conductor in those days.
[112] The author here uses a term to describe Dussek, which
I remove to the foot of the page, viz. _Epigonus_, which
means “one born after,” in the sense of a descendant who
merely continues his father’s work. Often it is equivalent
to our “decadent.”
[113] The author may perhaps refer to the Scherzi of Op. 2,
No. 3, in C, or Op. 7 in E flat.
[114] The student is not likely to find the passage marked
with this word, but the author is none the less correct in
his description, for it must be played so.
[115] See Op. 31, No. 3, first movement in E flat, bar 46
and ff.
[116] Apparently the passage referred to is the 10 bars
which precede the second subject, in the first movement of
the F sharp major sonata.
[117] Things corresponding to these expressions, which
convey scarcely anything in themselves, will be found in
this order in bars 1-3; bars 5, 6, 9, 10; bars 25, 26; bar
18, et cetera, of the first movement; and will illustrate
the author’s system of description.
[118] “Cancrizans” (_cancer_, a crab), is an adjective
applied to a tune that is the _same_ whether you play it
from the beginning to the end, or the reverse way. Here it
is used to characterise some rather mild reversions of the
theme, _e.g._--first section with two sharps, bars 15-17.
[119] This appears to be a subtle reference to the
“inversion” of the subject when the fugue is resumed.
The “individual” must learn to see things right side up,
knowing they are upside down!
[120] Thirteen bars from the end of the movement. _N.B._--A
curious instance of “cribbing” on the part of Chopin stands
confessed in the following passage.
[Illustration: Viennese pianoforte players about 1800. Eberl. Gelinek.
Wölffl. ]
The Virtuosos
Beethoven’s playing was naturalistic. In him there were no tricks
of technique to be admired, no mere virtuosity to praise; but the
hearers were stirred to their hearts. In this storm and stress, this
whispering and listening, this awakening of the soul, they recognised
an original naturalism of piano-playing, standing by the side of the
naturalism of his creative art. Rhythm was the life of his playing. He
thought out all technique with a view to rhythm. In the Berlin Library
is a collection of Cramer’s Études, containing a series of annotations
by Schindler, the well-known biographer of Beethoven. The expressions
are so remarkable that the spirit of Beethoven has not unjustly been
detected in them. Shedlock, in fact, has published them simply as
Beethoven’s elucidations of Cramer, whose Études the Master is known
to have prized exceedingly. In every Étude the _melos_, or latent
melodic air, which lies at the base of the figurations, is brought
into prominence, and the rhythmical presentation of these figurations
is made as accurate as possible. The rest is for the most part left to
the time, the diligence, and the ability of the player. Thus could a
great creator look at Études. Of necessity he looked at them from a
totally different point of view from the virtuoso pure and simple. He
cared chiefly for the presentation of the idea, for the inwardness of
the piece. Everything that was written down in concrete notes served
to him but as a means for that expression, the mastery of which was
the mastery of interpretation. From this point of view Beethoven would
have written his “Klavierschule,” of which he often spoke in his
latter years. With mere fingering and wrist action he would have had
little indeed to do.
This great task was undertaken by a band of artists who must not
be undervalued. They stood in the first rank of virtuosos. It is
precisely at this time that technique first properly arises as an
art; and their zeal in the attempt to solve the new problem was great
indeed. They discover new possibilities of expression, they disclose
new effects in the capacities of the pianoforte, and they reveal an
inventive power in these new paths which offers the most surprising
beauties. We must consider them from the right side, and never forget
that the development of the piano could never have taken place so
naturally and organically unless its technical advance had gone on in
parallel lines with its spiritual progress.
I have here no other aim than to view things under a certain _species
aeternitatis_. What was done by Bird, Bull, Couperin, or Pasquini,
though to-day perhaps only one in a thousand piano-players knows their
names, was of more importance than a Polacca of Kalkbrenner or an
Étude of Ludwig Berger. We have a fixed horizon; what is not within
it remains outside it. Lives of entire and rich content, sorrows and
joys of extreme intensity, may sink into oblivion; they are in history
a mere grain in the quicksand. It is useless to look up in my index
the name of everybody who has composed a Rondo or given piano-lessons
in Moscow. We must content ourselves with those who, by the great
halting-places, have deserved a monument on the way: those only
without whom history would offer a distinct blank.
