influences of Bach, and in fact, the extreme individualisation of the
fingers leads us of necessity back to Bach, in whose works the fingers
are called upon to perform the last possibilities of many-voiced
music. Throughout it all Chopin knew that Bach is nature in music.
When he was practising for his recitals, he played, not Chopin but
Bach.
* * * * *
[The English pianist and composer, William Sterndale Bennett,
contemporary and friend of Mendelssohn, equally popular as a musician
both in Germany and his own country, demands notice in this place.
If England has not succeeded in forming a definite musical style
for itself in the nineteenth century, at least it can take credit
for having possessed one composer who may be called “unique” in the
true sense of the word. As far as his powers extended, Sterndale
Bennett achieved the highest distinction. There is no one _like_
him--his pianoforte music (on which alone he can afford to take his
stand) ranks quite by itself in expression, character, and technical
difficulty. Those who class him with Mendelssohn look merely on the
surface, and show themselves incapable of making a worthy distinction.
Sterndale Bennett’s music is never _weak_, although for the most part
cast in a delicate mould. On the other hand, he seems to have felt
that the “grand” style was out of his reach, and that it was no part
of his business to act the strong man. Accordingly, he seldom shows
any inclination to venture too high a flight. This alone suffices to
distinguish him from Mendelssohn.
Probably most pianists, when speaking of Sterndale Bennett, would
naturally think first of the Three Sketches (Op. 10, Nos. 1, 2, 3),
“The Lake,” “The Millstream,” and “The Fountain.” And it would be
difficult to better this as a specimen list--the first as a perfect
expression of natural tranquillity, the second as an example of
Sterndale Bennett’s peculiar technical difficulties, and the last as a
complete imitative picture.
The “Six Studies” (Op. 11) are quite characteristic. Their musical
value is very evident to the hearer; it is only the player who can
appreciate the perfection of execution they demand. No. 3, in B flat,
is the gem of the set. No. 6, the octave study in G minor, approaches
real power in the first section. The _cantabile_ second subject is
an exemplification of the quite inimitable style of the composer.
Amongst other miscellaneous pieces the following must be named--the
Fantasia in A, Op. 16, dedicated to Schumann, especially the first
movement, with its lovely melody on arpeggiando accompaniment--the
Caprice in E (with orchestra), Op. 22, an excellent proof of Sterndale
Bennett’s mastery of the “concerto” manner--the Rondo piacevole in E,
Op. 25, where one notes the wonderful grace of the first subject, the
expressive power of the second.
Sterndale Bennett comparatively seldom rises to emotional heights;
however, see his Op, 28, No. 1, the Introduction and Pastorale in A,
particularly the early bars of the Introduction, where, if he does
not attain the seventh heaven of a man or an archangel, he at least
reaches the clear empyrean of the happy skylark. He touches the same
high level towards the close of the Pastorale itself. For other
examples of his capacity for the expression of deep feeling compare
also the third and fourth movements of the “Maid of Orleans” Sonata,
Op. 46, an idyllic work, almost unknown, and scarcely ever played.
Description of this Sonata would be useless: it should be studied.
It shows Sterndale Bennett at his best and worst--it shows all his
strength, and some of his peculiar weaknesses.
Space prevents more than the mere mention of other works in which the
pianoforte takes a prominent part:--The Concerto in F minor, Op. 19
(played by Sterndale Bennett himself “at the concerts of Leipsic”);
the violoncello and piano duet, Op. 32; the Sextett for two violins,
viola, violoncello and contrabasso, with pianoforte, Op. 8; the
pianoforte Trio in A, Op. 26; and, not least important, from the point
of view of this book, the twelve songs, the accompaniments of which
are of ideal beauty.]
[Illustration: Chopin’s Hand. From a marble in the National Museum at
Budapest.]
[126] Cx (C double sharp), bar 11 of Trio.
[127] See Papillons, No. 2, bar 5. The phrase
(“after-stroke accompaniment”) is untranslateable; and the
rhythmical formula referred to, though quite common, is not
to be described in words.
[128] “Flail-years” = “wild oats time.”
[129] S = E flat or A flat.
