After Wagner, Brahms. After Chopin? Bülow once confessed that Brahms
cured him of Wagner mania. To alter Browning--“Brahms is our music
maker now.” Brahms, whose music was at one time as an undecipherable
cryptogram!--Brahms now appeals to our finest culture. Without the
melancholy tenderness of Chopin he has not altogether escaped the
Weltschmerz, but his sadness is masculine, and he seldom if ever gives
way to the hysterical complainings of the more feminine Pole. Brahms
is a man, a dignified, mentally robust man, who feels deeply, who
developed wonderful powers of self-control, and who drives the musical
nail deeply when he hits it, as he sometimes does.
Could any styles be more at variance than Brahms’ and Chopin’s?
Moscheles declared much of Chopin’s music unplayable, and it
is a commonplace of the day to dismiss Brahms’ piano music as
“unpianistic.” Brahms’ affinity to Schumann is marked; perhaps when
the latter pronounced such favorable judgment of Brahms’ op. 1 he only
acknowledged blood relationship. Brahms tells us different things,
however; but as I intend dealing more with externals I will pass
by any question of musical content. To the student of the somewhat
florid Liszt, Chopin, Thalberg and Henselt school, the Schumann-Brahms
technic must offer few attractions. Possibilities for personal
display are rare--display of the glittering passage sort. Extensive
scale work is seldom found in either composer, and old-fashioned
ornamentation gladdens by its absence. Musically, the gain is immense;
“pianistically” there is some loss. No more of those delicate,
zephyr-like figures--no more sonorous and billowy arpeggio sweeps over
the keyboard!
In a word, the finger virtuoso’s occupation is gone, and a mental
virtuosity is needed. Heavy chordal work, arabesques that might have
been moulded by a Michel Angelo, a cantilena that is polyphonic, not
monophonic; ten voices instead of one--all this, is it not eminently
modern, and yet Bachian? Schumann came from Bach, and Schumann is
foster father to Brahms; but Bach and Beethoven blood also runs warmly
in Johannes’ musical veins. Under which king will you serve? for you
cannot serve two. Will you embrace the Scarlatti, Emanuel Bach, Mozart,
Cramer, Chopin, Liszt school, or will you serve under the standards
of Bach, Clementi, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms? Better let nature
decide for you, and decide she does with such marked preferences
that often I have attended piano recitals and wept silently because
the “piano reciter” fondly believed he was versatile and attempted
everything from Alkan to Zarembski. What a waste of vital force, what a
waste of time!
I have, and value them as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt’s études, op.
1. The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written
when Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show
traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured
to modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not the Études
d’Exécution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I
exclaimed at Liszt’s cleverness. Never prolific in thematic invention,
the great Hungarian has taken his op. 1 and dressed it up in the most
bewildering technical fashion. He gave these studies appropriate
names, and even to-day they require a tremendous technic to do them
justice. The most remarkable of the set--the one in F minor (No.
10)--Liszt left nameless, and like a mighty peak it rears its head
skyward, while about it cluster its more graceful fellows, Ricordanza,
Feux-Follets, Harmonies du Soir, Chasse Neige, and Paysage. What a
superb contribution to piano étude literature is Liszt’s! These twelve
incomparable studies, the three very effective Études de Concert, the
Paganini Studies, the Waldesrauschen, the Gnomenreigen, the Ab-Irato,
the graceful Au Lac de Wallenstadt and Au Bord d’une Source, have they
not developed tremendously the technical resources of the instrument?
And to play them one must have fingers of steel, a brain on fire,
a heart bubbling with chivalric grace and force. What a comet-like
pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept Europe with fire and sword,
who transformed the still, small voice of Chopin into a veritable
hurricane! But we can’t imagine a Liszt without a Chopin preceding him.
Liszt lost, the piano would lose its most dashing cavalier, and his
freedom, fantasy and fire are admirable correctives for the stilted
platitudes of the Hummel, Czerny, Mendelssohn school. You can’t--as
much as you may wish to--ignore Liszt’s technic. He got out of the
piano an orchestral quality. He advanced by great wing strokes toward
perfection, and not to include Liszt were to exclude color, sonority,
richness of tinting and powerful dynamic contrasts.
Liszt has had a great following; you can see how much he affected
modern technic. Tausig felt his influence, and even Schumann, whose
setting, however, of the Paganini études is far removed from Liszt’s.