A very great work is represented by the theoretical piano-schools,
which followed one another at this time in close succession. If in
the little book of Philip Emanuel Bach there was the beginning of a
unifying system, on which the following age had only to build, yet,
in the face of the most varying theories of the first half of our
century, we can but recognise that piano-teaching, from mere excess of
zeal, never succeeded in developing a genuine system. It has always
been the tendency of the piano-teacher to keep in the past an ideal to
worship, while with the present he has such a poor understanding that
every new method of instruction makes a _tabula rasa_ of the preceding
method, begins all afresh, and allows the pupil salvation only
according to its private judgment. Piano-study has never enjoyed the
advantage possessed by other sciences, of building up from century to
century, each upon the last. In theory it has remained a mere mosaic;
and it has been saved only by practice.
It is practice also that gives a certain systematisation, not to the
teaching, but to the history of teaching. All the separate workers
at the great task, little as they admit the possibility of salvation
outside their own creed, are yet driven forward by the stream of time
and by the results of experience; and the law of averages brings about
a clear advance apart from their personal agency. If we compare the
systems of the eighteenth century, the schools of Philip Emanuel, of
Marpurg, and that of Daniel Gottlob Türk, which closes this series,
with the works of the epoch on which we have now entered, we see
clearly how practice has marked out the path for theory, always
reflecting upon itself, itself inducing its decomposition into its
constituent _à priori_ and empirical parts, and finally limiting
itself to a mere application of experience.
The Pianoforte School which was written by Adam was a kind of
pronunciamento of the Paris Conservatoire. This Conservatoire, founded
in the midst of the troubles of the Revolution, ultimately gave French
technique a position to which for a long time it had been a stranger.
Adam’s principle is to put the “manieren” more on one side, and to
avoid that too eager devotion to the teaching of general composition
with which the books of the eighteenth century had been occupied. In
its place he brings the study of touch more prominently forward. The
day of the spinet is over; the hammer-clavier now dominates the world,
and leads theorists to attempt methods of touch which may correspond
to its possibilities of delicate expression. The pedals also begin
to play their part. Adam recognises four pedals, of which one is our
damper-raiser, and three serve for soft effects. Gradually they have
been reduced to two, the damper-raiser and the so-called “soft” pedal.
* * * * *
A great opponent of all use of the pedal was Hummel. In our time
it is no longer necessary to point out that the pedal, an integral
part of the hammer-clavier, deserves not to be rejected, but simply
to be treated on its own artistic lines. But Hummel stands, in his
theoretic relations, so strongly on the foundations of tradition,
that his attitude can excite no surprise. His “Ausführliche
theoretisch-praktische Anweisung zum Pianofortespiel,” which appeared
in 1828, is the crown of the united exertions of piano theory. This
voluminous work, which gained with difficulty a circulation that
it soon lost for ever, is a system, carried out into the minutest
details, of all the technical capacities of the piano; so systematic,
indeed, that here theory, by deductive methods, discovered effects
which practice could not have attained alone. It is an unparalleled
example of theoretic speculation, and yet really nothing more than
the extension of Marpurg’s or Türk’s old-fashioned methods. These
countless headings in capital letters, each describing a different
class of “passage,” these numbered possibilities of fingering, these
pedantic elucidations, beginning always from the first over again,
are nothing but, as he calls them, an “Anweisung,” mere directions,
abstraction from reflection outward. Any one who has mastered the
first part has the second already at his fingers’ ends, but this
master of dissection troubles himself not a whit on that point, and
knows no economy in pupilage. He is opposed to learning by heart,
since the fingers, he says, ought to find the keys without sight: so
far is he from the modern view that only a complete mastery of a piece
renders adequate interpretation possible. He troubles himself little
about a science of touch. He introduces the “manieren”; but, contrary
to the method of the eighteenth century, he makes the trill begin
on the upper note. So far is a system of execution from his purpose
that he can actually write as follows: “Runs and notes going upwards
are executed crescendo, downwards diminuendo; but there are cases in
which the composer intends the reverse, or that they should be played
with even strength.” Hummel’s book is to-day a monument of misguided
diligence, great in its patient calculation of permutations, but a
dead curiosity.
