the vague delight of its dim
but inviting perspective.
In the second he faces storm and conflict, revels in the discovery and
fullest exercise of his own strength and courage and in his successful
wrestle with danger and difficulty. The mood here is bold, heroic, full
of life and energy.
In the third our hero is suddenly confronted by the twin giants, death
and despair. The shadow of their sable forms envelops him with
impenetrable gloom. His soul is crushed by a weight as of a leaden pall,
and from the depths it sends up a half-stifled cry of unutterable,
inarticulate anguish, equaled by nothing in literature, unless it may be
by the verses of Edgar Allan Poe entitled “The Conqueror Worm.”
The fourth variation brings a reaction toward a brighter mood, flashes
of sunlight through parting clouds, fitful gleams of spasmodic gaiety,
half hope, half defiance, showing intermittently against the somber
background of grief.
Finally, the fifth and last variation is a tender, cheerful love poem,
telling, with a charming intermingling of fervent warmth and playful
brightness, of the sovereign magic of human affection, in which the
tried spirit has at last found solace and repose; while the brief but
significant little coda seems like a dreamy retrospect, a tender
reminiscence of bygone joys, and griefs, and struggles, tempered by
distance and brightened by the light of present happiness.
If the work ended here it would be well rounded and complete, and it may
be, in fact often is, presented in this form, entirely omitting the
other three movements. But though not indispensable to the symmetry of
the composition, the remaining three movements of the sonata are all
intrinsically interesting and enjoyable, and embody three radically
differing types of emotional life. In them we are dealing no longer with
an individual experience, but with general moods, with abstract elements
and conditions.
The principal subject of the scherzo is bright, piquant, exhilarating;
expressing unmixed, uncontrolled gaiety, toned down for a moment in the
trio to a touch of arch tenderness, but immediately breaking away again
into rollicking hilarity. It should be given with great clearness and
crispness, very little pedal, and a clean, sparkling tone, like sharply
cut glass icicles with the sun behind them. The term _scherzo_ is an
Italian word, signifying a jest, and all that is most capricious,
sportive, and humorous in music finds expression in this form.
The third movement is one of the two great funeral marches for the piano
in existence, the other being that in the sonata, Op. 35, by Chopin.
This one by Beethoven is so forcefully characteristic in mood and
movement, so full of gloomy grandeur, of dramatic intensity, of depth
and richness of somber harmonic coloring, that it may be ranked among
his very ablest artistic creations. It should be played with the utmost
fullness and sonority of tone, but not extremely loud even in the
climaxes, and never hard or rough; so as to convey the impression of
suppressed power and of a noble, sustained sorrow, not a spasmodic,
petulant distress. Its inflexible, unvarying rhythm throughout should
suggest, not only the slow, solemn movement of the funeral procession,
the heavily tolling bells, the awed, hushed grief of the mourners, but
as well the more abstract and universal thoughts of the slow but
relentless march of time and destiny and the might and majesty of death.
The last movement of the sonata is in the usual rondo form, light,
graceful, ethereal, with a certain subdued cheerfulness, telling of
dreamy aspiration and vague, intuitive faith in ultimate good, of the
airy, upward flight of light-winged hope toward a brighter realm beyond
the grave, where pain and death shall be remembered only as the minor
cadences and passing dissonances which lead to the enhanced beauty of
the final major harmony.
The sonata as a whole is one of the most interesting productions of
Beethoven’s second period, and is technically within the reach of most
good amateurs.
Beethoven: Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2
This is not usually considered a descriptive composition, but Beethoven,
when questioned regarding it, answered: “Read Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest.’”
With this hint from the most authoritative of all sources, the composer
himself, we may easily trace, if not a strongly realistic, at least a
suggestive reference in the music to that most romantic drama by the
greatest of English play-writers. And we may also find a pertinent
rebuke for those who are inclined to sneer at the idea of descriptive
suggestion in music in general and in Beethoven’s works in particular,
in spite of Beethoven’s own words: “I always have some picture in mind
when I write.”
The first movement of this sonata opens with an extremely simple theme,
consisting merely of the notes of the common triad—_do-mi-sol-do_—a
theme so bald, so apparently devoid of beauty and latent resources that
only Beethoven would have ventured to use it; and only his genius could
have given it any degree of interest. It is evidently chosen with
deliberate intention to indicate naïve simplicity and natural primitive
conditions of life in the island, as Prospero found it, with that
half-animal, half-savage man, Caliban, as the most prominent figure in
it. His singular, ludicrously grotesque personality may have suggested
some of the clumsily rollicking passages in this movement. The tempest
is only hinted at, not vividly portrayed—a tempest in miniature, a
storm in fairyland. Still, it is unmistakable, though divested of all
its terrors, just as it must have appeared to Prospero himself, whose
magic power and complete mastery over the elemental forces placed him
above and beyond all fear.
The second movement, full of sweet repose, of grave, tranquil happiness,
is like the hearts of the two lovers in the drama, safe in the loving
and powerful protection of Prospero, living close to the gentle,
passionless breast of Mother Nature, childlike in their simple trust,
their spontaneous affection, their simple joy in the passing hour. It
seems at first rather tame and colorless to our modern ears, accustomed
to the ceaseless stress and din of complex and conflicting elements,
warring together in the life and art of our own day; but if we can
forget for a moment the intensity, the restless questioning and striving
of the present and go back in spirit for a century or two to more normal
conditions, we shall find this music restful and soothing as the green
sweep of woods and meadows on a June morning in the country, after the
glare and fever of a city ball-room.
The closing movement, with its light, tripping rhythm, its playful,
half-facetious mood, is evidently intended to recall the pranks of that
merry, tricksy sprite, Puck, so brimming over with good-natured fun and
laughing mischief, yet so ready and able, at his master’s command, to
“put a girdle round the world in forty minutes.”
The whole is a work of delicate fancy rather than emotional depth or
dramatic force. It shows us a somewhat unusual phase of Beethoven’s
genius, and is but one more proof of his versatility, one more
justification for his title, “The Shakespeare of Music.”
Beethoven: Sonata, C Major, Op. 53
This is one of the best and justly most beloved of the pianoforte works
from what is known as Beethoven’s Second Period; that is to say, the
period when his creative power was at its zenith, when his genius had
reached its fullest maturity, yet showed no sign of waning; when, in its
individual development, it had outgrown all youthful crudities, all
reminiscent suggestions of older masters, occasionally to be found in
his earlier writings, yet before it had lapsed into that somewhat
obstruse, metaphysical vein to which some of us are inclined to object
in his latest works, in which individuality is sometimes exaggerated
into eccentricity. The present writer is not among those who regard his
latest sonatas for the piano as in any sense his greatest works, and it
is something of a question whether any pianist would play or any
audience tolerate the Op. 111, for instance, if it bore any signature
but that of Beethoven. The works of his second or middle period are
instinct with far more genuine spontaneity and true musical effect.
The Op. 53 is familiarly known among musicians under two names. It is
often designated as the “Aurora Sonata,” because of its suggestive
reference to, not to say actual description of, those wondrous fireworks
of the heavens, the northern lights. The first movement particularly,
with its constant change of key, its well-nigh infinite variety of light
and shade, above all, its constant flash and play of scintillating
embellishment and brilliant passage work, cannot fail to call up before
the imaginative mind the varying hues, the shifting, intermittent
splendors of the aurora borealis, with its flashes of crimson and
orange, and its flickerings of softest violet and rose.
The second movement forms a distinct and restful contrast and quiet
background to the brilliancy of the first. It is slow, reposeful, and
gravely impressive, symbolizing the hushed solemnity of the quiet,
frost-clear, winter night.
The last movement, a prefect rondo in form, returns to the mood and
general style of the first. It is bright and crisp, full of brilliant
ornamentations and striking contrasts, and should be given with the idea
of the northern lights again distinctly before the mind. Its airy,
buoyant melody, floating lightly upon swiftly flowing waves of
accompaniment, reminding one of that Wotan’s bridge which the ancient
Northman fancied he beheld in the glittering, far-spanning arch of the
aurora, that bright, but perilous, path of heroes from Earth to
Walhalla.
This composition is also known as the “Waldstein Sonata,” because
dedicated to Count Waldstein, of Vienna, one of Beethoven’s best
friends, during his earlier years in the Austrian capital. Count
Waldstein was a descendant of the famous general and most prominent
Catholic leader, who figured so prominently during the thirty years’ war
in Germany, that sanguinary struggle between Catholics and Protestants,
from 1618 to 1648. The name of this brilliant leader, a Bohemian noble
of vast wealth and power, and commander of the Austrian imperial forces,
is usually spelled Wallenstein; but the name and lineage are identical
with that of the Count to whom this sonata is dedicated—the confusion
arising from the difference between the German and Bohemian orthography.
The original Wallenstein, though unquestionably a man of pronounced
intellectual ability and a devout, enthusiastic Catholic, was a firm
believer in what we term the obsolete science of astrology and an
earnest student of its mysteries. He had fullest faith in all the mystic
auguries and prophetic omens of the skies, and never undertook any
important step without first carefully consulting them, aided by the
profounder knowledge of a trained, professional astrologer, whom he
always kept close at hand. It is of interest to note that the famous
German scientist, Kepler, served for many years as the private
astrologer of Wallenstein, In the researches and belief of Duke
Wallenstein he included every manifestation of the aurora borealis. In
fact, he seems to have laid particular stress upon these as bearing
directly upon his own life and career, as fraught with special prophetic
import for him personally. It is a curious coincidence, in view of these
facts, that the most brilliant display of the northern lights recorded
for the first half of the seventeenth century took place on the very
evening on which Wallenstein was assassinated, only a few hours prior to
his murder. In the light of his theories it would almost seem like an
attempt of his old friends in the skies to warn him of impending peril.
At all events, the aurora was, according to his belief, an important
factor in his life. His descendants, who naturally treasured all the
facts and traditions concerning their brilliant ancestor, would
therefore regard the aurora with special interest as being, in a certain
sense, connected with their own family history. It was for this reason,
as a delicate and appropriate compliment to his friend, that Beethoven,
in writing a work which was to be dedicated to him, chose this theme and
embodied it in a composition which, for his time and in view of the then
prevailing musical conditions, as well as the necessary limitations of
the strict sonata form, is remarkably, even graphically, descriptive.
Beethoven: Sonata, E Minor, Op. 90
This composition is one of the shortest, easiest, and, from the
standpoint of magnitude, least important of Beethoven’s later works. It
has but two movements, neither of them of extreme technical difficulty,
and in structure it fails, in various essential respects, to fulfil the
requirements of the conventional sonata form. Indeed, the same may be
said of many of his best known and most played sonatas, which are
sonatas only in name, according to the generally accepted technical
significance of the term, notably the Op. 26, Op. 27, No. 2, and others.
Yet this little Op. 90, in E minor, is among his most genial,
interesting, and gratefully musical compositions. In spite of an
occasional touch of pedantry, it is full of melodic charm and emotional
suggestiveness. It is not descriptive in the sense of portraying either
actual scenes or events. It deals not with action, but with a series of
varying, strongly contrasted moods.
It is dedicated to Count Lichnowsky, a resident of Vienna, with whom the
composer was intimately acquainted, and of whose touching little love
story it is a musical embodiment. The Count’s personal experiences of
mind and heart suggested the work and formed its emotional content. He
was a member of one of the most aristocratic Viennese families, belonged
to the highest nobility, and had inherited a proud old name and vast
estates. He occupied a lofty position in both social and diplomatic
circles, but he had become seriously and profoundly attached to a young
actress of unquestioned talent and rising fame, but of obscure and very
humble origin—a girl of exceptional beauty, sterling character, and
refined, winning personality, but, considered from the standpoint of
worldly position and class traditions, a wholly unsuitable alliance for
the great noble.
It is difficult for one educated in democratic America to grasp the
conditions involved in such a situation, or to understand and to
sympathize with the painful struggle in the mind of the Count, the
maddening doubts, the heart-sick vacillation on her account, as much as
his own, before the final decision was reached; the obstacles to be
overcome, the opposition of friends and relatives to be met or defied,
before the path could be cleared to his desired goal. On the one hand,
love and happiness with the woman of his choice; on the other, social
ostracism for his future wife, certainly, and for himself, probably;
serious detriment to his promising career; a life of constant battle
with class prejudice, of incessant petty slights and mortifications; a
position necessarily trying and humiliating to both. At last, however,
love triumphed over all doubts and difficulties, as it always should and
must if genuine, and the wedding took place.
It is said, “All the world loves a lover,” and certainly the story of
true love victorious over all opposition is the oldest and to most
people the most interesting ever told. This story, or at least the
emotions underlying it, expressed in music, Beethoven gives us in the
two strongly contrasted movements of this little sonata: a simple drama
of hearts, in two acts, written in the language of tone.
