The Pianolist Part 3

The "Moonlight Sonata," however, is less rigid in form than the average sonata. In it, in fact, Beethoven may be said to have broken away from form, for after the word sonata he adds the qualifying phrase "quasi una fantasia," signifying that, although he calls the work a sonata, it has the characteristics of a free fantasy.

Instead of opening with the usual rapid movement, the work begins with a broad and beautiful slow one, a sustained melody, a poem of profound pathos in musical accents. This is followed by a lighter allegretto which Liszt called "a flower 'twixt two abysses," the second "abyss"

being the last movement, which is one of Beethoven's most impa.s.sioned creations. At the end both of the first movement and of the allegretto the usual wait between the divisions of a sonata is omitted, Beethoven giving the direction "attacca subito il sequente," literally meaning "attack suddenly the following," indicating an inner relationship between the movements so close that there must be only the briefest possible pause between them.

This sonata is a true drama of life, a story of unrequited pa.s.sion. It is dedicated to one of the great beauties of Beethoven's time, the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. Although it is known that the composer subsequently was deeply in love with her cousin, the Countess Therese Brunswick, he is believed to have been in love with Giulietta at the time he wrote the "Moonlight Sonata." The countess was not insensible to his pa.s.sion. She already was engaged to Count Gallenberg, but one day, coming excitedly into the presence of her cousin Therese, she threw herself at the latter's feet, "like a stage princess," and exclaimed: "Counsel me, cold, wise one! I long to give Gallenberg the mitten and marry the wonderfully ugly, wonderfully beautiful Beethoven, if only it did not involve lowering myself socially." And so she gave up Beethoven and led a life, none too happy, with her Count. Connecting the "Moonlight Sonata" with this episode in Beethoven's life, the first movement of the sonata may appropriately be regarded as a song of love, deeply pathetic because no response is evoked by the longing it expresses. The second movement, the graceful allegretto, is the coquetish Giulietta who would not "lower herself socially" by marrying a genius. The third movement is the rejected lover crying out his pa.s.sion and despair to the night.

From Beethoven to Grieg, from Vienna to Norway, from the greatest master of the cla.s.sical period to a composer who still is living and who has been called not inaptly, "the Chopin of the North," may seem a long step. But the pianolist can travel with seven league boots.

Grieg's most widely known compositions are four of the pieces of incidental music which he wrote to Ibsen's drama "Peer Gynt." Peer Gynt is the Faust of Norwegian literature. Without attempting here to follow up this parallel, it may be said that he is a curious combination of ne'er-do-well, dreamer and philosopher, with a p.r.o.nounced streak of impishness running through his character and giving a touch of the extravagant and grotesque to many of his actions and to some of them even a suggestion of the weird and supernatural.

"Peer Gynt" has its roots in Norwegian folklore and was written by Ibsen in Italy when he was about thirty-seven years old, and it precedes the problem plays by which he is best known, although Peer's character is in itself a complex problem. Grieg in his incidental music, adroitly avoids the difficult task of interpreting or even hinting at the curiously contradictory nature of the princ.i.p.al role in the play, one of the most interesting psychological studies in modern literature. His music deals with the more superficial aspects of the story and is pictorial rather than intellectual or profoundly emotional. The princ.i.p.al selections for the piano-player from the "Peer Gynt" music, are contained on two rolls with two selections to each roll. One of them gives the music of "Anitra's Dance" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King"; the other the scenes "Daybreak" and "Death of Aase." Were these selections to be arranged in the order in which they occur in the drama it would be necessary to begin with the "The Hall of the Mountain King" and follow this, in the order mentioned, with "Aase's Death," "Anitra's Dance" and "Daybreak." On the rolls, however, the pieces are not arranged in the order of their occurrence in the play, but in the sequence which is most effective from a musical standpoint--just as in this book I have purposely refrained from following any set, historical sequence, but have adopted a purely musical method of guiding the pianolist from music of the lighter kind to that of a more serious character.

"Anitra's Dance" is an episode of the drama laid in Morocco which Peer has reached in the course of his wanderings. Anitra is a lithe-limbed daughter of the East who entrances Peer with her dancing, and, when he promises to endow her with a soul, promptly informs him that she would rather have the opal from his turban; gradually coaxes all his jewels from him; then swiftly throws herself upon his horse and gallops away, showing herself a true exemplar of the "eternal feminine," so called, I presume, because it eternally is getting the better of the eternal masculine. Be that as it may, "Anitra's Dance" is the very essence of witchery and grace. In the scene "In the Hall of the Mountain King"

the trolls gather for the marriage of Peer to the Troll King's daughter. When Peer, at the last moment, refuses to go through the ceremony, the trolls dash at him. One bites himself fast to his ear.

