smother the sense of humor, and intrench the petty pride of the
most magnanimous of men; Mendelssohn was peculiarly at its mercy,
because extreme sensitiveness inclined him to be wounded rather than
enlightened by such adverse criticism as he got, because consciousness
of real merit put him off his guard against the exaggerations of
hero-worshippers, and because the innate bias of his mind was more
toward a fastidious distinction than toward a rugged catholicity.
Even in his youth his affections, as we have seen, were exclusive
and jealous; and on the intellectual side a similar narrowness showed
itself in a certain preciosity that we should call bigotry had it been
less amiably expressed. That is a significant incident that Berlioz
relates of his sojourn with Mendelssohn in Rome in their student
days. "One evening," he says, "we were exploring together the Baths
of Caracalla, debating the question of the merit or demerit of human
actions, and their remuneration during this life. As I replied with
some enormity, I know not what, to his entirely religious and orthodox
opinions, his foot slipped, and down he rolled, with many scratches and
contusions, in the ruins of a very hard staircase. 'Admire the divine
justice,' said I, helping him to rise; 'it is I who blaspheme, and it
is you who fall!' This impiety, accompanied with peals of laughter,
appeared to him too much, it seemed; and, from that time, religious
discussions were always avoided." The lack of plasticity here shown
in a religious matter is also observable in his literary and musical
opinions. Lampadius quotes his comment on Shelley's "Cenci": "No, it
is too horrible! It is too abominable! I cannot read such a poem."
Mr. Hadow tells how he "praised the treatment of the double-basses in
Berlioz's Requiem, just as he afterwards told Wagner that 'a canonic
answer in the second act of "Tannhauser" had given him pleasure,'" and
remarks, "There was always a little touch of Atticus in Mendelssohn's
relations to his fellow-composers."
In the artificial air he was condemned to breathe, this pallor of
intellectual anemia gradually became habitual. As a rare plant, kept
always under glass, withers at a breeze which would invigorate the
hardy weed so he could but shiver and shrink from those winds of
impartial opinion which ruder natures inhale with zest. His youthful
exquisiteness of taste thus grew peevish and fretful with advancing
years. Too frequently we read of incidents like his studied coldness,
throughout a long rehearsal, toward a favorite singer, and his curt
explanation at the end: "Your curls provoke me, Fräulein Schloss.
Wear your hair smooth; curls ought never to be black, but light
brown or fair." Great, however, was the provocation. To set yourself
a pace no mortal could maintain by writing the "Midsummer Night's
Dream Overture" at seventeen; to marry an angelic creature who agreed
with your most casual word and kissed your hand when you improvised
in public; to move among admiring friends, relatives, pupils, and
acquaintances as a king might move in a never ending triumphal
procession; to find all qualms you might feel from time to time as to
the superiority of your work immediately drowned by the immemorial
habit of passive self-acceptance; to see other men, with other ideals,
winning a success which your universally recognized fair-mindedness
would not let you deny,--all this might bring pangs of bitterness to a
saint.
Perhaps this spiritual and professional exclusiveness, and the
isolation it resulted in, did not really grow with the years, but only
seems more anomalous in age, which should be mellow, than in naturally
arrogant youth. Certainly there were not lacking many evidences of
a more wholesome development, of a growth toward larger ideals, of
cordial services to fellow-artists. True self-respect, a very different
thing from narrow conceit, is shown in the following passage from a
letter. "As time goes on I think more deeply and sincerely of that--to
write only as I feel, to have less regard than ever to outward results,
and when I have produced a piece that has flowed from my heart--whether
it is afterwards to bring me fame, honors, orders, or snuff-boxes, does
not concern me." A fine modesty prompts the confession: "All I have
done appears to me somewhat miscellaneous.... I know what ought to
be, and is not." And in spite of the reserve that always impeded his
social efforts, there is plenty of evidence that he put himself to much
trouble to help such brother musicians as Liszt, Berlioz, and Spohr to
gain a hearing.[19]
Above all, he was raised quite above all petty personal considerations
by his whole-souled enthusiasm for the great ancient masters. His
efforts to educate popular taste by familiarity with classical works
were as unremitting and as disinterested as Schumann's. He was the
most active of all the champions of Bach, at that time so shamefully
neglected. His performance of the great "St. Matthew Passion" in
Berlin, in March, 1829, the first since the composer's death in the
middle of the eighteenth century, is one of the most important events
in musical history; the significance of it, and of his other labors in
behalf of Bach propaganda, to the entire subsequent progress of music,
and especially to the romantic movement, of which Bach is one of the
corner-stones, cannot be exaggerated.
Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like
Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial
and expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain
thinness of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind.
