Chopin : the Man and His Music Part 9

Kullak divides the accompaniment, difficult for small hands, between the two. Riemann detaches the eighth notes of the ba.s.s figures, as is his wont, for greater clearness. Like Klindworth, he accents heavily the final chords. He marks his metronome 50 to the half note. All the editions are lento with alla breve.

That the Preludes are a sheaf of moods, loosely held together by the rather vague t.i.tle, is demonstrated by the third, in the key of G. The rippling, rain-like figure for the left hand is in the nature of a study. The melody is delicate in sentiment, Gallic in its esprit. A true salon piece, this prelude has no hint of artificiality. It is a precise ant.i.thesis to the mood of the previous one. Graceful and gay, the G major prelude is a fair reflex of Chopin's sensitive and naturally buoyant nature. It requires a light hand and nimble fingers.

The melodic idea requires no special comment. Kullak phrases it differently from Riemann and Klindworth. The latter is the preferable.

Klindworth gives 72 to the half note as his metronomic marking, Riemann only 60--which is too slow--while Klindworth contents himself by marking a simple Vivace. Regarding the fingering one may say that all tastes are pleased in these three editions. Klindworth's is the easiest. Riemann breaks up the phrase in the ba.s.s figure, but I cannot see the gain on the musical side.

Niecks truthfully calls the fourth prelude in E minor "a little poem, the exquisitely sweet, languid pensiveness of which defies description.

The composer seems to be absorbed in the narrow sphere of his ego, from which the wide, noisy world is for the time shut out." Willeby finds this prelude to be "one of the most beautiful of these spontaneous sketches; for they are no more than sketches. The melody seems literally to wail, and reaches its greatest pitch of intensity at the stretto." For Karasowski it is a "real gem, and alone would immortalize the name of Chopin as a poet." It must have been this number that impelled Rubinstein to a.s.sert that the Preludes were the pearls of his works. In the Klindworth edition, fifth bar from the last, the editor has filled in the harmonies to the first six notes of the left hand, added thirds, which is not reprehensible, although uncalled for. Kullak makes some new dynamic markings and several enharmonic changes. He also gives as metronome 69 to the quarter. This tiny prelude contains wonderful music. The grave reiteration of the theme may have suggested to Peter Cornelius his song "Ein Ton." Chopin expands a melodic unit, and one singularly pathetic. The whole is like some canvas by Rembrandt, Rembrandt who first dramatized the shadow in which a single motif is powerfully handled; some sombre effect of echoing light in the profound of a Dutch interior. For background Chopin has subst.i.tuted his soul; no one in art, except Bach or Rembrandt, could paint as Chopin did in this composition. Its despair has the antique flavor, and there is a breadth, n.o.bility and proud submission quite free from the tortured, whimpering complaint of the second prelude. The picture is small, but the subject looms large in meanings.

The fifth prelude in D is Chopin at his happiest. Its arabesque pattern conveys a most charming content; and there is a dewy freshness, a joy in life, that puts to flight much of the morbid t.i.ttle-tattle about Chopin's sickly soul. The few bars of this prelude, so seldom heard in public, reveal musicianship of the highest order. The harmonic scheme is intricate; Klindworth phrases the first four bars so as to bring out the alternate B and B flat. It is Chopin spinning his finest, his most iridescent web.

The next prelude, the sixth, in B minor, is doleful, pessimistic. As George Sand says: "It precipitates the soul into frightful depression."

It is the most frequently played--and oh! how meaninglessly--prelude of the set; this and the one in D flat. Cla.s.sical is its repression of feeling, its pure contour. The echo effect is skilfully managed, monotony being artfully avoided. Klindworth rightfully slurs the duple group of eighths; Kullak tries for the same effect by different means.

The duality of the voices should be clearly expressed. The tempo, marked in both editions, lento a.s.sai, is fast. To be precise, Klindworth gives 66 to the quarter.