Others strike him. He falls. They throw themselves upon him in a heap.

At this critical moment, when he is writhing beneath them in torture, the sound of distant church bells is heard, the trolls take to flight, the palace of the Mountain King collapses and Peer is standing alone on a mountain. The scene may be construed as one of his supernatural experiences, as a nightmare, or as the allegory of a stricken conscience. "Daybreak" which opens the second roll is in Egypt, Peer standing before the statue of Memnon in the first hush of dawn and waiting for the rays of the rising sun to evoke the music which according to tradition many thousand years old, is drawn from the statue by the sunrise. In this number Grieg paints the colors of an Oriental daybreak rather than attempts to convey the thrill of an ancient sculpture, on the edge of the great desert, thrilling with song at the first kiss of the rising sun. In the "Death of Aase" Peer watches his mother's life slowly ebb away and seeks to divert her mind from death by grotesque tales, even throwing himself astride a chair and persuading her through subjective suggestion, that he is the forerider of a beautiful chariot in which she is seated, so that the poor woman, who all her life long has felt the pinch of penury, dies with a vision of wealth and glory before her eyes created for her by the son, worry over whom has hastened her death. In keeping with the lyric trend of his genius, Grieg has ignored the grotesque and ghastly humor of the situation, and has contented himself with portraying its sombre and tragic aspect, his music being in character somewhat like a funeral march.

The pianolist will find a characteristic Norwegian touch in Grieg's "Bridal Procession Pa.s.sing By," Op. 19, No. 2, from his "Sketches from Norwegian Life." It begins with a curiously droning rhythm, played softly as though the procession were approaching from a distance. Over this rhythm is introduced a piquant march figure, hopping and skipping along as if the musicians were dancing at the head of the marchers. As the procession approaches and the music becomes louder, one hears in the ba.s.s an accentuation of the characteristic rhythm, like the tap of a ba.s.s drum. When the march has swelled to a forte, it sinks to a brief piano, as if the winding path had led the procession away again.

Then there is another brief outburst, this time fortissimo, as if the marchers were quite near; and then a pianissimo, as if they had pa.s.sed behind a hill and almost out of hearing. The music grows loud again, the procession goes by, and there is a delicious effect as the march dies away in the distance, the rhythmic beats with which it opened becoming softer and softer, while the little hopping and skipping march-figure, somewhat curtailed, flutters over it.

Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite was composed for orchestra, but was arranged for pianoforte by the composer. Notwithstanding the fact that in its original form the suite is intended to be played by a large body of instruments of different tone coloring and that arrangements for pianoforte of orchestral works usually are so complex that even great pianists find difficulty in rendering them effectively, the "Peer Gynt" selections are among the most attractive in the pianolist's repertory. For, through the instrument on which he plays, he is able to overcome the most complicated chords and the most difficult and complex runs, as easily as if they were music of the simplest kind. If the pianola sometimes is called mechanical, the injustice thus done it is due to its superhuman capacity of playing with perfect ease things that are wholly beyond the fingers even of the greatest virtuosos, yet can be rendered fluently and also expressively by the pianolist who has genuine feeling for music.

It is this combination of technique and expression that gives to Liszt's enormously difficult pianoforte transcription of Saint-Saens'

symphonic poem, "Danse Maccabre," which even for orchestra is an extremely difficult piece, its place in the pianolist's repertory.

This is one of the most interesting of modern compositions, and most graphically descriptive of its subject, which is the "Dance of Death,"

"maccabre" being derived from the Arabic "makabir," which signifies a place of burial. Both in the literature and in the painting of the Middle Ages in Europe and particularly in church decoration, figures the legend that once a year on Hallowe'en the dead arose from their graves for a wild and hideous dance, with King Death himself as master of ceremonies. Saint-Saens' symphonic poem realistically describes these scenes, and, as if to attribute the inspiration for his music to its precise origin, the composer has placed above his score a poem by Henri Cazalis. Mr. Edward Baxter Perry has made a free transcription of this poem, which, at the same time, serves capitally as a description of the music:

On a sounding stone, With a blanched thigh-bone, The bone of a saint, I fear, Death strikes the hour Of his wizard power, And the specters haste to appear.