His personality is tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun
than a man. And hence it comes about that when, leaving his world of
fairies, elves, visionary landscapes, and ethereal joys and sorrows,
he tries to sound a fuller note of human pain and passion, he is
felt to be out of his element. His style is too fluent, too suave,
too insinuating and inoffensive, to embody tragic emotion. It lacks
the rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional harshness and
discordance even, of the natural human voice; its reading of life, in
which there is ugliness, crudity, and violence as well as beauty, is
too fastidiously expurgated. Which are the best of his piano works?
Certainly not the "Songs without Words," with their facile melody,
their monotonous rhythms and their cloyingly consonant harmony;
nor the respectable, harmless, unexciting sonatas, cut from the
same stuff, but by the yard instead of the square inch. Rather the
"Variations Sérieuses" and the "Preludes and Fugues," in which there
is some of the vigor of Bach, and the elusive immaterial whimsies,
in the true Mendelssohn vein, such as the "Capriccio," opus 118, the
scherzos, the "Spinning Song," the "E-minor Fantasie," and the "Rondo
Capriccioso." Similarly, in the chamber music, it is the Canzonetta
of the E-flat quartet, the scherzos of the trios, and the finale of
the violin concerto, that most please us. As for the symphonies, even
the noble adagio of the "Scotch" is just the least bit soporific; but
the scherzo or the Scottish jig, and the fresh allegro vivace and
stirring saltarello of the "Italian" are delightful. Mendelssohn gay
and gracious is the best of company; Mendelssohn sentimental makes us
"begin to loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a
little is by much too much."
The effeminate element in his work is probably chiefly responsible
for the indifference, boredom, or distaste with which it is nowadays
so often received. Since his romanticism was a matter of imagination
rather than of passion, of fancy and delicate sentiment rather than of
turbulent feeling, it is inevitably voted dull by a generation given
over like ours to the pursuit of thrills, tolerant of any turgidity
that can excite, and preferring intensity to clarity of emotion. He
represents a mild, tentative, and restrained application of artistic
principles that have been much more brilliantly and thoroughly
illustrated by bolder spirits like Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, who
have accordingly somewhat eclipsed him. His conservatism also made him
retain many of the traditional formulæ and mannerisms of classicism,
which have become repugnant to our less conventional age. The result
is that it has become almost a fashion to sneer or to smile at his
music. But it is conceivable that we err in one direction as much as
his contemporaries did in the other. It may be that we call his art
stale and vapid merely because our palates are jaded by over-indulgence
in spices and condiments. Mendelssohn is undeniably, for the present,
among the fallen gods; but whether a maturer and less sophisticated
taste than our own may some day set him up again is a question we must
be content to leave unanswered.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] See S. Hensel's "The Mendelssohn Family, from Letters and
Journals," a fascinating book. English translation published in London,
1881.
[15] "Mendelssohn," by S. S. Stratton, p. 40.
[16] Compare what is said of Chopin at page 231.
[17] "The Mendelssohn Family," p. 131.
[18] Compare the remarks on Schumann's scoring, at page 139.
[19] See the story of the banquet he tendered to Liszt in Leipsic, in
Lampadius' "Life," p. 167.
V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
[Illustration: FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN]
V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating
pretty widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is
determined largely by the technical conditions under which it develops.
We all know that one style is appropriate to engraving, another to
oil-painting, and still another to pastel work; we recognize that the
prose-writer and the versifier must use different vocabularies. Musical
critics, however, whether from ignorance or from a disposition to
involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of sentiment, have for
the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our primitive
notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains
unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best
sing, or instruments best play. We have to reach largely without their
aid the conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or
painting, the kind of body available to a composition determines in no
small degree the sort of spirit which is to inhabit it.
The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the
sixteenth century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which
at that time was firmly entrenched by tradition--the ecclesiastical
choir of mixed voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the
necessity of making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for
the various groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies
were restricted by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice;
his harmony, in the interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept
simple and transparent. When, somewhat later, the organ came into
vogue, it suggested certain modifications of style, splendidly realized
by J. S. Bach. The natural capacities of the hands on the keyboard
tended to focus attention quite as much on the chord as on the separate
strands of melody, and the massive effects of chord-patterns began to
vie in importance with the more polyphonic traits. At the same time
harmony was free to become much more complex, since pipes cannot sing
out of tune, and the mechanically even tone, free from the _vibrato_
and incapable of the accentuation of voices, made feasible a grand
impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's fugues. A little
later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and Beethoven,
ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his work on
the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed and
wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the
exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive
by motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic
extension of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same
time the marvelous expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly
utilized: on the emotional side music became more than ever before
profound, impassioned, mystical, and poignant.
