interpreters. Beethoven's _Adelaide_ is 'so beautiful' that not even Mr
du Maurier's tenor 'can make it ridiculous:' but there are few of us who
have not seen Chopin crushed out of recognition in the grasp of some
conscientious and heavy-handed pianist. These surface-effects lose all
their charm if they are played with stress and insistance, if they are
forced down into a third dimension, which they were never intended to
fill. There is much of Chopin's music in which solidity of execution is
as fatal as strictness of time; in which the phrases are essentially
light, wayward, aerial, demanding for their interpretation not only the
most flexible sympathy of feeling, but the daintiest delicacy of touch.
Even Moscheles, great musician as he was, found himself baffled by the
new style. 'Chopin has just been playing to me,' he writes, 'and now for
the first time I understand his music. The _rubato_, which, with his
other interpreters, degenerates into disregard of time, is with him only
a charming originality of manner: the harsh modulations which strike me
disagreeably when I am playing his compositions no longer shock me,
because he glides over them in a fairy-like way with his delicate
fingers. His _piano_ is so soft that he does not need any strong _forte_
to produce his contrasts: and for this reason one does not miss the
orchestral effects which the German school requires from a pianoforte
player, but allows oneself to be carried away as by a singer who, little
concerned about the accompaniment, entirely follows his emotion.' We of
the present day may express ourselves with more warmth of approbation;
but if we wish to understand Chopin, this is the standpoint from which
we must regard him.
The second point for consideration is the almost incomparable power
which Chopin displays in his use of accessory figures. By figure, in
this sense, is meant a certain group of notes, having a clearly defined
curve and rhythm, and maintained, with such changes as the harmony
necessitates, through a phrase, or a paragraph, or even a complete
work. In the use of this device there are two difficulties against
which a composer has to contend. On the one hand, the group, if it is to
command any part of the hearer's attention, must exhibit a distinct
character, almost a distinct melody of its own; on the other hand, it
will fail of its purpose unless it is sufficiently plastic to be adapted
to different context and different requirements. Now, it is obvious that
the more allegiance is claimed by the first of these conditions, the
more skill is needed in order to satisfy the second. A figure which
consists merely of simple _arpeggios_ or of plain repeated chords can
suffer any degree of harmonic alteration without loss of continuity; but
as its intrinsic interest is heightened, either by elaboration of curve
or by peculiarity of rhythm, so it becomes more individual, and
therefore, under a change of circumstance, more difficult to adjust.
Thus it not infrequently happens that a composer is forced to remodel
his scheme because the group of notes which he has devised to support
the first strain of his melody proves unsuitable to the next; or because
a curve, that can adequately fill a bar of uniform harmony, may lose all
fitness when applied to a bar in which the harmony changes. In
Schumann's _Widmung_, for instance, the beautiful accompaniment figure
wavers in the third bar, and breaks down altogether in the fourth; not
because the composer wishes to put forward a new pattern, for he retains
the rhythm of the old, but because nothing short of a total alteration
of curve will satisfy the harmonic conditions of the tune.
But, so far as concerns this particular exhibition of skill, we never
feel that Chopin is at the mercy of his materials. His simplest figures
are interesting, his most elaborate are moulded to his use with an
entire and unhesitating mastery. Under his hand the stubborn edges grow
smooth, the obdurate lines become pliant and tractable, the recurrent
shape preserves its unity without appearing wearisome or monotonous. The
Prelude in F sharp minor (No. 8) is perhaps the most astonishing
instance in music of this particular form of decorative effect; and
hardly less remarkable are the Étude in E flat minor (Op. 10, No. 6),
the Prelude in G major (No. 3), and the Prelude in F sharp major (No.
13). Indeed, Chopin's method of ornament is altogether his own; sensuous
it may be in origin, evoked, at any rate in part, by an imperious
craving for the pleasure of beautiful sound, but yet raised to the true
artistic level by its refinement of taste and its finished accuracy of
detail. It is no small matter that a type of art which appeals so
frequently to sense and emotion should never be either vulgar or trivial
or commonplace; that there should be nothing meretricious in its
sentiment, nothing indolent in its expression; that with every incentive
to a lax and careless Hedonism it should yet maintain an ideal of
unswerving labour.
