VFRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating pretty widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is determined largely by the technical conditions under which it develops. We all know that one style is appropriate to engraving, another to oil-painting, and still another to pastel work; we recognize that the prose-writer and the versifier must use different vocabularies. Musical critics, however, whether from ignorance or from a disposition to involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of sentiment, have for the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our primitive notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best sing, or instruments best play. We have to reach largelywithout their aid the conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or painting, the kind of body available to a composition determines in no small degree the sort of spirit which is to inhabit it.
The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the sixteenth century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which at that time was firmly entrenched by tradition—the ecclesiastical choir of mixed voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the necessity of making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for the various groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies were restricted by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice; his harmony, in the interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept simple and transparent. When, somewhat later, the organ came into vogue, it suggested certain modifications of style, splendidly realized by J. S. Bach. The natural capacities of the hands on the keyboard tended to focus attention quite as much on the chord as on the separate strands of melody, and the massive effects of chord-patterns began to vie in importance with themore polyphonic traits. At the same time harmony was free to become much more complex, since pipes cannot sing out of tune, and the mechanically even tone, free from thevibratoand incapable of the accentuation of voices, made feasible a grand impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's fugues. A little later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and Beethoven, ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his work on the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed and wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive by motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic extension of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same time the marvelous expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly utilized: on the emotional side music became more than ever before profound, impassioned, mystical, and poignant.
As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical individualities the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the orchestra, soChopin is in large measure a resultant of the peculiar qualities of the most influential of modern instruments, the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed an important rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert and Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar dialect it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors can it be said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and the orchestra not existed, his art would still have been essentially what it was. Indeed, his work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage between the artistic impulses of a sensitive human organism and the peculiar potentialities of a special instrument that it can be properly understood only through a study of both.
The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its tones. The tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in duration only by the air capacity of the lungs, those ofbowed string instruments can be held indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as long as the air pressure is maintained in the bellows. The vibrations of a piano string, on the contrary, are at their maximum only during the moment in which it is struck by the hammer operated by pressing the key, and from that moment gradually decrease, giving forth a sound constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is struck, the player's control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice but either to wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this reason the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate harmonies of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The long notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of their physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention, and so lose their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic passages, which depend for their effect on the leisurely succession of dissonances and their resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer from the discontinuity of the piano tone. The indifference, or even insensibility, to the beauty of pure line, whichcharacterizes so much of our modern musical taste, is probably in large measure due to the prevalence of an instrument so little suited to exhibit it.[20]
At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic defect by modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that if the tones would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over and over again as rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract evanescence. An early application of this principle is the use, by Bach and other clavichordists, of trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a means of keeping long melody-notes audible. A more important one is the breaking up of chords into figures of short notes in the accompaniments of Haydn andMozart, a device which soon became so indispensable that a glance at any modern piano score will discover hundreds of such groups of short notes, which are nothing but chords played piecemeal in order to make them sound.
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(a) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.
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(b) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.
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(c) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.
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(d) CHOPIN: Nocturne, Op. 53, No. 2.
Figure XV.
A melody in the right hand, accompanied by these broken chords in the left—this soon became the normal texture of music intended for the piano.
The first great merit of Chopin was that he carried to its logical extreme this system of counteracting the piano's defective sonority. The great advance made by him is shown even in the brief quotations of Figure XV. The Mozart example is rudimentary—the device at its lowest terms. In the Beethoven passage the chords are placed too low; they sound muddy, opaque, inelastic. In the Schubert passage the sonority is better, but the figures are so arranged as to be very difficult to play, on account of the wide jump the hand has to make at the middle of each measure. Chopin, on the other hand, avoids muddiness by clustering his harmonyfairly high (about the region of middle C), at the same time gets a sufficient bass for his chords, which he is able to do by covering a great deal of ground in each figure, and in spite of the wide space traversed on the keyboard respects the comfort of the player by not requiring any sudden leaps. It is furthermore worthy of note that by introducing two tones foreign to the harmony (the fourth and the sixteenth) he gains a richness of sound lacking in the other examples. We get here, however, but the merest inkling of the inexhaustible ingenuity with which he manages this matter of "figuration," or the ornamental disintegration of chords. In order really to appreciate it we should have to examine those nocturnes, say, like the second, third, seventh, and eighth, in which with the left hand unaided he supplies a good firm bass and an intricate texture of accompaniment; we should have to study those pieces, such as the first, fifth, and eighth of the Études, opus 10, and the Prelude, opus 28, no. 23, in which it is the right hand that, racing back and forth over the keyboard, fills in the chinks of the harmony as a painter"stipples" an even tint with an infinite number of tiny brush-strokes; we should have to analyze in detail such a masterpiece as the Étude in A-flat major, opus 25, no. 1, in which it is both hands that weave together a diaphanous web of sound, while the outer fingers of one sing the tune, and those of the other the bass.[21]
Chopin's negative merit of minimizing the disadvantages of his instrument is, however, very intimately connected with a more positive skill in utilizing its peculiar advantages, in order to understand which we shall have to revert for a moment to our examination of the mechanism of the piano. The most characteristic feature of this mechanism—a feature so vital that it has been called the soul of the piano, and so unique that no other instrument except the harp presentsa parallel to it—is the damper pedal, generally known by the inaccurate and misleading name of "the loud pedal." Its function is to raise all the dampers which control the vibrations of the strings, leaving them free to respond to any impulse they may receive. It thus secures two important results.