The first movement deals with the period of doubt and indecision, of
mental conflict and moody alternation, of resolve and depression. Its
strong, passionate minor first subject in chords expresses the struggle
and unrest, the indignant protest against petty prejudice and inflexible
conventionality; while its plaintive little counter-theme tells of
tender longings, of sad discouragements, of hopes deferred and desire
thwarted. In the development it reaches a vigorous, rough, almost
dissonant climax, as of bitter defiance and fierce scorn of the world
and its trammels.
The second movement, calm, fluent, and sweetly melodious, full of rest
and tranquil content, deals with the period after love’s victory, when
hope has been fulfilled and the heart’s unrest has been transformed to
peace and happiness, where life flows onward like a placid stream, its
waters brightened and purified by the glad sunlight of perfect love and
full-orbed happiness, its waves murmuring the old yet ever new refrain,
the simple, natural, yet magically potent melody, to which the symphony
of the universe is harmonized.
There is an occasional brief suggestion of past strife and remembered
trial, just sufficient to give enduring zest to the present, reposeful
joy; but, as a whole, this last movement, with its constantly reiterated
tender yet cheerful major melody, seems to sing over and over, with
trifling variations of form, but untiring delight in its essential
burden, the song of love’s completeness. A song without words it may be,
but with a meaning passing words.
Beethoven: Music to “The Ruins of Athens”
This composition, or rather series of fragmentary musical sketches,
containing some very original and telling movements, is wholly unknown
to the American public, and unfamiliar to most musicians, except for the
“Turkish Grand March,” the only number that has gained any considerable
popularity. “The Ruins of Athens” is the name of a curious but very
ingenious production for the stage, once quite popular in Germany—a
sort of combination of the spectacular play, the musical melodrama and
classical allegory, designated “A Dramatic Mask” by the author, a
playwright of Vienna. It was written and produced at a time when the
sympathies and interest of the Christian world were strongly enlisted
for the Greeks in their gallant and desperate struggles for freedom from
Turkish domination and oppression which ended successfully in 1829,
after a contest of seven years.
The scene is laid in Athens, then practically in ruins. The characters,
situations, and environment are all, of course, Greek. To this work
Beethoven furnished the music, originally scored for orchestra, some
numbers of which have since been transcribed for the piano. Of these,
only two are of any real value or importance to the pianist.
Turkish Grand March
First, the “Turkish Grand March” referred to, written to accompany the
march of the Turkish troops across the stage in one scene. Rubinstein,
when in this country years ago, scored many of his greatest popular
successes with his own effective arrangement of this number. It contains
no great originality or musical depth, in fact is quite primitive in
both content and structure, but is brilliant and pleasing, with a
strongly marked, rhythmic swing and a shrill, strident melody which, in
its intentional, bald simplicity, strongly suggests the rude but
spirited martial music of a half-barbaric people, given by fife and
drum. Its artistic effectiveness depends upon the skilful handling of an
old but ever popular device, the audible illusion of approach and
departure. The music, beginning with the softest possible pianissimo,
swells in a gradual, almost imperceptible crescendo, to the heaviest
obtainable triple forte, and then as gradually diminishes to double
pianissimo, tapering off at last into silence; thus simulating the
approach of marching troops from a distance nearer and nearer, till they
pass across the stage in immediate proximity, and then their gradual
receding till lost again in the distance. It is a device of which many
composers have availed themselves, and makes great demands upon the
player’s self-control and sense of proportion and gradation, as well as
his command of the tonal resources of his instrument.
The Dance of the Dervishes
By far the most original of these numbers is “The Dance of the
Dervishes,” the second one referred to. This brief but complete
composition is full of striking originality and graphic realism. It is
one in which Beethoven’s genius seems to have anticipated by half a
century the pronounced modern trend toward descriptive or program music,
and is as realistic a tone-painting as we might expect from the pen of
Saint-Saëns, Wagner, or any of the recent writers. The dance was
introduced into the play as an interesting local feature,—the dervishes
being numerous in connection with the Turkish army,—and Beethoven
naturally selected it as an effective subject for musical treatment.
But, before speaking of their dancing as illustrated by Beethoven, it
may be of sufficient historical interest to give a brief sketch of the
dervishes themselves.
They developed as a sect or order from Mohammedanism after it was well
established in the world. The name “dervishes,” which they assumed,
comes from a Russian word which means “beggars from door to door.” The
Arabic word which means the same thing is “fakirs.” So they are called
dervishes or fakirs in different localities, but are the same body. They
declared themselves Moslems, but their doctrines, in many respects,
differed widely from those of Mohammed. Their beginnings are in
obscurity, but they were a well-established order by the eleventh
century. Their expressed beliefs, as we earliest come to know them, were
chiefly and decidedly religious. They seemed to represent the spiritual
and mystical side of Islam, having a philosophy much like that of the
Hindus, and perhaps borrowed from them. Their central idea seemed to be
that the soul is an emanation from God, and that man’s highest aim is to
seek a total absorption in Him. Their various and strange rites and
ceremonies seem only different ways by which they sought for union with
the deity. In this way they claimed that they secured miraculous powers.
At first they largely lived in convents, under rules and orders, giving
themselves up to meditation and penance, observing the rules of poverty,
abstinence from wine, and celibacy, in the higher classes. Their growth
was rapid; but in time they largely fell away from their highest estate,
ceased to be so strictly a religious body, broke up into various ranks
and sub-orders, became more free from conventional rules, more nomadic,
and more wild and fanatical; but their social and political influence
ever increased, so that they have long been regarded as a dangerous
element in the state. There are crowds of them all through the East that
seem to belong to no society, wandering mendicants, and, though often
skilled in trades, largely subsisting by professional jugglery, bigoted
in their fantastic beliefs, and varying in their rites and strange
ceremonies. And yet always and everywhere there is still some general
adherence to the old appointed religious ways, a peculiar tie or
affiliation with the distinctive body or sect, however differing in
certain notions or modes of worship. The lowest devotee of them all
claims that the dervishes or fakirs constitute a distinct body of
religious believers in spite of all divisions and varieties in
manifestation. They acknowledge no authority but that of their spiritual
guides, as that of the Mahdi in the Soudan, where these fanatics have
been so lately fighting the English. They agree also in not following
the letter of the Koran, or the general teachings of its interpreters.
As a whole body, in all its orders, all over the world, they seek, as an
act of worship, to get into an ecstatic state. They do this in various
ways: Sometimes by drinking hasheesh, but more generally by some
physical or mental ways, and while under the excitement they perform
astounding feats in jugglery or mysticism that really seem almost
miraculous. We cannot stop to detail these different methods. One of
them is the dance of a certain order which has received the name of the
“dancing or whirling dervishes.”
This is the dance of Beethoven—an ingenious method of excitement and
self-torture, and at the same time a strict religious ceremonial. It
consists of little more than an exceedingly rapid gyration upon an
imaginary pivot, spinning round and round like tops, with almost
incredible velocity, till overcome by dizziness from the protracted
rotary motion, or by physical exhaustion, they fall in a swoon, after
passing through all the successive stages of delirious frenzy always
attending intense fanatical religious excitement, no matter what the
race or faith. The dance is accompanied by frantic gestures, wild cries,
and doleful groans, and often by a species of weird oriental music,
adapted to its rhythm, and intended to stimulate the dancers to greater
excitement, and consequently greater exertion and speed.
This music, as well as a portrayal of the dance, Beethoven gives us in
this composition, which has been admirably transcribed for the piano by
Saint-Saëns. It begins softly and a little slowly. As the dancers
gradually get under way and warmed to their task, it gradually grows in
speed and power as the frenzy increases, till it reaches a furious,
almost insane climax; then rapidly diminishes as, one by one, the
dancers, exhausted or swooning, drop out of the circle.
It demands great freedom and facility in octave playing, and endless
verve and abandon of style; and needs, to be comprehended and enjoyed by
an audience, some explanation of its character and artistic
signification, either given by the player or printed on the program.
WEBER
1786 1826
Weber: Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65
Critics have generally ascribed to this composition the honor of
inaugurating a new and important department in the realm of tonal
creation—namely, that of descriptive or program music; that is to say,
music which attempts to embody in tone something more than mere ideal
beauty of metrical form and rhythmic symmetry, and to express something
more than vague emotional states, too intangible for utterance in words;
music which conveys not only sensuous pleasure and indefinite moods, but
a distinct, realistic suggestion; which gives, against a background of
harmony, with its general emotional coloring, an actual picture of some
scene in nature or experience in life; music, in a word, which takes its
place in line with the advanced position of the other arts, in progress
toward dramatic truth and worthy realism. Descriptive music, like
landscape painting, has been the latest, and in some respects the
loftiest, phase of the art to be developed.
We can scarcely with justice credit to Weber, as a strictly original
departure, the opening of this new path in the domain of musical art,
which was in modern times to lead so far and to such important and
magnificent results. Descriptive music, of a more or less pronounced
character, had already appeared from time to time, though rarely so
labeled, and mostly in detached fragments, in the works of most of the
greatest composers, preëminently in those of Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, and
Beethoven. Even the austere Handel was not entirely free from occasional
digressions into this field. But we may safely ascribe to Weber the
honor of being one of the first to have the full courage of his
convictions and to declare himself boldly for this phase of creative
art, by giving to this distinctly descriptive composition an
unmistakably descriptive title, thus fearlessly unveiling and
emphasizing its realistic intentions.
The work opens with a simple but serious passage of recitative in single
notes, in the baritone register, conveying the “Invitation to the Dance”
as if by a mellow masculine voice. Then comes the reply, in a soft
soprano, brief, kindly, but as if offering some playful objection, as
the lady, true to her sex, waits to be asked a second time before saying
yes. The invitation is repeated more urgently, followed by the assenting
treble, as the lady steps upon the floor on the arm of her partner. A
brief dialogue ensues, in which the two voices can be distinctly traced
by their differing registers, alternating and interwoven, as the pair
pace the polished floor, exchanging those airy nothings of the
ball-room. Then the orchestra enters, with a passage of brilliant
resonant chords, full of spirited life and gay challenge, calling the
dancers to their places, and the waltz proper begins. Its crisp, piquant
rhythm and free elasticity of movement, its bright, graceful melody and
cheerful major harmony, all express youthful elation, fresh, joyous
excitement, thoughtless, hence unmixed, gaiety.
As the steps and the pulses quicken, there comes on that exhilaration of
mood familiar to all dancers, caused by the lights, the flowers, the
perfumes, the music, the gay costumes, the beauty and the gallantry of a
ball-room, the rhythmic exercise of the muscles and free circulation of
the blood, all acting together to produce upon the senses and the fancy
an effect amounting almost to intoxication; an echo of which is awakened
in every breast, which has felt it often and keenly, on catching a
strain of distant dance music, to the end of life. This mood is depicted
in the composition before us by an exuberance of runs and ornamentation,
following the first simple enunciation of the waltz melody.
After rising to quite a little climax of ecstasy, this mood lapses
abruptly into the second waltz theme, slower, more lyric, dreamy,
languorous, almost melancholy in tone, conveying that impression which
every susceptible person feels, to the verge of rising tears, after
listening long to waltz music, which is quite different from its first
inspiring effect, and which every devoted dancer feels equally surely in
the prolonged waltz. The time has come when one has grown so accustomed
to the waltz movement as to be scarcely conscious of it, seems rather,
in a state of rhythmic rest, to be floating on the atmosphere, which
ebbs and flows to a three-four measure. Thoughts, breath, pulses, flying
feet, the murmur of voices, all existence has adapted itself to this
waltz tempo, as to its normal element, and the very planets seem to
swing through space in triple rhythm. The true waltz has but two moods,
which touch the opposite poles of emotion—that of joyous elation and of
dreamy languor. We may call them the _Allegro_ and the _Penseroso_ of
the waltz. And Weber, in the “Invitation to the Dance,” has recognized
this and woven his composition of but two themes, representing the
contrasting phases of feeling described.
In the midst of the second warm and sinuous melody, we hear again the
masculine voice, in less conventional accents, and the soft responses of
the treble, through quite a colloquy, while the accompaniment keeps ever
steadily to the undulating waltz movement, till the two voices merge
gradually into the general murmur and are drowned in the flourishes of
the orchestra, as our couple disappears in the whirl, with which the
waltz, taking up again the first sparkling melody with accelerated pace,
draws with increasing confusion to its close. When the dance has ceased,
and the orchestra is silent, the introductory theme recurs, as the
gentleman leads his lady to a seat and expresses his thanks with the
sedate courtesy of his first greeting; and thus ends this charming
composition and this glimpse into that gay social world, where the hand
some, talented, but rather dissolute young composer was only too great a
favorite in his early years.
In spite of a certain baldness and primitive naïveté noticeable in the
treatment at times, the “Invitation to the Dance,” so widely and justly
popular, is one of Weber’s ablest pianoforte compositions, both from a
musical and a dramatic standpoint. Regarded from that of pure music, it
is especially interesting from the fact that it was the first
composition to raise the waltz, used up to that time only as an
accompaniment for dancing, to the level of legitimate and recognized
artistic musical forms. In the hands of Schubert, Chopin, Strauss,
Rubinstein, and Moszkowski, these successive kings of the waltz, it has
since reached its present development.
