The piano recital of modern times was then unknown. It was not until 1838 that Liszt dared give a recital without the assistance of other artists, and it was not Liszt’s music so much as his overshadowing personality that made the feat possible then. Chopin, coming to Paris under excellent auspices, had little need to make a name for himself in the concert hall under these conditions, and, as we may imagine, had still less zest for it. He was chiefly in demand to play at private parties and aristocratic salons, where he frequently enough, no doubt, met with stupidity and lack of understanding, but where, at least, he was spared the noisy vulgarity of a musical vaudeville. Taking the best from his friends, and selecting the excellent from the atmosphere of the salons which he adorned, Chopin went on composing, living a life which offers little color to the biographer. By the time he had reached Paris in 1831 he had several masterpieces tucked away in his portfolio, but, though perfectly polished, they are of his weaker sentimental style. The more powerful Chopin, the Chopin of the polonaises, the ballades, the scherzos, and some of the preludes, was perhaps partly the result of the intimacy with George Sand, whose personality was of the domineering, masculine sort. But more probably it was just the development of an extraordinarily sensitive personality. At any rate, it was not long after his arrival in Paris that Chopin’s creative power had reached full vigor.
After that the chronology of the pieces counts for little. They can be examined by classes, and not byopus numbers, except for the posthumous pieces (following opus 65), which were withheld from publication during the composer’s life by his own wish, and were meant by him to be burned. They are, in almost every case, inferior to the works published during his lifetime. The works, grouped together, may be summed up as follows: over fifty mazurkas, fifteen waltzes, nearly as many polonaises, and certain other dances; nineteen nocturnes, twenty-five preludes, twenty-seven études, four ballades, four scherzos, five rondos, three impromptus, a berceuse, a barcarolle, three fantasias, three variations, four sonatas, two piano concertos, and a trio for piano and strings. All his works, then, except the Polish songs mentioned in the last chapter, are written primarily for the piano, a few having other instruments in combination or orchestral accompaniment, but the vast majority for piano alone.
The dances are highly variable in quality. Of the many mazurkas, some are almost negligible, while a few reveal Chopin’s use of the Polish folk-manner in high perfection. They are not a persistent part of modern concert programs. The waltzes, on the other hand, cannot be escaped; they are with us at every turn in modern life. Theorists have had fine battles over their musical value; some find in them the most perfect art of Chopin, and others regard them as mere glorified, superficial salon pieces. Certainly they concede more to mere outward display than do most of his compositions, and the themes sometimes border on the trivial. The posthumous waltzes are like Schubert’s in that they are apt to be thin in style with occasional rare beauties interspersed. Of the remaining waltzes, the most pretentious, such as the two in A flat, are extremely brilliant in design, offering to the executant, besides full opportunity for the display of dexterity, innumerable chances for nuance ofeffect (which are, of course, frequently abused, so that the dances become disjointed and specious caricatures of music). The waltz in A minor is far finer, containing the true emotional Chopin, by no means undignified in the dance form. No less fine is the hackneyed C-sharp minor waltz, in which the opportunities for legitimate refinement and variety of interpretation are infinite. These waltzes retain little of the feeling of the dance, despite the frequent buoyancy of their rhythm. Chopin was interested in emotional expression and extreme refinement of style; it mattered little to him by what name his piece might be called.
The Polonaises are a very different matter. Here we find a type of heroic expression which Liszt himself could not equal. The fine energy of the ‘Military’ polonaise in A major is universally known. The sound and fury of this piece is never cheap; it is the exuberant energy of genius. Even greater, if possible, are the polonaises in F sharp minor and in A flat major. No element in them falls below absolute genius. All of Liszt’s heroics never evoked from the piano such superb power. The sick and ‘pathological’ Chopin which is described to us in music primers is here hardly to be found—only here and there a touch of moody intensity, which is, however, never repressive. The Chopin of the waltzes and nocturnes would have been a man of weak and morbid refinement, all the more unhealthy because of his hypersensitive finesse. But, when we have added thereto the Chopin of the Polonaises, we have one of the two or three greatest, if not the very greatest, emotional poet of music. The Polonaises will stand forever as a protest against the supposition that Chopin’s soul was degenerate.
