<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<div class='pagination'>
<p style='text-align:center; font-weight:bold; font-size:1.6em;'>
DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSES<br/>
OF PIANO WORKS</p>
<p style='text-align:center;font-size:1.2em;margin:2em auto;'>
FOR THE USE OF TEACHERS,<br/>
PLAYERS, AND MUSIC CLUBS</p>
<p style='text-align:center;font-size:0.5em;'>BY</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;font-weight:bold;'>EDWARD BAXTER PERRY</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;margin-top:4em;'>PHILADELPHIA</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;'>THEODORE PRESSER CO.</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;font-size:small;'>LONDON, WEEKES & CO.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_ii' id='Page_ii'>ii</SPAN></span>
<hr class='dec'/>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;font-size:small;'><span class='sc'>Copyright, 1902, by Theodore Presser</span></p>
<hr class='dec'/>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;font-size:small;'><span class='sc'>International Copyright</span></p>
<hr class='dec'/>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;margin-top:6em;font-size:small;'><span class='sc'>Printed in the United States of America</span></p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_iii' id='Page_iii'>iii</SPAN></span></p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;font-size:1.2em;'>My Keys</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;'>I.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>To no crag-crowning castle above the wild main,</p>
<p class='line0'>To no bower of fair lady or villa in Spain;</p>
<p class='line0'>To no deep, hidden vaults where the stored jewels shine,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or the South’s ruddy sunlight is prisoned in wine;</p>
<p class='line0'>To no gardens enchanted where nightingales sing,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the flowers of all climes breathe perpetual spring:</p>
<p class='line0'>            To none of all these</p>
<p class='line0'>            They give access, my keys,</p>
<p class='line0'>            My magical ebon and ivory keys.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;'>II.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>But to temples sublime, where music is prayer,</p>
<p class='line0'>To the bower of a goddess supernally fair;</p>
<p class='line0'>To the crypts where the ages their mysteries keep,</p>
<p class='line0'>Where the sorrows and joys of earth’s greatest ones sleep;</p>
<p class='line0'>Where the wine of emotion a life’s thirst may still,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the jewels of thought gleam to light at my will:</p>
<p class='line0'>            To more than all these</p>
<p class='line0'>            They give access, my keys,</p>
<p class='line0'>            My magical ebon and ivory keys.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;'>III.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>To bright dreams of the past in locked cells of the mind,</p>
<p class='line0'>To the tombs of dead joys in their beauty enshrined;</p>
<p class='line0'>To the chambers where love’s recollections are stored,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the fanes where devotion’s best homage is poured;</p>
<p class='line0'>To the cloudland of hope, where the dull mist of tears</p>
<p class='line0'>As the rainbow of promise illumined appears;</p>
<p class='line0'>            To all these, when I please,</p>
<p class='line0'>            They give access, my keys,</p>
<p class='line0'>            My magical ebon and ivory keys.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_v' id='Page_v'>v</SPAN></span></p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;font-size:1.2em;'>Only an Interpreter</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>The world will still go on the very same</p>
<p class='line0'>When the last feeble echo of my name</p>
<p class='line0'>Has died from out men’s listless hearts and ears</p>
<p class='line0'>        These many years.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Its tides will roll, its suns will rise and set,</p>
<p class='line0'>When mine, through twilight portals of regret,</p>
<p class='line0'>Has passed to quench its pallid, parting light</p>
<p class='line0'>        In rayless night,</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>While o’er my place oblivion’s tide will sweep</p>
<p class='line0'>To whelm my deeds in silence dark and deep,</p>
<p class='line0'>The triumphs and the failures, ill and good,</p>
<p class='line0'>        Beneath its flood.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Then other, abler men will serve the Art</p>
<p class='line0'>I strove to serve with singleness of heart;</p>
<p class='line0'>Will wear her thorned laurels on the brow,</p>
<p class='line0'>        As I do now.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>I shall not care to ask whose fame is first,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or feel the fever of that burning thirst</p>
<p class='line0'>To win her warmest smile, nor count the cost</p>
<p class='line0'>        Whate’er be lost.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>As I have striven, they will strive to rise</p>
<p class='line0'>To hopeless heights, where that elusive prize,</p>
<p class='line0'>The unattainable ideal, gleams</p>
<p class='line0'>        Through waking dreams.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_vi' id='Page_vi'>vi</SPAN></span></p>
<p class='line0'>But I shall sleep, a sleep secure, profound,</p>
<p class='line0'>Beyond the reach of blame, or plaudits’ sound;</p>
<p class='line0'>And who stands high, who low, I shall not know:</p>
<p class='line0'>        ’Tis better so.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>For what the gain of all my toilsome years,</p>
<p class='line0'>Of all my ceaseless struggles, secret tears?</p>
<p class='line0'>My best, more brief than frailest summer flower,</p>
<p class='line0'>        Dies with the hour.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>My most enduring triumphs swifter pass</p>
<p class='line0'>Than fairy frost-wreaths from the window glass:</p>
<p class='line0'>The master but of moments may not claim</p>
<p class='line0'>        A deathless name.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Mine but the task to lift, a little space,</p>
<p class='line0'>The mystic veil from beauty’s radiant face</p>
<p class='line0'>That other men may joy thereon to see,</p>
<p class='line0'>        Forgetting me.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Not mine the genius to create the forms</p>
<p class='line0'>Which stand serenely strong, thro’ suns and storms,</p>
<p class='line0'>While passing ages praise that power sublime</p>
<p class='line0'>        Defying time.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Mine but the transient service of a day,</p>
<p class='line0'>Scant praise, too ready blame, and meager pay:</p>
<p class='line0'>No matter, though with hunger at the heart</p>
<p class='line0'>        I did my part.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>I dare not call my labor all in vain,</p>
<p class='line0'>If I but voice anew one lofty strain:</p>
<p class='line0'>The faithful echo of a noble thought</p>
<p class='line0'>        With good is fraught.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>For some it cheers upon life’s weary road,</p>
<p class='line0'>And some hearts lightens of their bitter load,</p>
<p class='line0'>Which might have missed the message in the din</p>
<p class='line0'>        Of strife and sin.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_vii' id='Page_vii'>vii</SPAN></span></p>
<p class='line0'>My lavished life-blood warmed and woke again</p>
<p class='line0'>The still, pale children of another’s brain,</p>
<p class='line0'>Brimmed full the forms which else were cold,</p>
<p class='line0'>        Tho’ fair of mold.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>And thro’ their lips my spirit spoke to men</p>
<p class='line0'>Of higher hopes, of courage under pain,</p>
<p class='line0'>Of worthy aspirations, fearless flight</p>
<p class='line0'>        To reach the light.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Then, soul of mine, content thee with thy fate,</p>
<p class='line0'>Though noble niche of fame and guerdon great</p>
<p class='line0'>Be not for thee: thy modest task was sweet</p>
<p class='line0'>        At beauty’s feet.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>The Artist passes like a swift-blown breeze,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or vapors floating up from summer seas;</p>
<p class='line0'>But Art endures as long as life and love:</p>
<p class='line0'>        For her I strove.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_ix' id='Page_ix'>ix</SPAN></span><h1 id='t176'>Contents</h1></div>
<table summary="" class='center'>
<colgroup>
<col span='1' style='width: 30em;'/>
<col span='1' style='width: 2em;'/>
</colgroup>
<tr><td class='tdl'> </td><td class='tdr'> PAGE</td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Introduction, </td><td class='tdr'><SPAN href='#Page_11'>11</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Esthetic versus Structural Analysis, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_15'>15</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Sources of Information Concerning Musical Compositions, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_23'>23</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Traditional Beethoven Playing, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_32'>32</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: The Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_45'>45</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Sonata Pathétique, Op. 13, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_50'>50</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 26, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_55'>55</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_61'>61</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Sonata in C Major, Op. 53, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_64'>64</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Sonata in E Minor, Op. 90, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_68'>68</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Beethoven: Music to “The Ruins of Athens,” </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_72'>72</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Weber: Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_81'>81</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Weber: Rondo in E Flat, Op. 62, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_86'>86</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Weber: Concertstück, in F Minor, Op. 79, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_90'>90</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Weber-Kullak: Lützow’s Wilde Jagd, Op. 111, No. 4, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_93'>93</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Schubert: (Impromptu in B Flat) Theme and Variations, Op. 142, No. 3, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_99'>99</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Emotion in Music, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_105'>105</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Sonata, B Flat, Op. 35, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_113'>113</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>The Chopin Ballades, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_118'>118</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_123'>123</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Ballade in F Major, Op. 38, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_130'>130</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Ballade in A Flat, Op. 47, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_137'>137</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Polonaise, A Flat Major, Op. 53, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_142'>142</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Impromptu in A Flat, Op. 29, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_147'>147</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_149'>149</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Tarantelle, A Flat, Op. 43, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_152'>152</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Berceuse, Op. 57, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_156'>156</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Scherzo in B Flat Minor, Op. 31, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_158'>158</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Prelude, Op. 28, No. 15, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_161'>161</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'><div class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_x' id='Page_x'>x</SPAN></div>
</td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Waltz, A Flat, Op. 42, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_168'>168</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin’s Nocturnes, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_172'>172</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_174'>174</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_176'>176</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 32, No. 1, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_179'>179</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 1, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_183'>183</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_186'>186</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Chopin: Polish Songs, Transcribed for Piano by Franz Liszt, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_191'>191</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Liszt: Poetic and Religious Harmonies, No. 3, Book 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_194'>194</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Liszt: First Ballade, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_199'>199</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Liszt: Second Ballade, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_201'>201</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Transcriptions for the Piano by Liszt, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_203'>203</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Wagner-Liszt: Spinning Song from “The Flying Dutchman,” </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_205'>205</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Wagner-Liszt: Tannhäuser March, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_208'>208</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Wagner-Liszt: Abendstern, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_209'>209</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Wagner-Liszt: Isolde’s Love Death, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_210'>210</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Schubert-Liszt: Der Erlkönig, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_213'>213</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Schubert-Liszt: Hark! Hark! the Lark, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_216'>216</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Schubert-Liszt: Gretchen am Spinnrad, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_217'>217</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Liszt: La Gondoliera, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_219'>219</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>The Music of the Gipsies and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_222'>222</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Rubinstein: Barcarolle, G Major, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_237'>237</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Rubinstein: Kamennoi-Ostrow, No. 22, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_241'>241</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 46, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_247'>247</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Grieg: An den Frühling, Op. 43, No. 6, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_257'>257</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Grieg: Vöglein, Op. 43, No. 4, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_260'>260</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Grieg: Berceuse, Op. 38, No. 1, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_261'>261</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Grieg: The Bridal Procession, from “Aus dem Volksleben,” Op. 19, No. 2, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_264'>264</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Saint-Saëns: Le Rouet d’Omphale, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_271'>271</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Saint-Saëns: Danse Macabre, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_276'>276</SPAN></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>Counterparts among Poets and Musicians, </td><td class='tdr'> <SPAN href='#Page_281'>281</SPAN></td></tr>
</table></div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_11' id='Page_11'>11</SPAN></span></p>
<p style='font-size:1.4em; text-align:center;'>
DESCRIPTIVE<br/>
ANALYSES OF<br/>
PIANO WORKS<br/></p>
<h1 id='t252'>Introduction</h1>
<p>The material comprised in the following
pages has been collected for use
in book form by the advice and at
the earnest request of the publisher,
as well as of many musical friends,
who express the belief that it is of
sufficient value and interest to merit
a certain degree of permanency, and
will prove of practical aid to teachers and students of
music. A portion of it has already appeared in print
in the program books of the Derthick Musical Literary
Society and in different musical journals; and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_12' id='Page_12'>12</SPAN></span>
nearly all of it has been used at various times in my
own Lecture Recitals.</p>
<p>The book is merely a compilation of what have
seemed the most interesting and valuable results of
my thought, reading, and research in connection with
my Lecture Recital work during the past twenty years.</p>
<p>In the intensely busy life of a concert pianist a
systematic and exhaustive study of the whole broad
field of piano literature has been utterly impossible.
That would require the exclusive devotion of a lifetime
at least. My efforts have been necessarily confined
strictly to such compositions as came under my
immediate attention in connection with my own work
as player.</p>
<p>The effect is a seemingly desultory and haphazard
method in the study, and an inadequacy and incoherency
in the collective result, which no one can
possibly realize or deplore so fully as myself. Still
the work is a beginning, a first pioneer venture into a
realm which I believe to be not only new, but rich
and important. I can only hope that the example
may prompt others, with more leisure and ability, to
follow in the path I have blazed, to more extensive
explorations and more complete results.</p>
<p>Well-read musicians will find in these pages much
that they have learned before from various scattered
sources. Naturally so. I have not originated my
facts or invented my legends. They are common
property for all who will but seek. I have merely collected,
arranged, and, in many instances, translated
them into English. I claim no monopoly. On the
other hand, they may find some things they have not
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_13' id='Page_13'>13</SPAN></span>
previously known. In such cases I venture to suggest to
the critically and incredulously inclined, that this does
not prove their inaccuracy, though some have seemed
to fancy that it did. Not to know a thing does not
always conclusively demonstrate that it is not so.</p>
<p>To the general reader let me say that this book
represents the best thought and effort of my professionally
unoccupied hours during the past twenty
years. It comes to you with my heart in it, bringing
the wish that the material here collected may be to
you as interesting and helpful as it has been to me in
the gathering. The actual writing has mainly been
done on trains, or in lonely hotel rooms far from
books of reference, or aids of any kind; so occasional
inexactitudes of data or detail are by no means improbable,
when my only resource was the memory of
something read, or of personal conversation often
years before. With the limited time at my disposal,
a detailed revision is not practicable, and I therefore
present the articles as originally written. Take and use
what seems of value, and the rest pass by.</p>
<p>The plan and purpose of the book rest simply upon
the theory that the true interpretation of music
depends not only on the player’s possession of a correct
insight into the form and harmonic structure of a
given composition, but also on the fullest obtainable
knowledge concerning the circumstances and environment
of its origin, and the conditions governing the
composer’s life at the time, as well as any historical
or legendary matter which may have served him as
inspiration or suggestion.</p>
<p>My reason for now presenting it to the public is
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_14' id='Page_14'>14</SPAN></span>
the same as that which has caused me to devote my
professional life exclusively to the Lecture Recital—namely,
because experience has proved to me that
a knowledge of the poetic and dramatic content of a
musical work is of immense value to the player in
interpretation, and to the listener in comprehension
and enjoyment of any composition, and because,
except in scattered fragments, no information of just
this character exists elsewhere in print.</p>
<p>It being, as explained, impossible to make this collection
of analyses complete, or even approximately
so, it has seemed wise to limit the number here included
to just fifty, so as to keep the book to a convenient
size. I have endeavored to select those
covering as large a range and variety as possible, with
the view of making them as broadly helpful and suggestive
as may be.</p>
<p>It is my intention to continue my labors along this
line so far as strength and opportunity permit, in the
faith that I can devote my efforts to no more useful
end.</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:right;margin-right:1em;'><i>Edward Baxter Perry.</i></p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_15' id='Page_15'>15</SPAN></span><h1 id='t367'>Esthetic versus Structural Analysis</h1></div>
<p>It has been, and still is, the general
custom among most musicians,
when called upon to analyze a composition
for the enlightenment of
students or the public, or in the
effort to broaden the interest in
their art, to think and speak solely
of the <i>form</i>, the <i>structure</i> of the work,
to treat it scientifically, anatomically—to dwell with
sonorous unction upon the technical names for its
various divisions, to lay bare and delightedly call
attention to its neatly fashioned joints, to dilate
upon the beauty of its symmetrical proportions, and
show how one part fits into or is developed out of
another—in brief, to explain more or less intelligently
the details of its mechanical construction, without
a hint or a thought as to why it was made at all,
or why it should be allowed to exist. With the
specialist’s engrossing absorption in the technicalities
of his vocation, they expect others to share their
interest, and are surprised and indignant to find that
they do not. They forget that to the average hearer
this learned dissertation upon primary and secondary
subjects, episodical passages, modulation to related
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_16' id='Page_16'>16</SPAN></span>
and unrelated keys, cadences, return of the first theme,
etc., has about as much meaning and importance as so
much Sanskrit. It is well enough, so far as it goes, in
the classroom, where students are being trained for specialists,
and need that kind of information; but it
is only one side,—the mechanical side,—and the general
public needs something else; and even the student,
however gifted, if he is to become more than a
mere technician, must have something else; for composition
and interpretation both have their mere technic,
as much as keyboard manipulation, which is, however,
only the means, not the end.</p>
<p>Knowledge of and insight into musical form are
necessary to the player, but not to the listener, even
for the highest artistic appreciation and enjoyment,
just as the knowledge of colors and their combination
is essential to the painter, but not to the beholder.
The poet must understand syntax and prosody, the
technic of rhyme-making and verse-formation; but
how many of his readers could analyze correctly from
that standpoint the poem they so much enjoy, or give
the scientific names for the literary devices employed?
Or how many of them would care to hear it done, or
be the better for it if they did? The public expects
results, not rules or formulas; effects, not explanations
of stage machinery; food and stimulus for the
intellect, the emotions, the imagination, not recipes of
how they are prepared.</p>
<p>The value of esthetic analysis is undeniably great in
rendering this food and stimulus, contained in every
good composition, more easily accessible and more
readily assimilated, by a judicious selection and partial
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_17' id='Page_17'>17</SPAN></span>
predigestion, so to speak, of the different artistic
elements in a given work, and a certain preparation
of the listener to receive them. This is, of course,
especially true in the case of the young, and those of
more advanced years, to whom, owing to lack of training
and opportunity, musical forms of expression are
somewhat unfamiliar; or, in other words, those to
whom the musical idiom is still more or less strange.
But there are also very many musicians of established
position who are sorely in need of something of the
kind to awaken them to a perception of other factors
in musical art besides sensuous beauty and the display
of skill; to develop their imaginative and poetic
faculties, in which both their playing and theories
prove them to be deficient; and the more loudly they
cry against it as useless and illegitimate, the more palpably
self-evident becomes their own crying need of it.</p>
<p>Esthetic analysis consists in grasping clearly the
essential artistic significance of a composition, its
emotional or descriptive content, either with or without
the aid of definite knowledge concerning the circumstances
of its origin, and expressing it plainly in
a few simple, well-chosen words, comprehensible by
the veriest child in music, whether young or old in
years, conveying in a direct, unmistakable, and concrete
form the same general impressions which the
composition, through all its elaborations and embellishments,
all its manifold collateral suggestions, is
intended to convey, giving a skeleton, not of its form,
but of its subject-matter, so distinctly articulated that
the most untrained perceptions shall be able to recognize
to what genus it belongs.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_18' id='Page_18'>18</SPAN></span>
Of course, when it is possible, as it is in many cases,
to obtain and give reliable data concerning the conception
and birth of a musical work, the actual historical
or traditional material, or the personal experience,
which furnished its inspiration, the impulse
which led to its creation, it is of great assistance and
value; and this is especially so when the work is distinctly
descriptive of external scenes or human actions.
For example, take the Schubert-Liszt “Erlkönig.”
Here the elements embodied are those of
tempest and gloom, of shuddering terror, of eager pursuit
and panic-stricken flight, ending in sudden, surprised
despair. These may be vaguely felt by the
listener when the piece is played, with varying intensity
according to his musical susceptibility; but if
the legend of the “Erlkönig,” or “Elf-king,” is narrated
and attention directly called to the various descriptive
features of the work,—the gallop of the horse, the rush
and roar of the tempest through the depths of the
Black Forest, the seductive insistence and relentless
pursuit of the elf-king, the father’s mad flight, the
shriek of the child, and the final tragic ending, all so
distinctly suggested in the music,—the impression is
intensified tenfold, rendered more precise and definite;
and the undefined sensations produced by the music
are focused at once into a positive, complete, artistic
effect.</p>
<p>Who can doubt that this is an infinite gain to the
listener and to art? Again, take an instance selected
from a large number of compositions which are purely
emotional, with no kind of realistic reference to nature
or action, the Revolutionary Etude, by Chopin, Opus
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_19' id='Page_19'>19</SPAN></span>
10, No. 12. The emotional elements here expressed
are fierce indignation, vain but desperate struggle,
wrathful despair. These are easily recognized by the
trained esthetic sense. Indeed, the work cannot be
properly rendered by one who does not feel them in
playing it; and they can be eloquently described in a
general way by one possessing a little gift of language
and some imagination; but many persons find it hard
to grasp abstract emotions without a definite assignable
cause for them, and are incalculably aided if told
that the study was written as the expression of Chopin’s
feelings, and those of every Polish patriot, on receipt
of the news that Warsaw had been taken and sacked
by the Russians.</p>
<p>Where such data cannot be found concerning a composition,
one can make the content of a work fairly
clear by means of description, of analogy and comparison,
by the use of poetic metaphor and simile, by
little imaginative word-pictures, embodying the same
general impression; by any means, in short,—any
and all are legitimate,—which will produce the desired
result, namely: to concentrate the attention of the
student or the listener on the most important elements
in a composition, to show him what to listen for and
what to expect; to prepare him fully to receive and
respond to the proper impression, to tune up his
esthetic nature to the required key, so it may re-echo
the harmonious soul-utterances of the Master, as
the horn-player breathes through his instrument before
using it, to warm it, to bring it up to pitch, to put it
in the right vibratory condition.</p>
<p>The plan of esthetic analysis, in more or less complete
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_20' id='Page_20'>20</SPAN></span>
form, was used by nearly all of the great teachers,
such as Liszt, Kullak, Frau Schumann, and others,
and was a very important factor in their instruction.
It was used by all the great writers on music who were
at the same time eminent musicians, like Liszt, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Mozart, Wagner, Berlioz, Ehrlich,
and many more. Surely, with such examples as
precedents, not to mention other good and sufficient
grounds, we may feel safe in pursuing it to the best of
our ability, in print, in the teaching-room, in the
concert-hall, whenever and wherever it will contribute
to the increase of general musical interest and intelligence,
in spite of the outcries of the so-called “purists,”
who see and would have us see in musical art only
sensuous beauty and the perfection of form, with
possibly the addition of, as they might put it, a certain
ethereal, spiritual, indefinable something, too sacred
to be talked about, too transcendental to be expressed
in language, too lofty and pure to be degraded to the
level of human speech.</p>
<p>Who, I ask, are the sentimentalists—they, or we
who believe that music, like every other art, is <i>expression</i>,
the embodying of human experiences, than
which there is no grander or loftier theme on this
earth? Trust me, it is not music nor its subject-matter
that is nebulous, indistinct, hazy; but the
mental conceptions of too many who deal with it.</p>
<p>If art is <i>expression</i>, as estheticians agree, and music
is an art, as we claim, then it must express something;
and, given sufficient intelligence, training, and insight,
that something—the vital essence of every good composition—can
be stated in words. Not always
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_21' id='Page_21'>21</SPAN></span>
adequately, I grant, but at least intelligibly, as a key to
the fuller, more complex expression of the music;
serving precisely like the synopsis to an opera, or the
descriptive catalogue in a picture gallery. This is the
aim and substance of esthetic analysis.</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>Musicians are many who see in their mistress</p>
<p class='line0'>  But physical beauty of “color” and “form,”</p>
<p class='line0'>Who hear in her voice but a sensuous sweetness,</p>
<p class='line0'>  No thrill of the heart that is living and warm.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>They judge of her worth by “perfection of outline,”</p>
<p class='line0'>  “Proportion of parts” as they blend in the whole,</p>
<p class='line0'>“Symmetrical structure,” and “finish of detail”;</p>
<p class='line0'>  They see but the body—ignoring the soul.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>She speaks, but they seem not to master her meaning,</p>
<p class='line0'>  They catch but the “rhythmical ring of the phrase.”</p>
<p class='line0'>She sings, but they dream not a message is borne on</p>
<p class='line0'>  The breath of the sigh, while its “cadence” they praise.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Her saddest laments are “melodious minors”</p>
<p class='line0'>  To them, and her jests are but “notes marked staccato”;</p>
<p class='line0'>Her tenderest pleadings but “themes well developed,”</p>
<p class='line0'>  Her rage—but “a climax of chords animato.”</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>In vain she endeavors to rouse their perceptions</p>
<p class='line0'>  By touching their brows with her soul-stirring hand</p>
<p class='line0'>They measure her fingers, their fairness admire,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Declare her “divine,” but will not understand.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Away with such worthless and sense-prompted service;</p>
<p class='line0'>  Forgetting the goddess, to worship the shrine;</p>
<p class='line0'>Forgetting the bride, to admire her costume,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Her garments that glitter, and jewels that shine:</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>And give us the artists of true inspiration,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Whose insight is clear, and whose brains comprehend,</p>
<p class='line0'>To interpret the silver-tongued message of music</p>
<p class='line0'>  That speaks to the heart, like the voice of a friend;</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_22' id='Page_22'>22</SPAN></span></p>
<p class='line0'>That wakens the soul to the joys that are higher</p>
<p class='line0'>  And purer than all that the senses can give,</p>
<p class='line0'>That teaches the language of lofty endeavor,</p>
<p class='line0'>  And hints of a life that ’twere worthy to live!</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>For music is Art, and all Art is expression,</p>
<p class='line0'>  The “beauty of form” but embodies the thought,</p>
<p class='line0'>Imprisons one ray of that wisdom supernal</p>
<p class='line0'>  Which Genius to sense-blinded mortals has brought.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Then give us the artist whose selfless devotion</p>
<p class='line0'>  To Art and her service is earnest and true,</p>
<p class='line0'>To read us the mystical meaning of music;</p>
<p class='line0'>  Musicians are many, but artists are few.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_23' id='Page_23'>23</SPAN></span><h1 id='t628'>Sources of Information Concerning Musical Compositions</h1></div>
<p>During my professional career I have
received scores of letters from musical
persons all over the country,
asking for the name of the book or
books from which I derive the information,
anecdote, and poetic suggestion,
concerning the compositions
used in my Lecture Recitals, particularly
the points bearing upon the descriptive and
emotional significance of such compositions. All
realize the importance and value of this phase of
interpretative work, and many are anxious to introduce
it in their teaching or public performances; but all
alike, myself not excepted, find the sources of such
information scanty and difficult of access.</p>
<p>First, let me say frankly that there is no such book,
or collection of books. My own meager stock of available
material in this line has been laboriously collected,
without definite method, and at first without distinct
purpose, during many years of extensive miscellaneous
reading in English, French, and German; supplemented
by a rather wide acquaintance among musicians and
composers, and the life-long habit of seizing and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_24' id='Page_24'>24</SPAN></span>
magnifying the poetic or dramatic bearing and import of
every scene, situation, and anecdote. If asked to
enumerate the sources from which points of value concerning
musical works can be derived, I should answer
that they are three, not all equally promising, but from
each of which I myself have obtained help, and all of
which I should try before deserting the field. These
are:</p>
<p>First, and perhaps the most important, reading.
Second, a large acquaintance among musicians, and
frequent conversations with them on musical subjects.
Third, an intuitive perception, partly inborn and partly
acquired, of the analogies between musical ideas, on
the one hand, and the experiences of life and the
emotions of the human soul, on the other. I will now
elaborate each of these a little, to make my meaning
more clear.</p>
<p>While there is no book in which information concerning
the meaning of musical compositions is collected
and classified for convenient reference, such information
is scattered thinly and unevenly throughout all literatures,—a
grain here, a nugget there, like gold through
the secret veins of the earth,—and can be had only
by much digging and careful sifting. Now and again
you come upon a single volume, like a rich though
limited pocket of precious ore, and rejoice with exceeding
gladness at the discovery of a treasure. But unfortunately,
there is usually nothing in the appearance
or nature of such a book to indicate to the seeker before
perusal that this treasure is within, or to distinguish
it from scores of barren volumes. And the very item
of which he may be in search is very likely not here
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_25' id='Page_25'>25</SPAN></span>
to be found; so he must turn again to the quest, which
is much like seeking a needle in a hay-mow, or a pearl
somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.</p>
<p>Musical histories, biographies, and essays—what is
usually termed distinctly musical literature—by no
means exhibit the only productive soil, though they
are certainly the most fruitful, and should be first
turned to, because nearest at hand. Poetry, fiction,
travels, personal reminiscences, in short every department
of literature, from the philosophy of Schopenhauer
to the novels of George Sand, must be made to
contribute what it can to the stock of general and
comprehensive knowledge, which is our ambition. I
instance these two authors, because, while neither of
them wrote a single work which would be found embraced
in a catalogue of musical literature, the metaphysical
speculations of Schopenhauer are known to
have had great influence upon Wagner’s personality,
and through that, of course, upon his music; while
in some of the characteristics of George Sand will be
found the key to certain of Chopin’s moods, and their
musical expression. But even where no such relation
between author and composer can be traced, I deem
one could rarely read a good literary work, chosen at
random, without chancing upon some item of interest
or information, which would prove directly or indirectly
of value to the professional musician in his life-work.
And this is entirely apart from the general broadening,
developing, and maturing influence of good reading
upon the mind and imagination, which may be added
to the more direct benefit sought, forming a background
of esthetic suggestion and perception, against which
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_26' id='Page_26'>26</SPAN></span>
the beauties of tone-pictures stand forth with enhanced
power and heightened color.</p>
<p>I know of no better plan to suggest to those striving
for an intelligent comprehension of the composer’s
meaning in his great works than much and careful
reading of the best books in all departments, and the
more varied and comprehensive their scope the better.
In the search for enlightenment concerning any one
particular composition, I should advise the student
to begin with works, if such exist, from the pen of the
composer himself, followed by biographies and all
essays, criticisms, and dissertations upon his compositions
which are in print. If these fail to give
information, he should proceed to read as much as
possible regarding the composer’s country and contemporaries,
and concerning any and all subjects in
which he has become aware, by the study of his life,
that the master was interested. The chances are that
he will come upon something of aid or value before
finishing this task. Still very often the quest will and
must be in vain, because about many musical works
there exists absolutely no information in print.</p>
<p>I can perhaps better indicate the course to be pursued
by giving some illustrations in my own experience.
The following will serve: During a trip in New York
State I was asked whether Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” suite
was founded upon any legend or story, and if so, what.
Though familiar with the composition in question, I had
never played it myself, nor given it any particular attention,
and in point of fact was as ignorant on the
subject as my interrogator, and obliged to confess as
much. This was before the composition had become
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_27' id='Page_27'>27</SPAN></span>
familiar in this country and before the drama on which
it is founded had been translated into English. Being,
however, convinced, from the names attached to
different parts of the suite, of the probability of its
foundation upon some literary or historic subject, I
determined to investigate. I first read several biographical
sketches of Grieg, but found no special mention
of the “Peer Gynt” suite; then everything I could
secure on the subject of Norwegian music in general
and Grieg’s compositions in particular, without avail.
As I knew Grieg to be, with the possible exception of
Chopin, the most intensely national and patriotic of
all composers, I inferred that if he had taken any
legend or story as the basis of this work, it was undoubtedly
Norwegian in character. I read, therefore,
several articles on the history of Norway, the Norsemen,
and the Norwegian language and literature,
watching carefully for the name of Peer Gynt, but in
vain. I next undertook some of the <i>sagas</i> or ancient
Norse traditions, with the same result. Having exhausted
my resources in this direction, I began to investigate
modern Norwegian literature. Here, of
course, I encountered, in large type, the names of
Björnson and Ibsen, and almost at the outset I found
among the works of the latter the versified drama of
“Peer Gynt,” and my search was at an end. Having
procured a German translation of this drama, I found
scenes and characters to correspond exactly with those
which figure in Grieg’s music, and a reference in the
preface to an orchestral suite, by this composer, founded
upon “Peer Gynt.”</p>
<p>Now had I been as well informed as I recommend
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_28' id='Page_28'>28</SPAN></span>
all my readers to be, I should have known at the
outset of this Norwegian drama, and been at once
upon the right track. But being only familiar with
those prose dramas of Ibsen which have been translated
into English, I was obliged to undertake all this extra
labor, to ascertain a single fact; which only proves once
again, that the more the musician’s memory is stored
with miscellaneous facts and ideas, even such as do
not seem to have any connection with music, the
lighter and more successful will be his labors in his
profession.</p>
<p>The second main source of information concerning
musical works is found among musicians themselves.
There is a vast amount of tradition, suggestion, and
knowledge appertaining to the masterpieces in this art,
which has never got into print, and lives only by
passing from mouth to mouth, much as the early legends
of all countries were orally handed down among
minstrels and skalds from generation to generation.
Every great interpreter and every great composer
becomes, with the passage of years of a long and active
life, a vast and valuable storehouse of all sorts of hints,
facts, and ideas on the subject of various compositions,
which usually die with him, except such portions
as have been orally transmitted to pupils and associates.
In this respect the late Theodor Kullak was
worth any three men I have ever known, and those of
his pupils who had tastes and interests similar to his
own, and were of retentive memory, have all derived
from him no mean portion of their material. To cull
from every musician and musically informed person
all the odds and ends of information in his possession
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_29' id='Page_29'>29</SPAN></span>
is a valuable, though perhaps selfish habit. And here
let me emphasize to all students the importance of not
allowing the memory to get into that very prevalent
bad habit of refusing to retain anything which is not
presented in print to the organ of vision. The ear
is as good a road to the brain as the eye, and every
one should possess the faculty of acquiring information
from conversations, lessons, and lectures, as readily
as from books.</p>
<p>The third resource of the seeker after truth of this
nature is to be found within himself. The musician
should early accustom himself to grasp clearly the
essential essence, the vital principle, of an artistic
moment, a dramatic situation. For some such moment,
mood, or situation, however vague or veiled,
underlies every true art work; and unless the performer
can perceive and comprehend this inner germ of meaning
clearly enough to express it intelligibly, though it
may be crudely, in his own words, he will find that many
a hint has been lost upon him, and many a bit of
knowledge, that might have been his, has escaped him.
This is not a musical faculty merely; it is a mental
peculiarity. Every person, whatever his profession,
should train himself to catch, as quickly and clearly
as may be, the real drift of a book, of an argument, of
a chain of circumstances, of a political situation, of
history, of character, and to place his finger instinctively
upon the germ upon which all else centers.</p>
<p>The power to feel instinctively the real mood and
meaning of a musical composition is by no means confined
to the musical profession; indeed, is often strongly
marked in those ignorant of the very rudiments of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_30' id='Page_30'>30</SPAN></span>
art. I remember once playing to a rough old trapper,
of the early pioneer days in Wisconsin, who had
drifted back to civilization to “die in camp,” as he
expressed it, the Revolutionary Etude of Chopin, Op.
10, No. 12, already cited in illustration, written on
receipt of the knowledge that Warsaw had been taken
and sacked by the Russians. “What does it mean?”
I asked when it was finished. He sprang from his
chair in great excitement. “Mean?” he said; “it
means cyclone in the big woods! Indian onslaught!
White men all killed, but die hard!” His interpretation,
I need not say, was not historically correct, but
for all artistic purposes it was just as good, though
expressed in the rough backwoods imagery familiar
to him. He caught the tone of rage and conflict, of
desperate struggle and dark despair, which sounds in
every line, and he had truly understood the composition,
to the shame of many a well-educated musician,
whose comment would probably have been, “How
difficult that left hand part is! De Pachmann plays
it much faster, and with such a beautiful pianissimo!”</p>
<p>This particular study is simply a vivid mood picture.
It is not in any sense what is called descriptive
or program music; yet it has a distinct meaning which
can be more or less adequately expressed in words, for
the aid of those who do not readily grasp its expression.
I wish to reiterate here what I have before
stated, that I would not be understood to hold that
all music has or should have some story connected
with it. I merely believe that every worthy composition
is the musical setting of some scene, incident,
mood, idea, or emotion. Long practice in perceiving
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_31' id='Page_31'>31</SPAN></span>
and grasping what may be termed the “internal
evidence” of the music itself will develop, in the
musician, a susceptibility to such impressions, which
will often lead him to a knowledge elsewhere sought
in vain, and greatly lessen his labors in arriving at
knowledge elsewhere to be found.</p>
<p>I have now thrown all the light in my power upon
the <i>modus operandi</i> of obtaining information and ideas
relating to musical compositions, and have, I think,
demonstrated the difficulty of such an undertaking.
For my own Lecture Recital programs I often select
works about which I happen to be well informed,
and have more than once spent an entire summer in
reading and research concerning others which I wished
to include. It will be seen from the nature of the
case, that because one possesses full information in
regard to a certain ballade or polonaise, it by no means
establishes a certainty, as is sometimes inferred, that
he will be equally enlightened concerning all others.
There never was and never will be any one man who
can furnish information on the subject of all compositions,
and it is equally impossible that any glossary
or cyclopedia will ever be compiled which can
refer the student to books containing points in regard
to any musical work one may chance to be practising,
or wish to perform.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_32' id='Page_32'>32</SPAN></span><h1 id='t925'>Traditional Beethoven Playing</h1></div>
<p>How often of late years we hear this
expression: Will some one who
claims to know kindly tell us what it
means? For one, I confess myself,
after a decade of careful, thoughtful
investigation, utterly unable to find
out. We hear one pianist extolled
as a wonderful Beethoven player,
as a safe, legitimate, trustworthy champion of the
good old classical traditions; and another equally eminent
artist condemned as wholly unworthy to lift for
the public the veil of awe and deep mystery enshrouding
the sublimities of this grandest of tone-Titans.
The late von Bülow, for instance, was well-nigh
universally conceded to be the representative Beethoven
player of the age, for no better reasons, so
far as I can discover, than that he was generally
admitted to be a failure in the presentation of most
works of the modern school, and that cold, calculating,
cynical intellectuality was the predominant
feature of his personality and his musical work, which
made him the driest, most unideal, uninteresting
pianist of his generation, in spite of his phenomenal
technic, memory, and mental power.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_33' id='Page_33'>33</SPAN></span>
On the other hand, Paderewski, with all his infinitely
magnetic personality, his incomparable beauty of tone
and coloring, his blended nobility and refinement of
conception, is decried as a perverter of taste, a destroyer
of traditions and precedents, because, forsooth,
he plays Beethoven too warmly, too emotionally, too
subjectively.</p>
<p><i>De grace, messieurs</i>, what does it all signify? Are
we then to accept perforce as final, in spite of our
better instincts, the dictum of the long since petrified
Leipsic School, which holds technic of the hand and
head, not only as the supreme, but as the sole element
in musical art—which relegates all emotion and its
expression to the despised limbo of sickly sentimentality,
and which epitomizes its highest encomium of
an artist in the words “He allows himself no
liberties”—that is to say, he plays merely the
notes, with the faultless precision and soulless
monotony of a machine? Is this, then, <i>traditional</i>
playing of Beethoven, or any other composer? Is
it art at all? If there is any such thing as an authentic,
authoritative musical standard concerning any
given composition, upon what does or should it rest?
Surely either upon the way its composer rendered it,
or desired it rendered, if that can be ascertained, or
upon the way it was given by its first great public
interpreter. Let us examine the scanty available
data concerning Beethoven’s piano works from this
point of view. How did Beethoven himself play his
own works?</p>
<p>This question reminds one of the century-old dispute
among scholars as to the propriety of the so-called
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_34' id='Page_34'>34</SPAN></span>
English pronunciation of Latin, an absurdity on the
face of it. Fancy talking of the English pronunciation
of French or German! Of course, we do not
know and have no means of learning exactly how
the old Latins did pronounce their language in all
the niceties of detail, but one thing we do know with
absolute certainty, and that is that they did not
Anglicize it, for the one good reason that our language
did not come into existence until centuries after the
Latin tongue was dead. Similarly, as there is no
one now living who can remember and tell us just
how Beethoven did play any given sonata, and as, unfortunately,
the phonograph was not then invented to
preserve for us the incalculably precious records of his
interpretations, we have no means of ascertaining just
what his conceptions were, even supposing they had
been twice alike, which they probably were not. But
this we may be sure of, beyond a question or a doubt:
He did not play them according to von Bülow. Furthermore,
there is no ground for believing that his
performances were at all such as the conservative
sticklers for classic traditions insist that our renditions
of Beethoven must be to-day. We know this from a
study of the life and characteristics of the man, from
the internal evidence of his works, and from the reports
given us by his contemporaries of his manner of
playing them and their effect upon the hearer.</p>
<p>Beethoven was preëminently a romanticist, in the
content, if not always in the form of his works; a man
of pronounced, self-loyal individuality and intense
subjectivity, who wrote, and consequently must have
played, as he felt, and not in accordance with
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_35' id='Page_35'>35</SPAN></span>
prescribed rules and formulas; a man who can reply
without immodesty when criticized for breaking a
preëstablished law of harmony, “I do it,” with the
calm confidence in the divine right of genius to self-utterance
in its own chosen way which always accompanies
true greatness and has been the infallible
compass of progress in all ages. The man who was
the fearless, outspoken champion of artistic sincerity
and profound earnestness, whose scorn of shallow,
pedantic formulas was as uncompromising as it was
irrepressible, whose watchword was universality of
content, who believed that music could and should be
made to express every phase of human emotion, who
could venture on the unheard-of innovation of beginning
a sonata with a pathetic adagio, and introducing
a chorus into the last movement of a symphony,
in open defiance of all established tradition, who was
repeatedly accused by the critics of his day of being
unable to write a correct fugue or sonata, and whose
music was declared to be that of a madman by leading
musicians even as late as the beginning of our century—this
is surely not the man whose artistic personality
can be fairly represented by a purely intellectual,
stiffly precise, though never so scholarly reading of
his printed scores. How is that better than the
bloodless plaster casts of the living, breathing children
of his genius? The printed symbols represent audible
sounds and the sounds symbolize emotions. The mere
sounds with the emotions left out are no more Beethoven’s
music than the printed notes if never made
audible.</p>
<p>Of his own playing, we are told that it lacked finish
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_36' id='Page_36'>36</SPAN></span>
and precision, but never warmth and intensity; that,
like his nature, it was stormy, impetuous, impulsive,
at times even almost brutal in its rough strength and
fierce energy; that he often sacrificed tone quality
and even accuracy in his complete abandonment to
the torrent of his emotions, but never failed to stir
to their profoundest depths the hearts of his hearers.