The plaintive little mazurka of two lines, the seventh prelude, is a mere silhouette of the national dance. Yet in its measures is compressed all Mazovia. Klindworth makes a variant in the fourth bar from the last, a G sharp instead of an F sharp. It is a more piquant climax, perhaps not admissible to the Chopin purist. In the F sharp minor prelude No. 7, Chopin gives us a taste of his grand manner. For Niecks the piece is jerky and agitated, and doubtless suggests a mental condition bordering on anxiety; but if frenzy there is, it is kept well in check by the exemplary taste of the composer. The sadness is rather elegiac, remote, and less poignant than in the E minor prelude.

Harmonic heights are reached on the second page--surely Wagner knew these bars when he wrote "Tristan and Isolde"--while the ingenuity of the figure and avoidance of a rhythmical monotone are evidences of Chopin's feeling for the decorative. It is a masterly prelude.

Klindworth accents the first of the ba.s.s triplets, and makes an unnecessary enharmonic change at the sixth and seventh lines.

There is a measure of grave content in the ninth prelude in E. It is rather gnomic, and contains hints of both Brahms and Beethoven. It has an ethical quality, but that may be because of its churchly rhythm and color.

The C sharp minor prelude, No. 10, must be the "eagle wings" of Schumann's critique. There is a flash of steel gray, deepening into black, and then the vision vanishes as though some huge bird aloft had plunged down through blazing sunlight, leaving a color-echo in the void as it pa.s.sed to its quarry. Or, to be less figurative, this prelude is a study in arpeggio, with double notes interspersed, and is too short to make more than a vivid impression.

No. II in B is all too brief. It is vivacious, dolce indeed, and most cleverly constructed. Klindworth gives a more binding character to the first double notes. Another gleam of the Chopin sunshine.

Storm clouds gather in the G sharp minor, the twelfth prelude, so unwittingly imitated by Grieg in his Menuetto of the same key, and in its driving presto we feel the pa.s.sionate clench of Chopin's hand. It is convulsed with woe, but the intellectual grip, the self-command are never lost in these two pages of perfect writing. The figure is suggestive, and there is a well defined technical problem, as well as a psychical character. Disputed territory is here: the editors do not agree about the twelfth and eleventh bars from the last. According to Breitkopf & Hartel the ba.s.s octaves are E both times. Mikuli gives G sharp the first time instead of E; Klindworth, G sharp the second time; Riemann, E, and also Kullak. The G sharp seems more various.

In the thirteenth prelude, F sharp major, here is lovely atmosphere, pure and peaceful. The composer has found mental rest. Exquisitely poised are his pinions for flight, and in the piu lento he wheels significantly and majestically about in the blue. The return to earth is the signal for some strange modulatory tactics. It is an impressive close. Then, almost without pause, the blood begins to boil in this fragile man's veins. His pulse beat increases, and with stifled rage he rushes into the battle. It is the fourteenth prelude in the sinister key of E flat minor, and its heavy, sullen-arched triplets recalls for Niecks the last movement of the B flat minor Sonata; but there is less interrogation in the prelude, less sophistication, and the heat of conflict over it all. There is not a break in the clouds until the beginning of the fifteenth, the familiar prelude in D flat.

This must be George Sand's: "Some of them create such vivid impressions that the shades of dead monks seem to rise and pa.s.s before the hearer in solemn and gloomy funereal pomp." The work needs no programme. Its serene beginning, lugubrious interlude, with the dominant pedal never ceasing, a ba.s.so ostinato, gives color to Kleczynski's contention that the prelude in B minor is a mere sketch of the idea fully elaborated in No. 15. "The foundation of the picture is the drops of rain falling at regular intervals"--the echo principle again--"which by their continual patter bring the mind to a state of sadness; a melody full of tears is heard through the rush of the rain; then pa.s.sing to the key of C sharp minor, it rises from the depths of the ba.s.s to a prodigious crescendo, indicative of the terror which nature in its deathly aspect excites in the heart of man. Here again the form does not allow the ideas to become too sombre; notwithstanding the melancholy which seizes you, a feeling of tranquil grandeur revives you." To Niecks, the C sharp minor portion affects one as in an oppressive dream: "The re-entrance of the opening D flat, which dispels the dreadful nightmare, comes upon one with the smiling freshness of dear, familiar nature."

