Old Fogy Part 5

And this is your operatic hero today! This is your maker of music dramas! Pooh! it is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Give me one page from the _Marriage of Figaro_ or the finale to _Don Giovanni_ and I will show you divine melody and great dramatic writing! But I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. I have since been told the real story of _Die Walkure_ and am dumfounded. It is all worse than I expected. Give me my Dussek, give me Mozart, let me breathe pure, sweet air after this hot-house music with its debauch of color, sound, action, and morals. I must have the grip, because even now as I write my mind seems tainted with the awful music of Richard Wagner, the arch fiend of music. I shall send for the doctor in the morning.

XIV

A VISIT TO THE PARIS CONSERVATOIRE

I feel very much like the tutor of Prince Karl Heinrich in the pretty play _Old Heidelberg_. After a long absence he returned to Heidelberg where his student life had been happy--or at least had seemed so to him in the latter, lonesome years. Behold, he found the same reckless crowd, swaggering, carousing, flirting, dueling, debt-making, love-making, and occasionally studying. He liked it so well that, if I mistake not, the place killed him. I felt very much in the same position as the Doctor Juttner of the play when I returned to Paris last summer. The _Conservatoire_ is still in its old, crooked, narrow street; it is still a noisy sheol as one enters at the gate; and there is still the same old gang of callow youths and extremely pert misses going and coming. Only they all seem more sophisticated nowadays. They--naturally enough--know more than their daddies, and they show it. As they brushed past, literally elbowing me, they seemed contemptuously arrogant in their youthful exuberance. And yet, and yet--_ego in Arcadia!_

I stood in the quadrangle and dreamed. Forty years ago--or is it fifty?--I had stood there before; but it was in the chilly month of November. I was young then, and I was very ambitious. The little Ohio town whose obscurity I had hoped to transform into fame--ah! these mad dreams of egotistical boyhood--did not resent my leaving it. It still stands where it was--stands still. I seem to have gone on, and yet I return to that little, dull, dilapidated town in my thoughts, for it was there I enjoyed the purple visions of music, where I fondly believed that I, too, might go forth into the world and make harmony. I did; but my harmony exercises were always returned full of blue marks. Such is life--and its lead-pencil ironies!

To be precise as well as concise, I stood in the concierge's bureau some forty years ago and wondered if the secretary would see me. He did.

After he had tortured me as to my age, parentage, nationality, qualifications, even personal habits, it occurred to him to ask me what I wanted in Paris. I told him, readily enough, that I had crossed the yeasty Atlantic in a sailing vessel--for motives of economy--that I might study the pianoforte in Paris. I remember that I also navely inquired the hours when M. Francois Liszt--he called him _Litz!_--gave his lessons. The secretary was too polite to laugh at my provincial ignorance, but he coughed violently several times. Then I was informed that M. Liszt never gave piano-lessons any time, any-where; that he was to be found in Weimar; but only by pa.s.sed grand masters of the art of pianoforte-playing. Still undaunted, I insisted on entering my name amongst those who would compete at the forthcoming public examination. I was, as I said before, very young, very inexperienced, and I was alone, with just enough money to keep me for one year.

I lived in a fourth-story garret in a little alley--you couldn't call it a street--just off the exterior boulevard. Whether it was the Clichy or the Batignolles doesn't matter very much now. How I lived was another affair--and also an object lesson for the young fellows who go abroad nowadays equipped with money, with clothes, with everything except humility. Judging from my weekly expenses in my native town, I supposed that Paris could not be very much higher in its living. So I took with me $600 in gold, which, partially an inheritance, partially saved and borrowed, was to last me two years. How I expected to get home was one of those things that I dared not reflect upon. Sufficient for the day are the finger exercises thereof! I paid $8 a month--about 40 francs--for my lodgings. Heavens--what a room! It was so small that I undressed and dressed in the hall, always dark, for the reason that my bed, bureau, trunk, and upright piano quite crowded me out of the apartment. I could lie in bed and by reaching out my hands touch the keyboard of the little rattletrap of an instrument. But it was a piano, after all, and at it I could weave my musical dreams.

I forgot to tell you that my eating and drinking did not cut important figures in my scheme of living. I had made up my mind early in my career that tobacco and beer were for millionaires. Coffee was the grand consoler, and with coffee, soup, bread, I managed to get through my work. I ate at a cafe frequented by cabmen, and for ten cents I was given soup, the meat of the soup--tasteless stuff--bread, and a potato.