Is this the man, this hero of musical democracy, this
giant embodiment of the Titanic forces of primitive
Nature, this shaggy-maned lion, with the great, warm,
keenly sentient human heart, whose nearest prototype
among modern players is Rubinstein; is this the
man with whom originated the severely classical
school, the cold, prim, stately interpretations which
we are told to reverence as traditional, in which the
head is everything, the heart nothing—form all-important,
and feeling a deplorable weakness? It is impossible,
incredible!</p>
<p>I honestly believe that if Beethoven himself could
revisit the world and appear <i>incognito</i> in the concert-halls
of our musical centers to give us an ideal, authoritative
rendition of his great works, one-half of his
audience and nine-tenths of his critics would hold up
their hands in holy horror at his untraditional and
un-Beethoven-like readings, and would declare that
while he was an interesting and magnetic artist, and
an enjoyable player of the lighter, more emotional
modern school, his renderings of the revered classics
were dangerously perverting to the public taste and
could not be sufficiently condemned.</p>
<p>But if not with Beethoven himself, with whom did
these so-called traditions originate? Was it with the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_37' id='Page_37'>37</SPAN></span>
first great public interpreters of his works, who introduced
them to the world of concert-goers and so earned
the right to have their readings respected? Who was
the first, most enthusiastic, courageous, and efficient
champion of Beethoven’s piano works? Who did most
to introduce them to the concert audiences of Europe, to
force for them first a hearing, then a reluctant recognition?
Who first and oftenest dared to present Beethoven’s
serious chamber music to the frivolous sensation-loving
Parisians, and to risk his unprecedented
popularity with them upon the venture? Who but
Franz Liszt! For nearly two decades, during the whole
of his phenomenal career as a virtuoso, the vast weight
of his musical influence and example, the incalculable
force of his fervid, magnetic personality, and his inexhaustible
resources as an executant, were all brought
to bear in behalf of his revered Beethoven, in the effort
to render his best piano works familiar and popular
with the European public. It is safe to say that
during that period Liszt introduced more Beethoven
sonatas to more people than all other pianists combined.
He then established such traditions as there
may be regarding the proper interpretation of these
works; and surely no one who heard him play, no one
who is even slightly familiar with his life, characteristics,
and art ideals, will think for a moment of classing
him with the conservative school, with the inflexible,
puritanical adherents to cut-and-dried theories and
the cold dead letter of the law as represented by the
printed notes.</p>
<p>But we are told that precisely these printed notes
and signs should be our only and all-sufficient guide.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_38' id='Page_38'>38</SPAN></span>
We are commanded to stick to the text and not to
presume to take personal liberties with so sacred a
thing as a Beethoven composition. I wonder if the
advocates of this idea, which does so much credit to
their bump of veneration and so little to their artistic
insight, ever took the trouble to examine the text
of these same Beethoven compositions in the earliest
editions, as they came first from his own hand; and if
so, whether they noticed the conspicuous absence of
marks of expression. When they urge that Beethoven
probably knew best how his works should be
rendered and that we ought to follow exclusively
and religiously his indications, do they know how
very few and inadequate these were? So few, in fact,
that if only those given by the composer are to be observed,
even the most rigid of our sticklers for classical
severity are guilty of the most flagrant breaches
of their own rule. Are we then to suppose that Beethoven
wished his music played without varying expression,
on one dead monotonous level? Not at all;
but simply to infer that, like many great composers,
he felt such indications to be wholly unnecessary,
and was far too impatient to stop for such mechanical
details. To him his music was the vital utterance
of the intense life within. The meaning and true delivery
of each phrase were vividly, unmistakably self-evident,
needing arbitrary marks of expression as little
as a heart-felt declaration of love or outburst of grief.
He rightly assumed that to be played at all as it should
be, such music must first be felt, and that visible
marks of expression would be as needless to the player
with intuitive comprehension, as they would be
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_39' id='Page_39'>39</SPAN></span>
useless to the player without it. Just as Chopin omitted
the indication “tempo rubato” from all his later works,
declaring that any one who had sense enough to play
them at all would know that it was demanded without
being told.</p>
<p>True, Beethoven’s works have been edited well-nigh
to death since his time, but of course without his
sanction or revision; and as no two editions agree,
who shall decide which is infallible? And why, I ask,
is not the audible interpretation at the piano of a
Liszt, a Rubinstein, or a Paderewski just as likely
to be legitimate as the printed interpretation of a
Bülow or a Lebert? Has not one artist as good a right
to his conception as another? And in heaven’s name
what possible reason is there for assuming, in regard
to an intensely emotional composer and player like
Beethoven, that the coldly, stiffly scholastic reading
of his works is more in accordance with his original
intention than a more warm and subjective one?</p>
<p>Moreover, even if there were a complete, corrected,
authorized edition of Beethoven, carefully revised by
the composer himself, any one who has ever written
out, proof-read, and finally published the simplest
original composition knows well by experience how
utterly impossible it is to indicate definitely, with our
imperfect system of marking, just how each strain
should be rendered. A general outline of the whole
effect desired can be given; but try as we may, all the
more delicate shades, the finer details of accent and
inflection, must always be left to the taste, insight,
and temperament of the individual performer; just as
the intelligent reading of a poem depends upon much
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_40' id='Page_40'>40</SPAN></span>
besides an observance of the punctuation marks. It
is not within the limits of human ability to edit a
single period of eight measures so perfectly that no
variations or mistakes in the interpretation are possible.</p>
<p>In view of these facts, I am bold enough to maintain
that there is no such thing as an absolutely correct
traditional rendering of any single Beethoven composition,
one to be followed inflexibly. It might be
said of Beethoven, and in fact of any great composer,
as aptly as of Shakespeare, that he is always on the
level of his readers. Those possessing neither natural
nor acquired appreciation for the best music will find
in Beethoven nothing but a series of unintelligible
and more or less disagreeable noises, like Humboldt.
Those who by nature, training, and habit of mind
are fitted to perceive and enjoy only the physical and
intellectual elements in tonal art,—its sensuous effect
upon the ear, its rhythmic movement, its ingenious
intricacies of structure and symmetry of form,—will
seek and find, and, if they are players, will emphasize
in Beethoven only these factors, and will vehemently
protest that there is nothing else there, and that any
attempt to find or to introduce anything else is presumptuous
and morbid. But those to whom music is the
artistic medium for the expression of the strongest,
deepest, and best of human emotions, who demand
that every strain shall come fresh and warm from the
heart of the composer and speak directly and forcefully
to the heart of the hearer; those to whom the
brain, no less than the hand, is a servant to that
higher, subtler ego we call the soul, and form and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_41' id='Page_41'>41</SPAN></span>
technic alike mere vehicles for soul utterance, will
strive, with humble, self-abnegating fidelity, to read
between the lines of the printed music that unwritten,
unwritable spirit of their composer; will infuse for the
moment their own pulsing, revivifying life into the
symbolic forms until they glow with at least a faint
suggestion of their original warmth and vitality, as
when freshly born of the passion and the labor of
genius. These alone can give us, in the light and
truth of spiritual intuition, the only approximately
<i>traditional Beethoven playing</i>.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_43' id='Page_43'>43</SPAN></span></p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>BEETHOVEN</td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1770 </td><td class='tdr'> 1827</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_45' id='Page_45'>45</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1245'>Beethoven: The Moonlight Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2 (C Sharp Minor)</h1></div>
<p>There is probably no composition for
the piano of any real merit, by any
writer, which is so universally known,
at least by name, as this sonata.
Every one has heard of it, read
about it, and most persons are more
or less familiar with the music, or
at any rate with portions of it,
especially the first movement, which is, technically,
easy enough to be <i>executed</i>, in the literal sense, with
the greatest facility by every school-girl.</p>
<p>According to strict requirements of the law of form
it is, in reality, not a sonata at all, but a free fantasia,
in three detached movements, of a very pronounced
but widely diverse emotional character. There has
been considerable questioning on the part of the
public, and much discussion among musicians, as to
the origin of its name, its relevancy to the music, and
the true artistic significance of the work.</p>
<p>There is little, if any, suggestion of moonlight, or
the mood usually associated with a moonlight scene,
in any of the movements; but there are several more
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_46' id='Page_46'>46</SPAN></span>
or less credited traditions concerning it afloat, legitimatizing
the title and explaining its origin. Of these,
the one that seems to the present writer most fully
authenticated and best sustained by the content of
the compositions as a whole is the following. It is
given, not as a verified fact, but as a suggestive possibility,
a legendary background in keeping with the
work.</p>
<p>It is a well-known matter of history that, during
his early struggles for existence in Vienna, while experiencing
the inevitable period of probation, well
named the “starvation epoch,” common to the lot
of every creative artist, and the equally inevitable
heritage of great genius, born fifty years in advance
of its time,—lack of appreciation and scathing abuse
from the self-constituted, self-satisfied foes of all progressive
art, called critics,—Beethoven had the additional
misfortune to fall deeply, but hopelessly, in love
with a beautiful and brilliantly accomplished, though
shallow, young heiress, of noble birth and lofty social
position, Julie Guicciardi by name, who was, for a
short time, one of his pupils. She is said to have returned
his affection, but the union was, of course, under
the then prevailing conditions, utterly impossible;
and even if it could have taken place, would doubtless
have proved most incompatible and uncongenial. She
was a countess, accustomed to luxury and splendor;
he an obscure musician fighting for the bare necessities
of life, hardly higher in the social scale than her father’s
valet and not so well paid. It was absurd; and blind
Love had blundered once again in his marksmanship.
Or was it an intentional, cruel shaft from the tricky
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_47' id='Page_47'>47</SPAN></span>
little god? In any case, Beethoven was deeply smitten;
and this unlucky passion darkened and saddened his
life for many years, and is accountable for much of the
somber tone which we find in his compositions of that
period.</p>
<p>So much is fact. The story goes that one evening,
when wandering in the outskirts of the city, on one of
those long, solitary walks, which were his only relaxation,
he chanced to pass an elegant suburban villa in
which a gay social gathering was in progress. Some
one was playing one of his recent compositions as he
went by—a rare occurrence in those days. His attention
was attracted and, half unconsciously, he stopped
to listen—stopped, as luck would have it, in a full
flood of moonlight, was recognized from within, and a
laughing company of the guests, Julie among them,
sallied out, surrounded and captured him, and fairly
compelled him to come in and play for them. They
insisted that he should improvise and should take for
his theme the moonlight which had been the cause of
his capture and their unexpected pleasure. The
usually reticent, intractable, not to say morose,
Beethoven at last consented—under who shall say what
subtle spell of Julie’s voice and eyes?—and seated
himself at the piano.</p>
<p>But those who are at all familiar with his music know
that Beethoven was, except in a few rare instances, an
emotional, not a realistic writer; a subjective, not an
objective artist; reproducing not the scenes and circumstances
of his environment or fancied situations,
but the emotional impressions which they produced
upon his own inner being, colored by his own
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_48' id='Page_48'>48</SPAN></span>
personality and the mental conditions of the moment,
often just the reverse of what might naturally have
been expected. What he most keenly felt on this
particular occasion was not the soft splendor of the
summer night, or the opulent luxury and careless,
superficial gaiety about him, but the bitter and cutting
contrast which they afforded to his own struggling,
sorrow-darkened, care-laden existence, full of disappointments
and humiliations, of petty, sordid, yet
unavoidable anxieties, with those twin vultures ever
at his heart—a hopeless love, an unappreciated genius.
The result was moonlight music in which no gleam of
moonlight was reflected; only its somber shadow lying
heavily and depressingly upon the stream of his
emotions, which poured themselves out through the
harmonies of this composition with an unconscious
power and truth and a pathetic grandeur which have
justly made it world-famous.</p>
<p>The first movement expresses unmingled sadness,
but without any weakness of vain complaint; a calm,
candid, but hopeless recognition of the inevitable.</p>
<p>The second seems to be an attempt at a lighter,
more cheerful strain, a fleeting recollection of his
ostensible theme; but it is only partially successful
and very brief, and is followed by a reaction into a
mood far more intense and darkly fierce than the
first.</p>
<p>The last movement is full of indignant protest, of
passionate rebellion, with occasional bursts of fiery
defiance. In it we see the strong soul, surging like the
waves of a mighty sea against the rocky borders of
fate, striving desperately to break through or over
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_49' id='Page_49'>49</SPAN></span>
them, and returning again and again to the fruitless
attempt, with a courage only equaled by its futility.
It is the Titan Beethoven battling with the gods of
destiny.</p>
<p>It is, of course, unlikely, even impossible, that this
improvisation,—the tradition being true,—was precisely
the music of the Moonlight Sonata in its present
form. It could but furnish the themes, outlines, and
moods of the various movements, subsequently developed
into the composition so widely known and
admired.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_50' id='Page_50'>50</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1391'>Beethoven: Sonata Pathétique, Op. 13</h1></div>
<p>With the exception, perhaps, of the
“Moonlight,” this work is the best
known to the world at large, and
the one most frequently attempted
by ambitious students of the Beethoven
sonatas. Its familiar title
was not bestowed by Beethoven
himself, but by some publishers
later, and seems to me inaptly chosen; in fact, not
at all justly applicable to the composition as a whole.
It was probably suggested partly by the minor key,
but mainly by the second movement, which is gravely
pathetic in mood. As a whole the work is far too
strong, intense, and dramatic to warrant the name.
<i>Sonata Tragica</i> would have been better. I have not
been able to find any authority for attributing to it
definite descriptive significance in the objective sense.
It is the forceful expression of a pronounced emotional
condition, or rather, sequence of experiences, embodied
with all the fervent glow and impetuous power of
early manhood, yet with the precision and finish of
maturity. Every measure is replete with intense
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_51' id='Page_51'>51</SPAN></span>
feeling as well as intrinsic beauty. There is not a
superfluous note or a meaningless embellishment in it
from beginning to end; not an ounce of sawdust
stuffing to fill out the defective contours of a stereotyped
form—which, alas! is not true of many of
Beethoven’s piano works; and, all in all, it seems to
the present writer to be the most musically interesting
and evenly sustained composition for the piano from
Beethoven’s pen.</p>
<p>The broad, impressive introduction marked <i>grave</i>
is full of strength and somber majesty. It is gloomily
grand rather than pathetic, like the epitome of some
stern fatalist’s philosophy of life, and reminds one of
Swinburne’s lines:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“More dark than a dead world’s tomb,</p>
<p class='line0'>More high than the sheer dawn’s gate,</p>
<p class='line0'>More deep than the wide sea’s womb,</p>
<p class='line0'>          Fate.”</p>
</div>
<p>The first subject of the allegro movement is anything
but pathetic. It is full of fire, energy, and
restless striving; of fierce conflict and desperate endeavor;
of the defiant pride of genius exulting in the
unequal combat with the world’s stony indifference,
and the inimical conditions of life.</p>
<p>The second theme is warmer and more nearly approaches
the lyric vein. It is half pleading, half
argumentative in tone, strikingly suggestive of the
mood so common to young but gifted souls, in the
bitterness of their first pained surprise at the cruel
contrast between the ideal and the actual in life. It
seems to strive to reason with unreasoning and unreasonable
facts, and to touch the heart of a heartless
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_52' id='Page_52'>52</SPAN></span>
fate with its tender pleading. The continually reiterated
embellishments upon the melody notes here
should be given distinctly as a <i>mordente</i>, with marked
accent on the last of the three tones in every case,
not played as a triplet with accent on the first, as is
so often done, and even so indicated in many standard
editions, thus materially weakening the effect of the
passage, rendering it trivial and characterless as well
as out of keeping with the general mood. This is
what Kullak used to call “the lazy way” of playing it.
The striking contrast between the first and second
subjects should be maintained throughout, with
greatest possible distinctness, and the closing chords
must be given boldly, defiantly, like a challenge proudly
flung to all the powers of darkness, to fate, no matter
how adverse.</p>
<p>With the second movement comes a radical change
of mood. The first impetuous vigor has been expended
in the struggle; the first joy of combat and
self-reliant consciousness of strength have ebbed away
like a receding tide, leaving the soul exhausted, discouraged,
but not despairing. There is a moment of
truce in life’s battle, a moment of calm, though sad
reflection; a moment in which to contemplate the
impassable gulf between the heaven-piercing heights
of ambition and the petty levels of possible human
achievement, in which to dream, not of victory and
happiness,—those are among the unattainable ideals,—but
of rest and sweet forgetfulness, and to say with
Tennyson—</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“What profit do we have to war with evil?</p>
<p class='line0'>      Let us alone.”</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_53' id='Page_53'>53</SPAN></span>
There is an occasional hint of the volcanic fires of
passion, slumbering beneath this surface calm of a
spirit sent to earth, but not broken, gathering its
forces for a fresh uprising. But as a whole it is tranquilly
thoughtful, gravely introspective, and should
be rendered with great deliberation and profound
earnestness.</p>
<p>The last movement is hardly up to the standard
of the other two, either musically or emotionally.
Still it is interesting, symmetrically made, and not
devoid of depth and intensity. It is perhaps a logical
conclusion to the work, if we regard the whole as a
sort of tone-poem on life. With most of us in youth,
our boundless courage and aspiration lead us to dare
all things and believe in the possibility of all things;
to hurl ourselves into the fight with destiny, with the
limitless presumption of untried powers and unwarrantable
hopes. Later comes a period of depression
and discouragement, in which nothing seems worth
effort, so far do realities fall below our expectations.
Then, if we are reasonable, we learn, at last, to adapt
ourselves in a measure to things as they are, to content
ourselves in some wise with the flowers, since the
stars are out of reach, and to measure achievement
relatively, not by the standard of our first glorious,
ever-to-be-regretted ambitions, but of the possible,
the partial and imperfect, under the limitations of
inflexible earthly conditions; and we quench our soul’s
thirst as best we may with the meager, mingled draught
of bitter-sweet that life offers.</p>
<p>This movement is light, rapid, and would be cheerful
but for its minor key and its undertone of plaintive
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_54' id='Page_54'>54</SPAN></span>
sadness. It seems like an attempt to take a brighter
view of life, but is still shadowed by past experiences,—a
touching gaiety dimmed by the mist of recent tears,—and
this is, perhaps unintentionally, the most nearly
pathetic of the three movements. It should be given
with life and warmth, and, despite the pedants, with
a free use of the rubato, but not with extreme velocity.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_55' id='Page_55'>55</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1537'>Beethoven: Sonata in A Flat Major, Op. 26</h1></div>
<p>This sonata, like the “Moonlight”
and several others in the collection
of Beethoven’s piano work bearing
this name, is not cast in the usual
sonata mold; in fact, it is not a
sonata at all, according to the
modern technical application of the
term. But as the name sonata was
originally derived from the Italian verb <i>sonare</i>, to
sound, or, in musical parlance, to cause to sound, to
play upon a musical instrument, and was used to
designate any piece of instrumental music whatsoever,
in distinction from that which was intended to be
sung, it is perhaps as correctly employed in this connection
as in any other.</p>
<p>The first movement of this work consists of a simple,
beautiful, melodious, noble lyric theme, followed by
five strongly contrasted and strikingly characteristic
variations, and an exquisitely tender and expressive
little coda.</p>
<p>The <i>theme and variations</i>, not only in this, but in
every case where the form is well wrought out, is a
musical illustration of the natural, logical process of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_56' id='Page_56'>56</SPAN></span>
evolution. The simple, vital germ of thought or feeling,
inherent in the theme, as the life principle inheres
in the germ of wheat, is seen to expand gradually and
develop through the successive variations into new and
changing forms of ever-increasing beauty and suggestiveness
until every latent possibility of expression
has been matured and exhausted, and the idea has
been presented to us in every practicable light and
from every attainable standpoint; just as the gradual
growth and ripening of the wheat, subjected to nature’s
infinite variety of conditions and her ceaseless alternation
of day and night, cold and heat, sun and rain,
calm and storm, present to us daily some change of
form and hue, some new phase of its progressive existence,
until complete maturity is reached and its
utmost limit of development attained.</p>
<p>A still better analogy may be drawn from human
experience itself, from the constant modification and
development of a given character, subjected to the
shifting vicissitudes and changeful, often conflicting
influences of daily life. It is interesting and helpful,
in studying or listening to any work in the <i>theme and
variation</i> form, to conceive of the theme as symbolizing
a definite personality, as of hero or heroine in a narrative,
a personality clearly marked, but undeveloped,
distinct to the mind of the composer, and which the
performer or hearer should endeavor to grasp with
equal definiteness. Each variation may then represent
some varying phase of life, some different experience
or influence, or emotional condition, bearing upon this
typified personality. The peculiar mood and suggestive
characteristics of each variation must be clearly
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_57' id='Page_57'>57</SPAN></span>
perceived and strongly emphasized, and its due relation
to the whole work preserved, while the underlying,
all-pervading theme must be kept intelligibly recognizable
through all its most capricious and widely contrasting
modifications, to give purpose and continuity
to the whole; just as the strongly marked individuality
of a well-drawn character is traceable through all the
manifold vicissitudes of life and may be counted on
to follow out its own inherent laws of evolution, no
matter what the circumstances or conditions to which
it may be subjected.</p>
<p>Let us, in the case of this sonata, conceive of the first
simple theme as suggesting, through the subtle symbolism
of tone effects, the character of our hero, gravely
tender, calmly resolute, nobly, warmly, generously
affectionate, with much of innate strength, tempered
by gentleness and latent passion, refined by ideality.</p>
<p>In the first variation life presents itself to him as a
serious but interesting and agreeable problem, possessing
the charm of mystery. He investigates, speculates,
reflects, lingers fascinated upon the threshold of the
shadowy unknown, enjoys the vague delight of its
dim but inviting perspective.</p>
<p>In the second he faces storm and conflict, revels in
the discovery and fullest exercise of his own strength
and courage and in his successful wrestle with danger
and difficulty. The mood here is bold, heroic, full of
life and energy.</p>
<p>In the third our hero is suddenly confronted by the
twin giants, death and despair. The shadow of their
sable forms envelops him with impenetrable gloom.
His soul is crushed by a weight as of a leaden pall,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_58' id='Page_58'>58</SPAN></span>
and from the depths it sends up a half-stifled cry of
unutterable, inarticulate anguish, equaled by nothing
in literature, unless it may be by the verses of Edgar
Allan Poe entitled “The Conqueror Worm.”</p>
<p>The fourth variation brings a reaction toward a
brighter mood, flashes of sunlight through parting
clouds, fitful gleams of spasmodic gaiety, half hope,
half defiance, showing intermittently against the
somber background of grief.</p>
<p>Finally, the fifth and last variation is a tender,
cheerful love poem, telling, with a charming intermingling
of fervent warmth and playful brightness, of
the sovereign magic of human affection, in which the
tried spirit has at last found solace and repose; while
the brief but significant little coda seems like a dreamy
retrospect, a tender reminiscence of bygone joys, and
griefs, and struggles, tempered by distance and brightened
by the light of present happiness.</p>
<p>If the work ended here it would be well rounded
and complete, and it may be, in fact often is, presented
in this form, entirely omitting the other three movements.
But though not indispensable to the symmetry
of the composition, the remaining three movements
of the sonata are all intrinsically interesting
and enjoyable, and embody three radically differing
types of emotional life. In them we are dealing no
longer with an individual experience, but with general
moods, with abstract elements and conditions.</p>
<p>The principal subject of the scherzo is bright,
piquant, exhilarating; expressing unmixed, uncontrolled
gaiety, toned down for a moment in the trio
to a touch of arch tenderness, but immediately
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_59' id='Page_59'>59</SPAN></span>
breaking away again into rollicking hilarity. It should be
given with great clearness and crispness, very little
pedal, and a clean, sparkling tone, like sharply cut
glass icicles with the sun behind them. The term
<i>scherzo</i> is an Italian word, signifying a jest, and all
that is most capricious, sportive, and humorous in
music finds expression in this form.</p>
<p>The third movement is one of the two great funeral
marches for the piano in existence, the other being that
in the sonata, Op. 35, by Chopin. This one by Beethoven
is so forcefully characteristic in mood and movement,
so full of gloomy grandeur, of dramatic intensity,
of depth and richness of somber harmonic coloring,
that it may be ranked among his very ablest artistic
creations. It should be played with the utmost
fullness and sonority of tone, but not extremely loud
even in the climaxes, and never hard or rough; so as
to convey the impression of suppressed power and of a
noble, sustained sorrow, not a spasmodic, petulant
distress. Its inflexible, unvarying rhythm throughout
should suggest, not only the slow, solemn movement
of the funeral procession, the heavily tolling bells, the
awed, hushed grief of the mourners, but as well the
more abstract and universal thoughts of the slow but
relentless march of time and destiny and the might
and majesty of death.</p>
<p>The last movement of the sonata is in the usual
rondo form, light, graceful, ethereal, with a certain
subdued cheerfulness, telling of dreamy aspiration and
vague, intuitive faith in ultimate good, of the airy,
upward flight of light-winged hope toward a brighter
realm beyond the grave, where pain and death shall
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_60' id='Page_60'>60</SPAN></span>
be remembered only as the minor cadences and passing
dissonances which lead to the enhanced beauty of
the final major harmony.</p>
<p>The sonata as a whole is one of the most interesting
productions of Beethoven’s second period, and is
technically within the reach of most good amateurs.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_61' id='Page_61'>61</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1717'>Beethoven: Sonata in D Minor, Op. 31, No. 2</h1></div>
<p>This is not usually considered a descriptive
composition, but Beethoven,
when questioned regarding it, answered:
“Read Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest.’”
With this hint from the
most authoritative of all sources,
the composer himself, we may easily
trace, if not a strongly realistic, at
least a suggestive reference in the music to that most
romantic drama by the greatest of English play-writers.
And we may also find a pertinent rebuke for those
who are inclined to sneer at the idea of descriptive
suggestion in music in general and in Beethoven’s
works in particular, in spite of Beethoven’s own
words: “I always have some picture in mind when I
write.”</p>
<p>The first movement of this sonata opens with an
extremely simple theme, consisting merely of the
notes of the common triad—<i>do-mi-sol-do</i>—a theme so
bald, so apparently devoid of beauty and latent resources
that only Beethoven would have ventured to
use it; and only his genius could have given it any degree
of interest. It is evidently chosen with deliberate
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_62' id='Page_62'>62</SPAN></span>
intention to indicate naïve simplicity and natural
primitive conditions of life in the island, as Prospero
found it, with that half-animal, half-savage man,
Caliban, as the most prominent figure in it. His
singular, ludicrously grotesque personality may have
suggested some of the clumsily rollicking passages in
this movement. The tempest is only hinted at, not
vividly portrayed—a tempest in miniature, a storm
in fairyland. Still, it is unmistakable, though divested
of all its terrors, just as it must have appeared to
Prospero himself, whose magic power and complete
mastery over the elemental forces placed him above
and beyond all fear.</p>
<p>The second movement, full of sweet repose, of grave,
tranquil happiness, is like the hearts of the two lovers
in the drama, safe in the loving and powerful protection
of Prospero, living close to the gentle, passionless
breast of Mother Nature, childlike in their simple
trust, their spontaneous affection, their simple joy in
the passing hour. It seems at first rather tame and
colorless to our modern ears, accustomed to the ceaseless
stress and din of complex and conflicting elements,
warring together in the life and art of our own day;
but if we can forget for a moment the intensity, the
restless questioning and striving of the present and go
back in spirit for a century or two to more normal
conditions, we shall find this music restful and soothing
as the green sweep of woods and meadows on a June
morning in the country, after the glare and fever of
a city ball-room.</p>
<p>The closing movement, with its light, tripping
rhythm, its playful, half-facetious mood, is evidently
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_63' id='Page_63'>63</SPAN></span>
intended to recall the pranks of that merry, tricksy
sprite, Puck, so brimming over with good-natured fun
and laughing mischief, yet so ready and able, at his
master’s command, to “put a girdle round the world
in forty minutes.”</p>
<p>The whole is a work of delicate fancy rather than
emotional depth or dramatic force. It shows us a
somewhat unusual phase of Beethoven’s genius, and
is but one more proof of his versatility, one more
justification for his title, “The Shakespeare of Music.”</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_64' id='Page_64'>64</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1792'>Beethoven: Sonata, C Major, Op. 53</h1></div>
<p>This is one of the best and justly most
beloved of the pianoforte works from
what is known as Beethoven’s
Second Period; that is to say, the
period when his creative power was
at its zenith, when his genius had
reached its fullest maturity, yet
showed no sign of waning; when,
in its individual development, it had outgrown all
youthful crudities, all reminiscent suggestions of older
masters, occasionally to be found in his earlier writings,
yet before it had lapsed into that somewhat obstruse,
metaphysical vein to which some of us are inclined
to object in his latest works, in which individuality
is sometimes exaggerated into eccentricity. The present
writer is not among those who regard his latest sonatas
for the piano as in any sense his greatest works, and
it is something of a question whether any pianist
would play or any audience tolerate the Op. 111, for
instance, if it bore any signature but that of Beethoven.
The works of his second or middle period
are instinct with far more genuine spontaneity and
true musical effect.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_65' id='Page_65'>65</SPAN></span>
The Op. 53 is familiarly known among musicians
under two names. It is often designated as the
“Aurora Sonata,” because of its suggestive reference
to, not to say actual description of, those wondrous
fireworks of the heavens, the northern lights. The
first movement particularly, with its constant change
of key, its well-nigh infinite variety of light and shade,
above all, its constant flash and play of scintillating
embellishment and brilliant passage work, cannot fail
to call up before the imaginative mind the varying
hues, the shifting, intermittent splendors of the aurora
borealis, with its flashes of crimson and orange, and
its flickerings of softest violet and rose.</p>
<p>The second movement forms a distinct and restful
contrast and quiet background to the brilliancy of
the first. It is slow, reposeful, and gravely impressive,
symbolizing the hushed solemnity of the quiet, frost-clear,
winter night.</p>
<p>The last movement, a prefect rondo in form, returns
to the mood and general style of the first. It is bright
and crisp, full of brilliant ornamentations and striking
contrasts, and should be given with the idea of the
northern lights again distinctly before the mind. Its
airy, buoyant melody, floating lightly upon swiftly
flowing waves of accompaniment, reminding one of
that Wotan’s bridge which the ancient Northman
fancied he beheld in the glittering, far-spanning arch
of the aurora, that bright, but perilous, path of heroes
from Earth to Walhalla.</p>
<p>This composition is also known as the “Waldstein
Sonata,” because dedicated to Count Waldstein, of
Vienna, one of Beethoven’s best friends, during his
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_66' id='Page_66'>66</SPAN></span>
earlier years in the Austrian capital. Count Waldstein
was a descendant of the famous general and most
prominent Catholic leader, who figured so prominently
during the thirty years’ war in Germany, that sanguinary
struggle between Catholics and Protestants, from
1618 to 1648. The name of this brilliant leader, a
Bohemian noble of vast wealth and power, and commander
of the Austrian imperial forces, is usually
spelled Wallenstein; but the name and lineage are
identical with that of the Count to whom this sonata
is dedicated—the confusion arising from the difference
between the German and Bohemian orthography.
The original Wallenstein, though unquestionably a
man of pronounced intellectual ability and a devout,
enthusiastic Catholic, was a firm believer in what we
term the obsolete science of astrology and an earnest
student of its mysteries. He had fullest faith in all
the mystic auguries and prophetic omens of the skies,
and never undertook any important step without first
carefully consulting them, aided by the profounder
knowledge of a trained, professional astrologer, whom
he always kept close at hand. It is of interest to note
that the famous German scientist, Kepler, served for
many years as the private astrologer of Wallenstein,
In the researches and belief of Duke Wallenstein he
included every manifestation of the aurora borealis.
In fact, he seems to have laid particular stress upon
these as bearing directly upon his own life and career,
as fraught with special prophetic import for him personally.
It is a curious coincidence, in view of these
facts, that the most brilliant display of the northern
lights recorded for the first half of the seventeenth
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_67' id='Page_67'>67</SPAN></span>
century took place on the very evening on which
Wallenstein was assassinated, only a few hours prior
to his murder. In the light of his theories it would
almost seem like an attempt of his old friends in the
skies to warn him of impending peril. At all events,
the aurora was, according to his belief, an important
factor in his life. His descendants, who naturally
treasured all the facts and traditions concerning their
brilliant ancestor, would therefore regard the aurora
with special interest as being, in a certain sense, connected
with their own family history. It was for this
reason, as a delicate and appropriate compliment to
his friend, that Beethoven, in writing a work which
was to be dedicated to him, chose this theme and
embodied it in a composition which, for his time and
in view of the then prevailing musical conditions, as
well as the necessary limitations of the strict sonata
form, is remarkably, even graphically, descriptive.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_68' id='Page_68'>68</SPAN></span><h1 id='t1908'>Beethoven: Sonata, E Minor, Op. 90</h1></div>
<p>This composition is one of the shortest,
easiest, and, from the standpoint
of magnitude, least important of
Beethoven’s later works. It has
but two movements, neither of them
of extreme technical difficulty, and
in structure it fails, in various essential
respects, to fulfil the requirements
of the conventional sonata form. Indeed,
the same may be said of many of his best known
and most played sonatas, which are sonatas only in
name, according to the generally accepted technical
significance of the term, notably the Op. 26, Op. 27,
No. 2, and others. Yet this little Op. 90, in E minor,
is among his most genial, interesting, and gratefully
musical compositions. In spite of an occasional touch
of pedantry, it is full of melodic charm and emotional
suggestiveness. It is not descriptive in the sense
of portraying either actual scenes or events. It deals
not with action, but with a series of varying, strongly
contrasted moods.</p>
<p>It is dedicated to Count Lichnowsky, a resident of
Vienna, with whom the composer was intimately
acquainted, and of whose touching little love story it
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_69' id='Page_69'>69</SPAN></span>
is a musical embodiment. The Count’s personal experiences
of mind and heart suggested the work and
formed its emotional content. He was a member of
one of the most aristocratic Viennese families, belonged
to the highest nobility, and had inherited a
proud old name and vast estates. He occupied a
lofty position in both social and diplomatic circles, but
he had become seriously and profoundly attached to a
young actress of unquestioned talent and rising fame,
but of obscure and very humble origin—a girl of exceptional
beauty, sterling character, and refined, winning
personality, but, considered from the standpoint
of worldly position and class traditions, a wholly unsuitable
alliance for the great noble.</p>
<p>It is difficult for one educated in democratic America
to grasp the conditions involved in such a situation,
or to understand and to sympathize with the painful
struggle in the mind of the Count, the maddening
doubts, the heart-sick vacillation on her account, as
much as his own, before the final decision was reached;
the obstacles to be overcome, the opposition of friends
and relatives to be met or defied, before the path
could be cleared to his desired goal. On the one
hand, love and happiness with the woman of his
choice; on the other, social ostracism for his future
wife, certainly, and for himself, probably; serious
detriment to his promising career; a life of constant
battle with class prejudice, of incessant petty slights
and mortifications; a position necessarily trying and
humiliating to both. At last, however, love triumphed
over all doubts and difficulties, as it always should and
must if genuine, and the wedding took place.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_70' id='Page_70'>70</SPAN></span>
It is said, “All the world loves a lover,” and certainly
the story of true love victorious over all opposition
is the oldest and to most people the most interesting
ever told. This story, or at least the emotions
underlying it, expressed in music, Beethoven
gives us in the two strongly contrasted movements
of this little sonata: a simple drama of hearts, in two
acts, written in the language of tone.</p>
<p>The first movement deals with the period of doubt
and indecision, of mental conflict and moody alternation,
of resolve and depression. Its strong, passionate
minor first subject in chords expresses the struggle
and unrest, the indignant protest against petty prejudice
and inflexible conventionality; while its plaintive
little counter-theme tells of tender longings, of sad
discouragements, of hopes deferred and desire thwarted.
In the development it reaches a vigorous, rough, almost
dissonant climax, as of bitter defiance and fierce scorn
of the world and its trammels.</p>
<p>The second movement, calm, fluent, and sweetly
melodious, full of rest and tranquil content, deals with
the period after love’s victory, when hope has been
fulfilled and the heart’s unrest has been transformed
to peace and happiness, where life flows onward like
a placid stream, its waters brightened and purified
by the glad sunlight of perfect love and full-orbed
happiness, its waves murmuring the old yet ever new
refrain, the simple, natural, yet magically potent
melody, to which the symphony of the universe is
harmonized.</p>
<p>There is an occasional brief suggestion of past strife
and remembered trial, just sufficient to give enduring
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_71' id='Page_71'>71</SPAN></span>
zest to the present, reposeful joy; but, as a whole,
this last movement, with its constantly reiterated
tender yet cheerful major melody, seems to sing over
and over, with trifling variations of form, but untiring
delight in its essential burden, the song of love’s completeness.
A song without words it may be, but with
a meaning passing words.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_72' id='Page_72'>72</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2016'>Beethoven: Music to “The Ruins of Athens”</h1></div>
<p>This composition, or rather series of
fragmentary musical sketches, containing
some very original and telling
movements, is wholly unknown to
the American public, and unfamiliar
to most musicians, except for the
“Turkish Grand March,” the only
number that has gained any considerable
popularity. “The Ruins of Athens” is the
name of a curious but very ingenious production for the
stage, once quite popular in Germany—a sort of
combination of the spectacular play, the musical
melodrama and classical allegory, designated “A
Dramatic Mask” by the author, a playwright of
Vienna. It was written and produced at a time when
the sympathies and interest of the Christian world
were strongly enlisted for the Greeks in their gallant
and desperate struggles for freedom from Turkish
domination and oppression which ended successfully
in 1829, after a contest of seven years.</p>
<p>The scene is laid in Athens, then practically in ruins.
The characters, situations, and environment are all,
of course, Greek. To this work Beethoven furnished
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_73' id='Page_73'>73</SPAN></span>
the music, originally scored for orchestra, some numbers
of which have since been transcribed for the
piano. Of these, only two are of any real value or
importance to the pianist.</p>
<h2 id='t2048'>Turkish Grand March</h2>
<p>First, the “Turkish Grand March” referred to,
written to accompany the march of the Turkish troops
across the stage in one scene. Rubinstein, when in
this country years ago, scored many of his greatest
popular successes with his own effective arrangement
of this number. It contains no great originality or
musical depth, in fact is quite primitive in both content
and structure, but is brilliant and pleasing, with
a strongly marked, rhythmic swing and a shrill, strident
melody which, in its intentional, bald simplicity,
strongly suggests the rude but spirited martial music
of a half-barbaric people, given by fife and drum. Its
artistic effectiveness depends upon the skilful handling
of an old but ever popular device, the audible illusion
of approach and departure. The music, beginning
with the softest possible pianissimo, swells in a gradual,
almost imperceptible crescendo, to the heaviest obtainable
triple forte, and then as gradually diminishes to
double pianissimo, tapering off at last into silence;
thus simulating the approach of marching troops from
a distance nearer and nearer, till they pass across the
stage in immediate proximity, and then their gradual
receding till lost again in the distance. It is a device
of which many composers have availed themselves,
and makes great demands upon the player’s
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_74' id='Page_74'>74</SPAN></span>
self-control and sense of proportion and gradation, as well
as his command of the tonal resources of his instrument.</p>
<h2 id='t2079'>The Dance of the Dervishes</h2>
<p>By far the most original of these numbers is “The
Dance of the Dervishes,” the second one referred to.
This brief but complete composition is full of striking
originality and graphic realism. It is one in which
Beethoven’s genius seems to have anticipated by half
a century the pronounced modern trend toward descriptive
or program music, and is as realistic a tone-painting
as we might expect from the pen of Saint-Saëns,
Wagner, or any of the recent writers. The dance
was introduced into the play as an interesting local
feature,—the dervishes being numerous in connection
with the Turkish army,—and Beethoven naturally
selected it as an effective subject for musical treatment.