So far Chopin's music has been treated from the creative side. It now
remains to add a few words on the peculiar tact and intelligence with
which he employs his medium. In pictorial art this quality is of
acknowledged importance: oil, water, pastel, have their own conditions
and their own limitations, to overstep which is to invite failure; and
it is recognised as an adverse criticism if we can say of an example in
any one process that its effects could have been equally well produced
by another.
The same law is valid in musical art. The orchestra, the string
quartett, the organ, the pianoforte, are so diverse in tone and so
disparate in character, that they admit no community of treatment, and
hardly even a close community of idea. An arrangement may sometimes be
condoned as a _tour de force_, it may sometimes be allowed as a
preparation or a means of study, but to regard it as possessing
any absolute value is to convict the original work of a serious
imperfection. It is, therefore, a high testimony to the exactitude of
Chopin's writing that it has almost entirely escaped the sacrilegious
hand of the transcriber. Some of the Mazurkas are occasionally adapted
for the voice, one or two of the Nocturnes misused to the service of the
violin or the violoncello: but by far the greater number of Chopin's
compositions are too obviously suited to the piano for any other medium
to be regarded as possible. His very narrowness gave him concentration:
his want of sympathy with all other instruments enabled him to devote
his whole attention to the one that he understood. And, as a result, he
gives us Pianoforte Music which, considered as a pure expression of
technical intelligence, is almost without rival in the history of the
art. No other composer has ever surpassed the unerring judgment to which
we owe these wide-spread _arpeggios_, these wonderful liquid ripples of
chromatic scale, these showers of sparkling notes which fall, as Liszt
said, 'like dew drops' on some bend of phrase or turn of cadence.
Beethoven, of course, understood the piano as fully as he understood
everything else: but since Beethoven's time musicians, and especially
romantic musicians, have a little tended to blur and obliterate these
necessary distinctions, and to merge a due recognition of piano
technique into their overmastering desire for emotional significance.
Hence the fatal error of trying to extract orchestral effects from the
keyboard, an error into which Schumann falls occasionally, and Liszt
habitually, but from which Chopin may be regarded as entirely free. In
a word, he appreciates both the capacities and the limitations of
his material, and, while he draws from it every tone that it can
legitimately produce, he never strains it beyond the due and fitting
bounds of its proper individuality. It may be noted that Mendelssohn had
something of the same gift, but in pianoforte music, Mendelssohn's
thought is shallower than that of Chopin, and, therefore, more easily
kept within its range. Indeed, since 1827, there has been no composer
who could unite such poignancy of feeling with so exact an estimate of
the means at his disposal.
To sum up, Chopin can claim no place among the few greatest masters of
the world. He lacks the dignity, the breadth, the high seriousness of
Palestrina and Bach and Beethoven: he no more ranks beside them than
Shelley beside Shakespear, or Andrea beside Michael Angelo. But to say
this is not to disparage the value of the work that he has done. If he
be not of the 'di majorum gentium,' he is none the less of the
Immortals, filled with a supreme sense of beauty, animated by an
emotional impulse as keen as it was varied, and upholding an ideal of
technical perfection at a time when it was in danger of being lost by
the poets or degraded by the _virtuosi_. In certain definite directions
he has enlarged the possibilities of the art, and though he has,
fortunately, founded no school--for the charm of his music is wholly
personal--yet in a thousand indirect ways he has influenced the work of
his successors. At the same time, it is not as a pioneer that he elicits
our fullest admiration. We hardly think of him as marking a stage in the
general course and progress of artistic History, but, rather, as
standing aside from it, unconscious of his relation to the world,
preoccupied with the fairyland of his own creations. The elements of
myth and legend that have already gathered round his name may almost be
said to find their counterparts in his music; it is etherial, unearthly,
enchanted, an echo from the melodies of Kubla Khan. It is for this
reason that he can only make his complete appeal to certain moods and
certain temperaments. The strength of the hero is as little his as the
vulgarity of the demagogue: he possesses an intermediate kingdom of
dreams, an isle of fantasy, where the air is drowsy with perfume, and
the woods are bright with butterflies, and the long gorges run down to
meet the sea. If his music is sometimes visionary, at least it is all
beautiful; offering, it may be, no response to the deeper questions of
our life, careless if we approach it with problems which it is in no
mind to resolve, but fascinating in its magic if we are content to
submit our imagination to the spell. And precisely the same distinction
may be made on the formal side of his work. In structure he is a child,
playing with a few simple types, and almost helpless as soon as he
advances beyond them; in phraseology he is a master whose felicitous
perfection of style is one of the abiding treasures of the art. There
have been higher ideals in Music, but not one that has been more clearly
seen or more consistently followed. There have been nobler messages, but
none delivered with a sweeter or more persuasive eloquence.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] The Ballade, which originally ended in F major, was altered to its
present conclusion by an afterthought. See the review of it in
Schumann's _Collected Works_.
