years been set on foot to forbid untried teachers to occupy any
position. As yet, however, the movement wants legal enforcement.
Kullack and Klauwell in Cologne, Breslaur in Berlin, publisher
of the _Piano-teacher_ (a paper now twenty-one years old), have
founded seminaries for intending teachers. In 1896, in Cologne,
out of four hundred students only thirty received a diploma of
teaching capacity--but no means at present exists of forbidding the
others to teach. Consider the enormous crowds that pass out of our
music-schools. An infinitesimal proportion may perhaps decide for a
virtuoso career. Of the rest half remain amateur, the other half go in
to the teaching profession. The overcrowding may easily be imagined.
The largest music-school in the world, the English “Guildhall School”
of Music, had till lately 140 professors, 42 teaching-rooms, 2700
students; and will shortly be enlarged till it has 69 rooms and 5000
students. I have made special inquiries at the Berlin Conservatorium
of Klindworth and Scharwenka. My numbers are I think exact to a few
figures. In 1895-6, out of 387 students, 41 men and 208 women took
piano only; 8 men and 15 women took piano with some other subject. In
1896-7, out of 383 pupils, 40 men and 239 women learnt piano alone,
and 4 men and 8 women learnt piano with something else. Of these
247 women, besides, about 43 are English or Americans. Since on the
average we reckon two years for a course, there go from this school
alone, every year, more than fifty women-teachers into the world. Some
of them perhaps may win a doubtful testimonial in a dearly-bought
Berlin concert; others, who aimed at virtuosity, may, after a pitiful
experience, themselves sink into teachers. Of the frequency of
piano-performances in concerts the following figures may give some
notion. I have counted the more important Berlin concerts in nine
weeks taken at random--159 in all. Among them are 58 piano-concerts,
partly combined with performances on other instruments, partly
interesting through the personality of the pianist; mere accompanying
of songs being of course not reckoned.
[Illustration]
The number of music-schools has increased specially in the capital
cities. In France the Parisian High School has a great repute; in
Russia the Moscow and St Petersburg Conservatoriums; in Belgium the
Brussels Conservatoire, under the guidance of Dupont, who is also
distinguished as the editor of old piano-works; in London the Royal
Academy of Music [and the Royal College of Music]. In Germany we have
in Frankfort the Hoch Conservatorium under Bernhard Scholz, and the
Raff under Max Schwarz; Stuttgart has somewhat declined through the
deaths of Lebert and Starck, the editors of the great Theoretical
and Practical School; but Cologne has greatly gained in importance
under Wüllner. In Leipzig under Mendelssohn, Moscheles and Plaidy,
piano-playing took the first place; new technical devices like the
pedal-clavier--that is, with organ pedals for the low notes--were
freely admitted, as in our days the Janko-keyboard. But with the
inevitable reaction, this school has decayed, and its importance in
piano-art is not what it was. In Berlin the Royal “Hochschule” with
Barth, Raif, Rudorff, and others, at its head, experienced a like
fate. Private institutions have come to the front. Tausig’s School
for higher piano-playing (1866-1870), was very distinguished. From it
went Joseffy to New York and Robert Freund to Zürich. The New Academy,
founded by Theodor Kullak, was also famous. It was afterwards replaced
by another Institute founded by his son. The Stern Conservatorium, now
directed by Gustav Holländer along with Jedliczka; the Klindworth,
at which for a time Bülow and Moszkowski laboured; and that of
Scharwenka, which, after Xaver Scharwenka’s departure for America, was
for a time united with the Klindworth;--are known to all.
Like the practical “schools,” the theoretical have also become
innumerable. I take as a few of the most important works the
following: Adolph Kullak’s “Aesthetic of Piano-playing,” re-edited
by Bischoff, a unique and profound work on the theory of the art,
as a hundred years’ experience and the careful observations of the
author have enlarged it; Hugo Riemann’s “Comparative Theoretical and
Practical Piano School, presenting system, method, and materials, in a
historic and organic connection”; and, among the innumerable “schools”
and volumes of exercises, the various thoughtful works of Germer. Two
main principles have come to occupy the first place in the newest
school-practice. First, the systematic carrying out--not merely of a
musical mechanic of the hand, but its thorough gymnastic. This was the
natural advance, which carried yet further the teaching of Czerny.
