Old Fogy Part 3

And that fixed star in the pianistic firmament, one who refuses to descend to earth and please the groundlings--Rafael Joseffy--is for me the most satisfying of all the pianists. Never any excess of emotional display; never silly sentimentalizings, but a lofty, detached style, impeccable technic, tone as beautiful as starlight--yes, Joseffy is the enchanter who wins me with his disdainful spells. I heard him play the Chopin E minor and the Liszt A major concertos; also a brace of encores.

Perfection! The Liszt was not so brilliant as Reisenauer; but--again within its frame--perfection! The Chopin was as Chopin would have had it given in 1840. And there were refinements of tone-color undreamed of even by Chopin. Paderewski is Paderewski--and Joseffy is perfection.

Paderewski is the most eclectic of the four pianists I have taken for my text; Joseffy the most subtly poetic; D'Albert the most profound and intellectually significant, and Pachmann--well, Vladimir is the _enfant terrible_ of the quartet, a whimsical, fantastic charmer, an apparition with rare talents, and an interpreter of the Lesser Chopin (always the _great_ Chopin) without a peer. Let us be happy that we are vouchsafed the pleasure of hearing four such artists.

IX

THE INFLUENCE OF DADDY LISZT

Have you read Th.o.r.eau's _Walden_ with its smell of the woods and its ozone-permeated pages? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring under the delusion that they are developing their individuality.

Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays among musicians! They have been admonished so often in print and private that their ignorance is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these ambitious ladies and gentlemen rush off to the booksellers, to libraries, and literally gorge themselves with the "ologies" and "isms" of the day. Lord, Lord, how I enjoy meeting them at a musicale! There they sit, c.o.c.ked and primed for a verbal encounter, waiting to knock the literary chip off their neighbor's shoulder.

"Have you read"--begins some one and the chattering begins, _furioso_.

"Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,"--"Tolstoi's _What is Art?_ certainly, he ought to be electrocuted"--"Nordau! isn't he terrible?" And the cacophonous conversational symphony rages, and when it is spent, the man who asked the question finishes:

"Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in the _Kolnische Zeitung?_" and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards him whilst murmurs arise, "What an uncultured man! To talk 'shop' like a regular musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program--I mean plots for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England, begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.

Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He had read everything before he was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to pa.r.s.e a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_. The Weimar crew all imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose--came towards me. He wore a monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_.

"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us.

I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an outrageous manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats. When Liszt left me--we studied together with Czerny--they trooped after him, their garments ballooning in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was the devotion of a pet ape.

I mention this because I have never met a Liszt pupil since without recalling that day in Weimar. And when one plays I close my eyes and hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding, treacherous technic. Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch. The old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, "Don't copy my touch; it's spoiled." He had for so many years pounded and punched the keyboard that his tactile sensibility--isn't that your new-fangled expression?--had vanished. His "orchestral" playing was one of those pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe, and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons. I remember well that Liszt, who was first and foremost a melodramatic actor, had a habit of striding to the instrument, sitting down in a magnificent manner and uplifting his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories. He was a master hypnotist, and like John L. Sullivan he had his adversary--the audience--conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific, his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for a barn-floor!

Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied.

In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris, Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage. He wrote articles about himself in the musical papers--a practice that his disciples have not failed to emulate--and in an article on Thalberg displayed his bad taste in abusing what he could not imitate. Oh yes, Liszt was a great thief.

His piano music--I mean his so-called original music--is nothing but Chopin and brandy. His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed from Paganini, and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped himself to its hair. So in his piano music we find a conglomeration of other men's ideas, other men's figures. When he wrote for orchestra the hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz. I never could quite see Liszt. He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious Pole got rid of him and then he strung after Wagner. I do not mean that Liszt was without merit, but I do a.s.sert that he should have left the piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.

Let us consider some of his compositions.

Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not, however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through the _Lucia_ fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before she mounts her bicycle.

And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the _Don Juan_ of Liszt and the _Don Juan_ of Thalberg! See which is the more musical, the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies, bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thing he could lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the _Tannhauser_ overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors, appealed to pianists because of its fact.i.tious brilliancy.

The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes _a la_ Chopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up into _Twelve Etudes Transcendentales_--listen to the big, boastful t.i.tle!--is better than the furbished up later collection. His three concert studies are Chopinish; his _Waldesrauschen_ is pretty, but leads nowhere; his _Annees des Pelerinage_ sickly with sentimentalism; his _Dante Sonata_ a horror; his _B-minor Sonata_ a madman's tale signifying froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious, artificial and insincere. Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his continual worship of G.o.d in his music is for me monotonously blasphemous.

