How often of late years we hear this expression: Will some one who
claims to know kindly tell us what it means? For one, I confess myself,
after a decade of careful, thoughtful investigation, utterly unable to
find out. We hear one pianist extolled as a wonderful Beethoven player,
as a safe, legitimate, trustworthy champion of the good old classical
traditions; and another equally eminent artist condemned as wholly
unworthy to lift for the public the veil of awe and deep mystery
enshrouding the sublimities of this grandest of tone-Titans. The late
von Bülow, for instance, was well-nigh universally conceded to be the
representative Beethoven player of the age, for no better reasons, so
far as I can discover, than that he was generally admitted to be a
failure in the presentation of most works of the modern school, and that
cold, calculating, cynical intellectuality was the predominant feature
of his personality and his musical work, which made him the driest, most
unideal, uninteresting pianist of his generation, in spite of his
phenomenal technic, memory, and mental power.
On the other hand, Paderewski, with all his infinitely magnetic
personality, his incomparable beauty of tone and coloring, his blended
nobility and refinement of conception, is decried as a perverter of
taste, a destroyer of traditions and precedents, because, forsooth, he
plays Beethoven too warmly, too emotionally, too subjectively.
_De grace, messieurs_, what does it all signify? Are we then to accept
perforce as final, in spite of our better instincts, the dictum of the
long since petrified Leipsic School, which holds technic of the hand and
head, not only as the supreme, but as the sole element in musical
art—which relegates all emotion and its expression to the despised
limbo of sickly sentimentality, and which epitomizes its highest
encomium of an artist in the words “He allows himself no
liberties”—that is to say, he plays merely the notes, with the
faultless precision and soulless monotony of a machine? Is this, then,
_traditional_ playing of Beethoven, or any other composer? Is it art at
all? If there is any such thing as an authentic, authoritative musical
standard concerning any given composition, upon what does or should it
rest? Surely either upon the way its composer rendered it, or desired it
rendered, if that can be ascertained, or upon the way it was given by
its first great public interpreter. Let us examine the scanty available
data concerning Beethoven’s piano works from this point of view. How did
Beethoven himself play his own works?
This question reminds one of the century-old dispute among scholars as
to the propriety of the so-called English pronunciation of Latin, an
absurdity on the face of it. Fancy talking of the English pronunciation
of French or German! Of course, we do not know and have no means of
learning exactly how the old Latins did pronounce their language in all
the niceties of detail, but one thing we do know with absolute
certainty, and that is that they did not Anglicize it, for the one good
reason that our language did not come into existence until centuries
after the Latin tongue was dead. Similarly, as there is no one now
living who can remember and tell us just how Beethoven did play any
given sonata, and as, unfortunately, the phonograph was not then
invented to preserve for us the incalculably precious records of his
interpretations, we have no means of ascertaining just what his
conceptions were, even supposing they had been twice alike, which they
probably were not. But this we may be sure of, beyond a question or a
doubt: He did not play them according to von Bülow. Furthermore, there
is no ground for believing that his performances were at all such as the
conservative sticklers for classic traditions insist that our renditions
of Beethoven must be to-day. We know this from a study of the life and
characteristics of the man, from the internal evidence of his works, and
from the reports given us by his contemporaries of his manner of playing
them and their effect upon the hearer.