[43] Étude in D flat, Op. 25, No. 8.
[44] Étude in A flat, without Opus number.
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK.
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.
GOETHE.
I
DAYS OF PREPARATION
The village of Nelahozeves lies on the Moldau, about a mile to the north
of Kralup. The clean, well-kept cottages sun themselves upon a slope of
the low hills, or nestle among the trees by the river bank; a tiny
street comes trickling along the shallow dale like a tributary; at its
mouth a great square castle rises on a spur of jutting sandstone and
seems to dominate the very landscape by feudal right. Behind are uplands
of corn and pasture and orchard, where you may idle for half a summer's
afternoon, watching the play of light tremulous among the leaves, the
smoke curling lazily from the cluster of red roofs, and below them the
brown turbid river and the long timber-rafts floating down to the Elbe.
It is one of the quietest of places: hardly a sound, hardly an animal,
hardly a sign of life. There are a few geese meditating undisturbed in
the roadway, there is a knot of children busy with some inexplicable
game in a corner of waste ground; now and again a couple of gossips come
to fill their shapely wooden cans at the village well, or a slow,
patient ox-cart bears down its fragrant load from the hay-field. For the
rest, everything is fast asleep, secure in a bounteous land that asks
but little labour for the satisfaction of daily needs, and secure, too,
under the government of Prince Lobkowitz, who owns the castle and the
village and half the country-side, and who, though he never comes to
live among his own people, has always administered his territory with
justice and beneficence.
At the bottom of the street a lane turns across toward the church,
passing on its way a homestead which could take rank with an English
farm-house of moderate pretension. An arched gateway gives access to a
long, narrow court-yard, flanked on the one side by a solid, two-storey
building, white-walled and red-roofed like its neighbours; on the other
by a lower range of offices and storehouses; while at the back, behind
the stable, runs a rough wall, surmounted by a statue of St Florian;
and, carrying the eye upward, through a strip of coarse paddock, to the
hedgerows and cornfields of the higher slope. A sign over the entrance
announces that the place is still the village inn, as it was half a
century ago, when Pán František Dvořák held it in tenancy and served
his customers in the little taproom by the door.
Among the villagers Pán Dvořák was a person of some consequence. For
one thing, he belonged to a family old and respected--a peasant stock
that had grown and flourished from the earliest times that memory could
record; for another, he had married the daughter of one of the Prince's
bailiffs, and so caught a faint reflection from the remote and
inaccessible glories of the castle. Again, he was butcher as well as
innkeeper, and so represented the centre of village trade, as well as
the focus of village conviviality; and, to crown all, he was personally
popular--a handsome, active youngster of eight-and-twenty, vigorous,
alert, clean-limbed; and a good musician, too, who of an evening would
bring his zither under the great walnut tree and delight his guests with
'Hej Slované' or 'Sedlák Sedlák,' or the new national anthem that was
going to rouse Bohemia against Austrian oppression. It is only natural
that he should figure large in the public gaze, and that there should be
great rejoicings when, on September 8, 1841, the villagers assembled to
drink the health of his firstborn.