But Schumann certainly struck out a very original course when he
composed his Études Symphoniques. Here a Liszt style is a bar to
faithful interpretation. Music, music, music is wanted, with strong
singing fingers and a wrist of iron--malleable iron. The toccata in C
is an admirable example of not only Schumann’s but also of latter day
technic.
As in Brahms’ polyphonic fingers, great discrimination of tone in chord
passages is required here, and powers of stretching that tax most hands
to their utmost.
Brahms has reared upon this Schumann technic a glorious structure,
whose foundations--Bach-Schumann--are certainly not builded on sand.
You may get a fair notion of the Brahms piano technic by playing the
figure he gave Tausig for that great master’s Daily Studies, and also
in his later fifty-one studies. Look at his wonderful variations--true
studies; read the Paganini variations; are they not heaven storming?
Brains, brains and Bach. His studies on studies are not too
entertaining.
One is the rondo by Weber in his C major sonata, the so-called
“mouvement perpétuel.” This has Brahms transcribed for the left hand,
lifting the bass part into the treble. Anything more dispiriting I
cannot imagine. It makes one feel as if the clock struck nineteen in
the watches of the night. The étude in sixths on Chopin’s beautiful
F minor étude in op. 25 is an attempt to dress an exquisite violet
with a baggy suit of pepper-and-salt clothes. It is a gauche affair
altogether, and I fancy the perpetrator was ashamed of himself, for,
unlike Joseffy’s astounding transcription of Chopin’s G flat étude,
Brahms’ study upon a study is utterly unklaviermassig.
Constantin von Sternberg tells a story about this F minor étude of
Brahms-Chopin. When it first appeared Moszkowski was trying it over in
the presence of the Scharwenkas and Von Sternberg. Not content with
playing the right hand triplets in double-sixths, as Brahms had done,
he transposed them to the left hand, went to work rather hesitatingly,
saying, naturally enough: “Why not do it this way?”
It out-Heroded Herod, and Xaver Scharwenka could stand it no longer;
when Moszkowski stuck for a moment he strode up to the pianist, seized
his nose and chin, opened his mouth, gazed in it, and then said in a
slightly irritated voice: “That is the worst of these machines; they
_will_ get out of order sometimes.”
Bendel’s étude in double-sixths is a good study, evidently modelled
after Chopin’s G sharp minor study. Zarembski has written a
finger-breaker in B flat minor, and the two Von Schloezer studies
are by no means easy studies, but there are technical heights yet to
be explored. Charles V. Alkan, the Parisian pianist, has concocted,
contrived and manufactured about twenty-seven studies, which almost
reach the topmost technical notch, and are, to confess the truth,
unmusical. They are the extreme outcome of the Liszt technic and
consequently have only historical value. Don’t play them, for you
can’t, which remark is both Celtic and convenient.
Rubinstein’s op. 23--his six études--cannot be lightly passed over. The
first in F and the well-known staccato étude in C should be studied.
He has also written two studies, both in the key of C, one of which is
called Study on False Notes, and sometimes the Handball. They are all
very “pianistic.” Strelezski’s five concert studies are very modern and
require a cyclopean grip. Nos. 4 and 5 are the most musical. The same
composer’s étude, The Wind, is an excellent study in unison. The valse
étude is artificial.
You can play Balakireff’s Islamey, a fantasy Orientale, if you wish
some muscle twisting.
No need of telling you of Tausig’s Daily Studies. No pianist should
be without them. The Rosenthal-Schytte studies are rich in ideas, and
Schytte has written some Vortrag studies that are excellent.
Among modern artistic studies Saint-Saëns’, and MacDowell’s are
the best and most brilliant, and Godowsky has made some striking
paraphrases of Chopin studies. A novelty are the Exercises Journalières
preceded by a preface from the pen of Camille Saint-Saëns. Tausig
thought of such a comprehensive scheme as this, and Kullak, in the
third book of his octave school, puts it partially into execution. But
it remains for Isidor Philipp to work the formula out to its utmost,
and the result is a volume unique in the annals of piano literature and
of surpassing value to pianist, teacher and pupil.
This volume, I have no hesitation in saying, is the most significant
since the posthumous publication of Tausig’s Daily Studies. All
pianists have felt the need of such a work, and in his dumb-thumb way
Oscar Raif taught his pupils that the manner to master difficulties was
to walk chromatically about the passages in question. At a blow Philipp
demolishes thousands of technical studies.
