I
When Franz Liszt over fifty years age made some suggestions to the
Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in
their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had all been
foreshadowed in Clementi’s Gradus, and its intellectual resultant--the
Beethoven sonata, but the material side had not been realized. Chopin,
who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpassingly sweet tones, was by
nature unfitted to wrestle with the tone-problem.
The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole who
used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in
extended harmonies. But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a
glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the
Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms
of Chopin’s style he was, in the main, manly and unaffected. Thalberg,
who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant
the end and not the means of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic
and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took
precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone,
technique, was his trinity of gods.
Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling
Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at Leipsic’s doors and drove back
cackling to their nests the whole brood of old-women professors--a
respectable crowd that swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at
the spirit. Poverty, obedience and chastity were the three obligatory
vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic. To attain this triune
perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull,
musty precedent, and chaste of finger. What wonder, when the dashing
young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged
by the cotton of prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the
end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under; Chopin never competed but
stood a slightly astonished spectator at the edge of the fray. He saw
his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence, his polonaises
were so many cleaving battle-axes and he had perforce to confess that
all this noise, this carnage of tone, unnerved him, disgusted him;
Liszt was a warrior; not he.
Schumann both by word and note did all he could for the cause and
to-day, thanks to Franz Liszt and his followers--Tausig, Rubinstein,
d’Albert, Rosenthal, Joseffy, and Paderewski, we can never retrace
our footsteps. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann
astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor
of a once powerful school, and not the representative of an existing
method. There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style and
modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after
the rococo-isms of the idealists, but as a school pure and simple it
is of the past. We moderns are eclectic as the Byzantines. We have a
craze for selection, for variety, for adaption; hence the pianist of
to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the foundation,
the keynote of all is realism; a sometimes harsh realism that drives to
despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and at times forces one
to take lingering, retrospective glances. To all is not given the power
to summon spirits from the vasty deep and we have many times viewed
the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the
mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated, artistic
frame. But the path was blazoned by the great Magyar and we may now
explore with impunity the hitherto trackless region.
Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago
principally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand,
forearm and upper arm are now important factors in tone production
where formerly the finger-tips were considered the end-all, the be-all
of technique. The Viennese instruments certainly influenced Mozart,
Cramer and others in their styles, just as Clementi inaugurated
the most startling reforms by writing a series of studies and then
building a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety
of touch--tone-color--the old pearly-passage, rapid, withal graceful
school of Vienna, vanished, for it was absorbed in the new technique.
Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and then Liszt forced to the utmost the
orchestral development of the piano. Sonority, power, dynamic variety
and a new manipulation of the pedals combined with a technique that
included Bach part playing and the most sensational pyrotechnical
flights over the keyboard; these were some of the characteristics of
the new school. In the giddiness produced by freely indulging in this
heady new wine from old bottles an artistic intoxication ensued that
was for the time fatal to pure scholarly interpretation. The classics
were mangled by the young vandals who enlisted under Liszt’s victorious
standard. “Color, only color, all the rest is but music” was the motto
of these bold youths who had never heard of Paul Verlaine. But time
has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its clangorous quality and
when the last Liszt pupil gives his last recital we may wonder at the
charges of exaggerated realism. Tempered realism is now the watchword.
The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig’s efforts to let loose the
Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has been toned down into more sober,
grateful coloring. The scarlet vest of the romantic school has been
outworn; the brutal brilliancies and orchestral effects of the realists
are now viewed with mild amusement.
We are beginning to comprehend the possibilities of the instrument
and--of ourselves. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as
Donizetti or Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is almost as
obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. Bold is the man who plays one in
public. Realism beyond a certain point in piano playing, is dangerous.
We are in a transition period. With Alkan the old virtuoso technique
ends. The new was preached in piano music by Johannes Brahms whose
music suggests a continuation of Beethoven’s last period, with an
agreeable amalgam of Schumann and Bach. The gray is in fashion; red is
tabooed. The drunken, tattered gypsy who dances with bell and cymbalum
accompaniment in the Lisztian rhapsody is just tolerated. He is too
strong for our polite nostrils. The Brahms rhapsodies say more; they
deal not with externals but with soul states. The glitter is absent,
brilliancy is lacking but there is a fulness of emotional life, a depth
and eloquence of utterance that makes Liszt’s tinsel ridiculous. To
this new school, not wholly realistic yet certainly not idealistic
in its aims, is piano playing and composing drifting. It may be the
decadence--perhaps an artistic Götterdämmerung.
The nuance in piano playing is ruler. The reign of noise is past.
In modern music sonority, brilliancy is present, but the nuance is
necessary--not alone the nuance of tone but of expression. Infinite
shadings are to be found where before were but the forte, the piano and
the mezzo forte. Joseffy taught America the nuance just as Rubinstein
revealed to us the potency of tone. As Paul Verlaine, the French poet,
cried: “Pas la couleur rien que la nuance ... et tout le reste est
littérature.”