The child grew up into a sturdy, broad-shouldered boy, with brown eyes,
dark complexion, and a tangle of black hair--keen and adventurous in
character, ready to join in any sports that were afoot, and, as
tradition still attests, well able to hold his own in conflict. From the
first he was passionately fond of music--listening in eager enjoyment
when his father played to him, or when, on some lucky day, a band of
wandering musicians would come from Kralup or Prague or even Pressnitz,
and earn itself a welcome at the inn door. Better still were the times
of village holiday, when the street was gay with stalls, and the dancers
wore down the evening sun--Lenka in snowy hood and bright kirtle, Hanik
in jaunty hat, long coat and drab knee-breeches, threading the mazes of
Polka and Furiant until the fiddlers gave in for very weariness. It was
a childhood of simple pleasures and healthy out-door life, full of
colour, full of melody, the first preparation for a brilliant and
honourable artistic career.
Meantime the more serious part of Dvořák's education was entrusted to
an amiable pedagogue called Josef Spitz, who kept the village school at
the street corner, and who not only taught his new scholar the rudiments
of letters, but, what was more important, gave him his first lessons in
singing and the violin. When he was twelve years old, the boy was sent
to live with an uncle at Zlonic, in the coal country, where there was a
better school and a wider opportunity of study. He had already made some
advance in his two branches of music--enough, at any rate, for him to
have taken the solos in the church choir at home, and to have borne an
efficient part in the local orchestra: now, under the tuition of
Liehmann, the Zlonic organist, he ventured out into new fields, and
learned something not only of organ and piano but of the elements of
musical theory. No doubt the instruction was very imperfect and very
narrow of range, but within its limits it was gratefully accepted; and
the old kapellmeister deserves some honourable mention as having been
the first to discover evidences of unusual capacity in his shy,
simple-hearted pupil. In 1855 came another transference; this time to
Böhmisch-Kamnitz, where Dvořák learned German, and continued his
musical studies with the organist Hancke; and then appeared an obstacle
which seemed likely to block progress altogether. His father had
recently removed to Zlonic in order to open a new shop on a larger
scale; another hand was wanted to carry on the trade; and Antonin, at
the age of fifteen, was told to regard his education as finished, and to
return at once to the real business of his life.
It is easy enough to emphasise the incongruity of the situation: to
recall Burns the gauger and Keats the apothecary's drudge: to condole
with an artist who, like Fortuny, has to seek inspiration from the
shambles. It is still easier to be wise after the event, and condemn, as
tyrannous and unreasonable, a decision which time has signally refuted.
But there are here two considerations which may serve, in some degree,
to modify judgment. In the first place, the condition of music in
Bohemia was, at this time, entirely different from that in France
or Germany: its outlook far more desperate, its prizes far more
unattainable. Nearly all the posts were held by Germans, and native
talent, unless it could afford the price of expatriation, might readily
find itself reduced to gathering pence by the wayside, or at most, would
earn its reward in some village organistship--scanty, obscure and
ill-paid, with little opportunity in the present and with no hope of
further advance. No one could have foreseen that, within six years, a
national art would spring into sudden and unexpected existence--bringing
with it a means of expression which, in 1856, lay outside the reach of
the most sanguine hope. It may be true that the darkest hour is that
which precedes the dawn; but, for all this, it takes a robust faith to
infer the dawn from the darkness. And, in the second place, the boy had
as yet neither the education nor the material to offer his father any
convincing proofs of genius. So far as we know, he had never written a
note of music, and, though he could play skilfully on two or three
instruments, there was no very great likelihood of his making his name
as a virtuoso. His credentials were the reports of three village
schoolmasters: his attainment was but a promise which the subsequent
career might have failed to ratify. In a word, the capacity was
uncertain, the chances of a career were almost non-existent: surely it
was not unnatural that a plain man, who had no gift of prophecy, should
balance present alternatives and sum them up in favour of competence and
comfort.