Beethoven was preëminently a romanticist, in the content, if not always
in the form of his works; a man of pronounced, self-loyal individuality
and intense subjectivity, who wrote, and consequently must have played,
as he felt, and not in accordance with prescribed rules and formulas; a
man who can reply without immodesty when criticized for breaking a
preëstablished law of harmony, “I do it,” with the calm confidence in
the divine right of genius to self-utterance in its own chosen way which
always accompanies true greatness and has been the infallible compass of
progress in all ages. The man who was the fearless, outspoken champion
of artistic sincerity and profound earnestness, whose scorn of shallow,
pedantic formulas was as uncompromising as it was irrepressible, whose
watchword was universality of content, who believed that music could and
should be made to express every phase of human emotion, who could
venture on the unheard-of innovation of beginning a sonata with a
pathetic adagio, and introducing a chorus into the last movement of a
symphony, in open defiance of all established tradition, who was
repeatedly accused by the critics of his day of being unable to write a
correct fugue or sonata, and whose music was declared to be that of a
madman by leading musicians even as late as the beginning of our
century—this is surely not the man whose artistic personality can be
fairly represented by a purely intellectual, stiffly precise, though
never so scholarly reading of his printed scores. How is that better
than the bloodless plaster casts of the living, breathing children of
his genius? The printed symbols represent audible sounds and the sounds
symbolize emotions. The mere sounds with the emotions left out are no
more Beethoven’s music than the printed notes if never made audible.
Of his own playing, we are told that it lacked finish and precision, but
never warmth and intensity; that, like his nature, it was stormy,
impetuous, impulsive, at times even almost brutal in its rough strength
and fierce energy; that he often sacrificed tone quality and even
accuracy in his complete abandonment to the torrent of his emotions, but
never failed to stir to their profoundest depths the hearts of his
hearers. Is this the man, this hero of musical democracy, this giant
embodiment of the Titanic forces of primitive Nature, this shaggy-maned
lion, with the great, warm, keenly sentient human heart, whose nearest
prototype among modern players is Rubinstein; is this the man with whom
originated the severely classical school, the cold, prim, stately
interpretations which we are told to reverence as traditional, in which
the head is everything, the heart nothing—form all-important, and
feeling a deplorable weakness? It is impossible, incredible!
I honestly believe that if Beethoven himself could revisit the world and
appear _incognito_ in the concert-halls of our musical centers to give
us an ideal, authoritative rendition of his great works, one-half of his
audience and nine-tenths of his critics would hold up their hands in
holy horror at his untraditional and un-Beethoven-like readings, and
would declare that while he was an interesting and magnetic artist, and
an enjoyable player of the lighter, more emotional modern school, his
renderings of the revered classics were dangerously perverting to the
public taste and could not be sufficiently condemned.
But if not with Beethoven himself, with whom did these so-called
traditions originate? Was it with the first great public interpreters of
his works, who introduced them to the world of concert-goers and so
earned the right to have their readings respected? Who was the first,
most enthusiastic, courageous, and efficient champion of Beethoven’s
piano works? Who did most to introduce them to the concert audiences of
Europe, to force for them first a hearing, then a reluctant recognition?
Who first and oftenest dared to present Beethoven’s serious chamber
music to the frivolous sensation-loving Parisians, and to risk his
unprecedented popularity with them upon the venture? Who but Franz
Liszt! For nearly two decades, during the whole of his phenomenal career
as a virtuoso, the vast weight of his musical influence and example, the
incalculable force of his fervid, magnetic personality, and his
inexhaustible resources as an executant, were all brought to bear in
behalf of his revered Beethoven, in the effort to render his best piano
works familiar and popular with the European public. It is safe to say
that during that period Liszt introduced more Beethoven sonatas to more
people than all other pianists combined. He then established such
traditions as there may be regarding the proper interpretation of these
works; and surely no one who heard him play, no one who is even slightly
familiar with his life, characteristics, and art ideals, will think for
a moment of classing him with the conservative school, with the
inflexible, puritanical adherents to cut-and-dried theories and the cold
dead letter of the law as represented by the printed notes.