The traditional ‘sick’ Chopin is to be foundipsissimusin the Nocturnes, the most popular, with the waltzes, of his works. In such ones as those in E flat or G the sentiment is that of a lad suffering frompuppy-love and gazing at the moon. From beginning to end there is scarcely a bar which could correspond to the feelings of a physically healthy man. Yet we must remember that this sort of sentiment was quite in the fashion of the time. Byron had created of himself a myth of introspective sorrow. Only a few decades before, the Werther of Goethe’s novel, committing suicide in his suit of buff and blue, was being imitated by love-sick swains among all the fashionable circles which sought to do the correct thing. Chateaubriand and Jean Paul had cast their morbid spell over fashionable society, and this spell was not likely to pass away from the hectic Paris of the thirties while there were such men as Byron and Heine to bind it afresh each year with some fascinating book of verse. From such an influence a highly sensitive man like Chopin could not be altogether free. There is something in every artistic nature which can respond sympathetically to the claims of the morbid, for the reason that the artist is a man to feel a wide variety of the sensations that pertain to humanity. No one of the great creative musicians of the time was quite free from this morbid strain; in the sensitive, retiring Chopin it came out in its most effeminate guise. But the point is, it did not represent the whole of the man, nor necessarily any essential part of him. It was the response of his nervous organism to certain of the influences to which he was subject. Chopin may have been physiologically decadent or psychologically morbid; it is hardly a question for musicians. But his music, taken as a whole, does not prove a nature that was positively unhealthy. Its persistent emphasis of sensuousness and emotion makes it doubtless a somewhat unhealthy influence on the nerves of children; but the same could be said of many of the phases of perfectly healthy adult life. And, whatever may be the verdict concerning Chopin, we must admire the manner in which heheld his powerful emotional utterance within the firm restraint of his aristocratic sense of fitness. If he has sores, he never makes a vulgar display of them in public.
The Preludes have a bolder and profounder note. They are the treasure-house of his many ideas which, though coming from the best of his creative spirit, could not easily find a form or external purpose for themselves. We may imagine that they are the selected best of his improvisation on his own piano, late at night. Some of them, like the prelude in D flat major (the so-called ‘raindrop’ prelude) he worked out at length, with conscientious regard for form. Others, like that in A major, were just melodies which were too beautiful to lose but were seemingly complete just as they stood. The marvellous prelude in C-sharp minor is the ultimate glorification of improvisation with all the charm of willful fancy and aimlessness, and all the stimulation of a sensitive taste which could not endure having a single note out of place. The Preludes are complete and unique; a careful listener can hear the whole twenty-six successively and retain a distinct impression for each. This is the supreme test of style in a composer, and in sense of style no greater composer than Chopin ever lived.
The Études deserve their name in that they are technically difficult and that the performer who has mastered them has mastered a great deal of the fine art of the pianoforte. But they are the farthest possible from being études in the pedagogical sense. It is quite true that each presents some particular technical difficulty in piano playing, but the dominance of this technical feature springs rather from the composer’s sense of style than from any pedagogical intent. Certainly these pieces could not be more polished, or in most cases, more beautiful, whatever their name and purpose. They may be as emotional as anything of Chopin’s, as the ‘Revolutionary’ étude in C minor, which, tradition says, was written in 1831 when the composer received news of the fall of Warsaw before the invading Russians. The steady open arpeggio of the bass is supposed to represent the rumble of conflict, and the treble melody alternately the cries of rage of the combatants and the prayers of the dying. But for the most part the Études are pure grace and ‘pattern music,’ with always that morose or emotional under-current which creeps into all Chopin’s music. The peculiar virtue of the Études, apart from their interest for the technician, consists in their exquisite grace and freedom combined with perfection of formal pattern.