In the first place, it counteracts the non-sustainment of single tones by fusing a great many such individual tones, separately produced, into one impression. It will readily be seen, for instance, how indispensable is the pedal to the intended effect of the broken chords of Figure XV: only through its coöperation do they become worthy equivalents, in the piano idiom, of what the organ or voices would present in the form of sustained chords in long notes. Moreover, every tone sounded on the piano, with the pedal down, is reinforced, through what is known as sympathetic vibration, by many other tones not sounded by the hands at all. For, since every tone produced by a piano string is in reality, as proved by scientific analysis, by no means simple, but a complex of many elements known as "partial tones," and sinceany elastic body capable of producing a given tone will actually produce it, through sympathetic vibration, whenever the tone is already being otherwise sounded in its vicinity, it will readily be understood that all the partial tones set going by striking a piano key will, if the dampers are, by means of the pedal, kept from interfering, start into activity whatever strings are tuned to their respective pitches. Thus the pedal turns the entire body of strings into one vast Æolian harp, ready to take up, reëcho, and multiply the slightest breath of sound produced through the keyboard.
Some idea of the extraordinary enrichment of timbre or tone-quality which accrues to the piano through the sympathetic vibration made possible by the pedal may be gained by striking a single key, say middle C, first without, then with, the pedal. The first tone stands out hard and angular, like a leafless tree in a desert; the second is liquid, murmurous, palpitant, its outlines softened as a landscape is softened by a misty atmosphere. When a chord rather than a single key is struck, the effect is, of course, multiplied in direct proportionto the number of its constituent tones. The hard nucleus of the impression is clothed in a soft web of subordinate sounds, the result of sympathetic vibration. Suppose, for example, we play the chord of four whole notes in Figure XVI. If at the same time we free the strings by pressing the pedal, we shall summon from them an attendant train of ghostly "harmonics" for each of the four, represented in the figure by quarter-notes. These auxiliary tones, to be sure, will be exceedingly faint and individually indistinguishable, but they will nevertheless give to the impression that curious mellowness, depth, or liquidity (one calls vainly on the divers experiences of other senses to describe it) which is one of the fundamental charms of the piano tone.
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Figure XVI.
The second important result of the damper pedal is a still greater richness of tonewhich it enables composers to attain by artificially pushing still farther the fusion of many single tones which is illustrated on the plane of nature by the foregoing examples. The student of harmony will observe that though most of the "harmonics," written in quarter-notes, of Figure XVI, are consonant to the fundamental chord, and thus enrich without obscuring it, there are several, notably the G-sharp, which, being foreign to the chord, tend slightly to blur its clarity. These dissonant harmonics are, however, so faint that their effect is practically nil. But if the composer, acting on the hint they give him, introduces into his chords similar foreign tones, sounded more distinctly by the hands, he at once imparts to the harmony a curious opacity and thickness which it is almost impossible to describe, but which affords a pleasant contrast to the uniform clearness of purely consonant chords. The fourth and the sixteenth notes in the bit of Chopin already cited (Figure XV) illustrate this device. The effect of such dissonant tones may be likened to the effect of mixtures and body-colors in painting; they afford relief from the monotony of consonancejust as those afford relief from the monotony of the pure colors. They provide the musical picture with chiaroscuro and atmosphere, softening the sharpness of its lines, spreading over it, so to speak, a delicate translucent haze. Used to excess, of course, they make a mere smutch, a meaningless, chaotic daub; the music reverts to primitive noise; the nice point is to use them just enough to gain depth, solidity, light and shade, without blackening and confusing the whole impression.[22]
Now Chopin is one of the supreme masters in the coloristic use of the dissonance. His nocturnes, especially the first, seventh, eighth, and fourteenth, may fairly be said to inaugurate by this means a new era in music, comparable in many respects to the era of impressionism in painting. Their tremulous, vaporous harmonies seem to come from no common piano, but from some wind-swept Æolian harp. Take, for instance, such a passage as the following, at the end of the third nocturne:—