B flat minor scherzo, the second in order of composition. Who has not
heard with interest those overarching and questioning triplets which
Chopin could never make his pupils play sufficiently “tombé”? He told
De Lenz: “It must be a charnel-house.” Alas! These same vaulted phrases
have since become banal. This scherzo, like the lovely A flat Ballade,
is cruelly tortured by the ambitious musical flapper. Yet how great,
how vigorous, it all is; how it abounds in sweetness and light when
the music falls from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem—“so
tender, so bold, as full of love as of scorn,” to quote Schumann. Has
Chopin ever penned a more delicious song than this in D flat, with
its straying over the tonal borderland? It is the high noon of life.
The dark bud of the introduction has come to a perfect flowering, and
with what miracles of scent, shape, and color! The second section has
the quality of sane wit. It is serious to severity, yet its meanings
are noble. The brief excursion that follows is the awakening from a
wondering dream; no suggestion there of pallid morbidities. And how
supremely welded is the style with the subject; what masterly writing
evolved from the genius of the instrument! Then, fearful that he has
dwelt too long upon his ideas, Chopin, in a rapturous flight, soars away
to clear sky. After the repetition comes the development section, and
while it is ingenious and effective in a chaotic way, nevertheless it
is here that the composer is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of
Beethoven, which permitted him to survey his material from every point
of view, Chopin could not boast. He is a great composer, but he was also
a great pianist. He nurses his themes with constructive frugality, and
sometimes the mechanical limitation of the piano checks his imagination.
The well-sounding is considered as much as the clearly thought. There
is logic in his exposition, though it is often piano, not music, logic.
A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous
urge of the earlier pages, force us to feel easier with the return of the
first theme. The coda is brilliant. This scherzo in B flat minor bids
fair to remain the favorite among its fellows. It is neither cryptic nor
repellent, like the first and third scherzo. It is a perennial joy to
pupil and public. Like the soliloquy in Hamlet, the B flat minor scherzo
is become a popular quotation.
* * * * *
Its predecessor in B minor, opus 20, is the profounder of the pair, but
not so melodious. It is the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzos.
Though in the ironic vein, it is Chopin recklessly throwing himself to
the winds of remorse—a Manfred mood, a mood of self-torture, a confession
from the first chord to the last. Within the dream inclosed by its
gates of tonal brass there is the struggle of an imprisoned soul. It
is the unhappiest and the most riotous of the Pole’s works, and it is
also unduly long. Its emotional keynote is too tense to permit of the
repetitions marked by the composer. These repetitions are unsuited to
present taste, which, above all, demands brevity. Poignancy and prolixity
are mutually exclusive. The piece greatly gains when played without “da
capo.” Its first part is so drastically harsh that the succeeding melody
in B, with its lilting tenths—“the sweet slumber of the moonlight on
the hill”—after the tragic strain comes as benison. This scherzo seems
to possess a personal message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, was
consumptive. Slender of frame, as was the Scotch writer, his spirit was
leonine. His was psychic bravery. He could write terrible music, conjure
up desperate images. A sense of stifled longing, of the inability to
compass his lofty ambitions, fill this first scherzo. It is the tragedy
of Chopin’s life compressed within a few pages; the tragedy of one whose
spirit was weaker than his flesh.
The arabesques after the eight-bar introduction—some of them muted bars,
as is Chopin’s wont—has a spiritual resemblance to the principal figure
in the Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66; but instead of the ductile triplets,
as in the bars of the Impromptu, the figure in the scherzo is divided
between the hands, while the harshness of the mood is emphasized by the
anticipatory chord in the left hand. The vitality of this first page
is positively electrifying. The questioning chords at the close of the
section are as imaginative as any passage ever written by the composer.
The half-notes E and the upleaping appogiaturia are evidences of his
originality in minor details. These occur before the modulation into
the lyric theme and with some slight dashes before the dash into the
coda. The second section, in agitato, contains several knotty harmonic
problems; they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony.
Here Chopin is bold to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the
very gates of heaven or hell. But the thunder and surge, after waxing,
soon wanes and spends itself. The soul has stormed itself into sheer
weariness. By critical consent, the molto piu lento is a masterpiece.
Written in the luscious key of B, it is like a woven enchantment. Chopin
attains most subtle effects with broken accords in tenths. The only other
slow movements comparable to this are the B major episode in the B minor
octave study, opus 25, and the largo of the B minor sonata. The Garden of
Armida or the Vale of Tempe are evoked by all three tone-poems.