In the miscellaneous group of larger compositions, which includes the Ballades, the Scherzos, the Fantasias, the Sonatas, and the Concertos, we find some of Chopin’s greatest musical thoughts. The Ballades are the musical narration of some fanciful tale of love or adventure. Chopin supplied no ‘program,’ and it is probable that he had none in mind when he composed them. But they tease us out of thought, making us supply our own stories for the musical narration. They have the power of compelling the vision of long vistas of half-remembered experiences—the very mood of high romance. The Scherzos show Chopin’s genius playing in characteristic perfection. They are not the ‘fairy scherzos’ of Mendelssohn, but vivid emotional experiences, and Schumann could well say of the first, ‘How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?’ Though they seem to be wholly free and fantastical in form, they yet are related to the traditional scherzo, not only in their triple rhythm, but in the general disposition of musical material. Traces of the old two-part song form, in which most of the scherzos of Beethoven were written, are evident, and also of the third part, called the Trio. On the other hand,elaborate transitional passages from one part back to another conceal or enrich the older, simpler form, and in all four there is a coda of remarkable power and fire. The Fantasia in B minor, long and intricate, is one of the most profoundly moving of all Chopin’s works; it leaves the hearer panting for breath, as though he had waked up from an experience which had sapped the energy of his soul. As for the Sonatas and the Concertos, Chopin’s detractors have tried to deny them any particular merit—or any excellence except that of incidental beauties. The assertion will hardly stand. Chopin’s strength was not in large-scale architecture, nor in what we might call ‘formal form.’ But the sonatas and concertos have a way of charming the hearer and freeing his imagination in spite of faulty structure, and one sometimes feels that, had a few more of them been written, they would have created the very standards of form on which they are to be judged. The famous ‘Funeral March’ was interpolated as a slow movement of the B flat minor sonata, with which it is always heard. Liszt’s eulogy of this may seem vainly extravagant to our materialistic time, but it represents exactly what happens to any one foolish enough to try to put into words the emotions stirred up by this wonderful piece.
Chopin, as we have said, played little in public. He said the public scared him. When he did play people were wont to complain that he could not be heard. They were used to the bombastic tone of Kalkbrenner. Chopin might have remedied this defect and made a successful concert performer out of himself, but his physical strength was always delicate and his artistic conscience, moreover, unwilling to permit forcing or grossness; so he continued to play too ‘softly.’ The explanation was his delicate finger touch, coming entirely from the knuckles except where detached chords were to be taken, when the wrists, of course,came into play. Those who were so fortunate as really tohearChopin’s playing had ecstasies of delight over this pearly touch, which made runs and florid decorations sound marvellously liquid and flute-like. No other performer before the public could do this. Chopin’s pupils were in this respect never more than pupils.
People complained, on hearing Chopin’s music played by others, that it had no rhythm, that it was allrubato. The inaccuracy of this was evident when Chopin played his own compositions. For the melody, the ornament, of the right hand might berubatoas it pleased, but beneath it was a steady, almost mechanical operation of the left hand. It was a part of Chopin’s conscious method, and it is said he used a metronome in practising. The point is worth emphasizing because of the way it illuminates Chopin’s fine sense of self-control and fitness.
No technical method was ever more accurately suited to its task than Chopin’s. He grew up in the atmosphere of the piano, and ‘thought piano’ when composing music. He then drew on this and that piano resource until, by the time he had ended his short life, he had revealed the greater part of its potential musical possibilities—and always in what he had needed in the business of expressing his musical thoughts. With him the piano became utterly freed from the last traces of the tyranny of the polyphonic and chorale styles. But he supplied a polyphony of his own, the strangest, eeriest thing imaginable. It was the combination of two or three melodies, widely different and very beautiful, sometimes with the harmonic accompaniment added, sometimes with the harmony rising magically out of the counterpoint, but always in a new manner that was utterly pianistic. Chopin carried to its extreme the widely broken chord,as in the accompaniment to the major section of the ‘Funeral March.’
But it was in the art of delicate figuration (borrowed in the first place from Hummel) that Chopin was perhaps most himself. This, with Chopin, can be contained within no formula, can be described by no technical language. It was inexhaustible; it was eternally fluid, yet eternally appropriate. It somehow fused the utmost propriety of mood with the utmost grace of pattern. Even when it is most abundant, as in the F sharp major nocturne, it never seems exaggerated or in bad taste.
Harmonically Chopin was an innovator, at times a radical one. Here, again, he seemed to appropriate what he needed for the matter in hand, and exhibit no experimental interest in what remained. His free changes of key are graceful rather than sensuous, as with Schubert, and, when the modulation grows out of quasi-extemporaneous embellishment, as in the C sharp minor prelude, it melts with an ease that seems to come quite from the world of Bach. The later mazurkas anticipate the progressive harmonies of Wagner.