[Illustration: The Brothers Pixis. 1800. Engraved by Sintzenich after
Schröder.]
If, on the other hand, we look at Kalkbrenner’s Paris Pianoforte
School, which he dedicated “to all the conservatoriums in Europe,” we
see--with no heavy artillery--advances of all kinds which in part
fill up the perspective of Adam. Where Hummel has ten main classes
of fingered passages, he has only six; five-finger exercises for the
unmoving hand; scales in all forms; thirds, sixths, and chord-forms;
octaves with the wrist; trills; overlapping of the hands. In this
there is more thrift, while there is no talk of absolute completeness.
The “manieren” slowly cease to occupy important chapters; the pedals
again come by their own; for Kalkbrenner as a Parisian hates the dry
tone of the Vienna pianoforte. Execution also begins to receive a
systematic treatment. Interesting references are made to punctuation
in order to illustrate musical phraseology; conclusions on the tonic
are a full stop; on the dominant a semicolon; while interrupted
cadences are a note of exclamation. This is naive enough, but it is at
any rate a beginning.
We are thus already standing at the point at which clavier theory
decomposes itself into its elements. If Hummel was the great
theoretician, Czerny was the great man of practice; a quite unique
person, the hero of all piano-teachers, whose practical eye runs
equally over all the possibilities of playing, and works them out in
separate parts; the genius of the Étude. He it was who discovered
the great secret that no separation of methods of fingering is of
any avail in practice, but that the perfection of the fingers must
be carried out solely on the basis of their mechanical gymnastic. It
is useless to try to apply my five fingers to so many theoretically
possible permutations; the important question is what practical use
can be made of my fingers according to their physical structure.
Czerny has no obsolete rules of practice, but a science of mechanism;
thus taking the very opposite pole to Hummel. Piano-study, which with
Couperin and Philip Emanuel was still a part of a musical training
with just the necessary amount of mechanics, became with him primarily
the gymnastic of the fingers with the addition of instruction in touch
and execution. Long past are the times when the good old clavier
was only used to “fill” the song, which was after all the essence
of music. From music we have come to the fingers. A science of
the fingers is constructed, and the fingers are trained as earlier
only the throat was trained. Technique has remembered her own ways,
and made the last first. The emancipation of finger-gymnastic was
an epoch-marking point in the treatment of the piano, the desired
answer of theory to practice, which for a long time had recognised
the specific art of the piano. It was perhaps the last important
stride in its emancipation when the results of practice were made the
groundwork of instruction. Czerny, in his great Pianoforte School,
his Opus 500, is almost entirely free from the _à priori_ theory. He
transfers mechanics to music. With good results he treats individual
cases, as for example, when he appends to the beginning of passages
a finger-exercise not given in the scale; he designs immediately to
return to the usual fingering in order to arrive duly at the extreme
notes with the extreme fingers, and to avoid unnecessary underpassing.
It was reserved for a later time not merely to bring the note-material
lying before us into harmony with economic fingering, but also to
make execution, which with Czerny has but a loose dependence on the
finger-exercise, re-act upon the fingers. Bülow, for example, is fond
of unusual fingering, in which the execution forbids any too easy
playing, and a too loose rendering is prevented by irregularities in
the succession of the fingers.