The prelude has a nocturnal character. It has become slightly ba.n.a.l from frequent repet.i.tion, likewise the C sharp minor study in opus 25.

But of its beauty, balance and exceeding chast.i.ty there can be no doubt. The architecture is at once Greek and Gothic.

The sixteenth prelude in the relative key of B flat minor is the boldest of the set. Its scale figures, seldom employed by Chopin, boil and glitter, the thematic thread of the idea never being quite submerged. Fascinating, full of perilous acclivities and sudden treacherous descents, this most brilliant of preludes is Chopin in riotous spirits. He plays with the keyboard: it is an avalanche, anon a cascade, then a swift stream, which finally, after mounting to the skies, descends to an abyss. Full of imaginative lift, caprice and stormy dynamics, this prelude is the darling of the virtuoso. Its pregnant introduction is like a madly jutting rock from which the eagle spirit of the composer precipitates itself.

In the twenty-third bar there is curious editorial discrepancy.

Klindworth uses an A natural in the first of the four groups of sixteenths, Kullak a B natural; Riemann follows Kullak. Nor is this all. Kullak in the second group, right hand, has an E flat, Klindworth a D natural. Which is correct? Klindworth's texture is more closely chromatic and it sounds better, the chromatic parallelism being more carefully preserved. Yet I fancy that Kullak has tradition on his side.

The seventeenth prelude Niecks finds Mendelssohn-ian. I do not. It is suave, sweet, well developed, yet Chopin to the core, and its harmonic life surprisingly rich and novel. The mood is one of tranquillity. The soul loses itself in early autumnal revery while there is yet splendor on earth and in the skies. Full of tonal contrasts, this highly finished composition is grateful to the touch. The eleven booming A flats on the last page are historical. Klindworth uses a B flat instead of a G at the beginning of the melody. It is logical, but is it Chopin?

The fiery recitatives of No. 18 in F minor are a glimpse of Chopin, muscular and not hectic. In these editions you will find three different groupings of the cadenzas. It is Riemann's opportunity for pedagogic editing, and he does not miss it. In the first long breathed group of twenty-two sixteenth notes he phrases as shown on the following page.

It may be noticed that Riemann even changes the arrangement of the bars. This prelude is dramatic almost to an operatic degree. Sonorous, rather grandiloquent, it is a study in declamation, the declamation of the slow movement in the F minor concerto. Schumann may have had the first phrase in his mind when he wrote his Aufschwung. This page of Chopin's, the torso of a larger idea, is n.o.bly rhetorical.

[Musical score excerpt]

What piano music is the nineteenth prelude in E flat! Its widely dispersed harmonies, its murmuring grace and June-like beauty, are they not Chopin, the Chopin we best love? He is ever the necromancer, ever invoking phantoms, but with its whirring melody and furtive caprice this particular shape is an alluring one. And difficult it is to interpret with all its plangent lyric freedom.

No. 20 in C minor contains in its thirteen bars the sorrows of a nation. It is without doubt a sketch for a funeral march, and of it George Sand must have been thinking when she wrote that one prelude of Chopin contained more music than all the trumpetings of Meyerbeer.

Of exceeding loveliness is the B flat major prelude, No. 21. It is superior in content and execution to most of the nocturnes. In feeling it belongs to that form. The melody is enchanting. The accompaniment figure shows inventive genius. Klindworth employs a short appoggiatura, Kullak the long, in the second bar. Judge of what is true editorial sciolism when I tell you that Riemann--who evidently believes in a rigid melodic structure--has inserted an E flat at the end of bar four, thus maiming the tender, elusive quality of Chopin's theme. This is cruelly pedantic. The prelude arrests one in ecstasy; the fixed period of contemplation of the saint or the hypnotized sets in, and the awakening is almost painful. Chopin, adopting the relative minor key as a pendant to the picture in B flat, thrills the nerves by a bold dissonance in the next prelude, No. 22. Again, concise paragraphs filled with the smoke of revolt and conflict The impetuosity of this largely moulded piece in G minor, its daring harmonics,--read the seventeenth and eighteenth bars,--and dramatic note make it an admirable companion to the Prelude in F minor. Technically it serves as an octave study for the left hand.

