a sojourn at Paris occupied the years from 1832 to 1845. He found a
secondary occupation in a London musical house, in which he was a
partner from 1828 to 1842. Kalkbrenner (1784-1849), on the contrary,
lived in Paris, but his residence there was interrupted by a nine
years’ stay in London (1814-1823). He too had secondary interests. He
was concerned with Logier in a company for the exploitation of the
“Chiroplast,” and he had also a share in a piano-factory. Moscheles
(1794-1870) had no business. His external life was made up of his
youthful time in Vienna with Beethoven and Meyerbeer, his sensational
Parisian recitals of 1820, his glorious stay in London from 1821
to 1846, and his professoriate at the Leipzig Conservatorium. At
intervals, of course, he made Continental concert-tours.
Among all the great virtuosos and teachers only Czerny had a really
fixed abode (1791-1857). As a boy of fifteen he was already a teacher
in Vienna, and as such he died there; his tours also being few and far
between.
[Illustration: Prince Louis Ferdinand. Engraved by Geiger after
Grassy.]
But Czerny is in this respect an exception. Otherwise the
international play of virtuosity led to an exchange and co-operation,
to the mutual curiosity and desire to learn, which mark the
concert-life of that age. Duet-playing by great executants, in private
or in the concert-hall, is nothing unusual throughout this time. But
the genuine interpreter does not as yet exist. The player has mostly
a personal interest in the piece performed, and the friends assist at
the christening. It is the time of the Hexameron. Exchange is often
even too self-abnegatory. Moscheles composed for Cramer (with whom,
as also with Ries and Kalkbrenner, he often played duets) a last
movement for Cramer’s own sonata for two pianofortes. Later on he
took the piece back again and tacked it on to his well-known piece,
“Hommage à Haendel!” We need not then be surprised at such gruesome
pasticcios as the programme of a London Philharmonic concert under
Weber,[121] when were played the C sharp minor concerto of Ries, the E
flat major of Beethoven, and the Hungarian Rondo of Pixis.
The two volumes of “Recollections of the life of Moscheles,” which
his wife compiled from diaries and letters, give a clear view of the
rich international concert-life of this age. Year by year we follow
the kaleidoscopic existence of these artists, who see each other
constantly and constantly part. Triumphs of virtuosity fill the winter
seasons, followed by recreation in the country and preparations for
an enlarged repertoire. The halls echo with jubilation and applause;
and the audiences, especially the easily-kindled Viennese, are
enthusiastic in their cheers. Music has become so popular and the
compositions are so extraordinarily banal that it certainly did not
often occur that they were rejected for shallowness--although, on
the other hand, Kalkbrenner’s experience with a Beethoven symphony
at a Paris Conservatoire concert was a sad warning to those who try
to improve the public taste. The dilettantes push forward the more,
the circle of instruction widens the cheaper and better the pianos
become. They push themselves into rivalry with the artists in great
concerts; as Moscheles relates of the celloist Sir William Curtis and
the pianists Oom and Mrs Fleming. “I have to hear so much insipid
music.” “Musique mise à la portée de tout le monde.” 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
“obligato snaps.” Moscheles himself would play with hand turned round,
or with the fist; perhaps under the fist disguising the thumb, which
in Moscheles’ peculiar way of playing used to take the thirds under
the palm of the hand.
[Illustration: Marie Charlotte Antoine Josephe, Countess of
Questenberg.]
These players preferred to play their own compositions. The separation
between composer and virtuoso was not yet complete. Of course, when
Ferdinand Hiller in his “Life of an Artist” says that he had never
heard either Hummel or Chopin, Thalberg or Moscheles, play a piece
by another composer, his experience was at least unique. Moscheles,
for example, even played Scarlatti on the old harpsichord. But, as a
rule, they abode by the old custom, so far at least as amateurs were
not concerned. These latter were in their instruction-books liberally
provided with historical material.