[130] This sentence refers to the marvellous and perfectly
inexpressible passage in the Fantasia Op. 17, beginning
forty-one bars before the “Mässig, durchaus energisch.”
[131] These remarks, though severe, are just, if they are
not allowed to apply themselves to _all_ of Mendelssohn’s
work without proper discrimination. Many of his pianoforte
works and songs are abundantly feeble; but we, in England
at least, must always owe Mendelssohn a debt for having
provided an easy path by which amateurs have been led, now
for many years, towards the high and true romance of men
like Schubert, Bach, and the others. But it is necessary,
and indeed the special duty of an Englishman, to advise
young persons who read this book, that Mendelssohn _at his
best_ is what they should get to know, and that unless
they have “Elijah” and “St Paul” by heart, the adverse
criticism of the composer of those works is denied them.
Even in these two great oratorios it requires no practised
Diabolus to find their weaknesses--but what shall an honest
man say of “Yet doth the Lord see it not,” or “The nations
are now the Lord’s,” in spite of the wretched weakness of
counterpoint in the fugal parts of the latter movement? The
man who could write such things is a great man and a true
“romantic.”
[132] Cases of this kind are common in Purcell and Bach.
Examples are easily quoted. One of the commonest with
Purcell is the collision of ♮7 and ♭7 in perfect cadences.
[Illustration: An Afternoon with Liszt. Lithograph by Kriehuber.
Kriehuber. Berlioz. Czerny. Liszt. The violinist Ernst. ]
Liszt and the Present Time
At the beginning of the era of present-day piano-art, perhaps also at
the culmination of all independent and advancing piano-art, stands
Franz Liszt. The artistic phenomenon of Liszt is yet so near to us,
that it is still misunderstood. Even to-day he has fanatical friends
and bitter foes: blind assailants and diplomatic defenders. And
through it all, the whole world of piano-playing stands under his
influence.
[Illustration: Photograph of Liszt, taken in Budapest.]
This was possible because Liszt was a developed artistic nature,
who did not fall in with the established scheme, was by everybody
differently understood, differently loved, differently hated. We can
distinguish three types of artists. The one is the rapid composer,
whose new thoughts readily find their new suitable form. The second
class is that of the artists of the will--great innovators, like Manet
and Degas among the painters, who worked not so much by their visible
productiveness, as by their personal influence, exerted from day to
day; an influence which after their death seems almost inconceivable.
The third consists of the compilers, classics in the historical
sense, who form a synthesis of all the constituent parts, a unity of
opposites, into which history continually diverges, a conjunction
of all begun and severed paths, the complete culture of a time made
living. Liszt belongs to none of these types; he belongs to the last
two _together_. The union of the innovator and the classic forms his
essence; and in understanding this lies the complete comprehension of
him. He possessed a double power, which influenced the world as it
did, because the world never saw the one half of his nature before the
other.
Liszt the revolutionary cast his seed wide into the world. His system
of patronage, founded on artistic feeling, not merely smoothed the
way for Wagner and Berlioz, but assured to every suppliant the
preservation of a modicum of self-respect and a modicum of hope.
He pointed out to the modern musical development, in a kind of
theoretical praxis peculiar to himself, the paths which led from the
revolutionary principles of Berlioz to the popular musical realism
of to-day. He scattered over both hemispheres the seeds of intimate
personal instructions, of great and small disclosures; so that even
now eternal gratitude to this most kind-hearted of all artists is felt
over the world.
[Illustration: Title-page of Hofmeister’s Edition of Liszt’s Op. 1.]
Liszt the compiler is a new Liszt. Here the revolutionary remained
apart, and the new Liszt came forth, who rushed in undreamed-of
splendour through real and imagined worlds. He gathers cultures, a
princely collector, with the crown of rare desert upon his head.
The world did not know that this same man could pass through times of
quiet creation and thought. He is a man of the world of the highest
_savoir faire_, a writer of bewitching elegance, a conqueror who makes
nought of the boundaries of peoples, a king despising kings, a demigod
as conductor of tumultuous musical festivals, and in his works,
which seem to appear daily in countless, uncontrollable numbers,
a classical combiner of that which is and that which has been. It
was he who united composition and interpretation, music and poetry,
romance and virtuosity, Olympian and Titan, Beethoven and Paganini.
