recognition, at every turn, of this fineness of nature, this mental
and spiritual high-breeding, this exquisitely sensitive taste, and
in the detection of the various kinds of excellence it produces.
One easily traces it through several planes of achievement, in an
ascending series. On the first and lowest plane it appears merely as
an inimitable finesse in the execution of light, playful, and even
frivolous designs: no one has brought so delicate and yet firm a
touch, and so sure an instinct for dainty elegance of style, to the
treatment of the _salon_-piece (a _genre_ for which we find perhaps the
best parallel in the paintings of Watteau or the verses of Mr. Austin
Dobson) as the Chopin of the waltzes, the mazurkas, many of the études
and preludes, and even of the more old-fashioned concert fantasias
and "_variations_ _brillantes_." Weber is as polished, but less
subtle; Schubert is as spontaneous, but by no means so distinguished.
Schumann exerts the same fascination, but with less ingratiation, less
_politesse_; Liszt's musical garment is equally sparkling, but it is
gemmed with rubies rather than with diamonds. The technical sources of
Chopin's success in this _genre_ are his graceful, smoothly-moulded
melodies, frequently recalling those of Bellini and other Italians,
with whom he had much in common; his simple, transparent harmonies,
built up always with an unfailing sense of tone-color; and his
lambent, coruscating ornamentation, which always seems to effloresce
spontaneously from the melody. In all these matters he is the supreme
model of purity and felicity in this style.
But the same punctilious taste which guided him so safely among the
pitfalls of virtuosity and bravura soon led him beyond this entire
scheme of art, which is, after all, based on the somewhat frivolous
ideal of ostentation, up to the higher level of lyrical expression,
based on quiet and deep personal feeling. The virtuoso was transformed
into the poet. In the nocturnes, some of the études and preludes,
portions even of the ballades and polonaises, and most strikingly of
all in the slow movements of the concertos and sonatas, his object is
no longer to dazzle his audience, but to portray subjective emotion,
often of a profound earnestness and spiritual beauty. If in his early
pieces he was the prestidigitator, the brother-in-art of Thalberg and
Liszt, here he is the dreamer, the rhapsodist, and his nearest of kin
is Robert Schumann. The largo of the B-minor Sonata is Schumannesque in
its contemplativeness, its _innigkeit_, its marked note of mysticism;
the funeral march in the B-flat minor Sonata equals that of the great
quintet in poignancy and dignity, though it is a feminine version of
what in the German composer we find expressed with more virile force.
In the nocturnes the feminine quality is even more evident. Their
tender beauty has a pallor, a fragility, almost an emaciation, which
has often brought upon them the charge of morbidity. It is certain
that in the pieces of this type Chopin has carried his fastidiousness
a stage farther than in the display pieces, attaining an even greater
distinction and a rarer individuality. The nocturnes and preludes, the
larghettos of the two concertos, the largo of the Sonata in B-minor,
and a few other things of the same sort constitute one of the few
perfect manifestations of the romantic spirit in music.
There is still a third phase of Chopin's work, which some will probably
consider as much higher than the lyrical phase as that is higher than
the decorative. This may be called the heroic or epic phase, and is
exemplified in the polonaises, the ballades, the Fantaisie, opus 49,
the twelfth étude, the thirteenth nocturne, and the finale of the
Sonata in B-minor.[27] A study of these works will open the eyes of
any one who knows Chopin only through his virtuoso or lyrical pieces
to the scope and many-sidedness of his genius. There is about them a
largeness of utterance, a sustainment of mood, an intensity of emotion
hardly ever degenerating into the hysterical or the sentimental, which
it is strange to find in the graceful _salon_ writer, the delicate
miniaturist. Yet this final quality, too, by which Chopin proves
himself akin to Beethoven as well as to Thalberg and Schumann (an
oddly assorted trio), is, like the others, due to his characteristic
fineness of nature. It is the heroism of high breeding, the vigor
of intelligence, the dignity of impeccable taste. It bespeaks a
strength rather subtle than brutal--the strength of the mettlesome
thoroughbred, not that of the stolid dray-horse. It is a spiritual
superiority (like the technical and emotional superiority) born of
distinction and nourished by exclusiveness. Even in the most virile of
the polonaises, with the possible exception of the so-called "Military
Polonaise," which is unique in its fresh, open-air athleticism, we feel
that the power which surges through them is a nervous rather than a
muscular power. Thus when he is heroic, no less than when he is gay or
introspective, Chopin remains true to his slender, aquiline, subtle,
aristocratic self.