Improvisation also flourished in concerts and soirées; and playing and
composing, which in improvisation form a true union, can only with
difficulty be severed in an age of creative virtuosos. Kalkbrenner
composed while playing, and played while composing, so that no one
could tell the difference between the two; and Czerny used to invent
the necessary étude in the midst of the lesson. Thus it happened--a
state of things unparalleled to-day--that the beloved duet-playing
could be combined with the equally beloved improvisation--mutually
contradictory as they appear. Moscheles speaks of an improvised duet
with Mendelssohn. The latter played in the bass some English songs in
ballad-style; the former interwove in the treble the scherzo of his
friend’s A minor symphony.
Slight as was the advance yet made in division of labour between
player and composer, there was equally little comprehensive division
between the species of music. We do not hear of chamber-music
evenings, pianoforte evenings, orchestral concerts. All was mingled
in one; and chamber-music finds the same audience as the symphony. A
piano-recital without orchestra was a rarity; and the concerto-form
is almost _de règle_ in all the greater performances. This is seen in
the compositions of this period, which, as a rule, so far as they are
specially adapted to public performance, were written for orchestral
accompaniment. By their side were editions for private use, including
the important orchestral portions. This concerto-piece could not
greatly or permanently aid in the advance of a delicate or intimate
piano-music. Through the rarity of special piano recitals it was
not so easy to get pianos when they were wanted. In Frankfort there
lived a well-known old lady who had absolutely the only piano store
in the city. People had to praise her playing, to blow the trumpet of
advertisement for her wares (they were Streicher’s), to court her and
cringe to her in order to get an instrument for a concert.[122]
In 1837 Moscheles ventured to introduce piano-evenings without
orchestra. This was an important step. But even yet the evening was
not wholly devoted to the piano. A soprano or contralto filled the
gap between one performance and the next. How long was it before the
serious nature of a concert was universally acknowledged! Possibly
here the production of dubious works of the performer’s own led to a
low, acrobatic conception of the true state of affairs; and it was
only the interpretation of good works by others, which were more
serious, that saved taste from complete degeneration. The public
gradually became quiet, and felt itself turned from educator into
educated. The court ceases to take its supper during the playing;[123]
the cantatrice no longer concludes her _roulades_ with a smile worthy
of the circus; and a singer is no longer hissed off the stage if he
forgets to give his hand by way of thanks to his fair partner. Slowly
it is realised that the concert is not a place for showing off, nor a
mere form of social amusement, but a religious service.
This composite structure of virtuosity carried to the extent of
vapidity, and of interpretation carried into historical research,
is reflected in the compositions of the period. On the one side the
tradition was exactly carried on; people began to view the existing
classical works--Mozart’s and Beethoven’s Sonatas, or all kinds of
pieces by Scarlatti, Bach, and Handel, as material for study; they
republished half-forgotten or badly edited authors like Scarlatti;
they even wrote sonatas “in the style of Scarlatti”; they arranged for
the piano great quantities of the most various chamber or orchestral
music. Alongside of the historical tendency stands, as so often, the
international. Spanish, Irish, Russian, Italian, Polish national airs
and rhythms are taken _en_ _masse_ into the circle of salon music;
the air swarms with Polonaises, Boleros, Gipsy airs, Ecossaises,
Tarantelles. But this quite cosmopolitan music was stamped by a
_fade_ enthusiasm for beauty; and there is bound up with the pieces
an empty sentimental greeting or a hypocritical reminiscence. The
mythological titles of the seventeenth century, and the realistic
ones of the eighteenth, yield to the sentimental ones[124] of the
bourgeois empire. But never was this system of naming pieces on a
lower level; and never did it so corrupt the taste of the believing
multitude. Even to-day we are not yet freed from its traces. Then
there are the “Hommages à Beethoven” or “à Händel” corresponding
to the old “Tombeaux,” but with less sincerity of intention. Then
there are the “Fire pieces”--a whole collection of dedications to
fire brigades--the “Burning of Mariazell,” and the “Ruins of Wien
Neustadt,” figure among the salon-music of Czerny. Then follow the
geographical recollections--the innumerable souvenirs of all possible
towns, rivers, mountains, and people, such as the “Souvenir de mon
premier voyage,” “les Charmes de Paris,” “le Retour à Londres,” etc.
