Chapter VIII: Pianoforte and Chamber Music of the Romantic Period (1)

Development of the modern pianoforte--The pioneers: Schubert and
Weber--Schumann and Mendelssohn--Chopin and others--Franz Liszt,
virtuoso and poet--Chamber music of the romantic period; Ludwig Spohr
and others.

I

The striking difference between the pianoforte music of the nineteenth century and that of the eighteenth is, of course, not an accident. That of the eighteenth is in most cases not properly piano music at all, since it was composed specifically for the clavichord or harpsichord, which have little beyond the familiar keyboard in common with the modern pianoforte. Both classes of instruments were known and in use throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, and the date 1800 may be taken as that at which the pianoforte displaced its rivals. Much of the old harpsichord music is played to-day on the piano (as, for instance, Bach’s preludes and fugues), but the structure of the music is very different, and the effect on the piano gives no idea of the effect as originally intended.

The most superficial glance shows eloquently the difference between the two sorts of keyboard music. That of the nineteenth century differs from its predecessor in its emphasis on long sustained ‘singing’ melody, in its greater range, in its reliance on special tone qualities, in being (to a great extent) melodic instead of polyphonic, in wide skips and separation of notes, and, above all, in its use of sustained chords. Leaving aside the specific tendencies of the romantic period, all these differences can be explained by the difference in the instruments for which the two sorts of music were written.

The clavichord was a very simple instrument of keys and strings. The length of the vibrating string (which determines its pitch) was set, at the stroke which set it in vibration, by a metal ‘tangent’ on the end of the key lever, being at once the hammer and the fret of the string. The stroke was slight, the tone was extremely soft. The vibration continued only a few seconds and was so slight that anything like the ‘singing tone’ of the pianoforte was impossible. But within the duration of a single note the player, by a rapid upward and downward movement of the wrist which varied the pressure on the key, could produce a wavering tone similar to the vibrato of the human voice and the violin, which gave a faint but live warmth to the tone, unhappily wholly lacking in the tone of the pianoforte. It was doubtless this peculiar ‘live’ expressiveness which made the instrument a favorite of the great Bach, and which, moreover, justifies the player in making the utmost possible variety of tone in playing Bach’s clavier works on the modern instrument. The sound of the instrument was something like that of an æolian harp, and was therefore quite unsuited to the concert hall. But it was of a sympathetic quality that made it a favorite for small rooms, and much loved by composers for their private musings.

The harpsichord was the concert piano, so to speak, of the time. Its strings were plucked by means of a short quill, and a damper automatically deadened the tone an instant afterwards. The instrument was therefore quite incapable of sustained melody, or of gradations of volume, except with the use of stops, which on the best instruments could bring new sets of strings into play. Its tone was sharp and mechanical, not very unlike that of a mandolin.

Now what the modern pianoforte possesses (apart from its greater range and resonance) is chiefly ability to control the power of the tone by force or lightness of touch, and to sustain individual notes, by means of holding down the key, or all of them together through the use of the sustaining pedal. Theoretically, the clavichord could both control power and sustain notes, but the tone was so slight that these virtues were of little practical use. The ground principle of the pianoforte is its rebounding hammer, which strikes the string with any desired power and immediately rebounds so as to permit it to continue vibrating. Each string is provided with its damper, which is held away from it as long as the key is pressed down. The sustaining or damper pedal removes all the dampers from the strings, so that any notes which are struck will continue vibrating. The one thing which the piano cannot do is to control the tone after it is struck. By great care in the use of materials piano makers have been able to produce a tone which continues vibrating with great purity and persistence, but this inevitably dies out as the vibrations become diminished in amplitude. The ‘legato’ of the pianoforte is only a second best, and is rather an aural illusion than a fact. Any increasing of the tone, as with the violin, is quite impossible. Any true sustaining of the tone is equally impossible, but, by skillful writing and playing, the illusion of a legato tone can be well maintained and a far greater beauty and variety of effect can be reached than one might think possible from a mechanical examination of the instrument.

Before 1770 (the date of Beethoven’s birth) clavier music existed only for the clavichord and the harpsichord, though it could also be played on the pianoforte. Beethoven grew up with the maturing pianoforte. By the time he had reached his artistic maturity (in 1800) it had driven its rivals from the field. Up to 1792 all Beethoven’s compositions were equally adapted to the piano and the harpsichord. Up to 1803 they were published for pianoforte _or_ harpsichord, though it is probable that in the preceding decade he had written most of his clavier music with the pianoforte in mind.

The earliest pianoforte (made in the first two decades of the eighteenth century) had a compass of four and a half octaves, a little more than that of the ordinary clavichord. The pianoforte of Mozart’s time had five octaves, and Clementi added half an octave in 1793. By 1811 six and a half octaves had been reached, and in 1836 (about the time of the publication of Liszt’s first compositions, barring the youthful Études) there were seven, or seven and one-third, which have remained the standard ever since. During all this time piano makers had been endeavoring to increase the rigidity of the piano frame. This was partly to take care of the greater size due to the adding of bass strings, but chiefly to permit of greater tension. The quality and persistency of the vibration depends to a great extent on the tension of the strings. Other things being equal, the excellence of the tone increases (up to a certain limit) with the tension. This led gradually to the introduction of iron supports, and later to a solid cast iron or steel frame, though up to 1820 only wood was used in the body of the pianoforte, until the tension became so great and the pitch so high (for the sake of tonal brilliancy) that the wooden frame proved incapable of sustaining the strain. The average tension on each string is, in the modern piano, some one hundred and seventy-five pounds, and was up to recent times much higher. The present Steinway concert grand suffers a strain of more than twenty tons, and, under the higher pitch of former years, had to stand thirty. The weight of the instrument itself is half a ton.

