Chopin : the Man and His Music Part 8

It takes prodigious power and endurance to play this work, prodigious power, pa.s.sion and no little poetry. It is open air music, storm music, and at times moves in processional splendor. Small souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it.

The prime technical difficulty is the management of the thumb. Kullak has made a variant at the end for concert performance. It is effective.

The average metronomic marking is sixty-nine to the half.

Kullak thinks the twelfth and last study of op. 25 in C minor "a grand, magnificent composition for practice in broken chord pa.s.sages for both hands, which requires no comment." I differ from this worthy teacher.

Rather is Niecks more to my taste: "No. 12, C minor, in which the emotions rise not less high than the waves of arpeggios which symbolize them."

Von Bulow is didactic:

The requisite strength for this grandiose bravura study can only be attained by the utmost clearness, and thus only by a gradually increasing speed. It is therefore most desirable to practise it piano also by way of variety, for otherwise the strength of tone might easily degenerate into hardness, and in the poetic striving after a realistic portrayal of a storm on the piano the instrument, as well as the piece, would come to grief.

The pedal is needful to give the requisite effect, and must change with every new harmony; but it should only be used in the latter stages of study, when the difficulties are nearly mastered.

We have our preferences. Mine in op. 25 is the C minor study, which, like the prelude in D minor, is "full of the sound of great guns."

Willeby thinks otherwise. On page 81 in his life of Chopin he has the courage to write: "Had Professor Niecks applied the term monotonous to No. 12 we should have been more ready to indorse his opinion, as, although great power is manifested, the very 'sameness' of the form of the arpeggio figure causes a certain amount of monotony to be felt."

The C minor study is, in a degree, a return to the first study in C.

While the idea in the former is infinitely n.o.bler, more dramatic and tangible, there is in the latter naked, primeval simplicity, the larger eloquence, the elemental puissance. Monotonous? A thousand times no!

Monotonous as is the thunder and spray of the sea when it tumbles and roars on some sullen, savage sh.o.r.e. Beethov-ian, in its ruggedness, the Chopin of this C minor study is as far removed from the musical dandyisms of the Parisian drawing rooms as is Beethoven himself. It is orchestral in intention and a true epic of the piano.

Riemann places half notes at the beginning of each measure, as a reminder of the necessary clinging of the thumbs. I like Von Bulow's version the best of all. His directions are most minute. He gives the Liszt method of working up the climax in octave triplets. How Liszt must have thundered through this tumultuous work! Before it all criticism should be silenced that fails to allow Chopin a place among the greatest creative musicians. We are here in the presence of Chopin the musician, not Chopin the composer for piano.

III

In 1840, Trois Nouvelles Etudes, by Frederic Chopin, appeared in the "Methode des Methodes pour le piano," by F. J. Fetis and I. Moscheles.

It was odd company for the Polish composer. "Internal evidence seems to show," writes Niecks, "that these weakest of the master's studies--which, however, are by no means uninteresting and certainly very characteristic--may be regarded more than op. 25 as the outcome of a gleaning."

The last decade has added much to the artistic stature of these three supplementary studies. They have something of the concision of the Preludes. The first is a masterpiece. In F minor the theme in triplet quarters, broad, sonorous and pa.s.sionate, is unequally pitted against four-eight notes in the ba.s.s. The technical difficulty to be overcome is purely rhythmic, and Kullak takes pains to show how it may be overcome. It is the musical, the emotional content of the study that fascinates. The worthy editor calls it a companion piece to the F minor study in op. 25. The comparison is not an apt one. Far deeper is this new study, and although the doors never swing quite open, we divine the tragic issues concealed.

Beautiful in a different way is the A flat study which follows. Again the problem is a rhythmical one, and again the composer demonstrates his exhaustless invention and his power of evoking a single mood, viewing all its lovely contours and letting it melt away like dream magic. Full of gentle sprightliness and lingering sweetness is this study. Chopin has the hypnotic quality more than any composer of the century, Richard Wagner excepted. After you have enjoyed playing this study read Kullak and his "triplicity in biplicity." It may do you good, and it will not harm the music.

In all the editions save one that I have seen the third study in D flat begins on A flat, like the famous Valse in D flat. The exception is Klindworth, who starts with B flat, the note above. The study is full of sunny, good humor, spiritualized humor, and leaves the most cheering impression after its performance. Its technical object is a simultaneous legato and staccato. The result is an idealized Valse in allegretto tempo, the very incarnation of joy, tempered by aristocratic reserve. Chopin never romps, but he jests wittily, and always in supremely good taste. This study fitly closes his extraordinary labors in this form, and it is as if he had signed it "F. Chopin, et ego in Arcady."