By their side are genuine characteristic titles chiefly employed
to gild the pill of the “study.” Most objectionable of all are the
favourite opera-fantasias, which are specially in vogue in the
Parisian school. These tear the airs almost from the very mouths of
the singers, and the composer’s completed melodies from his work, and
stuff the _pot pourri_ with passages, figurations, and fragments of
études, with spurious slow introductions and sentimental passages, so
that finally absolutely nothing of the essence of the original airs is
left. These are perhaps the worst examples of want of style and taste
to be found in the history of art. Here the curse of popularity came
home to roost; here was reached the extreme point, in the publicity
of the concert and of society, which the clavier had to pass through
since the development of the hammer-mechanism. Any harshness in an
artistic work was sufficient to condemn it; invention was tabooed;
smoothness and the tickling of the ear were the only law. What in
Paris was done by Herz, Hünten, Karr, Rosellen, Kontski, and their
fellows, made a great sensation, and quickly vanished. Hünten received
for a moderate-sized work from fifteen hundred to two thousand francs;
to-day he is banished even from the salon. Karr wrote to order
hundreds of pieces; to-day no amateur knows a single one out of the
huge mass. And the days in which Kontski’s “Reveil du lion” was put in
the hands of pupils appear to be past for ever.
The interdependence of piano and opera was not merely external. In
Paris the opera, with its world-ruling influence, not merely forms a
musical centre to which everything gravitates; it is itself subjected
to the great law of this period--the law of mosaic work and of the
aim to please. In the thirties and forties the world had thus reached
hollow ostentation in the grand opera, and in the comic opera mere
ballet-dancing. “Where,” wrote Wagner at that time, “where has the
grace of Méhul, of Isouard, of Boieldieu, and of the young Auber
gone, chased out of sight by the abject quadrille rhythms, which
to-day rattle through the theatre of the opera comique and keep
everything else out?” What was seen there was like what was heard
on the pianoforte--pointless situations, introduced for the sake of
the “business,” tirades which seem to be closed with the smile of
the acrobat when he has finished his trick--technique, and nothing
but technique. A librettist like Scribe is loaded with commissions,
surrounded by Parisian or foreign composers--even Wagner in his youth
having once written to him. He understands how to manufacture the
proper substratum for the musical triflings. Read from this point
of view Auber’s later operas, as the “La Part du Diable,” or those
overtures whose whole structure depends on the fact that they are
skilfully adapted to dances; or that daub-work in the musical setting
with the jaundiced transition passages, where a proper modulation
would be almost out of place; or those boleros, which people sing
in circumstances of the utmost grief, without being able to raise
themselves to the height of the irony; or those étude colourations,
introduced in the most indifferent places provided they pay, and
developing themselves vigorously about a single vowel; or those
scores, which are so miserably transparent that one can see the author
first rapidly composing them at the piano and then putting in the
instrumentation slap-dash. It is the first, and let us hope, the last
time, that the piano reaches its hand to the opera--a most unfruitful
elective affinity. Opera and piano are necessarily and essentially
hostile. In the Paris of that day, when absolute music, as well that
of Berlioz as that of Chopin, is still a modest retiring flower, the
crowd ran after the gentle titillation of the opera, and the mass of
piano music moves in the operatic humdrum path. Among the Parisians
as among the Italians there was assuredly not an operatic composer
who did not invent at the piano and transfer his inventions from the
piano to the opera. Donizetti has left an interesting letter to his
brother-in-law Vesselli, which was fastened as an inscription on his
piano: “Do not sell this piano at any price, for it contains my whole
artistic life from 1822 onwards. Its tone lingers in my ears. In it
murmur Anna, Maria, Fausta, Lucia. Let it live as long as I live! I
lived with it my years of hope, of wedded happiness, of loneliness.