Everything that the piano had experienced, the mystic longings of
the old counterpoint, the love of variation of Bird and Bull, the
ornamentation of Couperin and Rameau, the sensuous delight in sound
of Scarlatti, the absolute art of Bach, the charm and formal beauty
of Mozart, the pain of Beethoven crying for release, the intellectual
confessions of the unique triumvirate, Schubert, Schumann, and
Chopin--the rays of all met in him. A true combiner, he did not jumble
these cultures in a learned and academic fashion together in himself,
but he developed their common medium, in which they could test their
mutual effects, with ever new charms.
[Illustration: Liszt in his youth. Lithograph by Kriehuber.]
The life of Liszt necessarily prepared him for this mighty
combination. It is a co-ordination of cultures, each of which, singly
experienced, might have sufficed for an ordinary mortal. He passed
through six such lives in the various parts of his existence. As
“petit Litz” he lived the life of a precocious much-loved child; then
in Paris he penetrated to the depths of a romantic idealism, which
drew closely together the men of that fruitful epoch; next, with the
Comtesse d’Agoult he lived for five years the free and productive
life of a wandering artist: then he experienced the glories of
European renown as a virtuoso; next, he exerted himself in Weimar as
the pioneer of the modern style; and finally, in Rome, Buda-Pest,
and Weimar, he lived the peaceful life of a ruler, having attained
the heights of worldly honour and equally those of that conquest
of the world which found its symbol in his priestly robe. Lina
Ramann had the courage to make three volumes of biography out of this
unparalleled life, in which the unique material is spoilt by doubtful
German and uncritical enthusiasm. Liszt is in her books not the
subject but the hero of the tale; and the wickedness of women is the
theme. The Comtesse d’Agoult receives the same measure as George Sand
in Niecks’ “Life of Chopin.” It is remarkable, how in the archives
which are arranged after the death of great men, so little is said
of humanity and so much of abstract right. Is the moral order of the
world so inexorable that even its fairest opponents must be docketed
and ticketed in accordance with it?[133]
[Illustration: After Dantan’s Caricature of Thalberg.]
In the romantic Thirties, and in Paris, men thought otherwise. In
the freedom of that society Liszt’s personality received its stamp.
In Paris he remained after the tour of the world which he made in
childhood, on which Beethoven had kissed him; and in Paris he learned
the elegance of a man of the world, and a depth of pantheistic
thought. These were his two opposite poles. And very soon this
mental culture raised him far above all his contemporaries in his
profession; Chopin alone was worthy to be placed at his side. It was
a good preparation for those triumphs of virtuosity that were soon
to come, which were to transform him from a delicate Parisian into a
European citizen. The splendour of virtuosity lay like the eternal
sun over Paris. From time to time something would happen to cast even
that splendour into the shade. In the twenties came Moscheles; then
the wonders of the little Liszt; and now the appearance of Thalberg.
Thalberg, the natural son of a prince, a ravishing and brilliant
person, a cavalier through and through, came to Paris in 1835 and
took her by storm. He had a luxuriant, fascinating execution, in
which the silken glitter was that of the _fontaine lumineuse_; and he
had besides the peculiarity of holding the middle melody supported
by the pedal, both hands taking part, while they enfolded it in
arabesques of chords. In the rivalry with him Liszt was the complete
and foursquare man: no longer the “petit Litz,” standing on the height
of the time, but the mature Liszt, with his “profil d’ivoire,” who
left the time far behind. Liszt and Thalberg were both _gentlemen_.
They never showed such animosity as their respective partisans, who
split Paris as once it had been split by the Gluckists and the
Piccinists. But their rivalry had nevertheless something dramatic
in it, and in it lay a regard for piano-culture never yet seen. The
crisis of the struggle was reached on the 31st of March 1837, when
the Princess Belgioso ventured to invite both Liszt and Thalberg to
a benefit-concert, at which the price of the tickets, forty francs,
was proportioned to the character of the company. Hitherto each had
performed on his own account; and each had been applauded for himself.