From their tombs they rise In sepulchral guise, Obeying the summons dread, And gathering round With obeisance profound, They salute the King of the Dead.

Then he stands in the middle And tunes up his fiddle, And plays them a gruesome strain.

And each gibbering wight In the moon's pale light Must dance to that wild refrain.

Now the fiddle tells, As the music swells, Of the charnal's ghastly pleasures; And they clatter their bones As with hideous groans They reel to those maddening measures.

The churchyard quakes And the old abbey shakes To the tread of that midnight host, And the sod turns black On each circling track, Where a skeleton whirls with a ghost.

The night wind moans In shuddering tones Through the gloom of the cypress tree, While the mad rout raves Over yawning graves And the fiddle bow leaps with glee.

So the swift hours fly Till the reddening sky Gives warning of daylight near.

Then the first c.o.c.k crow Sends them huddling below To sleep for another year.

The composition opens weirdly with the hollow strokes of the hour.

There is a light, staccato pa.s.sage suggesting the spectres tiptoeing from their graves to take their places in the fantastic circle. Then comes one of the most strikingly realistic pa.s.sages in the composition--Death attempting to tune up his fiddle, an effect that is repeated at intervals throughout the composition. After reading the poem, the pianolist will not require a detailed description of the work. He will recognize the details even to the moaning of the night wind and the crowing of the c.o.c.k, the scurry of the spectres and their final wail, as the grave closes upon them for another year.

V. AN "OPEN SESAME" TO CHOPIN

The goal of all pianists is Chopin. As the list of one hundred favorite compositions for the pianola includes no less than twenty-six works by this composer, he would seem to be the goal of the pianolist as well.

Chopin now is recognized universally as one of the great composers.

But during his lifetime he was much criticised, called morbid and effeminate and a composer of small ideas because he wrote almost entirely in the smaller forms. As if size had anything to do with the beauty of a work. In every art the best work of each great man should be ranked with the best of all other great men. Some geniuses express themselves on a larger, but not necessarily on a greater scale, than others. In poetry, for example, Poe's "Raven" is not to be ranked below Milton's "Paradise Lost" because shorter; nor in music need a Chopin ballad be placed below a Beethoven symphony because not so extended as the latter. Every genius, however, must expect to be condemned until Time silences criticism of his work. For ever since men began to create rare and beautiful things, there have been other men who, having failed therein, have found a bitter consolation in sitting in crabbed and ill-tempered judgment upon their successful betters.

Another point raised against Chopin was, that practically he confined himself to composing for pianoforte. A sufficient answer to this is, that his music made the pianoforte what it is. For he was the first composer who appreciated the genius of the instrument, discovered its latent tone colors and developed its resources to their full capacity for artistic beauty and expression. Chopin was the first to make the pianoforte both shimmer and sing. Rubinstein said that the art of music could go no further than Chopin and called him the pianoforte bard, rhapsodist, mind and soul. "How he wrote for it I do not know, but only an entire pa.s.sing over of one into the other could call such music into life." George Sand (Mme. Dudevant) the famous French auth.o.r.ess with whom Chopin had a love affair that was one of the tragedies of his life, said that "he made the instrument speak the language of the infinite. He did not need the great material methods of the orchestra to find expression for his genius. Neither saxophone nor ophicleide was necessary for him to fill the soul with awe.

Without church organ or human voice he inspired faith and enthusiasm."

Although Chopin figures on almost every pianoforte recital program the average amateur has comparatively slight knowledge of the range of his genius. Only the player able to go over his works in person can acquire such knowledge, and the number of amateurs possessed of sufficient technique to play Chopin's music is very small. "But to-day," writes Mr. Ashton Johnson in his "Hand-Book to Chopin's Works," "owing to the invention of the pianola and the fact that all Chopin's works, including even the least important of the posthumous compositions, are now available for that instrument, the whole domain of his music is, for the first time, open to all. Those who wish may pa.s.s the portal hitherto guarded by the dragon of technique and roam at will in his entrancing music land."

Chopin was a native of Poland. He was born near Warsaw in 1810. When the Poles lost their country it was as if their grief and the melancholy of their exile found expression through Chopin's music. He became the musical poet of an exiled race. The most significant years of his life he spent in Paris surrounded by the aristocracy of his own country, who yet had no country, and by the aristocrats of art. Liszt, Heine, Meyerbeer, Bellini and other famous men, as well as famous women, were his personal friends.

The affair with George Sand left on his music the imprint of sorrow, poignant grief, and a pathos reaching down into the depths of tragedy.