The hand is adapted for piano-playing--as in the systems of Thilo,
Virgil, and others--by gymnastics of the fingers, and stretching of
the muscles. Thus a great part of the gymnastic cultivation is got
over before actual musical practice begins. In this work the dumb
keyboards, which to-day are constructed with great delicacy, have
borne a great part. They now admit of legato playing and of different
degrees of strength in touch.
[Illustration: Hand of Eugene d’Albert. Röntgen ray photograph by
Spies.]
The second great principle is to take into account in instruction
the peculiarities of the pupil’s hand. It stands to reason that the
same exercises will not do for all hands. One hand demands this, the
other that. This method is carried out with the utmost precision by
the greatest of teachers, Leschetizky. A similar principle prevails
in modern teaching of singing. We no longer endeavour to base
voice-cultivation on the universal vowel A, but on that vowel which
comes most natural to the organ of the pupil.
* * * * *
The arrangement of the keys is the sacred tradition of centuries. It
presents the tone-system, as it were, lengthways, and is the natural
expression of a melodic musical concept. The separation of the black
and the white keys has been introduced in accordance with a certain
theoretical principle, which allows the difference of position in our
scales over the black and white keys to appear somewhat complicated.
Our keyboards are constructed entirely on the C major scale; the tones
outside this scale are thrown into the black keys, and thus appear
in a subordinate position: thus all other scales have a strange form
and often a somewhat difficult fingering. But since the seventeenth
century our conception of music has gradually, from melodic, become
harmonic; we hear vertically as well as horizontally; we hear the
beauty of all chords as sounded together, and, unconsciously, we fill
in the harmonies to every melody we hear. It would have been natural
if the keyed instruments had adapted themselves to this altered
musical conception, and had resigned the original conception of the
scale to make way for harmonic conveniences. Nothing, however, is
slower to be reached than the determination to revolutionise from the
foundation a technique adopted in the schools, since no one is willing
to make the sudden break with the old and the sudden start with the
new.
Attempts had already been made to break the monopoly of the C major
scale, and to form a regular chromatic scale of twelve similar keys.
In our own day Paul von Janko has improved this system by repeating
every regular chromatic series three times in terrace-style one
above another, so that not only wider stretches, but also, without
much movement of the hand, a surprising control of full chords and
of rapid passages is attained. The tones are thus brought more
narrowly together as the monopoly of the C major key is destroyed;
and the result betokens a decisive advance in the conception of
modern music. This conception still embodies a compromise between the
old scale-keyboard and an arrangement of the keys, which, founded
on harmonic ideas, has promise for the future. Janko’s keyboard is
slowly gaining converts. Great houses, like those of Ibach, Duysen,
Kaps, and Blüthner, are taking it up. Hausmann in Berlin, and Wendling
in Leipzig, are the chief supporters of the scheme. In America we
hear stories of remarkable results. Only by the development of such
a new keyboard, which will have to answer the demands of the modern
conception of music, will it be possible to draw new tone-effects
from the piano. Its utmost capacities, in its present form, have been
exhausted, it would seem, by Liszt.
Meanwhile the construction of the instruments has advanced to an
unexampled perfection. It is only a hundred years since Stein began
his laborious attempts on the new pianoforte. To-day a network of
factories is spread over the whole world, in which innumerable
faultless instruments are made, which put to use all the results of
experience in the treatment of wood and wires. The modern pianos have
already attained so completely the ideal of the hammer-mechanism that
we are beginning to hark back to the forgotten tones of the cembalo.
In Paris these aims have their strongest support in Diémer, who plays
his Couperin on clavecins, and at the same time wins new renown for
the oboe d’amour and the viol da gamba in the chamber-concert. Already
quill-claviers are being more frequently constructed, and the reaction
against the predominance of the pianoforte finds its satisfaction in
their sweet and thrilling sounds.
It is impossible to review all the piano-factories of both
hemispheres, or to register all their innovations. I must content
myself with mentioning the system of “overstringing,” invented
simultaneously by several persons; the felting of the hammers,
introduced by Pape; the third pedal of Steinway which holds on single
tones without affecting the others; the use of a cast-iron frame
and of cast-steel strings; and the vertical stringing of the upright
“cottage” piano, which is developed out of older forms. Bechstein’s
factory in Berlin stands at the head of German manufacture; but
there are also Duysen, Blüthner, Schiedmayer, Irmler, Westermayer,
Kaps, Ibach, and innumerable others; Bösendorfer in Vienna, Knabe
in Baltimore, and Steinway in New York, who have succeeded to the
renown of Chickering; besides the many other older-established firms.