Both came; and both played. The following conversation gives the
decision of the audience--“Thalberg est le premier pianiste du monde!”
“Et Liszt?” “Liszt, Liszt est--le seul!” It seemed a drawn match.
But meanwhile the depth of Liszt’s artistic character was conquering
though unobserved. Liszt had in an article severely censured the empty
compositions of Thalberg. Fétis, the musical historian, took the
other side, and maintained strongly that not Liszt but Thalberg was
the man of the new school. A few years only had to pass, when people
grew sick of playing Thalberg. The broader humanity of Liszt’s art
had won the victory over external glitter in popular dress--a victory
which Liszt’s personality could not gain over that of Thalberg.
Thenceforward Liszt’s supremacy was uncontested.
[Illustration: Lithograph of 1835 by Staub.]
[Illustration: After Dantan’s Caricature of Liszt. From the
Nicolas-Manskopf collection, Frankfort-on-Main.]
[Illustration: Facsimile of Liszt’s Hungarian Storm-March.]
[Illustration: Facsimile of Liszt’s Hungarian Storm-March.]
[Illustration: The “jeune école” of Parisian Pianists. Lithographed
by Maurin. _Standing_--J. Rosenhain, Döhler, Chopin, A. Dreyschock,
Thalberg. _Sitting_--Edward Wolff, Henselt, Liszt.]
[Illustration: Liszt in his youth. Engraved on steel by Carl Mayer.]
In the same year, 1837, Liszt made a confession, in an essay written
for the _Gazette Musicale_, which was the greatest flattery that ever
the piano received from one of its masters. Liszt refuses to go nearer
to the orchestra or to the opera. “My piano is to me what his boat
is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay, more, it has
been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated
under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice.
Perhaps the secret tie which holds me so closely to it is a delusion;
but I hold the piano very high. In my view it takes the first place in
the hierarchy of instruments; it is the oftenest used and the widest
spread.... In the circumference of its seven octaves it embraces the
whole circumference of an orchestra; and a man’s ten fingers are
enough to render the harmonies which in an orchestra are only brought
out by the combination of hundreds of musicians.... We can give broken
chords like the harp, long sustained notes like the wind, staccati and
a thousand passages which before it seemed only possible to produce on
this or that instrument.... The piano has on the one side the capacity
of assimilation; the capacity of taking into itself the life of all
(instruments); on the other it has its own life, its own growth, its
individual development.... It is a microcosm, a micro-theus.... My
highest ambition is to leave to piano players after me some useful
instructions, the footprints of attained advance, in fact a work which
may some day provide a worthy witness of the labour and study of my
youth. I remember the greedy dog in La Fontaine, which let the juicy
bone fall from its mouth in order to grasp a shadow. Let me gnaw in
peace at my bone. The hour will come, perhaps all too soon, in which I
shall lose myself and hunt after a monstrous intangible shadow.”
[Illustration: Cartoon representing Liszt and his Works. 1842.]
It is due in very great measure to the example of Paganini’s
violin-playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil,
created modern piano-playing. The world was struck dumb by the
enchantment of the Genoese violinist; men did not trust their ears;
something uncanny, inexplicable, ran with this demon of music through
the halls. The wonder reached Liszt; he ventured on _his_ instrument
to give sound to the unheard of: leaps which none before him had
ventured to make, “disjunctions” which no one had hitherto thought
could be acoustically united: deep tremolos of fifths, like a dozen
kettle-drums, which rushed forth into wild chords; a polyphony which
almost employed as a rhythmical element the overtones which destroy
harmony; the utmost possible use of the seven octaves in chords set
sharply one over another; resolutions of tied notes in unceasing
octave graces with harmonies thrown in the midst; an employment
hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fulness
of tone-colour; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest
notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application
of the tone-colours of different octaves for the coloration of the
tone-effect; the entirely naturalistic use of the tremolo and the
glissando; and above all a perfect systematization of the method of
interlacing the hands, partly for the management of runs so as to
bring out the colour, partly to gain a doubled power by the division,
and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in
the figures, a fulness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto
practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process
of individualisation begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin. The
three systems of notes, instead of two, appear more frequently; in
fact the two hands appear for the most part to play a group of notes
which seem to be conceived for three. And precisely by this means
the two hands run inside and through one another, as if they were
only a single tool of ten fingers. The music appears again to become
a corporate unity of tone, as it had already once been in its first
beginnings. But, it has now become, out of a universal music, a music
for the piano. An historic mission is fulfilled.