Much of his manner of playing, as well as the notion of the nocturne, Chopin got from the Scotchman, Field, who had fascinated European concert halls with his dreaming, quiet performance, and with the free melody of the nocturne genre which he had invented. From Hummel, as we have said, Chopin borrowed his embellishment, and from Cramer he chose many of the fundamentals of pianistic style. From the Italians (Italian opera included) he received his taste for long-drawn, succulent melody; in the composer of ‘Norma’ we see a poor relation of the aristocratic Pole. Thus from second and third-rate sources Chopin borrowed or took what he needed. He was surrounded by first-rate men, but dominated by none. He tookwhat he wanted where he found it, but only what he wanted. He was constantly selecting—and rejecting. Therein he was the aristocrat.
This is the place to make mention of several writers for the piano whose works were of importance in their day and occasionally to-day appear upon concert programs. Stephen Heller,[96]slightly younger than Chopin, and, unlike the Pole, blessed with a long life, wrote in the light and graceful style which was much in vogue, yet generally with sufficient selective sense to avoid the vapid. About the same can be said for Adolph Henselt (1814-1889), whose étude, ‘If I Were a Bird,’ still haunts music conservatories. His vigorous concerto for piano is also frequently played. William Sterndale Bennett, who, after his student years in Leipzig, became Mendelssohn’s priest in England, wrote four concertos, a fantasia with orchestra, a trio, and a sonata in F minor. His work is impeccable in form, often fresh and charming in content, but without radical energy of purpose—precisely Mendelssohn’s list of qualities. Finally, we may mention Joachim Raff (1822-1882), writer of a concerto and a suite, besides a number of smaller pieces which show programmistic tendencies.
Liszt, the supreme virtuoso of the piano, is the Liszt who wrote about three-fourths of the compositions which bear his name. The other fourth, or perhaps a quarter share of the whole, comes from another Liszt, a great poet, who could feel the values of whole nations as Chopin could feel the values of individual souls. It is not a paradox to say that Liszt was so utterly master of the piano that he was a slave to it. With it he won a place for himself among counts andprincesses, storming a national capital with twenty-four concerts at a single visit by way of variety between flirtations. Having so deeply in his being the pianistic formulas for conquering, it was inevitable that when he set out to do other tasks the pianistic formula conquered him. So it is, at least, in much of his music, which, with all its supreme pianistic skill, is sometimes pretty worthless music. Only, apart from this Liszt of the piano, there always stood that other Liszt—the one who, as he tells us in his book on gypsy music, slept in the open fields with the gypsies, studied and noted their tunes, and felt the great sweeps of nature as strongly as he felt the great sweeps of history. Both Liszts must be kept in mind if we would understand his piano works.
Liszt’s piano style was quite the opposite of Chopin’s. The Pole played for a few intimate friends; the Hungarian played for a vast auditorium. He had the sense of the crowd as few others have ever had it. His dazzling sweeps of arpeggios, of diatonic and chromatic runs, his thunderous chords, piling up on one another and repeated in violent succession, his unbelievable rapidity of finger movement, his way of having the whole seven octaves of the keyboard apparently under his fingers at once—in short, his way of making the pianoforte seem to be a whole orchestra—this was the Liszt who wrote the greater part of what we are about to summarize briefly.
Liszt’s piano style was not born ready made. Although he captured Paris as an infant prodigy when he first went there, he had an immense amount of maturing and developing to do. ‘It is due in great measure to the example of Paganini’s violin playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil, created modern piano playing,’ says Dr. Bie. ‘The world was struck dumb by the enchantment of the Genoese violinist; men did not trust their ears; something uncanny,inexplicable, ran with this demon of music through the halls. The wonder reached Liszt; he ventured onhisinstrument to give sound to the unheard of; leaps which none before him had ventured to make, “disjunctions” which no one had hitherto thought could be acoustically united; deep tremolos of fifths, like a dozen kettle-drums, which rushed forth into wild chords; a polyphony which almost employed as a rhythmical element the overtones which destroy harmony; the utmost possible use of the seven octaves in chords set sharply one over another; resolutions of tied notes in unceasing octave graces with harmonies hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fullness of tone-color; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application of the tone-colors of different octaves for the coloration of the tone-effect; the entirely naturalistic use of the tremolo and the glissando; and, above all, a perfect systematization of the method of interlacing the hands, partly for the management of runs, so as to bring out the color, partly to gain a doubled power by the division, and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in the figures, a fullness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process of individualization begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin.’