These improvements have made the piano second only to the orchestra for all around usefulness and expressiveness. The size of the instrument and the high tension of the strings made its tone sufficient for the largest concert hall, and permitted a keyboard range almost double that of the harpsichord. The individual dampers responsive to the pressure of the key made a quasi-legato and true melody playing possible. The rebounding hammer directly controlled by the key made possible all varieties of soft and loud tone. And the sustaining or damper, incorrectly called the loud pedal, made possible the sustaining of chords in great richness. The usefulness of this last device is still not half stated in saying that chords can be sustained; for, when all the strings are left open, there occurs a sympathetic vibration in the strings which are not struck by the hammers but are in tune with the overtones of the strings that are struck. This fact increases to an astonishing extent the resonance and sonority of any chords sounded with the help of the sustaining pedal. It makes the instrument almost orchestral in quality, opening to it an amazing range and variety of effect which Chopin, Liszt, and many piano writers after them, used with supreme and magical skill. The soft pedal opens another range of effects. On the grand piano it shifts the hammers so that they hit but one of the three strings proper to each note in the middle and upper registers. Hence the direction _una corda_, written in the pianoforte works of all great masters, including Beethoven.

The piano thus became an ideal sounding board for the romantic movement. It was capable of luscious expressive melody. It could obtain effects of great delicacy and intimate character. It could be loud, astonishing and orchestral. Its tone was in itself a thing of sensuous beauty. Its freedom in harmony was no less than its freedom in melody, and enharmonic changes, beloved of all the romanticists, became easy. It allowed the greatest liberty in the disposition of notes, and harmonic accompaniment, with broken chords and arpeggios, could take on an absolute beauty of its own. This sufficiently explains the complete change in the method of writing clavier music in the nineteenth century. One example of the way in which Mozart and Chopin obtained harmonic sonority in accompaniments will show how far-reaching the change was.

By the use of the damper pedal the Chopin formula gives the effect of a sustained chord. On the harpsichord it would have sounded like a few notes too widely scattered to be united in sonority.

With such an instrument every style of music became possible. Liszt asserted that he could reproduce any orchestral effect on it, and many of the best orchestral works of his time became generally known first through his pianoforte arrangements of them. Equally possible were the simple song-like melodies of some of Chopin’s preludes, or the whimsical genre pieces of Schumann. As a consequence the wonderful piano literature of the nineteenth century is equal to any music in range, power, and emotional expressiveness.

II

Nearly all the qualities of romantic music find their beginnings in Beethoven. But it is not always easy to disentangle the romantic from the classical element in his music, and for convenience we begin the history of the romantic period with Schubert and Weber. For the specific and conscious tendencies of romanticism first showed themselves in the fondness for smaller free pianoforte forms, which Beethoven cultivated not at all, if we omit his historically negligible _Für Elise_ and one or two other pieces of the same sort. Beethoven’s later sonatas, while romantic in their breaking through the classic form and seeking a more intense emotional expression, are rather the prophets of romanticism than its ancestors.

When Schubert dared to write lovely pieces without any reference to traditional forms he began the history of romantic piano music. This he did in his lovely Impromptus, opus 90, and the famous _Moments musicals_, both published in the year of his death, 1828. The Impromptus were not so named by the composer, but the title can well stand. They are essentially improvisations at the piano. They were written not to suit any form, nor to try any technical task, but simply because the composer became fascinated with his musical idea and wanted to work it out, which is true (theoretically at least) of all romantic music. In the very first of the Impromptus, that in C minor, we can almost see Schubert running his fingers over his piano, timidly experimenting with the discovery of a new tune, his childlike delight at finding it a beautiful one, and his pleasure in lingering over lovely cadences and enharmonic changes, or in working out new forms for his melody. The very first note--the octave G struck fortissimo--is a note for the pianoforte and not for clavichord or harpsichord. For it is held, and with the damper pedal pressed down, so that the other strings may join in the symphony in sympathetic vibration. And throughout the piece this G seems to sound magically as the dominant around which the whole harmony centres as toward a magnet. In other words, we are meeting in this first Impromptu our old Romantic friend, sensuous tone. The pleasure which Schubert takes in repeating the G, either by inference or in fact, or in swelling his chords by the use of the pedal, or in drawing out melodic cadences, or in coaxing out the reverberating tones of the bass, or in letting his melodic tone sound as though from the human voice--this, we might almost say, marks the discovery of the pianoforte by the nineteenth century. And it is equally romanticism’s growing realization of itself.

