The Project Gutenberg EBook of Old Fogy, by James Huneker

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Old Fogy
       His Musical Opinions and Grotesques

Author: James Huneker

Release Date: December 19, 2006 [EBook #20139]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD FOGY ***




Produced by Jeffrey Johnson and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





    OLD FOGY

    HIS MUSICAL OPINIONS
    AND GROTESQUES

    With an Introduction
    and Edited

    BY
    JAMES HUNEKER

    THEODORE PRESSER CO.
    1712 Chestnut Street      Philadelphia
    London, Weekes & Co.

       *       *       *       *       *


    Copyright, 1913, by Theodore Presser Co.

    International Copyright Secured.

    Third Printing, 1923.

       *       *       *       *       *

    These Musical Opinions and Grotesques
    are dedicated to

    RAFAEL JOSEFFY

    Whose beautiful art was ever a source of
    delight to his fellow-countryman,

    OLD FOGY

       *       *       *       *       *




INTRODUCTION


My friend the publisher has asked me to tell you what I know about Old
Fogy, whose letters aroused much curiosity and comment when they
appeared from time to time in the columns of The Etude. I confess I do
this rather unwillingly. When I attempted to assemble my memories of the
eccentric and irascible musician I found that, despite his enormous
volubility and surface-frankness, the old gentleman seldom allowed us
more than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament,
or, to employ a modern phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated as
were his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion into
latter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then
caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him
reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And
he confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's _Hannele_, though he
despised the same dramatist's _Weavers_. The truth is that no human
being is made all of a piece; we are, mentally at least, more of a
mosaic than we believe.

Let me hasten to negative the report that I was ever a pupil of Old
Fogy. To be sure, I did play for him once a paraphrase of _The Maiden's
Prayer_ (in double tenths by Dogowsky), but he laughed so heartily that
I feared apoplexy, and soon stopped. The man really existed. There are a
score of persons alive in Philadelphia today who still remember him and
could call him by his name--formerly an impossible Hungarian one, with
two or three syllables lopped off at the end, and for family reasons not
divulged here. He assented that he was a fellow-pupil of Liszt's under
the beneficent, iron rule of Carl Czerny. But he never looked his age.
Seemingly seventy, a very vital threescore-and-ten, by the way, he was
as light on his feet as were his fingers on the keyboard. A linguist,
speaking without a trace of foreign accent three or four tongues, he was
equally fluent in all. Once launched in an argument there was no
stopping him. Nor was he an agreeable opponent. Torrents and cataracts
of words poured from his mouth.

He pretended to hate modern music, but, as you will note after reading
his opinions, collected for the first time in this volume, he very often
contradicts himself. He abused Bach, then used the _Well-tempered
Clavichord_ as a weapon of offense wherewith to pound Liszt and the
_Lisztianer_. He attacked Wagner and Wagnerism with inappeasable fury,
but I suspect that he was secretly much impressed by several of the
music-dramas, particularly _Die Meistersinger_. As for his severe
criticism of metropolitan orchestras, that may be set down to provincial
narrowness; certainly, he was unfair to the Philharmonic Society.
Therefore, I don't set much store on his harsh judgments of Tchaikovsky,
Richard Strauss, and other composers. He insisted on the superiority of
Chopin's piano music above all others; nevertheless he devoted more time
to Hummel, and I can personally vouch that he adored the slightly banal
compositions of the worthy Dussek. It is quite true that he named his
little villa on the Wissahickon Creek after Dussek.

Nourished by the romantic writers of the past century, especially by
Hoffmann and his fantastic _Kreisleriana_, their influence upon the
writing of Old Fogy is not difficult to detect. He loved the fantastic,
the bizarre, the grotesque--for the latter quality he endured the
literary work of Berlioz, hating all the while his music. And this is a
curious crack in his mental make-up; his admiration for the exotic in
literature and his abhorrence of the same quality when it manifested
itself in tone. I never entirely understood Old Fogy. In one evening he
would flash out a dozen contradictory opinions. Of his sincerity I have
no doubt; but he was one of those natures that are sincere only for the
moment. He might fume at Schumann and call him a vanishing star, and
then he would go to the piano and play the first few pages of the
glorious A minor concerto most admirably. How did he play? Not in an
extraordinary manner. Solidly schooled, his technical attainments were
only of a respectable order; but when excited he revealed traces of a
higher virtuosity than was to have been expected. I recall his series of
twelve historical recitals, in which he practically explored all
pianoforte literature from Alkan to Zarembski. These recitals were
privately given in the presence of a few friends. Old Fogy played all
the concertos, sonatas, studies and minor pieces worth while. His touch
was dry, his style neat. A pianist made, not born, I should say.

He was really at his best when he unchained his fancy. His musical
grotesques are a survival from the Hoffmann period, but written so as to
throw an ironic light upon the artistic tendencies of our time. Need I
add that he did not care for the vaporous tonal experiments of Debussy
and the new school! But then he was an indifferent critic and an
enthusiastic advocate.