But, before speaking of their dancing as illustrated by
Beethoven, it may be of sufficient historical interest to
give a brief sketch of the dervishes themselves.</p>
<p>They developed as a sect or order from Mohammedanism
after it was well established in the world.
The name “dervishes,” which they assumed, comes
from a Russian word which means “beggars from door
to door.” The Arabic word which means the same
thing is “fakirs.” So they are called dervishes or
fakirs in different localities, but are the same body.
They declared themselves Moslems, but their doctrines,
in many respects, differed widely from those of Mohammed.
Their beginnings are in obscurity, but they
were a well-established order by the eleventh century.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_75' id='Page_75'>75</SPAN></span>
Their expressed beliefs, as we earliest come to know
them, were chiefly and decidedly religious. They
seemed to represent the spiritual and mystical side of
Islam, having a philosophy much like that of the
Hindus, and perhaps borrowed from them. Their
central idea seemed to be that the soul is an emanation
from God, and that man’s highest aim is to seek
a total absorption in Him. Their various and strange
rites and ceremonies seem only different ways by
which they sought for union with the deity. In this
way they claimed that they secured miraculous powers.
At first they largely lived in convents, under rules and
orders, giving themselves up to meditation and penance,
observing the rules of poverty, abstinence from
wine, and celibacy, in the higher classes. Their growth
was rapid; but in time they largely fell away from
their highest estate, ceased to be so strictly a religious
body, broke up into various ranks and sub-orders,
became more free from conventional rules, more
nomadic, and more wild and fanatical; but their social
and political influence ever increased, so that they
have long been regarded as a dangerous element in
the state. There are crowds of them all through the
East that seem to belong to no society, wandering
mendicants, and, though often skilled in trades, largely
subsisting by professional jugglery, bigoted in their
fantastic beliefs, and varying in their rites and strange
ceremonies. And yet always and everywhere there
is still some general adherence to the old appointed
religious ways, a peculiar tie or affiliation with the
distinctive body or sect, however differing in certain
notions or modes of worship. The lowest devotee of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_76' id='Page_76'>76</SPAN></span>
them all claims that the dervishes or fakirs constitute
a distinct body of religious believers in spite of all
divisions and varieties in manifestation. They acknowledge
no authority but that of their spiritual
guides, as that of the Mahdi in the Soudan, where
these fanatics have been so lately fighting the English.
They agree also in not following the letter of the Koran,
or the general teachings of its interpreters. As a
whole body, in all its orders, all over the world, they
seek, as an act of worship, to get into an ecstatic state.
They do this in various ways: Sometimes by drinking
hasheesh, but more generally by some physical or mental
ways, and while under the excitement they perform
astounding feats in jugglery or mysticism that really
seem almost miraculous. We cannot stop to detail
these different methods. One of them is the dance
of a certain order which has received the name of the
“dancing or whirling dervishes.”</p>
<p>This is the dance of Beethoven—an ingenious method
of excitement and self-torture, and at the same time
a strict religious ceremonial. It consists of little more
than an exceedingly rapid gyration upon an imaginary
pivot, spinning round and round like tops, with almost
incredible velocity, till overcome by dizziness from the
protracted rotary motion, or by physical exhaustion,
they fall in a swoon, after passing through all the
successive stages of delirious frenzy always attending
intense fanatical religious excitement, no matter what
the race or faith. The dance is accompanied by
frantic gestures, wild cries, and doleful groans, and
often by a species of weird oriental music, adapted to
its rhythm, and intended to stimulate the dancers to
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_77' id='Page_77'>77</SPAN></span>
greater excitement, and consequently greater exertion
and speed.</p>
<p>This music, as well as a portrayal of the dance,
Beethoven gives us in this composition, which has been
admirably transcribed for the piano by Saint-Saëns.
It begins softly and a little slowly. As the dancers
gradually get under way and warmed to their task,
it gradually grows in speed and power as the frenzy
increases, till it reaches a furious, almost insane climax;
then rapidly diminishes as, one by one, the dancers,
exhausted or swooning, drop out of the circle.</p>
<p>It demands great freedom and facility in octave
playing, and endless verve and abandon of style; and
needs, to be comprehended and enjoyed by an audience,
some explanation of its character and artistic
signification, either given by the player or printed on
the program.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_79' id='Page_79'>79</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>WEBER</td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1786 </td><td class='tdr'> 1826</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_81' id='Page_81'>81</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2203'>Weber: Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65</h1></div>
<p>Critics have generally ascribed to this
composition the honor of inaugurating
a new and important department
in the realm of tonal creation—namely,
that of descriptive or program
music; that is to say, music
which attempts to embody in tone
something more than mere ideal
beauty of metrical form and rhythmic symmetry, and
to express something more than vague emotional states,
too intangible for utterance in words; music which
conveys not only sensuous pleasure and indefinite
moods, but a distinct, realistic suggestion; which
gives, against a background of harmony, with its
general emotional coloring, an actual picture of
some scene in nature or experience in life; music, in
a word, which takes its place in line with the advanced
position of the other arts, in progress toward dramatic
truth and worthy realism. Descriptive music, like
landscape painting, has been the latest, and in some
respects the loftiest, phase of the art to be developed.</p>
<p>We can scarcely with justice credit to Weber, as a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_82' id='Page_82'>82</SPAN></span>
strictly original departure, the opening of this new
path in the domain of musical art, which was in modern
times to lead so far and to such important and magnificent
results. Descriptive music, of a more or less
pronounced character, had already appeared from
time to time, though rarely so labeled, and mostly in
detached fragments, in the works of most of the
greatest composers, preëminently in those of Haydn,
Mozart, Gluck, and Beethoven. Even the austere
Handel was not entirely free from occasional digressions
into this field. But we may safely ascribe to
Weber the honor of being one of the first to have the
full courage of his convictions and to declare himself
boldly for this phase of creative art, by giving to this
distinctly descriptive composition an unmistakably
descriptive title, thus fearlessly unveiling and emphasizing
its realistic intentions.</p>
<p>The work opens with a simple but serious passage
of recitative in single notes, in the baritone register,
conveying the “Invitation to the Dance” as if by a mellow
masculine voice. Then comes the reply, in a soft
soprano, brief, kindly, but as if offering some playful
objection, as the lady, true to her sex, waits to be
asked a second time before saying yes. The invitation
is repeated more urgently, followed by the assenting
treble, as the lady steps upon the floor on the arm of
her partner. A brief dialogue ensues, in which the
two voices can be distinctly traced by their differing
registers, alternating and interwoven, as the pair pace
the polished floor, exchanging those airy nothings
of the ball-room. Then the orchestra enters, with a
passage of brilliant resonant chords, full of spirited
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_83' id='Page_83'>83</SPAN></span>
life and gay challenge, calling the dancers to their
places, and the waltz proper begins. Its crisp, piquant
rhythm and free elasticity of movement, its bright,
graceful melody and cheerful major harmony, all
express youthful elation, fresh, joyous excitement,
thoughtless, hence unmixed, gaiety.</p>
<p>As the steps and the pulses quicken, there comes on
that exhilaration of mood familiar to all dancers,
caused by the lights, the flowers, the perfumes, the
music, the gay costumes, the beauty and the gallantry
of a ball-room, the rhythmic exercise of the muscles
and free circulation of the blood, all acting together
to produce upon the senses and the fancy an effect
amounting almost to intoxication; an echo of which is
awakened in every breast, which has felt it often and
keenly, on catching a strain of distant dance music, to
the end of life. This mood is depicted in the composition
before us by an exuberance of runs and ornamentation,
following the first simple enunciation of
the waltz melody.</p>
<p>After rising to quite a little climax of ecstasy, this
mood lapses abruptly into the second waltz theme,
slower, more lyric, dreamy, languorous, almost melancholy
in tone, conveying that impression which every
susceptible person feels, to the verge of rising tears,
after listening long to waltz music, which is quite
different from its first inspiring effect, and which every
devoted dancer feels equally surely in the prolonged
waltz. The time has come when one has grown so
accustomed to the waltz movement as to be scarcely
conscious of it, seems rather, in a state of rhythmic
rest, to be floating on the atmosphere, which ebbs and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_84' id='Page_84'>84</SPAN></span>
flows to a three-four measure. Thoughts, breath,
pulses, flying feet, the murmur of voices, all existence
has adapted itself to this waltz tempo, as to its normal
element, and the very planets seem to swing through
space in triple rhythm. The true waltz has but two
moods, which touch the opposite poles of emotion—that
of joyous elation and of dreamy languor. We
may call them the <i>Allegro</i> and the <i>Penseroso</i> of the
waltz. And Weber, in the “Invitation to the Dance,”
has recognized this and woven his composition of but
two themes, representing the contrasting phases of
feeling described.</p>
<p>In the midst of the second warm and sinuous melody,
we hear again the masculine voice, in less conventional
accents, and the soft responses of the treble, through
quite a colloquy, while the accompaniment keeps ever
steadily to the undulating waltz movement, till the
two voices merge gradually into the general murmur
and are drowned in the flourishes of the orchestra,
as our couple disappears in the whirl, with which
the waltz, taking up again the first sparkling melody
with accelerated pace, draws with increasing confusion
to its close. When the dance has ceased, and
the orchestra is silent, the introductory theme recurs,
as the gentleman leads his lady to a seat and expresses
his thanks with the sedate courtesy of his first greeting;
and thus ends this charming composition and this
glimpse into that gay social world, where the hand
some, talented, but rather dissolute young composer
was only too great a favorite in his early years.</p>
<p>In spite of a certain baldness and primitive naïveté
noticeable in the treatment at times, the “Invitation to
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_85' id='Page_85'>85</SPAN></span>
the Dance,” so widely and justly popular, is one of
Weber’s ablest pianoforte compositions, both from a
musical and a dramatic standpoint. Regarded from
that of pure music, it is especially interesting from the
fact that it was the first composition to raise the waltz,
used up to that time only as an accompaniment for
dancing, to the level of legitimate and recognized
artistic musical forms. In the hands of Schubert,
Chopin, Strauss, Rubinstein, and Moszkowski, these
successive kings of the waltz, it has since reached its
present development.</p>
<p>The “Invitation to the Dance” was written a few
months after Weber’s happy marriage with the opera
singer, Caroline Brandt, and is dedicated to “My
Caroline.”</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_86' id='Page_86'>86</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2351'>Weber: Rondo in E Flat, Op. 62</h1></div>
<p>The rondo is the most ancient, simple,
and natural form of homophonic
musical construction. It is based
upon the folk-song and is always
in one or the other of the more or
less complex song forms. It consists
of a simple melodic period, usually
eight measures in length, bright
and cheerful in character, alternating several times,
virtually unchanged at each reappearance, with one
or more subordinate subjects, in a more lyric or
dramatic mood, for the sake of variety and contrast.</p>
<p>An apt but homely illustration of the rondo may be
found in that most laborious and indigestible product
of American cookery, that culinary absurdity, originating
in our natural tendency toward display and dyspepsia,
the layer cake. In the most primitive form
of rondo, or more strictly speaking, rondino, the first
theme appears but twice, corresponding to a first and
second layer of cake, with the filling of cream or jelly
between, represented by the second contrasting subject,
of a more piquant and savory flavor, between the
first theme and its reappearance—a sort of musical
Washington pie. In the more extended forms, the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_87' id='Page_87'>87</SPAN></span>
principal melody recurs several times, occasionally
with slight changes of treatment, but without radical
transformation or development, like a successive
series of cake layers of slightly different flavor, but
the same fundamental material and an entirely different
filling between them, each time; and a coda, or musical
postscript, is occasionally added by way of frosting
over the whole.</p>
<p>The rondo form is by nature adapted to the expression
of the lighter, more pleasurable emotions. Graceful
fancy, playful tenderness, arch coquetry, sparkling
vivacity, here find their most ready and appropriate
embodiment. The form is sometimes employed to
express pensive sadness or restless, impatient longing,
but never effectively to utter grave, profound thought
or grand and lofty sentiment. Hence it most frequently
appears as the final movement of symphony
or sonata, a sort of light, pleasant dessert after the
more substantial repast.</p>
<p><i>Rondo</i> is one of those words of many relatives, both
in our own English and other languages. Probably
the great-grandfather of them all is the Latin <i>rotundus</i>,
and probably the first emigrant to America, in the
musical line of descent, was the old-fashioned <i>round</i>,
familiar to our ancestors. Cousins and other close
connections of the rondo are in music the <i>roundelay</i>
and in poetry the <i>rondeau</i>, <i>rondel</i>, and <i>roundel</i>, all
bearing a striking family resemblance both in external
features and inward characteristics.</p>
<p>The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, in his “Century
of Roundels,” presents to us many charming
representatives of this most modern branch of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_88' id='Page_88'>88</SPAN></span>
family. The following verses, quoted from the work
mentioned, are the best possible descriptive illustration
of the form, scope, and characteristics of both
the roundel in poetry and the rondo in music:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0' style='text-align:center;'>“THE ROUNDEL.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>“A Roundel is wrought as a ring or a star-bright sphere,</p>
<p class='line0'>With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,</p>
<p class='line0'>That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear</p>
<p class='line0'>        A Roundel is wrought.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>“Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught—</p>
<p class='line0'>Love, laughter, or mourning—remembrance or fear—</p>
<p class='line0'>That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>“As the bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear</p>
<p class='line0'>Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught.</p>
<p class='line0'>So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,</p>
<p class='line0'>        A Roundel is wrought.”</p>
</div>
<p>The E flat rondo of Weber is a fine specimen of its
class, perfect and considerably complex in form and
charmingly exhilarating in mood, with just enough
of dramatic suggestion to give the necessary contrast
of shading. It is neither distinctly descriptive nor
deeply emotional. It pleases like a piece of rare old
lace or hand embroidery, rather than like a picture
or poem, by its delicate workmanship, its fine finish,
and its beautiful, skilfully combined materials. Its
mission is to charm the esthetic taste, like some dainty
little Italian villa of variegated marbles, half hidden in
a grove of olive and orange trees, by its symmetry of
outline, its harmony of varied colors, and the simple,
joyous, sunshiny life and love of life which it suggests,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_89' id='Page_89'>89</SPAN></span>
rather than to arouse the intellect or stir the depths
of feeling by historic or legendary association with
vivid or tragic human interests.</p>
<p>This composition should be played freely and
fluently, with a certain gaiety and vivacity, but at
a reasonably moderate tempo, with a tone crisp and
sparkling, not dry, yet not too legato; clear, but not
heavy. The player should employ few, if any, of
the modern rubato effects and be careful to avoid
blurred or too close pedaling, especially in the first
subject. A somewhat slower tempo and more decided
lyric effect should be introduced when the left-hand
theme in B flat major occurs, and still more during the
suggestion of dramatic recitative, alternating between
the two hands, which opens with the half note in the
right hand on G flat, A natural, and E flat. But, as
a whole, the tempo should be kept very steady, and
a strongly marked rhythmic distinctness and precision
are absolute essentials in the proper presentation of
this, as of all Weber’s works.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_90' id='Page_90'>90</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2476'>Weber: Concertstück in F Minor Op. 79</h1></div>
<p>Although written for piano and
orchestra, and still occasionally
given as a concerto in symphony
concerts, this work is more familiar
and more frequently heard as a
piano solo merely, or with the
orchestral parts arranged for second
piano, in which form it is very
popular, especially for use in pupils’ recitals and
music schools. It is one of the best and most effective
of Weber’s compositions for piano, and one of the
most successful of his attempts in the line of descriptive
music, in which he was a pioneer; for as Sir George
Grove well says, “His talent shone most conspicuously
whenever he had a poetical idea to interpret musically.”
On the subject of this concerto, he continues: “Though
complete in itself as a piece of music, it is prompted
by a poetical idea, for a whole dramatic scene was in
the composer’s mind when he wrote it.... The
part which the different movements take in this program
is obvious enough, but a knowledge of the program
adds greatly to the pleasure of listening.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_91' id='Page_91'>91</SPAN></span>
It is rare indeed to find in print any accurate and
detailed information concerning the artistic and
dramatic content of any particular composition; but
in regard to this Concertstück by Weber, we are
fortunate enough to have the whole story on which
the music was founded given in the words of Benedict,
who had it from the composer himself.</p>
<p>“The châtelaine sits alone on her balcony, gazing
far away into the distance. Her knight has gone to
the Holy Land. Years have passed by, battles have
been fought. Is he still alive? Will she ever see him
again? Her excited imagination calls up a vision of
her husband, lying wounded and forsaken on the
battlefield. Can she not fly to him and die by his
side? She falls back unconscious. But hark! What
notes are those in the distance? Over there in the
forest something flashes in the sunlight—nearer and
nearer! Knights and squires with the cross of the
crusaders, banners waving, acclamations of the people.
And there, it is he! She sinks into his arms. Love is
triumphant. Happiness without end. The very
woods and waves sing the song of love. A thousand
voices proclaim his victory.”</p>
<p>The composition is in four movements, and it is
hardly necessary to add that the first, <i>larghetto</i>, represents
the sorrowful meditation of the lonely châtelaine
upon her balcony; the second, <i>allegro</i>, her lively imagination
picturing her lord upon the field of battle;
the third, <i>march</i>, the tramp of the returning crusaders
with flying banners; and the fourth, <i>finale</i>, the reunion
when “the very woods and waves sing the song of
love.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_92' id='Page_92'>92</SPAN></span>
Those Philistines who contend that program music
is but a mushroom growth of the last decades of the
nineteenth century will hardly care to come face to
face with this instance of it, backed by the authority
of Grove, Benedict, and von Weber, and nearly a
hundred years old.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_93' id='Page_93'>93</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2546'>Weber-Kullak: Lützow’s Wilde Jagd, Op. 111, No. 4</h1></div>
<p>Among the better class of rather old-fashioned
but effective transcriptions
for the piano, which have
fallen somewhat into neglect of
later years, Kullak’s pianoforte
version of Weber’s “Lützow’s Wild
Ride” deserves attention.</p>
<p>The original ballad, which formed
the text of Weber’s song, was one of the best of many
of similar character by Karl Theodor Körner, that
trumpet-voiced Swabian poet, the popular idol of his
time in southern Germany, who sounded the notes of
patriotism, conflict, and heroism in simple but ringing
verses, which still echo in the hearts of his countrymen,
and which describe the scenes, and glow with the
fervid spirit of the century’s dawn.</p>
<p>Major Lützow, the hero of the ballad, was an officer
in the Prussian Hussars during the brief and disastrous
struggle with Napoleon in 1813, when his country
went down, crushed well-nigh out of existence, by the
invincible power and iron hand of the all-conquering
Emperor. When Berlin surrendered, the Prussian
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_94' id='Page_94'>94</SPAN></span>
army was disarmed and disbanded, and the King,
Frederick William III, was forced to accept with thanks
the most humiliating conditions of peace; and even
the beautiful Queen Louisa, the people’s beloved
divinity, had to humble herself in her despair to beg
from the generosity of the victor the most ordinary
concessions to the vanquished. Major Lützow indignantly
repudiated the disgraceful treaty and openly
defied the vengeance of the great Napoleon. Rallying
a few of his gallant riders about him, he escaped
to the forests, and there organized a guerrilla band,
for months waging a phenomenally desperate but
successful war on his own account with the world’s
conqueror and his matchless army.</p>
<p>Lützow and his “Black Riders” were soon known far
and near, the hope and pride of friends, the terror of
foes; and hundreds of the best martial spirits of Germany
flocked to his standard. He pushed his daring
raids even across the Rhine into France, sweeping
down like a whirlwind apparently from the sky, at the
most unexpected times and places, leaving consternation
and destruction in his track, and was gone again
before the French could rally to oppose him. Soon the
belief spread that the “Black Riders” were a supernatural
phenomenon, an incarnation of the bloody spirit
of the time, half men, half demons, bearing charmed
lives, ignoring time, distance, and other human limitations,
and liable to appear at any moment, without
warning, in the midst of the imperial camp, or in the
heart of Paris. Their very name was enough to shake
the nerves of the bravest veteran.</p>
<p>This element of the supernatural Körner has
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_95' id='Page_95'>95</SPAN></span>
ingeniously worked into the ballad, and it adds materially to
the thrilling power of the heroic narration, though it
is used, and very judiciously, not in the form of positive
statement, but in a mood of shuddering inquiry
and doubt.</p>
<p>Weber, in his vocal setting of the ballad, with his
usual ability in grasping and utilizing every realistic
suggestion of his subject, has emphasized both the
martial and the spectral phases of the theme, treating
with equal skill the spirit of martial daring and heroic
patriotism which spoke in Lützow’s deeds, and the
supernatural terrors which they awoke. One moment
the “Black Huntsmen” sweep by us across some open
moonlit plain, with a wild haste, with the clang of saber,
the ring of bugle, and the tramp of rushing steeds;
the next they flit before us through the gloom of the
forests, vague, mysterious, like the indistinct phantoms
of war. The distinct imitation of the rhythmic beat
of galloping hoofs, so frequent a device in descriptive
music, is effectively utilized here in accompaniment,
while the melody of the song, full of trumpet-like suggestions,
is raid to consist in part of actual bugle calls
which were used among Lützow’s raiders.</p>
<p>Kullak, in his instrumental transcription, while preserving
with artistic fidelity the composer’s intention
in all the original effects of the song, has broadened,
enriched, and intensified them, and at the same time
adapted them cleverly to the resources of the piano.
In places they may be still further enhanced by playing,
as I would recommend to those possessing sufficient
technic for it, all the scale passages for both hands
in octaves, instead of single notes, as they are written,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_96' id='Page_96'>96</SPAN></span>
thus adding volume and brilliancy to the work as a
whole.</p>
<p>The introduction, in rapid triplets, with marked
accentuation, reproducing the exact rhythm of the
gallop of horses, should begin softly, as if distant, and
rise in a steady crescendo to a strong climax, suggesting
the swift approach of a troop of riders; then the
melody enters, bold and distinct, as if in trumpet
tones, or given by the resonant voices of the dashing
troopers. The piece must be varied by frequent and
marked contrasts; now a trumpet-call, clear and sharp,
answered by a distant echo; now a whispered hint of
spectral terrors; again the sweep and rush, the clash
and clamor, the delirious excitement of the impetuous
charge.</p>
<p>The exultant climax, at the close, well expresses
the sentiment of the final verse of the ballad:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“The Fatherland is free, famous, and triumphant,</p>
<p class='line0'>Glory to the heroes whose blood has bought the victory!”</p>
</div>
<p>This composition of Weber’s, when given by a
rousing, ringing, full-voiced male chorus of Germans,
stirs the martial spirit in every breast, just as the
Marseillaise fires the blood of the French. In its piano
transcription, by Kullak, I recommend it to every
player and teacher who is seeking something which is
very difficult to find—namely: a good and effective
number, martial and rhythmic in character, which is
of real merit, and is a novelty to the audience of to-day,
and yet has a classic name attached. It is admirably
adapted to close a program or to end a group of several
shorter compositions of varying mood.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_97' id='Page_97'>97</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>SCHUBERT </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1797 </td><td class='tdr'> 1828</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_99' id='Page_99'>99</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2687'>Schubert: (Impromptu B Flat) Theme and Variations, Op. 142, No. 3</h1></div>
<p>Franz Schubert, the golden sands
of whose brief existence, rich with
the jewel gleams of genius, ran all
too swiftly through the glass of
time, between the years 1797 and
1828, may be considered, if not the
strongest, certainly the most genial,
fluent, and spontaneous composer
of the modern Romantic School, which arose and
flourished so luxuriantly during the vigorous youth
of our own century. He is most generally known
as the master of the German “Lied” or song. This
brief, concise, epigrammatic form of condensed
musical expression, though not, of course, original
with Schubert, received at his hand its fullest
development, its highest perfection, both as regards
intrinsic beauty and dramatic precision; while in
quantity, as well as quality, he far surpasses all competitors
in this vein of creative work. There are
something like 600 of these songs from his pen, and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_100' id='Page_100'>100</SPAN></span>
such was his fluent versatility of production, that he is
known to have completed seven of these inimitable
musical gems in one day. His instrumental compositions,
whether for orchestra or piano, though far less
numerous, are for the most part equally able and
effective, and deserve a much more frequent hearing
in the concert-room than they at present receive, displaying,
as they do, to the full, his inventive spontaneity,
his inexhaustible fund of fresh, original
melody, and the peculiar, tender, poetic grace of his
style.</p>
<p>Most of Schubert’s best known pianoforte works,
like the composition under discussion, belong to the
smaller, more modest, and unpretentious forms. They
are eminently soft, sweet, and winning, rarely exhibiting
that breadth, grandeur, and passionate intensity
with which such composers as Chopin, Schumann,
and Liszt have made us familiar. But who would
despise the wood anemone because it chances not to
possess the voluptuous perfume of the queenly rose
or the gorgeous hues of the wizard poppy?</p>
<p>The “theme and variations,” of which this work is
an excellent example, is one of the most ancient,
natural, and logical forms of musical construction. A
simple melody, clearly enunciated at the beginning, is
used by the composer as the musical germ of his work,
from which he evolves, as by the process of spontaneous
growth, all its manifold possibilities for varied
expression and contrasted effect; much as the skilful
orator expands from his tersely stated thesis or text,
by means of elaborate comparison, analysis, antithesis,
and peroration, all that far-reaching sequence of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_101' id='Page_101'>101</SPAN></span>
deduction and argument latent in his thought-germ.
It is always fascinating to watch this growth, this
gradual evolution, this play of many colored lights
over the familiar theme, under the skilful and ingenious
manipulation of a master hand. But there is, I claim,
a deeper interest and a higher pleasure to be derived
from seeking, beneath the smoothly flowing harmonies
and graceful, rippling embellishment, for the allegorical
significance or suggestion mirrored in their clear
depths, as scenes and faces are reflected in the tranquil
stream, and which are rarely, if ever, wanting in the
true art work.</p>
<p>The “theme and variations” in music, which owes
its origin to the first crude attempts of early composers
to elongate and develop a musical idea into a symmetrical
art form, corresponds to a very early phase of
another art. I refer to the series of progressive pictures
carved on the friezes of many ancient Oriental and
Grecian temples, portraying successive episodes in the
life of some god, hero, king, or prophet. The central
figure is ever the same, however attitude, action, mood,
and environment may vary, to suit the stage of his story
represented in each scene. No smoke of battle,
strangeness of garb, or storm of emotion can so obscure
or distort the familiar lineaments that they are
not recognizable, though they take contour and expression
from circumstances, those variations in the
theme of life. The same idea is carried out in pictorial
art in the interiors of more modern edifices, when the
walls of cathedrals are adorned with frescoes representing
the life of Christ, in numerous consecutive panels,
from the infant in the manger to the death upon the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_102' id='Page_102'>102</SPAN></span>
cross. Painting can tell a story, within certain limitations,
as well as words, and more powerfully. The
same is true of music, for those who have ears to
hear.</p>
<p>As already stated in connection with the Beethoven
sonata, Op. 26, to me the “theme and variations”
always seems to represent a given character or personality,
met at different times, amid varying scenes
and circumstances, in many moods and situations, as
would be the case in real life; developing with the
progress of acquaintance and contrasting experiences,
showing now one aspect, now another, according to
the changes of inner emotion or outward environment,
but always preserving the same individuality, an
identity which lends itself to, but does not lose itself
in, the vicissitudes of human existence. In the particular
work before us, let the first fresh, simple, tender
theme symbolize a maiden, the heroine of the story
we will call her, fair, with the delicate freshness of
first youth, full of the winning grace, the naïve simplicity
and the dreamy poetic fancy of one of Lytton’s
heroines: a young girl,</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Standing with reluctant feet</p>
<p class='line0'>Where the brook and river meet—</p>
<p class='line0'>Womanhood and childhood fleet.”</p>
</div>
<p>All the manifold vicissitudes of life are lying untried
before her, with the latent possibilities of her nature
waiting to be unfolded and developed by experience,
that climate of the soul.</p>
<p>In the first variation, with its tremulous yet flowing
embellishment, all is vague, uncertain, conjectural.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_103' id='Page_103'>103</SPAN></span>
She seems in a mood of speculation, of reverie, to be
gazing forward down the dim vista of the years, and
wondering, with a thrill at heart, what they promise
or presage for her. It is the first rosy, dawning
twilight of as yet indefinite hope and desire.</p>
<p>In the second, her pulses beat to a swifter, stronger
measure. She has begun to taste the zest of life and
is borne along impetuously on the stream of youthful
exhilaration and unbroken confidence, out into the
broad, full sunlight of the first great happiness. Light
ripples of laughter, quick-drawn breaths of delight, a
sunny circuit of bright and blithe fancies, envelop the
theme and well-nigh conceal it.</p>
<p>The mournful melody, somber minor harmonies, and
sobbing accompaniment of the third variation, so
full of passionate pain, express the all too certain
reaction from the former hilarious mood, the coming
of that inevitable shadow of all great joy—its corresponding
grief. The hour has come when the first
great, crushing sorrow surges in upon the soul, in a
resistless, overwhelming tide; and our heroine, from
fancying that her life’s pathway was to be all roses
and sunshine, is forced to find it, for the time at least,
all thorns and midnight darkness, and to match her
single strength with the might of woe in that struggle
for supremacy which must come soon or late to all.</p>
<p>The fourth again changes wholly in character; is
bold, energetic, spirited, almost martial. The struggle
of life is in full progress. The resolute, forceful bass
tones, with which the left hand enters from time to
time, seem like the impetus of a strong will giving
momentum to earnest purpose. This variation tells
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_104' id='Page_104'>104</SPAN></span>
in stirring trumpet tones of victory, of the dauntless
courage and the elastic strength born in noble natures
of endurance and endeavor, of a character invigorated
by conflict, deepened and matured by adversity; and
it leads us back, at its close, through many winding
ways and devious modulations, to a later happiness,
expressed in the fifth and last—a happiness hard-won,
but more complete than the first, though less exuberant,
more ethereal and spiritual, with something in it of
the mellow sunset glow.</p>
<p>The work closes with a tranquil coda, a brief evening
retrospect, grave and thoughtful; but, on the whole,
cheerful in tone, as if the backward glance were, all
in all, fraught with satisfaction. Here we find the
opening theme, the character melody, in all its first
simplicity, but given an octave lower, in slower tempo
and in full chords. Our heroine has not altered;
the contours are clear, the proportions identical, not
a note is wanting; but the <i>leit-motif</i> of her personality
is deeper, broader, and fuller for the experiences
of life behind her, and seems to bear the imprint
as of an epitaph, “I have lived and loved and labored.
All is well.”</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_105' id='Page_105'>105</SPAN></span><h1 id='t2879'>Emotion in Music</h1></div>
<p>Not long since, when urging upon a
pupil the necessity of bringing out
the deeper mood and meaning of
a certain composition, the present
writer received this response: “I
am afraid to make it say all that,
to put so much of myself into it;
people will call me sentimental!”</p>
<p>The reply voiced a prevailing and thoroughly American
weakness. It is far too common here to find,
especially among our girls, a bright, warm, impulsive
nature, full of genuine sentiment and poetic fancy,
choked and perverted, turned shallow and bitter, by
this same paralyzing fear of ridicule; to meet persons
who take a morbid pride in concealing and repressing
their better selves so effectually, that even their most
intimate friends shall never suspect them of being one
degree less frivolous and heartless than their companions,
who in their turn are doubtless vying with
them in this deplorable, misguided effort to belittle
themselves, their lives and influence.</p>
<p>It is one of the most significant and lamentable signs
of the time, that any allusion to or expression of a
warm, true, earnest sentiment is met in society with
more or less open and bitter derision, even by those
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_106' id='Page_106'>106</SPAN></span>
who are secretly in sympathy with it, admire the
courage and sincerity of its champion, and would
gladly take the same bold stand in its defense, but
dare not, and so add their coward voices to swell the
majority. This is the more deplorable, since this
tendency is at once cause and effect. The continual
and systematic denial and suppression of emotion and
ideality result finally in their complete extinction in
most cases, or leave them deformed and feeble, to
struggle for a precarious existence in some dark, hidden
recess of the soul, whose highest throne is their
rightful heritage.</p>
<p>George Sand says, somewhere, speaking of the
French, “We once had sentiment, but the sirocco of
sarcasm has scorched it from our hearts, and where it
grew is a desert place!” Alas for the people of whom
this is true! Alas for the young man or maiden who
can say, “I have no sentiment,” and speak truth.
And let me here caution any young person against a
light and frequent, even though purposely insincere,
denial of any characteristic of value; for there is a
strange and subtle sympathy between the heart and
the lips, which works steadily, if stealthily, to bring
them more and more into accord. A lie is in
every sense a violation of the laws of nature; and what
is first uttered as a conscious, flagrant falsehood, becomes
less so with each repetition, till unawares a day
will come which shall see it transformed into a glaring
truth. Such a person, no matter how highly organized,
or perfectly trained otherwise, is no better than a
machine. He does not live, he simply runs.</p>
<p>One may not be to blame for a natural deficiency in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_107' id='Page_107'>107</SPAN></span>
those higher qualities which make a life warm and
rich and attractive, which mark a personality as something
more than an animated clod, or even a well-adjusted
mental mechanism; he must be pitied even
though instinctively shunned; but he who wantonly
draws the fatal knife of sarcasm across the throat of a
true sentiment or a lofty ideal, however feebly or imperfectly
embodied, commits a crime against humanity
at large, more injurious and far-reaching in its effects
than slaughter of the body only. Above all, let us
beware how we tamper with the natural, essential
relations between art and the emotions. Good-by
to the artist who has no place or use for sentiment in
his work; he should turn his attention at once to some
more practical and creditable branch of mechanics.</p>
<p>One grievous mistake in our American system of
training is that we ignore almost altogether this phase
of culture. We develop the conscience, the reason,
the memory, but do nothing for the taste, the imagination,
the esthetic sense, the whole ideal and spiritual
side of the character. The faithful, protracted study
of music, or other branch of art, even though it never
result in any financial profit or the smallest degree of
professional success, will develop faculties and tendencies
of more advantage to the student and to all
who may come in contact with him in private life,
than any amount of algebra, or any number of Greek
roots. The German methods of study, especially for
young ladies, might teach us a valuable lesson in this
connection.</p>
<p>He who would attain the best results in art should
remember that we do not gather dates of thorns, nor
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_108' id='Page_108'>108</SPAN></span>
figs of thistles; that “only life begets life,” and that
after its own kind; that an art product, to be really
good and great, must be the concentrated, crystallized
essence of the best that is in him, the epitome of his
highest moods and aspirations, of those rare, intuitive
glimpses of a loftier existence, to which in favorable
moments he can lift himself, the distilled perfume of
weeks, it may be years, of living. He should subject
himself to every possible cultivating, elevating influence,
should train, not only hand and head, but
heart as well; for these three are the inseparable trinity
of art. He should increase his resources, widen his
experiences, expand his horizon; not by cramming a
quantity of facts, or by the conquest of mere technical
means—what use in commanding words, or tones, if
one has nothing to express withal?—but by increased
familiarity with and capacity to appreciate and exercise
the qualities so constantly requisite in his work.</p>
<p>Let us remember, too, what the scientists tell us, that
light and heat radiated from a given center are dissipated
in force and intensity in proportion to the
square of the distance to be traversed. The same is
emphatically true of emotion. If one would stir his
audience to a pleasurable excitement, he must himself
be shaken as in a tempest; to warm them, he must be
at white heat.</p>
<p>Should the question arise, How shall one learn to feel
music more deeply and make it more expressive? my
answer would be, Read, think, feel, dream, love, live!
Read—not musical history and biography—these give
information, not culture; they are valuable, but not in
this connection; read poetry, especially the lyric and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_109' id='Page_109'>109</SPAN></span>
dramatic, and good prose literature. A person entirely
unaccustomed to understand or to utter anything in
tones, will often find the key to this unfamiliar medium
of expression by the following indirect method: Find
some work, a poem is best, because briefer and more
concrete, which expresses, approximately at least, the
sentiment of the composition to be studied. Most persons
are more familiar with the language of words than
with that of tones, and will reach a given mood more
directly and easily through that channel. Let the
poem be well studied, not only with the mind, but with
the imagination, dwelling upon it, trying to feel its
meaning and beauty as deeply as possible; then throw
the same emotional content into the music, making
the tones tell what the words have said. The present
writer has found this course in teaching very effective
with all sensitive natures, even with those who have
but the rudiments of an artistic temperament.</p>
<p>Above all, artist or amateur, teacher or pupil, fear
not to use in your work to the full all the emotional
power you have or can acquire. It may be the injudicious
application of force that sometimes impairs
artistic results; it is never the excess. Vital energy
should be controlled, regulated, but never stinted.
Ill-timed frenzy is not art, of course; but where intensity
is demanded and proper gradations and proportions
are observed, no dirge is ever too deeply gloomy, no
dramatic climax too strong. The danger is always
of tameness, rather than of excessive fervor.</p>
<p>Let us, then, be genuine, earnest, whole-hearted,
open, in our allegiance to the ideal; and as for those
who sneer at sentiment in art or in life, why, let them
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_110' id='Page_110'>110</SPAN></span>
rave. We adhere to the creed which T. T. Munger
has beautifully formulated for our profession in his
“Music as Revelation”: “Emotion is the summit of
existence, and music is the summit of emotion, the art
pathway to God.”</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_111' id='Page_111'>111</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>CHOPIN </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1810 </td><td class='tdr'> 1849</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_113' id='Page_113'>113</SPAN></span><h1 id='t3061'>Chopin: Sonata, B Flat Minor, Op. 35</h1></div>
<p>Whether regarded from the standpoint
of musical form, of intrinsic
beauty, or of dramatic intensity,
this work may safely be pronounced
Chopin’s masterpiece; and in the
present writer’s opinion it ranks
as the greatest composition in all
piano literature. Chopin’s ability to
handle the strict sonata form successfully has been
sometimes called in question; but whatever may be
said of his other two sonatas, this one will certainly
bear comparison with the most perfect models of
symmetry, finish, and architectural completeness, by
the best known and most universally recognized classic
masters. In the <i>allegro</i> movement, upon which the
distinguishing character of the sonata form always
depends, the first and second subjects are well contrasted
and admirably balanced, the development is
logical, ingenious, and forceful, and the statement
of the dramatic content is clear, concise, and strong,
without a single irrelevant phrase or superfluous
measure.</p>
<p>The work is founded upon an ancient Polish poem
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_114' id='Page_114'>114</SPAN></span>
of a semi-legendary, semi-allegorical significance, by
a once prominent, now well-nigh forgotten Polish
writer. It consists of four movements, corresponding
to the four cantos of the poem, of which it is, in a
sense, a musical translation, treating successively the
principal moods and situations in the story. The fact
that in the first two movements the incidents are
treated symbolically, emotionally, in accordance with
the composer’s usual subjective mode of expression,
rather than with the descriptive or imitative devices
of the modern school, does not in the least detract
from the poetic impression or suggestive power of the
music.</p>
<p>In the last two movements he has recourse, for
obvious reasons, to the direct method of definite
realism. The first movement pictures the life and
feelings of the hero, a Polish knight of the middle
ages, facing storm and conflict, danger and hardship,
in camp and field, fighting for king and country,
cheered now and then, in lonely hours of vigil at the
camp-fire, by waking visions of his distant home and
his waiting bride.</p>
<p>The opening measures of the brief introduction tell
of stern courage and inflexible resolve. Then the
first subject enters, stirring, impetuous, fiery, full of
the ring of trumpets, the clash of steel, the fierce
exultation of desperate combat. The tranquil second
subject suggests memories of the happy days of youth
in his quiet home—dreams of a future brightened by
the light of promised love, but still enveloped in the
softening haze of distance and uncertainty. The development,
with its complex, conflicting rhythms, its
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_115' id='Page_115'>115</SPAN></span>
resistless, tempestuous sweep, thrills with the excitement
of sudden onset, the rush of charging squadrons,
the battle cry of struggling hosts. The closing chords
express a somber triumph, the proud but sorrow-shadowed
elation of a hard-won victory, purchased
by the blood of many a patriot comrade.</p>
<p>The second movement, the scherzo, gives us the
triumphant return of our hero crowned with laurel,
accompanied by the jubilant strains of martial music,
and the glad acclamations of the crowd. Yet, in the
midst of his pride and well-earned glory, he finds time
to dream again; this time more tenderly, sweetly,
hopefully; to dream of his home-coming, and the fond
greeting that awaits him in his own native village,
where, through the difficulties and dangers of the
campaign, his promised bride has been watching, and
hoping, and praying for his return in faithful but
anxious affection.</p>
<p>Here again we find two contrasting and strongly
characteristic themes: The first, full of martial pride
and exultation, the thoughts of victory, the glad
tribute of applause to a nation’s hero; the second,
tender, dreamy, pulsing with love’s anticipation.