All the impromptus are of great beauty, and all are unmistakably of Schubert. They have the fault of improvisations in that they are too long, but if one is in a leisurely mood to receive them, they never become a bore. The _Moments musicals_ are still more typical of Schubert’s genius--some of them short, ending suddenly almost before the hearer is aware that they have begun, but leaving behind a definite, clear-cut impression like a cameo. They are the ancestors of all the genre pieces of later times. Each of them might have a fanciful name attached, and each has the directness of genius. Schubert’s sonatas are important only in their possession of the qualities of the Impromptus and _Moments musicals_. They are filled with beauties, but as sonatas--as representatives of classical organization and logic--they are negligible. Schubert cannot resist the charm of a lovely melody, and, when he finds one, the claims of form retire into the background. Certain individual movements are of high excellence, but played consecutively they are uneven. The ‘Fantasia’ in C minor (containing one of the themes from Schubert’s song, ‘The Wanderer,’) is a fine imaginative and technical work, but its freedom of form is of no historical importance, as Mozart wrote a long fantasia in C that was even more daring. The dances, likewise, have no significance in point of form, being written altogether after the usual manner of the day (they were, in fact, mostly pot boilers), but they contain at times such appealing beauty that they helped to dignify the dance as a type of concert piano music. The ability to create the highest beauty _in parvo_ is distinctive of the romantic movement, and Schubert’s dances and marches have stimulated many another composer to simplicity of expression. The influence of them is evident in the _Carnaval_ and the _Davidsbündler Tänze_ of Schumann. Liszt elaborated them and strung several together for concert use, and the waltzes of Brahms, who, more perhaps than any other, admired Schubert and profited by him, are derived directly from those of Schubert.

Liszt may be quoted once more, in his rhetorical style, but with his sympathetic understanding that never misses the mark: ‘Our pianists,’ he says, ‘hardly realize what a noble treasure is to be found in the clavier music of Schubert. The most of them play him through _en passant_, notice here and there repetitions and retards--and then lay them aside. It is true that Schubert himself is partly responsible for the infrequent performance of his best works. He was too unconsciously productive, wrote ceaselessly, mingling the trivial and the important, the excellent and the mediocre, paying no heed to criticism and giving his wilfullness full swing. He lived in his music as the birds live in the air and sang as the angels sing--oh, restlessly creative genius! Oh, faithful hero of my youthful heaven! Harmony, freshness, power, sympathy, dreaminess, passion, gentleness, tears, and flames stream from the depths and heights of your soul, and in the magic of your humanity you almost allow us to forget the greatness of your mastership!’

Along with Schubert, Weber stands as the progenitor of the modern pianoforte style. (The comparative claims of the two can never be evaluated.) Here, again, it was Liszt who chiefly made the importance of the man known to the world. He took loving pains in the editing of Weber’s piano works late in his life, and, with conscientious concern for the composer’s intention, wrote out amplified paraphrases of many of the passages to make them more effective in performance. The absolute value of these works, especially the sonatas, is much disputed. It is customary to call them structurally weak, and at least reputable to call them indifferent in invention. Yet we are constantly being reminded in them that their author was a genius, and the genius who composed _Der Freischütz_. Certainly they deserve more frequent performance. As sonatas, they are, on the whole, more brilliant and more adequate than Schubert’s. Single movements, such as the andante of the A flat sonata, opus 39, can stand beside Beethoven in emotional dignity and tender beauty. But, whatever is the absolute musical value of these works, they are an advance on Beethoven in one particular, the quality which the Germans describe with the word _klaviermässig_--suited to the piano. For Beethoven, with all the daring of his later sonatas, got completely away from the harpsichord method of writing only to write for piano in orchestral style. He never began to exhaust the qualities of the pianoforte which are distinctive of the instrument. Weber’s writing is more for the pianoforte. Especially Weber enriched piano literature with dramatic pathos and romantic tone coloring, with vigorous harmony and expressive song-like melody. The famous ‘Invitation to the Dance’ shows him at his best, giving full play to his love of the simple and folk-like tune, separating the hands and the fingers, and slashing brilliant streaks of light and shade in the piano keyboard. The famous _Konzertstück_, a great favorite of Liszt, and the concerto, once the rival in popularity of Chopin’s, are rapidly slipping back into the gloom of a forgotten style. As show pieces they pointed the way to further development of pianoforte technique; but that which made them brilliant is now commonplace, the stock in trade of even third-rate pianists; and the genuine emotional warmth which has made much of Schubert’s pianoforte works immortal is absent in these _tours de force_ of Weber.

Historically Schubert leads the way to the piano style of Schumann, and Weber to that of Liszt, and both in company to the great achievements of the romantic period. But their style is a long way from modern pianoforte style--much more closely related to Beethoven than to Chopin. The dependence on the damper pedal for harmonic effects, the extreme separation of the notes of a broken chord, the striving for excessive power by means of sympathetic vibrations of the strings, and, in general, the _pointillage_ use of notes as spots of color in the musical picture, are only in germ in their works. The chorale method of building up harmonies by closely adjacent notes still continues to the detriment of the best pianistic effect. But in the work of the composers immediately following we find the qualities of the piano developed almost to the limit of possible effect.