As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical
individualities the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the
orchestra, so Chopin is in large measure a resultant of the
peculiar qualities of the most influential of modern instruments,
the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed an important
rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert and
Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer
before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so
thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its
limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar
dialect it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors
can it be said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and
the orchestra not existed, his art would still have been essentially
what it was. Indeed, his work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage
between the artistic impulses of a sensitive human organism and the
peculiar potentialities of a special instrument that it can be properly
understood only through a study of both.
The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its
tones. The tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in
duration only by the air capacity of the lungs, those of bowed string
instruments can be held indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as
long as the air pressure is maintained in the bellows. The vibrations
of a piano string, on the contrary, are at their maximum only during
the moment in which it is struck by the hammer operated by pressing
the key, and from that moment gradually decrease, giving forth a sound
constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is struck, the player's
control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice but either to
wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this reason
the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate harmonies
of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The long
notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of
their physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention,
and so lose their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic
passages, which depend for their effect on the leisurely succession
of dissonances and their resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer
from the discontinuity of the piano tone. The indifference, or even
insensibility, to the beauty of pure line, which characterizes so much
of our modern musical taste, is probably in large measure due to the
prevalence of an instrument so little suited to exhibit it.[20]
At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians
began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic
defect by modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that
if the tones would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over
and over again as rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract
evanescence. An early application of this principle is the use, by Bach
and other clavichordists, of trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a
means of keeping long melody-notes audible. A more important one is the
breaking up of chords into figures of short notes in the accompaniments
of Haydn and Mozart, a device which soon became so indispensable that
a glance at any modern piano score will discover hundreds of such
groups of short notes, which are nothing but chords played piecemeal in
order to make them sound.
[Illustration: score]
(_a_) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.
[Illustration: score]
(_b_) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.
[Illustration: score]
(_c_) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.
[Illustration: score]
(_d_) CHOPIN: Nocturne, Op. 53, No. 2.
Figure XV.
A melody in the right hand, accompanied by these broken chords in the
left--this soon became the normal texture of music intended for the
piano.
The first great merit of Chopin was that he carried to its logical
extreme this system of counteracting the piano's defective sonority.
The great advance made by him is shown even in the brief quotations of
Figure XV. The Mozart example is rudimentary--the device at its lowest
terms. In the Beethoven passage the chords are placed too low; they
sound muddy, opaque, inelastic. In the Schubert passage the sonority
is better, but the figures are so arranged as to be very difficult
to play, on account of the wide jump the hand has to make at the
middle of each measure. Chopin, on the other hand, avoids muddiness by
clustering his harmony fairly high (about the region of middle C),
at the same time gets a sufficient bass for his chords, which he is
able to do by covering a great deal of ground in each figure, and in
spite of the wide space traversed on the keyboard respects the comfort
of the player by not requiring any sudden leaps. It is furthermore
worthy of note that by introducing two tones foreign to the harmony
(the fourth and the sixteenth) he gains a richness of sound lacking
in the other examples. We get here, however, but the merest inkling
of the inexhaustible ingenuity with which he manages this matter of
"figuration," or the ornamental disintegration of chords. In order
really to appreciate it we should have to examine those nocturnes, say,
like the second, third, seventh, and eighth, in which with the left
hand unaided he supplies a good firm bass and an intricate texture of
accompaniment; we should have to study those pieces, such as the first,
fifth, and eighth of the Études, opus 10, and the Prelude, opus 28, no.
23, in which it is the right hand that, racing back and forth over the
keyboard, fills in the chinks of the harmony as a painter "stipples"
an even tint with an infinite number of tiny brush-strokes; we should
have to analyze in detail such a masterpiece as the Étude in A-flat
major, opus 25, no. 1, in which it is both hands that weave together a
diaphanous web of sound, while the outer fingers of one sing the tune,
and those of the other the bass.[21]
Chopin's negative merit of minimizing the disadvantages of his
instrument is, however, very intimately connected with a more positive
skill in utilizing its peculiar advantages, in order to understand
which we shall have to revert for a moment to our examination of
the mechanism of the piano. The most characteristic feature of this
mechanism--a feature so vital that it has been called the soul of
the piano, and so unique that no other instrument except the harp
presents a parallel to it--is the damper pedal, generally known by the
inaccurate and misleading name of "the loud pedal." Its function is
to raise all the dampers which control the vibrations of the strings,
leaving them free to respond to any impulse they may receive. It thus
secures two important results.