Mark how the composer resumes his first savage mood. It is a picture
of contrasted violences. Beware of the “da capo.” Too many repetitions
provoke satiety. Rather attack at once the coda—that most dramatic of
Chopin’s codas. Bold, breathless, startling, is this impetuous ride
’cross country. The heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar
should not obscure one’s rhythmic sense to the second beat in the left,
which is likewise accented. This produces mixed rhythms, which add
to the murkiness, confusion, and despair of the finale. These daring
dissonances—so daring, so logical, so dramatic—how they must have rasped
the nerves of Chopin’s contemporaries! And they should be rigorously
insisted upon. No veiled half-lights. All bridges are burned. Naught
remains but catastrophe. To his doom goes this musical Childe Roland!
The Dark Tower crumbles as the poet dauntlessly blows his slug-horn. The
scherzo ends in overwhelming ruin. The last page is a supreme offering to
the god of pessimism.
* * * * *
Even though the sneering fretfulness of an unhappy sick-brained man
disturbs its sharp contours, the third scherzo in C sharp minor, opus 39,
is the most dramatic and the finest moulded of them all. It is capricious
to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with
scorn—if such an extravagant expression may be allowed; but it is
extravagant, full of fire and fury, yet signifying something. A word as
to the tempo: The scherzos, with a few exceptions, are marked presto,
but we must remember that it is the presto of Chopin’s time, also of his
piano action. His favorite Pleyel piano was light and elastic in action.
To-day actions are heavier, the key dip greater, though the elasticity
is the same. Therefore the tempi of these scherzos—or should I write
scherzi?—ought to be moderated, otherwise the music loses its significant
ponderability, not to say dignity, when we adopt the old-fashioned
time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a
presto pace—that is, a commodious presto, the scherzo in E major must
be played presto; also the one in E flat, as both are of the velocity
genre; but when the thought takes on a graver hue, where the mastery of
utterance and nobility of phrase are to be considered, then moderate your
pulse-beat. The scherzo in C sharp minor is a special sufferer from a too
hurried speed. Architectonics are blurred, details jumbled and grandeur
of style is absent. And if you start with such a fiery tempo, how shall
you secure contrast in the coda, which should be fairly shot from the
finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann in his G minor sonata, in the
finale, which begins prestissimo, and is later ordered by the composer
to become still more prestissimo? Achieve a presto, by all means, but
consider the heavier tonal mass of the modern piano.
This C sharp minor scherzo is a massive composition, yet replete with
fitful starts and rhythmic surprises. The chorale and its trio are
Chopinesque as to fioritura and in harmonic basis. Throughout the
narrative tone is dramatic; even in the “meno mosso” it never tarries.
The coda is built on an effect of persistent iteration. It is excellently
adapted to the keyboard. The composition has affinities with the dark
and grotesque conceptions of Hoffmann, Poe, or Coleridge. Its acid irony
recalls Heine. It is like fantastic architecture seen in a dream; about
it hover perpetual gloom and the despairing things that circle in the
night. It is like a tale from Poe’s iron-bound, melancholy volume of the
Magi and across its portal is written the word, Spleen.
Remains the E flat minor scherzo from the second sonata. It is the most
powerful of the set. To interpret, one needs breadth of style, heroic
spirit, abetted by wrists of steel. The big Rossinian one-bar crescendo
at the beginning taxes the strength. The composition is elemental; the
chromatic whistling of the wind in the chord of the sixth makes true
storm-music. There is menacing gloom in the initial bars; the blissful
song is not quite uninterrupted bliss; there is always a tempest that
threatens. The descending octaves, which seem to invite us to the
infernal regions, are swept away by the storm-theme, and once more we
are madly projected through space. Satanic pride, a challenge to fate,
the defiance of the microcosm to the threatening macrocosm; these and
other characteristics may be imagined in this profound work. It depends
on the listener. With Chopin as with Rome, you carry away what you fetch
to either man or city. But your little Peter’s pence of sympathy has
suffered a rich change in the return. We are the gainers. Some day, no
longer as remote as when the fallacious belief that the music of any
particular nation is better than another’s, perhaps Chopin may stand
where he should, next to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. There is no such
thing as map-music; there is only beautiful music. And you can never play
Chopin beautifully enough.