The “Invitation to the Dance” was written a few months after Weber’s
happy marriage with the opera singer, Caroline Brandt, and is dedicated
to “My Caroline.”
Weber: Rondo in E Flat, Op. 62
The rondo is the most ancient, simple, and natural form of homophonic
musical construction. It is based upon the folk-song and is always in
one or the other of the more or less complex song forms. It consists of
a simple melodic period, usually eight measures in length, bright and
cheerful in character, alternating several times, virtually unchanged at
each reappearance, with one or more subordinate subjects, in a more
lyric or dramatic mood, for the sake of variety and contrast.
An apt but homely illustration of the rondo may be found in that most
laborious and indigestible product of American cookery, that culinary
absurdity, originating in our natural tendency toward display and
dyspepsia, the layer cake. In the most primitive form of rondo, or more
strictly speaking, rondino, the first theme appears but twice,
corresponding to a first and second layer of cake, with the filling of
cream or jelly between, represented by the second contrasting subject,
of a more piquant and savory flavor, between the first theme and its
reappearance—a sort of musical Washington pie. In the more extended
forms, the principal melody recurs several times, occasionally with
slight changes of treatment, but without radical transformation or
development, like a successive series of cake layers of slightly
different flavor, but the same fundamental material and an entirely
different filling between them, each time; and a coda, or musical
postscript, is occasionally added by way of frosting over the whole.
The rondo form is by nature adapted to the expression of the lighter,
more pleasurable emotions. Graceful fancy, playful tenderness, arch
coquetry, sparkling vivacity, here find their most ready and appropriate
embodiment. The form is sometimes employed to express pensive sadness or
restless, impatient longing, but never effectively to utter grave,
profound thought or grand and lofty sentiment. Hence it most frequently
appears as the final movement of symphony or sonata, a sort of light,
pleasant dessert after the more substantial repast.
_Rondo_ is one of those words of many relatives, both in our own English
and other languages. Probably the great-grandfather of them all is the
Latin _rotundus_, and probably the first emigrant to America, in the
musical line of descent, was the old-fashioned _round_, familiar to our
ancestors. Cousins and other close connections of the rondo are in music
the _roundelay_ and in poetry the _rondeau_, _rondel_, and _roundel_,
all bearing a striking family resemblance both in external features and
inward characteristics.
The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his “Century of Roundels,”
presents to us many charming representatives of this most modern branch
of the family. The following verses, quoted from the work mentioned, are
the best possible descriptive illustration of the form, scope, and
characteristics of both the roundel in poetry and the rondo in music:
“THE ROUNDEL.
“A Roundel is wrought as a ring or a star-bright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A Roundel is wrought.
“Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught—
Love, laughter, or mourning—remembrance or fear—
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
“As the bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught.
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A Roundel is wrought.”
The E flat rondo of Weber is a fine specimen of its class, perfect and
considerably complex in form and charmingly exhilarating in mood, with
just enough of dramatic suggestion to give the necessary contrast of
shading. It is neither distinctly descriptive nor deeply emotional. It
pleases like a piece of rare old lace or hand embroidery, rather than
like a picture or poem, by its delicate workmanship, its fine finish,
and its beautiful, skilfully combined materials. Its mission is to charm
the esthetic taste, like some dainty little Italian villa of variegated
marbles, half hidden in a grove of olive and orange trees, by its
symmetry of outline, its harmony of varied colors, and the simple,
joyous, sunshiny life and love of life which it suggests, rather than to
arouse the intellect or stir the depths of feeling by historic or
legendary association with vivid or tragic human interests.
This composition should be played freely and fluently, with a certain
gaiety and vivacity, but at a reasonably moderate tempo, with a tone
crisp and sparkling, not dry, yet not too legato; clear, but not heavy.
The player should employ few, if any, of the modern rubato effects and
be careful to avoid blurred or too close pedaling, especially in the
first subject. A somewhat slower tempo and more decided lyric effect
should be introduced when the left-hand theme in B flat major occurs,
and still more during the suggestion of dramatic recitative, alternating
between the two hands, which opens with the half note in the right hand
on G flat, A natural, and E flat. But, as a whole, the tempo should be
kept very steady, and a strongly marked rhythmic distinctness and
precision are absolute essentials in the proper presentation of this, as
of all Weber’s works.
Weber: Concertstück in F Minor Op. 79
Although written for piano and orchestra, and still occasionally given
as a concerto in symphony concerts, this work is more familiar and more
frequently heard as a piano solo merely, or with the orchestral parts
arranged for second piano, in which form it is very popular, especially
for use in pupils’ recitals and music schools. It is one of the best and
most effective of Weber’s compositions for piano, and one of the most
successful of his attempts in the line of descriptive music, in which he
was a pioneer; for as Sir George Grove well says, “His talent shone most
conspicuously whenever he had a poetical idea to interpret musically.”
On the subject of this concerto, he continues: “Though complete in
itself as a piece of music, it is prompted by a poetical idea, for a
whole dramatic scene was in the composer’s mind when he wrote it.... The
part which the different movements take in this program is obvious
enough, but a knowledge of the program adds greatly to the pleasure of
listening.”
It is rare indeed to find in print any accurate and detailed information
concerning the artistic and dramatic content of any particular
composition; but in regard to this Concertstück by Weber, we are
fortunate enough to have the whole story on which the music was founded
given in the words of Benedict, who had it from the composer himself.
“The châtelaine sits alone on her balcony, gazing far away into the
distance. Her knight has gone to the Holy Land. Years have passed by,
battles have been fought. Is he still alive? Will she ever see him
again? Her excited imagination calls up a vision of her husband, lying
wounded and forsaken on the battlefield. Can she not fly to him and die
by his side? She falls back unconscious. But hark! What notes are those
in the distance? Over there in the forest something flashes in the
sunlight—nearer and nearer! Knights and squires with the cross of the
crusaders, banners waving, acclamations of the people. And there, it is
he! She sinks into his arms. Love is triumphant. Happiness without end.
The very woods and waves sing the song of love. A thousand voices
proclaim his victory.”
The composition is in four movements, and it is hardly necessary to add
that the first, _larghetto_, represents the sorrowful meditation of the
lonely châtelaine upon her balcony; the second, _allegro_, her lively
imagination picturing her lord upon the field of battle; the third,
_march_, the tramp of the returning crusaders with flying banners; and
the fourth, _finale_, the reunion when “the very woods and waves sing
the song of love.”
Those Philistines who contend that program music is but a mushroom
growth of the last decades of the nineteenth century will hardly care to
come face to face with this instance of it, backed by the authority of
Grove, Benedict, and von Weber, and nearly a hundred years old.
Weber-Kullak: Lützow’s Wilde Jagd, Op. 111, No. 4
Among the better class of rather old-fashioned but effective
transcriptions for the piano, which have fallen somewhat into neglect of
later years, Kullak’s pianoforte version of Weber’s “Lützow’s Wild Ride”
deserves attention.
The original ballad, which formed the text of Weber’s song, was one of
the best of many of similar character by Karl Theodor Körner, that
trumpet-voiced Swabian poet, the popular idol of his time in southern
Germany, who sounded the notes of patriotism, conflict, and heroism in
simple but ringing verses, which still echo in the hearts of his
countrymen, and which describe the scenes, and glow with the fervid
spirit of the century’s dawn.
Major Lützow, the hero of the ballad, was an officer in the Prussian
Hussars during the brief and disastrous struggle with Napoleon in 1813,
when his country went down, crushed well-nigh out of existence, by the
invincible power and iron hand of the all-conquering Emperor. When
Berlin surrendered, the Prussian army was disarmed and disbanded, and
the King, Frederick William III, was forced to accept with thanks the
most humiliating conditions of peace; and even the beautiful Queen
Louisa, the people’s beloved divinity, had to humble herself in her
despair to beg from the generosity of the victor the most ordinary
concessions to the vanquished. Major Lützow indignantly repudiated the
disgraceful treaty and openly defied the vengeance of the great
Napoleon. Rallying a few of his gallant riders about him, he escaped to
the forests, and there organized a guerrilla band, for months waging a
phenomenally desperate but successful war on his own account with the
world’s conqueror and his matchless army.
Lützow and his “Black Riders” were soon known far and near, the hope and
pride of friends, the terror of foes; and hundreds of the best martial
spirits of Germany flocked to his standard. He pushed his daring raids
even across the Rhine into France, sweeping down like a whirlwind
apparently from the sky, at the most unexpected times and places,
leaving consternation and destruction in his track, and was gone again
before the French could rally to oppose him. Soon the belief spread that
the “Black Riders” were a supernatural phenomenon, an incarnation of the
bloody spirit of the time, half men, half demons, bearing charmed lives,
ignoring time, distance, and other human limitations, and liable to
appear at any moment, without warning, in the midst of the imperial
camp, or in the heart of Paris. Their very name was enough to shake the
nerves of the bravest veteran.
This element of the supernatural Körner has ingeniously worked into the
ballad, and it adds materially to the thrilling power of the heroic
narration, though it is used, and very judiciously, not in the form of
positive statement, but in a mood of shuddering inquiry and doubt.
Weber, in his vocal setting of the ballad, with his usual ability in
grasping and utilizing every realistic suggestion of his subject, has
emphasized both the martial and the spectral phases of the theme,
treating with equal skill the spirit of martial daring and heroic
patriotism which spoke in Lützow’s deeds, and the supernatural terrors
which they awoke. One moment the “Black Huntsmen” sweep by us across
some open moonlit plain, with a wild haste, with the clang of saber, the
ring of bugle, and the tramp of rushing steeds; the next they flit
before us through the gloom of the forests, vague, mysterious, like the
indistinct phantoms of war. The distinct imitation of the rhythmic beat
of galloping hoofs, so frequent a device in descriptive music, is
effectively utilized here in accompaniment, while the melody of the
song, full of trumpet-like suggestions, is raid to consist in part of
actual bugle calls which were used among Lützow’s raiders.
Kullak, in his instrumental transcription, while preserving with
artistic fidelity the composer’s intention in all the original effects
of the song, has broadened, enriched, and intensified them, and at the
same time adapted them cleverly to the resources of the piano. In places
they may be still further enhanced by playing, as I would recommend to
those possessing sufficient technic for it, all the scale passages for
both hands in octaves, instead of single notes, as they are written,
thus adding volume and brilliancy to the work as a whole.
The introduction, in rapid triplets, with marked accentuation,
reproducing the exact rhythm of the gallop of horses, should begin
softly, as if distant, and rise in a steady crescendo to a strong
climax, suggesting the swift approach of a troop of riders; then the
melody enters, bold and distinct, as if in trumpet tones, or given by
the resonant voices of the dashing troopers. The piece must be varied by
frequent and marked contrasts; now a trumpet-call, clear and sharp,
answered by a distant echo; now a whispered hint of spectral terrors;
again the sweep and rush, the clash and clamor, the delirious excitement
of the impetuous charge.
The exultant climax, at the close, well expresses the sentiment of the
final verse of the ballad:
“The Fatherland is free, famous, and triumphant,
Glory to the heroes whose blood has bought the victory!”
This composition of Weber’s, when given by a rousing, ringing,
full-voiced male chorus of Germans, stirs the martial spirit in every
breast, just as the Marseillaise fires the blood of the French. In its
piano transcription, by Kullak, I recommend it to every player and
teacher who is seeking something which is very difficult to
find—namely: a good and effective number, martial and rhythmic in
character, which is of real merit, and is a novelty to the audience of
to-day, and yet has a classic name attached. It is admirably adapted to
close a program or to end a group of several shorter compositions of
varying mood.
SCHUBERT
1797 1828
Schubert: (Impromptu B Flat) Theme and Variations, Op. 142, No. 3
Franz Schubert, the golden sands of whose brief existence, rich with the
jewel gleams of genius, ran all too swiftly through the glass of time,
between the years 1797 and 1828, may be considered, if not the
strongest, certainly the most genial, fluent, and spontaneous composer
of the modern Romantic School, which arose and flourished so luxuriantly
during the vigorous youth of our own century. He is most generally known
as the master of the German “Lied” or song. This brief, concise,
epigrammatic form of condensed musical expression, though not, of
course, original with Schubert, received at his hand its fullest
development, its highest perfection, both as regards intrinsic beauty
and dramatic precision; while in quantity, as well as quality, he far
surpasses all competitors in this vein of creative work. There are
something like 600 of these songs from his pen, and such was his fluent
versatility of production, that he is known to have completed seven of
these inimitable musical gems in one day. His instrumental compositions,
whether for orchestra or piano, though far less numerous, are for the
most part equally able and effective, and deserve a much more frequent
hearing in the concert-room than they at present receive, displaying, as
they do, to the full, his inventive spontaneity, his inexhaustible fund
of fresh, original melody, and the peculiar, tender, poetic grace of his
style.