In the first place, it counteracts the non-sustainment of single tones
by fusing a great many such individual tones, separately produced,
into one impression. It will readily be seen, for instance, how
indispensable is the pedal to the intended effect of the broken chords
of Figure XV: only through its coöperation do they become worthy
equivalents, in the piano idiom, of what the organ or voices would
present in the form of sustained chords in long notes. Moreover, every
tone sounded on the piano, with the pedal down, is reinforced, through
what is known as sympathetic vibration, by many other tones not sounded
by the hands at all. For, since every tone produced by a piano string
is in reality, as proved by scientific analysis, by no means simple,
but a complex of many elements known as "partial tones," and since any
elastic body capable of producing a given tone will actually produce
it, through sympathetic vibration, whenever the tone is already being
otherwise sounded in its vicinity, it will readily be understood that
all the partial tones set going by striking a piano key will, if the
dampers are, by means of the pedal, kept from interfering, start into
activity whatever strings are tuned to their respective pitches. Thus
the pedal turns the entire body of strings into one vast Æolian harp,
ready to take up, reëcho, and multiply the slightest breath of sound
produced through the keyboard.
Some idea of the extraordinary enrichment of timbre or tone-quality
which accrues to the piano through the sympathetic vibration made
possible by the pedal may be gained by striking a single key, say
middle C, first without, then with, the pedal. The first tone stands
out hard and angular, like a leafless tree in a desert; the second is
liquid, murmurous, palpitant, its outlines softened as a landscape is
softened by a misty atmosphere. When a chord rather than a single key
is struck, the effect is, of course, multiplied in direct proportion
to the number of its constituent tones. The hard nucleus of the
impression is clothed in a soft web of subordinate sounds, the result
of sympathetic vibration. Suppose, for example, we play the chord of
four whole notes in Figure XVI. If at the same time we free the strings
by pressing the pedal, we shall summon from them an attendant train of
ghostly "harmonics" for each of the four, represented in the figure by
quarter-notes. These auxiliary tones, to be sure, will be exceedingly
faint and individually indistinguishable, but they will nevertheless
give to the impression that curious mellowness, depth, or liquidity
(one calls vainly on the divers experiences of other senses to describe
it) which is one of the fundamental charms of the piano tone.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XVI.
The second important result of the damper pedal is a still greater
richness of tone which it enables composers to attain by artificially
pushing still farther the fusion of many single tones which is
illustrated on the plane of nature by the foregoing examples. The
student of harmony will observe that though most of the "harmonics,"
written in quarter-notes, of Figure XVI, are consonant to the
fundamental chord, and thus enrich without obscuring it, there are
several, notably the G-sharp, which, being foreign to the chord, tend
slightly to blur its clarity. These dissonant harmonics are, however,
so faint that their effect is practically nil. But if the composer,
acting on the hint they give him, introduces into his chords similar
foreign tones, sounded more distinctly by the hands, he at once
imparts to the harmony a curious opacity and thickness which it is
almost impossible to describe, but which affords a pleasant contrast
to the uniform clearness of purely consonant chords. The fourth and
the sixteenth notes in the bit of Chopin already cited (Figure XV)
illustrate this device. The effect of such dissonant tones may be
likened to the effect of mixtures and body-colors in painting; they
afford relief from the monotony of consonance just as those afford
relief from the monotony of the pure colors. They provide the musical
picture with chiaroscuro and atmosphere, softening the sharpness of its
lines, spreading over it, so to speak, a delicate translucent haze.
Used to excess, of course, they make a mere smutch, a meaningless,
chaotic daub; the music reverts to primitive noise; the nice point
is to use them just enough to gain depth, solidity, light and shade,
without blackening and confusing the whole impression.[22]
Now Chopin is one of the supreme masters in the coloristic use of the
dissonance. His nocturnes, especially the first, seventh, eighth, and
fourteenth, may fairly be said to inaugurate by this means a new era
in music, comparable in many respects to the era of impressionism in
painting. Their tremulous, vaporous harmonies seem to come from no
common piano, but from some wind-swept Æolian harp. Take, for instance,
such a passage as the following, at the end of the third nocturne:--
[Illustration: score]
[Illustration: score]
Figure XVII.
Here it is as if, after placing on his canvas the two main chords of
the cadence, dominant and tonic, he took, while the colors were still
wet, a brush, and with the softest imaginable touch drew it across the
entire face of the picture. The grace-notes, most of which, it will
be noted, are dissonant to the main harmony, are no more meant to be
heard individually than the spots of paint in a Monet are meant to
be seen individually; they are a running of the colors, blurring the
otherwise too bald outline. Chopin's scores are full of these delicate
veilings and obscurations. In a majority of cases they are produced,
as in this instance, by the right hand, above a clear harmony in the
lower register. But sometimes, more daringly,[23] he assigns the web
of dissonance to the left hand, in the middle register or even in the
bass, thus gaining an extraordinary lurid gorgeousness of coloring. The
passage in the third ballade, beginning at the change of signature to
four sharps (Figure XVIII), is an instance.