In the concluding bar, but one, Chopin has in the F major Prelude attempted a most audacious feat in harmony. An E flat in the ba.s.s of the third group of sixteenths leaves the whole composition floating enigmatically in thin air. It deliciously colors the close, leaving a sense of suspense, of antic.i.p.ation which is not tonally realized, for the succeeding number is in a widely divorced key. But it must have pressed hard the philistines. And this prelude, the twenty-third, is fashioned out of the most volatile stuff. Aerial, imponderable, and like a sun-shot spider web oscillating in the breeze of summer, its hues change at every puff. It is in extended harmonics and must be delivered with spirituality. The h.o.r.n.y hand of the toilsome pianist would shatter the delicate, swinging fantasy of the poet. Kullak points out a variant in the fourteenth bar, G instead of B natural being used by Riemann. Klindworth prefers the latter.

We have reached the last prelude of op. 28. In D minor, it is sonorously tragic, troubled by fevers and visions, and capricious, irregular and ma.s.sive in design. It may be placed among Chopin's greater works: the two Etudes in C minor, the A minor, and the F sharp minor Prelude. The ba.s.s requires an unusual span, and the suggestion by Kullak, that the thumb of the right hand may eke out the weakness of the left is only for the timid and the small of fist. But I do not counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars.

Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this prelude.

Despite its fatalistic ring, its note of despair is not dispiriting.

Its issues are larger, more impersonal, more elemental than the other preludes. It is a veritable Appa.s.sionata, but its theatre is cosmic and no longer behind the closed doors of the cabinet of Chopin's soul. The Seelenschrei of Stanislaw Przybyszewski is here, explosions of wrath and revolt; not Chopin suffers, but his countrymen. Kleczynski speaks of the three tones at the close. They are the final clangor of oppressed, almost overthrown, reason. After the subject reappears in C minor there is a shift to D flat, and for a moment a point of repose is gained, but this elusive rest is brief. The theme reappears in the tonic and in octaves, and the tension becomes too great; the acc.u.mulated pa.s.sion discharges and dissolves in a fierce gust of double chromatic thirds and octaves. Powerful, repellant, this prelude is almost infernal in its pride and scorn. But in it I discern no vestige of uncontrolled hysteria. It is well-nigh as strong, rank and human as Beethoven. The various editorial phraseology is not of much moment.

Riemann uses thirty-second notes for the cadenzas, Kullak eighths and Klindworth sixteenths.

Niecks writes of the Prelude in C sharp minor, op. 45, that it "deserves its name better than almost any one of the twenty-four; still I would rather call it improvisata. It seems unpremeditated, a heedless outpouring, when sitting at the piano in a lonely, dreary hour, perhaps in the twilight. The quaver figure rises aspiringly, and the sustained parts swell out proudly. The piquant cadenza forestalls in the progression of diminished chords favorite effects of some of our more modern composers. The modulation from C sharp minor to D major and back again--after the cadenza--is very striking and equally beautiful."

Elsewhere I have called attention to the Brahmsian coloring of this prelude. Its mood is fugitive and hard to hold after capture. Recondite it is and not music for the mult.i.tude.

Niecks does not think Chopin created a new type in the Preludes. "They are too unlike each other in form and character." Yet notwithstanding the fleeting, evanescent moods of the Preludes, there is designedly a certain unity of feeling and contrasted tonalities, all being grouped in approved Bach-ian manner. This may be demonstrated by playing them through at a sitting, which Arthur Friedheim, the Russian virtuoso, did in a concert with excellent effect. As if wishing to exhibit his genius in perspective, Chopin carved these cameos with exceeding fineness, exceeding care. In a few of them the idea overbalances the form, but the greater number are exquisite examples of a just proportion of manner and matter, a true blending of voice and vision. Even in the more microscopic ones the tracery, echoing like the spirals in strange seash.e.l.ls, is marvellously measured. Much in miniature are these sculptured Preludes of the Polish poet.