Different in character was his idealization of the beautiful Countess Delphine Potocka. The episode is fully set forth in my "Loves of the Great Composers." One of Chopin's favorite musical amus.e.m.e.nts, when a guest in the house of intimate friends, was to play on the pianoforte "musical portraits" of the company. One evening in the salon of Delphine's mother, he played the portraits of the two daughters of the house. When it came to Delphine he gently drew her light shawl from her shoulders, and then played through it, his fingers, with every tone they produced, coming in touch with the gossamer like fabric, still warmed and hallowed for him from its contact with her.

It was Delphine who soothed his last hours by singing for him as he lay upon his death bed.

She was one of the very few people to whom he dedicated more than one of his works. Both his second concerto (in F minor, Op. 21) and his most familiar waltz, the Op. 64, No. 1, bear her name. Chopin as a pianist, showed decided preference for the slow movement of the concerto, a movement which is of almost ideal perfection, "now radiant with light and anon full of tender pathos," to quote from Liszt. It is indeed, an exquisite idyll, beautifully melodious and replete with delicate ornamentation. Because of its beauty and its a.s.sociation with Delphine, I would suggest that the pianolist begin with this larghetto. There is another reason for the suggestion. In its ornamentation it ill.u.s.trates to perfection that characteristic of Chopin's music known as the "tempo rubato." Much of Chopin's music has in addition to inspired melody, an iridescence as if produced by cascades of jewels. These are ornamental notes which yet are not ornamental in the limited meaning of the word; for in spite of all their light and shade and their play of changeable colors, they form part of the great undercurrent of melody. There are various technical definitions of tempo rubato, but Liszt described it poetically and yet exactly when he said, "You see that tree? Its leaves move to and fro in the wind and follow the gentlest motion of the air; but its trunk stands there immovable in its form." Or the effect might be compared with the myriad shafts from the facets of a jewel, vibrating brilliance in all directions, while the jewel itself remains immovable, the center of its own rays. These effects readily are discoverable in the larghetto of the Potocka concerto.

The pianolist should then take up the valses of Chopin beginning with Op. 64, No. 1, like the concerto, dedicated to Delphine. This is the most familiar of all the Chopin waltzes, so familiar that it frequently is referred to in a derogatory way as hackneyed. Yet, when properly played, it is one of the most effective of his compositions in this genre. Of the Chopin waltzes in general, it should first be said that they are not dance-tunes but expressions, alternately brilliant, charming and sad, of the intimacy of the ballroom, and that they possess an innate grace which no other composer has been able to impart to the form. They have been characterized as salon music of the n.o.blest kind and were well described by Schumann when he said that if they were played for dances, half the ladies present should be countesses--which exactly hits off the distinguished quality of these valses. To play them is like looking at a dance through a fairy lens; they seem like improvizations of a musician during a dance and to reflect the thoughts and feelings that arise as he looks on, playing the waltz rhythm with the left hand, while the melody and the ornamental note groups indicate his fancy--love, a jealous plaint, joy, ecstasy and the tender whisperings of enamored couples as they glide past.

"Gliding" is the word that has been applied to the smooth brilliance of the Potocka valse. There runs a story regarding this composition that George Sand had a little dog that used to chase its own tail around in a circle, and that one evening, she said to Chopin, "If I had your talent, I would improvise a valse for that dog," whereupon the composer promptly seated himself at the pianoforte and dashed off this fascinating little improvisation. It is Parisian in its grace and coquetry and ends with a rapid run, the last note of which is like the rhythmic tap of the foot with which a dainty ballet dancer might conclude a lightly executed _pas_.

In striking contrast to this is the "Valse," Op. 34, No. 2. This is in a minor key and instead of representing the abandon of the dance, it seems rather to depict a melancholy lover allowing his eyes to travel slowly around the ballroom in a futile search of his heart's desire.

The prevailing tone of the composition rather is that of an elegy--the burial of fond hopes. Stephen h.e.l.ler, pianist and composer, tells of meeting Chopin in the store of a Paris music publisher. h.e.l.ler had come in to order all the valses. Thereupon Chopin asked him which he liked best, and when h.e.l.ler mentioned this sad one in slow time, Chopin exclaimed, "I am glad you like that one, for it also is my favorite," and he invited h.e.l.ler to have luncheon with him.