The earliest of Liszt’s published études, published in 1826, are now difficult to obtain. They were the public statement of his pianistic creed, the ultimatum, so to speak, of the most popular pianist of the day to all rivals. They seemed to represent the utmost of pianistic skill. Then, in 1832, came Paganini to Paris, and Liszt, with his customary justice toward others, recognized in him the supreme executant, and, what was more significant, the element of the true artist. Inevitably the experience reacted on his own art. Headapted six of Paganini’s violin caprices for piano, achieving a new ‘last word’ in pianoforte technique. These studies still hold their place in piano concerts, especially the picturesque ‘Campanella.’ In 1838 Liszt sought to mark the progress of his pianism to date by publishing a new arrangement of his earliest études, under the name ofÉtudes d’exécution transcendante. These, while primarily technical studies, are also the work of a creative artist. TheMazeppawas a symphonic poem in germ (later becoming one in actuality). TheHarmonies du Soir, experimenting with ‘atmospheric’ tone qualities on the piano, is an ancestor of the modern ‘impressionistic’ school. TheÉtude Héroiqueforeshadows theTassoandLes Préludes. The significant thing in this is the way in which Liszt’s creative impulse grew out of his mastery of the piano.
A predominant part of Liszt’s earlier activity has in recent times passed into comparative insignificance. We are nowadays inclined to sneer at his pompous arrangements of everything from Beethoven symphonies and Bach preludes to the popular operas of the day. But these arrangements, by which his pianistic method chiefly became known, were equally important in their effect on pianism and on musical taste. The name and fame of Berlioz’sSymphonie Fantastiquewent out among the nations chiefly through Liszt’s playing of his arrangement of it. Schubert’s songs, likewise, which one would suppose were possible only for the voice, were paraphrased by Liszt with such keen understanding of the melodic resources of the piano, and such pious regard for the intentions of Schubert, that Liszt’s piano was actually the chief apostle of Schubert’s vocal music through a great part of Europe. Liszt was similarly an apostle of Beethoven’s symphonies. It is eternally to his credit that Liszt, though in many ways an aristocrat in spirit, was never a musical snob; his paraphrases of Auber’s andBellini’s operas showed as catholic a sense of beauty as his arrangements of Beethoven. He could bow to the popular demand for operapotpourriswithout ever quite descending to the vulgar level of most pianists of his day, though coming perilously near it. His arrangements were always in some degree the work of a creative artist, who could select his themes and develop them into an artistic whole. They were equally the work of an interpretive artist, for they frequently revealed the true beauties and meanings of an opera better than the conductors and singers of the day did.
As Liszt travelled about the world on his triumphal tours, or sojourned in the company of the Countess d’Agoult in Switzerland, he sought to confide his impressions to his piano. These impressions were published in the two volumes of the ‘Years of Pilgrimage,’ poetic musical pictures in the idiom of pianistic virtuosity. The first of these pieces was written to picture the uprising of the workmen in Lyons, following the Paris revolution of 1830. Thereafter came impressions of every sort. The chapel of William Tell, the Lake of Wallenstein, the dances of Venice or Naples, the reading of Dante or of Petrarch’s sonnets—all gave him some musical emotion or picture which he sought to translate into terms of the piano. The musical value of these works is highly variable, but at their best, as in certain of the grandiose Petrarch sonnets, they equal the best of his symphonic poems. In these works, too, his experiments in radical harmony are frequent, and at times he completely anticipates the novel progressions of Debussy—whole-toned scale and all. Along with the ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ may be grouped certain other large compositions for the piano, such as the two ‘Legends’ of St. Francis, the six ‘Consolations,’ the brilliant polonaises, the fascinating ‘Spanish Rhapsody,’ and the grandioseFunerailles.All of these works are still frequently played by concert pianists.
The two grand concertos with orchestra—in E flat major and A major—are of dazzling technical brilliancy. In the second in particular the pianistic resource seems inexhaustible. The thematic material is in Liszt’s finest vein and the orchestral accompaniment is executed in the highest of colors. In the second, too, Liszt not only connects the movements, as was the fashion of the day, but completely fuses them, somewhat in the manner that a Futurist painter fuses the various parts of his picture. Scherzo, andante, and allegro enter when fancy ordains, lasting sometimes but a moment, and returning as they please. In the same way is constructed the superb pianoforte sonata in B minor, a glorious fantasy in Liszt’s most heroic style. It is commonly said that as a sonata this work is structurally weak; it would be truer to say that as a sonata it has no existence. It is the nobility of the work, in its contrapuntal and pianistic mastership, that carries conviction.