Among the various editions let me recommend Klindworth for daily usage, while frequent reference to Von Bulow, Riemann and Kullak cannot fail to prove valuable, curious and interesting.

Of the making of Chopin editions there is seemingly no end. In 1894 I saw in ma.n.u.script some remarkable versions of the Chopin Studies by Leopold G.o.dowsky. The study in G sharp minor was the first one published and played in public by this young pianist Unlike the Brahms derangements, they are musical but immensely difficult. Topsy-turvied as are the figures, a Chopin, even if lop-sided, hovers about, sometimes with eye-brows uplifted, sometimes with angry, knitted forehead and not seldom amused to the point of smiling. You see his narrow shoulders, shrugged in the Polish fashion as he examines the study in double-thirds transposed to the left hand! Curiously enough this transcription, difficult as it is, does not tax the fingers as much as a bedevilment of the A minor, op. 25, No. 4, which is extremely difficult, demanding color discrimination and individuality of finger.

More breath-catching, and a piece at which one must cry out: "Hats off, gentlemen! A tornado!" is the caprice called "Badinage." But if it is meant to badinage, it is no sport for the pianist of everyday technical attainments. This is formed of two studies. In the right hand is the G flat study, op. 25, No. 9, and in the left the black key study, op. 10, No. 5. The two go laughing through the world like old friends; brother and sister they are tonally, trailing behind them a cloud of iridescent glory. G.o.dowsky has cleverly combined the two, following their melodic curves as nearly as is possible. In some places he has thickened the harmonies and shifted the "black key" figures to the right hand. It is the work of a remarkable pianist. This is the way it looks on paper at the beginning:

[Musical ll.u.s.tration]

The same study G flat, op. 10, No. 5, is also treated separately, the melody being transferred to the treble. The b.u.t.terfly octaves, in another study, are made to hop nimbly along in the left hand, and the C major study, op. 10, No. 7, Chopin's Toccata, is arranged for the left hand, and seems very practical and valuable. Here the adapter has displayed great taste and skill, especially on the third page. The pretty musical idea is not destroyed, but viewed from other points of vantage. Op. 10, No. 2, is treated like a left hand study, as it should be. Chopin did not always give enough work to the left hand, and the first study of this opus in C is planned on brilliant lines for both hands. Ingenious is the manipulation of the seldom played op. 25, No.

5, in E minor. As a study in rhythms and double notes it is very welcome. The F minor study, op. 25, No. 2, as considered by the ambidextrous G.o.dowsky, is put in the ba.s.s, where it whirrs along to the melodic encouragement of a theme of the paraphraser's own, in the right. This study has suffered the most of all, for Brahms, in his heavy, Teutonic way, set it grinding double sixths, while Isidor Philipp, in his "Studies for the Left Hand," has harnessed it to sullen octaves. This Frenchman, by the way, has also arranged for left hand alone the G sharp minor, the D flat double sixths, the A minor--"Winter Wind"--studies, the B flat minor prelude, and, terrible to relate, the last movement of the Chopin B flat minor Sonata.

Are the G.o.dowsky transcriptions available? Certainly. In ten years--so rapid is the technical standard advancing--they will be used in the curriculum of students. Whether he has treated Chopin with reverence I leave my betters to determine. What has reverence to do with the case, anyhow? Plato is pa.r.s.ed in the schoolroom, and Beethoven taught in conservatories! Therefore why worry over the question of G.o.dowsky's att.i.tude! Besides, he is writing for the next generation--presumably a generation of Rosenthals.

And now, having pa.s.sed over the salt and stubbly domain of pedagogics, what is the dominant impression gleaned from the twenty-seven Chopin studies? Is it not one of admiration, tinged with wonder at such a prodigal display of thematic and technical invention? Their variety is great, the aesthetic side is nowhere neglected for the purely mechanical, and in the most poetic of them stuff may be found for delicate fingers. Astounding, canorous, enchanting, alembicated and dramatic, the Chopin studies are exemplary essays in emotion and manner. In them is mirrored all of Chopin, the planetary as well as the secular Chopin. When most of his piano music has gone the way of all things fashioned by mortal hands, these studies will endure, will stand for the nineteenth century as Beethoven crystallized the eighteenth, Bach the seventeenth centuries in piano music. Chopin is a cla.s.sic.