Perhaps the most brilliant and extended of the valses is Op. 42. In this Chopin imposes upon the triple waltz time, a melody that is in double time--that is, while you count "one, two, three" for the accompaniment, "one, two" will suffice for the melody above it. The effect of this device has been described as indicative in this waltz of the loving, nestling and tender embracing of the dancing couples.

It is followed in the music by sweeping motions free and graceful like those of birds. The prolonged trill with which the piece begins, seems to summon the dancers to the ballroom, while the waltz itself, is an intermingling of coquetry, hesitation and avowal, with a closing pa.s.sage that is like an echo of the evening's events.

These three waltzes, if played in the order in which I have mentioned them, make a capital valse suite, and another could be made by taking in the following order, the dashing "Posthumous Waltz" in E minor, the C minor, Op. 64, No. 2, with its veiled, sad beauty; and the brilliant Op. 34, No. 1.

In his "Nocturnes" those sombre poems of night, Chopin seems weaving his own shroud. But if, like Robert Louis Stevenson, Chopin loved the darkness and its melancholy murmuring, and if there was a touch of morbidness in his nature, yet, like Stevenson, he had in him a strain of chivalry. Mr. Huneker, therefore, in his book on Chopin, is quite right when he says of the nocturnes that if they were played with more vigor, a quickening of the time pulse and a less languishing touch, they would be rescued from a surplus of lush sentiment.

Undoubtedly, the most popular of the nocturnes is the one in E flat, Op. 9, No. 2. In fact it is so popular that when any one is asked to play "Chopin's Nocturne," this one is meant. Because it is popular, it is sneered at by some critics, but it possesses a lyric beauty quite its own and "sometimes surprises even the weary teacher with a waft of unexpected freshness, like the fleeting odor from an old and much used school book in which violets have been pressed." A sustained love song, it ends with a cadence that should be played with a rippling delicacy suggestive of moonlight on a lake in the garden of an old chateau.

There are nocturnes of Chopin's composed on a larger scale than the Opus 37, No. 2, but to my taste there is none more beautiful. It bears a striking resemblance to a pa.s.sage in George Sand's diary describing a voyage with Chopin to the island of Majorca. "The night was warm and dark, illumined only by an extraordinary phosph.o.r.escence in the wake of the ship; everybody was asleep on board except the steersman, who, in order to keep himself awake, sang all night, but in a voice so soft and so subdued that one might have thought he feared to arouse the men of the watch. We did not weary of listening to him, for his singing was of the strangest kind. He observed a rhythm and modulation totally different from those we are accustomed to, and seemed to allow his voice to go at random, like the smoke of the vessel carried away and swayed by the breeze. It was a reverie rather than a song, a kind of careless floating of the voice, with which the mind had little to do, but which kept time with the swaying of the ship and the faint lapping of the dark water, and resembled a vague improvization restrained, nevertheless, by sweet and monotonous forms."

How suggestive this is of the nocturne! The undulating accompaniment, the scintillation of the treble, suggests the gliding, gently rocking motion of the vessel and the phosph.o.r.escence in its wake; while the second theme of the nocturne would, even without any suggestion from the pa.s.sage in George Sand's diary, be taken for a barcarolle, a reverie sung at night, now rising, now dying away, but with the pulse of a musical poet throbbing through every note--the most beautiful melody, I think, Chopin ever wrote.

And speaking of this melody as an improvization, reminds me of those other improvizations by Chopin, the "Impromptus," in which he has displayed his genius as convincingly as in any of his other works.

They are fresh and untrammeled in their development, and as full of sunlight as the nocturnes are of darkness. The one in A flat major was dedicated to the Countess de Loban as a wedding present, and was a farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby"

impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the hypnotic influence of Svengali.

Had Chopin's directions for the destruction of certain of his ma.n.u.scripts after his death been carried out, the world would be the poorer by the loss of his "Fantaisie Impromptu," published as Op. 66.

It is difficult to understand why he should have wanted this work destroyed, since it produces a sinuous, interwoven, flowing effect, interrupted by a middle melody of much sentiment and beauty. It has been very well described by Mr. Perry in a brief poem ent.i.tled "The Fantaisie Impromptu":

The sigh of June through the swaying trees, The scent of the rose, new blown, on the breeze, The sound of waves on a distant strand, The shadows falling on sea and land; All these are found In this stream of sound, This murmuring, mystical, minor strain.

And stars that glimmer in misty skies, Like tears that shimmer in sorrowing eyes, And the throb of a heart that beats in tune With tender regrets of a happier June, When life was new And love was true, And the soul was a stranger to sorrow and pain.