The Hungarian Rhapsodies, perhaps Liszt’s most typical achievement, are universally known. They were the outcome of his visit to his native land in 1840, and of the notes he made at the time from the singing of the gypsies. His book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ is well worth reading for any who wish to know the real impulse behind the Rhapsodies. Liszt, beyond any of his time, understood the æsthetic and ethical import of folk-music, and knew how to place it at the foundation of all other music whatsoever. Without such an appreciation he could not have caught so accurately the distinctive features of Hungarian music and developed them through his fifteen rhapsodies without ever once losing the true flavor. In them the gypsy ‘snap,’ the dotted notes, the instrumental character, the extreme emphasis on rhythm, and thepeculiar oriental scales become supremely expressive. Liszt is here, as he aspired to be, truly a national poet. The Lassan or slow movement of the second, and every note of the twelfth, the national hymn and funeral march which open the fourteenth, are a permanent part of our musical heritage. On the other hand, their real musical value is unhappily obscured by virtuoso display. They are, first and foremost, pieces for display, however much genuine life and virility the folk melodies and rhythms on which they are based may give them. As such they find their usual place at the end of concert programs, to suit the listener who is tired of really listening and desires only to be taken off his feet by pyrotechnics; as well as to furnish the player his final opportunity to dazzle and overpower.
The romantic age produced many works in the quieter forms of chamber music, but, perhaps because these forms were quieter, was not at its best in them. Nearly all the German composers of the period, save Liszt, wrote quantities of such music. The string quartet was comparatively under a cloud after Schubert’s death, suffering a decline from his time on. But no quartets, save those of Beethoven, are finer than Schubert’s. He brought to them in full power his genius for melody. Moreover, he showed in them a genius for organization which he did not usually match in his other large works. In the best of his quartets he escaped the danger to which a lesser melodist would have succumbed—that of incontinently putting a chief melody into the first violin part and letting the remaining instruments serve as accompaniment In no musical type are all the voices so absolutely equal as in the string quartet; the composer who unduly stresses anyone of the four is false to the peculiar genius of the form. But Schubert feels all the parts: he gives each its individuality, not in the close polyphonic manner of Bach, but in the melodist’s manner of writing each voice with an outline that is distinctive. In these works the prolixity which so often beset him is purged away; the musical standard is steadily maintained. The movements show steady development and coherence. The instruments are admirably treated with reference to their peculiar possibilities. Often the quartets are highly emotional and dramatic, though they never pass beyond the natural limitations of this peculiarly abstract type of music. In his search for color effects, too, Schubert frequently foreshadows the methods and feelings of modern composers, but these effects, such as the tremolo climax, are not false to the true nature of the instruments he is using. Some of Schubert’s chamber works still hold their place in undiminished popularity in concerts. A few make use of the melodies of some of his best songs, such as ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘Death and the Maiden,’ andSei mir gegrüsst. The best are perhaps those in A minor, G major, and D minor. To these we must add the great C major quintet, which uses the melody of ‘The Trout’ in its last movement.
Contemporary with Schubert, and outliving him by a number of years was Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), whose quartets number as many as those of Mozart and Beethoven put together. The only one which still holds its place in concert programs is that in G minor, opus 27. His quartets have the personal faults and virtues of their composer, being somewhat tenuous and mannered, and inclined to stress solo virtuosity. Schumann’s early quartets, especially the three in opus 41, show him very nearly at his best. These, written in the early years of his married life, after a deliberate study of the quartets of Beethoven, are thoroughly workmanlike, and are eminently successful as experiments in direct and ‘aphoristic’ expression. They rank among the best in string quartet literature. Not so much can be said for those of Mendelssohn. They were, of course, immensely popular in their time. But, though their style is polished, their content is not creative in the finer sense. And, strangely enough, their composer frequently committed in them faults of taste in his use of the instruments. The best to be said of them, as of much of the rest of Mendelssohn’s music, is that they were of immense value in refining and deepening the musical taste of the time, when the greater works of every type were caviar to the general.
