I
“As-tu réfléchi combien nous sommes organisés pour le Malheur”? A
fatal fleet of names sails before us evoked by Flaubert’s pitiless and
pitiful question in a letter addressed to George Sand. She could have
answered for at least two--two names writ large in the book of fate
opposite her own--Frederic Chopin and Alfred De Musset. Androgynous
creature that she was, she filled her masculine maw with the most
delicate bonnes bouches that chance vouchsafed her. Can’t you see
her, with the gaze of a sibyl, crunching such a genius as Chopin,
he exhaling his melodious sigh as he expired? But this attrition of
souls filled the world with art, for after all what was George Sand
but a skilful literary midwife, who delivered men of genius and often
devoured their souls after forcing from them in intolerable agony the
most exquisite music? They sowed in sorrow, in sorrow they reaped.
It is not always meet and just that we exhibit to the gaze of an
incurious world our intellectual Lares and Penates. There is something
almost indecent in the way we rend our mental privacies, our heart
sanctuaries. To the artist in prose, the temptation to be utterly
subjective is chilled by the thought of the sacrifice. Hamlet-like, he
may feel that wearing his heart on his sleeve will never compensate him
for the holiness of solitude, no matter if the heart he dissects be of
unusual color and splendor. Far happier is the tone poet. Addressing
a selected audience, appealing to sensibilities firm and tastes
exquisitely cultured, he may still remain secluded. His musical phrases
are cryptic and even those who run fastest may not always read. The
veil that hangs hazily about all great art works is the Tanit veil that
obscures the holy of holies from the gaze of the rude, the blasphemous.
The golden reticence of the music artist saves him from the mortifying
misunderstandings of the worker in verse, and spares him the pang which
must come from the nudity of the written word.
I have worshipped, and secretly, those artists in whose productions
there is a savor of the strange. I loved Poe, although I seldom read
him to-day. I thought Chopin the last word in music, until I heard
Tristan and Isolde. I can never shake off my wonder for Flaubert’s
great chiselled art, and I would give a wilderness of Rubens for one
Whistler. I know this may be a confession of æsthetic narrowness,
but I never could bow down to overgrown reputations, nor does the
merely big excite my nerves. In this matter I agree unreservedly with
Mr. Finck. I would rather read Poe’s Silence than all the essays of
Macaulay, and can echo George Sand, who wrote that one tiny prelude of
Chopin is worth all the trumpeting of Meyerbeer. It was in this spirit
I approached Chopin years ago; it is in the same spirit I regard him
to-day. But while my vantage ground has not perceptibly shifted, I
descry a Chopin other than the melancholy dreamer I knew a decade ago.
My glances are imprisoned by new and even more fascinating aspects of
this extraordinary man and poet. It is of the greater Chopin I would
speak; the Chopin not of yester-year, but the Chopin of to-morrow.
The old Chopin is gone for most of us. The barrel organ--not Mallarmé’s
organ, but that deadly parallel for pianists, the piano-organ, with its
super-Janko technic--now drives the D flat valse across its brassy
gamut helter-skelter. The E flat nocturne is drummed by schoolgirls as
a study in chord playing for the left hand, and the mazourkas--heaven
protect us!--what have not these poor dances, with their sprightly
rhythms, now wilted, been subjected to; with what strange oaths have
they not been played? Alas! the Chopin romance is vanished. His studies
follow those of the prosaic Clementi, and Du Maurier nabbed one of his
impromptus for Trilby. Poor Chopin! devoured by those ravening wolves,
the concert pianists, tortured by stupid pupils and smeared with the
kisses of sentimentalists, well may you cry aloud from the heights of
Parnassus, “Great Jove, deliver me from my music!”
What is left us in all this furious carnage, what undefiled in this
continuous rape, this filching of a man’s spiritual goods? Some few
works unassailed, thanks to the master--some noble compositions whose
sun-smitten summits are at once a consolation and an agony. To strive,
to reach those wonderful peaks of music is granted but to the few. Even
that bird of prey and pedals, the professional piano reciter, avoids a
certain Chopin, not so much from instinctive reverence, but because
of self-interest. He understands not, and also knows full well that
his audiences do not. This hedges the new Chopin from cheap, vulgar
commerce.
I have been criticised for asserting that in Chopin’s later works may
be found the germ of the entire modern harmonic scheme. It was not in
the use of the chord of the tenth alone that Chopin was a path-breaker.
Even in his first book of studies may be found a melodic and harmonic
scheme, without which the whole modern apparatus of composition would
not be as it is now. Does this sound daring? Come, put it to the test!
That wonderful upward inflection which we look upon as Wagner’s may be
found in the G sharp minor part of the C minor study in opus 10. Look
at it! Sift its significance and then revert to Isolde’s Liebestod,
or Wotan’s entrance in the third act of Die Walküre. There is the nub
of the entire system of modern emotional melody. Take all the études
and what treasures do we not find? The lovely Fantaisie-polonaise, op.