PHASES OF THE GREATER CHOPIN
To-day the Impromptus of Chopin are well-nigh impossible in
the concert-room. Those delights of all true “flappers,” the
Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, and the A flat Impromptu are
played too often, that is, played badly. The first part of the
Fantasie-Impromptu is taken at too swift a pace, and, in consequence,
sounds too much like an etude, when in reality its arabesques do hint at
something more emotional. The figuration suggests that of the B minor
scherzo, not, however, so pregnant with dramatic meanings. And that
second section in D flat, how it is dragged, how it is sprawled and
drawled! In company with the second theme of the Funeral March, it is
the most sentimental of its composer. The greater Chopin is revealed in
the second Impromptu, the one in the key of F sharp major. It is a sheaf
of moods organically more bound together than seems at a first hearing.
Because of its true impromptu spirit, its vagrant moods, its restless
outpouring of fancies, it has been rather disregarded by some Chopinists,
who, hidebound as any academic critic, are shocked by the changes in
tonality, and, being unimaginative, are shocked also by the capricious
shifting of moods; one dream melts into another, and after a repetition
of those sweetly attuned chords at the close, a vigorous affirmation
awakens the listener as would a sudden clap of thunder during a peaceful
evening in June. There are several enigmatic bars of modulation that have
puzzled purists and still are disquieting even to excursionists through
the tangled harmonic underwoods of Ornstein and Stravinsky. I refer to a
transitional passage after the march-like measures and immediately before
the return of the principal melody. Elsewhere I have compared them to the
creaking of a rusty hinge in the dooryard where Walt Whitman’s lilacs
last bloomed. The G flat Impromptu, the third in the published order—the
Fantasie-Impromptu, opus 66, is posthumous—was seldom heard in recital
till Vladimir de Pachmann, master expositor of the more delicate phases
of the Polish composer, revived it in his programme. Since then it is
become more familiar. It is charming with its spiral figuration, though
less novel than its two predecessors.
The Mazurkas, those impish, morbid, gay, sour, dour, graceful little
dances, I need not dwell upon here at length. For the majority of
pianists they are a sealed book, and if you have not a savor of Slav
in you pray do not disturb them with your literalism. De Pachmann,
Godowsky, Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch, and Josef Hofmann play them
wonderfully, but how few others. I recall a story told me by Rosenthal,
whose colossal performances here are memorable. He wished to hear from
De Pachmann’s nimble fingers his own version of the Mazurkas and paid
the Russian a visit one evening. Pachmann did not greet Rosenthal too
sympathetically. “Ah!” he exclaimed, when Moriz, the octave-thunderbolt,
explained the reason for his unexpected appearance. “Ah! but I play
the Mazurkas so badly. Now, if I had your technique”—his eyes fairly
sparkled with malicious irony—“I might be able to play them!” However,
he was persuaded, and once seated at the piano he didn’t leave it till
he had almost finished the entire collection; and Chopin wrote many of
these dances. (At least fifty-one, if you include several of doubtful
authenticity). How did he play them, this perverse magical artist?
Rosenthal told me that he had never heard such beautiful, subtle, and
treacherous playing; the treachery was the manner in which he interpreted
the music. Not an accent was correct, the phrasing was falsified, though
the precise notation was adhered to, and all delivered with a variety of
touches positively exquisite. “There!” cried De Pachmann, as he finished,
“that is the only way to play the Mazurkas.” And he smiled with his eyes.
“Not!” thought Rosenthal, who thanked his colleague and hurried into
the open air where he could explode. Talk about camouflage! The joke
was later when Rosenthal teased De Pachmann about his trickery and the
Chopinzee absolutely grinned with joy. Surely, as Sam Johnson remarked,
the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in
the farce of life. The splenetic doctor could have joined musicians to
authors.
Chopin has composed some marvellous music in the Mazurka form. Consider
the three or four of these dances in the key of C sharp minor, the poetic
one in B flat minor, the one with the morbidly insistent theme in B minor
or that sad, appealing example in F minor, the last which Chopin is
said to have put on paper. Its fixed idea, its hectic gaiety and acrid
gloom reveal a sick brain, the brain of a dying man. But there are many
other Mazurkas filled with daylight cheerfulness. Of the greater Chopin
posterity will probably acclaim the Polonaises in F sharp minor, A flat
major and the Fantaisie-Polonaise in the same key. There is a wealth of
fantasy in this Polonaise, opus 61; its restless tonalities, the beauty
of the first theme, the vaporous deliquescence later of this theme, the
violent mood changes and harmonic grandeur left this work to the elect
of the composer. The F sharp minor Polonaise and the so-called Siberian
in E flat minor, as well as the Polonaise in C minor are nothing if not
virile. They demand men as well as pianists to interpret them.