But we are told that precisely these printed notes and signs should be
our only and all-sufficient guide. We are commanded to stick to the text
and not to presume to take personal liberties with so sacred a thing as
a Beethoven composition. I wonder if the advocates of this idea, which
does so much credit to their bump of veneration and so little to their
artistic insight, ever took the trouble to examine the text of these
same Beethoven compositions in the earliest editions, as they came first
from his own hand; and if so, whether they noticed the conspicuous
absence of marks of expression. When they urge that Beethoven probably
knew best how his works should be rendered and that we ought to follow
exclusively and religiously his indications, do they know how very few
and inadequate these were? So few, in fact, that if only those given by
the composer are to be observed, even the most rigid of our sticklers
for classical severity are guilty of the most flagrant breaches of their
own rule. Are we then to suppose that Beethoven wished his music played
without varying expression, on one dead monotonous level? Not at all;
but simply to infer that, like many great composers, he felt such
indications to be wholly unnecessary, and was far too impatient to stop
for such mechanical details. To him his music was the vital utterance of
the intense life within. The meaning and true delivery of each phrase
were vividly, unmistakably self-evident, needing arbitrary marks of
expression as little as a heart-felt declaration of love or outburst of
grief. He rightly assumed that to be played at all as it should be, such
music must first be felt, and that visible marks of expression would be
as needless to the player with intuitive comprehension, as they would be
useless to the player without it. Just as Chopin omitted the indication
“tempo rubato” from all his later works, declaring that any one who had
sense enough to play them at all would know that it was demanded without
being told.
True, Beethoven’s works have been edited well-nigh to death since his
time, but of course without his sanction or revision; and as no two
editions agree, who shall decide which is infallible? And why, I ask, is
not the audible interpretation at the piano of a Liszt, a Rubinstein, or
a Paderewski just as likely to be legitimate as the printed
interpretation of a Bülow or a Lebert? Has not one artist as good a
right to his conception as another? And in heaven’s name what possible
reason is there for assuming, in regard to an intensely emotional
composer and player like Beethoven, that the coldly, stiffly scholastic
reading of his works is more in accordance with his original intention
than a more warm and subjective one?
Moreover, even if there were a complete, corrected, authorized edition
of Beethoven, carefully revised by the composer himself, any one who has
ever written out, proof-read, and finally published the simplest
original composition knows well by experience how utterly impossible it
is to indicate definitely, with our imperfect system of marking, just
how each strain should be rendered. A general outline of the whole
effect desired can be given; but try as we may, all the more delicate
shades, the finer details of accent and inflection, must always be left
to the taste, insight, and temperament of the individual performer; just
as the intelligent reading of a poem depends upon much besides an
observance of the punctuation marks. It is not within the limits of
human ability to edit a single period of eight measures so perfectly
that no variations or mistakes in the interpretation are possible.
In view of these facts, I am bold enough to maintain that there is no
such thing as an absolutely correct traditional rendering of any single
Beethoven composition, one to be followed inflexibly. It might be said
of Beethoven, and in fact of any great composer, as aptly as of
Shakespeare, that he is always on the level of his readers. Those
possessing neither natural nor acquired appreciation for the best music
will find in Beethoven nothing but a series of unintelligible and more
or less disagreeable noises, like Humboldt. Those who by nature,
training, and habit of mind are fitted to perceive and enjoy only the
physical and intellectual elements in tonal art,—its sensuous effect
upon the ear, its rhythmic movement, its ingenious intricacies of
structure and symmetry of form,—will seek and find, and, if they are
players, will emphasize in Beethoven only these factors, and will
vehemently protest that there is nothing else there, and that any
attempt to find or to introduce anything else is presumptuous and
morbid. But those to whom music is the artistic medium for the
expression of the strongest, deepest, and best of human emotions, who
demand that every strain shall come fresh and warm from the heart of the
composer and speak directly and forcefully to the heart of the hearer;
those to whom the brain, no less than the hand, is a servant to that
higher, subtler ego we call the soul, and form and technic alike mere
vehicles for soul utterance, will strive, with humble, self-abnegating
fidelity, to read between the lines of the printed music that unwritten,
unwritable spirit of their composer; will infuse for the moment their
own pulsing, revivifying life into the symbolic forms until they glow
with at least a faint suggestion of their original warmth and vitality,
as when freshly born of the passion and the labor of genius. These alone
can give us, in the light and truth of spiritual intuition, the only
approximately _traditional Beethoven playing_.
BEETHOVEN
1770 1827