61, has an introduction which is marvellous and which will sound new
a century hence. There is a kernel of a figure that will surprise the
Wagnerite who knows his Ring. I speak of a triplet figure in sixteenths
in the introduction. It was the late Anton Seidl who first called
my attention to the “Chopinisms” of the wonderful love-duet in the
second act of Tristan. He said Wagner had laughed about the coloring.
If Wagner is the oak tree, then Chopin is the acorn of the latter-day
music.
What is this new Chopin I pretend to see? Or is it only as the soul in
Browning’s poem, All that I Know of a certain Star? Does my Chopin star
dart now red, now blue, for me alone? Chopin left us four ballades and
a fantaisie in F minor, which is a tremendous ballade, although not in
the traditional ballade form. But it has unmistakably the narrative
tone; it tells an overwhelmingly dramatic story. Yet of the four
ballades, who dare play the first and second in G minor and A flat?
They are hopelessly vulgarized. They have been butchered to make a
concert goer’s holiday. The G minor, full of dramatic fire and almost
sensual expression, is a whirlwind; unsexed by women and womanish men,
it is a byword, a reproach. Little wonder that Liszt shuddered when
asked to listen to this abused piece. As for the A flat ballade, I
can say nothing. Graceful, charming, it appeals even to the lovers of
music-hall ditties. It, too, has been worried to death. The one in F
has been spared for us. It is a thunderbolt in a bed of violets. Its
tempest, scurrying and growling, is for the hand of the master. Let no
mean disciple juggle with its vast elemental tones. Disaster dire will
surely follow. And when the sky has cleared how divinely azure it is!
The lilt of the breezes with thin thunder in the distance closes a page
that is immortal.
When young I had no god but Beethoven, and all other gods were strange.
To-day, hemmed in by the noise and dust of the daily traffic of life,
I have a tiny sanctuary which I visit betimes. In it is the fourth
ballade of Chopin, the one in the mode of F minor. It is a masterpiece
in piano literature as the Mona Lisa and Madame Bovary are masterpieces
in painting and prose. Its melody, which probes the very coverts
of the soul, is haunting in its chromatic coloring, and then that
fruitful pause in half notes, the prelude to the end! How it fires the
imagination; how unlike the namby-pamby Chopin of the school-room and
the critics!
The études are beyond the limit of this paper. I can only say that
they are enormously misunderstood and misread. Studies in moods, as
well as in mechanism, they are harnessed with the dull, unimaginative
creatures of the conservatory curriculum, and so in the concert room
we miss the flavor, the heroic freedom of the form. Who plays the
C minor in the opus 25? Who ever gives us with true bravoura that
dazzling drive of notes, the A minor, the second of the tonality in
the same book? De Pachmann plays the study in thirds, but it is only a
study, not a poem. When will these series of palpitating music pictures
be played with all their range of emotional dynamics?
The impromptus are almost denied us. The fantaisie impromptu and
the A flat, are they not commonplaces, seldom played beautifully? A
greater Chopin is in the one in F sharp, the second. There is the true
impromptu spirit, the wandering, vagrant mood, the restless outpouring
of fancy. It is delicious. The G flat is practically undiscovered. Of
the mazourkas, the impish, morbid, gay, sour, sweet little dances, I
need not speak. They are a sealed book for most pianists; and if you
have not the savor of the Slav in you you should not touch them. Yet
Chopin has done some great things in this form. Think of the three or
four in C sharp minor, the one in B flat minor, the curiously insistent
one in B minor and that sad, funereal mazourka in A minor, the last
composition Chopin put on paper. The singular idea of the last named,
almost a fixed one, its hectic gayety and astounding gloom show us the
sick brain of the dying man. But it is not upon these works I would
dwell. The new, the larger Chopin will be known to posterity by the
three great polonaises in F sharp minor, in A flat and the fantaisie
polonaise. What a wealth of fantasy there is in opus 61! Its restless
tonality, the marked beauty of the first theme, the almost vaporous
treatment, the violent mood changes and the richness of the harmonies
place this work among the elect. The F sharp minor polonaise and the
two in E flat minor and C minor contain some strong, virile writing.
They need men, not pianists, to play them.