Most of Schubert’s best known pianoforte works, like the composition
under discussion, belong to the smaller, more modest, and unpretentious
forms. They are eminently soft, sweet, and winning, rarely exhibiting
that breadth, grandeur, and passionate intensity with which such
composers as Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt have made us familiar. But who
would despise the wood anemone because it chances not to possess the
voluptuous perfume of the queenly rose or the gorgeous hues of the
wizard poppy?
The “theme and variations,” of which this work is an excellent example,
is one of the most ancient, natural, and logical forms of musical
construction. A simple melody, clearly enunciated at the beginning, is
used by the composer as the musical germ of his work, from which he
evolves, as by the process of spontaneous growth, all its manifold
possibilities for varied expression and contrasted effect; much as the
skilful orator expands from his tersely stated thesis or text, by means
of elaborate comparison, analysis, antithesis, and peroration, all that
far-reaching sequence of deduction and argument latent in his
thought-germ. It is always fascinating to watch this growth, this
gradual evolution, this play of many colored lights over the familiar
theme, under the skilful and ingenious manipulation of a master hand.
But there is, I claim, a deeper interest and a higher pleasure to be
derived from seeking, beneath the smoothly flowing harmonies and
graceful, rippling embellishment, for the allegorical significance or
suggestion mirrored in their clear depths, as scenes and faces are
reflected in the tranquil stream, and which are rarely, if ever, wanting
in the true art work.
The “theme and variations” in music, which owes its origin to the first
crude attempts of early composers to elongate and develop a musical idea
into a symmetrical art form, corresponds to a very early phase of
another art. I refer to the series of progressive pictures carved on the
friezes of many ancient Oriental and Grecian temples, portraying
successive episodes in the life of some god, hero, king, or prophet. The
central figure is ever the same, however attitude, action, mood, and
environment may vary, to suit the stage of his story represented in each
scene. No smoke of battle, strangeness of garb, or storm of emotion can
so obscure or distort the familiar lineaments that they are not
recognizable, though they take contour and expression from
circumstances, those variations in the theme of life. The same idea is
carried out in pictorial art in the interiors of more modern edifices,
when the walls of cathedrals are adorned with frescoes representing the
life of Christ, in numerous consecutive panels, from the infant in the
manger to the death upon the cross. Painting can tell a story, within
certain limitations, as well as words, and more powerfully. The same is
true of music, for those who have ears to hear.
As already stated in connection with the Beethoven sonata, Op. 26, to me
the “theme and variations” always seems to represent a given character
or personality, met at different times, amid varying scenes and
circumstances, in many moods and situations, as would be the case in
real life; developing with the progress of acquaintance and contrasting
experiences, showing now one aspect, now another, according to the
changes of inner emotion or outward environment, but always preserving
the same individuality, an identity which lends itself to, but does not
lose itself in, the vicissitudes of human existence. In the particular
work before us, let the first fresh, simple, tender theme symbolize a
maiden, the heroine of the story we will call her, fair, with the
delicate freshness of first youth, full of the winning grace, the naïve
simplicity and the dreamy poetic fancy of one of Lytton’s heroines: a
young girl,
“Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet—
Womanhood and childhood fleet.”
All the manifold vicissitudes of life are lying untried before her, with
the latent possibilities of her nature waiting to be unfolded and
developed by experience, that climate of the soul.
In the first variation, with its tremulous yet flowing embellishment,
all is vague, uncertain, conjectural. She seems in a mood of
speculation, of reverie, to be gazing forward down the dim vista of the
years, and wondering, with a thrill at heart, what they promise or
presage for her. It is the first rosy, dawning twilight of as yet
indefinite hope and desire.
In the second, her pulses beat to a swifter, stronger measure. She has
begun to taste the zest of life and is borne along impetuously on the
stream of youthful exhilaration and unbroken confidence, out into the
broad, full sunlight of the first great happiness. Light ripples of
laughter, quick-drawn breaths of delight, a sunny circuit of bright and
blithe fancies, envelop the theme and well-nigh conceal it.
The mournful melody, somber minor harmonies, and sobbing accompaniment
of the third variation, so full of passionate pain, express the all too
certain reaction from the former hilarious mood, the coming of that
inevitable shadow of all great joy—its corresponding grief. The hour
has come when the first great, crushing sorrow surges in upon the soul,
in a resistless, overwhelming tide; and our heroine, from fancying that
her life’s pathway was to be all roses and sunshine, is forced to find
it, for the time at least, all thorns and midnight darkness, and to
match her single strength with the might of woe in that struggle for
supremacy which must come soon or late to all.
The fourth again changes wholly in character; is bold, energetic,
spirited, almost martial. The struggle of life is in full progress. The
resolute, forceful bass tones, with which the left hand enters from time
to time, seem like the impetus of a strong will giving momentum to
earnest purpose. This variation tells in stirring trumpet tones of
victory, of the dauntless courage and the elastic strength born in noble
natures of endurance and endeavor, of a character invigorated by
conflict, deepened and matured by adversity; and it leads us back, at
its close, through many winding ways and devious modulations, to a later
happiness, expressed in the fifth and last—a happiness hard-won, but
more complete than the first, though less exuberant, more ethereal and
spiritual, with something in it of the mellow sunset glow.
The work closes with a tranquil coda, a brief evening retrospect, grave
and thoughtful; but, on the whole, cheerful in tone, as if the backward
glance were, all in all, fraught with satisfaction. Here we find the
opening theme, the character melody, in all its first simplicity, but
given an octave lower, in slower tempo and in full chords. Our heroine
has not altered; the contours are clear, the proportions identical, not
a note is wanting; but the _leit-motif_ of her personality is deeper,
broader, and fuller for the experiences of life behind her, and seems to
bear the imprint as of an epitaph, “I have lived and loved and labored.
All is well.”
Emotion in Music
Not long since, when urging upon a pupil the necessity of bringing out
the deeper mood and meaning of a certain composition, the present writer
received this response: “I am afraid to make it say all that, to put so
much of myself into it; people will call me sentimental!”
The reply voiced a prevailing and thoroughly American weakness. It is
far too common here to find, especially among our girls, a bright, warm,
impulsive nature, full of genuine sentiment and poetic fancy, choked and
perverted, turned shallow and bitter, by this same paralyzing fear of
ridicule; to meet persons who take a morbid pride in concealing and
repressing their better selves so effectually, that even their most
intimate friends shall never suspect them of being one degree less
frivolous and heartless than their companions, who in their turn are
doubtless vying with them in this deplorable, misguided effort to
belittle themselves, their lives and influence.
It is one of the most significant and lamentable signs of the time, that
any allusion to or expression of a warm, true, earnest sentiment is met
in society with more or less open and bitter derision, even by those who
are secretly in sympathy with it, admire the courage and sincerity of
its champion, and would gladly take the same bold stand in its defense,
but dare not, and so add their coward voices to swell the majority. This
is the more deplorable, since this tendency is at once cause and effect.
The continual and systematic denial and suppression of emotion and
ideality result finally in their complete extinction in most cases, or
leave them deformed and feeble, to struggle for a precarious existence
in some dark, hidden recess of the soul, whose highest throne is their
rightful heritage.
George Sand says, somewhere, speaking of the French, “We once had
sentiment, but the sirocco of sarcasm has scorched it from our hearts,
and where it grew is a desert place!” Alas for the people of whom this
is true! Alas for the young man or maiden who can say, “I have no
sentiment,” and speak truth. And let me here caution any young person
against a light and frequent, even though purposely insincere, denial of
any characteristic of value; for there is a strange and subtle sympathy
between the heart and the lips, which works steadily, if stealthily, to
bring them more and more into accord. A lie is in every sense a
violation of the laws of nature; and what is first uttered as a
conscious, flagrant falsehood, becomes less so with each repetition,
till unawares a day will come which shall see it transformed into a
glaring truth. Such a person, no matter how highly organized, or
perfectly trained otherwise, is no better than a machine. He does not
live, he simply runs.
One may not be to blame for a natural deficiency in those higher
qualities which make a life warm and rich and attractive, which mark a
personality as something more than an animated clod, or even a
well-adjusted mental mechanism; he must be pitied even though
instinctively shunned; but he who wantonly draws the fatal knife of
sarcasm across the throat of a true sentiment or a lofty ideal, however
feebly or imperfectly embodied, commits a crime against humanity at
large, more injurious and far-reaching in its effects than slaughter of
the body only. Above all, let us beware how we tamper with the natural,
essential relations between art and the emotions. Good-by to the artist
who has no place or use for sentiment in his work; he should turn his
attention at once to some more practical and creditable branch of
mechanics.
One grievous mistake in our American system of training is that we
ignore almost altogether this phase of culture. We develop the
conscience, the reason, the memory, but do nothing for the taste, the
imagination, the esthetic sense, the whole ideal and spiritual side of
the character. The faithful, protracted study of music, or other branch
of art, even though it never result in any financial profit or the
smallest degree of professional success, will develop faculties and
tendencies of more advantage to the student and to all who may come in
contact with him in private life, than any amount of algebra, or any
number of Greek roots. The German methods of study, especially for young
ladies, might teach us a valuable lesson in this connection.
He who would attain the best results in art should remember that we do
not gather dates of thorns, nor figs of thistles; that “only life begets
life,” and that after its own kind; that an art product, to be really
good and great, must be the concentrated, crystallized essence of the
best that is in him, the epitome of his highest moods and aspirations,
of those rare, intuitive glimpses of a loftier existence, to which in
favorable moments he can lift himself, the distilled perfume of weeks,
it may be years, of living. He should subject himself to every possible
cultivating, elevating influence, should train, not only hand and head,
but heart as well; for these three are the inseparable trinity of art.
He should increase his resources, widen his experiences, expand his
horizon; not by cramming a quantity of facts, or by the conquest of mere
technical means—what use in commanding words, or tones, if one has
nothing to express withal?—but by increased familiarity with and
capacity to appreciate and exercise the qualities so constantly
requisite in his work.
Let us remember, too, what the scientists tell us, that light and heat
radiated from a given center are dissipated in force and intensity in
proportion to the square of the distance to be traversed. The same is
emphatically true of emotion. If one would stir his audience to a
pleasurable excitement, he must himself be shaken as in a tempest; to
warm them, he must be at white heat.
Should the question arise, How shall one learn to feel music more deeply
and make it more expressive? my answer would be, Read, think, feel,
dream, love, live! Read—not musical history and biography—these give
information, not culture; they are valuable, but not in this connection;
read poetry, especially the lyric and dramatic, and good prose
literature. A person entirely unaccustomed to understand or to utter
anything in tones, will often find the key to this unfamiliar medium of
expression by the following indirect method: Find some work, a poem is
best, because briefer and more concrete, which expresses, approximately
at least, the sentiment of the composition to be studied. Most persons
are more familiar with the language of words than with that of tones,
and will reach a given mood more directly and easily through that
channel. Let the poem be well studied, not only with the mind, but with
the imagination, dwelling upon it, trying to feel its meaning and beauty
as deeply as possible; then throw the same emotional content into the
music, making the tones tell what the words have said. The present
writer has found this course in teaching very effective with all
sensitive natures, even with those who have but the rudiments of an
artistic temperament.
Above all, artist or amateur, teacher or pupil, fear not to use in your
work to the full all the emotional power you have or can acquire. It may
be the injudicious application of force that sometimes impairs artistic
results; it is never the excess. Vital energy should be controlled,
regulated, but never stinted. Ill-timed frenzy is not art, of course;
but where intensity is demanded and proper gradations and proportions
are observed, no dirge is ever too deeply gloomy, no dramatic climax too
strong. The danger is always of tameness, rather than of excessive
fervor.
Let us, then, be genuine, earnest, whole-hearted, open, in our
allegiance to the ideal; and as for those who sneer at sentiment in art
or in life, why, let them rave. We adhere to the creed which T. T.
Munger has beautifully formulated for our profession in his “Music as
Revelation”: “Emotion is the summit of existence, and music is the
summit of emotion, the art pathway to God.”
CHOPIN
1810 1849
Chopin: Sonata, B Flat Minor, Op. 35
Whether regarded from the standpoint of musical form, of intrinsic
beauty, or of dramatic intensity, this work may safely be pronounced
Chopin’s masterpiece; and in the present writer’s opinion it ranks as
the greatest composition in all piano literature. Chopin’s ability to
handle the strict sonata form successfully has been sometimes called in
question; but whatever may be said of his other two sonatas, this one
will certainly bear comparison with the most perfect models of symmetry,
finish, and architectural completeness, by the best known and most
universally recognized classic masters. In the _allegro_ movement, upon
which the distinguishing character of the sonata form always depends,
the first and second subjects are well contrasted and admirably
balanced, the development is logical, ingenious, and forceful, and the
statement of the dramatic content is clear, concise, and strong, without
a single irrelevant phrase or superfluous measure.