After this soulful trio melody, the first martial strains
are repeated; but in the coda, a brief recurrence of
the trio theme seems to emphasize the idea that with
him the love thought dominates. This brings us to
the third movement, the Funeral March, unquestionably
the best funeral march ever written for the
piano, the most intrinsically beautiful, the most
touchingly, intensely sad, and the most complete,
finely finished, and perfectly sustained, from first
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_116' id='Page_116'>116</SPAN></span>
measure to last; the strongest, noblest, deepest expression
of heart-crushing sorrow to be found in all
piano literature.</p>
<p>As it is published and most often heard by itself,
many who have played and listened to it have not
even been aware that it affords the third chapter, so
to speak, in a great tone epic, for as such this sonata
must be considered.</p>
<p>As our hero approaches home, his heart swelling
with anticipation, he is greeted by the distant, solemn
tolling of cathedral bells, too evidently funeral bells,
and soon is met by a slowly moving, somber procession
of black-robed monks and mourners, bearing to her
last resting-place in the church-yard the very bride
to whose fond greeting he has so ardently looked
forward. The music, soft and muffled at first, like the
toll of far-off bells, gradually grows in power and
intensity as the procession advances, assuming more
and more the heavy, measured, inflexible rhythm of
a funeral march, and swelling at last to an overwhelming
climax of passionate pain.</p>
<p>Then the procession comes to a stand by the open
grave. After a brief pause, the sweet, plaintive trio
melody enters, pure and tender as a prayer, touched
and thrilled to warmth and pathos by memories of
happier days; after which the march movement is
resumed, as the procession slowly and sadly returns
to the village; the music, heavy, crushing, inexorable
at first as the voice of fate, gradually recedes, diminishes,
dies in the distance; and then follows the
last movement, the presto, in some respects the most
original and most impressive of all, the lament of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_117' id='Page_117'>117</SPAN></span>
autumn night-wind over a forsaken grave, one of the
few cases in which Chopin chose to be distinctly
realistic, a literal and graphic imitation of wind effects;
yet woven through it is an unmistakable suggestion
of the mood of the hour and situation, the chill, the
gloom, the wild despair, and a hint of that ever darker
thought that will arise at such moments; after death,
formless void, chaos.</p>
<p>There is an important vein of allegory underlying
this whole story, like a deep substratum. The hero
is a personification of the typical Polish patriot,
struggling, in a forlorn hope, for his native land; the
bride is Poland, and the mighty, overwhelming grief
expressed is more than a personal sorrow: it is for the
death and burial of a nation.</p>
<p>The authority for connecting the poem referred to
with this sonata has been frequently questioned. I
wish to state here that the poetic background to this
great work is by no means hypothetically sketched in
by my own imagination, however fully justified by
the inherent character of the music. I have my data
in full from Kullak and Liszt, the latter having been
a personal friend of Chopin, as is well known, and
having first presented the sonata in public to the
musical world. We may safely assume, therefore, that
he was correctly informed with regard to it, and that
this interpretation is authentic and authoritative.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_118' id='Page_118'>118</SPAN></span><h1 id='t3225'>The Chopin Ballades</h1></div>
<p>Probably no class of musical compositions
ever presented to the world
by any master has been so little
understood, and consequently so
much misrepresented as the ballades
by Frederic Chopin. Even
so standard an authority as Grove,
in his “Dictionary of Music and
Musicians,” writes as follows: “<i>Ballade</i>, a name adopted
by Chopin for four pieces of pianoforte music, which
have no peculiar form or character of their own,
beyond being written in triple time, and to which the
name seems to be no more applicable than that of
sonnet to the pieces which others have written under
that title”—a statement which proves that he had
little information and less interest in regard to the
subject.</p>
<p>The French word <i>ballade</i>, which Chopin used as
title for these compositions, is derived from the Provencal
<i>ballata</i>, a dancing song, which in turn comes
from <i>bellare</i>, to dance; and our modern English
words ballad, ball, ballet, all descend to us from the
same source. In Italian, <i>ballata</i> meant a dancing
piece, in distinction from <i>sonata</i>, a sounding piece,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_119' id='Page_119'>119</SPAN></span>
and <i>cantata</i>, a singing piece; and the <i>ballade</i> and
<i>ballata</i> originally meant a piece of music to be sung
while dancing or accompanied by dancing. The dance
element, however, was early lost, and ballade in French,
like ballad in English, came to mean a short and
popular narrative poem adapted for singing or recitation.
The ballad is a tale in verse. It differs from
the epic in being briefer, less dignified in tone, and in
concerning itself with actual practical events in the
lives of individuals, instead of with historic and
mythological subjects, which form the main province
of the epic. The true ballad treats of some knightly
exploit, some national episode, or some tale of love
and adventure; and, as we shall see, Chopin, in adopting
this title for instrumental compositions, adhered
strictly to its definition and its literary characteristics
and significance.</p>
<p>The Chopin ballades, four in number and ranking
among his most strikingly original and effective contributions
to pianoforte music, introduced an entirely
new and distinctly unique musical form, well-nigh
limitless in its possibilities of expression and application,
its facile adaptability to every phase of emotional
and descriptive writing. As was natural, they
opened the way for a host of more or less worthy followers,
bold, independent free lances, heedless of the
forms and rules which bind in rank and file the more
orderly conservative compositions; all bearing a strong
racial resemblance, but variously designated by such
special clan cognomens as ballade, novelette, legend,
fable, fairy-tale, and the like. They now constitute
a complete and markedly individual school of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_120' id='Page_120'>120</SPAN></span>
composition, of which Chopin in his ballades was the
originator, and which is differentiated from all others
by its distinctly declamatory, narrative style.</p>
<p>Chopin used the name ballade in the sense in which
it is employed in modern literature—to designate a
short, poetic narrative, a miniature epic, as distinguished
from the lyric, didactic, and dramatic forms of
poetry. He intended the ballade in music to be a
counterpart of the ballad in poetry, and his inventive
genius and unerring taste supplied and perfected a
form precisely adapted to the end in view; a form
which is strictly akin neither to the rondo, the sonata
allegro, nor the free fantasia, though having certain
points of resemblance to all three, still less to any of
the dance forms. It reminds us more of some of the
larger, more complex song forms, as, for instance, the
musical settings by Schubert and others of the more
pretentious German ballads by Goethe, Berger, and
Uhland; but its development is broader and ampler,
at once more extended and more logical, evincing a
greater degree of constructive musicianship.</p>
<p>Chopin’s able biographer, Karasowski, says of the
ballades: “Some regarded them as a variety of the
rondo; others, with more accuracy, called them poetical
stories. Indeed, there is about them a narrative tone
(<i>Märchenton</i>) which is particularly well rendered by
the six-four and six-eight time, and which makes them
differ essentially from the existing forms.” In view
of these facts, patent even to the superficial student
of Chopin’s life and works, it seems very strange that
we should so often hear and even see in print sneering
insinuations to the effect that the composer christened
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_121' id='Page_121'>121</SPAN></span>
these works ballades for lack of any better or more
appropriate name; that the title has in reality nothing
of significance or distinctness, which is justified either
by the form or the content of the works.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, all four of these ballades, according
to Chopin’s own statement to Schumann during
an interview at Leipsic, are founded directly upon
Polish poems by the greatest poet of that nation,
Adam Mickiewicz, the father of the romantic school in
Poland, a contemporary and personal friend of the
composer, a man whose fervent patriotism and unswerving
fidelity to national themes, as well as the
warmth, tenderness, and power of his creative genius,
specially endeared him to the heart of his compatriot
and brother artist, the tone-poet Chopin. It is difficult,
not to say impossible, to estimate the stimulating influence
of Mickiewicz and his works upon the creative
activity of Chopin. That the music of the latter has
attained world-wide celebrity, while the poems of the
former are scarcely heard of outside of the small and
cultured circle of his own countrymen and women,
is due perhaps not so much to the superiority of the
composer’s genius over that of the poet, as to the
more universal intelligibility of his chosen idiom, his
medium of expression, Polish being a language understood
by few persons even of cosmopolitan tendencies,
and one which is ill adapted for translation into non-Slavonic
tongues. Certain it is that Chopin himself
was quick to acknowledge his deep indebtedness to
his gifted countryman, and rose to some of his loftiest
flights of creative effort when translating into his own
beloved language of tone ideas, experiences, incidents,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_122' id='Page_122'>122</SPAN></span>
and situations which had already been molded and
vivified into artistic life and beauty by the hand of the
poet, as in the case of the four ballades under consideration.</p>
<p>Though the origin of these ballades as musical
transcripts of certain poems by Mickiewicz is indisputable,
it has always been a mooted question, and one
fraught with the keenest interest, at least to some of
us, upon what particular poem any given ballade is
founded; what special experience or incident, national,
personal, or imaginary, found its first embodiment in
the verses of the Slavic poet, to thrill with its power
and beauty a limited circle of Polish readers, and was
later reincarnated by Chopin, to find a far wider sphere
of influence throughout the musical world; and what
may be the peculiar subtle karma of romantic or
dramatic association which this vital art germ has
brought with it in its transmigration from a former
existence; in a word, whence and what is the essential
artistic essence of each ballade?</p>
<p>If we could trace it to its fountain head and familiarize
ourselves with the sources of Chopin’s own
inspiration, the task of rightly comprehending and
interpreting any one of these compositions would be
vastly facilitated. This no one has hitherto done
successfully. Few among English-speaking musicians
are able to read Mickiewicz in the original Polish;
translations of his works are meager, imperfect, and
very difficult to obtain. It is therefore not without a
certain glow of satisfaction that the present writer is
able, after diligent, unwearying inquiry and voluminous
reading, covering a period of some fifteen years,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_123' id='Page_123'>123</SPAN></span>
confidently to affirm that he has at last traced back to
their inspirational sources three at least of the four
ballades; and he submits to the reader the results of
his research, in the hope that some degree of the
interest and pleasure he has himself derived from this
line of investigation may be shared by others.</p>
<p>Should any question arise with regard to the
accuracy of the statements and conclusions here advanced,
I would say that the authority on which they
are based is derived partly from definite historical
data, existing, though widely diffused, in print; partly
from direct traditions gathered from those who enjoyed
the personal acquaintance of the composer; and
partly from the carefully considered internal evidence
of the works themselves, when critically compared with
the poems to which they presumably had reference.
I will say further that concerning the fourth ballade,
in F minor, I am still as completely in the dark as any
of my readers, and would gratefully welcome any
information or suggestion which might tend to throw
the smallest light upon the subject.</p>
<h2 id='t3413'>Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23</h2>
<p>The first ballade, Op. 23, in G minor, was published
in June, 1836, perhaps written a year or two earlier.
It was suggested by and is founded upon one of the
most able and forceful, as well as extended, patriotic
historical poems by Mickiewicz, often called the
Lithuanian Epic, entitled “Konrad Wallenrod,” and
published in 1828. The following is a brief synopsis
of its plot:</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_124' id='Page_124'>124</SPAN></span>
During the latter half of the fourteenth century, the
Red Cross knights, a powerful religious, political, and
military order, controlling large dominions on the
Baltic, in territory now included in modern Russia,
were at fierce feud with Lithuania, then an independent
principality, later united with Poland by a marriage
of its reigning prince, Jagiello, to the heiress of the
Polish throne, thus founding the dynasty of the
Jagiellos, the most illustrious of the royal houses of
Poland. Long and desperate was the struggle. The
Lithuanians, though vastly outnumbered and frequently
outgeneraled and defeated, defended every inch
of their beloved fatherland, now absorbed in western
Russia, with heroic valor. At last their ruling prince
and idolized leader fell in battle, their army was routed
and cut to pieces, the scanty remnant taking refuge
from their merciless pursuers among the fastnesses of
the mountains; and the country was for a time practically
subjugated and forced to submit to the most
cruel and tyrannical oppression. The conquerors,
being Crusaders and Christian knights, considered
every species of atrocious spoliation and barbaric
violence, when practised against the infidel Lithuanians,
as justifiable, even laudable, and for some years the
sufferings of the conquered knew no limit.</p>
<p>Among the prisoners taken and carried into virtual
slavery by the Teutonic Order, was the little seven-year-old
son of the fallen prince—a bright, precocious,
winsome lad, who, after serving for some time as page
in the household of the grand master of the Order,
so completely won the heart of the old knight, that he
adopted the boy and educated him with his own
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_125' id='Page_125'>125</SPAN></span>
children, in all the courtly and martial accomplishments
of the time. Years passed. Young Konrad
grew in manly power and promise, and came to be
ranked among the flower of Teutonic chivalry, first
in the tourney, first in the field, and first in the ladies’
hall. But ever at his side, as strange friend and
secret counselor, was seen the somber figure of the
aged Wajdelote, or bard, a venerable minstrel, who
had come none knew whence, and, despite his proud
and gloomy bearing, had won high favor at the court
by the magic of his voice and lute. Ostensibly a
wandering singer, he was in reality a Lithuanian noble
of high degree, a former friend of Konrad’s father, the
fallen prince, and stood high in the confidence of the
Lithuanian people and nobility as an able, devoted
patriot. He came as an emissary from them to find
and win back their lost prince Konrad to his own true
flag and his native land. They were still hoping and
fitfully struggling to throw off the tyranny of the Red
Cross knights and wanted Konrad for their leader.</p>
<p>Under the cloak of his minstrelsy, the Wajdelote
plied this secret mission. With all the fiery eloquence
of his poet’s genius, he wrought upon the spirit of the
young man, rousing it to duty and action, to honor,
ambition, and patriotism, to sympathy with the
wrongs of his oppressed fellow-countrymen, to vengeance
for the death of his slaughtered father, stirring
its latent heroism, steeling it to steadfast purpose. And
as his influence strengthened day by day, the open
brow of the young prince grew clouded, the smile
vanished from his lips, and his sunny eyes grew deeper
and darker with stern resolve.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_126' id='Page_126'>126</SPAN></span>
At last the occasion came. In a foray against a band
of insurgent Lithuanians, Konrad and his mentor
detached themselves from their companions, and
feigning to be taken captive, joined the forces of their
own countrymen, where they were welcomed with the
wildest enthusiasm. The two years that followed were
the happiest of Konrad’s life. He threw himself heart
and soul into the fierce joy of combat for his native
land, devoting to her service all his personal courage
and ability, and all the military skill so carefully
acquired at the court and camp of the Red Cross
knights; yet found time in the brief pauses of activity
to woo and win as wife the fairest and truest of the
Lithuanian maids. For a time the pulses of his life
throbbed with a full but fluctuating tide, in the swift
interchange of love’s delights and the thrill of gallant
deeds. Caressing whispers alternated with the clash
of swords, and the tender light of the honeymoon
with the lurid gleam of the camp-fire; but his happiness
was destined to be as transient as his valor was
vain. A sterner duty, a more self-sacrificing devotion
claimed him, and his veteran mentor was still at his
side to mature the plan and urge its execution. His
beloved Lithuania, enfeebled, broken, disorganized for
so long, was wholly unable to cope in open field with
her powerful, disciplined, and well-equipped antagonist.
Some daring, subtle, and far-sighted stratagem alone
might save her; and such a one had formed itself in
the mind of the old minstrel. Again his eloquence
rang in the ears of Konrad, like the voice of fate,
“Behold, this is to do! Thou art the man!”</p>
<p>A heart-breaking farewell to his bride, and Konrad
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_127' id='Page_127'>127</SPAN></span>
disappears utterly from the scene for ten years; then
returns irrecognizably altered in appearance, under
an assumed name, with wealth and fame and following,
acquired in wars with the Saracens of Spain. The old
grand master of the Red Cross knights is dead, and
Konrad with little difficulty secures his own election
to that office; and then begins the work of vengeance.
By his absolute power as grand master, and his cunning
diplomacy, he involved the order in bitter internal
dissensions, depleted its treasury, wasted its resources,
weakened its garrisons, and in every possible way
sapped its strength, and finally led the flower of its
army to complete annihilation in a winter campaign
against the Lithuanians, into whose snares and ambuscades
the Red Cross knights were mercilessly
thrown by secret and preconcerted arrangement with
his countrymen.</p>
<p>Thus by a course of treachery, which for daring,
subtlety, and sustained purpose, both in conception
and execution, has hardly a parallel in history, was
accomplished what could not have been done by force.
The power of the order was effectually broken and
Lithuania set free. But Konrad’s life, as well as his
happiness, paid the price of his patriotism. His
beloved bride he never saw but once again, and that
only for a moment of agonized parting through dungeon
bars, just before his execution. And it is said he
never smiled from the hour when the voice of the
stern old minstrel first stirred his heart with the
trumpet call of inexorable duty, till the hour when its
proud pulses were stilled forever by the daggers of the
secret tribunal. For his identity was discovered; he
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_128' id='Page_128'>128</SPAN></span>
was, of course, tried and condemned as a traitor to
the order, and died in disgrace by the hands of his
former comrades.</p>
<p>Such is the story, sad but stirring, which Mickiewicz
handles in his poem, and which Chopin reëmbodied
in the G minor ballade, not following literally its
successive steps, but emphasizing to his utmost its
spirit, character, and moral. I think no one ever
played this composition, or listened to it attentively,
without feeling that its mood was not of our day and
land. The time it represents is the middle ages, its
scene is laid in stern and rugged Lithuania, among
warlike knights and resentful rebels, and its whole
spirit is therefore medieval and military.</p>
<p>It opens with a brief but scornfully defiant introduction,
a call to arms, reminding one of the first lines
of that familiar address to the Roman gladiators:
“Friends, I come not here to talk; ye all do know the
story of our thraldom.” Then the first and principal
theme enters, symbolizing the forceful personality and
stern mentor voice of the old minstrel, in its somber
yet resolute phrases, solemn, inflexible, relentless as
fate; telling of wrongs to be avenged, of a nation in
bondage awaiting its deliverer; of the imperative call
of duty and patriotism; and it constantly recurs all
through the composition as its leading motive, whenever,
as is vividly suggested by the other contrasting,
conflicting themes and passages, continually introduced,
the young prince wavers in his purpose, deterred
by doubts and forebodings, lured by seductive
temptations from pursuance of the desperate and soul-trying
venture; whenever his mind wanders, as it
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_129' id='Page_129'>129</SPAN></span>
must at times, to regretful memories of happier days,
to the splendors of feast and tournament, to the pomp
and pride of a martial career under the adopted flag
of the order, to the blithe hunting-horns of his gay
companions in youth, and tender dreams of the first
great love of his manhood, all sacrificed to a grand
but pitiless cause. He is ever recalled to the heroic
mood, to the proud but rugged path of duty, by this
mentor voice—gravely insistent, quietly determined,
which will not be gainsaid; and which finally triumphs
over all other considerations. The impetuous presto
which closes the work portrays the fierce excitement
and fiery rush of conflict, the utter self-abandon that
hurls itself jubilantly into the arms of an ignominious
death for a cherished ideal; and it ends with the savage
but triumphant shout of a blood-bought victory.</p>
<p>This ballade, though comparatively an early work,
is one of Chopin’s most darkly grand and dramatically
powerful efforts; and the subjective personal moods of
the exiled Polish patriot are voiced in its gloomy
indignation, its desperate courage, and its fierce
defiance.</p>
<p>There is an undercurrent of political meaning in
“Konrad Wallenrod,” which fortunately escaped the
notice of the Russians, who allowed its publication at
St. Petersburg, but which appeals to every native and
friend of Poland and has had no small share in making
its popularity. Lithuania in the fourteenth century,
broken and crushed, represents Poland in the nineteenth,
and the tyrannical Teutonic Order stands for
Russian oppression. The Wajdelote’s recitals of the
wrongs of a dear but downtrodden land, the indignation
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_130' id='Page_130'>130</SPAN></span>
and resentment under a foreign yoke, and the
appeal to arms for freedom and revenge, are all spoken
in the cause of Poland, and are so felt by the native
reader. Konrad’s dire vengeance on the conqueror
is a picture of the secret hope of all Polish patriots of
the final overthrow and punishment of the tyrant and
the reëstablishment of Polish independence.</p>
<h2 id='t3640'>Ballade in F Major, Op. 38</h2>
<p>The second ballade, in F major, is, of the three
under consideration, the least of a favorite and the
least played; probably because the radical extremes
of mood which it presents, in abrupt, almost painful
contrast, its apparent incoherency, and its sudden,
startling, seemingly causeless changes of movement,
render it difficult to comprehend and still more so to
interpret, and difficult to follow with intelligent sympathy
even when well rendered.</p>
<p>It opens with an exceedingly simple, undemonstrative
theme, in the major key, almost too lucid and
childlike in the naïve directness of its utterance, and
singularly devoid of the glowing warmth and color
which usually characterize the melodies by this writer.
Cool, pure, and passionless, yet velvet-soft and delicately
sweet, it floats upon the gentle pulsations of the
simple accompaniment, like a snow-white, freshly
fragrant water-lily, upon the crystal ripples of some
glacier-fed mountain lake. Then suddenly, without
warning or apparent reason, there bursts a furious
tempest of rage, pain, and conflict, as if some vast
Titanic embodiment in bronze of lurid war had been
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_131' id='Page_131'>131</SPAN></span>
melted by a world-conflagration into a stream of
fluid destruction, and poured out upon some fair scene
of pastoral peace and happiness.</p>
<p>Almost as suddenly the storm of fury abates, or
rather seems to recede into distance, sounding still for
a time, but far and faint, as if its tumult reached us
muffled by intervening walls. Then the first simple
theme returns, sweetly calm in its pristine innocence, but
soon merged into a series of plaintive minor cadences,
as of pathetic pleading, of earnest, insistent supplication,
interrupted by a brief and startlingly abrupt
climax, in full massive chords, like the confident defiance
hurled by the children of light at the hosts of
darkness, certain of victory, in their reliance on the
omnipotent arm of the God of battles. Once more
the gentle first theme, followed by those imploring
minor cadences and a repetition of the strong, courageous
climax, and then the tempest breaks again with
renewed intensity, the stress of desperate strife, the
agony of terror, a seething, surging, rushing torrent
of tone, as if men and demons were struggling for life
in a swirling vortex, where the elemental forces of
ocean and fire had met in a death-grapple.</p>
<p>The <i>finale</i>, in presto movement, an impetuous sweep
of gloomy, exultant harmonies, suggests the mood of
a brave but sorely tried spirit, dominating distress,
rising superior to disaster, and proudly triumphant in
spite of seeming defeat. At the close, in form of a
coda, a few measures of the first melody return, saddened,
but still gentle, ending plaintively in the minor,
as if to say, “There have been great wrong and suffering
and bitterness, but now is peace.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_132' id='Page_132'>132</SPAN></span>
Unquestionably this work presents two radically
opposing elements in sharpest contrast; the one,
reposeful purity; the other, infuriate passion. Of this
much we are sure in simply listening to the music,
without searching for historical origin or collateral
information. It is interesting to note Rubinstein’s
words with regard to it, and to see how near his art
instinct led him to the discovery of its realistic significance,
presumably without the aid of any definite
knowledge as to its actual origin. He writes of it:</p>
<p>“Is it possible that the interpreter does not feel the
necessity of representing to his hearers a field flower
caught by a gust of wind, a caressing of the flower by
the wind, the resistance of the flower, the stormy
struggle of the wind, the entreaty of the flower, which
at last lies broken there? This may be paraphrased:
the field flower, a rustic maiden; the wind, a knight.”</p>
<p>Let us now examine the substance at least of the
poetic material from which Chopin derived the mood
and suggestion of this musical work. Again it is a
ballad upon a Lithuanian theme, from the pen of
Mickiewicz. But this time it is a legendary and not a
historical subject which is treated. The Polish ballad
is entitled “The Switez Lake,” and its substance is here
given in a somewhat abbreviated and simplified form:</p>
<p>In the heart of Lithuania lies the beautiful, sequestered
Lake Switez, its forest-mantled shores rarely
visited by the foot of a stranger, but peopled by the
peasant fancy with wild legends, shadowy traditions,
and wraith-like memories of bygone days. Its blue
waves murmur, at the foot of giant oaks, their strange
tales of nymphs and sprites and water-kelpies, while
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_133' id='Page_133'>133</SPAN></span>
through the long and still summer nights the sleepy
branches make answer, in dreamy whisperings, of
elves and gnomes and the uncanny doings of the little
people of the forest. At least so the belated countryman
affirms, overtaken by nightfall in this haunted
region; and many are the tales of that awesome place
and hour with which he terrifies his companions
around the winter fire.</p>
<p>Once, many years ago, a gallant knight, of a most
ancient and lofty lineage, with dauntless courage and
a pious heart, whose castle crowned a neighboring
height, resolved to sound and solve the mystery hid in
its depths; and, taking with him a mammoth net of
stoutest cords, a score of brawny henchmen to draw
its meshes, and a venerable priest, to bless the catch
and exorcise spirits, he proceeded to the shore. Prayer
was said, the net was flung and sank, and mighty
was the struggle that ensued. The tightened meshes
strained to bursting, the taut ropes writhed and
moaned like things alive, and dragged upon the arms
that strained to draw them shoreward. The water
raved and churned against the trembling banks,
and black clouds, thunder-voiced, concealed the sky.
The pious father’s constant prayers at last prevailed,
and the net, with its strange burden, was safely landed.
A pale but exquisitely lovely maid, with sweet, calm
dignity in face and mien, a wreath of snow-white water-lilies
on her shining hair, arose from out the tangles of
the net, and in a voice like the low murmur of soft
waves at twilight, thus she spoke:</p>
<p>“Rash knight! Thy lineage and piety combined
protect thee, else hadst thou found a grave, with all
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_134' id='Page_134'>134</SPAN></span>
thy following, in this adventure. But as thou art of
godly mind and as we are akin by blood, through long
descent, it is vouchsafed to me this once to break the
mystic silence of the centuries, and to reveal to thee
the secret of the lake, and mine, its lily queen.</p>
<p>“Know then, where now is forest dark and dense,
a noble city reared its lofty battlements in former
years. My sire, its ruling prince, held all but regal
sway; and I, his child, a princess well beloved by all,
counted my sunny years beside the Switez waves, as
blithe as they. One morning, in that ne’er-to-be-forgotten
spring, the trumpet voice of war through all
our streets rang out the call to arms. Our royal master,
Mindog, Lithuania’s king, had summoned all who
wielded lance, to join him in the field, against a horde
of merciless Russian barbarians, wasting all the land.
And forth my father hastened, with him all his goodly
company of knights and men at arms, and left us
women, trembling and defenseless, in the town, trusting
in God and in our innocence, till their return.
That very night, by a circuitous route, evading
Mindog’s might and my stout father’s sword, the
Russians came, many as the sands upon the shore, ruthless
as wolves in winter’s dearth. Our gates unguarded
proved an easy prize, and in they poured, thronging
our streets, demoniac in their lust for blood, exulting
in the havoc of our homes. My maidens, wild with
terror, crowded round, imploring succor; while I, as
weak as they, saw our dishonor, worse than death,
stalking upon us from the barbarian ranks.</p>
<p>“Then, in the frenzied panic, some one cried, ‘Our
only hope is mutual destruction! Let us slay each
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_135' id='Page_135'>135</SPAN></span>
other, cursed be she who falters!’ Like sudden
inspiration, the mad purpose seized us all. And then
was seen a sight to set red war atremble with affright,
and blanch the lurid sun to sickly pallor. Fair hands,
used only to the lute and broidery frame, unsheathed
the dagger and made bare the breast. With clinging
arms and lips together pressed, and sad eyes beaming
love-light through their tears, each sought to find her
sister’s heart and still its throbbing with her poniard’s
point. Yet strength and courage faltered at the fatal
stroke. In my great agony I raised my voice in
prayer to Him who guides the storm-clouds’ wrath
and curbs the tempest in its wild career. ‘Prevent,’
I cried, ‘this awful crime, and save us in this hour of
direst need! Send us in mercy the swift death we
needs must find, but let not maiden blood by maiden
hands be shed!’</p>
<p>“The prayer was heard. An earthquake shook our
city, until it rocked and reeled, crumbling and sinking
like the snow-drifts in a springtime rain; while from
the lake a mighty wall of water rose and rushed upon
us, whelming alike pursuer and pursued, foeman and
friend; hushing the din of war and shriek of victim in
one common flood of cool, safe silence.</p>
<p>“So our city fell. My maidens, all transformed to
water-lilies, blossom here in happy purity through
long summers, and palsy-withered is the impious hand
that strives to drag them from the friendly shelter of
the waves; while I, their lily queen, within my crystal
realm hold quiet sway, safe from the rude approach
of man’s destructive passions. Now thou knowest the
story, all save this. My father fell by Russian spears.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_136' id='Page_136'>136</SPAN></span>
My princely brother, on returning from the wars, found
all his realm a waste, his capital destroyed, found home
and sister vanished in the flood; and wandering in
other lands, when years had passed, he wedded a stranger
bride. From this their union, through a long, illustrious
line of heroes, thou art sprung. Hence thou art
safe upon these shores, despite this day’s temerity,
so long as with a pure heart and noble mind, thou
dost guard our name and honor in the world. Remember
this. But seek no more to pierce the kindly
veil of mysteries, not meant for mortal eyes; and
never hope or strive to see again the lily queen of
Switez.”</p>
<p>So speaking, with a smile of saddest sweetness, she
turned slowly to the lake, and vanished in its whelming
waters, which closed with laughing ripples round her.</p>
<p>No one familiar with Chopin’s ballade in F can fail
to perceive the close and accurate application of the
music to this romantic tale. It begins at and deals
with the appearance and story of the lily queen, and
her gentle, pure, and winning personality, and soft-voiced
narration, figure symbolically in the opening
melody. The sudden burst of the terrific war cloud,
the maiden’s trust in and confident appeal to a higher
power, the final whelming of the city in the friendly
flood, follow successively in almost literal portrayal,
the work closing in the mood of the maiden’s final
farewell and warning to the adventurous knight who
had disturbed her repose.</p>
<p>Viewed from the standpoint of the subject-matter,
the startling, almost drastic, contrasts of the work
seem not only intelligible, but legitimate and artistic.</p>
<h2 id='t3880'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_137' id='Page_137'>137</SPAN></span>Ballade No. 3, in A Flat, Op. 47</h2>
<p>This is the best known, the most played, and most
popular of all the Chopin ballades. Its warm, lyric
opening theme, its strikingly original rhythmic effects,
its piquant, bewitching second subject, full of playful
grace, as well as its magnificently developed climax,
one of the finest in the piano literature, have all endeared
it to the hearts of Chopin lovers and rendered
it one of the most effective of concert solos.</p>
<p>Like the second ballade in F major, this composition
is founded upon an ancient legend of Lake Switez,
which seems to be a center about which cluster many
of the Lithuanian myths. The one in question had
been previously treated by Chopin’s friend and compatriot,
Adam Mickiewicz, in the form of a ballad in
Polish verse, and the substance of the story, briefly
and simply told, is as follows:</p>
<p>A young and fearless knight, whose ancestral castle
crowned a forest-covered eminence above the beautiful
blue lake, was wont to wander on its lone and wooded
shores at evening and to meet there clandestinely his
radiant, beautiful, mysterious lady-love, whose name,
home, and origin he was unable to discover, and which
she persistently refused to disclose. She always appeared
to him suddenly, without warning or visible
approach, as if born anew each night of the filtering
moonlight and shifting forest shadows, or as if drawing
her ethereal substance at will from the floating mist
wreaths above the lake. And she vanished as miraculously,
when she chose to end their interview,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_138' id='Page_138'>138</SPAN></span>
dissolving from his very arms into mist once more. Perhaps
the very mystery which enveloped her enhanced
her charms. In any case, her power grew upon the
knight till he became most desperately enamoured,
pressing his suit with growing ardor. At first she
coquetted with his passion, laughing at his fervor and
meeting his fiery protestations with playful, incredulous
mockery; but, finally touched by his fiery
eloquence, she made him a conditional promise. If he
would prove his fidelity, would remain true to her and
her memory during her absence, no matter what temptations
might arise, for the space of just one little passing
moon, she would then return, reveal her identity,
and become his bride, if he still desired it.</p>
<p>Of course, he swore eternal fidelity, and she, with a
little half-sad, half-incredulous smile, vanished into
the night mist. For several evenings he wandered,
lonely and disconsolate, on the shores of the lake, longing
and vainly seeking for his absent love and cursing
the tardy hours of his probation. Then, when his
patience was about exhausted, he was met there, on
the selfsame spot, in the same mystic moonlight and
with the same suddenness and mystery, by another
maiden, even more beautiful than the first, and not
inclined to be so distant. She jeered at him for his
depression, for his useless and stupid fidelity to an
absent prude, while with many lures and graces she
beckoned him on to join her in the moonlit mazes of
the dance.</p>
<p>At first, remembering his promise, he made some
show of resistance, but very soon he yielded completely
to her seductions, declaring his admiration for
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_139' id='Page_139'>139</SPAN></span>
this new beauty in ardent terms, and followed her with
extended arms, as she flitted on before him, keeping
always just a little out of reach; followed, heedless
where his steps might lead, reckless of consequences,
conscious only of her tender glances and her beckoning
hand, till, borne up and on by the spell of her enchantment,
she had led him far out upon the treacherous
surface of the lake, whose placid ripples seemed magically
to sustain both pursuer and pursued. Then,
when midway across the lake, she turned upon him,
indignation blazing in her eyes. With a single impatient
gesture she flung off her disguise and faced him,
poised upon a curling wave, in all the airy grace and
winsomeness of his first abandoned love. “False
lover!” she cried, “where is now thy true love, thy
sworn love? Forgotten, forsaken, ere the moon that
witnessed thy plighted vows hath run one-quarter of
its little circle. Behold thy doom! So perish the
faithless!” Her white arms waved in mystic incantation,
a sudden storm-wind swept the lake, the billows
heaved and swirled beneath him, and a yawning chasm
opened at his feet. With a last passionate appeal he
sank to its chilly depths, while she, laughing in mocking
derision, vanished in a shower of silver spray.</p>
<p>The peasants declare that to this day, on quiet
moonlit nights, one may still see the white form of
the Switez maid wandering, as if in search, among the
shadows of the forest-mantled shores or gliding over
the surface of the lake; while mingling with the whisper
of the wind among the trees and the murmurs of the
waves upon the strand, one still hears the echo of her
words: “Forsaken, forsworn. So perish the faithless.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_140' id='Page_140'>140</SPAN></span>
Such is the story of the Switez maid, as told by
Mickiewicz in inimitable Polish verse, and translated
into the symbolic language of music by the Polish
tone-poet, Chopin, in the A flat ballade.</p>
<p>The first warmly emotional theme of the composition,
with its tender, persuasive cadences, its ever-growing
passionateness, symbolizes the ardent and
impulsive hero of the legend; while the bright, piquant
second theme admirably portrays the arch, coquettish
heroine, with her airy witcheries and playful grace.
It cannot be mistaken, for it compels attention as it
enters, after a moment of suspense, in radical contrast
to what precedes, with the dainty rhythmic effect,
so difficult to render for most players. Its introduction
later in a different key, with different accompaniment
and embellishments, represents the disguise
with which the maid attempts to cloak her identity,
but the same melody is distinctly traceable through
all changes. The superb climax near the close of the
work forcibly depicts at once the swift approach and
resistless sweep of the tempest upon the lake and the
intensity of the emotional situation at the moment
of the final catastrophe. Here, too, is heard again
the first melody, the hero theme, in a brief return,
as he makes his last, vain appeal, and we even catch
the vanishing ripple of the maiden’s mocking laughter.</p>
<p>The details of the story are not so literally worked
out in the music, or followed with so much realistic
fidelity, as would have been the case with Liszt or
Wagner, or with some other more recent writers.
Chopin’s art is always rather suggestive than descriptive,
dealing directly with the moods evoked by a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_141' id='Page_141'>141</SPAN></span>
given situation or event, rather than with the physical
aspect of the events themselves; with the awe and
terror produced by the tempest, for instance, rather
than with the audible or visible phenomena of the
tempest. In this particular case he deals mainly with
the general emotional and mental elements which underlie
the legend and the characteristics of the two personages
who figure in it, instead of treating its successive
incidents in detail, or in definite chronological order.
The work is therefore sketched on broad, fundamental
lines, and leaves the setting and filling in in large
measure to the imagination of the hearer. This must
always be the ideal method in an art so ethereal and,
in one sense, so vague as that of music. Still, the connection
between the music of this ballade and the actual
scenes and development of the legend is distinct enough
to be easily traced by those familiar with the story,
and players or listeners will find, as always, that the
purely musical interest of this and all the Chopin ballades
is materially deepened and increased by the
background of relevant facts—by an acquaintance
with the material on which they are based and which
gave to the composer the impulse for their creation.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_142' id='Page_142'>142</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4044'>Chopin: Polonaise, A Flat Major, Op. 53</h1></div>
<p>Interesting from a historic as well
as a musical standpoint is the origin
of the polonaise. In the year
1573, when the Polish throne became
vacant on the extinction of the
royal dynasty of Jagiello, a national
assembly of electors was convened
at the then capital, Cracow, to decide
upon a new sovereign. The candidates for the throne
were all of royal blood—Ernest of Austria, Henry of
Anjou of the house of Valois, brother to the ruling
king of France, a Swedish prince, and Ivan the Terrible
of Russia. But the real struggle lay between the
Austrian and French princes. The choice fell at last
on Henry of Anjou, later himself king of France as
Henry III.</p>
<p>In the following autumn he ascended the Polish
throne, and among the many gorgeous ceremonials
attending his coronation, was one quite natural and
proper under the circumstances—a formal presentation
to the new monarch, of the leading dignitaries
and personages of his realm. It took place in the vast
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_143' id='Page_143'>143</SPAN></span>
and magnificent throne hall of the royal castle at
Cracow. The nobles and officials, each with his lady
on his arm, defiled before the throne where the monarch
was seated, in a stately procession, and as they passed
before the king were presented by the master of ceremonies.
This formal march was accompanied by
suitable music, written expressly for the occasion
and performed by the royal band. Whether this embryonic
polonaise is still in existence, no one knows;
probably not; but two distinct ideas were, or should
have been, before the composer’s mind in penning
the harmonies for this solemn ceremonial.</p>
<p>First, of course, to write music eminently suited to
the occasion, to embody, and, if possible, enhance all
the pomp and splendor of the magnificent, august
assembly; second, to portray through the music, so
far as might be, something of the national characteristics
of this Polish race which the Frenchman came
as a stranger to rule over. The music in its own way
was to serve as a species of introduction.</p>
<p>Little by little, from this crude but characteristic
beginning was developed through the centuries the
peculiar national dance, or, more strictly speaking,
march of the Poles; and the music performed during
its progress came to have among dance forms the same
title. It partook of the various stages of evolution
to which all music was subject at different epochs,
and within the last hundred years has been modified
to keep pace with the general development of musical
resources. But however it may vary in minor details
of form and treatment, every polonaise which is true
to itself must express the original ideas upon which
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_144' id='Page_144'>144</SPAN></span>
the form was primarily based—on the one hand a splendid
ceremonial, on the other Polish national life.</p>
<p>In the present day the polonaise is a universally
accepted musical form, common property with the composers
of all nations. But Chopin, Polish by birth,
education, and sympathies, found it strictly within
his scope, and has easily surpassed all other writers
in number, quality, and characteristic force as a polonaise
writer.</p>
<p>Of his many works in this vein, the Op. 53, in A flat,
is in my opinion decidedly the best, both as regards
virile power and direct, forceful expression of the original
polonaise idea. It begins with a wild, impetuous
introduction, brief but stirring, a sort of fanfare of
drums and trumpets, intended to call the people to
order and to establish at the outset the tonality of
the mood, so to speak. Then follows the swinging,
pompous measure of the polonaise proper, readily suggesting
by its splendid martial harmonies the proud
military bearing, the gorgeous armor, and the stately
tread of those steel-clad feudal heroes, as they defiled
before the throne.</p>
<p>In place of the trio, usually of a more quiet nature
in works of this kind, Chopin has introduced a very
singular passage, the most strikingly original portion
of the whole composition—a long-sustained, stupendous
octave climax of the left hand, consisting of a
little rhythmic figure of four notes, constantly reiterated
with growing power, against a sort of trumpet
obligato in brilliant measured chords for the right.
The movement vividly suggests the tramp of cavalry.
The composer had in mind the Polish light-horse of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_145' id='Page_145'>145</SPAN></span>
medieval fame, a very aristocratic body of picked
horsemen, composed of the flower of Polish chivalry
and disciplined in constant warfare with the Turks.
A number of the brilliant officers of this division were
necessarily present at the coronation ceremony when
the polonaise form originated, and these with their
exploits Chopin endeavors to introduce by means of
this singular passage.</p>
<p>There is a curious anecdote afloat concerning the
effect of this movement on the composer himself. On
one occasion, when playing the nearly completed work,
his nervous organism enfeebled by illness and his imagination
intensely excited by the fever-glow of composition,
he was seized by a peculiar hallucination.