Bechstein, so fundamentally sound; and Steinway, with his patent
fulness of tone, are the two rivals for the laurel at the end of the
century.
Henry Engelhard Steinway, born in Brunswick, began, in the fifties,
his New York business in very small circumstances. A three-storied
house was the factory, and one piano a week was the output. In 1859,
however, the firm was in a position to build a great establishment,
which now, after several enlargements, covers more than four acres.
The output advanced with giant strides: numerous patents were taken
out for the improvement of the resonance and the fulness of tone: in
1872 the Emperor Alexander bought the twenty-five thousandth piano,
and in 1883 Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild of Vienna bought the fifty
thousandth. Besides the factory, the firm possesses in Astoria great
estates, the timber of which covers not less than a hundred and
fifty acres. There they have their yards, saw-mills, turning-mills,
foundries, metal-workshops, and mechanical wood-bending and carving
apparatus. The parts are sent from Astoria to New York to be fitted
together. When completed, the pianos are exhibited in Steinway Hall
(14th Street) with a view to sale. More than ninety thousand have been
completed up to date, of which a large proportion has been transmitted
to Europe through the London and Hamburg branches.
[Illustration]
Bechstein has adopted a similar division of his work. He has two
factories, the one in the suburbs, for the preparation of the parts
and the drying of the wood, the other in the town for the fitting
together of the pieces. This latter is in close connection with the
shop. Karl Bechstein, like Steinway, began in the fifties on a very
small scale, and in 1860 founded his great house in Johannisstrasse.
In 1880 he acquired the first portion of the suburban estate, on
which to-day four factories stand. The victorious brilliancy of
modern ingenuity is to be seen in the whole establishment. The
probation through which the wood has to pass in the yards, then in
the dry-rooms, in the store-cellars, and finally when sized in the
store-houses of the factories, before it can be used, is a grand
guarantee of its suitability. Two important rooms are devoted to
steam-power. The one is the planing-room, where sides and lid are
planed together by machines of such extraordinary power that the
shavings hum about under centrifugal force, and are carried off by an
exhaust apparatus. The other is the foundry, where all the metal work
is carried on, from the boring of the cast frame to the preparation of
the screws. Next, in the upper storeys, in the more distant factories,
begins the process of fitting the piano together from the rough
parts. The action is provided by a separate factory, the Nürnberg
wires are spun, the walls of the grand pianos are glued together in
from twelve to twenty thicknesses, the frame is bronzed, the wood
inlaid, the ornaments put on, every tiny screw, every spindle is
touched up with rare attention, till the instrument gains its speech,
and is tested, for the last refinements, in separate rooms. Since the
completion of the last building, they reckon on a yearly output of not
less than three thousand five hundred pianos, on which eight hundred
workers are employed. The proportion of grands to cottages is as
three to four, a proof of the enormous popularity of the cottage, for
which as a piece of furniture it is so easy to find room, but which,
even in its best specimens, can never give to the musician the fulness
of tone and the resonance of a grand. The demand for Bechsteins is
greater than their factories can meet. It is remarkable that half
of them go to England and the English colonies through the London
branches; while Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, and South
America, share the other half. In a business of such magnitude it is
no mere ostentation to record these figures, which simply supply the
necessary statistics of the general trade.
[Illustration: Upright Hammerclavier (pianoforte), Italian, beginning
of 19th century. Two pedals, one to raise the dampers, the other a
“jalousie schwellung” (_i.e._ Venetian shutters, like an organ swell
or the harmonium “forte” action). Richly inlaid. Engraved crowns on
the fronts of the keys. De Wit collection. ]
[Illustration: Bechstein Cottage Piano, “English style.”]
So long as the piano was merely an instrument for more or less gifted
musicians, it was unnecessary to consider the question which to-day,
when it has become a general means of social pleasure, stands in
the foreground--namely its treatment as a piece of furniture. The
“square” instrument has only certain parts, particularly the lower
extremities, in which the style of the time could be expressed. The
legs and the feet were, in the time of the Ruckers, _baroque_; as
in the time of the Streichers they adopted the style of the Empire,
and in our day that of the Renaissance. The rest of the body was
fixed in its main lines by the given natural forms; and has altered
very little in architectural relations in the course of centuries.