What more did an ambitious young man want? There were many not so well off as I. I took two meals a day, the first, coffee and milk with a roll. Then I starved until dark for my soup meat. I recall wintry days when I stayed in bed to keep warm, for I never could indulge in the luxury of fire, and with a pillow on my stomach I did my harmony lessons. The pillow, need I add, was to suppress the latent pangs of juvenile appet.i.te. My one sorrow was my washing. With my means, fresh linen was out of the question. A flannel shirt, one; socks at intervals, and a silk handkerchief, my sole luxury, was the full extent of my wardrobe.

When the wet rain splashed my face as I walked the boulevards on the morning of the examination I was not cast down. I had determined to do or die. With a hundred of my sort, both s.e.xes and varying nationality, I was penned up in a room, one door of which opened on the stage of the Conservatory theater. I looked about me. Giggling girls in crumpled white dresses stalked up and down humming their arias, while shabbily dressed mothers gazed admiringly at them. Big boys and little, bad boys and good, slim, fat, stupid, shrewd boys, encircled me, and, as I was mature for my age, joked me about my senile appearance. I had a numbered card in my hand, No. 13, and all those who saw it shuddered, for the French are as stupid as old-time Southern "darkies." Something akin to the expectant feeling of the early Christian martyrs was experienced by all of us as a number was called aloud by a hoa.r.s.e-voiced Cerberus, and the victim disappeared through the narrow door leading to the lions in the arena. At last, after some squabbling between No. 14 and No. 15, both of whom thought they had precedence over No. 13, I went forth to my fate.

I came out upon a dimly lighted stage which held two grand pianofortes and several chairs. A colorless-looking individual read my card and with marked asperity asked for my music. Frightened, I told him I had brought none. There were murmurings and suppressed laughter in the dim auditorium. _There_ sat the judges--I don't know how many, but one was a woman, and I hated her though I could not see her. She had a disagreeable laugh, and she let it loose when the a.s.sistant professor on the platform stumbled over the syllables of my very Teutonic name. I explained that I had memorized a Beethoven sonata, all the Beethoven sonatas, and that was the reason I left my music at home. This explanation was received in chilly silence, though I did not fail to note that it prejudiced the interrogating professor against me. He evidently took me for a superior person, and he then and there mentally proposed to set me down several pegs. I felt, rather than saw, all this in the twinkling of an eye. I sat down to the keyboard and launched forth into Beethoven's first _Sonata in F minor_, a favorite of mine.

Ominous silence broken by the tapping of a nervous lead pencil in the hand of a nervous woman. I got through the movement and then a voice punctuated the stillness.

"Ah, Mozart is _so_ easy! Try something else!" And then I made my second mistake. I arose and, bowing to the invisible one in the gloom, I said: "That, was _not_ Mozart, but Beethoven." There was an explosion of laughter, formidable, brutal. The feminine voice rose above it all in irritating accents.

"Impertinent! And what a silly beard he has!" I sat down in despair, plucking at my fluffy chin-whiskers and wondering if they looked as frivolous as they felt.

Nudged from dismal reverie, I saw the colorless professor with a music book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar about the musical text told me that before me, inverted, was the _C-sharp Major Prelude_ in the first book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_.

Mechanically my fingers began that most delicious and light-hearted of caprices--I did not dare to touch the music--and soon I was rattling through it, all my thoughts three thousand miles away in a little Ohio town. When I had finished I arose in grim silence, took the music, held it toward the chief executioner, and said:

"And upside down!"

There was another outburst, and again that woman's voice was heard:

"What a comedian is this young Yankee!"

I left the stage without bowing, jostled the stupid doorkeeper, and fled through the room where the other numbers huddled like sheep for the slaughter. Seizing my hat I went out into the rain, and when the concierge tried to stop me I shook a threatening fist at him. He stepped back in a fine hurry, I a.s.sure you. When I came to my senses I found myself on my bed, my head buried in the pillows. Luckily I had no mirror, so I was spared the sight of my red, mortified face. That night I slept as if drugged.

In the morning a huge envelope with an official seal was thrust through a crack in my door--there were many--and in it I found a notification that I was accepted as a pupil of the Paris _Conservatoire_. What a dream realized! But only to be shattered, for, so I was further informed, I had succeeded in one test and failed in another--my sight reading was not up to the high standard demanded. No wonder! Music reversed, and my fingers mechanically playing could be hardly called a fair sight-reading trial. Therefore, continued this implacable doc.u.ment, I would sit for a year in silence watching other pupils receiving their instruction. I was to be an _auditeur_, a listener--and all my musical castles came tumbling about my ears!

What I did during that weary year of waiting cannot be told in one article; suffice it to say I sat, I heard, I suffered. If music-students of today experience kindred trials I pity them; but somehow or other I fancy they do not. Luxury is longed for too much; young men and young women will not make the sacrifices for art we oldsters did; and it all shows in the shallow, superficial, showy, empty, insincere pianoforte-playing of the day and hour.