Professor Frederick Niecks calls the F sharp minor polonaise
“pathologic,” and Stanislaw Przybyszewski, that curious, half-mad
genius who, like Verlaine, has seen the inside of prisons, has written
surprisingly of the polonaise; indeed, he is said to play it well,
and has coupled the composer’s name with Nietzsche’s in his strange
brochure, The Psychology of the Individual. To me the piece far
surpasses in grandeur all of Chopin’s polonaises, even the “Heroic,”
with its thunderous cannon and rattling of horses’ hoofs. It may be
morbid, but it is also magnificent. The triplets in eighth notes in
the introduction gradually work up to a climax of great power before
the theme enters in single notes. Soon these are discarded for octaves
and chords and do not occur again. The second subject in D flat is
less drastic, less fantastic, and also less powerful. There is epical
breadth in that beginning, and at each reiteration it grows bigger,
more awful, until it overflows the limits of the keyboard. That strange
intermezzo in A, which comes before the mazourka, is an enigma for
most of us. It seems at first irrelevant, but its orchestral intent is
manifest, and it leads to the D flat theme now transposed to C sharp
minor and full of the blackest despair. If you play the thirty-second
notes in octaves more color is obtained. The mazourka which follows
tempted Liszt to extravagant panegyric. Its brace of notes, thirds and
sixths, are lovely in accent and hue, but do not become languishing
in your tempo, or the episode turns sugary and sentimental. With an
almost ferocious burst the polonaise is reached, and again begins that
elemental chant, which grows huger in rancorous woe until the bottom of
the pit is reached, and then without a gleam of light the work ends in
a coda, with mutterings like curses of the polonaise theme, and only
in the very last bar comes the relief of a crackling and brilliant F
sharp in octaves.
Pathologic in a sense it is, for it makes its primary appeal to the
nerves, but it is wonderful music, though depressing. It hurts the very
pulp of one’s sensibilities, yet it is never sensational. I am reminded
of Salvator Rosa’s rugged, sullen and barbarous landscapes with a
modern figure in the foreground, agitated, distracted, suicidal; in a
word, something that paint and canvas can never suggest.
The nocturnes are sometimes beneath contempt. When I hear a Chopin
nocturne played on the fiddle or ’cello I murmur complainingly as I
listen, for it irresistibly reminds me of degraded beauty. There are
exceptions. The vandals have vouchsafed us the one in C sharp minor,
the gloomiest and grandest of Chopin’s moody canvases. Its middle
section is Beethovian in breadth. Ah! my friend, why do you take this
piano composer for a weakling? Why give him over to the tough mercies
of the Young Person? I would sentence to a vat of boiling oil, that
is if I were the Sultan of Life, any woman who presumed to touch a
note of Chopin. They have decked the most virile spirit of the age
in petticoats, and upon his head they have placed a Parisian bonnet.
They murdered him while he was alive, and they have hacked and cut
at him since his death. If women must play the piano let them stick
to Bach and Beethoven. They cannot hurt those gentlemen with their
seductions and blandishments, their amblings and jiggings. There are
several other nocturnes that will never appeal to hoi polloi. The noble
one in C minor, the fruity one in B and the one in E, form a triad of
matchless music. They are not popular. The wonder-child that came to us
through the pink gates of the dawn and was rocked to rhythmic dreams
in the berçeuse has grown to be a brat of horrid mien and muscular
proportions. I will have none of it. Its banal visage is cherished in
conservatories. Long may it howl, but not for me!
The scherzi, the preludes, you cry! Ah! at last we are getting upon
solid ground. The twenty-five preludes alone would make good Chopin’s
claim to immortality. Such range, such vision, such humanity! All
shades of feeling are divined, all depths and altitudes of passion
explored. If all Chopin, all music, were to be destroyed, I should
plead for the preludes. The cameo stillness of some of them is as
soft-spoken sentences in a cloister. Religious truly, but these appeal
less to me than those thunder-riven visions in D minor, in B flat
minor, in F minor, in E flat minor. Surpassingly sweet is the elegiac
prelude in B flat. It is greater than any of the Chopin nocturnes.
Number two, with its almost brutal quality and enigmatic beginning, is
for a rainy day--a day when the soul is racked by doubts and defeats.
It is shuddersome and sinister. About it hovers the grisly something
which we all fear in the dark but dare not define. A ray of sunshine,
but a sun that slants in the west, is the prelude in G. Why detail
these marvels in miniature, these great and cunningly wrought thoughts?
The embroideries of the barcarolle--a more fully developed and dramatic
nocturne--and the bolero are both more Polish than Italian or Spanish.
The fantaisie, opus 49, is considered by many to be Chopin’s most
perfect work. The grave, march-like introduction, the climbing and
insistent arpeggio figures in triplets, the great song in F minor,
followed by the beautiful episode in double notes and the climax of
amazing power and almost brutality, give us glimpses of the new
Chopin. There is development, but only of tonality--if such may be
called development--and the lento sostenuto is curt and very sweet.
The end is impressive. The entire composition is larger in scope, its
phrases fuller breathed, and there is a massiveness absent from much of
the master’s music. To my own way of thinking this fantaisie, with the
F sharp minor polonaise, the F minor ballade, the C sharp minor and B
minor scherzi, the D minor prelude, the sonatas in B flat minor and B
minor, and the C minor study (opus 25), are Chopin at the top of his
powers.