It is interesting to examine the evolution of technique that went hand
in hand with his growth in emotional earnestness. In the first place
the Bellini-like tunefulness, illustrated in the theme of the Rondeau,
opus 1, with its agile turns and trills and its skipping staccato
movement, gives place in the maturer works to a freer, more chromatic,
more impassioned and rhapsodic type of melody. It recrudesces, to be
sure, here and there, as in the ninth nocturne, the larghetto of the
E-minor concerto, the moderato cantabile of the "Fantaisie Impromptu";
for the languid southern luxuriousness was once for all a part of
Chopin's temperament. But the deeper and more intimate the mood he is
trying to express, the broader and less trammelled becomes his melodic
curve. How sinuous the line, how gradual the climax, how deliberate the
subsidence, of this theme from the fourteenth nocturne (_a_, in Figure
XX):
[Illustration: score]
(_a_)
[Illustration: score]
(_b_)
Figure XX.
How majestically the phrases rise, tier on tier, in the chief melody of
the Polonaise, opus 44! How nobly rhapsodical, how genially spontaneous
and flexible, is the phraseology of the second theme in the allegro of
the B-minor Sonata (_b_, in Figure XX)! Well may Mr. Edward Dannreuther
call Chopin "the supreme master of elegiac melody."
In his greatest tunes Chopin indeed touches a point which few purely
romantic writers ever reach. We have noted, from time to time, in the
course of these studies, the tendency of all lyrical composers to build
up their music out of a few short phrases many times repeated, like
the patterns in a wall-paper; we have seen how Schubert, Schumann, and
Mendelssohn fell into this pitfall even in their orchestral works,
which therefore, in comparison with Mozart's or Beethoven's, seem
patchy, breathless, or monotonous. We have seen that melodies of "long
breath" are conceivable only by minds of sufficient synthetic power
to entwine many phrases, diverse in length, contour, and rhythm, into
a single organism. Now Chopin, like the rest, writes only too often
in the "wall-paper" style, as may be seen especially in the waltzes,
mazurkas, and nocturnes. But at other times he shows a synthetic
faculty rare among lyrists, by which he attains a noble breadth. Look,
for example, at the passage marked "sostenuto" in the Grande Valse,
opus 42, at the surging bass theme of the Polonaise, opus 40, no. 2, or
at the second theme of the allegro of the B-flat minor Sonata, noting
the sustained flight of the second eight measures of the tune. Better
still, examine with some particularity, studying the diversity of the
rhythmic figures employed, the two melodies in Figure XXI, one from
the Ballade, opus 23, and one from the finale of the Sonata, opus 58.
Mark the deliberation, the suspension of interest, of the sequence in
measures 5-8 of the first, the exciting inevitability of the chromatic
descending scale near the end of the second.[28] In such tunes as
these, which are frequent in his later works, Chopin proves himself
capable of the veritable "_longue haleine_" of the epic melodist.[29]
[Illustration: score]
(_a_)
[Illustration: score]
(_b_)
Figure XXI.
A second technical result of the gradual deepening of Chopin's ideal
of expression was a wonderful development of his harmonic sense. In
the works of his prime he is one of the greatest of all masters of
expressive harmony. His originality in modulation and enharmonic
transition, his employment of chromatic progressions cheek by jowl
with passages based on the old diatonic modes of the Polish folk-music,
his daring use of consecutive fifths and other such bugbears of the
scholastic, entitle him to a high place among the pioneers of modern
methods. He constantly surprises us with premonitions of Liszt, Wagner,
the French and Russian composers of to-day, and even Richard Strauss.