The piano was in the fortunate position, even in the times when as
yet little attention was paid to constructive logic, of being a
construction, which, from its very aim, gained the most beautiful
form. With its gracefully-bending walls, and its natural and yet
characteristic shape, the grand piano, in many furnishing schemes of
the insipid fifties or the glaring eighties, in many a jerry-built
and cheaply appointed house, stood as the single solid and carefully
wrought article in the place. The cottage, on the other hand, which
too often is meant to be nothing but a piece of furniture, and
which with its encasing wood-walls offers only too much opportunity
to fashionable taste, has sunk deep into the domestic style, and
even to-day has hardly freed itself from these false influences. It
would seem that the cottage piano was invented in 1739 by the priest
Don Domenico of Mela in Gagliano. Only at the commencement of this
century did it begin to spread on this side of the Alps. It offered
a grand field for dubious artistic experiments. Now it was treated
merely as a sideboard, now as an Egyptian pyramid, now as an altar
with figurative paintings, now as the _corpus vile_ for all kinds of
marqueterie-experiments. I know only one cottage piano that expresses
its essence in characteristic style, and develops its form without
grimaces: this is the “English” type, plain and unadorned, introduced
into the trade by Bechstein, a principal feature of which is that the
legs are continued above the keyboard in a very graceful style, as
candle-brackets.
[Illustration: Bechstein Grand Piano _de luxe_, “Rheingold.” 1896.]
When the grand piano is used as an object for decoration, the result
is usually unsatisfactory. The contradiction between its plain form
and gaudy ornamentation becomes very marked. Earlier ages saw clearly
that the walls of the piano and its lid are best left plain, and
adorned with paintings. But to-day the cases are more frequent in
which specially magnificent pianos are so carefully fitted up with
plastic ornamentation in all styles with pillars, reliefs, and other
descriptions of carving, that one can only smile at the waste of
labour. In the over-rich rococo adornment, which was presented by a
piano built by Bechstein some time ago for the Empress Frederick for a
particular apartment, a trained eye can to-day find no pleasure. More
tolerable are the splendid grands, richly adorned with paintings, in
which, in Germany, Max Koch is chiefly concerned. The Wagner piano
for the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, or the Rheingold piano, both by
Bechstein, are also worth noticing. The latter has the daughters of
the Rhine for legs, a waving ornamentation on the walls, and carved
bulrushes on the lid; it is one of the most interesting monster-pianos
built in our time. In England Alma Tadema is the piano-painter most
in request. For Henry Marquand of New York he prepared an instrument,
adorned with precious stones and with painting, which was priced at
£15,000. His own piano is also extraordinary. The ornamentation
chosen is in the style of mediæval mosaics, with expensive surface
ornamentations. Under the lid are framed and adorned parchment strips,
on which Liszt, Tschaïkowski, Gounod, and others, inscribed their
names. This was appraised at £2500. A piano built in London for Carmen
Sylva had ivory legs. Perhaps a varied ebony and ivory ornamentation,
which springs from the appearance of the keys, taking advantage of the
splendid surface provided by these materials, would be more promising
than any kind of rococo or Gothic design. Ivory is still in strong
demand for pianos. Ninety thousand instruments are yearly issued from
the hundred and seventy London houses; and these take ten thousand
tusks.
Ever since composers began to write easier pieces the demand for
pianos has been greater. The market has of course been well supplied.
In 1896 appeared over 2500 “books”[134] of piano solos, 2000 songs
with piano accompaniment, more than 250 books of duets, and 300 pieces
for piano and violin. Among these figure many new editions of old
works, which to-day form a literature by themselves. The arrangement
of historical material, as it gives its character to the calling
of the modern pianist, is also reflected in it. We have excellent
editions, like the Berlin “Original Texts” (Urtexte), “Bischoff’s
Bach,” published by Steingräber, “Klindworth’s Chopin,” published by
Bote and Bock, “Bischoff and Neitzel’s Schumann,” “Bülow’s Beethoven’s
Sonatas.” Breitkopf and Härtel have extended their Popular Library
over the widest area. They have arranged their piano-publications into
a uniform piano-library, which soon will embrace 10,000 numbers. Nay,
the “Moonlight Sonata” is already to be purchased for a penny. And
yet we must confess that really beautiful editions of bibliographical
value are not to be found. An edition in artistic binding, on thick
paper, in elegant engraving, following the best original copy, with
none of those instructive but unornamental marks of fingering or
phrasing, and at the same time well adapted for opening out without
injury, and calculated for perfect typographical pictures on every
page--why is there no such edition of Beethoven, when people can be
found who will pay ten or twelve thousand pounds for a piano?