III

Keyboard music now tended more and more away from the old chorale and polyphonic style, in which eighteenth century music was ‘thought,’ toward a style which could take its rise from a keyed instrument with pedals. Weber and Schubert achieved only at times this complete freedom in their clavier music. It remained for Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin to reveal the peculiar richness of the piano. Their styles are widely differentiated, yet all truly pianistic and supplementary one to the other. The differences can be derived from the personalities and the outward lives of the three men. Schumann was the unrestrained enthusiast, who was prevented by an accident from becoming a practising virtuoso and was obliged to do his work in his work-room and his inner consciousness. Liszt was, above all, the man of the world, the man who loved to dominate people by his art and understood supremely well how to do it. Chopin was by nature too sensitive ever to be a public virtuoso; he reflected the Paris of the thirties in terms of the individual soul where Liszt reflected it in terms of the crowd. Each of them loved his piano ‘as an Arab his steed,’ in Liszt’s words. Hence Schumann’s music, while supremely pianistic, has little concern for outward effect, and was, in point of fact, slow in winning wide popularity. With an influential magazine and a virtuoso wife to preach and practise his music in the public ear, Schumann nevertheless had to see the more facile Mendelssohn win all the fame and outward success. Schumann’s reputation was for many years an ‘underground’ one. But he was too much a Romantic enthusiast to make any concessions to the superficial taste of the concert hall or drawing room, and continued writing music which sounded badly unless it was very well played, and even then rather austerely separated the sheep from the goats among its hearers. Schumann is, above all, the pianists’ pianist. The musical value and charm of his works is inextricably interwoven with the executant’s delight in mastering it.

Liszt is, of course, no less the technician than Schumann--in fact, much more completely the technician in his earlier years. But his was less the technique of pleasing the performer than of pleasing the audience. With a wizardry that has never been surpassed he hit upon those resources of the piano which would dazzle and overpower. Very frequently he adopts the too easy method of getting his effect, the crashing repeated chord and the superficial fireworks. None of Schumann’s technical difficulties are without their absolute musical value; all of Liszt’s, whether they convey the highest poetry or the utmost banality, are directed toward the applause of the crowd.

Chopin is much more than the elegant salon pianist, which is the part of him that most frequently conditions his external form. He was the sensitive harpstring of his time, translating all its outward passions into terms of the inward emotions. Where Schumann had fancy Chopin had sentiment or emotion. Chopin had little of Schumann’s vivid interest in experimenting in pianistic resources for their own sake. Even his Études are so preëminently musical, and have so little relation to a pianistic method, that they show little technical enthusiasm in the man. Chopin was interested in the technical possibilities of the piano only as a means of expressing his abounding sentiments and emotions. It is because he has so much to express and such a great variety of it that his music is of highest importance in the history of piano technique, and is probably the most subtly difficult of all pianoforte music. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there are twenty pianists who can play the Liszt studies to one who can play those of Chopin. The technical demands he makes upon his instrument are always just enough to present his musical message and no more. Though he was utterly and solely of the piano (as neither Schumann nor Liszt was) he had neither the executant nor the public specifically in mind when he composed.

Schumann’s first twenty-six published works (covering \ most of the decade from 1830 to 1840) were almost exclusively for the piano. From the beginning he showed his instinct for its technical possibilities. Opus 1, published in November, 1831, was a set of variations, the theme being the musical ‘spelling’ of the name of a woman friend of his, the ‘Countess Abegg,’ perhaps as much a product of the imagination as was the music itself. The variations show the crudities of dilettantism, as well as its enthusiasm and courage. They were far from being the formal mechanical variations of classical clavier music. No change of the theme but has a musical and expressive beauty apart from its technical ingenuity. Especially they reveal a vivid sense of what the piano could do as distinguished from what the clavichord or harpsichord could do. Much better was opus 2, the _Papillons_, or ‘Butterflies,’ which is still popular on concert programs. All that is typical of Schumann the pianist is to be found in some measure in this opus 2. For, besides the vivid joy they reveal in experimentation with pianistic effects, there is the fact that they came, by way of Schumann’s colorful imagination, out of literature. Here was romanticism going full tilt. From his earliest years Schumann had adored his Jean Paul. He had equally adored his piano. When he read the one he heard the other echoing. This was precisely the origin of the _Papillons_, as Schumann confessed in letters to his friends. The various dances of opus 2 are the portions of the masked dance of the conclusion of Jean Paul’s _Flegeljahre_--not as program music, nor even as pictorial music, but in the vaguest way the creation of the sensitive musician under the stimulus of literature. Schumann attached no especial value to the fanciful titles which he gave much of his piano music; in his later revisions of it he usually withdrew them altogether. He always insisted that the music and not the literature was the important thing in his music. The names which betitle his music were often afterthoughts. They were nearly always given in a playful spirit. The literary music of Schumann is not in the least music which expresses literature, but only music written by a sensitive musician under the creative stimulus of literature.

The ‘Butterflies’ of opus 2 (_Papillons_) are by no means the flittering, showy butterflies common to salons of that day. They are free and fanciful dances, rich in harmonic and technical device, and rich especially in buoyant high spirits. The canons, the free melodic counterpoint, the recurrence of passages to give unity to the series, the broken or rolling chords, the spicy rhythmical devices, the blending of voices in a manner quite different from the polyphonic style of old, and the use of single anticipatory or suspended notes for changes of key--these gave evidence of what was to be the nature of Schumann’s contribution to piano literature.

From now on until 1839, when Schumann began to be absorbed in song writing, there appeared at leisurely intervals piano works from his study, few of which are anything short of creations of genius. In the Intermezzi his technical preoccupations were given fuller play; in the _Davidsbündler Tänze_ our old friends ‘Florestan,’ ‘Eusebius,’ and ‘Meister Raro’ contribute pieces in their own special vein, all directed to the good cause of ‘making war on the Philistines’--in other words, asserting the claims of lovely music against those of mechanical music, and of technically scholarly music against those of sentimental salon music. Following this work came the Toccata, one of Schumann’s earliest serious works later revised--an amazing achievement in point of technical virtuosity, based on a deep knowledge of Bach and polyphonic procedure, yet revealing the new Schumann in every bar. It proved that the young revolutionist who was emphasizing musical beauty over musical learning was not doing so because he was technically unequipped.