Thus, for instance, the opening of the great Polonaise-Fantaisie,
with its constantly shifting tonality, its groping bass, its murky,
mysterious minor-ninth and diminished-seventh chords, seems like a
page from "Tristan"; the series of kaleidoscopic modulations, marked
"stretto," near the end of the fourth ballade, recall Tschaïkowsky in
one of his most reckless moods; and we must go to César Franck to find
a parallel for the lapsing chromatic dominant-seventh chords of the
twenty-first mazurka.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXII.
Nor does Chopin make the mistake, so fatal to some modern writers,
of surfeiting our ears on these complexities until they become
apathetic. His taste is too sensitive for that. Scarcely are we
launched on an admiring study of his harmonic intricacies (which it
must be confessed became in his latest pieces, as Mr. Niecks suggests,
almost too fine-spun) before we are arrested by some fascinating bit
of utter simplicity and bell-like clarity. How grateful, after the
ominous harmonics at the beginning of the Polonaise, opus 26, no. 2,
in the lower register, the restless seventh chords of the principal
tune, and the clanging dissonances above the pedal-point on F at the
middle of the first section--how grateful, after all this clamor and
stridency, are the triads and dominant sevenths of the Meno mosso (see
Figure XXII). It is as if some bright band of pilgrims marched, to the
clear peal of trumpets, out of the dust and blood of a battlefield.
Exquisitely beautiful, again, is the celestial purity of those chords,
transparent and colorless as crystal, which are introduced near the
beginning of the second impromptu:--
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXIII.
Other similar passages are the "religioso" section in the sixth
nocturne, and the middle section of the eleventh, both of which,
in their ecclesiastical serenity and severity, take one back to
Palestrina. And with all his diversity of vocabulary, Chopin never
confuses his effects. He can pass from the extreme plainness of the
fifth étude to the chromatic complexity of the sixth, without the least
adulteration of either.
Why the works of a master so various yet always so elevated in style,
animated by so high an ideal of what it is worth while to say,
and of how it should be said, should be specially marked out for
sentimentalization and degradation at the hands of performers too
dull to divine their distinction, is one of the mysteries of perverse
destiny. It is hard to see what justification can be found, either
in the internal evidence of the works themselves or in the recorded
opinions of their composer, by the misguided enthusiasts who drag out
his lovely melodies into mawkish recitatives, break his chords into
arpeggios, and vulgarize his _tempo rubato_ into license of meter and
confusion of rhythm. There is, to be sure, in much of his music, a
subjective quality, an intimacy of mood, which gives the debauchee of
sentiment an opportunity he does not find in abstract classic art.
There are even a few instances, to give him countenance, of actual
affectation, the tiresome posturing of the "dramatic" tone-poet, as in
the pompous ending of the ninth nocturne and the theatrical opening
of the third scherzo, where Chopin seems to borrow a gesture from his
friend Liszt. But the entire object of the foregoing analysis will
have been missed if it has not convinced the reader of the essential
distinction, the superiority to all claptrap eloquence and feverish
emotion, of Chopin's mind. He was not a man to strut and pose; he was
too busy with an artistic ideal, too bent upon expressing a high vein
of feeling in a faultless technical medium.
There is also plenty of documentary evidence to prove his abhorrence
of all sickly sentiment, and of the messy technique it induces. Take,
for example, the matter of the much discussed _tempo rubato_. Chopin
regarded this as a sensitive adjustment of time values, a delicate
elasticity or flexibility of pace--by no means as a departure from
essential metrical accuracy. "The left hand," he said to his pupil
Von Lenz, "is the conductor; it must not waver or lose ground; do
with the right hand what you will and can." "He required adherence,"
says another pupil, "to the strictest rhythm, hated all lingering
and dragging, misplaced _rubatos_ and exaggerated _ritardandos_. 'Je
vous prie de vous asseoir,' he said on such an occasion, with gentle
mockery." His aversion to melodramatic expressiveness, in which
the artist surrenders himself weakly to a momentary excitement, may
be inferred from his remark on Liszt's performance of a Beethoven
sonata: "Must one, however, always speak so declamatorily (_si
declamatoirement_)?" and from a comment on his own playing by Cramer,
a pedant who, without entirely comprehending him, yet could not but
discern the dignity of his art: "I do not understand him, but he plays
beautifully and correctly, he does not give way to his passion like
other young men." Finally, if Chopin had really been a mere voluptuary
and sentimentalist, is it likely that he would have composed with such
concentrated intensity of labor? "He shut himself up in his room for
whole days," writes George Sand, "weeping, walking, breaking his pens,
repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing
it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and
desperate perseverance."