VIII. IMPROMPTUS AND VALSES

To write of the four Impromptus in their own key of unrestrained feeling and pondered intention would not be as easy as recapturing the first "careless rapture" of the lark. With all the freedom of an improvisation the Chopin impromptu has a well defined form. There is structural impulse, although the patterns are free and original. The mood-color is not much varied in three, the first, third and fourth, but in the second there is a ballade-like quality that hints of the tragic. The A flat Impromptu, op. 29, is, if one is pinned down to the t.i.tle, the happiest named of the set. Its seething, prankish, nimble, bubbling quality is indicated from the start; the D natural in the treble against the C and E flat--the dominant--in the ba.s.s is a most original effect, and the flowing triplets of the first part of this piece give a ductile, gracious, high-bred character to it. The chromatic involutions are many and interesting. When the F minor part is reached the ear experiences the relief of a strongly contrasted rhythm. The simple duple measure, so naturally ornamented, is n.o.bly, broadly melodious. After the return of the first dimpling theme there is a short coda, a chiaroscura, and then with a few chords the composition goes to rest. A bird flew that way! Rubato should be employed, for, as Kleczynski says, "Here everything totters from foundation to summit, and everything is, nevertheless, so beautiful and so clear." But only an artist with velvety fingers should play this sounding arabesque.

There is more limpidezza, more pure grace of line in the first Impromptu than in the second in F sharp, op. 36. Here symmetry is abandoned, as Kullak remarks, but the compensation of intenser emotional issues is offered. There is something sphinx-like in the pose of this work. Its nocturnal beginning with the carillon-like ba.s.s--a ba.s.s that ever recalls to me the faint, buried tones of Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell," the sweetly grave close of the section, the faint hoof-beats of an approaching cavalcade, with the swelling thunders of its pa.s.sage, surely suggests a narrative, a programme. After the D major episode there are two bars of anonymous modulation--these bars creak on their hinges--and the first subject reappears in F, then climbs to F sharp, thence merges into a glittering melodic organ-point, exciting, brilliant, the whole subsiding into an echo of earlier harmonies. The final octaves are marked fortissimo which always seems brutal. Yet its logic lies in the scheme of the composer. Perhaps he wished to arouse us harshly from his dreamland, as was his habit while improvising for friends--a glissando would send them home shivering after an evening of delicious reverie.

Niecks finds this Impromptu lacking the pith of the first. To me it is of more moment than the other three. It is irregular and wavering in outline, the moods are wandering and capricious, yet who dares deny its power, its beauty? In its use of accessory figures it does not reveal so much ingenuity, but just because the "figure in the carpet" is not so varied in pattern, its pa.s.sion is all the deeper. It is another Ballade, sadder, more meditative of the tender grace of vanished days.

The third Impromptu in G flat, op. 51, is not often played. It may be too difficult for the vandal with an average technique, but it is neither so fresh in feeling nor so spontaneous in utterance as its companions. There is a touch of the faded, blase, and it is hardly healthy in sentiment. Here are some ophidian curves in triplets, as in the first Impromptu, but with interludes of double notes, in coloring tropical and rich to morbidity. The E flat minor trio is a fine bit of melodic writing. The absence of simplicity is counterbalanced by greater freedom of modulation and complexity of pattern. The impromptu flavor is not missing, and there is allied to delicacy of design a strangeness of sentiment--that strangeness which Edgar Poe declared should be a const.i.tuent element of all great art.

The Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, op. 66, was published by Fontana in 1855, and is one of the few posthumous works of Chopin worthy of consideration. It was composed about 1834. A true Impromptu, but the t.i.tle of Fantaisie given by Fontana is superfluous. The piece presents difficulties, chiefly rhythmical. Its involuted first phrases suggest the Bellini-an fioriture so dear to Chopin, but the D flat part is without n.o.bility. Here is the same kind of saccharine melody that makes mawkish the trio in the "Marche Funebre." There seems no danger that this Fantaisie-Impromptu will suffer from neglect, for it is the joy of the piano student, who turns its presto into a slow, blurred mess of badly related rhythms, and its slower movement into a long drawn sentimental agony; but in the hands of a master the C sharp minor Impromptu is charming, though not of great depth.