The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last. They are the nightmare curse of the pianist, with their rattle-trap harmonies, their helter-skelter melodies, their vulgarity and cheap bohemianism. They all begin in the church and end in the tavern. There is a fad just now for eating ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accompaniment of a wretched gypsy circus called a Czardas. Liszt's rhapsodies irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirty _table d'hote_, where evil-smelling dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced by evil-tasting messes. If Liszt be your G.o.d, why then give me Czerny, or, better still, a long walk in the woods, humming with nature's rhythms. I think I'll read _Walden_ over again. Now do you think I am as amiable as I look?

X

BACH--ONCE, LAST, AND ALL THE TIME

I'm an old, old man. I've seen the world of sights, and I've listened eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, maddening concourse of tones civilized Caucasians agree is the one, the only art.

I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled--doesn't Walt Whitman say that somewhere?--I've even rioted in Verdi. Ah, you are surprised! You fancied I knew my Czerny _et voila tout_? Let me have your ear. I've run the whole gamut of musical composers. I once swore by Meyerbeer. I came near worshiping Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I am willing to acknowledge that _Die Meistersinger_ is the very apex of a modern polyphonic score. I adored Spohr and found good in Auber. In a word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and the mumps.

As I grew older my task clarified. Having admired Donizetti, there was no danger of being seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni.

Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not for an instant impose on me. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being violently self-conscious, I sought as I pa.s.sed youth and its dangerous critical heats to a.n.a.lyze just why I preferred one man's music to another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more than Beethoven? At last, one day, and not many years ago, I cried aloud, "Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless limbs of these cla.s.sicists, these modern men. Bach--once, last, and all the time."

And so it came about that with my prying nose I dipped into all composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations. If much Bach, then granted talent, the man reared a solid structure. If no Bach, then no matter how brilliant, how meteoric, how sensational the talents, smash came tumbling down the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's hastily erected palace. Whether it is Perosi--who swears by Bach and doesn't understand or study him--or Mascagni or Ma.s.senet, or any of the new school, the result is the same. Bach is the touchstone. Look at Verdi, the Verdi of _Don Carlo_ and the Verdi who planned and built _Falstaff_. Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale--surely one of the most astounding operatic codas in existence--that carries me away.

It is the general texture of the work, its many voices, like the sweet mingled roar of b.u.t.termilk Falls, that draws me to _Falstaff_. It is because of Bach that I have forsworn my dislike of the later Wagner, and unlearned my disgust at his overpowering sensuousness. The web he spins is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so admirable, that I have grown very fond of _The Mastersingers_.

Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test for modern piano music. The monophonic has been done to the death by a whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure, built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been invented, or rather re-discovered--for in Bach all were latent--but, confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic life. It is only in a few latter-day composers that I find music that moves, that sings, that thrills.

How did I discover that Bach was in the very heart of Wagner? In the simplest manner. I began playing the _E-flat minor Prelude_ in the first book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_, and lo! I was transported to the opening of _Gotterdammerung_.

Pretty smart boy that Richard Geyer to know his Bach so well! Yet the resemblance is far fetched, is only a hazy similarity. The triad of E-flat minor is common property, but something told me Wagner had been browsing on Bach; on this particular prelude had, in fact, got a starting point for the Norn music. The more I studied Wagner, the more I found Bach, and the more Bach, the better the music. Chopin knew his Bach backwards, hence the surprisingly fresh, vital quality of his music, despite its pessimistic coloring. Schumann loved Bach and built his best music on him, Mendelssohn re-discovered him, whilst Beethoven played the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ every day of his life.

All _my_ pupils study the _Inventions_ before they play Clementi or Beethoven, and what well-springs of delight are these two- and three-part pieces! Take my word for it, if you have mastered them you may walk boldly up to any of the great, insolent forty-eight sweet-tempered preludes and fugues and overcome them. Study Bach say I to every one, but study him sensibly. Tausig, the greatest pianist the world has yet heard, edited about twenty preludes and fugues from the Clavichord. These he gave his pupils _after_ they had played Chopin's opus 10. Strange idea, isn't it? Before that they played the _Inventions_, the symphonies, the _French_ and _English Suites_--Klindworth's edition of the latter is excellent--and the _Part.i.tas_. Then, I should say, the Italian concert and that excellent three-voiced fugue in A minor, so seldom heard in concert. It is pleasing rather than deep in feeling, but how effective, how brilliant!