Philipp’s scheme is this: his collection is only for pianists who have
a sound ordinary technic, say a technic which enables one to play the
Beethoven sonatas of the first and second period, Clementi, Cramer, and
of course Bach.
Philipp begins with extensive exercises, for extended harmonies are the
keynote of modern piano music. Then follow studies for independence of
the fingers, for the left hand alone, for scales, arpeggios, double
notes, trills, octaves and chord playing, rhythmic studies and sundry
studies that cannot be classified. These are all original, and are the
result of the most independent researches. Conciseness is aimed at.
They are reinforced by examples from Alkan to Willmers--the latter
being the hero of the trill in the annals of piano playing.
Now, suppose you have each day an hour for technical study. You sit
down before your keyboard; play one study for finger extension. Here
is one on the first page--a terror, but a salutary one. Then take the
example--it is from the F sharp minor prelude of Chopin. If you do
not care for that there is the peroration of the E minor concerto of
Chopin, the trill on B natural in the left hand. Alkan; Henselt (an
example from the first study in op. 5 in C)--you can take your choice.
Now for independence of the fingers. Only two examples are given. If
you master them you will have ten perfectly autonomous fingers. One
is from a study by Alkan and the other from Saint-Saëns, op. 52. This
latter is the famous study in A minor. It is invaluable.
Studies for the left hand: one example from the last movement of the
Appassionata, you remember the figure in F minor. Others by Beethoven
from concerto and variations. Chopin is represented by studies and
extracts from the concertos, and a page is devoted to the G sharp
minor section of the Revolutionary study, the Tristan and Isolde
episode. Liszt, Georges Mathias, Brahms are all quoted with judgment.
Scales: Copious quotations from Chopin, Hummel, the A minor study of
the former has a variant which gives the left hand employment. Liszt,
Henselt, Rubinstein, the odd little chromatic episode in the last
movement of the D minor concerto, and a finger-breaker by Henri Fissot,
in which the thumb is treated to convict labor, as it deserves.
We have now reached the arpeggio section. After a lot of figures
from which you may select your pattern for the day--notably the
arpeggio of the dominant seventh, the most difficult and therefore
the most valuable--you may indulge in examples from Beethoven,
Chopin, Thalberg--the master of arpeggios--Delaborde, Rubinstein and
Saint-Saëns.
Do not forget that these examples are selected from representative
works, works that are played and are selected with rare skill and
appreciation.
The double note chapter is admirable, although I notice M. Philipp
clings to the Chopin fingering in chromatic double notes, the minor
third, etcetera. The examples are from Beethoven, Hummel, Weber,
Cramer, Chopin (the first chromatic scale in op. 25, No. 6); Schumann,
Litolff, Saint-Saëns, Liszt, Rubinstein, Delaborde, Alphonse Duvernoy,
a valuable and ingenious study; Marmontel, and last, but by no means
least, Philipp himself. One example of his is from a Bach fugue in D in
double sixths!
The trill department--this sounds like the Bon Marché--contains
examples from Beethoven, Chopin, Willmers, Doehler, Liszt, Brahms, a
monstrous octave trill from the F sharp minor sonata, Duvernoy, Czerny
and Liszt. It is as complete as possible.
The octave section contains more modern examples than Kullak.
Saint-Saëns, Diémer, Rimski-Korsakoff and Tschaïkowsky are some of the
moderns quoted.
Then follow rhythmical examples, skips, tremolo, a good example is
from Thalberg’s beautiful and sadly neglected theme and variations in
A minor, op. 45 and a lot of tangled tricks from the works of Lalo,
D’Indy, Bernard, Pierné and other modern Frenchmen. I wish M. Philipp
had quoted Thalberg’s famous tremolo study in C. It is the best of its
class. But to be hypercritical before this ingenious catalogue would be
impertinence, even ingratitude. From the maddening mass of classical
and latter-day piano literature the editor has selected and fingered
a most representative series of the difficulties of piano music. A few
bars, at most a page, are given, and we do not wonder that Saint-Saëns
called the work a vade mecum for pianists.
Not content with his gigantic task this astonishing Philipp has made
another collection of studies for the left hand alone.
His compilation is so complete that I must speak of it in detail.