He fancied that a band of the knights he had been
attempting to portray, came riding in from the gloom
of the outer night, in through the opening walls of his
apartment, arrayed in their antique war panoply,
horse and rider just as they might have arisen from
their century-old graves in Poland. He was so overcome
by this self-invoked apparition that he actually
fled from the room, and it was some days before he
could be induced to re-enter it or resume work on the
mighty polonaise.</p>
<p>Immediately following the great octave climax referred
to is a subdued, vague, fearsome little passage
in light running figures, totally foreign in movement,
mood, and even key to the remainder of the work,
for which we would be at a loss to account if unacquainted
with the circumstances narrated, but which,
with the light just thrown upon it, is readily understood.
The author seems to have lost for the time the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_146' id='Page_146'>146</SPAN></span>
thread of the composition, to have drifted far from its
martial mood and swinging rhythm, but after a period
of groping indecision, through which we hear the trepidation
and reluctant fascination with which he again
approaches this monster of his own creation, with a
sudden boldness of attack he regains the clew, resumes
with energy the march movement, and the work sweeps
to its close with even more than its original power and
splendor.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_147' id='Page_147'>147</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4187'>Chopin: Impromptu in A Flat, Op. 29</h1></div>
<p>Light, graceful, dainty, capricious,
full of playful tenderness and delicate
fancy is this little work, written
for and presented as a wedding
gift to one of his favorite pupils,
La Comtesse de Lobau, to whom it
is dedicated. The first movement
embodies the joyous, hopeful, congratulatory
spirit of the occasion, expressed with all
that refined elegance and polished perfection of style
of which Chopin was so preëminently the master,
both in music and language. It is the most unqualifiedly
optimistic strain from his pen with which I am
acquainted.</p>
<p>The trio, in F minor, brings a touch of half-veiled
sadness and irrepressible regret, as if called forth by
the thought that their art work together is now to end.
She has been for years one of his most talented, diligent,
and interesting students. She is, like himself,
a Polish exile in a foreign land, and their community
of sympathies and sorrows, combined with her charming
personality and congenial temperament, have
tended to merge the relations of teacher and pupil into
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_148' id='Page_148'>148</SPAN></span>
the closer bonds of a life-long friendship. He is naturally
reluctant to lose her, but this mood of depression
is soon subordinated to the thought that she has found
the philosopher’s stone, the fabled blue flower of the
German poets, the subtile, yet supreme panacea for
all human ills—love. This idea is expressed in the
last half of the trio as only Chopin could express it;
and the work ends with a repetition of the first strain,
brightly, happily, with a certain restful completeness
of fulfilled desire in the reiterated closing chords.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_149' id='Page_149'>149</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4226'>Chopin: Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66</h1></div>
<p>Among other manuscripts found on
Chopin’s writing-table after his death
was the original of this composition,
complete in every detail, but written
across the back, in his own trembling
hand, were the words, “To
be destroyed when I am gone.”</p>
<p>It is difficult to account for this
injunction, except upon the theory that he feared that
both the form and the content of the work were too
original, too subtle and complex, and too wholly unfamiliar
to the musical world of his day, to be readily
comprehended, and that it would either suffer from
incorrect rendition or be condemned and ignored.
So he preferred a quick death by fire for this child
of his sad later days, to a slow death by mutilation or
cruel neglect.</p>
<p>Fortunately the request was disregarded by his
friends. The work was published and has become
one of his most beloved, as it is one of his most faultlessly
beautiful compositions. The peculiarity of
form referred to is familiar to all who have attempted
the study of this impromptu. The whole first
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_150' id='Page_150'>150</SPAN></span>
movement, consisting of a continuous rapid figure of four
notes in the right hand against three in the left, is one
of the most unusual and difficult musical problems to
solve satisfactorily, and only to be mastered by long
and special practice—a case, as I have often said,
where it is well to remember the biblical injunction,
“let not thy right hand know what thy left hand
doeth.” But when smoothly played, it produces just
that sinuous, interwoven, flowing effect which the
composer desired, and which could not have been
obtained, in such perfection, in any other way.</p>
<p>The content of this composition, like that of many
of Chopin’s smaller works, is purely emotional, like
a strictly lyric poem, by his literary counterpart
Tennyson, for instance; it is a wholly subjective
expression of a mental state, an emotional condition,
not of any scene or any action. It touches the minor
key and sounds the plaintive harmonies to which his
heart-strings were tuned and vibrating at the time
when it was written. It voices a soft summer twilight
mood, half sad, half tender, full of vague regrets, of
indefinite longings and aspirations, of fluttering hope,
never destined to be realized, and bright fleeting
memories that rise and pass, dimmed by intervening
clouds of sorrow and disappointment, like the shifting
forms and hues of a kaleidoscope seen through a misty
glass, or the luminous phantoms of dead joys and
shadowy suggestions of the “might have been,”
against the gray background of a sad present and an
uncertain, promiseless future. It is a strange, delicately
complex mood, a mood of life’s sunset hour,
colored by the pathetic glories of the dying day, and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_151' id='Page_151'>151</SPAN></span>
the depressing, yet tranquilizing shadows of the coming
night—a mood well-nigh impossible to express,
but perfectly embodied in the music.</p>
<p>The following simple little verses, in which, as will
be seen, has been made a somewhat free use of the
suggestive symbolism of nature, may serve to illustrate,
though by no means to the writer’s satisfaction, his
conception of the artistic significance of this composition:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>            THE FANTASIE IMPROMPTU.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>The sigh of June through the swaying trees,</p>
<p class='line0'>The scent of the rose, new blown, on the breeze,</p>
<p class='line0'>The sound of waves on a distant strand,</p>
<p class='line0'>The shadows falling on sea and land;</p>
<p class='line0'>    All these are found</p>
<p class='line0'>    In this stream of sound,</p>
<p class='line0'>This murmuring, mystical, minor strain.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>And stars that glimmer in misty skies,</p>
<p class='line0'>Like tears that shimmer in sorrowing eyes,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the throb of a heart that beats in tune</p>
<p class='line0'>With tender regrets of a happier June,</p>
<p class='line0'>    When life was new</p>
<p class='line0'>    And love was true,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the soul was a stranger to sorrow and pain.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_152' id='Page_152'>152</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4319'>Chopin: Tarantelle, A Flat, Op. 43</h1></div>
<p>Brilliant, effective, and not excessively
difficult though it be, this admirably
constructed and thoroughly
characteristic <i>tarantelle</i> in A flat is
but little played; perhaps because it
appeals less to the love of the “true
Chopinism of Chopin” than most of
his compositions, as being out of the
recognized Chopin vein, deficient in the special melodic
and emotional elements usually distinguishing his works.
Nevertheless, considered objectively as a tarantelle,
from the standpoint, not of Chopinism, but of what
the true tarantelle should be, it is one of the best ever
written,—hence one of his masterpieces,—and furnishes
another proof of the almost infinite versatility of his
creative power, both in style and in mood.</p>
<p>The origin of the tarantelle, as a musical form, is
interesting and must be considered in judging the
real merit of this or any similar work. The name is
derived from that of the tarantula, that venomous
denizen of southern climes, of the spider species, whose
bite is usually fatal. There is a generally prevalent
belief among the peasants of both Spain and Italy,
a belief founded, no doubt, upon centuries of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_153' id='Page_153'>153</SPAN></span>
experience, that there is but one reliable cure for this
poison, and one which Nature herself prescribes and
imperatively demands—that of violent and protracted
bodily exercise, and the consequent excessively profuse
perspiration, enabling the system to throw off
the poison through the pores. The idea has the
same pathological base as the ancient Arabic cure for
hydrophobia, recently revived with great success
in this day of resurrection of buried wisdom—an extremely
hot and long-continued steam bath.</p>
<p>It is claimed that the victim of the tarantula is
seized by a delirious desire, an uncontrollable madness
for dancing, which, if fully gratified, in fact encouraged
and stimulated to the utmost, may save his life
by means of the prosaic but practical process above
suggested. So his friends assemble in haste, form a
circle on the village green or plaza, strike up the
wildest, most furiously rapid and exciting music possible,
on any instrument that may be at hand, preferably
the mandolin and tambourine, as the most
rhythmic and inspiring, and take turns dancing with
him, until each is exhausted and gives place to the
next, and until the victim recovers or dies of fatigue.
The faster the tempo, the more intoxicating the
music, the better the purpose will be served, and
the greater the hope of a successful cure.</p>
<p>From this crude and primitive germ the modern
musical art form, known and used all over the world,
has gradually developed, retaining, of course, as must
every characteristic dance form, the spirit and fundamental
element of the situation and circumstances
which gave it birth.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_154' id='Page_154'>154</SPAN></span>
The true tarantelle may be either in a major or
minor key, the latter being most common; but it
must be wild, stirring, exceedingly rapid, with a strong
rhythmic swing and a certain dash and go, irresistibly
suggesting the fever of the dance at its most delirious
ecstasy. It is always written in six-eight time, which
is somewhat singular, as it has none of the usual
rhythmic peculiarities of that measure, but invariably
produces the impression of twelve-eight, or, perhaps
still more strongly, that of four-four with the beats
divided into triplets. In fact, this is generally the
best method of counting it for the pupil. It should
contain no harmonic or technical complexities to distract
the attention of either player or listener from
the regular rhythmic swing and form and movement
of the dance; and the melodic trio, occasionally introduced
by some composers, is always an incongruous
artistic absurdity, wholly out of place.</p>
<p>Though the musical form is common property of all
composers in all lands, the actual dance, as such, is
specially identified with southern Spain and Italy,
and is rarely used elsewhere. To the tourist one of
the most unique and vividly interesting episodes of
his sojourn in these localities is the performance of
the tarantelle by one of the trained dancing girls,
which may be witnessed almost any evening, given
with all the dash and verve of the southern temperament,
a perfect embodiment of grace and fire and
dance frenzy.</p>
<p>This tarantelle by Chopin possesses all the essential
characteristics in a high degree, with not a single
lapse or irrelevant digression in mood, in form, even
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_155' id='Page_155'>155</SPAN></span>
in the details of accompaniment. It may be taken as
a model of the true tarantelle, spirited, well sustained
throughout, and eminently playable.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_156' id='Page_156'>156</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4423'>Chopin: Berceuse, Op. 57</h1></div>
<p>The Chopin Berceuse (which is the
French word for cradle-song) is a
most unique as well as most ideally
beautiful composition, standing
alone in all piano literature, as
regards its form and harmonic
structure, the only one of its species.
It is beyond all question or
comparison, the finest cradle-song ever written for
the piano, an exceptionally perfect example of that
rare blending of spontaneous genius and mechanical
ingenuity, for which Chopin was so preëminent, resulting
in a work matchless in its originality, its
suggestive realism, its delicacy of finish, and its poetic
content. An organ point on D flat, which is its only
bass note, sustained throughout the entire composition,
and a couplet of the simplest chords, the tonic
and dominant seventh, alternating back and forth
in a swinging, rocking motion, form the accompaniment,
continued practically without change, from
first measure to last, portraying naturally, easily, yet
unmistakably, the soothing monotony of the rockaby
movement. The left hand may be said to rock the
cradle throughout the whole composition, while in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_157' id='Page_157'>157</SPAN></span>
the soft, continually intertwining melody in the
right hand, like an endless, infolding circle of maternal
love, we find the lullaby song of the mother, sung
as she sits there in the hush of the twilight, rocking
her little one to sleep.</p>
<p>Around and over this melody Chopin has flung,
with his own inimitable delicacy, a silver lace-work of
embellishment, falling soft and light as the moonlight
spray from fountains in fairyland, as through
the idealizing summer haze, half veiling a distant landscape,
we seem to catch dim glimpses of the dream-pictures,
the fleeting fancies, the changing phantasmagoria
of prophetic visions, that drift through the
brain of the mother as she sits there in the gathering
dusk, waiting for the little eyes to be tightly closed,
and wondering vaguely to herself on what scenes they
will open in the far future years.</p>
<p>Slower and gentler grows the motion of the cradle,
softer and lower the lullaby song, further and further
the dream pictures drift into the shadows, until at
last the wings of slumber are folded about the little
one. Silence reigns. The mother’s daily task of
loving ministry is ended and she, too, may rest. The
two lingering closing chords, soft and slow, suggest
the moment when she rises from the cradle and spreads
her hands in silent benediction over the sleeping child.</p>
<p>Infinite tenderness and delicacy are needed for the
interpretation of this composition; a tone like violet
velvet, and a light, fluent finger technic, to which
its really extreme difficulties seem like dainty play.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_158' id='Page_158'>158</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4485'>Chopin: Scherzo in B Flat Minor, Op. 31</h1></div>
<p>A very familiar, yet always fresh and
intensely interesting composition is
this scherzo. The name is an Italian
word signifying a jest, and we find
in musical nomenclature a number
of derivatives from it, as <i>scherzino</i>
(little jest) and <i>scherzando</i> (jestingly,
playfully). The term is used
by most composers to designate compositions that are
bright, playful, humorous in character. Nearly all the
leading composers have written more or less in this vein.
Mendelssohn particularly excelled in it, and even serious
old Beethoven became quite jocose at times in the
scherzo movements of his symphonies; though it always
reminds one of the sportive dancing of an elephant.</p>
<p>Chopin applied the name to four of his greatest,
most intense and impassioned works, seemingly
without the smallest reason or relevancy. Why, no
one can even surmise, unless it may have been in a
mood of sardonic perversity, of sarcastic bitterness,
purposely to mislead the public as to the real artistic
intention and significance of the music, and see if they
would have sufficient perception to discover it for
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_159' id='Page_159'>159</SPAN></span>
themselves. It is a sad commentary on the insight
of many of our so-called musicians, that they have
not done so even to this day, and persist in playing
the Chopin scherzi jestingly and as trivially as possible,
which may be the subtle, covert jest which Chopin
intended. Who knows? In reality these four works,
especially the first three of them, are among his
greatest and grandest. They are broad, heroic,
seriously and profoundly emotional productions, marking
the high-water line of his creative power; full of
the strength and virile energy which those acquainted
only with his nocturnes and waltzes are inclined to
deny him altogether, but in which he far exceeds all
other composers, past or present, with the possible
exception of Beethoven and Wagner. Jests only in
name, or, if in fact, then in the sense of bitterest
satire, aimed at the world and at life, jests written in
the heart’s blood of the composer; written when
Poland, his beloved native land, lay in her death
agony, when three great European powers had combined
to write the word <i>finis</i> in Polish blood and tears,
across the last page of her history. What wonder that
the music throbs with intense but conflicting emotions—fiery
indignation, fierce defiance, bitter scorn, and,
in the next breath, pitiful tenderness for the wronged
and the suffering, heart-breaking sorrow for the unavailing
heroism and wasted lives of his countrymen!</p>
<p>All these moods will be found in swift and sharply
contrasting succession in all the four scherzi, but
notably in the one in B flat minor, which I regard
as the best of the four. The seeming incongruity
between its name and its musical content, its ostensible
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_160' id='Page_160'>160</SPAN></span>
and its real significance, always recalls to me
famous lines:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“The lip that’s first to wing the jest</p>
<p class='line0'>  Is first to breathe the secret sigh;</p>
<p class='line0'>The laugh that rings with keenest zest</p>
<p class='line0'>  But chokes the flood-gates of the eye.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_161' id='Page_161'>161</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4557'>Chopin: Prelude (D Flat Major), Op. 28, No. 15</h1></div>
<p>A unique position in pianoforte literature
is occupied by these Preludes,
Op. 28. They derive their name
rather from their form than from
their musical import. Like the usual
preludes to songs, or more extended
musical works, they are short,
fragmentary tone sketches rather
than complete pictures; each consisting, as a rule,
of a single, simple movement, and embodying but
a single concrete idea, and seeming to imply by its
brevity and its suggestive rather than fully descriptive
character, that a more elaborately developed
composition is to follow, to which this has been but an
introduction and in which the idea, here merely outlined,
will receive more exhaustive treatment. In
reality, however, each of these preludes is complete in
itself; an exquisite musical vignette containing, like
some dainty vial of hand-cut Venetian glass, the distilled
essence of dead flowers of memory and experience
from Chopin’s past; particularly of scenes, episodes,
and emotional impressions of his romantic life on the
island of Majorca. Just as a painter might have
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_162' id='Page_162'>162</SPAN></span>
sketched, with hasty but truthfully graphic pencil,
on the pages of his portfolio, the fleeting impressions
produced upon his senses and imagination by this
novel, picturesque environment, so the composer has
preserved in these bits of offhand but vivid tone
painting, glimpses into his daily life, his moods and
experiences during that winter of 1838-39.</p>
<p>Banished by his physicians to this Mediterranean
isle, in the hope of benefit to his fast failing health,
and refused shelter in any hotel or private residence,
on account of the there prevalent belief that consumption
was contagious, Chopin and the little party of devoted
friends who accompanied him (most notable
among whom was the famous French novelist, George
Sand) were forced to improvise a temporary abode
in the semi-habitable wing of an old ruined convent,
which had been abandoned by the monks. It was
picturesquely situated on a rocky promontory, commanding
a view, on the one side, of the open sea,
dotted with the countless white sails of Mediterranean
commerce; on the other, of the sheltered bay, the
village beyond, and the lofty volcanic mountains in
the background. Here they spent the winter, and
here nearly all of the preludes, with many others of
Chopin’s most poetic smaller works, originated—artistic
crystallizations of passing impressions and experiences,
concerning which and the life in which they
originated, George Sand writes: “While staying here
he composed some short but very beautiful pieces
which he modestly entitled preludes. They were
real masterpieces. Some of them create such vivid
impressions that the shades of the dead monks seem
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_163' id='Page_163'>163</SPAN></span>
to rise and pass before the hearer in solemn and gloomy
funeral pomp. Others are full of charm and melancholy,
glowing with the sparkling fire of enthusiasm,
breathing with the hope of restored health. The laughter
of the children at play, the distant strains of the
guitar, the twitter of birds on the damp branches,
would call forth from his soul melodies of indescribable
sweetness and grace. But many also are so full of
gloom and sadness that, in spite of the pleasure they
afford, the listener is filled with pain. Some of his
later tone-poems bring before us a sparkling crystal
stream reflecting the sunbeams. Chopin’s quieter compositions
remind us of the song of the lark as it lightly
soars into the ether, or the gentle gliding of the swan
over the smooth mirror of the waters; they seem filled
with the holy calm of nature. When Chopin was in a
despondent mood, the piercing cry of the hungry eagle
among the crags of Majorca, the mournful wailing of
the storm, and the stern immovability of the snow-clad
heights, would awaken gloomy fancies in his soul.
Then again, the perfume of the orange blossoms, the
vine bending to the earth beneath its rich burden, the
peasant singing his Moorish songs in the fields, would
fill him with delight.”</p>
<p>The Prelude in D flat, No. 15, which I select as one
of the most beautiful and characteristic of these
sketches, embodies a strange day dream of the composer
in which, as he says, “vision and reality were
indistinguishably blended.”</p>
<p>One bright, late autumn morning the little party
of friends had taken advantage of the weather, and of
the fact that Chopin seemed in unusually good health
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_164' id='Page_164'>164</SPAN></span>
and spirits, to make a long-talked-of excursion to the
neighboring village, promising to return before sunset.
During their absence a sudden tropical tempest of
terrific severity swept the island. The wind blew a
hurricane, the rain descended in floods, the streams
rose, bridges and roadways were destroyed, and it was
only with extreme difficulty and considerable danger
that they succeeded in reaching the convent about
midnight, having spent six hours in traversing the last
mile and a half of the distance. They found Chopin
in a state bordering on delirium. The physical effect
of the storm on his shattered nerves, combined with
his own depression and his keen anxiety for them, had
combined to work his sensitive, and at that time
morbid, temperament up to a state of feverish excitement,
in which the normal barriers between perception
and hallucination had well-nigh vanished. He
told them afterward that he had been a prey to a gruesome
vision of which this prelude is the musical portrayal.</p>
<p>He fancied that he lay dead at the bottom of the
sea; that near him sat a beautiful siren singing in
exquisitely sweet and tender strains, a song of his own
life and love and sorrow. But though her voice was
soothing in its dreamy pathos, and though he felt
oppressed by a crushing languor and fatigue and longed
for rest, he could not lose consciousness, because tormented
by the regular, relentlessly monotonous fall
of great drops upon his heart. As the drops continued
increasing steadily in weight and in importunate
demand upon his attention, as if burdened with some
great and sad significance which he must recognize, he
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_165' id='Page_165'>165</SPAN></span>
became aware that they were the tears of his friends
on earth whom he had loved and lost. With this
knowledge, vivid memory and poignant pain awoke
together, and his anguish grew to an overpowering
climax of intensity. Then, nature’s limit being
reached, the force of his tempest of grief finally exhausted
itself, and he sank gradually into a state of
dull, despairing lethargy, and at last into welcome
unconsciousness, the last sound in his ears being the
soothing strains of the siren, and his last sensation the
now faint and feeble, but still regular falling of his
friends’ tears upon his heart.</p>
<p>This composition should be conceived and executed
so as to render, to the full, its intensely emotional
character. The first theme in D flat major, with its
sweetly languorous tone, should be given quite
slowly, with pressure touch, producing a penetrating,
but not loud, singing quality of tone, while the reiterated
A flat in the accompaniment, which, throughout
the whole work suggests the falling drops, must
be at first vaguely hinted rather than distinctly struck.
The middle part in chords should be commenced very
softly with a whispering, mysterious tone, affecting
the hearer like the first shadow of an approaching
thunder cloud, or the presentiment of coming woe.
Then the power should steadily increase—gradually,
relentlessly, like the stealthy, irresistible rising of the
dark cold tide about some chained victim in an ocean
cave, where the light of day has never penetrated;
mounting steadily—not rapidly—to the overwhelming
climax of the reiterated octave B in the right hand.</p>
<p>In the repetition of this passage the same effect
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_166' id='Page_166'>166</SPAN></span>
should be produced, with the climax still more intensified.
Then let the power as gradually decrease, till
at the return of the siren’s song it has sunk into pianissimo
and the closing measure should fade away into
silence, like the echo of dream bells.</p>
<p>I have dwelt at some length upon this prelude because
it is the best known of the set; the most complete
and, generally speaking, the most effective;
and because, in connection with the suggestive quotation
from George Sand, it will serve as a helpful illustration
to the student in arriving at an intelligent
comprehension of the others. But a few words in
further elucidation of some of them may be in place.</p>
<p>The first, in somber, sonorous chords, expresses
Chopin’s initial impressions of the stately, but half-ruined
monastery in which he and his little party had
found refuge, and the solemn thoughts called up by
its decaying grandeur, its silent loneliness, its vast,
gloomy, memory-haunted halls and cloisters.</p>
<p>The third represents an evening scene, with the
setting sun kindling to crimson and gold the spires
and picturesque whitewashed cottages of the village
of Majorca, a mile away across the little bay, while the
gentle breeze, like the sigh of departing day, brings
the sound of silvery bells from the little village church
ringing the vesper chimes.</p>
<p>The fifth and sixth embody the same mood, in an
almost identically similar setting. They may be
effectively combined into one picture of a dark, depressing,
late autumnal day; a day of gray skies and
leaden sea; of heavy, windless calm, the calm of
exhaustion and utter weariness, with the low, sad
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_167' id='Page_167'>167</SPAN></span>
rain dripping monotonously upon the roof like the tears
of the gods for a dying world. In one, the melody
expressing the element of human sorrow is in the
soprano, plaintively, touchingly, sweetly pathetic. In
the other, it is placed in the lower register of Chopin’s
favorite orchestral instrument, the ’cello, which it reproduces,
throbbing with a more passionate intensity,
a more poignant pain. But in general character and
treatment the two belong together.</p>
<p>No. 8 tells of the gay carol of the birds at dawn,
floating in at the open windows of Chopin’s chamber.
No. 17 is a rustic dance of the Majorcan peasants.
No. 24, the last, is a graphic description of a tropical
storm with the flash of lightning and the ominous roll
of the thunder literally portrayed.</p>
<p>Space does not permit of a detailed analysis of all
the numbers, but each has its special character and
suggestive import, and is a picture of some episode
or mood during that winter’s sojourn on Majorca.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_168' id='Page_168'>168</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4780'>Chopin: Waltz, A Flat, Op. 42</h1></div>
<p>Every dance, the waltz included, is
based upon and adapted to some
particular dance movement. All its
effects, whether of melody, harmony,
rhythm, or embellishment, are carefully
calculated by the composer to
meet the requirements of this special
movement, to conform to and express
its general character and be governed by its
usual rate of speed. Each of these dance movements
embodies in itself some peculiar quality or
characteristic, such as stately grace in the minuet,
martial pomp in the polonaise, impetuous vivacity
in the galop, which the music must indicate and
supplement. The Chopin waltzes are no exception
to this rule. They are distinctly and preëminently
waltzes; and though of course not for actual dance purposes,
they are intended as idealized tone-pictures of
the waltz, and of ball-room scenes and experiences.</p>
<p>The one in question, Op. 42 in A flat, is planned
upon a broader scale, contains more variety, and taxes
more thoroughly the resources of the accomplished
pianist than any other work of Chopin in this vein.
Its tender, floating melodies, bright, delicate passage
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_169' id='Page_169'>169</SPAN></span>
work, and swinging, swaying rhythms are replete with
all that eloquent, gliding grace, that arch coquetry,
that passionate warmth of mood, which we so invariably
associate with the festive scenes,</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>      “Where youth and pleasure meet</p>
<p class='line0'>To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.”</p>
</div>
<p>Lights sparkle, delicate draperies are afloat, like perfumed
clouds, upon the languid air, bright eyes scintillate
with mirth or soften with emotion, and</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“All goes merry as a marriage bell.”</p>
</div>
<p>And yet throughout all there runs a half-hidden undertone
that tells of deeper, sterner thought and far intenser
feeling; that tells of dark forebodings, of distant
alarms, of sudden trumpet calls; so that the work in its
entirety cannot but seem to us the counterpart in music
of that familiar, almost hackneyed, but immortal word-picture
of Byron, describing the great ball on the eve
of the battle of Waterloo, to whose thunderous music
the fate of nations was reversed, like the steps of the
dancers in a ball-room, and France changed monarchs
as a lady shifts her partners.</p>
<p>The somber trio strain, about the middle of the composition,
suggests to us “Brunswick’s fated chieftain,”
who sat apart and watched the dancers and listened
to the revelry with “Death’s prophetic ear.” Later,
where the rhythmic pulsation of the waltz is abruptly
and violently interrupted in the midst of its flowing
cadences, by a strong emphasized G natural F, repeated
twice by both hands in unison, we are forcibly reminded
of the line—</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!”</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_170' id='Page_170'>170</SPAN></span>
After a moment of consternation and suspense, the
waltz movement proceeds, appearing almost flippant
by contrast, and seeming to say, like the verse which
follows,</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!”</p>
</div>
<p>Lastly, the breathless, impetuous finale indicates the
“hurrying to and fro,” the “mounting in hot haste,”
and “marshalling in arms,” with which the dance
broke up at midnight, as cavaliers rushed from the ball-room
to the battlefield. Both Chopin, the greatest
musician of Poland, and Mickiewicz, her greatest poet,
were powerfully impressed by the personality and
poetry of Lord Byron, and there is no doubt that our
composer had the stanzas of the contemporaneous
English writer in mind in the creation of this work.</p>
<p>The first duty of the performer in rendering this
composition should be to suggest irresistibly to the
listeners both the mood and movement of the waltz,
and to force them to feel, as far as may be, the elastic
swing of the rhythm and the warm, voluptuous mood
of the music. The tone quality employed should constantly
change to suit the contrasting colors of the
different strains; now warmly lyric, now sparkling
and vibrant, at times deeply somber, and again strikingly
dramatic and declamatory.</p>
<p>As to tempo, I would caution the player against an
extreme rate of speed. Remember that the usual
waltz step is, approximately at least, our guide in
choosing the proper movement. I am aware that
many pianists, of the greatest skill and reputation, are
guilty of the cardinal error of playing one of these
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_171' id='Page_171'>171</SPAN></span>
beautiful poetic little compositions of Chopin’s at
<i>prestissimo</i> tempo, so as to display their phenomenal
finger dexterity at the expense of all musical and
artistic truth; so fast, indeed, that even if the notes
were all struck with accuracy, which is by no means
always the case, its graceful rhythmic swing and all
its melodic and harmonic effects are utterly lost,
leaving nothing but an incoherent, formless, purposeless
whirlwind of tone, as dry and unlovely as the eddies of
dust in a September gale, suggesting neither the mood
nor movement of a waltz.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_172' id='Page_172'>172</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4904'>Chopin’s Nocturnes</h1></div>
<p>In derivation and general significance
the term nocturne coincides with
our English word nocturnal. It is
music appertaining to the night, a
night piece, suited to and expressing
its usually quiet, dreamful, pensive
mood, and frequently portraying
some nocturnal scene or episode.
The name nocturne was originally used as synonymous
with that of serenade, and they were virtually identical
in character. But in later times it has come to
have a much broader application, and to-day, though
every serenade is of course a nocturne, all nocturnes
are by no means serenades.</p>
<p>The serenade is a real or imaginary song of love,
and presupposes a fair listener at a lattice window and
a lover singing beneath the stars, to the accompaniment
of a harp, mandolin, or guitar. The nocturne
may legitimately embody any phase of human emotion
or experience, or any aspect of inanimate nature,
which can rationally be conceived of as appropriately
emanating from or environed by nocturnal conditions.</p>
<p>It must not be supposed that this vein of composition
was Chopin’s only or even his most important
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_173' id='Page_173'>173</SPAN></span>
field of activity. To judge him exclusively by his
nocturnes and waltzes is precisely like judging Shakespeare
solely by his sonnets. But it was a vein in which,
owing to his peculiarly poetic temperament and fertile
imagination, he far excelled all other writers, no less in
the quality than in the number and variety of his
creations.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_174' id='Page_174'>174</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4942'>Chopin: Nocturne in E Flat, Op. 9, No. 2</h1></div>
<p>This perhaps is the easiest and certainly
the best known of Chopin’s
nocturnes. Scarcely a student but
has played it at one time or another.
In fact, it has been worn well-nigh
to shreds; yet still retains its simple,
tender charm, if approached in the
proper spirit. It is replete with
melodic beauty and warm harmonic coloring, and
is an excellent study in tone-production and shading,
as well as a model of symmetrical form. It was
one of his early works, and the glow of first youth
still lingers about it, in spite of its over-familiarity
and much abuse. As a teaching-piece it sometimes
surprises 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.</p>
<p>It is a pure lyric, a love-song without words, but to
which a dreamily tender poetic text can easily be
imagined and supplied; and the very evident suggestion
of the harp or guitar in its accompanying chords
facilitates the effort and brightens the poetic effect.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_175' id='Page_175'>175</SPAN></span>
So far as I can learn, it has no definite local background,
either in fact or tradition; no special place or
persons to which it refers. It is an abstract idea
treated subjectively, the embodied emotional reflex
of imaginary conditions. The scene is a garden—any
garden, so it be beautiful, rich with the vivid luxuriance
of the South, fragrant with the breath of sleeping
flowers, with the South summer-night hanging fondly
over it, and the summer stars glittering above. The
melody is the song of the ideal troubadour, pouring
out his heart to the night and his listening lady, while
the accompanying chords are lightly swept from
vibrant strings by the practised fingers of the minstrel.
The cadenza at the close is intended as a mere delicate
ripple of liquid brilliancy, as if the moon, suddenly
breaking through a veil of evening mist, had flooded
the scene with a rain of silvery radiance.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_176' id='Page_176'>176</SPAN></span><h1 id='t4988'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 2</h1></div>
<p>This nocturne, though one of Chopin’s
most intrinsically beautiful compositions
for the piano, is even more
frequently heard upon the violin.
It has been, for decades, a favorite
lyric number with all the leading
violinists of the world, and adapts
itself admirably to the resources and
peculiar character of this instrument.</p>
<p>For this there is an excellent reason, far other than
mere chance. On a certain evening in the early thirties
were assembled in an elegant Parisian salon a company
of the musical and literary <i>élite</i> of the French
capital, to meet several foreign celebrities and enjoy
one of those rare opportunities for intellectual and
artistic converse and companionship, of which we read
with envious longing, but which are practically unknown
in our busy, prosaic age.</p>
<p>There were present Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn,
the latter then in Paris on a brief visit, besides many
local musicians of note, including some of the professors
of the Conservatoire, also George Sand, Heinrich
Heine, Alfred De Musset, with some lesser literary
lights, and a brilliant gathering of social leaders. It
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_177' id='Page_177'>177</SPAN></span>
was an evening long to be remembered for the sparkling
wit and repartee, flashed back and forth from
these brilliant intellects, like the rays of light from the
glittering jewels of the ladies, for the occasional bursts
of glowing eloquence and poetic thought from the
profounder minds, and especially for the music, which
was plentiful and of the best.</p>
<p>It may have been on this very occasion that Rossini
made his famous, but most unfriendly, hit at the
expense of Liszt’s marvelous powers of improvisation,
which he, Rossini, was inclined seemingly to doubt.
Liszt was being pressed to play and to improvise, and
Rossini called out across the room: “Yes, my friend,
do improvise that beautiful thing that you improvised
at Madam —’s last Friday, and at Lord So
and So’s the week before.”</p>
<p>In the course of the evening a local violinist of
prominence played for the company a new composition
of his own, a sweet, long-sustained cantilena, with a
more involved second movement in double stopping.
When he had finished and the applause had subsided,
one of the ladies was heard to remark, “What a pity
that the piano is incapable of these effects! It is brilliant,
dramatic, resourceful, what you will; but only
the violin can stir the heart in that way.”</p>
<p>Chopin rose, bowing with one of his equivocal
smiles, half-sad, half-playfully mocking, stepped to
the piano and improvised this nocturne, a perfect
reproduction of all the best violin effects, cantilena
and all, including the double-stopping in the second
theme, with a certain warmth and poetry added,
which were all his own. Of course, it was afterward
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_178' id='Page_178'>178</SPAN></span>
finished and perfected in detail, but in substance it
was the same as the D flat nocturne which we all
know so well and which the violinists, though most of
them unconscious of the reason, have singled out as
specially adapted to their instrument.</p>
<p>The player should keep the violin and its effects in
mind in rendering it, the lingering, songful, string
quality of tone in the melody, the smooth legato, the
leisurely, well-rounded embellishments; and the tempo
should never be hurried. It may be well to say, in
this connection, that in these Chopin nocturnes, and in
all other lyric compositions, the embellishments, grace-notes,
and the like should be made to conform to the
general mood and character of the rest of the music.
Symmetry and fitting proportions are among the
primal laws of all art.</p>
<p>In a Liszt rhapsody, a cadenza should flash like a
rocket, but in a Chopin nocturne it should glide with
easy, undulating grace, should float like a wind-blown
ribbon, a fallen rose-leaf. Too often we hear the
ornamental passages in a lyric played as if they were
wholly irrelevant matter, dropped in there by accident
out of some other entirely different compositions,—a
bit of vain, noisy display in the midst of a poetic
dream, breaking instead of enhancing its charm,
utterly incongruous. Harmonize the embellishments
with the subject! Fit the trimming to the fabric!</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_179' id='Page_179'>179</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5084'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 32, No. 1</h1></div>
<p>Although technically easy and
thoroughly musical, this little work
is strangely enough but little played.
It is technically no harder than the
Op. 9 referred to, though it requires
more intensity and stronger
contrasts in its treatment.</p>
<p>It is singular that a comparatively
simple composition, of such intrinsic merit, by one of
the great composers, comprising, as it does, so many
attractive elements in such small compass, should be so
little used. Possibly, to those not acquainted with its
subject, the closing chords, with their sharp, almost
painful contrast, and utter dissimilarity to the preceding
movement, have seemed incongruous and unintelligible;
but, when the theme and purpose of the
whole are understood, it is seen in what a masterly
manner, and with what simple material, Chopin has
produced the most striking dramatic results.</p>
<p>The subject of this nocturne is the same as that of
Robert Browning’s later poem, “In a Gondola”; an
episode to be found in the annals of Venice, when, at
the height of her pride and power, she was nominally
a republic, but from the large legislative body elected
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_180' id='Page_180'>180</SPAN></span>
exclusively from among the nobility, an inner, higher
circle of forty was chosen, and they, in turn, selected
from their number, by secret ballot, the mysterious,
potent Council of Ten, gruesomely famous in history,
who wielded the real power of the State, often for
the darkest personal ends, the Doge being little more
than a figure-head. Highest and most dreaded of all
was the Council of Three, chosen from their own
number by the Ten, by an ingenious system of secret
ballot so perfect that only those selected knew on
whom the choice had fallen, and they did not know
each other’s identity. They met at night, in a secret
chamber, in which the three tables and three chairs,
and even the blocks of marble in the pavement of the
floor were symbolically triangular. They entered at
the fixed hour, by three separate doors, disguised in
black masks and long black cloaks, conferred in
whispers only, and their decrees, like those of the
Greek Fates, were inexorable and inevitable. Veiled
and shielded by mystery, they worked their awful
will, from which there was no escape and no appeal.</p>
<p>The story runs that once a beautiful and high-spirited
heiress, the daughter of a former Doge, and
the special ward of the Council of Three, as the disposal
of her hand and fortune was an important
State matter, had the courage to brave their prohibition
and secretly to welcome the suit and return
the love of a young, gallant, but fortuneless knight,
who risked his life to obtain their brief, stolen interviews,
or to breathe his love in subdued but heart-stirring
melody beneath her window. One night,
when a great ball at the palace seemed to afford an
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_181' id='Page_181'>181</SPAN></span>
opportunity for her to escape unnoticed, he came disguised
as a gondolier, and for a few sweet moments
they were alone together upon the moonlit water.</p>
<p>The first theme of this nocturne suggests the scene
in the gondola, with its softly swaying motion as it
feels the faint swell of the great sea’s distant heart-throb,
while the melodic phrases embody the tender
mood of the lovers as if in a sweet, low song. Browning
expresses the mood in his opening lines:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“I send my heart up to thee, all my heart,</p>
<p class='line0'>  In this my singing;</p>
<p class='line0'>For the stars help me and the sea bears part;</p>
<p class='line0'>  The very night is clinging</p>
<p class='line0'>Closer to Venice’s streets to leave one space</p>
<p class='line0'>  Above me, whence thy face</p>
<p class='line0'>May light my joyous heart to thee, its dwelling-place.”</p>
</div>
<p>The second theme is somewhat more intense,
though still subdued. It tells of greater passion and
also of deeper sadness, with an occasional passing
thrill of suppressed terror. Browning sings it:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“O which were best, to roam or rest?</p>
<p class='line0'>The land’s lap or the water’s breast?</p>
<p class='line0'>To sleep on yellow millet sheaves,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or swim in lucid shadows, just</p>
<p class='line0'>Eluding water-lily leaves.</p>
<p class='line0'>An inch from Death’s black fingers, thrust</p>
<p class='line0'>To lock you, whom release he must;</p>
<p class='line0'>Which life were best on summer eves?”</p>
</div>
<p>To which the lady answers:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Dip your arm o’er the boat-side, elbow deep,</p>
<p class='line0'>As I do; thus; were death so unlike sleep,</p>
<p class='line0'>Caught this way? Death’s to fear from flame or steel,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or poison, doubtless; but from water—feel!”</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_182' id='Page_182'>182</SPAN></span>
The last measures of the lyric melody, full of lingering
sweetness, are like the parting kiss. Then suddenly,
brutally, with the G major chord against the crashing
F’s in the bass, the voice of fate breaks the tender
spell. Death enters with swift, heart-crushing tread,
and his icy hand snatches his victim from the very
arms of love; and the closing chords, brief, but impressive,
voice the shock, the cry of anguish, and the
swift sinking into black despair, which were the lady’s
more bitter share in the tragedy. For too soon the
time had passed. Their brief happiness had been
saddened and softened to deeper, graver tenderness
by the knowledge of impending danger, by the ever-recurrent
cloud like the passing thought that Browning
voices in the line:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“What if the Three should catch at last thy serenader?”</p>
</div>
<p>They must return or be detected. Reluctantly he
guides the boat back to the landing, and just in the
moment of their farewell he is surprised, overpowered,
and stabbed to death by waiting assassins, dying in
her arms.</p>
<p>The closing of the nocturne as just described is,
to my thinking, more dramatic, more realistic, and
far stronger than the last lines of Browning’s poem:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“It was ordained to be so, sweet! and best</p>
<p class='line0'>Comes now, beneath thine eyes, upon thy breast.</p>
<p class='line0'>Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards! Care</p>
<p class='line0'>Only to put aside thy beauteous hair</p>
<p class='line0'>My blood will hurt! The Three I do not scorn</p>
<p class='line0'>To death, because they never lived; but I</p>
<p class='line0'>Have lived, indeed, and so (yet one more kiss) can die.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_183' id='Page_183'>183</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5235'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 1</h1></div>
<p>Opus 37, No. 1, in G minor, was written
during Chopin’s winter sojourn on
the island of Majorca already described.