[Illustration: Der General Bass wird durch List in seinen festen
Linien überrumpelt u überwunden. “General” Bass surprised and overcome
in his fortress by Liszt. (_List_ means craft, or stratagem. Observe
Liszt’s wings, _flügel_, which word also means grand piano. General or
“thorough” Bass is a personification of the “classical” school.)]
[Illustration: Liszt and Stavenhagen.]
Liszt invents a fingering for his purposes which has no other
principle than that of the most absolute opportunism. Scales, struck
by one finger, trills played with changing fingers, strenuous parallel
octave passages, heavy fingering in order to drag out parts which
otherwise glide too lightly--everywhere, in place of the academic
rule, there is an attempt to grasp the effect of the moment, a
moulding after the impulses of the expression. And thence arises a
soul-giving power even down to the most trifling passing-note, until
the man and the playing are one. Liszt did the miracles of a prophet
in his recitals, tumultuous assemblies, in which it actually happened
that the people did not stir from the place till one o’clock in the
morning.
So early as 1839 he was able to venture on the first pure
piano-recital ever given, after Moscheles had paved the way with
his mixed piano-recital without orchestra. Not only could he fill
up a whole evening with performances on this instrument alone; he
was able to fill with his performances twenty-one evenings in the
short space between December 27, 1841, and March 2, 1842. This was
the brilliant period of his virtuoso-years; twenty-one recitals in
Berlin within this short space! In the history of piano-playing
they are festival weeks, holy days, in which by the greatest of all
pianists a world-literature was made living on the keys, so that all
Europe resounded. At that time we hear of a critic wondering how this
marvellous man could actually improvise along with an orchestra! So
little were people accustomed to playing by heart, which since Liszt’s
time has become the universal rule.
Liszt’s innumerable compositions for the piano, which were first
completely named in Ramann’s book, remind us again of the three
types of artists of which we spoke above. We find in them Liszt the
compiler, who makes use of the experiences of centuries; and we find
Liszt the innovator, who points out new ways in motives which we
might think were only seen in Wagner, in naturalisms which developed
music, and in technical means of expression; but we do not find in
him a composer of genius, who can hardly hold himself back from his
inspirations, and who with unforced ease, creates new forms for the
new ideas. We shall, as time advances, suffer less and less from
illusions on this point. And Liszt himself was content to be an
innovator without being a creator. He was a clever artist who knew his
own limitations accurately. He invents a theme which is spirited, new,
and characteristic; and when he has invented the theme he sits down
and arranges it according to all the powers of technical expression;
and varies it in forms whose technique is their content, so that
technique and content become identical. This is the last effect of
the Étude-principle, in which an idea finds, not its form, but its
technical expression.
[Illustration: Plaster Cast of Liszt’s Hand. Weimar.]
This special method of Liszt is preserved at its best in the twenty
Rhapsodies. The Magyar _Dallok_ had appeared already as studies.
But these Rhapsodies far surpass them in polish. Hungarian national
airs, with their rushing rhythmical and unrhythmical _verve_, were
here for the first time taken up into the circle of art, and supplied
the motives from which he poured forth a pyrotechnic display of
brilliant variations, whose technique has not a single useless note,
and whose working-out is indescribably delicate and harmonically
interesting. Nos. 2, 6, 9 (Pester Karneval), 12 (to Joachim), and 14
(to Bülow), are not unjustly preferred to the rest. No 14, with its
astounding development from the funeral march to the joyous stretto,
has remained one of the most marvellous piano-pieces on record. In it
an unparalleled technique is revealed, while the piece is not thereby
rendered hollow or superfluous.
[Illustration: Liszt lying in state. Bayreuth. 1886.]