Liszt pronounced the F sharp minor Polonaise pathologic. As a matter of
fact, it surpasses in sombre grandeur the Heroic Polonaise, opus 53,
notwithstanding the thundering cannons and cavalry charges of the more
popular of the pair. The triplets in eight notes of the introduction
achieve a splendid climax of suspense before the entrance of the chief
theme. Soon octaves and chords supplant the single notes of the melody.
There is epical breadth which at each reiteration becomes bigger, so big
that it almost overflows the frame of the keyboard, in suggestion becomes
orchestral. The second subject in the major (D flat) is less drastic, is
an excellent contrast figure. The strange intermezzo in A which precedes
the Mazurka is not enigmatic if you hear it as a sinister roll of drums.
I think of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and its muffled morning music.
Its intent is manifest, it leads to the second theme, now transposed
to the despairing key of C sharp minor; the Mazurka which follows
tempted Liszt—or his amanuensis, Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein—to the most
extravagant panegyric. Its brace of double notes, thirds and sixths are
lovely in hue and scent, but pray do not languish your tempo, else the
episode soon becomes sugary. Again the Polonaise resumes its elemental
chant, a chant which grows huger in rancorous woe until the very bottom
of the pit of desolation is reached, and, without a gleam of light, comes
the code with mutterings of the main theme, and only in the very last
bar we hear with positive relief a smashing F sharp in octaves.
What does it all mean? Some obscure psychological drama of the
composer’s soul in which he vents his spleen, indignation and defiance,
and rages against the ineluctable canons of destiny. In a sense this
Polonaise is pathologic. It appeals to the nerves. It lacerates the
pulp of our sensibility, it is morbid, but it is also magnificent. It
is not sensational like the two Polonaises of Liszt in E major and C
minor, though it is equally brilliant. Arthur Friedheim played the
Chopin Polonaise superbly at one time. It suited his saturnine mood.
I fancy, however, that Franz Liszt’s performance must have been the
supreme exemplar. There is a loftiness of mood coupled with the heroic
patterns of this piece which place it in the category of masterpieces.
It reminds one of a sullen, rugged landscape in the style of Salvator
Rosa, a solitary human in the foreground, distracted, who lifts suicidal
hands to the darkling, indifferent skies. It is the tragedy of Man,
who is no longer, as in the old-fashioned geocentric conception of the
universe, the centre of things, but discovers himself alone, deserted by
the familiar signs and stars in his cosey firmament, and despairs. The
tragedy of unfaith. The tragedy of love that slays. Unhappy Chopin was
baptized a Roman Catholic, so was George Sand. Both were, to put the case
mildly, slack in the practices of their church. Chopin was of a pious
bent.
He concealed his attachment to the French sphinx of the inkpot from
his mother in Warsaw because he feared to pain her. She was profoundly
religious. Madame Sand, who didn’t wear trousers and smoke all day,
as caricature proclaims, was cruel to her consumptive genius. She
appreciated his work, but his humors were antic. She called Frederic
“mon cher cadavre,” and this “corpse” must have grated on his nerves.
Oh! if he had possessed but a tithe of her saving sense of humor. But
Chopin was not given to jesting over his love. He flirted and mildly
diverted himself; the Sand affair was deadly serious to him. When the
spirit moved her she betrayed him (let us politely call it spirit
rather than temperament). Her final desertion didn’t kill him. It was
the liaison that slew the man, body and soul. She robbed him of love,
faith, and fatherland. His ending, though, was in the proper religious
key. According to Turgines, half the countesses in Europe sang him to
his death. (Many are still singing their hearers along the same road.) I
believe the F sharp Polonaise to be the most subjective from the pen of
its composer, even more so than the B minor scherzo, opus 20.
The nocturnes are done to death. Let us pass them by. The C sharp minor
nocturne is like the one in C minor; both are still free from persecution
at the hands of the young person who has decked the most virile spirit
of his age with Parisian millinery. These two nocturnes do not intrigue
the fancy of the amateur. In breadth of conception they are Beethovenian.