On this occasion also the
composer had been left alone to occupy
himself with his piano, while
his more active friends went for a
sail on the bay. The sun had disappeared
behind a western bank of cloud. The evening
shadows were fast closing around him, filling with gloom
and mystery the distant recesses of the vast, irregular
apartment where he sat, and the columned cloister beyond,
which led from the ruined refectory of the monastery
to the chapel where the priests and abbots of ten
centuries lay entombed. The ruins of a dead past were
on every side. The silent presence of Death seemed all
about him. He felt that, like the day, his life was
swiftly declining, and the mood of the place and the hour
was strong upon him. It found utterance in the sorrowfully
beautiful, passionately pathetic first melody of this
nocturne, with its falling minor phrases, like the cry
of a deep but suppressed despair, and its somber, sobbing
accompaniment, like the muffled moan of the
surf on the adjacent beach. A precisely similar mood
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_184' id='Page_184'>184</SPAN></span>
is powerfully expressed in Tennyson’s poem “Break,
break, break,” especially in the closing lines,</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“But the tender grace of a day that is dead</p>
<p class='line0'>Will never come back to me.”</p>
</div>
<p>Suddenly, in the midst of his melancholy reveries,
Chopin was seized by one of those deceptive visions,
so frequent at that time. The shadowy forms of a
procession of dead monks seemed to emerge from
beneath the obscure arches of the refectory, in a slow
funeral march along the cloister behind him to the
chapel, where their evening services were formerly
held, solemnly chanting as they passed their <i>Santo
Dio</i>. This impressive chant, as if sung by a chorus of
subdued male voices, is realistically reproduced in the
middle movement of the nocturne. The very words
<i>Santo Dio</i> are distinctly suggested by each little phrase
of four consecutive chords.</p>
<p>When the monks have vanished, and their voices
have died away in the distance beneath the echoing
vault of the chapel, Chopin recovers himself with a
shudder and resumes his sad dreaming, symbolized by
a return of the first melody. But just at its close the
sun sinks below the western bank, its last rays gleam
for a moment on the white sail of the boat just rounding
up to the landing. His friends return. His lonely
brooding is cheerfully interrupted. His mood brightens
and the nocturne ends with an exquisite transition to
the major key.</p>
<p>The player should strive in this work for a somber
intensity of tone, and should render each phrase of
the melody as if the pain expressed were his own,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_185' id='Page_185'>185</SPAN></span>
making the undertone of the sobbing sea distinctly
apparent in the accompanying chords. In the middle
movement, where the monks’ chant is introduced,
the imitation of a muffled chorus of male voices should
be made deceptively realistic. All the notes of each
chord must be pressed, not struck, with a firm but
elastic touch, and exactly simultaneously; and each
little quadruplet of chords must rise and fall in power,
so accented as to enunciate the words <i>Santo Dio</i>. This
is at once the saddest, the deepest, and the most descriptive,
while technically the easiest, of all the
Chopin nocturnes.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_186' id='Page_186'>186</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5314'>Chopin: Nocturne, Op. 37, No. 2</h1></div>
<p>Graceful, tender, and cheerful is the
general tone of the Nocturne in
G major. It was written the following
summer after Chopin’s return to
France, during a visit of some weeks
at Nohant, the beautiful country
seat of George Sand, where in the
midst of a smiling rural landscape,
bright and winning, rather than awe-inspiring, breathing
the mild but invigorating air of his beloved France,
surrounded by cheerful and congenial companions and
by every possible physical comfort, our composer’s
health and spirits temporarily revived. To this epoch,
brief as it was, we owe some of his most genial and
attractive compositions.</p>
<p>Again it is evening and Chopin is alone, but this time
it is in his own familiar, cozy room, where the perfect
appointments and tasteful arrangement tell of loving
feminine hands, glad to minister to every fancy of his
delicately fastidious nature. The scent of flowers
floats in through the open window, and mingled with
it the low voices of friends in the garden below. He
watches the play of lights and shadows among the
swaying branches of a tall, graceful willow tree just
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_187' id='Page_187'>187</SPAN></span>
outside his casement, the vaguely outlined, fleecy,
floating gray clouds, ghosts of dead storms, silently
passing on into the infinite unknown spaces of the sky.
He listens to the night wind sighing among the tree-tops,
to the good-nights of sleepy birds, to the vesper
bell of a distant village, and embodies his dreamy
impressions in the first movement of this nocturne,
with its wavering, undulating murmurous effects, and
its faint, intermittent melodic suggestions, like the
half-remembered music of a dream.</p>
<p>The second movement, twice alternating with the
first, though in different keys, is distinctly a slumber
song in rhythm and mood, a restful, gentle, soothing
lullaby to the composer’s own weary heart, to his
momentarily slumbering griefs, and forebodings; peaceful,
tender, pensively sad at times, but entirely free
from that ultra-bitterness and gloom which color most
of his later works. His Polish biographer calls this
the most beautiful melody Chopin ever wrote, and it
reminds us strongly of Tennyson’s lines in the same
mood:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“There is sweet music here that softer falls</p>
<p class='line0'>Than petals from blown roses on the grass,</p>
<p class='line0'>Or night-dews on still waters between walls</p>
<p class='line0'>Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;</p>
<p class='line0'>Music that gentler on the spirit lies</p>
<p class='line0'>Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.”</p>
</div>
<p>An extremely light but fluent legato touch, and an
ethereal delicacy and grace of conception are demanded
for the first movement, and the ever-present curve of
beauty should be indicated in each little passage of
three measures. Let the player imagine a brightly
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_188' id='Page_188'>188</SPAN></span>
tinted feather ball, tossed lightly into the air and
fluttering softly and slowly to earth again.</p>
<p>For the second movement, a singing lyric tone, a
subdued warmth of color, and a steady, reposeful,
rocking rhythm are a necessity, and the lullaby mood
should be kept in mind.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_189' id='Page_189'>189</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>LISZT </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr><td class='tdl'>1811 </td><td class='tdr'> 1886</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_191' id='Page_191'>191</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5394'>Chopin’s Polish Songs, Transcribed for Piano by Liszt</h1></div>
<p>Six of these songs, transcribed for
piano, with all Liszt’s wonted skill,
render this charming vein of Chopin’s
work available to the pianist.
I cite two as illustrations:</p>
<p>These Polish songs by Chopin are,
comparatively speaking, unknown,
even among musicians, overshadowed
and hidden as they have always been by
the number and magnitude of his pianoforte works,
like wood-violets lost in the depths of a forest. Yet,
though small and unpretentious as the violets, they
are among his most genial and poetic creations. Seventeen
of them have been published, as genuine bits
of vocal melody as ever were penned or sung; and there
are many more which have never been printed, scarcely
even written out in full; hasty pastime sketches, the
fair daughters of a momentary inspiration, wedded to
stray verses of Polish poetry which caught Chopin’s
fancy, from the pen of Mickiewicz and other national
bards.</p>
<h2 id='t5419'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_192' id='Page_192'>192</SPAN></span>The Maiden’s Wish</h2>
<p>“The Maiden’s Wish,” the first of the two songs
presented, is one of the earliest and most popular, so
far as known; a dainty, capricious little mazurka song,
half playful, half tender. The words embody the fond
wish of a merry, winsome maiden, whose life is touched
to seriousness by the shadow of first love upon her
pathway, the wish that she were a sunbeam to leave
the high vault of Heaven and desert the flowers and
streams of earth to shine through her lover’s window
and gladden him alone; or that she were a bird to
leave the fields and forests and fly on swift pinions to
his window at early dawn and wake him with a song
of love.</p>
<p>The music accurately and closely reproduces the
spirit of the words, in all their warmth, archness, and
grace. The short but continually recurring trill,
“ever on the self-same note,” in prelude and interlude,
suggests the thrill which the maiden feels at heart as
she flits singing about the house and garden, unconsciously
keeping step to the rhythm of the mazurka,
the native dance of her province.</p>
<h2 id='t5444'>The Ring</h2>
<p>The second song selected resembles in form the
ordinary folk-song, with its single, reiterated musical
strophe, and also in its simplicity, its fresh, unaffected
sincerity of mood. But it shows far more perfect
workmanship, and is of a much more refined and
poetic quality. It is plaintively sad, tenderly pathetic
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_193' id='Page_193'>193</SPAN></span>
in every phrase, a pale, delicate blossom of sentiment,
dropped upon the grave of youth and first love. It
describes the early betrothal of a youth, full of faith,
hope, and happiness, to his playmate and child-love.
On departing into strange lands, the youth gives the
maiden a ring and she gives him in exchange a promise
to become his bride on his return. After years of
weary wandering, during which his heart has been ever
faithful to his early love, he returns to find she has
forgotten ring and promise and lover. But in spite
of her perfidy and the hopelessness of his attachment,
his constant thoughts cling ever to the little ring he
gave and the little playmate with her childish grace
and garb. A very old story and a very simple one,
but none the less sad for that.</p>
<p>In addition to its intrinsic charm and artistic merit
this little composition possesses a personal interest in
its subtle reference to Chopin’s own experience. The
great tone-poet knew a love other and earlier than that
destructive passion for George Sand which blasted his
life and broke his heart. But his beloved Constantia,
to whom he was betrothed before leaving Poland, at
twenty years of age, to seek his fortune in the great
world, forgot her plighted vows and the little ring he
gave as their visible token, and married another; and
it is the composer’s own grieved and disappointed
heart that speaks in this tenderly beautiful song, saddened
by the first of the many swiftly gathering
clouds which obscured the brightness of his sunny
youth, and in a few short years rendered the name of
Chopin synonymous to his friends with grief and
suffering.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_194' id='Page_194'>194</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5488'>The Poetic and Religious Harmonies by Franz Liszt</h1></div>
<p>Liszt’s reputation in this country as
a pianoforte composer has hitherto
rested, in the main, upon his brilliant
and popular operatic fantasies,
a few of his études, and his unique
and world-famous Hungarian rhapsodies;
all of which, though effective
and by no means to be despised, are,
after all, only the bright bubbles tossed off in playful
mood from the surface of his genius, like the globules
that rise from the sparkling champagne.</p>
<p>That there is a deeper, more serious, and far more
important vein of strictly original work of his, which
has as yet scarcely been discovered, still less exploited,
few persons, even among the musicians themselves,
seem to be aware. Of course, in the large cities, his
orchestral works—that is to say, some of them—have
been occasionally given and his concertos have become
fairly well known; but elsewhere he is chiefly
known as the leading manufacturer of musical pyrotechnics,
the inventor of the best pianistic sky-rockets
and the best articles in tonal thunder and lightning
thus far put upon the world’s market. But the fact
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_195' id='Page_195'>195</SPAN></span>
is that his future fame as a creative musician is destined
to stand upon a much firmer and more lasting
basis—namely, that of the original work referred to;
and I believe in a much higher niche in the temple of
art than it at present occupies.</p>
<p>Among these original works, and forming an important
and distinct division of them, peculiar to
itself both in form and subject matter, the “Poetic
and Religious Harmonies” claim our attention. These
were written under rather singular circumstances.</p>
<p>All through his life, from early boyhood, Liszt was
subject to occasional moods of intense religious fervor,—devotional
paroxysms, one might almost call them,—sweeping
over him like a tidal wave, submerging,
for the time, all other thoughts and impulses, and
then receding, to leave him about where they found
him. Their transitory and spasmodic nature has led
many to believe that they were not real, but assumed,
simulated hypocritically for effect, or for a purpose;
as, for example, to escape the importunate claims of
his several mistresses.</p>
<p>But those who knew him best are inclined to make
allowance for his impulsive, erratic, unbalanced temperament,
his undeveloped oriental nature, half barbaric
in spite of its immense and manifold powers,
and to concede that, while they lasted, they were very
genuine and very profound. Under this impelling
force he was several times on the point of giving up his
worldly career and devoting himself to a monastic life,
and was only restrained by the efforts of his many
friends and admirers.</p>
<p>In 1856 came the last and most enduring of these
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_196' id='Page_196'>196</SPAN></span>
impulses, and, in obedience to it, he abandoned his
life as a concert artist, which, for phenomenal success,
has never had a parallel before or since, retired
into rigorous seclusion in the Vatican at Rome, where
he was the guest and pupil of the Pope himself, and
devoted nearly five consecutive years to religious study
and contemplation, receiving the title of Abbé in the
Catholic Church, which he retained till his death,
and writing a considerable number of compositions,
all of a distinctively religious character, all based upon
religious themes, either incidents narrated in the
Scriptures, or in the lives of the saints, or subjective
experiences connected with his own spiritual life and
development.</p>
<p>Among these, his great “Legend of St. Elizabeth” is
preëminent, and this series of nine poetic and religious
harmonies; each a complete composition, having no
connection with the others except in its general character,
bearing a special title indicating its nature and
subject. Some of them are of very great musical
worth and importance, and are among his best productions,
notably, the No. 3, Book 2, entitled “The
Benediction of God in the Solitude.” It is one of the
subjective, emotional compositions referred to, giving
us a glimpse into the heart life of the composer during
this epoch of profound and intense religious experience.</p>
<p>It opens with a subdued but strongly emotional,
’cello-like theme in the left hand, expressing the first
discontent and vague longings of a soul whose best
aspirations and highest needs have found no real
satisfaction in worldly things, yet which has no
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_197' id='Page_197'>197</SPAN></span>
certain grasp, no safe reliance on any life beyond and
above the present; a soul adrift on the dark ocean of
doubt and skepticism, with no guiding star of hope,
no beacon-light of promise, not even the compass of
faith in things unseen by which to shape its course.
This mood grows steadily in intensity, through the
successive stages of unrest, agitation, distress, despair,
to an overpowering climax. Then it is followed by
a short, quiet movement in D major, literally imitating
the tranquil strain of the organ and the distant sound
of cathedral bells; thus symbolizing the promises and
proffered consolations of the Church; then a period of
grave pondering, of thoughtful examination and introspection,
and then the first theme repeats, but with
less vehement treatment, in a gentle though still
agitated mood, like a recapitulation of his former
state from a newly acquired standpoint, a softened
memory of the old, stormy, desperate mood.</p>
<p>The work closes with a tranquil, flowing movement,
a complete inundation of the spirit by a flood of that
“peace which passeth understanding,” the benediction
of God in the solitude. He has found, as he believes,
safety, rest, and reconciliation with divine law and
will. This closing strain, in its reposeful happiness,
forms a fitting and most beautiful ending to this
serious, ideally suggestive composition.</p>
<p>Other numbers of this set are almost equally interesting,
but I have not space for more of them. This one
will serve as a good example, and I may add that it
was regarded by Liszt himself as the best of his piano
compositions.</p>
<p>A little French poem from Liszt’s own pen, which
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_198' id='Page_198'>198</SPAN></span>
stands as motto at the head of this music, sums up its
significance. I append a nearly literal translation.</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Whence comes, O my God, this sweet peace that surrounds</p>
<p class='line0'>My glad heart? And this faith that within me abounds?</p>
<p class='line0'>To me who, uncertain, in anguish of mind,</p>
<p class='line0'>On an ocean of doubt tossed about by each wind,</p>
<p class='line0'>Was seeking for truth in the dreams of the sage,</p>
<p class='line0'>And for peace, among hearts that were chafing with rage.</p>
<p class='line0'>A sudden—there flashed on my soul from above</p>
<p class='line0'>A vision of glorified heavenly love;</p>
<p class='line0'>It seemed that an age and a world passed away</p>
<p class='line0'>And I rise, a new man, to enjoy a new day.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_199' id='Page_199'>199</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5639'>Liszt’s Ballades</h1></div>
<p>While speaking of Liszt’s original compositions,
we must not omit his two
ballades, which, though musically a
little disappointing, are works of
considerable magnitude and marked
individuality, and possess no small
degree of descriptive interest. They
are in the same general form and
vein as the Chopin ballades, and were evidently suggested
by them, though they cannot be compared
with them either for beauty or for strength.</p>
<h2 id='t5653'>First Ballade</h2>
<p>The first, in B minor, is decidedly the more vigorous
of the two, and the more difficult. It is based upon
the pathetically tragic story of the Prisoner of Chillon,
so ably told in Byron’s poem, which the player should
read with care, so as to familiarize himself thoroughly
with its incidents and moods. The poem tells of that
nameless captive chained for life to a pillar in a rock-hewn
dungeon beneath the castle of Chillon, on Lake
Leman, below the surface of the lake, so that he listens
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_200' id='Page_200'>200</SPAN></span>
day and night to the dull thunder or mournful murmur
of the changeful waves above his head, as his only
indication of the shifting moods of Nature in the
living world, her passing smiles and storms, her slowly
circling seasons as they come and go.</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“A double dungeon, wall and wave</p>
<p class='line0'>Have made—and like a living grave.</p>
<p class='line0'>Below the surface of the lake</p>
<p class='line0'>The dark vault lies, wherein we lay:</p>
<p class='line0'>We heard its ripple night and day,</p>
<p class='line0'>Sounding o’er our heads it knocked,</p>
<p class='line0'>And then the very rock hath rocked,</p>
<p class='line0'>And I have felt it shake unshocked:</p>
<p class='line0'>Because I could have smiled to see</p>
<p class='line0'>The death that would have set me free.”</p>
</div>
<p>Years drag themselves out to eternities. One by
one his few companions die of cold and hunger, leaving
him alone in that living tomb, with his endless, changeless,
unutterable misery.</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“I had no thought, no feeling—none.</p>
<p class='line0'>Among the stones I stood a stone.</p>
<p class='line0'>It was not night, it was not day,</p>
<p class='line0'>For all was blank and bleak and gray:</p>
<p class='line0'>A sea of stagnant idleness,</p>
<p class='line0'>Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless.”</p>
</div>
<p>His only gleam of comfort were the occasional
visits of an azure-winged bird that came now and then
and perched on the window ledge outside his dungeon
bars, a fair and gentle companion symbolizing
for him all the beauty and tenderness and sweetness
in the life he has lost; and on which he comes to concentrate
the love and interest of his famished heart.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_201' id='Page_201'>201</SPAN></span></p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“A lovely bird with azure wings,</p>
<p class='line0'>And song that said a thousand things,</p>
<p class='line0'>And seemed to say them all to me!</p>
<p class='line0'>I never saw the like before,</p>
<p class='line0'>I ne’er shall see its likeness more:</p>
<p class='line0'>It seemed, like me, to want a mate,</p>
<p class='line0'>But was not half so desolate;</p>
<p class='line0'>And it was come to love me, when</p>
<p class='line0'>None lived to love me so again.”</p>
</div>
<p>The opening movement of the ballade, representing
the thunder of the waves reverberating through the
gloom of that cavern-like cell, and the later lyric,
which might be called the bird theme, suggesting
his tender communing with his little friend, are the
best movements in the work. The details of the story
are not carried out, but its outlines, and especially its
moods, are clearly given.</p>
<h2 id='t5728'>Second Ballade</h2>
<p>The second ballade, in D flat major, is more melodious
and attractive, but less strong. It is dedicated to
Liszt’s life-long friend and powerful patron, the Duke
of Weimar, and, out of compliment to him, treats of
an episode in the Duke’s family history, back in the
days of the second Crusade.</p>
<p>A young and gallant chief of the house of Weimar
stands in the rosy light of early dawn, on the highest
turret of his castle, with his newly wedded bride,
taking a long farewell of her and of their fair domain,
for at sunrise he leads his knights and men-at-arms to
the crusade, and the return is years distant and uncertain.
Their mood is full of sadness and yet of a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_202' id='Page_202'>202</SPAN></span>
strong, religious exultation and trust. His mission is a
grand and glorious one. Heaven will surely guide and
protect its faithful knights, and his lady bids him Godspeed,
though with tearful eyes. From the castle
court below, sounds of gathering troops and martial
preparation rise to their ears, at first faintly, then
with growing din and clamor, till a burst of trumpets
greets the rising sun; the gates are flung open and,
hastily descending, he takes his place at the head of
his forces and they march away to the strains of
inspiriting military music. The lady still stands alone
on her turret, waving her greetings—stands there, as
he sees her last, flooded with the glory of the morning,
an embodiment of love and hope and promise—a
vision to haunt his waking dreams in far-away Palestine,
to cheer his lonely camp-fire vigils and lead him
to victory on the field of action.</p>
<p>As she still stands dreamily watching the last gleam
of the spear-points, the last flutter of the receding
banners, the sanguine fancy of youth leaps the intervening
years, and she thinks she hears the strains of
the martial music at the head of the returning army
coming in triumph back from a successful campaign.</p>
<p>The successive moments in the story above
sketched are given with realistic distinctness in the
music, and can be followed without difficulty.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_203' id='Page_203'>203</SPAN></span><h1 id='t5775'>Transcriptions for the Piano by Franz Liszt</h1></div>
<p>The peculiar aptitude required for successfully
rewriting a song or orchestral
composition for the piano, so
that it shall become, not a mere
bald, literal reproduction of the
melodies and harmonies, as in most
of the piano-scores of the opera, interesting
only to students, but a
complete and effective art-work for this instrument,
may be a lower order of genius than the original creative
faculty, but is certainly more rare and almost as
valuable to the musical world. It demands, first, a
clear, discriminating perception of the essential musical
and dramatic elements of the original work, in their
relative proportions and degrees of importance, distinct
from the merely idiomatic details of their setting;
second, a supreme knowledge of the resources and limitations
of the new medium of expression, so as at once
to preserve unimpaired the peculiar character and primal
force of the original composition, and to make it
sound as if expressly written for the piano. It is one
thing to write out the notes of an orchestral score so
that they are, in the main, playable by a single
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_204' id='Page_204'>204</SPAN></span>
performer on the piano; but it is quite another thing to
readjust all the effects to pianistic possibilities, so as to
produce in full measure the intended artistic impression.
There is practically the same difference as in
poetic translation between the rough, verbal rendering
of a Latin exercise by a school-boy, and the finished,
artistic English version of a poem from some foreign
tongue, by a gifted and scholarly writer like Longfellow.</p>
<p>Whatever may be thought or said of Liszt as an
original composer, in his piano transcriptions he has
never had an equal, scarcely even a would-be competitor.
His work in this line is of inestimable importance
to the pianist, both as student and public
performer, and forms a rich and extensive department
of piano literature. Think what a gap would
be left in any artist’s repertoire if Liszt’s transcriptions,
including the rhapsodies, were struck out of
it; for the rhapsodies are only transcriptions of gipsy
music. Practically all of Wagner’s music that is
available for the pianist he owes to Liszt’s able intermediation.
True, Brassin has done some commendable
work in his settings of fragments from the Nibelungen
operas, but of these the “Magic Fire” music is the
only really usable number; and this, though playable
and attractive from its own intrinsic merits, is hardly
satisfactory, either as a genuinely pianistic setting
or as a reproduction of the artistic effects of the
original. One feels that it is an interesting attempt,
not a complete success; and the “Ride of the Walkyrie,”
which ought to be the most effective of all the Wagner
numbers for piano, is wholly unusable for concert
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_205' id='Page_205'>205</SPAN></span>
purposes. One is practically restricted to Liszt in this
direction, but finds in him a mine of highly finished,
admirably set gems, accessible, though technically not
easy to appropriate.</p>
<h2 id='t5839'>Wagner-Liszt: Spinning Song, from the “Flying Dutchman”</h2>
<p>Take, for example, the familiar and ever-enjoyable
“Spinning Song” from the “Flying Dutchman,” definite
and symmetrical in form, perfect in every detail
as a piano composition, eminently playable and pianistic,
yet preserving the original dramatic intention
with absolute completeness and integrity. Those who
are familiar with the opera will need no explanation
of its contents; but for the many piano students who
are not, I give a brief synopsis of the scene of which
this music is at once an accompaniment and a picture;
for Wagner’s music is all intended to intensify, by
reduplicating in tone, scenes and moods represented
on the stage.</p>
<p>A little company of village maidens, in a seaport
town in Holland, is assembled of a winter evening to
spin. It is to be a semi-social, semi-useful gathering,
much like the old quilting parties of our grandmothers’
time, and they are all in the best of spirits. They
start the wheels, but something is wrong apparently;
the thread breaks or tangles, and two or three times
they are obliged to stop, wait a moment, and recommence,
till finally the buzz and hum of the swift-rolling
wheels become continuous. This orchestral imitation
of the spinning-wheel is a piece of very graphic realism,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_206' id='Page_206'>206</SPAN></span>
and in the piano arrangement is given almost equally
well in the left-hand accompaniment, while the right
hand carries in chords the chorus of the spinning
maidens, as they sing at their work, a bright, joyous,
rhythmical song, full of gaiety and wit, as shown by
an occasional interruption by a burst of merry laughter.</p>
<p>In the very midst of their jollity they are startled
into an abrupt silence by the ominous sound of a
single horn close by, and they suspend their work to
listen. The horn rings out, clear and strong, a peculiar
impressive signal, which they know and dread as that
of the “Flying Dutchman,” the terror of those shores,
the fated commander of a phantom ship, manned by
a specter crew, who sails the northern seas eternally,
in winter storm and summer fog, condemned forever to
this ghastly isolation from his living fellow-men, and
striking terror to the hearts of all the simple fisher-folk,
whenever the dim outlines of his ship are seen in the
misty offing; and especially when his signal horn is
heard; for it is known that he does sometimes land.
His only possible chance of escape from the awful
curse upon him is that once in a hundred years he is
permitted to spend a few brief days on shore and mingle
with his kind, and if, during that short period, he can
win the love of any true maiden so completely that
she will voluntarily give her life for him, then the
curse is ended and both may rise to the realms of the
blessed together. It is a grand opportunity for generous
self-sacrifice on the part of some noble girl; but
naturally all shrink from it, and are panic-stricken at
his approach.</p>
<p>But the horn dies away. Echo repeats the notes
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_207' id='Page_207'>207</SPAN></span>
and drops them. All is still. They think he is merely
passing, as he often does, and has no intention of landing
here at present. So, after a little timid hesitation,
they resume their work and their song, become as
hilarious as before, even more so, going off at last into
a perfect gale of laughter, in the midst of which the
horn sounds again; this time nearer, louder, more importunate.
Surely he is about to land, perhaps is
already on shore and approaching; and then there is
a frenzy of panic; work is flung aside, wheels are overturned
in the confusion, and the girls scatter in mad
terror in all directions; and with this flight the scene
closes, and this transcription for the piano ends.</p>
<p>I will add, however, for the completion of the
story, that one of the girls, the heroine, her woman’s
heart touched to pity by the awful destiny of the
curse-laden commander, remains, half in eagerness,
half in fear, to meet him at his entrance and to become
the willing sacrifice for his redemption.</p>
<p>The keynote of the whole opera is found in that
sublimest of all facts—human love triumphant over
fate.</p>
<p>With this story in mind, even those quite unfamiliar
with the music cannot fail to recognize and follow the
successive details of the scene described: the whir and
hum of the spinning-wheels, the chorus of singing
maidens, the entrance of the signal horn, with its echo
and the terror that follows; the repetition of these incidents
in growing climax, and the mad confusion
and scamper at the close.</p>
<h2 id='t5936'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_208' id='Page_208'>208</SPAN></span>Wagner-Liszt: Tannhäuser March</h2>
<p>Liszt’s brilliant transcription of this fragment of the
<i>Tannhäuser</i> music is another of the most popular and
grateful Wagner numbers for the piano. It must not
be confounded with the “March of the Pilgrims,”
or, more properly, the “Pilgrim’s Chorus,” as it often
is by those not familiar with the opera. The latter,
a chorus of fervently devout pilgrims departing for
the Holy Land, is solemn, inspiring, but somber in
character, while the march is brilliantly festive in tone,
gorgeous in coloring, pompously magnificent in its
martial rhythms, its rich major harmonies and its
ringing trumpet themes. It appropriately accompanies
the entrance of a long and splendidly appareled procession
of guests into the old castle known as the <i>Wacht
Burg</i>, a famous feudal stronghold in Thuringia during
the middle ages. They have assembled in holiday
mood and attire to witness one of those prize contests
in singing—a sort of musical tournament between the
leading Minnesingers of the time, frequently held at
the castles of the powerful German nobles of that
period. The word <i>Minne</i> is an old German, poetic
synonym for <i>Liebe</i>, or love. Hence the Minnesinger
was a minstrel whose avowed theme was love.</p>
<p>It was a gala occasion. Excitement and anticipation
ran high, for some of the most celebrated names
of the time were on the list of competitors. All had
their favorites, to whom they were disposed to accord
the victory in advance, and all came in the expectation,
not only of a rich musical feast, but of a close and
sharply contested combat of genius, for the honors of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_209' id='Page_209'>209</SPAN></span>
the day. The opening trumpet signal announces
that the castle gates are thrown open, and summons
the guests to form in marching order, and then the
glittering ranks move forward to the rhythmically
cadenced measures of the march music. Gallant
knights in glistening armor, the pride of race and
martial glory in mien and carriage, stately dames in
silk and jewels, fair maidens sweet as the blossoms
they wear, and old men in the dignity of years and
proven wisdom—all are there and are faithfully
mirrored in the music as they pass before us. There
is an imposing pomp and gorgeous splendor about it;
a little wearying, it may be, after a time, but certainly
never equaled, if approached, by any other composition,
and absolutely in keeping with the mood and
setting of the scene. The tempo should be very moderate,
the rhythm marked and steady, the contrasts
distinct, and the tone, for the most part, full and
brilliant, but never harsh.</p>
<h2 id='t5990'>Wagner-Liszt: Abendstern</h2>
<p>Another selection from this same opera, this time in
the lyric vein, which Liszt has effectively arranged
for the piano, is the “Evening Star Romance,” as it
is often called. It is one of the songs of Wolfram,
the leading baritone of the opera. The theme is love,
and the opening line of the song, “O thou, my gracious
evening star,” clearly indicates the bard’s intention.
The love of which he sings is to be a modest, distant,
respectful devotion, a pure adoration rather than a
passionate desire. His lady-fair is to be his light, his
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_210' id='Page_210'>210</SPAN></span>
guide, his inspiration to lofty vows and noble deeds
of chivalry. For her will he be all things, achieve all
things, sacrifice all things, asking no reward but her
smile of approbation. She is to be his divinity, not
his bride; to be worshiped, not possessed.</p>
<p>The mood is one of glowing enthusiasm and ideal
unselfishness, but subdued to a dreamy, half intensity,
like sunlight through a fleece of summer clouds. The
player should strive to produce in the melody the effects
of a rich, mellow baritone voice, clearly, smoothly,
musically modulated, warm, but never impassioned.
The Minnesingers always accompany themselves upon
the harp, and the harp effects used by Wagner in the
orchestra have been retained, as a matter of course,
by Liszt in the piano arrangement, and must be reproduced
by the player with the utmost fidelity.</p>
<h2 id='t6021'>Wagner-Liszt: Isolde’s Love Death</h2>
<p>One of the most vividly interesting, to musicians,
of all the Wagner-Liszt transcriptions, is the death
scene from “Tristan und Isolde,” known as “Isolde’s
Love Death.” It is not a number easily grasped, or
usually enjoyed by the general audience; and the
elemental power and intensity of the passion it so
forcefully expresses have been often criticized as
morbid, unnatural, and exaggerated, by those, the
mildly tempered milk-and-water of whose stormiest
passions never exceed the moderate, decorous fury of a
tempest in a tea-pot. But to those who can sympathize
with and appreciate its irresistible, volcanic outburst
of emotion, its overwhelming sweep of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_211' id='Page_211'>211</SPAN></span>
life-rending anguish, it is one of the strongest, grandest
lyric utterances in all the realm of music, thrilling
and overpowering the heart to the degree of pain and
terror.</p>
<p>It is a lyric in form, in treatment, and in subject-matter,
dealing exclusively with emotion, not action,
though its breadth of outline, its somber strength,
and its passionate intensity give it a decidedly dramatic
effect. Here is no pink-and-white pet of the modern
drawing-room, grieving for her missing poodle, or
another’s failure to wear the most up-to-date tie; but
a glorious primeval woman, with the fire of youth and
plenty of good red blood in her veins, a goddess in
the unreserved frankness of her feelings, the boundless
strength of her devotion, sublime in the might of
her passion and the majesty of her doom.</p>
<p>Her life is her love and must end with it. Her
hero-lover, Tristan, lies beside her, dying of a mortal
wound received in combat for love of her, however
dishonorable in the world’s eyes; and he is the more
to be cherished because despised and hunted to his
death by his king and former comrades for her sake.
Further attempt at flight with him is hopeless. Fate
and their foes are closing swiftly in around them. The
end is inevitable. Their brief, wild dream of stolen
happiness is over. The first black, crushing moment
of despairing realization, portrayed in the opening
measures in sober chords, is followed by a strain of
sweet, tender, but plaintive reminiscence of what love
was to them and might have been. Then comes a long,
steadily growing, tremendously impassioned climax
of impotent protest, of desperate love, of vehement,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_212' id='Page_212'>212</SPAN></span>
heart-breaking sorrow, all mingled in one glowing lava
stream of frenzied anguish, merging at last into a soft,
half-delirious vision of reunion and happiness beyond
the grave, in which her spirit takes its flight, to realms,
we will hope, where hearts, not crowned heads, were
the arbiters of her woman’s destiny.</p>
<p>Those who have no sympathy with a really great
passion which sweeps all before it, flinging the pretty
policies and cut-and-dried conventions of life aside
like straw in the path of a cataract, had better let this
music alone. It is not for them either to feel or to
render. It requires exceptional intensity of treatment,
a broad, strong, yet flexible chord-technique,
and an absolute mastery of the tonal resources of the
piano.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_213' id='Page_213'>213</SPAN></span><h1 id='t6090'>Schubert-Liszt: Transcriptions</h1></div>
<p>Some of Liszt’s very best though earliest
work in the line of pianoforte
transcription was done in connection
with the Schubert songs; most of it
in the thirties. These songs were
then first coming into prominence,
and their markedly romantic and descriptive
character appealed strongly
to the dramatic instincts of this master of the piano,
understanding and utilizing as no other writer ever
had, the resources and possibilities of his instrument.
Liszt adapted a large number of these songs to it,
rendering them most effectively available as piano
solos, selecting mainly those in which the character
of the text and original music gave opportunity for
suggestively realistic and descriptive treatment.</p>
<h2 id='t6109'>Der Erlkönig</h2>
<p>Most famous and decidedly most dramatic of these
is the “Erlkönig.” All German students and most
vocalists are familiar with the text of this song, which
is its own best explanation; but the piano student
may find a sketch of the story helpful. It is a legend
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_214' id='Page_214'>214</SPAN></span>
of the Black Forest in Baden, brought to the world’s
notice by Goethe in one of his most dramatic and
perfectly wrought ballads. This ballad Schubert set to
music in a moment of highest inspiration; then, in
the natural reaction and discouragement following
such a supreme effort of genius, he threw the manuscript
into the waste-basket as unsuccessful and impracticable.
It was rescued a few hours later by a
celebrated tenor of the day, who chanced to call, and
accidentally discovering this gem among the torn
papers, saved it to the world. Liszt recognized its
immense possibilities as a piano number and gave the
song an instrumental setting which is even more
effective than the original vocal composition.</p>
<p>The story is briefly this. A horseman is riding homeward
through the depths of the Black Forest at midnight
in a raging tempest, bearing in his arms his little
boy, wrapped safely against the storm, held close for
warmth and safety. The “Erlkönig,” or, as we should
say, “Elf King,” is abroad in the dark, storm-racked
forest. He espies the boy, takes a freakish fancy to
him, determines to possess the child, approaches
softly, with coaxing and persuasion, offers flowers,
playthings, pretty elf playmates, everything he can
think of, to tempt the boy to leave his father, and
come with him. But the little one is terrified, shrieks
to his father for protection; and the father, while
striving to quiet his fears, spurs onward at utmost
speed, seeking in vain to distance the pursuing Elf
King.</p>
<p>The composition is graphically descriptive and contains
many varied, yet blended elements. The swift
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_215' id='Page_215'>215</SPAN></span>
gallop of the horse over the broken ground is given
in rapid triplets as a continuous accompaniment;
the rush of the storm-wind through the moaning pine-tops,
the roar of the thunder, the chill and gloom and
terrors of the wild night, are forcefully depicted in
the sweeping crescendos and somber harmonies of the
left hand, while the three voices engaged in the flying,
intermittent colloquy are rendered the more distinct
and easy to follow, by being played in different and
suitable registers; the father’s voice in the baritone—grave,
stern, impressive; the child’s in the soprano—plaintive
and pathetic; and the Elf King’s high in the
descant—sweet, seductive, persuasive, impossible to
mistake. Three times this colloquy is renewed, with
growing agitation, each time ending with the terrified
shriek of the child, while the flight and pursuit continue
with increasing speed, and the tempest grows
apace. Finally the Elf King loses patience, throws
off the mask of friendly gentleness, declares that if
the child will not come willingly he shall use force,
and tries to take him by violence. The child shrieks
for the third time in an anguish of fear, for the touch
of the elf is death to a mortal.</p>
<p>The father, now himself frantic with terror, spurs
on madly for home, with the tempest crashing about
him. He reaches his door at last and dismounts in
fancied security, only to find the boy dead in his arms;
and perhaps the most impressive moment of the whole
composition is that at its suddenly subdued, solemnly
mournful close, when he stands at the goal of his
furious but futile race, and gazes, by the light of his
own home fire, into the dead face of his child.</p>
<h2 id='t6186'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_216' id='Page_216'>216</SPAN></span>Hark! Hark! the Lark</h2>
<p>Among the Schubert-Liszt transcriptions, the one
which probably stands next to the “Erlkönig” in
general popularity is the song “Hark! Hark! the Lark
at Heaven’s Gate Sings!” the words being the well-known,
charming little matin song by Shakespeare
which Schubert has set to music with all his infallible
insight into their exact emotional import, and all his
masterly command of musical resources, reproducing
in the melody and its harmonic background the effect
intended in every line of the text, filling every subtlest
shade of feeling to a nicety, realizing once again that
ideal union, that perfect marriage of words and music,
so difficult and so rare with most song-writers, but
which was a distinguishing characteristic of Schubert’s
work.</p>
<p>In his piano accompaniment Liszt has displayed
even more than his usual skill in preserving all the
intrinsic beauty and precise poetic significance of the
original, besides giving to it an eminently pianistic
form. The music is bright, buoyant, joyous as the
summer morning, fresh as its breezes, light as its
floating clouds, stirring our hearts with the revivifying
call of a new day, breathing hope and happiness in
every measure, while the airy rippling embellishments
remind us of the exuberant song of the skylark, as he
rises exultantly to meet the dawn, shaking the dew
from his swift wings and pouring out the plenitude
of his glad heart upon the awakening earth in a sparkling
shower of music, like the bubbling overflow of
some sky fountain of pure delight.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_217' id='Page_217'>217</SPAN></span>
The player and listener will do well to have in
mind Shelley’s lines, describing the “clear, keen joyance”
of that “scorner of the ground,” the English
skylark.</p>
<h2 id='t6226'>Gretchen am Spinnrad</h2>
<p>A striking contrast to the composition just described
is afforded by the equally able but intensely
mournful transcription entitled “Gretchen am Spinnrad.”</p>
<p>The text of this song is taken from Goethe’s “Faust.”