XV

TONE VERSUS NOISE

The tropical weather in the early part of last month set a dozen problems whizzing in my skull. Near my bungalow on the upper Wissahickon were several young men, camping out for the summer. One afternoon I was playing with great gusto a lovely sonata by Dussek--the one in A-flat--when I heard laughter, and, rising, I went to the window in an angry mood. Outside were two smiling faces, the patronizing faces of two young men.

"Well!" said I, rather shortly.

"It was like a whiff from the eighteenth century," said a stout, dark young fellow.

"A whiff that would dissipate the musical malaria of this," I cried, for I saw I had musicians to deal with. There was hearty laughter at this, and as young laughter warms the c.o.c.kles of an old man's heart, I invited the pair indoors, and over some bottled ale--I despise your new-fangled slops--we discussed the Fine Arts. It is not the custom nowadays to capitalize the arts, and to me it reveals the want of respect in this headlong irreverent generation. To return to my mutton--to my sheep: they told me they were pianists from New York or thereabouts, who had conceived the notion of spending the summer in a tent.

"And what of your practising?" I slyly asked. Again they roared. "Why, old boy, you must be behind the times. We use a dumb piano the most part of the year, and have brought a three-octave one along." That set me going. "So you spend your vacation with the dumb, expecting to learn to speak, and yet you mock me because I play Dussek! Let me inform you, my young sirs, that this quaint, old-fashioned music, with its faint odor of the _rococo_, is of more satisfying musical value than all your modern gymnasiums. Of what use, pray, is your superabundant technics if you can't make music? Training your muscles and memorizing, you say?

Fiddlesticks! The _Well-tempered Clavichord_ for one hour a day is of more value to a pianist technically and musically than an army of mechanical devices.

"I never see a latter-day pianist on his travels but I am reminded of a comedian with his rouge-pot, grease-paints, wigs, arms, and costumes.

Without them, what is the actor? Without his finger-boards and exercising machines, what is the pianist of today? He fears to stop a moment because his rival across the street will be able to play the double-thirds study of Chopin in quicker _tempo_. It all hinges on velocity. This season there will be a race between Rosenthal and Sauer, to see who can vomit the greater number of notes. Pleasing, laudable ambition, is it not? In my time a piano artist read, meditated, communed much with nature, slept well, ate and drank well, saw much of society, and all his life was reflected in his play. There was sensibility--above all, sensibility--the one quality absent from the performances of your new pianists. I don't mean super-sickly emotion, nor yet sprawling pa.s.sion--the pa.s.sion that tears the wires to tatters, but a poetic sensibility that infused every bar with humanity. To this was added a healthy tone that lifted the music far above anything morbid or depressing."

I continued in this strain until the dinner-bell rang, and I had to invite my guests to remain. Indeed, I was not sorry, for all old men need some one to talk to and at, else they fret and grow peevish.

Besides, I was anxious to put my young masters to the test. I have a grand piano of good age, with a sounding-board like a fine-tempered fiddle. The instrument, an American one, I handle like a delicate thoroughbred horse, and, as my playing is accomplished by the use of my fingers and not my heels, the piano does not really betray its years.

We dined not sumptuously but liberally, and with our pipes and coffee went to the music room. The lads, excited by my criticisms and good cheer, were eager for a demonstration at the keyboard. So was I. I let them play first. This is what I heard: The dark-skinned youth, who looked like the priestly and uninteresting Siloti, sat down and began idly preluding. He had good fingers, but they were spoiled by a hammer-like touch and the constant use of forearm, upper-arm, and shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made every individual wire jangle, and I trembled for my smooth, well-kept action. Then he began the _B-minor Ballade_ of Liszt. Now, this particular piece always exasperates me. If there is much that is mechanical and conventional in the Thalberg fantasies, at least they are frankly sensational and admittedly for display. But the Liszt _Ballade_ is so empty, so pretentious, so affected! One expects that something is about to occur, but it never comes. There are the usual chromatic modulations leading nowhere and the usual portentous roll in the ba.s.s.

The composition works up to as much silly display as ever indulged in by Thalberg. My pianist splashed and spluttered, played chord-work straight from the shoulder, and when he had finished he cried out, "There is a dramatic close for you!"

"I call it mere brutal noise," I replied, and he winked at his friend, who went to the piano without my invitation. Now, I did not care for the looks of this one, and I wondered if he, too, would display his biceps and his triceps with such force. But he was a different brand of the modern breed. He played with a small, gritty tone, and at a terrible speed, a foolish and fantastic derangement of Chopin's _D-flat Valse_.