The E major nocturne, a favorite of Josef Hofmann, and the one in B, the
Tuberose, in which Paderewski proved so eloquent and whose very title
makes H. L. Mencken grit his teeth, are loaded with purest Chopin ore. I
admire, but with reservations, the transcription of various nocturnes to
instruments of the string family. Wilhelmj transposed the D flat nocturne
for violin and Leopold Auer has arranged the posthumous nocturne in E
minor, which Heifetz plays beautifully; yet, effective as they may be,
they are not truly Chopinesque. They are too saccharine on the strings;
we miss the cool, crystalline tones of the pianoforte.
The Berceuse! Of that wonder-child who came to us through the pink gates
of the dawn, and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in Chopin’s Cradle Song,
I may only say that in the hands of many pianists it has grown to be
a brat of banal visage and muscular proportions. An ululation of the
D flat tonality, it has now become a mere finger study. When Joseffy
played the composition a poem emerged from the ivories. What of the
Preludes? Alone the twenty-five Preludes would give their creator a claim
on immortality. There are technical range and poetic vision; above all,
there is humanity. Shades of feeling are explored, depths and altitudes
of passion explored. If all Chopin were to be annulled I should plead
for the salvation of the Preludes. The cameo-like stillness of some is
like softly spoken words overheard in a cloister. Truly religious. But
thunder-riven Preludes in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor and E flat
minor stir our pulse to sharper vibration. Surpassingly sweet is the
elegiac Prelude in B flat. It recalls the nocturnes. The second Prelude
with its enigmatic questionings is for a rainy day; a day when the soul
is racked by doubt or defeat; about it, hovers a grisly something that we
dare not define. It may be Chopin’s Horla, this sinister music-making. A
ray of sunshine, but from a sun that slants in the west is the Prelude in
G. What marvels in miniature, what cunningly wrought jewels! Darker drama
may be found as the D minor Prelude with its elemental ground—bass—in
angry sea roars somewhere in the background; also in the glittering
scales of the B flat minor Prelude and the declamatory passages of the F
minor Prelude. In the C sharp minor Prelude, opus 45, there are marked
anticipations of the later manner of Brahms, not alone in spirit but in
figuration. This Prelude is a foretaste of Brahms, the familiar Chopin
note not missing.
The embroideries of the Barcarolle—a fully developed and dramatic
Nocturne—and of the Bolero are more Polish than Italian or Spanish. By
some critics the Fantaisie, opus 49, has been adjudged the most perfect
work of the composer. The grave, march-like introductions, the insistent,
climbing figures in triplets, the great song in F minor, followed by
the enchanting episodes in double-notes, and the powerful climax reveal
another Chopin from the sentimental dreamer, the conventional Thaddeus
of Warsaw. There is logical development. There are dramatic scope and
intensity. The lento is peaceful, the coda impressive. The entire
composition is massive, its phraseology long-breathed. It represents the
master at the peak of his powers.
THE TWILIGHT OF COSIMA I
When Cosima I, Queen of Baireuth, does enter the eternal shadowland,
her passing will not greatly intrigue the attention of a world whose
ears buzz with the rumors of mightier happenings. She has been a
dweller for years in the Twilights. (She was born December 25, 1837,
at Bellagio, Italy, and not in 1840, as the musical annals have it.)
She is the last of the famous dynasty founded by her husband, Richard
Wagner, greatest of modern composers. No one, not even his admirers,
dared pretend that Siegfried Wagner would ever succeed his father on
the musical throne. A brief span Cosima entertained high hopes for
her son’s future. He had been coached by Humperdinck and Richter. His
operas were produced in European capitals, but to no avail. He could not
fill the shadow of his sire, much less write a bar of music worth the
whistling. Wotan had fathered a Parsifal, Jr., and Baireuth sympathized
with Cosima’s disappointment. It was the second sorrow of a life crowded
with happiness. In 1883 the man she adored as a god died on her bosom
at Venice. That tragic event transformed her from a loving wife to the
sternly ambitious woman who ruled the destinies of Baireuth for thirty
years. In 1913 the third sorrow came to her in the unwelcome shape of
copyright expiration. The music of Wagner was free to every country.
Parsifal, the Rhinegold of Baireuth, already had been ravished by an
American Alberich; nevertheless, from the shock of the legal decision
which blotted Baireuth off the map of music Cosima never recovered. She
was become a shadow of her former grandeur. She had outlived her majesty.