* * * * *
The mechanics of the fingers formed the first part of
piano-instruction; touch and execution were the second. Their
importance as means to the mechanism of music was fully seen; and
in the “Technical Studies” of Plaidy, or in Köhler’s “Methode für
Klavierspiel und Musik” (1857), they are as exhaustively handled
as before had been the “manieren” or the thorough-bass. The former
contents himself with the simple terms, Legato, Staccato, Legatissimo,
and Portamento; the latter gives a more mechanical division, always
according to the use of the fore-arm, the finger-joints, the wrist, or
the elbow. Neither is complete, neither supplies a systematic advance
on the lines of his predecessors; and we should be astonished at these
divergences if we set the numerous schools of these times, from a
theoretical point of view, over against one another. Practically
considered, however, they agree well enough. The holding of the
hand as enjoined by Philip Emanuel Bach has remained on the whole
unaltered down to the present day. With trifling differences, which
concern the relation of the extreme fingers to the middle finger,
and the profile of the back of the hand, Bach, Türk, Müller, Hummel,
Logier, Kalkbrenner and the rest, are at one as to the support of
the arm which carries the hand, and of the hand which carries the
fingers as they descend. In Paris Logier constructed an instrument to
hold the hand in practice, in shape like a bracket, which he named
“chiroplast.” Kalkbrenner, in his “Guide-mains,” introduced some
modifications on the chiroplast; but such mechanical contrivances
gained no general acceptance. Logier’s speciality was his prefatory
note that the finger must remain in continual touch with the key. With
this was allied that special kind of sensuously charming touch which
differentiated the Parisian school from the brilliant playing of the
Viennese and the emotional style of the English. That _carezzando_,
or stroking of the keys, was a favourite practice of Kalkbrenner and
Kontski in Paris. To-day Risler remains perhaps alone in this school
with his pure sensuous charm of touch.
If, in the whole great group of technical artists, which is bounded
on the one side by Wölffl, Wanhal, Kozeluch, Eberl, in Mozart’s
generation, and on the other by Thalberg and Liszt in ours, we should
look for truly pre-eminent spirits, then we should have remaining
Clementi, the father of all technique; Hummel, the inventor of the
modern piano-exercise; and Czerny, the genius of teaching. But if we
ask for the lines of the motion which runs through this epoch, we
observe the victory of a virtuoso impulse, which goes back to Hummel,
over a plainer and more intellectual tendency which has its rise in
Clementi. The school of Clementi prefers the English pianoforte with
its heavier but richer touch; that of Hummel the Viennese, with its
lighter tone, which lends itself more easily to effects.
[Illustration: Ludwig Berger. Pupil of Clementi; founder of a widely
influential piano-school at Berlin. Lithograph by Wildt.]
But it is not possible to draw a sharp line between the two groups.
A Moscheles serves not less the spirit of Clementi than that of
Hummel. The simplicity of Cramer, the counterpoint of Klengel, the
plainness of Ludwig Berger, the intensity of Field, belong to the
circle of Clementi’s influence. Berger’s pupils, Greulich, Heinrich
Dorn, Wilhelm Taubert, Albert Löschhorn, whose studies still live,
carry this style down to our own time. The teaching of Hummel lived
on in Ferdinand Hiller, Benedict, Wilmers, Baake, Ernst Pauer, the
Viennese Pixis. While Beethoven left behind him as actual pupils
only the Archduke Rudolf and Ferdinand Ries, a respectable imitator,
his temporary pupil Czerny passed over into the wake of Hummel, and
brought the Viennese style to a final victory. Kalkbrenner, Moscheles,
Weber, Liszt, Thalberg, Döhler, Madame Oury, Madame Pleyel, Theodore
Kullak, Pollini, of whom many belong externally to Clementi’s school,
passed as apostles of Viennese technique to all lands from St
Petersburg to London, from Paris to Milan.
Certain traditions of musical coteries and centres of instruction
exhibit with this international character some more or less important
local groups. In Prague men adored Tomaschek, the composer of
Eclogues and Rhapsodies; Dionysius Weber, the first director of a
Conservatorium there; and his successor Kittl. From Tomaschek’s school
proceeded Alexander Dreyschock, the specialist of the left hand; Ignaz
Tedesco, the “Hannibal of octaves”; and Schulhoff, the fashionable
composer. In the middle of the century the Prague tradition was upheld
by Proksch.