VII. MOODS IN MINIATURE:--THE PRELUDES.

The Preludes bear the opus number 28 and are dedicated to J. C.

Kessler, a composer of well-known piano studies. It is only the German edition that bears his name, the French and English being inscribed by Chopin "a son ami Pleyel." As Pleyel advanced the pianist 2,000 francs for the Preludes he had a right to say: "These are my Preludes." Niecks is authority for Chopin's remark: "I sold the Preludes to Pleyel because he liked them." This was in 1838, when Chopin's health demanded a change of climate. He wished to go to Majorca with Madame Sand and her children, and had applied for money to the piano maker and publisher, Camille Pleyel. He received but five hundred francs in advance, the balance being paid on delivery of the ma.n.u.script.

The Preludes were published in 1839, yet there is internal evidence which proves that most of them had been composed before the trip to the Balearic Islands. This will upset the very pretty legend of music making at the monastery of Valdemosa. Have we not all read with sweet credulity the eloquent pages in George Sand in which the storm is described that overtook the novelist and her son Maurice? After terrible trials, dangers and delays, they reached their home and found Chopin at the piano. Uttering a cry, he arose and stared at the pair.

"Ah! I knew well that you were dead." It was the sixth prelude, the one in B minor, that he played, and dreaming, as Sand writes, that "he saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy, ice cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast; and when I called his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature."

Yet this prelude was composed previous to the Majorcan episode. "The Preludes," says Niecks, "consist--to a great extent, at least--of pickings from the composer's portfolios, of pieces, sketches and memoranda written at various times and kept to be utilized when occasion might offer."

Gutmann, Chopin's pupil, who nursed him to the last, declared the Preludes to have been composed before he went away with Madame Sand, and to Niecks personally he maintained that he had copied all of them.

Niecks does not credit him altogether, for there are letters in which several of the Preludes are mentioned as being sent to Paris, so he reaches the conclusion that "Chopin's labors at Majorca on the Preludes were confined to selecting, filing and polishing." This seems to be a sensible solution.

Robert Schumann wrote of these Preludes: "I must signalize them as most remarkable. I will confess I expected something quite different, carried out in the grand style of his studies. It is almost the contrary here; these are sketches, the beginning of studies, or, if you will, ruins, eagles' feathers, all strangely intermingled. But in every piece we find in his own hand, 'Frederic Chopin wrote it.' One recognizes him in his pauses, in his impetuous respiration. He is the boldest, the proudest poet soul of his time. To be sure the book also contains some morbid, feverish, repellant traits; but let everyone look in it for something that will enchant him. Philistines, however, must keep away."

It was in these Preludes that Ignaz Moscheles first comprehended Chopin and his methods of execution. The German pianist had found his music harsh and dilettantish in modulation, but Chopin's originality of performance--"he glides lightly over the keys in a fairy-like way with his delicate fingers"--quite reconciled the elder man to this strange music.

To Liszt the Preludes seem modestly named, but "are not the less types of perfection in a mode created by himself, and stamped like all his other works with the high impress of his poetic genius. Written in the commencement of his career, they are characterized by a youthful vigor not to be found in some of his subsequent works, even when more elaborate, finished and richer in combinations; a vigor which is entirely lost in his latest productions, marked by an overexcited sensibility, a morbid irritability, and giving painful intimations of his own state of suffering and exhaustion."

Liszt, as usual, erred on the sentimental side. Chopin, being essentially a man of moods, like many great men, and not necessarily feminine in this respect, cannot always be pinned down to any particular period. Several of the Preludes are very morbid--I purposely use this word--as is some of his early music, while he seems quite gay just before his death.

"The Preludes follow out no technical idea, are free creations on a small basis, and exhibit the musician in all his versatility," says Louis Ehlert. "No work of Chopin's portrays his inner organization so faithfully and completely. Much is embryonic. It is as though he turned the leaves of his fancy without completely reading any page. Still, one finds in them the thundering power of the Scherzi, the half satirical, half coquettish elegance of the Mazurkas, and the southern, luxuriously fragrant breath of the Nocturnes. Often it is as though they were small falling stars dissolved into tones as they fall."