The work is founded upon an ancient Polish poem of a semi-legendary,
semi-allegorical significance, by a once prominent, now well-nigh
forgotten Polish writer. It consists of four movements, corresponding to
the four cantos of the poem, of which it is, in a sense, a musical
translation, treating successively the principal moods and situations in
the story. The fact that in the first two movements the incidents are
treated symbolically, emotionally, in accordance with the composer’s
usual subjective mode of expression, rather than with the descriptive or
imitative devices of the modern school, does not in the least detract
from the poetic impression or suggestive power of the music.
In the last two movements he has recourse, for obvious reasons, to the
direct method of definite realism. The first movement pictures the life
and feelings of the hero, a Polish knight of the middle ages, facing
storm and conflict, danger and hardship, in camp and field, fighting for
king and country, cheered now and then, in lonely hours of vigil at the
camp-fire, by waking visions of his distant home and his waiting bride.
The opening measures of the brief introduction tell of stern courage and
inflexible resolve. Then the first subject enters, stirring, impetuous,
fiery, full of the ring of trumpets, the clash of steel, the fierce
exultation of desperate combat. The tranquil second subject suggests
memories of the happy days of youth in his quiet home—dreams of a
future brightened by the light of promised love, but still enveloped in
the softening haze of distance and uncertainty. The development, with
its complex, conflicting rhythms, its resistless, tempestuous sweep,
thrills with the excitement of sudden onset, the rush of charging
squadrons, the battle cry of struggling hosts. The closing chords
express a somber triumph, the proud but sorrow-shadowed elation of a
hard-won victory, purchased by the blood of many a patriot comrade.
The second movement, the scherzo, gives us the triumphant return of our
hero crowned with laurel, accompanied by the jubilant strains of martial
music, and the glad acclamations of the crowd. Yet, in the midst of his
pride and well-earned glory, he finds time to dream again; this time
more tenderly, sweetly, hopefully; to dream of his home-coming, and the
fond greeting that awaits him in his own native village, where, through
the difficulties and dangers of the campaign, his promised bride has
been watching, and hoping, and praying for his return in faithful but
anxious affection.
Here again we find two contrasting and strongly characteristic themes:
The first, full of martial pride and exultation, the thoughts of
victory, the glad tribute of applause to a nation’s hero; the second,
tender, dreamy, pulsing with love’s anticipation. After this soulful
trio melody, the first martial strains are repeated; but in the coda, a
brief recurrence of the trio theme seems to emphasize the idea that with
him the love thought dominates. This brings us to the third movement,
the Funeral March, unquestionably the best funeral march ever written
for the piano, the most intrinsically beautiful, the most touchingly,
intensely sad, and the most complete, finely finished, and perfectly
sustained, from first measure to last; the strongest, noblest, deepest
expression of heart-crushing sorrow to be found in all piano literature.
As it is published and most often heard by itself, many who have played
and listened to it have not even been aware that it affords the third
chapter, so to speak, in a great tone epic, for as such this sonata must
be considered.
As our hero approaches home, his heart swelling with anticipation, he is
greeted by the distant, solemn tolling of cathedral bells, too evidently
funeral bells, and soon is met by a slowly moving, somber procession of
black-robed monks and mourners, bearing to her last resting-place in the
church-yard the very bride to whose fond greeting he has so ardently
looked forward. The music, soft and muffled at first, like the toll of
far-off bells, gradually grows in power and intensity as the procession
advances, assuming more and more the heavy, measured, inflexible rhythm
of a funeral march, and swelling at last to an overwhelming climax of
passionate pain.
Then the procession comes to a stand by the open grave. After a brief
pause, the sweet, plaintive trio melody enters, pure and tender as a
prayer, touched and thrilled to warmth and pathos by memories of happier
days; after which the march movement is resumed, as the procession
slowly and sadly returns to the village; the music, heavy, crushing,
inexorable at first as the voice of fate, gradually recedes, diminishes,
dies in the distance; and then follows the last movement, the presto, in
some respects the most original and most impressive of all, the lament
of the autumn night-wind over a forsaken grave, one of the few cases in
which Chopin chose to be distinctly realistic, a literal and graphic
imitation of wind effects; yet woven through it is an unmistakable
suggestion of the mood of the hour and situation, the chill, the gloom,
the wild despair, and a hint of that ever darker thought that will arise
at such moments; after death, formless void, chaos.
There is an important vein of allegory underlying this whole story, like
a deep substratum. The hero is a personification of the typical Polish
patriot, struggling, in a forlorn hope, for his native land; the bride
is Poland, and the mighty, overwhelming grief expressed is more than a
personal sorrow: it is for the death and burial of a nation.
The authority for connecting the poem referred to with this sonata has
been frequently questioned. I wish to state here that the poetic
background to this great work is by no means hypothetically sketched in
by my own imagination, however fully justified by the inherent character
of the music. I have my data in full from Kullak and Liszt, the latter
having been a personal friend of Chopin, as is well known, and having
first presented the sonata in public to the musical world. We may safely
assume, therefore, that he was correctly informed with regard to it, and
that this interpretation is authentic and authoritative.
The Chopin Ballades
Probably no class of musical compositions ever presented to the world by
any master has been so little understood, and consequently so much
misrepresented as the ballades by Frederic Chopin. Even so standard an
authority as Grove, in his “Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” writes
as follows: “_Ballade_, a name adopted by Chopin for four pieces of
pianoforte music, which have no peculiar form or character of their own,
beyond being written in triple time, and to which the name seems to be
no more applicable than that of sonnet to the pieces which others have
written under that title”—a statement which proves that he had little
information and less interest in regard to the subject.
The French word _ballade_, which Chopin used as title for these
compositions, is derived from the Provencal _ballata_, a dancing song,
which in turn comes from _bellare_, to dance; and our modern English
words ballad, ball, ballet, all descend to us from the same source. In
Italian, _ballata_ meant a dancing piece, in distinction from _sonata_,
a sounding piece, and _cantata_, a singing piece; and the _ballade_ and
_ballata_ originally meant a piece of music to be sung while dancing or
accompanied by dancing. The dance element, however, was early lost, and
ballade in French, like ballad in English, came to mean a short and
popular narrative poem adapted for singing or recitation. The ballad is
a tale in verse. It differs from the epic in being briefer, less
dignified in tone, and in concerning itself with actual practical events
in the lives of individuals, instead of with historic and mythological
subjects, which form the main province of the epic. The true ballad
treats of some knightly exploit, some national episode, or some tale of
love and adventure; and, as we shall see, Chopin, in adopting this title
for instrumental compositions, adhered strictly to its definition and
its literary characteristics and significance.
The Chopin ballades, four in number and ranking among his most
strikingly original and effective contributions to pianoforte music,
introduced an entirely new and distinctly unique musical form, well-nigh
limitless in its possibilities of expression and application, its facile
adaptability to every phase of emotional and descriptive writing. As was
natural, they opened the way for a host of more or less worthy
followers, bold, independent free lances, heedless of the forms and
rules which bind in rank and file the more orderly conservative
compositions; all bearing a strong racial resemblance, but variously
designated by such special clan cognomens as ballade, novelette, legend,
fable, fairy-tale, and the like. They now constitute a complete and
markedly individual school of composition, of which Chopin in his
ballades was the originator, and which is differentiated from all others
by its distinctly declamatory, narrative style.
Chopin used the name ballade in the sense in which it is employed in
modern literature—to designate a short, poetic narrative, a miniature
epic, as distinguished from the lyric, didactic, and dramatic forms of
poetry. He intended the ballade in music to be a counterpart of the
ballad in poetry, and his inventive genius and unerring taste supplied
and perfected a form precisely adapted to the end in view; a form which
is strictly akin neither to the rondo, the sonata allegro, nor the free
fantasia, though having certain points of resemblance to all three,
still less to any of the dance forms. It reminds us more of some of the
larger, more complex song forms, as, for instance, the musical settings
by Schubert and others of the more pretentious German ballads by Goethe,
Berger, and Uhland; but its development is broader and ampler, at once
more extended and more logical, evincing a greater degree of
constructive musicianship.
Chopin’s able biographer, Karasowski, says of the ballades: “Some
regarded them as a variety of the rondo; others, with more accuracy,
called them poetical stories. Indeed, there is about them a narrative
tone (_Märchenton_) which is particularly well rendered by the six-four
and six-eight time, and which makes them differ essentially from the
existing forms.” In view of these facts, patent even to the superficial
student of Chopin’s life and works, it seems very strange that we should
so often hear and even see in print sneering insinuations to the effect
that the composer christened these works ballades for lack of any better
or more appropriate name; that the title has in reality nothing of
significance or distinctness, which is justified either by the form or
the content of the works.
As a matter of fact, all four of these ballades, according to Chopin’s
own statement to Schumann during an interview at Leipsic, are founded
directly upon Polish poems by the greatest poet of that nation, Adam
Mickiewicz, the father of the romantic school in Poland, a contemporary
and personal friend of the composer, a man whose fervent patriotism and
unswerving fidelity to national themes, as well as the warmth,
tenderness, and power of his creative genius, specially endeared him to
the heart of his compatriot and brother artist, the tone-poet Chopin. It
is difficult, not to say impossible, to estimate the stimulating
influence of Mickiewicz and his works upon the creative activity of
Chopin. That the music of the latter has attained world-wide celebrity,
while the poems of the former are scarcely heard of outside of the small
and cultured circle of his own countrymen and women, is due perhaps not
so much to the superiority of the composer’s genius over that of the
poet, as to the more universal intelligibility of his chosen idiom, his
medium of expression, Polish being a language understood by few persons
even of cosmopolitan tendencies, and one which is ill adapted for
translation into non-Slavonic tongues. Certain it is that Chopin himself
was quick to acknowledge his deep indebtedness to his gifted countryman,
and rose to some of his loftiest flights of creative effort when
translating into his own beloved language of tone ideas, experiences,
incidents, and situations which had already been molded and vivified
into artistic life and beauty by the hand of the poet, as in the case of
the four ballades under consideration.
Though the origin of these ballades as musical transcripts of certain
poems by Mickiewicz is indisputable, it has always been a mooted
question, and one fraught with the keenest interest, at least to some of
us, upon what particular poem any given ballade is founded; what special
experience or incident, national, personal, or imaginary, found its
first embodiment in the verses of the Slavic poet, to thrill with its
power and beauty a limited circle of Polish readers, and was later
reincarnated by Chopin, to find a far wider sphere of influence
throughout the musical world; and what may be the peculiar subtle karma
of romantic or dramatic association which this vital art germ has
brought with it in its transmigration from a former existence; in a
word, whence and what is the essential artistic essence of each ballade?
If we could trace it to its fountain head and familiarize ourselves with
the sources of Chopin’s own inspiration, the task of rightly
comprehending and interpreting any one of these compositions would be
vastly facilitated. This no one has hitherto done successfully. Few
among English-speaking musicians are able to read Mickiewicz in the
original Polish; translations of his works are meager, imperfect, and
very difficult to obtain. It is therefore not without a certain glow of
satisfaction that the present writer is able, after diligent, unwearying
inquiry and voluminous reading, covering a period of some fifteen years,
confidently to affirm that he has at last traced back to their
inspirational sources three at least of the four ballades; and he
submits to the reader the results of his research, in the hope that some
degree of the interest and pleasure he has himself derived from this
line of investigation may be shared by others.
Should any question arise with regard to the accuracy of the statements
and conclusions here advanced, I would say that the authority on which
they are based is derived partly from definite historical data,
existing, though widely diffused, in print; partly from direct
traditions gathered from those who enjoyed the personal acquaintance of
the composer; and partly from the carefully considered internal evidence
of the works themselves, when critically compared with the poems to
which they presumably had reference. I will say further that concerning
the fourth ballade, in F minor, I am still as completely in the dark as
any of my readers, and would gratefully welcome any information or
suggestion which might tend to throw the smallest light upon the
subject.
Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23
The first ballade, Op. 23, in G minor, was published in June, 1836,
perhaps written a year or two earlier. It was suggested by and is
founded upon one of the most able and forceful, as well as extended,
patriotic historical poems by Mickiewicz, often called the Lithuanian
Epic, entitled “Konrad Wallenrod,” and published in 1828. The following
is a brief synopsis of its plot:
During the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Red Cross knights,
a powerful religious, political, and military order, controlling large
dominions on the Baltic, in territory now included in modern Russia,
were at fierce feud with Lithuania, then an independent principality,
later united with Poland by a marriage of its reigning prince, Jagiello,
to the heiress of the Polish throne, thus founding the dynasty of the
Jagiellos, the most illustrious of the royal houses of Poland. Long and
desperate was the struggle. The Lithuanians, though vastly outnumbered
and frequently outgeneraled and defeated, defended every inch of their
beloved fatherland, now absorbed in western Russia, with heroic valor.