In Frankfort lived Vollweiler, who enjoyed a widespread renown as a
teacher, and later went to St Petersburg; and Aloys Schmitt, whose
delicate Études have been taken up by Bülow into his great collection
of educational pieces.
Vienna alternates, but never loses in wealth. Berlin and St Petersburg
as yet produced no fixed or permanent school. Leipzig takes its
colour from the foundation of the Conservatorium with Mendelssohn and
Moscheles and their fellow-citizen Schumann. England, from Clementi
to Moscheles, imported a constant succession of Continental artists.
The influence of the Conservatorium runs far and wide. A Strassburger
named Hüllmandel, who took up his abode in Paris in 1776, had started
clavier-instruction there. His pupil Jadin was director of the piano
at the new Conservatoire. For forty-six years after 1797, Adam, whose
name we remember because of his improved piano-school, carried on
his labours in Paris. He was a tasteful professor, and brought the
Parisian renown to its height. Kalkbrenner, the acrobat, succeeded
him. Adam’s colleague, Pradher, was the teacher of those worst of
fashionable composers, Herz, Hünten, Rosellen, shallowest and emptiest
of musicians. Within the same walls was a Chopin!
The life of the great virtuosos is a reflection of the unrest
inseparable from their calling. It is indeed no longer a life of
adventure, as with Marchand and Froberger; there is method in the
madness. The life of the executant, no less than the execution,
has found its form. The concert-campaigns are the foundation; the
warrior returns to his home at greater and greater intervals; until
at last, when delight in recitals has waned along with the pliancy
of the fingers, some resting-place or other is found--a share in
a piano-manufactory or a steady round of instruction. During the
campaigns instruction also takes a kind of locomotive form; devoted
pupils follow the master, and leave him at fitting places, to pitch
their tents there and make room for other peregrinating pupils. Or,
on the other hand, pupils swarm from all parts of the earth to a
place which the Master is always leaving, but to which he constantly
returns--like the summer students of German universities--a type of
professional existence of which Liszt’s Weimar period gives perhaps
the most famous exemplification.
[Illustration: John Field, 1782-1837. Steel engraving by C. Mayer.]
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) was the first to exhibit this form of
virtuoso-life on the great scale. Born in Italy, he found a home in
London through the support of a wealthy Englishman; but he was far
from showing the sedentary character of a Bach, a Couperin, or a
Beethoven. Virtuosity impels to travel, as composition keeps a man at
home. The difference which we observed between the sensitive anchorite
Bach and the cosmopolitan popularity-hunter Handel, appears again
between Beethoven and these executants. Mozart was too many-sided,
and besides he died too young, to become a universal teacher of the
piano; but Clementi lived almost three generations, during which half
Europe grouped itself round him and his pupils. Down to 1780 he was
still “cembalist” at the London Italian opera; during the next ten
years he undertook two great tours, one to Vienna, the other to Paris.
Meanwhile he became partner in an English piano-firm, which failed,
whereupon he founded one of his own along with Collard. He set out for
St Petersburg with his pupil Field; left him there; but on the way
gained two new pupils, Berger and Klengel, whom also he established
in St Petersburg. On one of his tours at Berlin he married, only to
lose his wife shortly after. In 1810 he made another circular tour
through Vienna and Italy. He spent another whole winter in Leipzig,
and married a second time. His last years, when the world had outgrown
him, he spent quietly in London.
In the life of Hummel (1778-1837), the favourite pupil of Mozart,
posts as kapellmeister with Esterhazy, in Stuttgart and in Weimar,
with a longer, unattached residence at Vienna, regulated the
varying domiciles at which he lived. Weimar, as a great resting
place, enjoyed through him its first musical renown, which reached
half through the period of Goethe. In the intervals he took his
concert-tours to Dresden, Paris, Holland, Berlin, Belgium, England,
Scotland, and St Petersburg. These, as far as the furloughs of a
kapellmeister permitted, recurred with a certain regularity, till they
gradually ceased entirely.
[Illustration: Marcelline Czartoryska, _née_ Princess Radziwill, pupil
of Czerny. Engraved by Marchi.]