Indeed I could write much on this topic. I know so many students, so
many able pianists who have gone through the valley of technical death
in search of a path to Parnassus, that I hail these short cuts with
joy. Remember I am of a band of admirable lunatics that played all
the studies in the world when I was a young fellow! What ignorance,
depraved and colossal, was it not?
Czerny, who is old fashioned in most of his studies, has nevertheless
written some of the best studies for the left hand solo. He wrote them
because no one else would. He looks in his pictures as if he might be
that sort of a man.
Philipp the indefatigable has sifted Czerny, and the left hand is
treated, not with arpeggiated contempt--most composers write as if
this hand was only for accompanying purposes--but as if it were the
companion and co-sharer of the throne of digital independence. All
sorts--but not too many--of preparatory exercises are there, thanks
to the ingenuity of the editor, who must be a teacher of the first
magnitude. In addition to Czerny we get passages from Weber, right hand
passages transposed, from Mendelssohn, Hummel, Schumann, the first
page of the great Toccata in C, transpositions from Bach and Chopin,
a big Kessler study, the first study in C of Chopin, the first study
in A minor for the left hand--a pet idea of Joseffy’s--a transposition
from the B flat minor prelude, a capital notion for velocity playing,
another transposition of the A minor study in op. 25, hideously
difficult. The same with the G sharp minor study, Godowsky has a
version for concert performance, but this is for one hand only; the
double sixth study in D flat, a Kreutzer violin caprice in octaves in
E, a Kreutzer étude in octaves, and the F minor study of Chopin, op.
25, No. 2 in octaves.
The volume ends with a formidable version in octaves for left hand of
the last movement of Chopin’s B flat minor sonata. This is truly a tour
de force.
This clever Parisian has also written six new concert studies. The
first is a double note arrangement of the D flat valse. Tausig,
Rosenthal and Joseffy have done the same thing. But Philipp has written
the trio in three clefs so as to render clear the contrapuntal figure
over the melody, which figure is the first theme. His second study
is the same valse written for the left hand, the accompaniment being
transposed to the right. The third study is the F minor study in
triplets of Chopin, most ingeniously transcribed for left hand. Brahms
turned this study into forbidding thistles of double sixths. The fourth
study is devoted to the G flat étude of Chopin, the one on the black
keys. It is in double notes, fourths, sixths and octaves. Joseffy ten
years ago anticipated Philipp.
For his fifth concert study I congratulate M. Philipp. He has taken
Chopin’s first A minor study in op. 10 and turned it into a bombarding
chord study, something after the manner of the sombre and powerful
B minor octave study. The blind octave is the technical foundation
of this transcription. It is very effective. The book closes with a
magnificent paraphrase of Weber’s perpetual movement from the sonata in
C. Brahms and others have transcribed this for the left hand. It is
aptly dedicated to the master, a veritable master, Camille Saint-Saëns.
I wish I could enlarge on the “pianistic” qualities of this piece.
Oddly enough it suggests in a distant fashion Rubinstein’s C major
study, he one d’Albert plays so masterfully. Philipp has made the
changes in the most musicianly manner.
M. Philipp has credited to Theodore Ritter, now dead, the octave
version of the rondo of Chopin’s E minor concerto. To Tausig belongs
the honor. I wonder why he failed to quote the stunning étude in B flat
minor by Franz Bendel? After Chopin’s it is the most valuable of all
the studies for the playing of double sixths.
Not satisfied with making a unique volume of daily studies, he has
out-Tausiged Tausig in the new Études d’Octaves. The studies are after
Bach, Clementi, Cramer and Chopin, with original preludes by Dubois,
Delaborde, Émile Bernard, Duvernoy, Gabriel Fauré, Matthias, Philipp,
Pugno and Widor. I advise you to play Kullak upside down before you
touch these new studies on studies--these towering Pelions piled on
metacarpal Ossias.
Philipp begins with the E flat study of Clementi, the one in broken
octaves; this he transforms to a repeated note exercise. The first two
studies in the Gradus he makes octaves. So far nothing remarkable nor
difficult. Then follows the B flat invention of Bach--in two voices--in
octaves; the study in E by Cramer treated as a study in sustained
tones, like the second section of Chopin’s great octave study in B
minor. We begin to grow warm over Cramer’s first famous study in C, all
bedeviled into chords and taken at the interesting metronomic tempo of
116 to the quarter notes. It sounds like a gale from Rubinstein.