At any rate, whether justified or not, the order was irrevocable. Pleas
and entreaties proved equally unavailing, Hancke's protests fell upon
deaf ears, and at last Dvořák reluctantly prepared to leave Kamnitz
and to sacrifice all prospects of an artistic profession. But before
yielding, he determined to make one more bid for freedom. Hitherto his
father had known him only as an executant: perhaps the case would be
altered if he could present himself as a composer. There were plenty of
people in the country-side who could sing and play; it was little wonder
if, amid that undistinguished crowd, his abilities were unnoticed; but
to write music brings a man to the forefront, and shows a gift which it
may be profitable to stimulate and encourage. He therefore prepared his
last appeal in the shape of an original polka; copied the band parts,
distributed them secretly among the Zlonic musicians, and, after a few
days of breathless anticipation, launched his _coup de théâtre_ for the
conversion of an unexpectant household. It is better to draw a veil over
the performance. The composer did not know that the trumpet is a
transposing instrument: strings and wind contended strenuously in
different keys; there was an agonised moment of jagged and excruciating
discord; and it is not surprising that the family remained unconvinced.
There is some little irony in the disaster, if it be remembered that
among all Dvořák's gifts the instinct of orchestration is perhaps
the most conspicuous. He is the greatest living exponent of the art; and
he was once in danger of forfeiting his career through ignorance of its
most elementary principle.
After so inopportune a failure, there was nothing left but submission,
and for little short of a year Dvořák set himself with a good grace
to accept the inevitable. But by the spring of 1857 he began to feel
that the position was impossible, and once more assailed his father with
urgent entreaties. There were his brothers--František, Josef, Adolf,
Karel--growing up to take his place in the shop; there was no pressing
need that he should remain any longer at work which he found wholly
uncongenial; he was sure that he could succeed as a musician, and
whether he succeeded or not, his whole heart was set upon the attempt.
At last, after some months of anxious discussion, he carried his point,
and in October set out for Prague--full of hope, full of ambition, eager
to explore a realm of which hitherto he could hardly be said to have
passed the frontier.
At Prague he entered the Organ School (founded some thirty years before
by a society for the encouragement of ecclesiastical music), and, from
1857 to 1860, worked his way through a period of diligent and laborious
studentship. The difficulties that beset him were even greater than
those that traditionally obstruct the path of genius. At first, no
doubt, his father was able to make him a small monthly allowance; but
even this slender income had soon to be withdrawn, and the boy, at
sixteen years of age, was left to maintain himself by an art of which he
knew little more than the rudiments, in a city which was almost wholly
barren of opportunities. And it was not only the material problems of
food and lodging that pressed him for a solution. He had learned next to
nothing of composition, he was totally unacquainted with the great
classics, he had no books and no money to buy them; even the teaching of
his school seems to have been mainly concentrated upon organ technique,
and to have given little or no assistance in wider fields of study.
Berlioz was poor, but at least he had the library of the Paris
Conservatoire. Wagner spent two years of grinding poverty, but at least
he could compensate them with 'Rienzi' and the 'Flying Dutchman.' Here
is a case in which everything alike is denied--not only recognition but
power, not only the rewards of life but its very appliances. The most
certain confidence, the most indomitable courage, might well have lost
heart at a prospect so dreary and so disspiriting.
In order to obtain the bare means of livelihood he joined a small band
of some twenty performers, and went about with them, earning a meagre
pittance at the cafés and restaurants of the city. On Sundays he played
the viola at a private chapel, where there was some show of an
orchestral service, and, between his two engagements, contrived to amass
a revenue of rather more than thirty shillings a month. Of course all
systematic study, except at his organ classes, appeared to be out of the
question. He could no more have hired a piano than he could have
purchased the crown jewels; even music paper was a luxury of the rarest
indulgence; and concerts were only attainable, when, now and again, some
good-natured bandsman would see him standing wistfully at the door and
would let him in as a stowaway. But in spite of all discouragements, he
continued his work with unabating enthusiasm, and, in 1860, graduated
at the Organ School as second prizeman of his year.