[Illustration]
Where the historic tendency is so well marked, creativeness has
degenerated. Since the middle of the century plenty of good sound
stuff has been written for the piano; but it must be confessed
that piano-music has shown no tendency to strike out a new path.
No commanding or revolutionary personality, like Schumann, Chopin,
or Liszt, has arisen. Almost all modern production is but the
popularisation of Liszt, or a respectable mean between Chopin and
Schumann.
Ferdinand Hiller began the endless succession of these eclectic
musicians. But the last of the solid old style was Alkan, a solitary,
eccentric, misanthropic, but withal interesting old man. He was born
in Paris in 1813, and remained there. He was one of the many pupils of
Zimmermann, that modest but most influential teacher. Alkan’s pieces
were highly esteemed by Bülow, who gave him a place in his list of
Étude-masters. In his works, which are chiefly Études and Preludes,
there speaks a Berlioz, with an elemental and realistic power. He
stands in his kind half-way between Chopin and Liszt. Some pieces,
like the highly original Op. 39, 1, do not easily fade out of the
memory. The seventh of the twelve Études, dedicated to Fétis, is a
remarkably significant Chopin-like Ballade in Berlioz’ style, with
kettle-drum rolls, and other most peculiar harmonic and orchestral
effects. In the “Allegro Barbaro” of the fifth Étude he gives full
play to his propensity to exotic phrases of foreign colouring.
He works with uncanny, lengthy unisons, or with cutting climbing
ninths. An out-and-out romantic, he delights not merely to rush into
the middle of his pieces with explanatory words--“Mors” is one of
these--but he has hit upon the most original titles that ever an
association of ideas led a composer to adopt: “Pseudo-naïveté,” “Fais
Dodo,” “Heraclitus and Democritus,” “Railroad,” “Odi profanum vulgus,”
“Morituri te salutant.” To play his pieces is as difficult as to
construe the Talmud.
[Illustration:
Stephen Heller. Ferdinand Hiller. Adolf Henselt.]
A constant succession of romantic writers of Études or small pieces
stretches from that era to our own. First stands the intellectual
Volkmann; next, the somewhat too dainty Kirchner, a regular
album-writer, who went so far in his admiration for Schumann as to
publish “New Davidsbündler” and “The New Florestan and Eusebius.”
Adolf Henselt, who lived at St Petersburg, practised an extraordinary
longdrawn legato technique. He is still esteemed for his tolerable F
minor Concerto, and for his second and fifth Études, especially the
well-known “Si oiseau j’étais.” Stephen Heller, who lived in Paris,
wrote a hundred and forty-nine works, almost exclusively for the
piano. He is a combination of Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and
water; but we light occasionally on passages of some inspiration.
His well-known Saltarellos and Tarantelles, his effective “Forellen”
(Trout) Fantasia, and his excellent “Danses Bois,” are in the taste
of the time. More important was his pretty idea, in the Freischütz
Studies, of uniting operatic motives and étude-practice in an organic
and poetic combination.
[Illustration: Tschaïkowski.]
The lesser Romantics and Romanticists were meanwhile working
diligently in Paris. A group of successful piano-composers of this
class reaches down to our own day. The chief names are Fauré, Widor,
Vincent d’Indy, Chabrier, César Franck, Dubois, Cécile Chaminade, Paul
Lacombe. The drawing-room romance, which in Chaminade unfortunately
tends too often to shallowness, exhibits often a Mendelssohnian
classicism, of which dainty specimens are given in Lacombe’s
Toccatina, and in the Toccata of Chaminade herself. The literature
for two pianos is well illustrated in Chabrier’s Romantic Waltzes,
which are unusually spirited. César Franck’s symphonic variations,
serious and academic, and St Saens’ Concertos, more interesting in
their effective technique than in content, stand out from the mass of
orchestral piano-work.
[Illustration: From painting by Fritz Erler.]