As all flesh is grass, so all difficult piano studies become food for
the virtuoso. Brahms in a moment of heavy jocundity made night and
Chopin hideous with the study in F minor by forcing the sweet, coy,
maidenly triplets to immature coquetting with rude and crackling double
sixths. Philipp is too polite, too Gallic to attempt such sport, so he
gives the étude in unison octaves. It is a good study, but one prefers
the original.
Cramer’s left hand study in D minor is treated to octaves, and so the
A minor study of Chopin in op. 10 is worked up magnificently and is
really worth the while to play as well as to practice--a distinction
you will observe. But more momentous matter follows. I expected that I
should see the day when Weber’s so-called Perpetual Motion--the rondo
in C--would be played in octaves by children, but I little dreamed of
the daring of the latter-day pianist. The tenth study in this book is
in interlocked octaves, after the manner of Tausig, and is in the key
of B flat minor. Can you guess on what it is built? No less a theme
than the last movement of the B flat minor sonata of Chopin, and it is
a presto. Tausig is reported to have said that the movement reminded
him of the wind sighing over the grave of the beloved, and Joseffy told
me that Tausig could play it in octaves.
Like all legends of the sort, you treasure it and grow reverend, but
when you see these octaves on the printed page you shudder. Where
will technic end? It is worse than Brahms in his stupendous Paganini
studies. In a study by Paderewski, The Desert, may be found just such
toying with the gigantic, the ineffable. Philipp, with his precise,
practical mind, pins his miracles to the paper, and while we curiously
study the huge wings of this phenomenal bird we are not attracted. The
study is written for a dozen living pianists at the utmost.
Henselt has written some studies which he calls Master Studies for
Piano. They are really studies for virtuosi, and should be severely
left alone by any but finished pianists. Carlyle Petersilyea once made
a sort of technical variante on Chopin’s study in sixths in op. 25.
Henselt goes upon the principle that pianists grow weary of playing a
piece in the same manner; that the fingers become indolent from the
fatal facility which follows upon many performances of a composition.
So he takes up the familiar difficulty and views it from another
rhythmical point of view. He distorts, perverts, alters, and almost
roots up from the harmonic and rhythmic soil, the figuration, and
believes that with a new aspect, a fresh difficulty, that you will
return refreshed in finger and mentally invigorated to the normal
version. And the great pianist and pedagogue has accomplished his task
with a vengeance.
There are 167 examples; some make you shudder, some cause a smile,
all command respect for the agility of the paraphrase, the downright
cleverness of the changes. When you have thoroughly mastered the
Philipp Daily Studies--which will be never--I commend these Henselt
perversions. But may God preserve you from dallying too long in
these curious and repulsive pastures, for can you imagine anything
more horrible than a pianist assailed in the full glare of a public
performance by a Henselt version and unable to resist the temptation!
Some of the perversions are worthy of the consideration of a musical
Lombroso. There is the G flat study of Chopin, The Butterfly; Henselt
has lots of fun with the piece, and his humor peeps out at the close,
for instead of the epigrammatic ending--alas! so seldom adhered to
by foolish pianists--he makes an elaborate run and delays the end,
a delicate and satiric commentary on the ambitious pounder who will
insist on bowling all over the keyboard before he lets go the key.
Chopin is liberally paraphrased, and the version of the E minor valse
is fit for concert performance, so brilliant and effective is it.
There are examples from Beethoven, Henselt--he has mocked his own Bird
Study--Hummel, Mendelssohn, Weber, Cramer, Liszt, Raff, Schumann and
Moscheles. Yet one coyly suggests these studies. They are apt to hoist
the pianist with his own petard.
I once asked Rosenthal what finger exercises or studies he employed
to build up that extraordinary mechanism of his. He startled me by
replying “none.” Then he explained that he picked out the difficulties
of a composition and made new combinations of them. Every rope has
its weak spot and in every composition there is the one difficulty
that will not down. Master it and you are technically master of all
you survey. The whole question may be summed up this way: study a few
Cramer, a few Clementi études for elegance and endurance, avoid daily
studies except those few that by experience you discover limber up your
wrist and fingers. Play the Chopin études, daily, also the preludes,
for the rest trust to God and Bach. Bach is the bread of the pianist’s
life; always play him that your musical days may be long in the land.