Jean Kleczynski, who is credited with understanding Chopin, himself a Pole and a pianist, thinks that "people have gone too far in seeking in the Preludes for traces of that misanthropy, of that weariness of life to which he was prey during his stay in the Island of Majorca...Very few of the Preludes present this character of ennui, and that which is the most marked, the second one, must have been written, according to Count Tarnowski, a long time before he went to Majorca. ... What is there to say concerning the other Preludes, full of good humor and gaiety--No. 18, in E flat; No. 21, in B flat; No. 23, in F, or the last, in D minor? Is it not strong and energetic, concluding, as it does, with three cannon shots?"

Willeby in his "Frederic Francois Chopin" considers at length the Preludes. He agrees in the main with Niecks, that certain of these compositions were written at Valdemosa--Nos. 4, 6, 9, 13, 20 and 21--and that "Chopin, having sketches of others with him, completed the whole there, and published them under one opus number. ... The atmosphere of those I have named is morbid and azotic; to them there clings a faint flavor of disease, a something which is overripe in its lusciousness and febrile in its pa.s.sion. This in itself inclines me to believe they were written at the time named."

This is all very well, but Chopin was faint and febrile in his music before he went to Majorca, and the plain facts adduced by Gutmann and Niecks cannot be pa.s.sed over. Henry James, an old admirer of Madame Sand, admits her utter unreliability, and so we may look upon her evidence as romantic but by no means infallible. The case now stands: Chopin may have written a few of the Preludes at Majorca, filed them, finished them, but the majority of them were in his portfolio in 1837 and 1838. Op. 45, a separate Prelude in C sharp minor, was published in December, 1841. It was composed at Nohant in August of that year. It is dedicated to Mme. la Princesse Elizabeth Czernicheff, whose name, as Chopin confesses in a letter, he knows not how to spell.

II

Theodore Kullak is curt and pedagogic in his preface to the Preludes.

He writes:

Chopin's genius nowhere reveals itself more charmingly than within narrowly bounded musical forms. The Preludes are, in their aphoristic brevity, masterpieces of the first rank. Some of them appear like briefly sketched mood pictures related to the nocturne style, and offer no technical hindrance even to the less advanced player. I mean Nos. 4, 6, 7, 9, 15 and 20.

More difficult are Nos. 17, 25 and 11, without, however, demanding eminent virtuosity. The other Preludes belong to a species of character-etude. Despite their brevity of outline they are on a par with the great collections op. 10 and op.

25. In so far as it is practicable--special cases of individual endowments not being taken into consideration--I would propose the following order of succession: Begin with Nos. 1, 14, 10, 22, 23, 3 and 18. Very great bravura is demanded by Nos. 12, 8, 16 and 24. The difficulty of the other Preludes, Nos. 2, 5, 13, 19 and 21, lies in the delicate piano and legato technique, which, on account of the extended positions, leaps and double notes, presupposes a high degree of development.

This is eminently a common sense grouping. The first prelude, which, like the first etude, begins in C, has all the characteristics of an impromptu. We know the wonderful Bach Preludes, which grew out of a free improvisation to the collection of dance forms called a suite, and the preludes which precede his fugues. In the latter Bach sometimes exhibits all the objectivity of the study or toccata, and often wears his heart in full view. Chopin's Preludes--the only preludes to be compared to Bach's--are largely personal, subjective, and intimate.

This first one is not Bach-ian, yet it could have been written by no one but a devout Bach student. The pulsating, pa.s.sionate, agitated, feverish, hasty qualities of the piece are modern; so is the changeful modulation. It is a beautiful composition, rising to no dramatic heights, but questioning and full of life. Klindworth writes in triplet groups, Kullak in quintolets. Breitkopf & Hartel do not. Dr. Hugo Riemann, who has edited a few of the Preludes, phrases the first bars thus:

Desperate and exasperating to the nerves is the second prelude in A minor. It is an asymmetric tune. Chopin seldom wrote ugly music, but is this not ugly, forlorn, despairing, almost grotesque, and discordant?

It indicates the deepest depression in its sluggish, snake-like progression. Willeby finds a resemblance to the theme of the first nocturne. And such a theme! The tonality is vague, beginning in E minor. Chopin's method of thematic parallelism is here very clear. A small figure is repeated in descending keys until hopeless gloom and depraved melancholy are reached in the closing chords. Chopin now is morbid, here are all his most antipathetic qualities. There is aversion to life--in this music he is a true lycanthrope. A self-induced hypnosis, a mental, an emotional atrophy are all present.