In addition to the quartets of the romantic period we should mention the vast quantity of chamber music written for various combinations of instruments. Spohr in particular was very prolific, and his combinations were sometimes highly unusual. For instance, he has to his credit a nonet, four double quartets, a ‘nocturne’ for wind and percussion instruments, a sextet for strings and a concerto for string quartet with orchestral accompaniment. Mendelssohn’s octet for strings, opus 22, is fresh and interesting, especially in the scherzo, where the composer is at his best. And, to follow the great trios (piano, violin, and 'cello) of Beethoven, we have two trios, D minor and C minor, by Mendelssohn, and three trios, in D minor, F major, and G minor, by Schumann, of which the first is the best. The later Schumann sonatas for violin show only too clearly the composer’s declining powers.
The romantic period was naturally the time for great pianoforte concertos. Weber, in his two concertos, in C and E flat, and in hisConcertstückfor piano and orchestra, foreshadowed the spirit of great concertos that followed, though his technique was still one of transition. Mendelssohn’s concerto in G minor was for years the most popular of show pieces in conservatories, though it has since largely dropped out of use.(HisCapriccio, however, is still familiar and beautiful.) But the great concerto of the period, and one of the great ones of all time, was Schumann’s in A minor. This was originally written as a solo piece of moderate length, but broadened into a concerto of three distinct though joined movements, each representing the best of Schumann’s genius. No concerto ever conceded less to mere display, or maintained a more even standard of musical excellence. And to-day, though the technical brilliance is somewhat dimmed by comparison with more modern works, the idealistic sincerity of the lovely concerto speaks with unlessened vigor. Numerous other concertos for pianoforte were composed and were popular in the period we are discussing, but most of them have dropped out of use, except for the instruction of conservatory students. Among them we may mention the concerto in F minor by Adolph Henselt (1814-1889), one of the famous virtuosos of the time, whose work is exceedingly pianistic, elaborate and graceful, but somewhat pedantic and lacking in force; that in A flat by John Field (1782-1837); that in C sharp minor by Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838); that in F minor by Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875); that in F sharp minor by Ferdinand Hiller (1811-1885), a famous virtuoso of the time, who was closely identified with the work and activities of some of the greatest composers; and that in G minor by Joachim Raff (1822-1882). Chopin’s two concertos, composed in his earliest years of creative activity, are uneven, but in parts reveal the genius of their composer and justly maintain their somewhat limited popularity in modern concerts.
Ludwig Spohr, whom Rupert Hughes calls one of ‘the first of second-best composers,’ was a virtuoso of the violin, and it is chiefly through his writing for that instrument that he retains what position he has in modern times. He first became known as a violinistand constantly showed his predilection for the instrument in his writings. In his day he seemed a dazzling genius, with his eleven operas, his nine symphonies, and his great oratorio ‘The Last Judgment.’ Yet these have hardly more than a historical value to-day—except for the quiet pleasure they can give the student who takes the trouble to examine the scores. It is as a composer for the violin that Spohr continues to speak with some authority. His seventeen concertos still enter largely into the training of young violin virtuosos, and figure to a considerable though diminishing extent in concerts. As a master of the violin Spohr represents the old school. His bowing, when he played, was conservative. He drew from his instrument a broad singing quality of tone. All his writing shows his intimacy with the instrument of his personal triumphs. It has been said that ‘everything turned to a concerto at his touch.’ His style, however, was not lurid, but rather delicate and nuanced. Presently he was eclipsed by Paganini,[97]a genius who was half charlatan, who stopped short of no trick with his instrument provided it might procure applause. Spohr could see nothing but the trickster in this man who thrilled Liszt and who has left several pieces which are to-day in constant use and are not scorned by the best of musicians. Spohr, however, had an individuality which could not blend with that of the meteoric virtuoso. In some respects he is extraordinarily modern. His harmony was continually striving for peculiar and colorful effects. He was addicted, in a mild way, to program music, and gave titles to much of his music, such as the ‘Seasons’ symphony. But his genius always stopped short of the epoch-making quality of supreme creativeness.
In violin literature we must mention one more work,one which has never been surpassed in beauty of workmanship and which remains one of the great things of its kind in all music. This is Mendelssohn’s concerto. It is, outside of the concert overtures, the one work of his which has not sunk materially in the eyes of musicians since its first years. Its themes, though not robust, are of the very highest beauty. Its technical qualities make it one of the best beloved of works to violinists. And its unmatchable polish and balance of architecture make it a constant joy to concert audiences.
H. K. M.