It heard my cries of joy, it saw my tears, my disenchantments, my
honours. It shared with me my toils and the sweat of my brow. In it
dwells my genius, every section of my path. It saw your father, your
brother, all of us; we all have tortured it; it was a true comrade to
us all, and may it always be a comrade to your daughter as a dowry of
a thousand sad and happy thoughts.”
There seems so much that is contemptible in this technical school
that it would almost appear, at least from the artistic point of
view, to have lived in vain. And yet it was at this time that a form
sprang into existence which, born from technical necessities, became
a custom, and from a custom a style, and so emphatically a style that
it was able to enter into effective rivalry with the older styles--the
contrapuntal, the thematic, the _leit-motif_. We are still under its
dominion. This form is the _Étude_.
The Étude was not the invention of the technists. It existed in germ
in Bach; it half grew out of thematic; only the visual angle altered
with time. In an invention or symphony of Bach a motive is treated
according to the free laws of imitation; it is used up in all the
voices, for all fingers. In a Prelude on some thematic ground-subject,
in a fugue with its stern code of canonic succession, the same is the
case: the motive is expended on itself. But between the broken chords
of Bach’s C sharp Prelude and those of Chopin’s C sharp Étude there
is a vast difference in the treatment. What in the one is used with a
view to the motive is here expended with a view to the technique. Bach
sets before him the artistic possibilities of the theme: Chopin the
mechanical. Bach wrote many of his preludes with educational purposes;
but he did not compose them with a sole view to their full practical
value. As in theory the musical and the mechanical cannot be sharply
severed, so the pieces are half for the purpose of supplying music,
half means of instruction. The mechanical part was obliged first to
emancipate itself before the conception of the Étude could be fully
grasped. On the straight line leading from the old thematic to the
Étude style, the conception of the motive altered itself. Motives
were now found which could be arranged according to their technical
productiveness. We see perhaps even the same motive, considered first
contrapuntally or as a fixed idea, but afterwards according to its
mechanical value.
There are motives whose interest lies in the size of the hand; or
in the playing of a legato passage simultaneously with the chords
in the same hand;[125] or again, contrary motion of chords in both
hands has to be carried out; or, yet further, attention is paid to
an easy gliding of the hand over great stretches; or finger-changing
on the same key is the ground-idea. The piece may aim at _cantabile_
or at the perfect legato in a _fugato_ movement, or at the practice
of octaves, pearl-like scales, pianissimo touch, the freedom of
the left hand, a double melody, or any of the hundred technical
possibilities. There are dry and insipid methods of thus working
out academically a technical idea; but it is also possible to see in
delicate and ingenious ways, slumbering germs of great fruitfulness
in the technical motive, and to develop powers of unexpected beauty.
The one way sees in a broken chord only the means of using it in major
or minor modes, or in the seventh, or in some unusual successions,
first for the right hand, then for the left, then for both, and
perhaps finally with sustained notes. Theory is satisfied, a practical
object provided, the academic conscience laid to rest. But the other
way sees in the broken chords their elementary character, the germ
of the Rheingold or of the Götterdämmerung. It permits them first
to sound slightly, then to grow further and further, to assume a
daemonic grandeur; like eternal signs, to stretch over the heavens
and embrace the worlds. Thus, no less than the other, it presents all
the _nuances_ of major, minor, seventh, right, left, up and down;
but it covers these technical variations so perfectly with the sense
of the inner meaning that they become identified, and can never be
separated: the technical and the characteristic content have, in the
mind of a genius like this, involuntarily become a unity. Such a
master, for example, takes the neat finger-changing on one note as
the means for a rococo-sketch, the pianissimo leaps for a dance of
the elves, the rolling passages in the left hand for the roar of the
sea with elemental upper parts; the rhythmical varieties in left and
right for graceful fetters of the dance; the scurrying glide over the
black keys for a picture of homely pleasures. Here reveals itself
the entire fruitfulness of the technical setting, which--who could
believe it?--precisely by the limitation of the motive, approaches
very near to characteristic art and realism of presentation. Here is
a rich field opened to technical subjectivity. Personality is very
variously displayed in the setting of a technical idea. Contrast with
Clementi, who scarcely ever shows any specific sense of character in a
motive, such a man as Hummel, who on theoretic grounds calculates out
the utmost technical possibilities of a motive; or Czerny, who in a
practical manner attains the same many-sidedness; or Cramer, who was
the first to find his way back to music from technique; or Moscheles,
Chopin, Schumann, who cannot think technique without feeling character.