At last their ruling prince and idolized leader fell in battle, their
army was routed and cut to pieces, the scanty remnant taking refuge from
their merciless pursuers among the fastnesses of the mountains; and the
country was for a time practically subjugated and forced to submit to
the most cruel and tyrannical oppression. The conquerors, being
Crusaders and Christian knights, considered every species of atrocious
spoliation and barbaric violence, when practised against the infidel
Lithuanians, as justifiable, even laudable, and for some years the
sufferings of the conquered knew no limit.
Among the prisoners taken and carried into virtual slavery by the
Teutonic Order, was the little seven-year-old son of the fallen
prince—a bright, precocious, winsome lad, who, after serving for some
time as page in the household of the grand master of the Order, so
completely won the heart of the old knight, that he adopted the boy and
educated him with his own children, in all the courtly and martial
accomplishments of the time. Years passed. Young Konrad grew in manly
power and promise, and came to be ranked among the flower of Teutonic
chivalry, first in the tourney, first in the field, and first in the
ladies’ hall. But ever at his side, as strange friend and secret
counselor, was seen the somber figure of the aged Wajdelote, or bard, a
venerable minstrel, who had come none knew whence, and, despite his
proud and gloomy bearing, had won high favor at the court by the magic
of his voice and lute. Ostensibly a wandering singer, he was in reality
a Lithuanian noble of high degree, a former friend of Konrad’s father,
the fallen prince, and stood high in the confidence of the Lithuanian
people and nobility as an able, devoted patriot. He came as an emissary
from them to find and win back their lost prince Konrad to his own true
flag and his native land. They were still hoping and fitfully struggling
to throw off the tyranny of the Red Cross knights and wanted Konrad for
their leader.
Under the cloak of his minstrelsy, the Wajdelote plied this secret
mission. With all the fiery eloquence of his poet’s genius, he wrought
upon the spirit of the young man, rousing it to duty and action, to
honor, ambition, and patriotism, to sympathy with the wrongs of his
oppressed fellow-countrymen, to vengeance for the death of his
slaughtered father, stirring its latent heroism, steeling it to
steadfast purpose. And as his influence strengthened day by day, the
open brow of the young prince grew clouded, the smile vanished from his
lips, and his sunny eyes grew deeper and darker with stern resolve.
At last the occasion came. In a foray against a band of insurgent
Lithuanians, Konrad and his mentor detached themselves from their
companions, and feigning to be taken captive, joined the forces of their
own countrymen, where they were welcomed with the wildest enthusiasm.
The two years that followed were the happiest of Konrad’s life. He threw
himself heart and soul into the fierce joy of combat for his native
land, devoting to her service all his personal courage and ability, and
all the military skill so carefully acquired at the court and camp of
the Red Cross knights; yet found time in the brief pauses of activity to
woo and win as wife the fairest and truest of the Lithuanian maids. For
a time the pulses of his life throbbed with a full but fluctuating tide,
in the swift interchange of love’s delights and the thrill of gallant
deeds. Caressing whispers alternated with the clash of swords, and the
tender light of the honeymoon with the lurid gleam of the camp-fire; but
his happiness was destined to be as transient as his valor was vain. A
sterner duty, a more self-sacrificing devotion claimed him, and his
veteran mentor was still at his side to mature the plan and urge its
execution. His beloved Lithuania, enfeebled, broken, disorganized for so
long, was wholly unable to cope in open field with her powerful,
disciplined, and well-equipped antagonist. Some daring, subtle, and
far-sighted stratagem alone might save her; and such a one had formed
itself in the mind of the old minstrel. Again his eloquence rang in the
ears of Konrad, like the voice of fate, “Behold, this is to do! Thou art
the man!”
A heart-breaking farewell to his bride, and Konrad disappears utterly
from the scene for ten years; then returns irrecognizably altered in
appearance, under an assumed name, with wealth and fame and following,
acquired in wars with the Saracens of Spain. The old grand master of the
Red Cross knights is dead, and Konrad with little difficulty secures his
own election to that office; and then begins the work of vengeance. By
his absolute power as grand master, and his cunning diplomacy, he
involved the order in bitter internal dissensions, depleted its
treasury, wasted its resources, weakened its garrisons, and in every
possible way sapped its strength, and finally led the flower of its army
to complete annihilation in a winter campaign against the Lithuanians,
into whose snares and ambuscades the Red Cross knights were mercilessly
thrown by secret and preconcerted arrangement with his countrymen.
Thus by a course of treachery, which for daring, subtlety, and sustained
purpose, both in conception and execution, has hardly a parallel in
history, was accomplished what could not have been done by force. The
power of the order was effectually broken and Lithuania set free. But
Konrad’s life, as well as his happiness, paid the price of his
patriotism. His beloved bride he never saw but once again, and that only
for a moment of agonized parting through dungeon bars, just before his
execution. And it is said he never smiled from the hour when the voice
of the stern old minstrel first stirred his heart with the trumpet call
of inexorable duty, till the hour when its proud pulses were stilled
forever by the daggers of the secret tribunal. For his identity was
discovered; he was, of course, tried and condemned as a traitor to the
order, and died in disgrace by the hands of his former comrades.
Such is the story, sad but stirring, which Mickiewicz handles in his
poem, and which Chopin reëmbodied in the G minor ballade, not following
literally its successive steps, but emphasizing to his utmost its
spirit, character, and moral. I think no one ever played this
composition, or listened to it attentively, without feeling that its
mood was not of our day and land. The time it represents is the middle
ages, its scene is laid in stern and rugged Lithuania, among warlike
knights and resentful rebels, and its whole spirit is therefore medieval
and military.
It opens with a brief but scornfully defiant introduction, a call to
arms, reminding one of the first lines of that familiar address to the
Roman gladiators: “Friends, I come not here to talk; ye all do know the
story of our thraldom.” Then the first and principal theme enters,
symbolizing the forceful personality and stern mentor voice of the old
minstrel, in its somber yet resolute phrases, solemn, inflexible,
relentless as fate; telling of wrongs to be avenged, of a nation in
bondage awaiting its deliverer; of the imperative call of duty and
patriotism; and it constantly recurs all through the composition as its
leading motive, whenever, as is vividly suggested by the other
contrasting, conflicting themes and passages, continually introduced,
the young prince wavers in his purpose, deterred by doubts and
forebodings, lured by seductive temptations from pursuance of the
desperate and soul-trying venture; whenever his mind wanders, as it must
at times, to regretful memories of happier days, to the splendors of
feast and tournament, to the pomp and pride of a martial career under
the adopted flag of the order, to the blithe hunting-horns of his gay
companions in youth, and tender dreams of the first great love of his
manhood, all sacrificed to a grand but pitiless cause. He is ever
recalled to the heroic mood, to the proud but rugged path of duty, by
this mentor voice—gravely insistent, quietly determined, which will not
be gainsaid; and which finally triumphs over all other considerations.
The impetuous presto which closes the work portrays the fierce
excitement and fiery rush of conflict, the utter self-abandon that hurls
itself jubilantly into the arms of an ignominious death for a cherished
ideal; and it ends with the savage but triumphant shout of a
blood-bought victory.
This ballade, though comparatively an early work, is one of Chopin’s
most darkly grand and dramatically powerful efforts; and the subjective
personal moods of the exiled Polish patriot are voiced in its gloomy
indignation, its desperate courage, and its fierce defiance.
There is an undercurrent of political meaning in “Konrad Wallenrod,”
which fortunately escaped the notice of the Russians, who allowed its
publication at St. Petersburg, but which appeals to every native and
friend of Poland and has had no small share in making its popularity.
Lithuania in the fourteenth century, broken and crushed, represents
Poland in the nineteenth, and the tyrannical Teutonic Order stands for
Russian oppression. The Wajdelote’s recitals of the wrongs of a dear but
downtrodden land, the indignation and resentment under a foreign yoke,
and the appeal to arms for freedom and revenge, are all spoken in the
cause of Poland, and are so felt by the native reader. Konrad’s dire
vengeance on the conqueror is a picture of the secret hope of all Polish
patriots of the final overthrow and punishment of the tyrant and the
reëstablishment of Polish independence.
Ballade in F Major, Op. 38
The second ballade, in F major, is, of the three under consideration,
the least of a favorite and the least played; probably because the
radical extremes of mood which it presents, in abrupt, almost painful
contrast, its apparent incoherency, and its sudden, startling, seemingly
causeless changes of movement, render it difficult to comprehend and
still more so to interpret, and difficult to follow with intelligent
sympathy even when well rendered.
It opens with an exceedingly simple, undemonstrative theme, in the major
key, almost too lucid and childlike in the naïve directness of its
utterance, and singularly devoid of the glowing warmth and color which
usually characterize the melodies by this writer. Cool, pure, and
passionless, yet velvet-soft and delicately sweet, it floats upon the
gentle pulsations of the simple accompaniment, like a snow-white,
freshly fragrant water-lily, upon the crystal ripples of some
glacier-fed mountain lake. Then suddenly, without warning or apparent
reason, there bursts a furious tempest of rage, pain, and conflict, as
if some vast Titanic embodiment in bronze of lurid war had been melted
by a world-conflagration into a stream of fluid destruction, and poured
out upon some fair scene of pastoral peace and happiness.
Almost as suddenly the storm of fury abates, or rather seems to recede
into distance, sounding still for a time, but far and faint, as if its
tumult reached us muffled by intervening walls. Then the first simple
theme returns, sweetly calm in its pristine innocence, but soon merged
into a series of plaintive minor cadences, as of pathetic pleading, of
earnest, insistent supplication, interrupted by a brief and startlingly
abrupt climax, in full massive chords, like the confident defiance
hurled by the children of light at the hosts of darkness, certain of
victory, in their reliance on the omnipotent arm of the God of battles.
Once more the gentle first theme, followed by those imploring minor
cadences and a repetition of the strong, courageous climax, and then the
tempest breaks again with renewed intensity, the stress of desperate
strife, the agony of terror, a seething, surging, rushing torrent of
tone, as if men and demons were struggling for life in a swirling
vortex, where the elemental forces of ocean and fire had met in a
death-grapple.
The _finale_, in presto movement, an impetuous sweep of gloomy, exultant
harmonies, suggests the mood of a brave but sorely tried spirit,
dominating distress, rising superior to disaster, and proudly triumphant
in spite of seeming defeat. At the close, in form of a coda, a few
measures of the first melody return, saddened, but still gentle, ending
plaintively in the minor, as if to say, “There have been great wrong and
suffering and bitterness, but now is peace.”
Unquestionably this work presents two radically opposing elements in
sharpest contrast; the one, reposeful purity; the other, infuriate
passion. Of this much we are sure in simply listening to the music,
without searching for historical origin or collateral information. It is
interesting to note Rubinstein’s words with regard to it, and to see how
near his art instinct led him to the discovery of its realistic
significance, presumably without the aid of any definite knowledge as to
its actual origin. He writes of it:
“Is it possible that the interpreter does not feel the necessity of
representing to his hearers a field flower caught by a gust of wind, a
caressing of the flower by the wind, the resistance of the flower, the
stormy struggle of the wind, the entreaty of the flower, which at last
lies broken there? This may be paraphrased: the field flower, a rustic
maiden; the wind, a knight.”
Let us now examine the substance at least of the poetic material from
which Chopin derived the mood and suggestion of this musical work. Again
it is a ballad upon a Lithuanian theme, from the pen of Mickiewicz. But
this time it is a legendary and not a historical subject which is
treated. The Polish ballad is entitled “The Switez Lake,” and its
substance is here given in a somewhat abbreviated and simplified form:
In the heart of Lithuania lies the beautiful, sequestered Lake Switez,
its forest-mantled shores rarely visited by the foot of a stranger, but
peopled by the peasant fancy with wild legends, shadowy traditions, and
wraith-like memories of bygone days. Its blue waves murmur, at the foot
of giant oaks, their strange tales of nymphs and sprites and
water-kelpies, while through the long and still summer nights the sleepy
branches make answer, in dreamy whisperings, of elves and gnomes and the
uncanny doings of the little people of the forest. At least so the
belated countryman affirms, overtaken by nightfall in this haunted
region; and many are the tales of that awesome place and hour with which
he terrifies his companions around the winter fire.
Once, many years ago, a gallant knight, of a most ancient and lofty
lineage, with dauntless courage and a pious heart, whose castle crowned
a neighboring height, resolved to sound and solve the mystery hid in its
depths; and, taking with him a mammoth net of stoutest cords, a score of
brawny henchmen to draw its meshes, and a venerable priest, to bless the
catch and exorcise spirits, he proceeded to the shore. Prayer was said,
the net was flung and sank, and mighty was the struggle that ensued. The
tightened meshes strained to bursting, the taut ropes writhed and moaned
like things alive, and dragged upon the arms that strained to draw them
shoreward. The water raved and churned against the trembling banks, and
black clouds, thunder-voiced, concealed the sky. The pious father’s
constant prayers at last prevailed, and the net, with its strange
burden, was safely landed. A pale but exquisitely lovely maid, with
sweet, calm dignity in face and mien, a wreath of snow-white
water-lilies on her shining hair, arose from out the tangles of the net,
and in a voice like the low murmur of soft waves at twilight, thus she
spoke:
“Rash knight! Thy lineage and piety combined protect thee, else hadst
thou found a grave, with all thy following, in this adventure. But as
thou art of godly mind and as we are akin by blood, through long
descent, it is vouchsafed to me this once to break the mystic silence of
the centuries, and to reveal to thee the secret of the lake, and mine,
its lily queen.