It is the song of Marguerite, sitting at her wheel,
in the gathering dusk of evening, spinning mechanically
from the force of long habit, but with her thoughts
engrossed by memories of her lost happiness, her
ruined life, and blighted future. The mood is one of
overwhelming melancholy, of crushing despair, whose
dark depths are fitfully stirred from time to time by a
rebellious surge of passionate but hopeless longing,
as her heart throbs to some passing recollection of
departed joys and love’s fateful delirium.</p>
<p>Her dashing but faithless lover, Faust, after winning
and betraying her affection, robbing her of the innocence
and tranquil happiness of girlhood, has abandoned
her to face her bitter fate alone; and she moans
in her solitary anguish:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“My peace is gone, my heart oppressed,</p>
<p class='line0'>And never again will my soul find rest.”</p>
</div>
<p>The music perfectly voices the piteous sadness of
her mood, with the occasional intermittent outbursts
of passion; while the monotonous hum of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_218' id='Page_218'>218</SPAN></span>
spinning-wheel, literally imitated in the accompaniment, as in
every good spinning song, seems in this case to adapt
itself to the song of the maiden, to harmonize with
its sadness, to take on a corresponding melancholy,
reflecting the emotions expressed in her voice and
words, as a stream reflects the somber cloud that
shadows it—a good illustration of that universal
principle in art, which invests inanimate things with
a fancied sympathy with human experiences.</p>
<p>Nothing could be more complete or perfectly appropriate
than the musical treatment of this subject;
but its unmitigated sadness probably prevents its
becoming a popular favorite; and its extreme, though
not at first apparent, difficulty places it beyond the
reach of most amateur players.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_219' id='Page_219'>219</SPAN></span><h1 id='t6277'>Liszt: La Gondoliera</h1></div>
<p>Like many of Liszt’s contributions to
piano literature, this dainty and
most pleasing little work is not
exclusively his own; that is, it is
not an original melodic creation,
but the admirably clever arrangement
or setting of an old Venetian
boat-song. The melody has been
in existence for many decades, perhaps centuries, and
may be heard by any one who visits Venice, as sung
by the gondolier in time to the swing of his dextrously
handled single oar. It is called “La Biondina in
Gondoletta” (“the blond maid in a gondola”), and
was originally composed by Pistrucci, to words by
Peruchini, and harmonized later by Beethoven, in his
folk-songs, entitled “Zwölf verschiedene Volkslieder.”</p>
<p>It is a distinctly Italian melody, with no pretensions
to great depth or dramatic intensity, but simple, tender,
and sweet, winning rather than commanding—a lyric
of the sensuously beautiful type, but not to be despised,
as it is a spontaneous product of the sunny-tempered,
warm-hearted children of the South. It contains no
hint of the Venice of mystery, of secret cruelty, of
world-wide powers, of the Council of the Ten, that
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_220' id='Page_220'>220</SPAN></span>
masked midnight tribunal of former days; but breathes
only of Venice the fair, in her moonlit beauty—of
Venice, “the Bride of the Sea.”</p>
<p>Liszt’s setting gives us not only the melody enhanced
by effective harmonic coloring and delicate embellishment,
but a characteristic and picturesque background
of accompaniment suggesting the scene, the mood,
and the environment; the low murmur of the Adriatic,
at the distant water-gate, pleading to be admitted
to the presence of his Queen; the soft ripples stealing
up the long winding canals, whispering their love
secrets under the palaces of Juliette and Desdemona,
and creeping fearfully beneath the Bridge of Sighs,
and past the dreaded dungeons of the doges; the
silvery moonlight gleaming upon marble frieze and
column, and touching to soft brilliancy the fadeless
tints of glass mosaic; the dip and sway of the graceful
gondola as it glides on its silent way along those water
streets between rows of stately buildings, every carved
stone of which is alive with history or with some
romantic legend.</p>
<p>All these are delicately yet graphically depicted,
while the boatman’s song rises and falls, seeming now
near, now distant, as it is borne to us on the varying
breath of the light sea-breeze. The whole picture is
one of subdued evening tints, of half-disclosed, half-hinted
outlines, with a pervading mood of dreamy
fancy, of wistful tenderness. It seems to me one of
Liszt’s most perfect and ably sustained efforts in the
purely lyric, yet suggestively descriptive vein.</p>
<p>At the close, the great, sonorous bell of St. Mark’s
Cathedral strikes midnight, its grave, deep-toned
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_221' id='Page_221'>221</SPAN></span>
voice majestically commanding the attention. The
F sharp here used to produce the bell effect, and at the
same time serving as bass in a prolonged organ-point
throughout the coda, is the actual keynote of the St.
Mark’s bell, ingeniously utilized for this double purpose.
Meanwhile, the last notes of the song die away
in the distance, and slumber, like a veil of mist floating
in from the summer sea, envelops the city.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_222' id='Page_222'>222</SPAN></span><h1 id='t6351'>The Music of the Gipsies and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies</h1></div>
<p>Liszt, in his able and unique but
somewhat prolix work, entitled
“The Bohemians and Their Music
in Hungary,” which, so far as I
can learn, has never been translated
into English, gives some most interesting
information concerning these
much-played and much-discussed
Rhapsodies, their origin, character, and artistic importance,
their relation to the national music of the
gipsies and the racial peculiarities of this strange people,
which I believe will be new to most readers.</p>
<p>I present here what seem to me the most valuable
facts and ideas in Liszt’s book in connection with
these Rhapsodies, using, so far as possible, his own
words translated from the French. I have used the
word “gipsies” for “Bohemians” in the translation;
this being the usual English name for the race, as
“Bohemian” is the French.</p>
<p>It should be distinctly borne in mind that, contrary
to the generally prevailing impression, these so-called
Hungarian Rhapsodies are not in any sense derived
from or founded upon national Hungarian music, or
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_223' id='Page_223'>223</SPAN></span>
the national life and racial traits of the Hungarians.
The floating fragments of wild, fantastic melody and
strange, weird harmony which Liszt has gathered and
utilized in this form, came neither from the Huns nor
from the Magyars, whose blended tribes compose the
present Hungarian race; but they are of purely gipsy
origin. It is distinctly and characteristically gipsy
music which Liszt has merely adapted to the piano.
His reasons for calling these works Hungarian Rhapsodies
he states as follows:</p>
<p>“In publishing a part of the material which we had
the opportunity to collect during our long connection
with the gipsies of Hungary, in transcribing it for the
piano, as the instrument which could best render, in
its entirety, the sentiment and the form of the gipsy
art, it was necessary to select a generic name which
should indicate the doubly national character which
we attach to it.</p>
<p>“We have called the collection of these fragments
‘Hungarian Rhapsodies.’ By the word ‘Rhapsody’
we have wished to designate the fantastically
epic element which we believe we recognize therein.
Each of these productions has always seemed
to us to form a part of a poetic series. These fragments
narrate no facts, it is true; but ‘those who have
ears to hear’ will recognize in them certain states
of mind, in which are condensed the ideals of a nation.
It may be a nation of Pariahs; but what difference
does that make to art? Since they have experienced
sentiments capable of being idealized, and have
clothed them in a form of undisputed beauty, they
have acquired the right to recognition in art.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_224' id='Page_224'>224</SPAN></span>
“Furthermore, we have called these Rhapsodies
‘Hungarian’ because it would not be just to separate
in the future what has been united in the past. The
Hungarians have adopted the gipsies as their national
musicians. They have identified themselves with
their proud and warlike enthusiasms, as with their
poignant griefs, which they know so well how to
depict. They have not only associated themselves
in their ‘Frischka’ with their joys and feasts, but
have wept with them while listening to their ‘Lassans.’</p>
<p>“The nomadic people of the gipsies, though scattered
in many countries, and cultivating elsewhere their
music, have nowhere given it a value equivalent to
that which it has acquired on Hungarian soil; because
in no other place has it met, as there, the popular
sympathy which was necessary to its development.
The liberal hospitality of the Hungarians toward the
gipsies was so necessary to its existence that it belongs
as much to the one as to the other. Hungary, then,
can with good right claim as its own this art nourished
by its cornfields and its vineyards, developed by its
sun and its shade, encouraged by its admiration, embellished
and ennobled, thanks to its favor and protection.”</p>
<p>These compositions, then, according to Liszt’s own
statement, are called “Hungarian” only by courtesy
and a sort of national adoption. They are called
“Rhapsodies” because of their resemblance, in form,
character, and content, to those detached, fragmentary
poems sung or recited by the wandering bards, troubadours,
and rhapsodists of the olden time—poems
embodying the collective sentiments, the heroic deeds,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_225' id='Page_225'>225</SPAN></span>
the touching or stirring experiences of a people, which
were later collected and welded together, with more
or less coherency, by some master mind, to form the
national epic of that people. This music, of an authentically
gipsy parentage, of which Liszt speaks as “the
songs without words” of the gipsies, and to which
he has merely stood sponsor at its rechristening and
its introduction, in new civilized dress, to the musical
world, is the only art form in which this enigmatical
race has ever expressed itself—the only channel through
which its ill-comprehended but intense inner life of
emotion, imagination, and vague idealism has found
vent. It is the inarticulate, but none the less expressive,
cry of the soul of a race struggling with that
universal human longing for self-utterance.</p>
<p>Liszt’s aim, pursued for many years, at great pains
and with masterly ability, was to collect and preserve
for the world at least certain representative portions
of this music, and construct from them a tone epic of the
gipsies, possessing, not only from the artistic, but from
the historical and anthropological standpoint, an interest
and value similar to that of other epics in
verse, as, for instance, those of the Greeks, the Persians,
the Germans, the Finns, Scandinavians, etc.</p>
<p>Of the actual history of the gipsies little is known,
save that they are the strangest and most anomalous
people of the globe. Numerous theories as to their
origin have been advanced, only to be abandoned.
But the best belief of to-day is that they originated in
India, being of the lowest Soodra caste or Pariahs
there, driven out by the terrible Mongol invasions
between the tenth and thirteenth centuries A. D.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_226' id='Page_226'>226</SPAN></span>
They first appear to the historical world in Egypt,
and their name, “gipsies,” given them in this country
and Great Britain, is but a corruption of the word
“Egyptian”; and hence they were long erroneously
supposed to have originated there. In other countries
they have received various names, as Bohemians in
France, Gitanos in Spain, Zigeuner in Germany,
Zingari in Italy. But they always and everywhere
designate themselves as Romani, or Roma Sinte,
meaning, “Roma” (men) and “Sinte,” probably from
Scind, or the Indus River. They did not appear in
Western Europe till the early part of the fifteenth
century, first in Bohemia, then in France and Germany,
and thence they spread, in wandering bands,
from natural increase, and, perhaps, from further
immigration, over most of Europe and other large portions
of the world, everywhere abused and hated, and
by most governments cruelly persecuted. The Austrian
government, under Maria Theresa, was the
main, modified exception to this harshness. She encouraged
and protected them in some localities in
Hungary, and, under this more humane care, they
have there lived, in very considerable numbers, a
more stable and localized life than elsewhere on earth,
affording some modifications and improvement of
their general habits and character, as nomad, oriental
vagabonds.</p>
<p>Liszt, in the book referred to, has eloquently and
strikingly characterized this strange people, as follows:
“Among the nations of Europe there suddenly appeared
one day a people, whence no one could definitely
say. It cast itself upon the Continent without
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_227' id='Page_227'>227</SPAN></span>
showing any desire of conquest, but also without asking
any right to a domicile. It did not desire to appropriate
to itself an inch of ground, but it declined to
give up an hour of time. It had no wish to conquer,
but it refused to submit. It avowed neither from
what Asiatic or African plateaus it had descended,
nor from what necessity it had sought other skies. It
brought no memories; it betrayed no hope. Too vain
of its sad race to condescend to merge itself in any
other, it was content to live repulsing all foreign
elements.... This is a strange people, so
strange as to resemble no other in any respect. It
possesses neither country, nor religion, nor history,
nor any law whatever.... It permits no influence,
no will, no persecution, no instruction either
to modify, dissolve, or extirpate it. It is divided
into tribes, hordes, and bands which wander here and
there, following each the route dictated by chance,
without communication with each other, largely
ignoring their collective existence, but each preserving,
under the most distant meridian, with a solidarity
which is sacred to them, infallible rallying signs, the
same physiognomy, the same language, the same
manners.... The ages pass. The world progresses.
The countries where they sojourn make war
or peace, change masters and manners, while they
remain impassive and indifferent, living from day to
day, profiting by the preoccupations caused by events
which decide the fate of nations, to secure their own
existence with less difficulty.... This people
that shares the joys, the sorrows, the prosperities, and
misfortunes of no other; that, like an incarnate
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_228' id='Page_228'>228</SPAN></span>
sarcasm, laughs at the ambitions, the tears, the combats,
and festivals of all others; that knows neither whence
it came nor whither it goes; ... that preserves
no traditions and registers no annals; that has no
faith and no law, no belief and no rule of conduct;
that is held together only by gross superstitions,
vague customs, constant misery, and deep humiliation;
this people, that nevertheless is obstinate, at the
price of all degradation and destitution, to preserve
its tents and its tatters, its hunger and its liberty;
this people, that exercises upon civilized nations an
indescribable and indestructible fascination, passing
as a mysterious legacy from one age to the next,
all defamed as it is, offers nevertheless some striking
and charming types to our grandest poets; this people,
so heterogeneous, of a character so indomitable, so
intractable, so inexplicable, must conceal, in some
corner of its heart, some lofty qualities, since, susceptible
of idealization, it has idealized itself; for it
has poems and songs which, if united, might perhaps
form the national epic of the gipsies.”</p>
<p>It is from such a people, so understood and described
by him, that Liszt has taken the musical fragments
inwrought into his Hungarian Rhapsodies; and he
reasons at length and ingeniously as to his right to call
these musical cycles parts of what could be enlarged
and made to cohere into a national tone epic. This
people, being unfitted to express itself nationally in
any other mode save through its wonderful, though
rude and uncultivated, instinct for music, “as it drew
the bow upon the strings of the violin, inspiration
taught it, without its seeking, rhythms, cadences,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_229' id='Page_229'>229</SPAN></span>
modulations, songs, speech, and discourse. Hegel was
not wrong,” says Liszt, “when he gives to the word
‘epic’ more of the signification of the verb ‘to
speak,’ or utter, than of the substantive, ‘recital’;
and these tone pictures are fragments of an epic,
because they speak sentiments which are common
to all the race, which form their inner nature, the
physiognomy of their soul, the expression of their
whole sentient being.” And therefore, in summary
conclusion, Liszt says: “Believing that the scattered
fragments of the instrumental music of the gipsies,
properly arranged, with some understanding of the
succession necessary to make them reciprocally valuable,
would afford the expression of those collective
sentiments which inhere in the entire people, determining
their character and customs, one feels himself
authorized to give to such a collection the name of
National Epic.”</p>
<p>Regarded from a purely musical standpoint, the
Rhapsodies have occasioned much controversy and
considerable adverse criticism on the part of certain
musicians who pride themselves on their loyalty to
conservative traditions. They have been decried as
trivial, superficial, and sensational; as lacking in depth
and dignity, in symmetry of form and nobility of sentiment.
These critics seem to forget that the object of
all art is primarily, not instruction or elevation, or
even abstract beauty, but expression. Its mission is
to portray, not exclusively the highest and grandest
emotions of humanity, but every experience, every
shade of feeling, every psychological possibility of the
race, with equally sympathetic fidelity. Humanity
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_230' id='Page_230'>230</SPAN></span>
is the broad theme; and the various forms of art, on
which the specialist is apt to lay undue stress, are
only the means of expression, not the supreme end.
That form is best, in any given case, which best serves
the artist’s purpose.</p>
<p>It should be remembered that the music under discussion
does not purport to embody the loftiest or
profoundest sentiment which Liszt was personally
capable of feeling or portraying, but the life, scenes,
and moods of the gipsy camp, presented in the primitive,
but spontaneous and vividly graphic, tone
imagery of the gipsies themselves. Who shall say
that, as a representative racial art, it is not precisely
as legitimate, as worthy, and as genuinely artistic
as the characteristic national art of the Germans,
the Italians, or any other people? Who shall presume
to dictate to the artist what subject, or class of subjects,
he may or may not select for treatment? I repeat,
all art has for its mission the expression of life, all
life; not the establishment or maintenance of standards
either of morals or emotions; still less of mere forms
of expression. Is not the gipsy maid, with her ungoverned
caprices, her moments of exuberant gaiety,
or passionate grief, just as much alive, hence as
legitimate a theme for the artist, and certainly as interesting
and romantic a subject for art treatment,
as the staid German <i>Hausfrau</i>, or the frivolous American
society girl? The beggar boy has been as ably
painted, and is considered as artistic a figure as the
king. Poets have sung the loves of shepherds and
shepherdesses as fondly as those of lords and ladies.
Is not, then, a good portrayal of a gipsy camp, whether
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_231' id='Page_231'>231</SPAN></span>
in words, colors, or tones, just as legitimate a work
of art as an equally able picture of an imperial palace,
or an imposing cathedral? Will not “Carmen” live
as long on the operatic stage as even that paragon of
all feminine virtues, “Fidelio”? Is not Don Juan as
immortal a personage in art as Lohengrin? Goethe
says: “We have only the right to ask three questions
of any art work: First, what did the artist intend?
Second, was it worth doing? Third, has he succeeded?”
Judged from this, the only true standpoint of esthetic
criticism, I venture to maintain that the Hungarian
Rhapsodies are just as good and just as legitimate
music, in their own peculiar way,—that is to say,
they fulfil the essential conditions of their special
artistic purpose, as well and as completely,—as the
Bach fugues, or the Beethoven sonatas.</p>
<p>Granting, if need be, that the Rhapsodies are sensational,
heaven protect us from music that produces
no sensation! And, in this case, it is the sensation,
or startling effect, not of mere brilliancy, but of the
unfamiliar contact with the spirit of a race radically
differing from our own; not sensuous and superficial,
but profoundly temperamental, possessing all the
fresh charm of new thought expressed in a novel
idiom. Granting again that their melodies are capricious
and fantastic, their harmonies strange and half-barbaric,
their form incoherent and wholly at variance
with our established notions of musical structure, all
this but renders them the more characteristic. The
picturesque gipsy could not appear to advantage, nor
as a typical figure in conventional evening dress, with
punctilious drawing-room manners; and the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_232' id='Page_232'>232</SPAN></span>
sentiments imputed to him, to be true to life, must not be
those of the cultivated modern gentleman, expressed
with the stately precision affected by the scholastic
world; but primitive, elementary, to some degree
chaotic, uttered with the rude force and directness of
the undeveloped nature. In brief, he must be represented
against the background and amid the surroundings
which are his natural environment.</p>
<p>These Rhapsodies are to be taken as rough but
faithful self-portraitures of the gipsies, strictly on their
own standards of merit, as art works in a department
by themselves, with a pronounced individuality and
a definite purpose. They are sixteen in number, and
all constructed on the same general plan, made up,
like mosaics, of widely varying fragments of melody,
each expressing some particular mood or phase of life,
but combined so as to give a comprehensive impression
of the scenes and conditions of gipsy camps,
familiar to Liszt for many years, through frequent
and lengthy visits, as vividly described by him in the
book from which we have so largely quoted.</p>
<p>Roughly speaking, the melodies so interwoven in
the Rhapsodies may be divided into three classes,
all of which appear in about equal proportions, and
with their ever startling sharpness of contrast, in each
and all of these works: the “lassan,” a slow, mournfully
lugubrious song, expressing the uttermost depths
of depression; the “frischka,” a bright, playful, capricious
dance movement, full of grace, humor, and
witching coquetry, and the “czardas,” a furious,
almost demoniac dance portraying the dance delirium
at its most intoxicating extreme, resembling
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_233' id='Page_233'>233</SPAN></span>
somewhat the Tarantelle of Spain and the Dervish dance
of the Orient. These three, with an occasional brief
strain from a fugitive love-song, shy and elusive as
the notes of some timid night bird, or a march-like
movement of wild but distinctly martial character,
formed the crude material from which Liszt has
wrought these always effective and thoroughly pianistic
compositions. A brief, special reference to two
or three of the best known among them will be sufficient
to indicate an intelligent interpretation of them all.</p>
<p>The No. 6, for instance, begins with one of the
march movements referred to. It is rhythmic and
pompous, with a bold, half-barbaric splendor. Next
comes one of the slower forms of the “frischka,” which
is often sung in Hungary to the words of a half-tipsy
drinking-song. Then follows one of the most doleful
of the “lassans,” the words to which, in free translation,
run as follows: “My father is dead, my mother
is dead, I have no brothers or sisters, and all the
money that I have left will just buy a rope to hang
myself with.”</p>
<p>The work closes with one of the wildest, most impetuous
of the “czardas” dances, which Liszt has
wrought up to an irresistible, overwhelming climax.</p>
<p>The No. 12 begins with a slow, gloomy recitative
delivered with an impressive dignity so exaggerated as
to border on the bombastic; a tale of strange adventures,
it may be, narrated by the chief of the tribe at
the evening camp-fire, while the flickering firelight
plays upon the picturesque figures grouped about
against the somber background of the pines, and the
thunder mutters sullenly in the distance. Then a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_234' id='Page_234'>234</SPAN></span>
quiet bit of lyric, evidently a love-song, gives a touch
of softness to the scene, and hints at a covert courtship
among the shadows. Later, the crisp, piquant music
of the “frischka” calls the young people to the dance,
which gradually increases in speed and brilliancy, till
it finally merges in the “czardas,” in which all join,
and which is given with the greatest possible dash and
abandon.</p>
<p>No. 15 is founded upon, and mainly consists of the
Rakoczy March, composed by a gipsy musician in
honor of Rakoczy, that Hungarian patriot, popular
general, and hero, whose daring exploits as leader,
in the Hungarian struggle for independence, made him
a prominent historical figure of his time, and the idol
of his countrymen. This march has been adopted as
the national march of Hungary, and Liszt’s setting
of it for piano is among his most stupendous works.</p>
<p>These few illustrations may serve as guides in forming
a correct conception of all the Rhapsodies. I
have given to the foregoing article more space than
seems, at first thought, to be warranted; partly, because
it gives a somewhat unusual point of view in
considering Liszt, not only as a composer, but as a
thoughtful and philosophic student of esthetics, and
as an eloquent, forceful writer; partly, because I hope
it may produce in the minds of some readers a more
favorable, because more justly discriminating, attitude
of mind toward these Hungarian Rhapsodies as
musical art works; but mainly, because it emphasizes,
with the powerful support of Liszt’s authority, certain
general principles of art which seem to me all-important,
but which are too often ignored in considering
the special art of music.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_235' id='Page_235'>235</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>RUBINSTEIN </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1830 </td><td class='tdr'> 1894</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_237' id='Page_237'>237</SPAN></span><h1 id='t6800'>Rubinstein: Barcarolle, in G Major</h1></div>
<p>Strictly speaking, the “barcarolle”
is an Italian boat-song—“barca”
being the Italian word for boat.
But in musical terminology it has
been localized and signifies distinctly
a Neapolitan boat-song associated
as exclusively with the Vesuvian bay
as is the gondoliera with the lagoons
and canals of Venice. In each case it is the song of
the local boatman, sung to the rhythmical accompaniment
of the swinging oar, and enhanced in poetic
charm by the beauty and romantic atmosphere of the
surroundings. In each case also it has served as a
suggestive and grateful artistic subject for musical
treatment, used by nearly all the modern composers,
great and small, and one which is particularly suited
to the pianoforte and facilely adapted to its characteristic
resources.</p>
<p>In many respects the barcarolle, in this its idealized
form as a musical art work, closely resembles the
gondoliera, similarly developed; for instance, in its
graceful six-eight rhythm, its gliding, swaying
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_238' id='Page_238'>238</SPAN></span>
boat-like movement, its suggestions of dipping oar and
rippling water, and in its sustained song-like melody
which we may easily consider as representing the
voice of the boatman.</p>
<p>These descriptive elements are common to all
works of both classes, but the characteristic mood of
the typical barcarolle is less tender and passionate,
more cheery and fanciful than that of the gondoliera.
It has less of the human element, more of the sea and
its slumbering mystery; less of the lover’s sigh, and
more of the half-seen witchery of sea-sprites and
mermaids in the clear depths of inverted sky beneath.
To appreciate this mood to the full, one must have
drifted, with suspended oars, in a small boat, upon
the far-famed bay of Naples, just as evening fell, with
the lofty banner of blue-black smoke waving majestically
above the summit of Vesuvius, in the distance,
like the pennon of some mighty earth giant, an ominous
reminder of his terrible, through slumbrous, power;
with the city rising in the background, terrace on
terrace, from the water’s edge to the stern old ducal
castle, which crowns the height and looms dark and
forbiddingly against the sky, a memory in stone,
with the fairy island of Capri lying to seaward and
the cool breath of the Mediterranean filling the sails
of the countless fishing-boats gliding shoreward, while
the boatmen sing to the subdued accompaniment of
the evening chimes softened by distance. Seen at
midday from the height, under the glare and scorch of
the noonday sun, with the discordant, jangling sounds
of busy life rising harshly to one, like the cries from
some pit of torment, Naples seems a hell; but at the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_239' id='Page_239'>239</SPAN></span>
evening hour, viewed from the bay, it is a veritable
dream of heaven.</p>
<p>No one has caught and embodied in music the
mood and scene of this hour, with its caressing coolness,
its murmuring ripples, whispering secrets of
other days, like Rubinstein, though many have
attempted it with more or less success. Of his five
barcarolles, all beautiful and characteristic, the most
faultlessly typical seems to me the one in G major
which I have selected for special mention.</p>
<p>This is not only one of the most graceful and characteristic,
as well as most perfect in form and finish,
but also decidedly the most realistic of the five. The
rhythmic play of the oars, the undulating movement
of the boat, and the constant plash of the water, are all
vividly suggested, and the melody of the boatman’s
song, original with Rubinstein, is very appropriate
and typical, heard in intermittent fragments as if sung
fitfully in broken snatches. The chords accompanying
the melody should be given lightly, though in nearly
strict time, in regular, rhythmic pulsations, but with a
broken arpeggio effect, that may well coincide with
the representation of rippling water, which idea is
to be kept in mind.</p>
<p>The passages in double-thirds, which form the principal
difficulty of the work, must be rendered with the
utmost smoothness and delicacy. It is a good plan to
begin each passage with a very low and extremely
loose wrist, raising it gradually till quite high toward
the middle of the run and then lowering it as gradually
and easily to the end. This insures absolute flexibility
and enhances the undulating effect. The following
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_240' id='Page_240'>240</SPAN></span>
little verses, by T. Buchanan Read, express exactly in
words the mood of this barcarolle, and I never play it
without thinking of them:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>    “My soul to-day</p>
<p class='line0'>    Is far away,</p>
<p class='line0'>Adrift upon the Vesuvian bay.</p>
<p class='line0'>    My winged boat,</p>
<p class='line0'>    A bird afloat,</p>
<p class='line0'>Glides by the purple peaks remote.</p>
<p class='line0'>    Across the rail</p>
<p class='line0'>    My hand I trail</p>
<p class='line0'>Within the shadow of the sail.</p>
<p class='line0'>    With bliss intense</p>
<p class='line0'>    The cooling sense</p>
<p class='line0'>Glides down my drowsy indolence.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_241' id='Page_241'>241</SPAN></span><h1 id='t6916'>Rubinstein: Kamennoi-Ostrow, No. 22</h1></div>
<p>Kamennoi-Ostrow is the name of
one of a group of islands situated
in the Neva River, some miles below
St. Petersburg, “Ostrow” being the
Russian word for island, and “Kamennoi”
the specific name for this
particular island, signifying at once
small and rocky. This island is a
favorite pleasure resort, both winter and summer, for
the wealthy and aristocratic classes of St. Petersburg;
one of the imperial palaces is situated upon it, besides
many cafés, dance halls, summer and winter concert
gardens, and the like. In winter it is the objective
point for countless gay sleighing parties, in which the
lavish Russian nobles vie with each other in the
display of elaborately decorated sledges, fine blooded
horses in glittering harness, and piles of almost priceless
furs. At this time the highway to and from the
island is the smooth, solid ice of the frozen river. In
summer the transit is made by boat, and the gaiety
is higher during those gorgeous summer nights, when
the midnight sun, never quite vanishing below the
southern horizon, floods the scene with its wondrous,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_242' id='Page_242'>242</SPAN></span>
mystical light, unlike either moonlight or the ordinary
light of day, but described by enthusiastic beholders
as possessing a peculiar, magical charm wholly its own
and scarcely to be imagined by those who have never
witnessed it.</p>
<p>Rubinstein, who spent many years of his later life at
St. Petersburg, was naturally a frequent visitor at
Kamennoi-Ostrow. In fact, on several occasions he
spent a number of weeks consecutively at one of its
summer hotels and became very familiar with all
phases of gaiety at this festive resort and well acquainted
with most of its habitués. His set of twenty-four
pieces for the piano, entitled “Kamennoi-Ostrow,”
is a series of tone sketches suggested by and representing
various scenes and personages which his sojourn
there brought within his experience. The No. 22,
which is probably the best of the set and certainly
the most widely known, is intended as the musical
portrait of a lady, Mademoiselle Anna de Friedebourg,
a personal acquaintance of Rubinstein, to
whom the composition is dedicated. It is a portrait
drawn in tender yet glowing tints against the soft
background of the summer night, outlining, however,
the spiritual rather than the physical charms and characteristics
of the lady, affording us a conception of her
individuality as well as the mood of the surroundings.
The first and principal subject, a slow and song-like
lyric melody, enunciated by the left hand, with its
peculiarly warm and mellow character, reminding one,
in color and quality, of the tone of the G string on
the violin, is intended to suggest the personality of
the lady, or perhaps, more strictly, the emotional
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_243' id='Page_243'>243</SPAN></span>
impression which this personality produced upon the
composer; while the delicate, vibratory accompaniment
of the right hand indicates the poetic setting or
background, the luminous midsummer night, in one
of those island pleasure gardens, the weird light
quivering down through tremulous leaves, the mingled
scent of flowers and faint sea-breezes, the hum of
summer insects, and the whisper of the reeds stirred
by the lazily flowing river.</p>
<p>Upon the dreamful hush of this audible silence
sounds clear, but sweet and silvery, the little bell of a
Greek Catholic chapel, not far distant, calling to
midnight mass and ringing out at regular intervals,
with soft persistency, through the whole of the second
strain or movement. Below and subordinate to it is
heard a curious series of colloquial phrases of melody,
subdued and fitful, like the fragments of a murmured
conversation, as if a low and interrupted dialogue were
taking place. Then the full, rich chords of the organ
roll out upon the quiet night, flooding it at once with
ample waves of grave, solemn harmony. This is
followed by a brief passage of recitative in single
notes, suggesting the voice of the priest intoning the
service within the chapel. It is said to be an exact
reproduction, note for note, of a fragment of very
ancient Hebrew music, once forming a part of the
religious exercises of the Jews and long ago incorporated
into the Greek Catholic service.</p>
<p>Then comes an effective, but seemingly irrelevant,
cadenza in double arpeggios which, though pleasing,
has no apparent connection either with the subject or
the mood of the rest of the composition, but which
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_244' id='Page_244'>244</SPAN></span>
serves indifferently well as a means of leading back to
the first theme, presented this time with full, flowing
accompaniment in a more impassioned guise, as if to
indicate the deeper, more intensified emotions developed
by the romantic scene and poetic surroundings.</p>
<p>The composition closes with a momentary return of
the little conversational strain, merely suggested and
only just audible this time, like whispered words of
farewell; and then a few quiet chords of the organ,
lingering and slowly fading into the silence, as a
pleasant memory reluctantly dissolves into slumber.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_245' id='Page_245'>245</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>GRIEG </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr style='font-size:1.2em;'><td class='tdl'>1843 </td><td class='tdr'> 1907</td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_247' id='Page_247'>247</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7030'>Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 46</h1></div>
<p>Grieg is the chief living exponent of
Norwegian music, as Ibsen is of its
literature. “Peer Gynt” is a versified
drama by Henrik Ibsen, to which
Grieg has written an orchestral suite
of that name, from which arrangements
for piano have been transcribed,
both for two and four hands.</p>
<p>The scenes, incidents, moods, and characters of Ibsen’s
drama are essentially Scandinavian; wild,
gloomy, fantastic, often vague and incoherent to the
reader of more classic and polished literature. Peer
Gynt, the hero, is a lawless adventurer, of wild and
uncouth personality, undisciplined instincts and passions,
and most chaotic career.</p>
<p>The various parts of the Grieg suite are founded
upon various scenes of the drama, but the numbering
of the different movements will mislead the player,
as the chronological progression of the drama is not
always adhered to in the music. The following is the
order in which the numbers should be presented to
fit the scenes which they represent in the life and
adventures of Peer Gynt: (1) Peer Gynt and Ingrid;
(2) Troll Dance; (3) Death of Ase; (4) Arabian Dance;
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_248' id='Page_248'>248</SPAN></span>
(5) Anitra’s Dance; (6) Solveig’s Song; (7) Morning;
(8) Storm; (9) Cradle Song. I have included in their
proper places two of the songs of Solveig, the principal
heroine of the drama, which Grieg has also set
to music and which should be rendered by soprano
voice.</p>
<h2 id='t7066'>1. Peer Gynt and Ingrid</h2>
<p>This is also called “Ingrid’s Complaint” and <i>“Brautraub</i>,”
or the robbery of the bride. It is the first of
the scenes in the drama which Grieg has rendered
into music, and represents one of the earliest escapades
in the life of the hero, when he attended the rustic
festivities of a wedding in the neighborhood, and,
seized with a sudden infatuation for the bride, Ingrid,
ran away with her to the mountains, in the face of the
assembled company. The first four measures, marked
“allegro furioso,” suggest the furious movement and
delirious excitement of the flight and pursuit, contrasting
ludicrously with the dazed, helpless astonishment
of the disappointed bridegroom.</p>
<p>The following protracted plaintive minor strains embody
the complainings and reproaches of Ingrid,
grieving for a life ruined and happiness destroyed,
from which Peer suddenly makes his escape, brutally
leaving her to her fate in the hills; and the first four
measures are repeated at the close, to indicate that
the only lasting impression made upon him by the
whole affair was that of the exciting and triumphant
moment of his success.</p>
<h2 id='t7092'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_249' id='Page_249'>249</SPAN></span>2. Troll Dance</h2>
<p>This is the most graphic of all the numbers, and is
sometimes called “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”
The <i>troll</i> seems to be the Scandinavian mountain
spirit, but more of the nature of gnomes, kobolds, and
goblins than of the gentle elves and fairies of English
lore. After deserting the unfortunate Ingrid in the
forest, Peer fled still deeper into the rugged fastnesses,
where he was surrounded at nightfall by a pack of
trolls, who alternately teased and entertained him with
their pranks and antics, until scattered at dawn by
the sound of church-bells in the distance.</p>
<p>The grotesque character of this movement admirably
depicts the uncanny mood and nature of the trolls.
The opening measures are light and weird, fantastically
suggesting the stealthy footsteps of the gathering
pack of trolls, emerging on tiptoe from the mists
and shadows of the night, and cautiously surrounding
their uninvited guest. Little by little the movement
becomes more impetuous, as the hilarity and excitement
increase, until toward the close it grows to an
incoherent whirl and rush, above which ring out
sharply the gruesome shrieks of the infuriated goblins,
balked of the continuance of their vindictive delight
in tormenting their victim, by the approach of
dawn.</p>
<h2 id='t7121'>3. Death of Ase</h2>
<p>On returning to his mother’s hut in his native village,
after these and many other adventures, Peer finds
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_250' id='Page_250'>250</SPAN></span>
her on her death-bed, and remains with her through
the night, during which she passes away, enlivening
her last hours with the most preposterous tales and
pantomimes. This scene of the drama, in spite of its
solemnity and sadness, carries the fantastic to the extreme
verge of the grotesque.</p>
<p>The illustrative music is cast in the mold of a “funeral
march,” without trio and with but one well-developed
theme. In it Grieg has emphasized only the somber
and tragical aspect of the situation, ignoring entirely
its touches of ghastly humor. The utter and crushing
despair of a wrecked and disappointed life, of shattered
hopes and unrequited and unappreciated maternal
affection, sobs through its strains, enhancing the
pangs of approaching dissolution. Its mood is that of
unqualified gloom, unrelieved by a single vibration of
hope or consolation.</p>
<h2 id='t7145'>4. Arabian Dance</h2>
<p>In the interval which has elapsed since the death
of Ase, our hero, now in the prime of life, driven by
his erratic spirit and love of adventure, has landed
upon the coast of Africa, after being fairly hounded
out of his own country by the ridicule and contempt
of his neighbors. This scene takes place in an oasis of
the Great Desert, where an Arab chief has pitched
his tent, and where Peer, mounted on a stolen white
charger and clad in stolen silk and jeweled robes, has
arrived in the rôle of the prophet to the Bedouins. A
bevy of Arabian girls are dancing before him in oriental
costume, pausing to render homage at intervals to
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_251' id='Page_251'>251</SPAN></span>
the supposed prophet, who reclines among cushions,
drinking coffee and smoking a long pipe. The music
begins with a monotonous rhythmical figure in the accompaniment,
suggesting the beat of tambourines and
castanets, and the melody of the opening strain is
weird rather than bright, stealthily playful rather
than openly gay, rising soon to a considerable degree
of excited movement. The trio, with its double melody
and its languorous warmth of cadence, tells of increasingly
involved figures in the dance and a more
voluptuous, seductive grace of motion among the
dancers. Then the opening strain is repeated, with
its clash of tambourines, its tinkle of silver bangles
and anklets, and its mood of repressed, but jocose,
humor, beneath a flimsy veil of fictitious gravity.</p>
<h2 id='t7176'>5. Anitra’s Dance</h2>
<p>Anitra, the light-limbed and dark-eyed daughter of
the chief, has won the especial favor of the prophet,
and dances alone before him after her companions
have retired. Peer is enraptured and promises to make
her an houri in paradise, and to give her a soul, a
very little one, in return for her love and service. She
is not much tempted by the soul, but finally consents
to fly to the desert with him for the gift of the large
opal from his turban. Anitra’s dance is more warmly
subjective, more distinctly personal in character than
the preceding, at once lighter and more rapid, more
tender and winningly graceful, full of arch defiance,
playful witcheries, and the coquettish confidence of the
high-born maiden and practised solo-danseuse, certain
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_252' id='Page_252'>252</SPAN></span>
of her power and bent on using it to the full, for the
complete subjugation of their prophet guest. We can
almost feel her smoothly undulating movements, her
swift, but seductive, changes of pose, and those sharp,
stolen side-glances, skilfully blended of shyness and
fire, flashing from beneath her drooping black lashes,
fascinating, but dangerous, like lightning gleams from
a fringe of somber cloud.</p>
<h2 id='t7202'>6. Solveig’s Song</h2>
<p>Solveig, a Norwegian maiden of Peer’s own village,
the earliest and only worthy love of his life, whom he
has deserted in a spasm of virtue, feeling himself unfit
to remain with her, sits spinning at the door of a log
hut, in a forest far up in the North. She is now a
middle-aged woman, fair and comely, and as she spins
she sings of her unfailing faith in Peer’s return, her
own ever-constant love, and her prayers to God to
strengthen and gladden her lover on earth or in heaven.
In the music to this song Grieg has admirably depicted
the character of Solveig: beautiful, tender, joyous,
and full of hope. The English translation of the words,
which is but a poor and inadequate representation of
the original, runs as follows:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Though winter departeth,</p>
<p class='line0'>  And fadeth the May;</p>
<p class='line0'>Though summer, too, may vanish,</p>
<p class='line0'>  The year pass away;</p>
<p class='line0'>Yet thou’lt return, my darling,</p>
<p class='line0'>  For thou, love, art mine.</p>
<p class='line0'>I gave thee my promise,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Forever I am thine.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_253' id='Page_253'>253</SPAN></span></p>
<p class='line0'>“God help thee, my darling,</p>
<p class='line0'>  If living art thou;</p>
<p class='line0'>God bless thee, O my darling,</p>
<p class='line0'>  If dead thou art now.</p>
<p class='line0'>I will wait thy coming</p>
<p class='line0'>  Till thou drawest near;</p>
<p class='line0'>Or tarry thou in heaven,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Till I can meet thee, dear.”</p>
</div>
<h2 id='t7240'>7. Morning</h2>
<p>This, the most musical and sensuously beautiful
movement of the whole suite, represents daybreak in
Egypt, with the desert in the distance and the great
pyramids, with groups of acacias and palms in the
foreground, against a rosy eastern sky. Peer stands
before the statue of Memnon in the first hush of the
dawn, and watches the rays of the rising sun strike
upon it, when, true to the ancient tradition, the statue
sings. Soft and mysterious strains of music, monotonous
and prolonged, are drawn by the sunbeams from
the venerable stone.</p>
<p>The melody of this movement is of extreme simplicity
and lyric beauty, pure and fresh as the dawn.
Its cadences swell in power and volume as the sun
rises higher; and the full flood of light is transmitted
into a full flood of song, as the statue thrills and vibrates
with the first kisses of the ardent Egyptian sun.</p>
<p>After the climax, which is full and joyous, but never
passionate, the music diminishes and dies away in
broken snatches, as the statue, now thoroughly impregnated
with light and warmth, ceases to emit those
sounds with which it has been said to salute the daybreak
for four thousand years.</p>
<h2 id='t7268'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_254' id='Page_254'>254</SPAN></span>8. Storm</h2>
<p>Peer Gynt, now a vigorous old man, is on board a
ship on the North Sea off the Norwegian coast, trying
to discern the familiar outline of mountains and glaciers
through the growing twilight and gathering
storm. The wind rises to a gale; it grows dark; the
sea increases; the ship labors and plunges; breakers
are ahead; the sails are torn away; the ship strikes
and goes to pieces, a shattered wreck, and the waves
swallow all. Peer, true to his nature, saves his life
and adds to the list of his sins by pushing a fellow-passenger
from an upturned boat which will not support
both, and floating to shore.</p>
<p>This, the final instrumental number of the suite, is
by far the most difficult, important, and pretentious
of them all; and whether regarded from a musical or
descriptive standpoint, is unquestionably the crowning
effort of the whole work. It portrays the mood
and the might of the tempest with startling vividness,
the blackness of the storm-racked clouds, the rage of
the wind-lashed waters, the shrieking of the gale
through snapping cordage, the almost human complaining
of the noble ship, struggling hopelessly with
her doom. In brief, the strength, the power, and the
manifold phantom voices of the storm are simultaneously
and graphically expressed, and the mood and
movement, both in duration and completeness of development,
exceed those in any of the other numbers.