He now wrote the _Carnaval_, perhaps the most popular of Schumann’s piano works, with Schumann’s friends, including Clara Wieck, Chopin, and Paganini, appearing among the ‘musical pictures.’ Schumann’s humor is growing more noisy, for in the last movement the whole group join in an abusive ‘march against the Philistines,’ to the tune of the old folk-song, ‘When Grandfather Married Grandmother.’ Why should an avowed revolutionist take as his patron theme a song which praises the good old times ‘when people knew naught of Ma’m’selle and Madame,’ and deprecates change? But the romanticists, especially of Schumann’s type, prided themselves on nothing more than their historical sense and their kinship with the past--especially the German past.

Next came more ambitious piano works, and interspersed among them the _Phantasiestücke_ (‘Fantasy Pieces’), containing some of Schumann’s most characteristic numbers, and the brilliant ‘Symphonic Études,’ masterpieces one and all. And still later the ‘Novelettes,’ the _Faschingsswank_, the well-known ‘Scenes from Childhood,’ and the _Kreisleriana_. This group Schumann felt to be his finest work. It was taken, like the _Papillons_, from literature, this time E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tales of the eccentric Kapellmeister Kreisler.

It is worth while to recall Hoffmann’s story, as an example of the sort of literature to which Schumann responded musically. In Dr. Bie’s words:[93] ‘The garden into which the author leads us is full of tone and song. The stranger comes up to the young squire and tells him of many distant and unknown lands, and strange men and animals; and his speech dies away into a wonderful tone, in which he expresses unknown and mysterious things, intelligibly, yet without words. But the castle maiden follows his enticements, and they meet every midnight at the old tree, none venturing to approach too near the strange melodies that sound therefrom. Then the castle maiden lies pierced through under the tree, and the lute is broken, but from her blood grow mosses of wonderful color over the stone, and the young Chrysostom hears the nightingale, which thereafter makes its nest and sings its song in the tree. At home his father is accompanying his old songs on the clavicymbal, and songs, mosses, and castle maiden are all fused in his mind into one. In the garden of tone and song all sorts of internal melodies rise in his heart, and the murmur of the words gives them their breath. He tries to set them to the clavier, but they refuse to come forth from their hiding places. He closes the instrument, and listens to see whether the songs will not now sound forth more clearly and brightly; for “I knew well that the tones must dwell there as if enchanted.” Out of a world like this floated all sorts of compositions in Schumann’s mind.... A thousand threads run from all sides into this intimate web in which the whole lyrical devotion of a musical soul is interwoven. The piano is the orchestra of the heart. The joys and sorrows which are expressed in these pieces were never put into form with more sovereign power. For the external form Bach gave the impulse; for the content, Hoffmann. The garlanded roses of the middle section of No. 1, the shimmering blossoms of the ‘inverted’ passage in the _Langsamer_ of No. 2, the immeasurable depth of the emotions in the slow pieces (4 and 6), the bass unfettered by accent, in the last bars of No. 8, leading down to final whisperings, all are among the happiest of inspirations.’

It will be noticed that most of the piano works of Schumann which we have mentioned are series of short pieces. Some of the series, notably the _Papillons_, the _Carnaval_, and _Kreisleriana_, are held loosely together by a literary idea. The twenty little pieces which constitute the _Carnaval_ have, moreover, an actual relation to each other, in that all of them contain much the same melodic intervals. Three typical sequences of intervals, which Schumann called ‘Sphinxes,’ are the groundwork of the _Carnaval_, but very subtly disguised. That _Pierrot_, _Arlequin_, the _Valse Noble_, _Florestan_, and _Papillons_ are thus closely related is likely to escape even the careful listener; and these are perhaps the clearest examples. But this device of ‘Sphinxes,’ and other devices for uniting a long series of short pieces, really accomplish Schumann’s purpose. On the other hand, they never give to the works in question the broad design and the epic continuity of the classical sonata at its best. The Beethoven sonatas opus 101 and 110, for example, are carved out of one piece. The Schumann cycles are many jewels exquisitely matched and strung together. The skill in so putting them together was peculiarly his, and is the more striking in that each little piece is separately perfect.

In general, it may be said that Schumann was at his best when working on this plan. The power over large forms came to him only later, after most of his pianoforte music had been written. The two sonatas, one in F sharp and one in G minor, both belong to the early period; and both, in spite of most beautiful passages, are, from the standpoint of artistic perfection, unsatisfactory. In neither are form and content properly matched. Exception must be made, however, for the Fantasia in C major, opus 17. Here, what was uncertainty or insincerity becomes an heroic freedom by the depth of ideas and the power of imagination which so found expression. The result is a work of immeasurable grandeur, unique in pianoforte literature.

After his marriage to Clara Wieck Schumann gave most of his attention to music for voice and for orchestra. In this later life belongs the concerto for piano and orchestra. No large concert piece in all piano literature is more truly musical and less factitious; no large work of any period in the history of music shows more economy in the use of musical material and means. In it Schumann is as completely sincere as in his smaller pieces, and, in addition, reveals what came more into view in his later years--the fine reserve and even classic sense of fitness in the man.