“Know then, where now is forest dark and dense, a noble city reared its
lofty battlements in former years. My sire, its ruling prince, held all
but regal sway; and I, his child, a princess well beloved by all,
counted my sunny years beside the Switez waves, as blithe as they. One
morning, in that ne’er-to-be-forgotten spring, the trumpet voice of war
through all our streets rang out the call to arms. Our royal master,
Mindog, Lithuania’s king, had summoned all who wielded lance, to join
him in the field, against a horde of merciless Russian barbarians,
wasting all the land. And forth my father hastened, with him all his
goodly company of knights and men at arms, and left us women, trembling
and defenseless, in the town, trusting in God and in our innocence, till
their return. That very night, by a circuitous route, evading Mindog’s
might and my stout father’s sword, the Russians came, many as the sands
upon the shore, ruthless as wolves in winter’s dearth. Our gates
unguarded proved an easy prize, and in they poured, thronging our
streets, demoniac in their lust for blood, exulting in the havoc of our
homes. My maidens, wild with terror, crowded round, imploring succor;
while I, as weak as they, saw our dishonor, worse than death, stalking
upon us from the barbarian ranks.
“Then, in the frenzied panic, some one cried, ‘Our only hope is mutual
destruction! Let us slay each other, cursed be she who falters!’ Like
sudden inspiration, the mad purpose seized us all. And then was seen a
sight to set red war atremble with affright, and blanch the lurid sun to
sickly pallor. Fair hands, used only to the lute and broidery frame,
unsheathed the dagger and made bare the breast. With clinging arms and
lips together pressed, and sad eyes beaming love-light through their
tears, each sought to find her sister’s heart and still its throbbing
with her poniard’s point. Yet strength and courage faltered at the fatal
stroke. In my great agony I raised my voice in prayer to Him who guides
the storm-clouds’ wrath and curbs the tempest in its wild career.
‘Prevent,’ I cried, ‘this awful crime, and save us in this hour of
direst need! Send us in mercy the swift death we needs must find, but
let not maiden blood by maiden hands be shed!’
“The prayer was heard. An earthquake shook our city, until it rocked and
reeled, crumbling and sinking like the snow-drifts in a springtime rain;
while from the lake a mighty wall of water rose and rushed upon us,
whelming alike pursuer and pursued, foeman and friend; hushing the din
of war and shriek of victim in one common flood of cool, safe silence.
“So our city fell. My maidens, all transformed to water-lilies, blossom
here in happy purity through long summers, and palsy-withered is the
impious hand that strives to drag them from the friendly shelter of the
waves; while I, their lily queen, within my crystal realm hold quiet
sway, safe from the rude approach of man’s destructive passions. Now
thou knowest the story, all save this. My father fell by Russian spears.
My princely brother, on returning from the wars, found all his realm a
waste, his capital destroyed, found home and sister vanished in the
flood; and wandering in other lands, when years had passed, he wedded a
stranger bride. From this their union, through a long, illustrious line
of heroes, thou art sprung. Hence thou art safe upon these shores,
despite this day’s temerity, so long as with a pure heart and noble
mind, thou dost guard our name and honor in the world. Remember this.
But seek no more to pierce the kindly veil of mysteries, not meant for
mortal eyes; and never hope or strive to see again the lily queen of
Switez.”
So speaking, with a smile of saddest sweetness, she turned slowly to the
lake, and vanished in its whelming waters, which closed with laughing
ripples round her.
No one familiar with Chopin’s ballade in F can fail to perceive the
close and accurate application of the music to this romantic tale. It
begins at and deals with the appearance and story of the lily queen, and
her gentle, pure, and winning personality, and soft-voiced narration,
figure symbolically in the opening melody. The sudden burst of the
terrific war cloud, the maiden’s trust in and confident appeal to a
higher power, the final whelming of the city in the friendly flood,
follow successively in almost literal portrayal, the work closing in the
mood of the maiden’s final farewell and warning to the adventurous
knight who had disturbed her repose.
Viewed from the standpoint of the subject-matter, the startling, almost
drastic, contrasts of the work seem not only intelligible, but
legitimate and artistic.
Ballade No. 3, in A Flat, Op. 47
This is the best known, the most played, and most popular of all the
Chopin ballades. Its warm, lyric opening theme, its strikingly original
rhythmic effects, its piquant, bewitching second subject, full of
playful grace, as well as its magnificently developed climax, one of the
finest in the piano literature, have all endeared it to the hearts of
Chopin lovers and rendered it one of the most effective of concert
solos.
Like the second ballade in F major, this composition is founded upon an
ancient legend of Lake Switez, which seems to be a center about which
cluster many of the Lithuanian myths. The one in question had been
previously treated by Chopin’s friend and compatriot, Adam Mickiewicz,
in the form of a ballad in Polish verse, and the substance of the story,
briefly and simply told, is as follows:
A young and fearless knight, whose ancestral castle crowned a
forest-covered eminence above the beautiful blue lake, was wont to
wander on its lone and wooded shores at evening and to meet there
clandestinely his radiant, beautiful, mysterious lady-love, whose name,
home, and origin he was unable to discover, and which she persistently
refused to disclose. She always appeared to him suddenly, without
warning or visible approach, as if born anew each night of the filtering
moonlight and shifting forest shadows, or as if drawing her ethereal
substance at will from the floating mist wreaths above the lake. And she
vanished as miraculously, when she chose to end their interview,
dissolving from his very arms into mist once more. Perhaps the very
mystery which enveloped her enhanced her charms. In any case, her power
grew upon the knight till he became most desperately enamoured, pressing
his suit with growing ardor. At first she coquetted with his passion,
laughing at his fervor and meeting his fiery protestations with playful,
incredulous mockery; but, finally touched by his fiery eloquence, she
made him a conditional promise. If he would prove his fidelity, would
remain true to her and her memory during her absence, no matter what
temptations might arise, for the space of just one little passing moon,
she would then return, reveal her identity, and become his bride, if he
still desired it.
Of course, he swore eternal fidelity, and she, with a little half-sad,
half-incredulous smile, vanished into the night mist. For several
evenings he wandered, lonely and disconsolate, on the shores of the
lake, longing and vainly seeking for his absent love and cursing the
tardy hours of his probation. Then, when his patience was about
exhausted, he was met there, on the selfsame spot, in the same mystic
moonlight and with the same suddenness and mystery, by another maiden,
even more beautiful than the first, and not inclined to be so distant.
She jeered at him for his depression, for his useless and stupid
fidelity to an absent prude, while with many lures and graces she
beckoned him on to join her in the moonlit mazes of the dance.
At first, remembering his promise, he made some show of resistance, but
very soon he yielded completely to her seductions, declaring his
admiration for this new beauty in ardent terms, and followed her with
extended arms, as she flitted on before him, keeping always just a
little out of reach; followed, heedless where his steps might lead,
reckless of consequences, conscious only of her tender glances and her
beckoning hand, till, borne up and on by the spell of her enchantment,
she had led him far out upon the treacherous surface of the lake, whose
placid ripples seemed magically to sustain both pursuer and pursued.
Then, when midway across the lake, she turned upon him, indignation
blazing in her eyes. With a single impatient gesture she flung off her
disguise and faced him, poised upon a curling wave, in all the airy
grace and winsomeness of his first abandoned love. “False lover!” she
cried, “where is now thy true love, thy sworn love? Forgotten, forsaken,
ere the moon that witnessed thy plighted vows hath run one-quarter of
its little circle. Behold thy doom! So perish the faithless!” Her white
arms waved in mystic incantation, a sudden storm-wind swept the lake,
the billows heaved and swirled beneath him, and a yawning chasm opened
at his feet. With a last passionate appeal he sank to its chilly depths,
while she, laughing in mocking derision, vanished in a shower of silver
spray.
The peasants declare that to this day, on quiet moonlit nights, one may
still see the white form of the Switez maid wandering, as if in search,
among the shadows of the forest-mantled shores or gliding over the
surface of the lake; while mingling with the whisper of the wind among
the trees and the murmurs of the waves upon the strand, one still hears
the echo of her words: “Forsaken, forsworn. So perish the faithless.”
Such is the story of the Switez maid, as told by Mickiewicz in
inimitable Polish verse, and translated into the symbolic language of
music by the Polish tone-poet, Chopin, in the A flat ballade.
The first warmly emotional theme of the composition, with its tender,
persuasive cadences, its ever-growing passionateness, symbolizes the
ardent and impulsive hero of the legend; while the bright, piquant
second theme admirably portrays the arch, coquettish heroine, with her
airy witcheries and playful grace. It cannot be mistaken, for it compels
attention as it enters, after a moment of suspense, in radical contrast
to what precedes, with the dainty rhythmic effect, so difficult to
render for most players. Its introduction later in a different key, with
different accompaniment and embellishments, represents the disguise with
which the maid attempts to cloak her identity, but the same melody is
distinctly traceable through all changes. The superb climax near the
close of the work forcibly depicts at once the swift approach and
resistless sweep of the tempest upon the lake and the intensity of the
emotional situation at the moment of the final catastrophe. Here, too,
is heard again the first melody, the hero theme, in a brief return, as
he makes his last, vain appeal, and we even catch the vanishing ripple
of the maiden’s mocking laughter.
The details of the story are not so literally worked out in the music,
or followed with so much realistic fidelity, as would have been the case
with Liszt or Wagner, or with some other more recent writers. Chopin’s
art is always rather suggestive than descriptive, dealing directly with
the moods evoked by a given situation or event, rather than with the
physical aspect of the events themselves; with the awe and terror
produced by the tempest, for instance, rather than with the audible or
visible phenomena of the tempest. In this particular case he deals
mainly with the general emotional and mental elements which underlie the
legend and the characteristics of the two personages who figure in it,
instead of treating its successive incidents in detail, or in definite
chronological order. The work is therefore sketched on broad,
fundamental lines, and leaves the setting and filling in in large
measure to the imagination of the hearer. This must always be the ideal
method in an art so ethereal and, in one sense, so vague as that of
music. Still, the connection between the music of this ballade and the
actual scenes and development of the legend is distinct enough to be
easily traced by those familiar with the story, and players or listeners
will find, as always, that the purely musical interest of this and all
the Chopin ballades is materially deepened and increased by the
background of relevant facts—by an acquaintance with the material on
which they are based and which gave to the composer the impulse for
their creation.
Chopin: Polonaise, A Flat Major, Op. 53
Interesting from a historic as well as a musical standpoint is the
origin of the polonaise. In the year 1573, when the Polish throne became
vacant on the extinction of the royal dynasty of Jagiello, a national
assembly of electors was convened at the then capital, Cracow, to decide
upon a new sovereign. The candidates for the throne were all of royal
blood—Ernest of Austria, Henry of Anjou of the house of Valois, brother
to the ruling king of France, a Swedish prince, and Ivan the Terrible of
Russia. But the real struggle lay between the Austrian and French
princes. The choice fell at last on Henry of Anjou, later himself king
of France as Henry III.
In the following autumn he ascended the Polish throne, and among the
many gorgeous ceremonials attending his coronation, was one quite
natural and proper under the circumstances—a formal presentation to the
new monarch, of the leading dignitaries and personages of his realm. It
took place in the vast and magnificent throne hall of the royal castle
at Cracow. The nobles and officials, each with his lady on his arm,
defiled before the throne where the monarch was seated, in a stately
procession, and as they passed before the king were presented by the
master of ceremonies. This formal march was accompanied by suitable
music, written expressly for the occasion and performed by the royal
band. Whether this embryonic polonaise is still in existence, no one
knows; probably not; but two distinct ideas were, or should have been,
before the composer’s mind in penning the harmonies for this solemn
ceremonial.
First, of course, to write music eminently suited to the occasion, to
embody, and, if possible, enhance all the pomp and splendor of the
magnificent, august assembly; second, to portray through the music, so
far as might be, something of the national characteristics of this
Polish race which the Frenchman came as a stranger to rule over. The
music in its own way was to serve as a species of introduction.
Little by little, from this crude but characteristic beginning was
developed through the centuries the peculiar national dance, or, more
strictly speaking, march of the Poles; and the music performed during
its progress came to have among dance forms the same title. It partook
of the various stages of evolution to which all music was subject at
different epochs, and within the last hundred years has been modified to
keep pace with the general development of musical resources. But however
it may vary in minor details of form and treatment, every polonaise
which is true to itself must express the original ideas upon which the
form was primarily based—on the one hand a splendid ceremonial, on the
other Polish national life.