The first Impromptu, dedicated to Mlle. la Comtesse de Lobau, was published December, 1837; the second, May, 1840; the third, dedicated to Madame la Comtesse Esterhazy, February, 1843. Not one of these four Impromptus is as naive as Schubert's; they are more sophisticated and do not smell of nature and her simplicities.

Of the Chopin Valses it has been said that they are dances of the soul and not of the body. Their animated rhythms, insouciant airs and brilliant, coquettish atmosphere, the true atmosphere of the ballroom, seem to smile at Ehlert's poetic exaggeration. The valses are the most objective of the Chopin works, and in few of them is there more than a hint of the sullen, Sarga.s.son seas of the nocturnes and scherzi.

Nietzsche's la Gaya Scienza--the Gay Science--is beautifully set forth in the fifteen Chopin valses. They are less intimate, in the psychic sense, but exquisite exemplars of social intimacy and aristocratic abandon. As Schumann declared, the dancers of these valses should be at least countesses. There is a high-bred reserve despite their intoxication, and never a hint of the brawling peasants of Beethoven, Grieg, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and the rest. But little of Vienna is in Chopin. Around the measures of this most popular of dances he has thrown mystery, allurement, and in them secret whisperings and the unconscious sigh. It is going too far not to dance to some of this music, for it is putting Chopin away from the world he at times loved.

Certain of the valses may be danced: the first, second, fifth, sixth, and a few others. The dancing would be of necessity more picturesque and less conventional than required by the average valse, and there must be fluctuations of tempo, sudden surprises and abrupt languors.

The mazurkas and polonaises are danced to-day in Poland, why not the valses? Chopin's genius reveals itself in these dance forms, and their presentation should be not solely a psychic one. Kullak, stern old pedagogue, divides these dances into two groups, the first dedicated to "Terpsich.o.r.e," the second a frame for moods. Chopin admitted that he was unable to play valses in the Viennese fashion, yet he has contrived to rival Strauss in his own genre. Some of these valses are trivial, artificial, most of them are bred of candlelight and the swish of silken attire, and a few are poetically morbid and stray across the border into the rhythms of the mazurka. All of them have been edited to death, reduced to the commonplace by vulgar methods of performance, but are altogether sprightly, delightful specimens of the composer's careless, vagrant and happy moods.

Kullak utters words of warning to the "unquiet" s.e.x regarding the habitual neglect of the ba.s.s. It should mean something in valse tempo, but it usually does not. Nor need it be brutally banged; the fundamental tone must be cared for, the subsidiary harmonies lightly indicated. The rubato in the valses need not obtrude itself as in the mazurkas.

Opus 18, in E flat, was published in June, 1834, and dedicated to Mile.

Laura Harsford. It is a true ballroom picture, spirited and infectious in rhythms. Schumann wrote rhapsodically of it. The D flat section has a tang of the later Chopin. There is bustle, even chatter, in this valse, which in form and content is inferior to op. 34, No. I, A flat.

The three valses of this set were published December, 1838. There are many editorial differences in the A flat Valse, owing to the careless way it was copied and pirated. Klindworth and Kullak are the safest for dynamic markings. This valse may be danced as far as its dithyrhambic coda. Notice in this coda as in many other places the debt Schumann owes Chopin for a certain pa.s.sage in the Preambule of his "Carneval."

The next Valse in A minor has a tinge of Sarmatian melancholy, indeed, it is one of Chopin's most desponding moods. The episode in C rings of the mazurka, and the A major section is of exceeding loveliness; Its coda is characteristic. This valse is a favorite, and who need wonder?

The F major Valse, the last of this series, is a whirling, wild dance of atoms. It has the perpetuum mobile quality, and older masters would have prolonged its giddy arabesques into pages of senseless spinning.

It is quite long enough as it is. The second theme is better, but the appoggiatures are flippant. It buzzes to the finish. Of it is related that Chopin's cat sprang upon his keyboard and in its feline flight gave him the idea of the first measures. I suppose as there is a dog valse, there had to be one for the cat.