Mendelssohn as piano composer is universally known by his ‘Songs Without Words,’ a title which he invented in accordance with the fashion of the time. Like all the rest of his music, these pieces are less highly regarded now than a few decades ago. Modern music has passed far beyond the romanticism of the first half of the last century, and the ‘Songs Without Words,’ with all their occasional charm, have no one quality in sufficient proportion to make them historical landmarks. They are never heard on concert programs; their chief use is still in the instruction of children. Their finish and fluidity would not plead very strongly for them if it were not for the occasional beauty of their melodies. They remain chiefly as an indication of the better dilettante taste of the time. And, as Mr. Krehbiel has pointed out,[94] we should give generous credit to the music which was engagingly simple and honest in a time when the taste was all for superficial brilliance.

But Mendelssohn as a writer for the pianoforte is at his best in the Scherzos, the so-called ‘Elf’ or ‘Kobold’ pieces, a type in which he is in his happiest and freshest mood. One of these is a ‘Battle of the Mice,’ ‘with tiny fanfares and dances, all kinds of squeaks, and runnings to and fro of a captivating grace.’ Another is the well-known ‘Rondo Capriccioso,’ one of his best. In these ‘fairy pieces’ Mendelssohn derives directly from Schubert and the _Moments musicaux_. In the heavier pianoforte forms Mendelssohn had great vogue in his day, and Berlioz tells jestingly how the pianos at the Conservatory started to play the Concerto in G minor at the very approach of a pupil, and how the hammers continued to jump even after the instrument was demolished.

IV

The quality of the musical taste which Chopin and in part Liszt were combatting is forcibly brought out in the ‘Recollections of the Life of Moscheles,’ as quoted by Dr. Bie.[95] ‘The halls echo with jubilations and applause,’ he says, ‘and the audiences, especially the easily kindled Viennese, are enthusiastic in their cheers; and music has become so popular and the compositions so banal that it seldom occurs to them to condemn shallowness. The dilettantes push forward, the circle of instruction widens the cheaper and better the pianos become. They push themselves into rivalry with the artists, in great concerts. From professional piano-playing--and they often played at two places in an evening--the artists took recreation with the good temper which never failed in those years. The great singer Malibran would sit down to the piano and sing the “Rataplan” and the Spanish songs, to which she would imitate the guitar on the keyboard. Then she would imitate famous colleagues, and a Duchess greeting her, and a Lady So-and-so singing “Home, Sweet Home” with the most cracked and nasal voice in the world. Thalberg would then take his seat and play Viennese songs and waltzes with “obbligato snaps.” Moscheles himself would play with hand turned round, or with the fist, perhaps hiding the thumb under the fist. In Moscheles’ peculiar way of playing the thumb used to take the thirds under the palm of the hand.’

_From a study by Delacroix_

The piano recital of modern times was then unknown. It was not until 1838 that Liszt dared give a recital without the assistance of other artists, and it was not Liszt’s music so much as his overshadowing personality that made the feat possible then. Chopin, coming to Paris under excellent auspices, had little need to make a name for himself in the concert hall under these conditions, and, as we may imagine, had still less zest for it. He was chiefly in demand to play at private parties and aristocratic salons, where he frequently enough, no doubt, met with stupidity and lack of understanding, but where, at least, he was spared the noisy vulgarity of a musical vaudeville. Taking the best from his friends, and selecting the excellent from the atmosphere of the salons which he adorned, Chopin went on composing, living a life which offers little color to the biographer. By the time he had reached Paris in 1831 he had several masterpieces tucked away in his portfolio, but, though perfectly polished, they are of his weaker sentimental style. The more powerful Chopin, the Chopin of the polonaises, the ballades, the scherzos, and some of the preludes, was perhaps partly the result of the intimacy with George Sand, whose personality was of the domineering, masculine sort. But more probably it was just the development of an extraordinarily sensitive personality. At any rate, it was not long after his arrival in Paris that Chopin’s creative power had reached full vigor.

After that the chronology of the pieces counts for little. They can be examined by classes, and not by opus numbers, except for the posthumous pieces (following opus 65), which were withheld from publication during the composer’s life by his own wish, and were meant by him to be burned. They are, in almost every case, inferior to the works published during his lifetime. The works, grouped together, may be summed up as follows: over fifty mazurkas, fifteen waltzes, nearly as many polonaises, and certain other dances; nineteen nocturnes, twenty-five preludes, twenty-seven études, four ballades, four scherzos, five rondos, three impromptus, a berceuse, a barcarolle, three fantasias, three variations, four sonatas, two piano concertos, and a trio for piano and strings. All his works, then, except the Polish songs mentioned in the last chapter, are written primarily for the piano, a few having other instruments in combination or orchestral accompaniment, but the vast majority for piano alone.

The dances are highly variable in quality. Of the many mazurkas, some are almost negligible, while a few reveal Chopin’s use of the Polish folk-manner in high perfection. They are not a persistent part of modern concert programs. The waltzes, on the other hand, cannot be escaped; they are with us at every turn in modern life. Theorists have had fine battles over their musical value; some find in them the most perfect art of Chopin, and others regard them as mere glorified, superficial salon pieces. Certainly they concede more to mere outward display than do most of his compositions, and the themes sometimes border on the trivial. The posthumous waltzes are like Schubert’s in that they are apt to be thin in style with occasional rare beauties interspersed. Of the remaining waltzes, the most pretentious, such as the two in A flat, are extremely brilliant in design, offering to the executant, besides full opportunity for the display of dexterity, innumerable chances for nuance of effect (which are, of course, frequently abused, so that the dances become disjointed and specious caricatures of music). The waltz in A minor is far finer, containing the true emotional Chopin, by no means undignified in the dance form. No less fine is the hackneyed C-sharp minor waltz, in which the opportunities for legitimate refinement and variety of interpretation are infinite. These waltzes retain little of the feeling of the dance, despite the frequent buoyancy of their rhythm. Chopin was interested in emotional expression and extreme refinement of style; it mattered little to him by what name his piece might be called.