At length, however, after the catastrophe, the force
of the storm is broken, the fury of wind and waves
subsides, and the receding thunder clouds mutter their
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_255' id='Page_255'>255</SPAN></span>
baffled rage and threats of deferred destruction more
and more faintly as they disappear, and the light of
morning breaks upon the scene. Then softly, like the
audible voice of the sunlight, comes an instrumental
transcription of Solveig’s song of love, previously sung,
whose familiar strains symbolically express the idea
that her sleepless affection, her guardian thoughts and
prayers have watched over her loved one and brought
him at last safely through danger and tempest to his
native shore. This symbolic use of Solveig’s song,
with its suggestive significance, is in my opinion the
happiest and most poetic touch in the whole composition.</p>
<h2 id='t7315'>9. Solveig’s Cradle Song</h2>
<p>Solveig, the guardian angel of Peer’s life, represents
and appeals to all that is good in his nature. Her
influence, even in the midst of his maddest escapades,
has never wholly deserted him, and serves at last as
the magnet to draw him back to her and home. The
last scene in the drama represents Solveig, now a
serene-faced, silver-haired old lady, stepping forth from
the door of the forest hut, on her way to church. Peer,
who in his chaotic fashion has become a prey to disappointment,
to remorse, and to fear of death, appears
suddenly before her, calling himself a sinner and crying
for condemnation from the lips of the woman whom
he has most sinned against. Solveig sinks upon a
bench at the door of the hut. Peer drops upon his
knees at her feet and buries his face in her lap. The
sun rises and the curtain falls as she sings her lullaby
song of peace and happiness. Grieg has set these last
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_256' id='Page_256'>256</SPAN></span>
stanzas of the drama to music under the title of Solveig’s
Wiegenlied, or Cradle Song. They are translated
as follows:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Sleep thou, dearest boy of mine!</p>
<p class='line0'>I will cradle thee, I will watch thee.</p>
<p class='line0'>The boy has been sitting on his mother’s lap,</p>
<p class='line0'>The two have been playing all the life-day long.</p>
<p class='line0'>The boy has been resting at his mother’s breast</p>
<p class='line0'>All the life-day long. God’s blessing on my joy.</p>
<p class='line0'>The boy has been lying close in to my heart</p>
<p class='line0'>All the life-day long. He is weary now.</p>
<p class='line0'>Sleep thee, dearest boy of mine!</p>
<p class='line0'>I will cradle thee, I will watch thee.</p>
<p class='line0'>Sleep and dream thou, dear my boy!”</p>
</div>
<p>These lines seem to indicate a transition from wifely
love to maternal love in the affection of Solveig, with
the advent of age.</p>
<p>The moral of the drama, not a very ethical one, but
one which has possessed the minds of many devoted
women since the world began, appears to be that in
love alone is salvation. Whatever the errors and sins
and follies of the man, he is won at last and saved,
even at the eleventh hour, by the faith, the hope, and
the love of one devoted woman.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_257' id='Page_257'>257</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7366'>Grieg: An den Frühling (Spring Song), Op. 43, No. 6</h1></div>
<p>Among the very few strictly lyric
compositions for the piano by Grieg,—a
vein in which he was singularly
unproductive for so eminent a genius,—this
spring song must unquestionably
take rank as the best, the
most evenly sustained throughout,
the most perfect in form and finish,
and decidedly the finest as well as most emotional in
quality.</p>
<p>The opening notes of the right hand accompaniment
fall light and silvery as the soft drops of the April
shower upon the waiting woods, when the first faint
shimmer of tender green begins to tint the tips of the
waving boughs. Then the melody enters in the left
hand with subdued, repressed intensity, warmly,
sweetly vibrant, like the upper register of that most
passionate of instruments, the ’cello, a melody telling
of mild, languorous days and soft, dream-haunted
nights, thrilled through by the mysterious throbbing of
a new life in the earth’s long-frozen veins; telling of
Nature, surprised but radiantly happy, awakening at
the touch of her ardent lover, the sudden spring, from
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_258' id='Page_258'>258</SPAN></span>
her ice-locked sleep, like the slumbering, frost-fettered
bride in the old legend of Siegfried and Brünnhilde;
telling of summer joys and brightness begotten of their
union, of bird songs, sweeter for the long silence, of
many-tinted flowers springing in fragrant profusion
where the cold white drifts of winter lay but yesterday,
as if the snowflakes had all been transformed to blossoms
by the magic kiss of the sun; of love as sudden as
the spring, as tenderly sweet as its violets, strong as
its rushing torrents, but alas! too often as transient
as its fleeting glories. This sudden, startling thought
of pain and disillusion strikes sharply across the
mellow, golden current of the stream with a somber
threatening note of danger and distress rising to a
swift, strong climax of indignant protest or fierce
defiance, a contrasting reactionary mood common to
certain minds, like those, for instance, of Byron and
Heine, aptly illustrated by the following lines, translated
from the German of Amentor:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Sing not to me of spring, its flowers and azure skies,</p>
<p class='line0'>Fleeting delusions all to cheat unwary eyes.</p>
<p class='line0'>Talk not to me of love, its dreams of Paradise.</p>
<p class='line0'>The charms of spring, the joys of love, are brilliant lies.”</p>
</div>
<p>But this dark mood is of but brief duration; it is soon
exorcised by the plenitude of sunshine and the exuberance
of springtime happiness, and the first melody
returns with all its glowing beauty and seductive
sweetness, and with a fuller, more fluent, voluptuous
accompaniment, suggesting the mingled voices of many
streams exulting in their new freedom, or the irregular,
intermittent sighs of May breezes, impatient with having
to rock all the baby leaves at once.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_259' id='Page_259'>259</SPAN></span>
This composition is technically of only moderate
difficulty, but requires for its proper delivery a fine
taste, great warmth of feeling, and a telling, sensuous
quality of tone for the melody, while the right hand
accompaniment in the first movement is kept almost
infinitely light and delicate. The sudden burst of
passionate pain and resentment in the climax should
be given with extreme intensity and a decided acceleration
of tempo, as well as increase in power; followed
by an abrupt fall to a caressing pianissimo, and a long
lingering hold on the final chord just preceding the
return of the first melody, to accentuate the renewal
of the softer, sunnier mood.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_260' id='Page_260'>260</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7446'>Grieg: Vöglein (Little Birds), Op. 43, No. 4</h1></div>
<p>A charming and effective supplementary
companion piece to the spring
song is that exquisitely, daintily fanciful,
yet exceedingly brief piece
of descriptive tone painting, called
“The Little Birds,” published in
the same volume of lyrics with the
preceding number. It may be
played as an added and appropriate coda to the
spring song. It is one of those graphically realistic
productions which tell their own story. It portrays
very literally, by more than suggestive imitation, the
blithe twitter of the spring birds fluttering amid the
dancing leaves and sunlight, engaged in their delightful
occupation of nest-building. Notice, too, the
sudden touch of facetious drollery, so characteristic
of Grieg, where the delicate little bird motive is abruptly
transferred to the bass register, producing a
peculiarly comical, grotesque effect, reminding one
of the gutteral hilarity of the spring-awakened frogs
in some neighboring pool.</p>
<p>Exceeding lightness and delicacy, combined with a
certain playful staccato effect, are the chief technical
requisites for the correct performance of this work,
which, though small, will well repay careful study.
The tone produced should be crisp and bright, though
never rising above piano, and the tempo not exceedingly
rapid.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_261' id='Page_261'>261</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7479'>Grieg: Berceuse, Op. 38, No. 1</h1></div>
<p>One of Grieg’s most charming lyrics
is this thoroughly unique and characteristic
Cradle Song. This has
always been a most attractive and
facilely treated subject for piano-compositions,
on account of the
way in which it lends itself to realistic
handling.</p>
<p>The general plan of these compositions is always
substantially the same: a simple, swinging accompaniment
in the left hand, symbolizing the rocking
cradle, and a soft, soothing melody in the right, more
or less elaborately ornamented, suggesting the song
of the nurse or mother lulling the child to rest.</p>
<p>An almost infinite variety of effect is possible, however,
within these seemingly narrow limits, dependent
upon the differing ability and personality of the
composer, the diversity in melodic and harmonic coloring,
and especially upon the environment and conditions
conceived of by the writer as the setting or
background of the picture. The range of legitimate
suggestion in this regard by means of such works is
as broad as that of human experience itself. For instance,
the child imagined may be the idolized prince
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_262' id='Page_262'>262</SPAN></span>
of a royal line, rocked in a golden cradle with a jeweled
crown embossed upon its satin canopy, and guarded
by the loyalty, the hopes and pride of a mighty nation;
or it may be the sickly offspring of want and suffering,
doomed from its birth to sorrow and struggle and
disappointment, to a crown of toil and a heritage of
tears; or perhaps it may be a fairy changeling, stolen
by Titania in some wayward caprice, rocked to sleep
in a lily-cup upon crystal waves, or watching, with
large, wondering human eyes, the pranks of the forest
elves as they trace with swiftly circling feet their
magic rings upon the moss, or awaken the morning-glories
upon the lawn with a shower-bath of dew.</p>
<p>The lullaby song of the mother may thrill with the
sweet content and rapturous joy of a life of love and
brightness but just begun, and seemingly endless in
its forward vista of ever new and ever glad surprises.
Her fancies may be winged by hope and happiness to
airy flights in which no sky-piercing height seems impossible;
or her voice may vibrate with the songs of
a broken-hearted widow, who guards the little sleeper
in an agony of loving fear, as the last treasure saved
from the wreck of her world. As the smallest plot of
garden ground possesses the capacity to receive and
develop the germs of the most diverse forms of vegetation,
from the violet to the oak, from the fragrant
rose to the deadly poppy, so these modest little musical
forms are replete with an almost boundless potentiality
of suggestion.</p>
<p>In the case of this particular work by Grieg, the
child portrayed is no delicate rose-tinted girl-baby,
downily cushioned upon silken pillows, peeping timidly
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_263' id='Page_263'>263</SPAN></span>
from a drift of dainty laces like the first crocuses from
the feathery snow of April, but the lusty son of a
Viking stock, with the blood of a sturdy race of fighters
coursing red through his veins, and with a will and
a voice of his own, cradled in the hollow trunk of a
pine or the hide-lashed blade-bones of the elk, wrapped
in the skin of wolf or bear, and lulled to sleep by the
rough, but kindly, crooning of a peasant nurse. May
we not fancy the refrain of her song somewhat after
the fashion of the following lines?</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>“Oh, hush thee, my baby;</p>
<p class='line0'>  The time will soon come</p>
<p class='line0'>When thy rest will be broken</p>
<p class='line0'>  By trumpet and drum,</p>
<p class='line0'>When the bows will be bent,</p>
<p class='line0'>  The blades will be red,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the beacon of battle</p>
<p class='line0'>  Will blaze overhead.</p>
<p class='line0'>Then hush thee, my baby,</p>
<p class='line0'>  Take rest while you may,</p>
<p class='line0'>For strife comes with manhood</p>
<p class='line0'>  As waking with day.”</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_264' id='Page_264'>264</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7570'>Grieg: The Bridal Procession, from “Aus dem Volksleben.” Op. 19, No. 2</h1></div>
<p>One of the best known and most
popular of Grieg’s compositions is
the second movement of his piano
suite entitled “Aus dem Volksleben”
(sketches of Norwegian country
life), a work which portrays, with
all his graphic power and good-natured
humor, a number of unique
and characteristic phases of the peasant life in Norway.
This second movement, at once the easiest
and most pleasing number of the suite, is intended
as a realistic representation of the music of a primitive
peasant band, which leads a rural bridal procession,
made up of Norwegian countrypeople, on its way to
the church.</p>
<p>We may fancy ourselves seated on a bank by the
roadside, with a jolly company of villagers in picturesque
holiday costume, listening to their jests and
gaiety as we await the rustic pageant. Soon our attention
is caught by the sound of distant music, gradually
approaching, strange, weird, uncanny music, as
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_265' id='Page_265'>265</SPAN></span>
if the gnomes and trolls had left their work in the secret
mines and caverns of the mountains, where they are
ever forging new chains for the fettered earth-giants
as their prisoned strength increases, and had turned
musicians for a frolic and come forth into the light
of day to join the festival. The rhythmic beat of
drums and cymbals, the shrill, strident notes of the
fife, the quaint, quavering tones of the pipe and clarinet,
mingle in a strain jocosely mirthful, rather than
truly gay, and becoming more insistent as it advances.</p>
<p>There is no trace of tenderness, no hint of sweet
anticipation, no suggestive undertone of sacred solemnity,
in this music. We miss the warm color and
tremulous, sustained effects of the violins, which with
us are always symbolic of love. It seems almost like
a musical satire on the tender passion; as if the divine
but dethroned Balder (the God of Love in Norse
mythology), disgusted by the infidelity and ingratitude
of mankind, were employing all his wondrous
power as a minstrel to depreciate and deride this his
best gift to humanity. But perhaps we do not rightly
appreciate the significance of the music. As it draws
nearer and nearer, growing stronger with every moment,
we begin to suspect that perhaps its very rudeness
and primitive energy express more truthfully
than more delicate, dreamy, finely shaded cadences
could do, the idea that human love is one of the elemental
forces of nature, underlying and antedating
all the subtilizing refinements of civilization, and destined
to outlast them, as the rugged granite of the
northern mountains antedates and will outlast all the
crystal palaces of taste and luxury.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_266' id='Page_266'>266</SPAN></span>
On comes the procession, the music swelling and
growing with every step, till as it passes immediately
before us it becomes an almost deafening crash of dissonant
instruments, each player with lusty good-will
doing his utmost to honor the occasion, outvie his
comrades, and earn his share in the wedding feast,
by making his part most prominent in the general din.
First comes the band, then the bride and groom and
the bridesmaids in white, with wands and wreaths, a
troop of children with baskets of flowers, then a company
of the immediate friends and relatives of the
bridal pair, with the older neighbors and acquaintances
soberly bringing up the rear. So they defile
before us, and pass on their way down the sunlit country
road to the church, the music gradually diminishing
as it recedes into the distance, growing fainter and
fainter till only occasional shriller notes or louder fragments
reach us, and at last even these are sunk in the
summer silence.</p>
<p>This movement is in march time and form, and the
strict, unvarying march rhythm should be preserved
throughout, absolutely without variation. The tone
should be crisp and clear, with but little singing quality,
to represent that of wooden wind instruments,
but varying in degree from the softest possible <i>pp</i> to
the most tremendous <i>fff</i> which the performer is capable
of producing. The player is here afforded an opportunity
of testing his powers in that most difficult
of all elements in pianism—a long-sustained, evenly-graded
crescendo and diminuendo. To produce its
true realistic effect, the music should emerge almost
imperceptibly out of silence, increase steadily, but
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_267' id='Page_267'>267</SPAN></span>
by infinitesimal degrees, to the greatest quantity of
tone power which the instrument will produce; then
diminish as gradually and steadily till it dissolves
into silence again at the close; not stopping at a given
point, but simply ceasing to sound. Those who have
heard Rubinstein render the Turkish march from
“The Ruins of Athens” will remember it as a masterly
model for this effect.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_269' id='Page_269'>269</SPAN></span></p>
<table summary="" class='center composertitle'>
<tr><td class='tdl' colspan='2'>SAINT-SAËNS </td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
<tr class='years'><td class='tdl'>1835–</td><td class='tdr'></td></tr>
</table>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_271' id='Page_271'>271</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7679'>Saint-Saëns: Le Rouet d’Omphale</h1></div>
<p>Saint-Saëns, though himself a first-rate
concert pianist and the composer
of some excellent things for
the piano, notably in concerto form,
is, nevertheless, chiefly gifted and
principally celebrated as a writer for
orchestra, having done his best,
most original, and most interesting
work in this line. Among his many important compositions
for full orchestra, there are perhaps none
which better represent his individuality and peculiar
style than his four “Symphonic Poems,” of which two
have been selected for illustration here. This form of
composition, as well as its name, originated with Franz
Liszt, whose twelve “Symphonic Poems” are his
most important contributions to orchestra literature.
In musical structure the symphonic poem corresponds
to the modern overture and to the pianoforte ballade,
as exemplified by Chopin, much more nearly than
to the symphony proper. It consists of a single movement,
without different divisions and pronounced differentiated
parts, such as are to be found in the regulation
symphony, though it often expresses a wide
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_272' id='Page_272'>272</SPAN></span>
variety of moods, merging into one another without
pause or interruption.</p>
<p>Its only radical point of similarity to the symphony
lies in the fact that its first principal theme is
subjected to an elaborate and logical development in
most cases, as in the symphonic allegro. It is distinctly
an outgrowth of modern romanticism and deals
always with the somewhat definite poetic thought, or
some real or imaginary episode from life. It is, in
fact, program music of the most pronounced and
uncompromising type, and the special thought or
episode is always indicated by its descriptive title.</p>
<p>The four Symphonic Poems of Saint-Saëns are: (1)
Le Rouet d’Omphale; (2) Phaeton; (3) Danse Macabre;
(4) La Jeunesse d’Hercule.</p>
<p>I have selected for consideration here the first and
third, entitled respectively the “Rouet d’Omphale”
and the “Danse Macabre”; the one descriptive of a
classic, the other of a medieval scene and tradition.</p>
<p>The first, the “Wheel of Omphale,” was suggested
by the Greek myth of Hercules and Omphale. The
story of the pair is familiar to all readers of classic
mythology, and represents perhaps the most singular
episode in the checkered career of this hero and demigod.
The legend runs as follows: Hercules, having
killed his friend Iphitus in a fit of madness, to which
he was occasionally subject, fell a prey to a severe
malady, sent upon him by the gods in punishment
for this murder. He consulted the Delphic oracle
with a view to learning the means of escaping from this
disease. He was informed by the oracle that he could
only be cured by allowing himself to be sold as a slave
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_273' id='Page_273'>273</SPAN></span>
for three years, and giving the purchase money to the
father of Iphitus as recompense for the loss of his son.
Accordingly Hercules was sold by Mercury as a slave
to Omphale, the Queen of Lydia, then reigning in that
country, who had long been desirous to see this strongest
of men and greatest hero of his age. He remained
with her the allotted three years, and during this period
of slavery, by the wish of the queen, the warrior-hero
assumed female attire and sat spinning among the
women, where his royal mistress often chastised him
with her sandal for his awkward manner of holding the
distaff, while she paraded in his lion’s skin, armed with
his famous war-club. But if awkward at the distaff
this son of Jupiter understood other arts which he
practised upon the Lydian queen; for in the intervals
of spinning he made love to her so successfully that
from their union sprang the race of Crœsus, famous
in antiquity. Some authorities regard this legend of
Hercules and Omphale as of astronomical significance,
while others give it a moral interpretation, saying it
illustrates how even the strongest and bravest of men
is demeaned and belittled when subjugated by a
woman.</p>
<p>The music opens with a playfully realistic introduction,
consisting of a series of light, rapid-running
figures and graceful embellishments, imitatively suggesting
the roll and buzz of the spinning-wheels. A
series of delicate turns, each an audible circle, add their
quota of pertinent symbolism to the general effect.
Soon the melody enters, joyous, musical, yet with
a certain arch mockery, enhanced by its odd, piquant
rhythm. It is the song of the spinning maidens,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_274' id='Page_274'>274</SPAN></span>
cheerfully speeding their hours of toil with music and
mirth, with occasional irrepressible touches of gay
raillery at the expense of the clumsy captive warrior,
whose long face and futile attempts at their handicraft
afford them vast amusement. Now and then a distinct
burst of silvery laughter is heard above the boom
of the wheels, interrupting the strain. Omphale, too,
is there, admonishing, chiding, ridiculing the hero, as
he moodily pursues his unwonted and unwilling task
with many a blunder and comical mistake; yet we can
fancy a half-tender smile softening her reprimands
and sweetening her playful chastisements.</p>
<p>Then with a radical change of mood and movement
comes the second important theme, a broad, impressive,
strikingly original melody in the bass, half
gloomy, half indignant, the mighty manly voice of
Hercules, uplifted in grave lament and dignified protest,
deploring his hard lot, defying its humiliations,
reproaching his gay tormentors, rebelling at his menial
duties and unworthy surroundings, yet with a stern,
proud gravity, a grand fortitude which scorns alike
weak complainings and impotent petulance. It subsides
at last into philosophic resignation and sorrowful
self-repression, as if consoled by the thought that his
punishment is after all just and his submission voluntary.</p>
<p>Then the spinning movement is resumed and the
first song virtually repeated, though in a materially
modified rhythm; and the work ends playfully, as it
begins, with a wonderfully realistic imitation of the
gradual stopping of the wheels, as their momentum
exhausts itself and little by little their speed slackens
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_275' id='Page_275'>275</SPAN></span>
and they finally come to a complete rest when abandoned
by the girls, as sunset ends the day’s work.</p>
<p>This composition is one of Saint-Saëns’ most genial
and melodious productions, as well as an excellent piece
of descriptive work. It may be rendered on the piano
either in the four-hand arrangement by Guiraud, or as
transcribed for two hands by the composer himself.
It is about equally feasible and effective in either of
these forms.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<div><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_276' id='Page_276'>276</SPAN></span><h1 id='t7822'>Saint-Saëns: Danse Macabre</h1></div>
<p>For the significance of the French
word <i>macabre</i> we must turn to the
Arabic <i>makabir</i>, signifying a burial
place or cemetery. The “Danse
Macabre,” therefore, is simply a
“cemetery dance” or “Dance of
Death.”</p>
<p>One of the most prevalent superstitions
during the middle ages throughout Europe, and
especially France, was that of the “Danse Macabre,”—a
belief that once a year, on Hallowe’en, the dead of the
churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival, one
bacchanalian revel, in which old King Death acted as
master of ceremonies. This gruesome idea appears
frequently in the literature of the period, and also in
its painting, particularly in church decoration, and a
more or less graphic portrayal of the “Danse Macabre”
may still be seen on the walls of some old cathedrals
and monasteries.</p>
<p>This composition, belonging as it does to the ultra-realistic
French school of the present day, is a vivid
tone picture of the same “Danse Macabre.” At the
head of the original composition, serving as motto and
undoubtedly as direct inspiration for the music, stands
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_277' id='Page_277'>277</SPAN></span>
a curious ancient French poem in well-nigh obsolete
fourteenth century idiom. I have made a free translation
of these verses into English, as follows:</p>
<div class='poetry-container'>
<p class='line0'>On a sounding stone,</p>
<p class='line0'>With a blanched thigh-bone,</p>
<p class='line0'>The bone of a saint, I fear,</p>
<p class='line0'>Death strikes the hour</p>
<p class='line0'>Of his wizard power,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the specters haste to appear.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>From their tombs they rise</p>
<p class='line0'>In sepulchral guise,</p>
<p class='line0'>Obeying the summons dread,</p>
<p class='line0'>And gathering round</p>
<p class='line0'>With obeisance profound,</p>
<p class='line0'>They salute the King of the Dead.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Then he stands in the middle</p>
<p class='line0'>And tunes up his fiddle,</p>
<p class='line0'>And plays them a gruesome strain.</p>
<p class='line0'>And each gibbering wight</p>
<p class='line0'>In the moon’s pale light</p>
<p class='line0'>Must dance to that wild refrain.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>Now the fiddle tells,</p>
<p class='line0'>As the music swells,</p>
<p class='line0'>Of the charnel’s ghastly pleasures;</p>
<p class='line0'>And they clatter their bones</p>
<p class='line0'>As with hideous groans</p>
<p class='line0'>They reel to those maddening measures.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>The churchyard quakes</p>
<p class='line0'>And the old abbey shakes</p>
<p class='line0'>To the tread of that midnight host,</p>
<p class='line0'>And the sod turns black</p>
<p class='line0'>On each circling track,</p>
<p class='line0'>Where a skeleton whirls with a ghost.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_278' id='Page_278'>278</SPAN></span></p>
<p class='line0'>The night wind moans</p>
<p class='line0'>In shuddering tones</p>
<p class='line0'>Through the gloom of the cypress tree,</p>
<p class='line0'>While the mad rout raves</p>
<p class='line0'>Over yawning graves</p>
<p class='line0'>And the fiddle bow leaps with glee.</p>
<p class='line'> </p>
<p class='line0'>So the swift hours fly</p>
<p class='line0'>Till the reddening sky</p>
<p class='line0'>Gives warning of daylight near.</p>
<p class='line0'>Then the first cock crow</p>
<p class='line0'>Sends them huddling below</p>
<p class='line0'>To sleep for another year.</p>
</div>
<p>The composition opens with twelve weird strokes
indicating the arrival of midnight, struck out upon a
vibrant tombstone by the impatient hand of Death
himself. There follows a light, staccato passage, suggesting
the moment when, in obedience to this awesome
signal, the specters appear from their graves
and come tiptoeing forward to take their places in the
fantastic circle. Then comes a strikingly realistic
passage where Death attempts to tune up his fiddle,
as he is to furnish the music for the dance. It has
been lying disused since the last annual festival, is
very much out of tune, and refuses to come up to
pitch. In spite of his best endeavors, the E string
obstinately remains at E flat. The repetition of this
passage at intervals throughout the composition suggests
occasional hasty and ill-timed efforts to tune up.</p>
<p>Now comes the first theme of the dance itself, light,
fantastic, suggestive of purely physical excitement
and ghastly pleasure, and graphically representing
the imagery of the corresponding verse of the poem.</p>
<p>The second theme is slower, heavier, more gloomily
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_279' id='Page_279'>279</SPAN></span>
impressive, with its weird minor harmonies and its
strongly marked rhythms, suggesting the darkness
and terror of that midnight scene, the gruesome
gravity of old King Death, as master of ceremonies,
and the increasingly ponderous tread of that ghostly
multitude, to which the gray walls of the abbey and
the very ground itself seem to reel in unison. This is
the moment when “the sod turns black where each
skeleton whirls with a ghost.”</p>
<p>Death again attempts to tune up his fiddle, with
frenzied haste, and the dance grows in speed and
impetuous power. Later it is interrupted by a lyric
intermezzo, brief but pathetically sweet. It seems
to be a plaintive lament played in a momentary pause
of the dancing, expressing the sad memories and hopeless
longings of the dancers, the real mood which underlies
the forced gaiety of this wild revel. It is appropriately
accompanied by the Æolian-like effect of the
night wind sighing among the cypress boughs. An
onward rush follows, more furiously impetuous than
before, for just as in the small hours the boisterous
and frenzied merriment of the witches in “Walpurgis
Night” grew apace, so does this skeleton dance gradually
reach an almost demoniac climax of hilarity, as
all unite in a grand finale, a thunderous whirl of
hideous merriment. Here the first and second dance
themes are very ingeniously woven together, appearing
simultaneously in a piece of most grotesque but
effective counterpoint.</p>
<p>Then comes a sudden hush, in which the distant
crow of the morning cock is distinctly heard, a signal
that daylight is approaching and the revel must end.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_280' id='Page_280'>280</SPAN></span>
With a wild hurry and scurry the specters betake
themselves to their graves once more, a final lugubrious
wail from the fiddle closing the composition, as Death
is the last to leave the field.</p>
</div>
<div class='pagination'>
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_281' id='Page_281'>281</SPAN></span>
<h1 id='t7972'>Counterparts among Poets and Musicians</h1>
<p>Those who have had sufficient interest
to read any considerable number
of the foregoing chapters cannot
have failed to perceive that, to the
mind of the author, the sister arts,
music and poetry, sustain to each
other an even closer, more vitally
intimate relation than the family
connection generally conceded to them.</p>
<p>It is a kinship of soul and sympathy, as well as of
race—a similarity of aim and influence upon humanity;
a similarity, even in the kind of effect produced, and
the means employed to produce it, which renders
them largely interdependent and reciprocally helpful.
The purpose of both is expression, chiefly emotional expression,
descriptions of nature and references to
natural phenomena being introduced merely as accessories,
as background or setting for the human life
and interest, which are of primary importance. Both
express their meaning, not through imitated sounds
or forms borrowed from the physical world, but by
means of audible symbols devised by man for this
express purpose, which have come by long usage and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_282' id='Page_282'>282</SPAN></span>
general acceptance to have a definite significance, but
require a certain degree of education to comprehend
them, and which are therefore more intellectual, more
adapted to the expression of the subtler phases of life,
and more purely human in their origin, than the
media of form and color employed in the plastic arts.</p>
<p>True, the one uses tones, the other words, as its
material; but the difference is by no means so radical
as at first appears. Both exist in time, while all other
arts have to do with space and substance. Both
have but one dimension, so to speak,—namely, duration,—and
owe whatever of the beauty of form and
proportion they possess to a symmetrical subdivision
of this given duration into correspondent parts or
sections, by means of accents, brief pauses, and
rhymes or cadences. Both may successfully treat a
progressive series of moods or scenes, of varying character,
and fluctuating intensity, which is not possible
in the plastic arts, limited as they all are to the portrayal
of a single situation, a single instant of time,
a single fixed conception. Both, again, possess a
certain warmth and inherent pulsing life, which is
their common, dominant characteristic, due to the
heart-throb of rhythm, which is lacking in all other
arts.</p>
<p>Even in the media they employ, there is a strong
though subtle resemblance; both appeal directly to
the sense of hearing, which scientists tell us is more
intimately connected with the nerve centers of
emotional life than any other of the senses. In
both cases the immediate appeal is to the feelings
and the imagination, without recourse to intervening
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_283' id='Page_283'>283</SPAN></span>
imagery borrowed from external nature. Both embody
the cry of one soul to another, and they are not
widely divergent in quality or effect. Language at
its highest is almost song, and music at its best is
idealized declamation. All good poetry must be
musical. It should, as we say, sing itself; and all
good music must be poetical, conveying a distinctly
poetic impression.</p>
<p>To me every poem presupposes a possible musical
setting, and every worthy composition, a possible
poetic text. Hence the language used, in describing
music, must of necessity, so far as the powers of the
writer permit, possess a generally poetic character.
In all my thought and reading, along this line, it has
seemed to me, not only of extreme interest, but of great
practical value to every musician and writer, to devote
careful study to the analogy between these arts, to
the correspondences between artists, in these parallel
lines of work, and between their special productions
in each, to obtain the widest possible familiarity with
both arts and their mutual relations, with a view to
letting each aid to a fuller elucidation and better
appreciation of the other. I have always grouped
together in my mind Bach and Milton, Beethoven and
Shakespeare, Mozart and Spenser, Schubert and Moore,
Schumann and Shelley, Mendelssohn and Longfellow,
Chopin and Tennyson, Liszt and Byron, Wagner and
Victor Hugo.</p>
<p>Bach and Milton seem to me to occupy corresponding
niches in the temples of music and of verse, because of
the strong religious element in the personality of both,
of their severe, involved, lengthy, sonorous, and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_284' id='Page_284'>284</SPAN></span>
dignified style of utterance; their mutual disdain of mere
sentiment and softer graces, and their fondness for
works of large dimensions and serious import. Furthermore,
because of the proneness of both to religious
and churchly subjects, and the corresponding position
which they occupy as veteran classics in their respective
arts.</p>
<p>The analogy between Beethoven and Shakespeare is
almost too obvious for remark. They are the twin
giants of music and literature in their colossal and
comprehensive powers, in the breadth and universality
of their genius, and in the verdict of absolute superiority
unanimously accorded them by all nations, all
schools, and all factions, both in the profession and by
the public. They are like the pyramids of Egypt;
they overtop all altitudes, cover more area, and present
a more enduring front to the “corroding effects of time”
than aught else the world has known.</p>
<p>Mozart and Spenser resemble each other in their
quaint and classic, yet naïve and sunshiny style, their
abundance, almost excess of fancy, and their fondness
for supernatural, though for the most part non-religious
and non-mythological scenes, incidents, and characters;
also in their habit of treating startling situations
and normally grievous catastrophes without exciting
any very profound subjective emotions in their
readers and hearers. Not that they are flippant or
superficial in character; far from it; but with them art
was somewhat removed from humanity. With Spenser
literature was not life, and with Mozart music was
not emotion. We smile and are glad at heart because
of them, but we are not thrilled; we are pensive or
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_285' id='Page_285'>285</SPAN></span>
reflective, but we rarely weep and are never plunged
into despair. There is a moral lesson, it is true, in
the feats of the knights and ladies in the “Faery
Queen,” as also in the vicissitudes of that rather admirable
scoundrel, Don Juan, but it is not burned into
us, as by a keener and crueler hand. Those who enjoy
poetry and music, rather than feel it, love it, or learn
from it, are always partial to Spenser and Mozart.</p>
<p>No artistic affinity is more marked than that of Schubert
and Moore. They are both preëminently song-writers.
Both had a gift of spontaneous, happy, graceful
development of a single thought in small compass.
Both are melodious beyond compare, and both wrote
with an ease, rapidity, and versatility rarely matched
in the annals of their arts. Moore is the most musical
of poets, and Schubert, perhaps, the most poetic of
musicians. One of Moore’s life-purposes was the collection
of stray waifs of national airs and furnishing
them with appropriate words. Likewise, one of Schubert’s
main services to art was the collection of brief
lyric poems and setting them to suitable melodies.
Each reached over into the sister art a friendly hand,
and each, unawares, won his chief fame thereby.
Moreover, though clinging by instinct and preference
to the smaller, simpler, more unpretentious forms,
each wrote one or two lengthy and well-developed
works, such as the “Lalla Rookh,” with Moore, and the
“Wanderer Fantaisie,” with Schubert, which gloriously
bear comparison with the masterpieces of their type
from the pens of the ablest writers in the larger forms.</p>
<p>Shelley has been called the poet’s poet, and Schumann
might as aptly be termed the musician’s
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_286' id='Page_286'>286</SPAN></span>
composer; because the subtle, fanciful, subjective character
and the metaphysical tendency of the works of both require
the keen insight and the fertile imagination of the
artistic temperament, to follow them in all their flights
and catch the full significance of their suggestions.
With both, the instinct for form is weak, and the constructive
faculty almost wanting. Ideas and figures
are fine, profound, and astute, but there is a lack of
lucidity, brevity, and force, as well as of logical development,
in their expression. A few bits of melody by
Schumann, such as the “Träumerei,” and an occasional
brief lyric by Shelley, like “The Skylark,” have
become well-known and popular; but their works, in
the main, are likely to be the last ever written to catch
the public ear. They appeal the more strongly to the
inner circle of initiates who are familiar spirits in the
mystical realm, whose language they speak. Where
Shelley is the favorite poet, and Schumann the favorite
composer, an unusually active fancy and subtle intellect
are sure to be found.</p>
<p>Mendelssohn and Longfellow are alike in almost
every feature. Both are in temperament objective and
optimistic. Both are graceful, fluent, melodious, tender,
and thoughtful, without being ever strongly impassioned
or really dramatic. Both display superior and
well-disciplined powers, nobility of sentiment, and ease
and grace of manner. Perfect gentlemen and polished
scholars, both avoid all radical and reformatory tendencies,
to such an extent as to lend a shade of conventionality
to their artistic personality, as compared
with the extreme romanticists of their day. Both have
reached the public ear and heart as no other talent of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_287' id='Page_287'>287</SPAN></span>
equal magnitude has ever done. Many of the ballads,
narrative poems, and shorter pieces by Longfellow,
and the “Songs Without Words,” by Mendelssohn,
have become so familiar as to be almost hackneyed,
even with the non-poetic and non-musical populace.</p>
<p>Chopin is beyond dispute the Tennyson of the pianoforte.
The same depth, warmth, and delicacy of feeling
vitalizing every line, the same polish, fineness of detail,
and symmetry of form, the same exquisitely refined,
yet by no means effeminate, temperament are seen in
both. Each shows us fervent passion, beyond the ken
of common men, without a touch of brutality; intense
and vehement emotion, with never a hint of violence
in its betrayal, expressed in dainty rhythmic numbers
as polished and symmetrical as if that symmetry and
polish were their only <i>raison d’être</i>. This similar trait
leads often to a similar mistake in regard to both.
Superficial observers, fixing their attention on the preëminent
delicacy, tenderness, elegance, and grace of
their manner and matter, regard them as exponents of
these qualities merely, and deny them broader, stronger,
sterner characteristics. Never was a grosser wrong
done true artists. No poet and no composer is more
profound, passionate, and intense than Tennyson and
Chopin, and none so rarely pens a line that is devoid of
genuine feeling as its legitimate origin. But the artist
in each stood with quiet finger on the riotous pulses of
emotion, and forbade all utterance that was crude,
chaotic, or uncouth. Both had the heart of fire and
tongue of gold. Tennyson wrote the model lyrics of
his language and Chopin the model lyrics of his instrument,
for all posterity. Edgar Poe said of Tennyson:
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_288' id='Page_288'>288</SPAN></span>
“I call him and think him the noblest of poets, because
the excitement which he induces is at all times the most
ethereal, the most elevating, and the most pure. No
poet is so little of the earth, earthy.” The same words
might well be spoken of Chopin.</p>
<p>Liszt and Byron were kindred spirits, both as men
and artists. Among the serener stars and planets that
move majestically in harmony with heaven’s first law,
to the music of the spheres, they were like meteors
or comets, appearing above the horizon with dazzling
brilliance, and darting to the zenith, through an erratic
career, reaching a summit of fame and popularity,
attained during his lifetime by no other poet or
musician, and setting at defiance all laws of art, of
society, and of morals. Brilliancy of style and character,
haughty independence, impetuous passion, a
matchless splendor of genius, a supreme contempt for
the weaknesses of lesser mortals, combined with the
warmest admiration for their peers, are the distinguishing
attributes of both. Byron’s devoted friendship
for Moore and Shelley corresponds exactly to Liszt’s
feeling for Chopin and Wagner. Liszt himself recognized
this affinity between himself and Byron. The
English poet was for many years his model and favorite
author; many of his scenes and poems he translated
into tones, and his influence is marked in most of
his earlier compositions. The works of both are remarkable
for a fire and fury almost demoniac, alternating
with a light and flippant grace, almost impish. Both
understood a climax as few others have done, and both
had the dramatic element strongly developed. Both
were lawless and dissolute, according to the world’s
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_289' id='Page_289'>289</SPAN></span>
verdict, yet scrupulous and refined to an extreme in certain
respects. Each scandalized the world, repaid its censure
with scorn, and saw it at his feet; and each left,
like a meteor, a track of fire behind him, which still
burns with a red and vivid, if not the purest, luster.</p>
<p>Wagner and Victor Hugo are the two Titans of the
nineteenth century, having created more stir and ferment
in the world of art and letters than any other writers,
contemporary or previous. Each is the leading
genius of his nation. They resemble each other in the
pronounced originality of their genius, their virile energy
and productivity, and their colossal force. Of both,
the rare and singular fact is true, that their productions
all attain about the same level of merit. Most authors
and most composers are known by one or a few sublime
creations. I know of no others who have written an
equal number of great works and none that are mediocre
or feeble. They are also alike in the circumstance
that while each has done fine work in a number
of other departments, it is the dramatic element which
forms the strongest feature of their artistic personality.
Few French novels can compare with those of Victor
Hugo; but it is the powers of the dramatist displayed
in the plot, striking situations and characters, which
constitute their chief merit; and in his writings for the
stage he has far surpassed all that he has done as
novelist. Likewise, while Wagner’s orchestral works
for the concert room would alone have made him a
reputation, it is by his operas that he has made the
world ring with his fame. Each had a sense of the
dramatic and a mastery of its effects not even approached
by any other artist. They bear,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name='Page_290' id='Page_290'>290</SPAN></span>
furthermore, a strong resemblance in their revolutionary
character and tendencies. Both were born pioneers,
innovators, reformers. Both headed a revolt against
the reigning sovereigns and the established government
of their respective arts and after a desperate
struggle came out victorious. Both have been followed
by a host of disciples, belligerent and radical beyond all
that the annals of music and literature can show. They
were like two powerful battering-rams, attacking the
bulwarks of classic prejudice and conventionality. The
revolution which Wagner brought about in opera was
exactly matched by Hugo with the drama. His “Hernani”
was as great a shock to the established precedents
of the stage, as was Wagner’s “Nibelungen.”
Lastly, both display the unusual phenomenon of retaining
their creative power into extreme old age, and
both died when life and art and fame were fully ripe,
with the eyes of the world upon them and their names
on every tongue.</p>
<p class='line' style='text-align:center;margin-top:2em;'>FINIS.</p>
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