I'm an old, old man. I've seen the world of sights, and I've listened
eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, maddening
concourse of tones civilized Caucasians agree is the one, the only art.
I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled--doesn't Walt
Whitman say that somewhere?--I've even rioted in Verdi. Ah, you are
surprised! You fancied I knew my Czerny _et voilà tout_? Let me have
your ear. I've run the whole gamut of musical composers. I once swore by
Meyerbeer. I came near worshiping Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I
am willing to acknowledge that _Die Meistersinger_ is the very apex of a
modern polyphonic score. I adored Spohr and found good in Auber. In a
word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like
measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and the mumps.
As I grew older my task clarified. Having admired Donizetti, there was
no danger of being seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni.
Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not
for an instant impose on me. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who
not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping
his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being
violently self-conscious, I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous
critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's music to
another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why
did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more
than Beethoven? At last, one day, and not many years ago, I cried aloud,
"Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless
limbs of these classicists, these modern men. Bach--once, last, and all
the time."
And so it came about that with my prying nose I dipped into all
composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the
exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations. If much Bach,
then granted talent, the man reared a solid structure. If no Bach, then
no matter how brilliant, how meteoric, how sensational the talents,
smash came tumbling down the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's
hastily erected palace. Whether it is Perosi--who swears by Bach and
doesn't understand or study him--or Mascagni or Massenet, or any of the
new school, the result is the same. Bach is the touchstone. Look at
Verdi, the Verdi of _Don Carlo_ and the Verdi who planned and built
_Falstaff_. Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale--surely one of
the most astounding operatic codas in existence--that carries me away.
It is the general texture of the work, its many voices, like the sweet
mingled roar of Buttermilk Falls, that draws me to _Falstaff_. It is
because of Bach that I have forsworn my dislike of the later Wagner, and
unlearned my disgust at his overpowering sensuousness. The web he spins
is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so admirable,
that I have grown very fond of _The Mastersingers_.
Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test
for modern piano music. The monophonic has been done to the death by a
whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they
wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of
students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the
quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have
retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure,
built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been
invented, or rather re-discovered--for in Bach all were latent--but,
confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait
for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like
movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic life. It is only in a few
latter-day composers that I find music that moves, that sings, that
thrills.
How did I discover that Bach was in the very heart of Wagner? In the
simplest manner. I began playing the _E-flat minor Prelude_ in the first
book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_, and lo! I was transported to the
opening of _Götterdämmerung_.
Pretty smart boy that Richard Geyer to know his Bach so well! Yet the
resemblance is far fetched, is only a hazy similarity. The triad of
E-flat minor is common property, but something told me Wagner had been
browsing on Bach; on this particular prelude had, in fact, got a
starting point for the Norn music. The more I studied Wagner, the more I
found Bach, and the more Bach, the better the music. Chopin knew his
Bach backwards, hence the surprisingly fresh, vital quality of his
music, despite its pessimistic coloring. Schumann loved Bach and built
his best music on him, Mendelssohn re-discovered him, whilst Beethoven
played the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ every day of his life.
All _my_ pupils study the _Inventions_ before they play Clementi or
Beethoven, and what well-springs of delight are these two- and
three-part pieces! Take my word for it, if you have mastered them you
may walk boldly up to any of the great, insolent forty-eight
sweet-tempered preludes and fugues and overcome them. Study Bach say I
to every one, but study him sensibly. Tausig, the greatest pianist the
world has yet heard, edited about twenty preludes and fugues from the
Clavichord. These he gave his pupils _after_ they had played Chopin's
opus 10. Strange idea, isn't it? Before that they played the
_Inventions_, the symphonies, the _French_ and _English
Suites_--Klindworth's edition of the latter is excellent--and the
_Partitas_. Then, I should say, the Italian concert and that excellent
three-voiced fugue in A minor, so seldom heard in concert. It is
pleasing rather than deep in feeling, but how effective, how brilliant!
Don't forget the toccatas, fantasias, and capriccios. Such works as _The
Art of Fugue_ and others of the same class show us Father Bach in his
working clothes, earnest if not exactly inspired.
But in his moments of inspiration what a genius! What a singularly happy
welding of manner and matter! The _Chromatic Fantasia_ is to me greater
than any of the organ works, with the possible exception of the _G
minor Fantasia_. Indeed, I think it greater than its accompanying _D
minor Fugue_. In it are the harmonic, melodic, and spiritual germs of
modern music. The restless tonalities, the agitated, passionate,
desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are
not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashion as
to beggar imitation?
Let us turn to the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ and bow the knee of
submission, of admiration, of worship. I use the Klindworth, the Busoni
and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny. I think
it was the latter who once excited my rage when I found the C sharp
major prelude transposed to the key of D flat! This outrageous
proceeding pales, however, before the infamous behavior of Gounod, who
dared--the sacrilegious Gaul!--to place upon the wonderful harmonies of
the master of masters a cheap, tawdry, vulgar tune. Gounod deserved
oblivion for this. I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude
myself that I prefer certain preludes, certain fugues, but a few hours'
study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated with _its_
beauties. We have all played and loved the _C minor Prelude_ in Book
one--Cramer made a study on memories of this--and who has not felt happy
at its wonderful fugue! Yet a few pages on is a marvelous _Fugue in C
sharp minor_ with five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a
little distance and you land in the _E flat Fugue_ with its
assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering,
gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been
written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in
F? Its germ is perhaps the _F major Invention_, the eighth. A marked
favorite of mine is the fifteenth fugue in G. There's a subject for you
and what a jolly length!
Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky
and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the _B-flat Prelude
and Fugue_? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He
made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the
air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then
celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is
packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the _B-flat
minor Prelude_? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.
I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any
particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by
the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience! But
before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so
freely, so profoundly, so poignantly.
Touching on his technics, I may say that they require of the pianist's
fingers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is
spiritual as well as material. The diligent daily study of Bach will
form your style, your technics, better than all machines and finger
exercises. But play him as if he were human, a contemporary and not a
historical reminiscence. Yes, you may indulge in _rubato_. I would
rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin. Play Bach as if he still
composed--he does--and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of
performance. He would alter all that if he were alive today.
I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print. The
story was related to me by a pupil of Reinecke, and Reinecke got it from
Mendelssohn. Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every
day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons,
headed by the naughty Friedmann, resolved to play a joke on their good
old father. Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the
bellows-blower away, and started in to give the Master a surprise. They
tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a long
rope fastened to the outside knob they pulled the door open and shut,
and of course the wind ran low. Johann Sebastian--who looked more like
E. M. Bowman than E. M. B. himself--suddenly found himself clawing
ivory. He rose and went softly to the rear. Discovering no blower, he
investigated, and began to gently haul in the line. When it was all in
several boys were at the end of it. Did he whip them? Not he. He locked
the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade them blow. They did.
Then the archangel of music went back to his bench and composed the
famous _Wedge_ fugue. How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is
quaint enough. Let me end this exhortation by quoting some words of
Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: "If you want music for
your own and music's sake--look up to Bach. If you want music which is
as absolutely full of meaning as an egg is full of meat--look up to
Bach."
Look up to Bach. Sound advice. Profit by it.