In the present day the polonaise is a universally accepted musical form,
common property with the composers of all nations. But Chopin, Polish by
birth, education, and sympathies, found it strictly within his scope,
and has easily surpassed all other writers in number, quality, and
characteristic force as a polonaise writer.
Of his many works in this vein, the Op. 53, in A flat, is in my opinion
decidedly the best, both as regards virile power and direct, forceful
expression of the original polonaise idea. It begins with a wild,
impetuous introduction, brief but stirring, a sort of fanfare of drums
and trumpets, intended to call the people to order and to establish at
the outset the tonality of the mood, so to speak. Then follows the
swinging, pompous measure of the polonaise proper, readily suggesting by
its splendid martial harmonies the proud military bearing, the gorgeous
armor, and the stately tread of those steel-clad feudal heroes, as they
defiled before the throne.
In place of the trio, usually of a more quiet nature in works of this
kind, Chopin has introduced a very singular passage, the most strikingly
original portion of the whole composition—a long-sustained, stupendous
octave climax of the left hand, consisting of a little rhythmic figure
of four notes, constantly reiterated with growing power, against a sort
of trumpet obligato in brilliant measured chords for the right. The
movement vividly suggests the tramp of cavalry. The composer had in mind
the Polish light-horse of medieval fame, a very aristocratic body of
picked horsemen, composed of the flower of Polish chivalry and
disciplined in constant warfare with the Turks. A number of the
brilliant officers of this division were necessarily present at the
coronation ceremony when the polonaise form originated, and these with
their exploits Chopin endeavors to introduce by means of this singular
passage.
There is a curious anecdote afloat concerning the effect of this
movement on the composer himself. On one occasion, when playing the
nearly completed work, his nervous organism enfeebled by illness and his
imagination intensely excited by the fever-glow of composition, he was
seized by a peculiar hallucination. He fancied that a band of the
knights he had been attempting to portray, came riding in from the gloom
of the outer night, in through the opening walls of his apartment,
arrayed in their antique war panoply, horse and rider just as they might
have arisen from their century-old graves in Poland. He was so overcome
by this self-invoked apparition that he actually fled from the room, and
it was some days before he could be induced to re-enter it or resume
work on the mighty polonaise.
Immediately following the great octave climax referred to is a subdued,
vague, fearsome little passage in light running figures, totally foreign
in movement, mood, and even key to the remainder of the work, for which
we would be at a loss to account if unacquainted with the circumstances
narrated, but which, with the light just thrown upon it, is readily
understood. The author seems to have lost for the time the thread of the
composition, to have drifted far from its martial mood and swinging
rhythm, but after a period of groping indecision, through which we hear
the trepidation and reluctant fascination with which he again approaches
this monster of his own creation, with a sudden boldness of attack he
regains the clew, resumes with energy the march movement, and the work
sweeps to its close with even more than its original power and splendor.
Chopin: Impromptu in A Flat, Op. 29
Light, graceful, dainty, capricious, full of playful tenderness and
delicate fancy is this little work, written for and presented as a
wedding gift to one of his favorite pupils, La Comtesse de Lobau, to
whom it is dedicated. The first movement embodies the joyous, hopeful,
congratulatory spirit of the occasion, expressed with all that refined
elegance and polished perfection of style of which Chopin was so
preëminently the master, both in music and language. It is the most
unqualifiedly optimistic strain from his pen with which I am acquainted.
The trio, in F minor, brings a touch of half-veiled sadness and
irrepressible regret, as if called forth by the thought that their art
work together is now to end. She has been for years one of his most
talented, diligent, and interesting students. She is, like himself, a
Polish exile in a foreign land, and their community of sympathies and
sorrows, combined with her charming personality and congenial
temperament, have tended to merge the relations of teacher and pupil
into the closer bonds of a life-long friendship. He is naturally
reluctant to lose her, but this mood of depression is soon subordinated
to the thought that she has found the philosopher’s stone, the fabled
blue flower of the German poets, the subtile, yet supreme panacea for
all human ills—love. This idea is expressed in the last half of the
trio as only Chopin could express it; and the work ends with a
repetition of the first strain, brightly, happily, with a certain
restful completeness of fulfilled desire in the reiterated closing
chords.
Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66
Among other manuscripts found on Chopin’s writing-table after his death
was the original of this composition, complete in every detail, but
written across the back, in his own trembling hand, were the words, “To
be destroyed when I am gone.”
It is difficult to account for this injunction, except upon the theory
that he feared that both the form and the content of the work were too
original, too subtle and complex, and too wholly unfamiliar to the
musical world of his day, to be readily comprehended, and that it would
either suffer from incorrect rendition or be condemned and ignored. So
he preferred a quick death by fire for this child of his sad later days,
to a slow death by mutilation or cruel neglect.
Fortunately the request was disregarded by his friends. The work was
published and has become one of his most beloved, as it is one of his
most faultlessly beautiful compositions. The peculiarity of form
referred to is familiar to all who have attempted the study of this
impromptu. The whole first movement, consisting of a continuous rapid
figure of four notes in the right hand against three in the left, is one
of the most unusual and difficult musical problems to solve
satisfactorily, and only to be mastered by long and special practice—a
case, as I have often said, where it is well to remember the biblical
injunction, “let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.” But
when smoothly played, it produces just that sinuous, interwoven, flowing
effect which the composer desired, and which could not have been
obtained, in such perfection, in any other way.
The content of this composition, like that of many of Chopin’s smaller
works, is purely emotional, like a strictly lyric poem, by his literary
counterpart Tennyson, for instance; it is a wholly subjective expression
of a mental state, an emotional condition, not of any scene or any
action. It touches the minor key and sounds the plaintive harmonies to
which his heart-strings were tuned and vibrating at the time when it was
written. It voices a soft summer twilight mood, half sad, half tender,
full of vague regrets, of indefinite longings and aspirations, of
fluttering hope, never destined to be realized, and bright fleeting
memories that rise and pass, dimmed by intervening clouds of sorrow and
disappointment, like the shifting forms and hues of a kaleidoscope seen
through a misty glass, or the luminous phantoms of dead joys and shadowy
suggestions of the “might have been,” against the gray background of a
sad present and an uncertain, promiseless future. It is a strange,
delicately complex mood, a mood of life’s sunset hour, colored by the
pathetic glories of the dying day, and the depressing, yet tranquilizing
shadows of the coming night—a mood well-nigh impossible to express, but
perfectly embodied in the music.
The following simple little verses, in which, as will be seen, has been
made a somewhat free use of the suggestive symbolism of nature, may
serve to illustrate, though by no means to the writer’s satisfaction,
his conception of the artistic significance of this composition:
THE FANTASIE IMPROMPTU.
The sigh of June through the swaying trees,
The scent of the rose, new blown, on the breeze,
The sound of waves on a distant strand,
The shadows falling on sea and land;
All these are found
In this stream of sound,
This murmuring, mystical, minor strain.
And stars that glimmer in misty skies,
Like tears that shimmer in sorrowing eyes,
And the throb of a heart that beats in tune
With tender regrets of a happier June,
When life was new
And love was true,
And the soul was a stranger to sorrow and pain.
Chopin: Tarantelle, A Flat, Op. 43
Brilliant, effective, and not excessively difficult though it be, this
admirably constructed and thoroughly characteristic _tarantelle_ in A
flat is but little played; perhaps because it appeals less to the love
of the “true Chopinism of Chopin” than most of his compositions, as
being out of the recognized Chopin vein, deficient in the special
melodic and emotional elements usually distinguishing his works.
Nevertheless, considered objectively as a tarantelle, from the
standpoint, not of Chopinism, but of what the true tarantelle should be,
it is one of the best ever written,—hence one of his masterpieces,—and
furnishes another proof of the almost infinite versatility of his
creative power, both in style and in mood.
The origin of the tarantelle, as a musical form, is interesting and must
be considered in judging the real merit of this or any similar work. The
name is derived from that of the tarantula, that venomous denizen of
southern climes, of the spider species, whose bite is usually fatal.
There is a generally prevalent belief among the peasants of both Spain
and Italy, a belief founded, no doubt, upon centuries of experience,
that there is but one reliable cure for this poison, and one which
Nature herself prescribes and imperatively demands—that of violent and
protracted bodily exercise, and the consequent excessively profuse
perspiration, enabling the system to throw off the poison through the
pores. The idea has the same pathological base as the ancient Arabic
cure for hydrophobia, recently revived with great success in this day of
resurrection of buried wisdom—an extremely hot and long-continued steam
bath.
It is claimed that the victim of the tarantula is seized by a delirious
desire, an uncontrollable madness for dancing, which, if fully
gratified, in fact encouraged and stimulated to the utmost, may save his
life by means of the prosaic but practical process above suggested. So
his friends assemble in haste, form a circle on the village green or
plaza, strike up the wildest, most furiously rapid and exciting music
possible, on any instrument that may be at hand, preferably the mandolin
and tambourine, as the most rhythmic and inspiring, and take turns
dancing with him, until each is exhausted and gives place to the next,
and until the victim recovers or dies of fatigue. The faster the tempo,
the more intoxicating the music, the better the purpose will be served,
and the greater the hope of a successful cure.
From this crude and primitive germ the modern musical art form, known
and used all over the world, has gradually developed, retaining, of
course, as must every characteristic dance form, the spirit and
fundamental element of the situation and circumstances which gave it
birth.
The true tarantelle may be either in a major or minor key, the latter
being most common; but it must be wild, stirring, exceedingly rapid,
with a strong rhythmic swing and a certain dash and go, irresistibly
suggesting the fever of the dance at its most delirious ecstasy. It is
always written in six-eight time, which is somewhat singular, as it has
none of the usual rhythmic peculiarities of that measure, but invariably
produces the impression of twelve-eight, or, perhaps still more
strongly, that of four-four with the beats divided into triplets. In
fact, this is generally the best method of counting it for the pupil. It
should contain no harmonic or technical complexities to distract the
attention of either player or listener from the regular rhythmic swing
and form and movement of the dance; and the melodic trio, occasionally
introduced by some composers, is always an incongruous artistic
absurdity, wholly out of place.
Though the musical form is common property of all composers in all
lands, the actual dance, as such, is specially identified with southern
Spain and Italy, and is rarely used elsewhere. To the tourist one of the
most unique and vividly interesting episodes of his sojourn in these
localities is the performance of the tarantelle by one of the trained
dancing girls, which may be witnessed almost any evening, given with all
the dash and verve of the southern temperament, a perfect embodiment of
grace and fire and dance frenzy.
This tarantelle by Chopin possesses all the essential characteristics in
a high degree, with not a single lapse or irrelevant digression in mood,
in form, even in the details of accompaniment. It may be taken as a
model of the true tarantelle, spirited, well sustained throughout, and
eminently playable.
Chopin: Berceuse, Op. 57
The Chopin Berceuse (which is the French word for cradle-song) is a most
unique as well as most ideally beautiful composition, standing alone in
all piano literature, as regards its form and harmonic structure, the
only one of its species. It is beyond all question or comparison, the
finest cradle-song ever written for the piano, an exceptionally perfect
example of that rare blending of spontaneous genius and mechanical
ingenuity, for which Chopin was so preëminent, resulting in a work
matchless in its originality, its suggestive realism, its delicacy of
finish, and its poetic content. An organ point on D flat, which is its
only bass note, sustained throughout the entire composition, and a
couplet of the simplest chords, the tonic and dominant seventh,
alternating back and forth in a swinging, rocking motion, form the
accompaniment, continued practically without change, from first measure
to last, portraying naturally, easily, yet unmistakably, the soothing
monotony of the rockaby movement. The left hand may be said to rock the
cradle throughout the whole composition, while in the soft, continually
intertwining melody in the right hand, like an endless, infolding circle
of maternal love, we find the lullaby song of the mother, sung as she
sits there in the hush of the twilight, rocking her little one to sleep.
Around and over this melody Chopin has flung, with his own inimitable
delicacy, a silver lace-work of embellishment, falling soft and light as
the moonlight spray from fountains in fairyland, as through the
idealizing summer haze, half veiling a distant landscape, we seem to
catch dim glimpses of the dream-pictures, the fleeting fancies, the
changing phantasmagoria of prophetic visions, that drift through the
brain of the mother as she sits there in the gathering dusk, waiting for
the little eyes to be tightly closed, and wondering vaguely to herself
on what scenes they will open in the far future years.
Slower and gentler grows the motion of the cradle, softer and lower the
lullaby song, further and further the dream pictures drift into the
shadows, until at last the wings of slumber are folded about the little
one. Silence reigns. The mother’s daily task of loving ministry is ended
and she, too, may rest. The two lingering closing chords, soft and slow,
suggest the moment when she rises from the cradle and spreads her hands
in silent benediction over the sleeping child.
Infinit
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