This he followed, at a break-neck _tempo_, with Brahms' dislocation of Weber's _C major Rondo_, sometimes called "the perpetual movement." It was all very wonderful, but was it music?

"Gentlemen," I said, as I arose, pipe in hand, "you have both studied, and studied hard," and they settled themselves in their bamboo chairs with a look of resignation; "but have you studied well? I think not. I notice that you lay the weight of your work on the side of technics.

Speed and a brutal _quasi_-orchestral tone seem to be your goal. Where is the music? Where has the airy, graceful valse of Chopin vanished?

Encased, as you gave it, within hard, unyielding walls of double thirds, it lost all its spirit, all its evanescent hues. It is a b.u.t.terfly caged. And do you call that music, that topsy-turvying of the Weber _Rondo_? Why, it sounds like a clock that strikes thirteen in the small hours of the night! And you, sir, with your thunderous and grandiloquent Liszt _Ballade_, do you call that pianoforte music, that constant striving for an aping of orchestral effects? Out upon it! It is hollow music--music without a soul. It is easier, much easier, to play than a Mozart sonata, despite all its tumbling about, despite all its notes.

You require no touch-discrimination for such a piece. You have none. In your anxiety to compa.s.s a big tone you relinquish all attempts at finer shadings--at the _nuance_, in a word. Burly, brutal, and overloaded in your style, you make my poor grand groan without getting one vigorous, vital tone. Why? Because elasticity is absent, and will always be absent, where the fingers are not allowed to make the music. The springiest wrist, the most supple forearm, the lightest upper arm cannot compensate for the absence of an elastic finger-stroke. It is what lightens up and gives variety of color to a performance. You are all after tone-quant.i.ty and neglect touch--touch, the revelation of the soul."

"Yes, but your grand is worn out and won't stand any forcing of the tone," answered the Liszt _Ballade_, rather impudently.

"Why the d.i.c.kens do you want to force the tone?" said I, in tart accents. "It is just there we disagree," I yelled, for I was getting mad. "In your mad quest of tone you destroy the most characteristic quality of the pianoforte--I mean its lack of tone. If it could sustain tone, it would no longer be a pianoforte. It might be an organ or an orchestra, but not a pianoforte. I am after tone-quality, not tonal duration. I want a pure, bright, elastic, spiritual touch, and I let the tonal ma.s.s take care of itself. In an orchestra a full chord _fortissimo_ is interesting because it may be scored in the most prismatic manner. But hit out on the keyboard a smashing chord and, pray, where is the variety in color? With a good ear you recognize the intervals of pitch, but the color is the same--hard, cold, and monotonous, because you have choked the tone with your idiotic, hammer-like attack. Sonorous, at least, you claim? I defy you to prove it. Where was the sonority in the metallic, crushing blows you dealt in the Liszt _Ballade_? There was, I admit, great clearness--a clearness that became a smudge when you used the damper pedal. No, my boys, you are on the wrong track with your orchestral-tone theory. You transform the instrument into something that is neither an orchestra nor a pianoforte. Stick to the old way; it's the best. Use plenty of finger pressure, elastic pressure, play Bach, throw dumb devices to the dogs, and, if you use the arm pressure at all, confine it to the forearm. That will more than suffice for the shallow dip of the keys. You can't get over the fact that the dip is shallow, so why attempt the impossible?

For the amount of your muscle expenditure you would need a key dip of about six inches. Now, watch me. I shall, without your permission, and probably to your disgust, play a nocturne by John Field. Perhaps you never heard of him? He was an Irish pianist and, like most Irishmen of brains, gave the world ideas that were promptly claimed by others. But this time it was not an Englishman, but a Pole, who appropriated an Irishman's invention. This nocturne is called a forerunner to the Chopin nocturnes. They are really imitations of Field's, without the blithe, dewy sweetness of the Irishman's. First, let me put out the lamps. There is a moon that is suspended like a silver bowl over the Wissahickon. It is the hour for magic music."

Intoxicated by the sound of my own voice, I began playing the _B-flat Nocturne_ of Field. I played it with much delicacy and a delicious touch. I am very vain of my touch. The moon melted into the apartment and my two guests, enthralled by the mystery of the night and my music, were still as mice. I was enraptured and played to the end. I waited for the inevitable compliment. It came not. Instead, there were stealthy snores. The pair had slept through my playing. Imbeciles! I awoke them and soon packed them off to their canvas home in the woods hard by.

They'll get no more dinners or wisdom from me. I tell this tale to show the hopelessness of arguing with this stiff-necked generation of pianists. But I mean to keep on arguing until I die of apoplectic rage.

Good-evening!

XVI

TCHAIKOVSKY