No, Chopin may not be a giant like Bach, or Mozart, or Handel, or
Beethoven, but he is a sincere and earnest artist, who feels vividly,
and spares no pains to give his feelings worthy expression, and to
attain a supreme plastic beauty. Above all, he is a man of the most
delicate sensibility, the most discriminating taste, the most exacting
ideal of artistic perfection. In leaving him, it is pleasant to attend
less to the sufferings to which these qualities condemned him as a
man, than to the achievements to which they led him as an artist.
This shifting of emphasis is what he would himself have desired, for
his aspirations and standards were æsthetic rather than ethical; he
lived as he could, it was only in composing that his will was free and
efficient; his very individuality takes definite shape only in the
favoring medium of musical imagination and emotion. In that firmament
of music he will continue to shine, a fixed star, not perhaps of the
first magnitude, but giving a wondrously clear, white light, and, as he
would have wished, in peerless solitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord" is an example of a work to
which, since its beauty is largely one of line, the piano cannot do
justice. See, for instance, Prelude IV, in C-sharp minor, in the first
book, measures 4-7, inclusive. The tenor part, of a wonderful nobility,
is concealed by the more rapidly moving, and therefore on the piano
more sonorous, soprano. In order fully to bring it to our consciousness
we must sing or otherwise reinforce it.
[21] Schumann reports of Chopin's playing of this étude: "It would be
a mistake to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes
with distinctness; it was more like a billowing of the A-flat major
chord, swelled anew here and there by means of the pedal; but through
the harmonies were heard the sustained tones of a wondrous melody,
and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come into greater
prominence amid the chords, along with that principal cantilena."
[22] Of course, the amount of dissonance acceptable is not a fixed
quantity, but increases as the perceptive power of the ear develops.
[23] More daringly, because the lower the pitch of a dissonant tone,
the greater the number of its audible harmonics, and hence the greater
the degree of its obscuration of the harmony. Even a consonance, such
as the major third, sounds "muddy" when placed in the lower register.
Readers interested in this matter should consult some convenient
handbook of acoustics, such as Broadhouse's "The Student's Helmholtz,"
on the subjects of harmonics or partial tones, sympathetic vibration,
etc., and Mr. Arthur Whiting's "Pedal Studies," for a highly suggestive
discussion of color in piano music.
[24] It is, however, interesting to note that, lavish as Chopin's use
of the pedal seems when compared to the general practice of his time,
the fondness for the turbid and cloudy colors produced by commingled
dissonances has grown so rapidly that to-day we prefer sometimes even
more pedal than he gives us. In the Ballade, opus 52, during that
brilliant passage which debouches into the simple chords in B-flat
major, modern taste would prefer a continuous pedal through six
measures, instead of through only three, as Chopin has directed. We
should also blur the eleventh Étude more recklessly than he does, and
many other instances will occur to the reader.
[25] _Schwärmerisch_--visionary, imaginative, dreamy.
[26] Three of his pieces are dedicated to baronesses, nine to
countesses, and four to princesses.
[27] It is noteworthy that most of these compositions bear opus numbers
higher than 40, and belong to the last decade of the composer's life.
[28] Cf. also the subsequent, even more extended, treatment in the
sequel.
[29] It may be asked why, possessing this enviable _longue haleine_,
Chopin did not turn it to better advantage in writing his sonatas and
concertos, which are structurally not satisfactory examples of their
types. In answer it may be suggested (1) that in the concertos he was
hampered by the orchestra, his technique being essentially pianistic;
and (2) that his melodies, however broad in scope, are generally
lyrical in character, and hence not adapted to symphonic treatment.
With his characteristic caution, however, he used these most extended
forms but sparingly; and in the more rhapsodic long forms, such as the
polonaises and ballades on a large scale, he is highly successful.
VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ
[Illustration: HECTOR BERLIOZ]
VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ
Not many years ago three Americans, coming, late one afternoon, in the
course of a walking tour in northern France, to the little cathedral
town of Beauvais, found its ordinarily quiet air filled with tumult,
bustle, and confusion. The streets, gay with colored bunting and
venders' booths, were thronged with crowds of merrymakers; the hum
of insatiable conversation was everywhere; no rooms were to be had
at the hotels, and their dining rooms were preëmpted by crowds of
men in uniform, engaged in an endless round of toasts and speeches.
Beauvais was, in a word, the scene of a "Grande Fête des Pompiers,"
or Firemen's Festival. The firemen of all the surrounding country had
assembled there, had taken possession of the town, and had surrendered
themselves to conviviality and joy. It was a spectacle interesting
from many points of view; but the fancy of the American observers was
most of all struck by certain long strips of bunting which spanned the
streets at intervals, bearing in large letters the legend, "Honneur
aux victimes du devoir." This, it seemed to them, was the note in this
motley symphony most perfectly, inimitably, and deliciously French.
These festive firemen, in the midst of their jollifications, did not
forget for a moment that it was their proud privilege to stand before
the world, so long as cognac allowed them to stand at all, as the
honored victims of duty. One hardly knew whether to smile at their
ingenuousness, or to thrill in sympathy with their emotion, which,
however theatrical, was perfectly sincere; on consideration one did
both.
Something of the quandary of these American observers of the very
Gallic firemen of Beauvais must perhaps always be experienced by the
Anglo-Saxon who tries to understand the French attitude toward life
or art, so essentially different are the two types of temperament. It
is hard for the stolid, matter-of-fact, insensitive, self-satisfied
Anglo-Saxon, singly set upon his business, indifferent to what the
world may think of him, to comprehend the subtleties and indirections
of the Gaul, who conceives personal conduct as an actor conceives a
rôle, spares no pains or labor to do justice to his part, and feeds
on the applause or starves on the indifference of his audience. To
your Englishman or American such an ideal seems trivial, artificial.
His sense of humor, a faculty in which it must be confessed that the
French, for all their wit, are deficient, seizes at once upon the
incongruities that must always exist between an ordinary human life and
a histrionically conceived rôle, and in his amusement he often fails
to do justice to the intelligence, imagination, and courage that may
be brought into play by such a dramatic exercise. Possibly to a higher
point of view his own attitude, which he likes to call "practical,"
and which less friendly critics sometimes call stupid, might seem
essentially no better than the playful chivalry of his fellow.
Such thoughts as these are bound to occur to the candid critic of
that singular man, that quintessential Frenchman, Hector Berlioz.
On first acquaintance he seems a creature of postures and pretence,
grandiloquent, artificial, specious. He resorts to any means to make an
impression, keeps his name before the public by journalism, by social
eccentricities, by Byronic love-affairs, by all manner of ingenious
indirect advertising, thrives only in the smile of the public, and
writes much less to express an inner conception of beauty than to
dazzle, startle, and stun. He seems to make a religion of idiosyncrasy,
and to shrink from nothing but the natural. He lives, speaks, writes,
composes, only in the interest of his carefully laid plot to be
unprecedented. But then, as one studies him more, one begins to find
admirable traits under this fantastic exterior. However artificial
his ideal may be, he brings a most vivid and many-sided intelligence
to its service; in spite of the opposition to the world in which his
excessive individuality places him, his stock of good-nature and of
half-ironical, half-kindly wit is inexhaustible; and if he does not
worship at an orthodox shrine, he can suffer, and endure, and strive,
like a true martyr. And so Berlioz's critic, like the Americans at
Beauvais, finally decides to smile at and at the same time to admire
him.
Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La Côte St. André, a small
town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world
when, in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent
him to become a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the
study of medicine for that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash,
resolve, worthy of a born dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were
all external forces clearly in league to keep him in the beaten path,
but his vocation for music was as yet far from obvious. He played only
the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his knowledge of harmony
was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his autobiography
that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he found a
sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a moment
the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they might
give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on
that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when
the young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's
"Iphigénie en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into
unquenchable flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.