The Polonaises are a very different matter. Here we find a type of heroic expression which Liszt himself could not equal. The fine energy of the ‘Military’ polonaise in A major is universally known. The sound and fury of this piece is never cheap; it is the exuberant energy of genius. Even greater, if possible, are the polonaises in F sharp minor and in A flat major. No element in them falls below absolute genius. All of Liszt’s heroics never evoked from the piano such superb power. The sick and ‘pathological’ Chopin which is described to us in music primers is here hardly to be found--only here and there a touch of moody intensity, which is, however, never repressive. The Chopin of the waltzes and nocturnes would have been a man of weak and morbid refinement, all the more unhealthy because of his hypersensitive finesse. But, when we have added thereto the Chopin of the Polonaises, we have one of the two or three greatest, if not the very greatest, emotional poet of music. The Polonaises will stand forever as a protest against the supposition that Chopin’s soul was degenerate.

The traditional ‘sick’ Chopin is to be found _ipsissimus_ in the Nocturnes, the most popular, with the waltzes, of his works. In such ones as those in E flat or G the sentiment is that of a lad suffering from puppy-love and gazing at the moon. From beginning to end there is scarcely a bar which could correspond to the feelings of a physically healthy man. Yet we must remember that this sort of sentiment was quite in the fashion of the time. Byron had created of himself a myth of introspective sorrow. Only a few decades before, the Werther of Goethe’s novel, committing suicide in his suit of buff and blue, was being imitated by love-sick swains among all the fashionable circles which sought to do the correct thing. Chateaubriand and Jean Paul had cast their morbid spell over fashionable society, and this spell was not likely to pass away from the hectic Paris of the thirties while there were such men as Byron and Heine to bind it afresh each year with some fascinating book of verse. From such an influence a highly sensitive man like Chopin could not be altogether free. There is something in every artistic nature which can respond sympathetically to the claims of the morbid, for the reason that the artist is a man to feel a wide variety of the sensations that pertain to humanity. No one of the great creative musicians of the time was quite free from this morbid strain; in the sensitive, retiring Chopin it came out in its most effeminate guise. But the point is, it did not represent the whole of the man, nor necessarily any essential part of him. It was the response of his nervous organism to certain of the influences to which he was subject. Chopin may have been physiologically decadent or psychologically morbid; it is hardly a question for musicians. But his music, taken as a whole, does not prove a nature that was positively unhealthy. Its persistent emphasis of sensuousness and emotion makes it doubtless a somewhat unhealthy influence on the nerves of children; but the same could be said of many of the phases of perfectly healthy adult life. And, whatever may be the verdict concerning Chopin, we must admire the manner in which he held his powerful emotional utterance within the firm restraint of his aristocratic sense of fitness. If he has sores, he never makes a vulgar display of them in public.

The Preludes have a bolder and profounder note. They are the treasure-house of his many ideas which, though coming from the best of his creative spirit, could not easily find a form or external purpose for themselves. We may imagine that they are the selected best of his improvisation on his own piano, late at night. Some of them, like the prelude in D flat major (the so-called ‘raindrop’ prelude) he worked out at length, with conscientious regard for form. Others, like that in A major, were just melodies which were too beautiful to lose but were seemingly complete just as they stood. The marvellous prelude in C-sharp minor is the ultimate glorification of improvisation with all the charm of willful fancy and aimlessness, and all the stimulation of a sensitive taste which could not endure having a single note out of place. The Preludes are complete and unique; a careful listener can hear the whole twenty-six successively and retain a distinct impression for each. This is the supreme test of style in a composer, and in sense of style no greater composer than Chopin ever lived.

The Études deserve their name in that they are technically difficult and that the performer who has mastered them has mastered a great deal of the fine art of the pianoforte. But they are the farthest possible from being études in the pedagogical sense. It is quite true that each presents some particular technical difficulty in piano playing, but the dominance of this technical feature springs rather from the composer’s sense of style than from any pedagogical intent. Certainly these pieces could not be more polished, or in most cases, more beautiful, whatever their name and purpose. They may be as emotional as anything of Chopin’s, as the ‘Revolutionary’ étude in C minor, which, tradition says, was written in 1831 when the composer received news of the fall of Warsaw before the invading Russians. The steady open arpeggio of the bass is supposed to represent the rumble of conflict, and the treble melody alternately the cries of rage of the combatants and the prayers of the dying. But for the most part the Études are pure grace and ‘pattern music,’ with always that morose or emotional under-current which creeps into all Chopin’s music. The peculiar virtue of the Études, apart from their interest for the technician, consists in their exquisite grace and freedom combined with perfection of formal pattern.