Don't forget the toccatas, fantasias, and capriccios. Such works as _The Art of Fugue_ and others of the same cla.s.s show us Father Bach in his working clothes, earnest if not exactly inspired.

But in his moments of inspiration what a genius! What a singularly happy welding of manner and matter! The _Chromatic Fantasia_ is to me greater than any of the organ works, with the possible exception of the _G minor Fantasia_. Indeed, I think it greater than its accompanying _D minor Fugue_. In it are the harmonic, melodic, and spiritual germs of modern music. The restless tonalities, the agitated, pa.s.sionate, desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashion as to beggar imitation?

Let us turn to the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ and bow the knee of submission, of admiration, of worship. I use the Klindworth, the Busoni and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny. I think it was the latter who once excited my rage when I found the C sharp major prelude transposed to the key of D flat! This outrageous proceeding pales, however, before the infamous behavior of Gounod, who dared--the sacrilegious Gaul!--to place upon the wonderful harmonies of the master of masters a cheap, tawdry, vulgar tune. Gounod deserved oblivion for this. I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude myself that I prefer certain preludes, certain fugues, but a few hours'

study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated with _its_ beauties. We have all played and loved the _C minor Prelude_ in Book one--Cramer made a study on memories of this--and who has not felt happy at its wonderful fugue! Yet a few pages on is a marvelous _Fugue in C sharp minor_ with five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a little distance and you land in the _E flat Fugue_ with its a.s.sertiveness, its c.o.c.ksure subject, and then consider the pattering, gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in F? Its germ is perhaps the _F major Invention_, the eighth. A marked favorite of mine is the fifteenth fugue in G. There's a subject for you and what a jolly length!

Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the _B-flat Prelude and Fugue_? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the _B-flat minor Prelude_? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.

I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience! But before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so freely, so profoundly, so poignantly.

Touching on his technics, I may say that they require of the pianist's fingers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is spiritual as well as material. The diligent daily study of Bach will form your style, your technics, better than all machines and finger exercises. But play him as if he were human, a contemporary and not a historical reminiscence. Yes, you may indulge in _rubato_. I would rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin. Play Bach as if he still composed--he does--and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of performance. He would alter all that if he were alive today.

I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print. The story was related to me by a pupil of Reinecke, and Reinecke got it from Mendelssohn. Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons, headed by the naughty Friedmann, resolved to play a joke on their good old father. Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the bellows-blower away, and started in to give the Master a surprise. They tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a long rope fastened to the outside k.n.o.b they pulled the door open and shut, and of course the wind ran low. Johann Sebastian--who looked more like E. M. Bowman than E. M. B. himself--suddenly found himself clawing ivory. He rose and went softly to the rear. Discovering no blower, he investigated, and began to gently haul in the line. When it was all in several boys were at the end of it. Did he whip them? Not he. He locked the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade them blow. They did.

Then the archangel of music went back to his bench and composed the famous _Wedge_ fugue. How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is quaint enough. Let me end this exhortation by quoting some words of Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: "If you want music for your own and music's sake--look up to Bach. If you want music which is as absolutely full of meaning as an egg is full of meat--look up to Bach."

Look up to Bach. Sound advice. Profit by it.

XI

SCHUMANN: A VANISHING STAR

The missing meteors of November minded me of the musical reputations I have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into ineffectual twilight. Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age, one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn!

Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified--the Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision.

Schubert was a divinely awkward stammerer, and Liszt the brilliant centipede amongst virtuosi. They were rapturous days and we fed full upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshine and mush.

What the lads and la.s.sies of ideal predilections needed was a man like Schumann, a dreamer of dreams, yet one who pinned illuminative tags to his visions to give them symbolical meanings, dragged in poetry by the hair, and called the composite, art. Schumann, born mentally sick, a man with the germs of insanity, a pathological case, a literary man turned composer--Schumann, I say, topsy-turvied all the newly born and, without knowing it, diverted for the time music from its true current. He preached Brahms and Chopin, but practised Wagner--he was the forerunner to Wagner, for he was the first composer who fashioned literature into tone.

Doesn't all this sound revolutionary? An old fellow like me talking this way, finding old-fashioned what he once saw leave the bank of melody with the mintage glitteringly fresh! Yet it is so. I have lived to witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? _Dinna ye hear the slogan_ of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of the _Zeitgeist_. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he called Bachian--but it wasn't. In variety of key-color perhaps; but structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficient reason.

Schumann had the great structure models before him; he heeded them not.