Deep and mysterious is this connection between the Étude and its
musical setting. Like the fugue the simplest Étude goes back to those
elemental foundations which cannot fail of their impression, even
if practically nothing is composed upon them. I hear some simple
scale-étude of Bertini played, with the smooth harmonies on which it
is built. There is nothing in the piece, no soul reveals itself to
me, and yet there is a weird charm in these eternal ground-motives of
all music, and in their tonics and dominants which are so to speak
anchored in eternity. The dull man is soon wearied by them, but the
sensitive man instantly responds. At this point the Étude sinks down
to the great mother of all music: like the fugue it springs directly
out of Nature. With the consciousness of character the Étude grows
tuneful. In the studies of Moscheles, in the Symphonic Études of
Schumann, in Chopin’s studies, art creates what Nature created. From
the technical theme rises a certain spiritual aroma, reminding us of
a tune, a scene, a landscape; the tune condenses itself in the return
of the technical motive; it collects itself all the more narrowly and
closely, in proportion as all contrasts and secondary tunes keep their
distance. It is a spiritual melody, set in a firm frame, as condensed
as neither the free fantasia form, nor the thematic sonata, nor the
canonic fugue, had ever presented it. The tune is so concentrated
that it cannot dispense with the frame, or it would fly to pieces. It
has no capacity of transference; it prefers to exist as a fragment
ready-made.
It is thus that the Étude fixes the form. It favours fixed and
limited technical models, which fit mosaic-wise into each other. It
is opposed to huge, Beethoven-like emotions and their expression; its
horizon does not pass beyond two pages. It is still further removed
from Bach’s method, which depended on plain thematic development; it
loves the speedy and the limited, and confines itself entirely to the
practical. It penetrates into all works in which technical brilliance
gives a false impression of the contents, or in which the greatness of
the contents only finds its last expression by technique.
The technical setting of the form, and the technical expression, pass
over entirely into the consciousness of the time, and create new works
in chamber-music, opera, and orchestra.
Compare the development of a sonata by Weber with that of one by
Beethoven; for example, Weber’s fourth in E minor with Beethoven’s
Op. 28--two sonatas which in original idea, a soft melodic tune, were
not so unlike as they turned out to be. In Beethoven the first melody
develops itself on a 3/4 rhythm, which begins and ends naturally;
the second theme is an unforced contrast to the first; gradually
figurations attach themselves, which are natural offshoots of them,
intertwining themselves without losing their original dependence; all
grows logically out of itself; the end is given in the beginning,
and the progress in the variation. In Weber, on the contrary, each
piece is carried through by itself: the whole is no organism but a
mere pasticcio. The sensitive first subject is treated in its naked
melodic beauty; a semiquaver passage is attached to it; a bald
enharmonic study leads on to the second theme, which treats its
soothing character from many sides; and only the “free” section brings
the whole a little closer together. And we know how even in the best
men of this period the great creative organism, in which every part
conditions its own subordinate part, gives place to a mere isolation
and to total want of system. In the concertos, after the traditional
mutual compliments of orchestra and piano, the solo instrument starts,
with surprising suddenness, on its passages, which are strung together
from étude-pieces, selected haphazard. At the conventional places the
curtain is withdrawn, and the whole glitter of technique is displayed.
The harsh transitions, the quick returns, the jostling fugues, are not
only a peculiarity, say, of Schumann--they are the style of the time.
They are the _framing_ style of a time which does not care for the
want of restraint that attends great emotions.
Its preference is for constructive logic in detail. More genuine piano
music than the Étude there cannot be. The essence of the piano has in
it become music. Matter and aim here alone determine the form, which
no longer speaks merely in a universal musical language.