In the miscellaneous group of larger compositions, which includes the Ballades, the Scherzos, the Fantasias, the Sonatas, and the Concertos, we find some of Chopin’s greatest musical thoughts. The Ballades are the musical narration of some fanciful tale of love or adventure. Chopin supplied no ‘program,’ and it is probable that he had none in mind when he composed them. But they tease us out of thought, making us supply our own stories for the musical narration. They have the power of compelling the vision of long vistas of half-remembered experiences--the very mood of high romance. The Scherzos show Chopin’s genius playing in characteristic perfection. They are not the ‘fairy scherzos’ of Mendelssohn, but vivid emotional experiences, and Schumann could well say of the first, ‘How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?’ Though they seem to be wholly free and fantastical in form, they yet are related to the traditional scherzo, not only in their triple rhythm, but in the general disposition of musical material. Traces of the old two-part song form, in which most of the scherzos of Beethoven were written, are evident, and also of the third part, called the Trio. On the other hand, elaborate transitional passages from one part back to another conceal or enrich the older, simpler form, and in all four there is a coda of remarkable power and fire. The Fantasia in B minor, long and intricate, is one of the most profoundly moving of all Chopin’s works; it leaves the hearer panting for breath, as though he had waked up from an experience which had sapped the energy of his soul. As for the Sonatas and the Concertos, Chopin’s detractors have tried to deny them any particular merit--or any excellence except that of incidental beauties. The assertion will hardly stand. Chopin’s strength was not in large-scale architecture, nor in what we might call ‘formal form.’ But the sonatas and concertos have a way of charming the hearer and freeing his imagination in spite of faulty structure, and one sometimes feels that, had a few more of them been written, they would have created the very standards of form on which they are to be judged. The famous ‘Funeral March’ was interpolated as a slow movement of the B flat minor sonata, with which it is always heard. Liszt’s eulogy of this may seem vainly extravagant to our materialistic time, but it represents exactly what happens to any one foolish enough to try to put into words the emotions stirred up by this wonderful piece.

Chopin, as we have said, played little in public. He said the public scared him. When he did play people were wont to complain that he could not be heard. They were used to the bombastic tone of Kalkbrenner. Chopin might have remedied this defect and made a successful concert performer out of himself, but his physical strength was always delicate and his artistic conscience, moreover, unwilling to permit forcing or grossness; so he continued to play too ‘softly.’ The explanation was his delicate finger touch, coming entirely from the knuckles except where detached chords were to be taken, when the wrists, of course, came into play. Those who were so fortunate as really to _hear_ Chopin’s playing had ecstasies of delight over this pearly touch, which made runs and florid decorations sound marvellously liquid and flute-like. No other performer before the public could do this. Chopin’s pupils were in this respect never more than pupils.

People complained, on hearing Chopin’s music played by others, that it had no rhythm, that it was all _rubato_. The inaccuracy of this was evident when Chopin played his own compositions. For the melody, the ornament, of the right hand might be _rubato_ as it pleased, but beneath it was a steady, almost mechanical operation of the left hand. It was a part of Chopin’s conscious method, and it is said he used a metronome in practising. The point is worth emphasizing because of the way it illuminates Chopin’s fine sense of self-control and fitness.

No technical method was ever more accurately suited to its task than Chopin’s. He grew up in the atmosphere of the piano, and ‘thought piano’ when composing music. He then drew on this and that piano resource until, by the time he had ended his short life, he had revealed the greater part of its potential musical possibilities--and always in what he had needed in the business of expressing his musical thoughts. With him the piano became utterly freed from the last traces of the tyranny of the polyphonic and chorale styles. But he supplied a polyphony of his own, the strangest, eeriest thing imaginable. It was the combination of two or three melodies, widely different and very beautiful, sometimes with the harmonic accompaniment added, sometimes with the harmony rising magically out of the counterpoint, but always in a new manner that was utterly pianistic. Chopin carried to its extreme the widely broken chord, as in the accompaniment to the major section of the ‘Funeral March.’

But it was in the art of delicate figuration (borrowed in the first place from Hummel) that Chopin was perhaps most himself. This, with Chopin, can be contained within no formula, can be described by no technical language. It was inexhaustible; it was eternally fluid, yet eternally appropriate. It somehow fused the utmost propriety of mood with the utmost grace of pattern. Even when it is most abundant, as in the F sharp major nocturne, it never seems exaggerated or in bad taste.

Harmonically Chopin was an innovator, at times a radical one. Here, again, he seemed to appropriate what he needed for the matter in hand, and exhibit no experimental interest in what remained. His free changes of key are graceful rather than sensuous, as with Schubert, and, when the modulation grows out of quasi-extemporaneous embellishment, as in the C sharp minor prelude, it melts with an ease that seems to come quite from the world of Bach. The later mazurkas anticipate the progressive harmonies of Wagner.

Much of his manner of playing, as well as the notion of the nocturne, Chopin got from the Scotchman, Field, who had fascinated European concert halls with his dreaming, quiet performance, and with the free melody of the nocturne genre which he had invented. From Hummel, as we have said, Chopin borrowed his embellishment, and from Cramer he chose many of the fundamentals of pianistic style. From the Italians (Italian opera included) he received his taste for long-drawn, succulent melody; in the composer of ‘Norma’ we see a poor relation of the aristocratic Pole. Thus from second and third-rate sources Chopin borrowed or took what he needed. He was surrounded by first-rate men, but dominated by none. He took what he wanted where he found it, but only what he wanted. He was constantly selecting--and rejecting. Therein he was the aristocrat.