He never played in public to my knowledge, nor within the memory of any
man alive today. He was always vivacious, pugnacious, hardly sagacious.
He would sputter with rage if you suggested that he was aged enough to
be called "venerable." How old was he--for he died suddenly last
September at his home somewhere in southeastern Europe? I don't know.
His grandson, a man already well advanced in years, wouldn't or couldn't
give me any precise information, but, considering that he was an
intimate of the early Liszt, I should say that Old Fogy was born in the
years 1809 or 1810. No one will ever dispute these dates, as was the
case with Chopin, for Old Fogy will be soon forgotten. It is due to the
pious friendship of the publisher that these opinions are bound between
covers. They are the record of a stubborn, prejudiced, well-trained
musician and well-read man, one who was not devoid of irony. Indeed, I
believe he wrote much with his tongue in his cheek. But he was a
stimulating companion, boasted a perverse funny-bone and a profound
sense of the importance of being Old Fogy. And this is all I know about
the man.

James Huneker.




I

OLD FOGY IS PESSIMISTIC


Once every twelve months, to be precise, as the year dies and the sap
sinks in my old veins, my physical and psychologic--isn't that the
new-fangled way of putting it?--barometer sinks; in sympathy with Nature
I suppose. My corns ache, I get gouty, and my prejudices swell like
varicose veins.

Errors! Yes, errors! The word is not polite, nor am I in a mood of
politeness. I consider such phrases as the "progress of art," the
"improvement of art" and "higher average of art" distinctly and
harmfully misleading. I haven't the leisure just now to demonstrate
these mistaken propositions, but I shall write a few sentences.

How can art improve? Is art a something, an organism capable of "growing
up" into maturity? If it is, by the same token it can grow old, can
become a doddering, senile thing, and finally die and be buried with all
the honors due its long, useful life. It was Henrik Ibsen who said that
the value of a truth lasted about fifteen years; then it rotted into
error. Now, isn't all this talk of artistic improvement as fallacious as
the vicious reasoning of the Norwegian dramatist? Otherwise Bach would
be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the
health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more
youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the
moderns more virile, more passionately earnest or noble than Beethoven?
Bach, of the three, seems the oldest; yet his _C-sharp major Prelude_
belies his years. On the contrary, the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ grows
younger with time. It is the Book of Eternal Wisdom. It is the Fountain
of Eternal Youth.

As a matter of cold, hard fact, it is your modern who is ancient; the
ancients were younger. Consider the Greeks and their naïve joy in
creation! The twentieth-century man brings forth his works of art in
sorrow. His music shows it. It is sad, complicated, hysterical and
morbid. I shan't allude to Chopin, who was neurotic--another empty
medical phrase!--or to Schumann, who carried within him the seeds of
madness; or to Wagner, who was a decadent; sufficient for the purposes
of my argument to mention the names of Liszt, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and
Richard Strauss. Some day when the weather is wretched, when icicles
hang by the wall, and "ways be foul" and "foul is fair and fair is
foul"--pardon this jumble of Shakespeare!--I shall tell you what I think
of the blond madman who sets to music crazy philosophies, bloody
legends, sublime tommy-rot, and his friend's poems and pictures. At this
writing I have neither humor nor space.

As I understand the rank and jargon of modern criticism, Berlioz is
called the father of modern instrumentation. That is, he says nothing in
his music, but says it magnificently. His orchestration covers a
multitude of weaknesses with a flamboyant cloak of charity. [Now, here I
go again; I could have just as easily written "flaming"; but I, too,
must copy Berlioz!] He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his
works, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to
fill in his big sonorous frame with a picture. Your picture is not
mine, and I'll swear that the young man who sits next to me with a silly
chin, goggle-eyes and cocoanut-shaped head sees as in a fluttering
mirror the idealized image of a strong-chinned, ox-eyed, classic-browed
youth, a mixture of Napoleon at Saint Helena and Lord Byron invoking the
Alps to fall upon him. Now, I loathe such music. It makes its chief
appeal to the egotism of mankind, all the time slily insinuating that it
addresses the imagination. What fudge! Yes, the imagination of your own
splendid _ego_ in a white vest [we called them waistcoats when I was
young], driving an automobile down Walnut Street, at noon on a bright
Spring Sunday. How lofty!

Let us pass to the Hungarian piano-virtuoso who posed as a composer.
That he lent money and thematic ideas to his precious son-in-law,
Richard Wagner, I do not doubt. But, then, beggars must not be choosers,
and Liszt gave to Wagner mighty poor stuff, musically speaking. And I
fancy that Wagner liked far better the solid cash than the notes of
hand! Liszt, I think, would have had nothing to say if Berlioz had not
preceded him. The idea struck him, for he was a master of musical
snippets, that Berlioz was too long-winded, that his symphonies were
neither fish nor form. What ho! cried Master Franz, I'll give them a
dose homeopathic. He did, and named his prescription a _Symphonic Poem_
or, rather, _Poéme Symphonique_, which is not quite the same thing.
Nothing tickles the vanity of the groundlings like this sort of verbal
fireworks. "It leaves so much to the imagination," says the stout man
with the twenty-two collar and the number six hat. It does. And the
kind of imagination--Oh, Lord! Liszt, nothing daunted because he
couldn't shake out an honest throw of a tune from his technical
dice-box, built his music on so-called themes, claiming that in this
matter he derived from Bach. Not so. Bach's themes were subjects for
fugal treatment; Liszt's, for symphonic. The parallel is not fair.
Besides, Daddy Liszt had no melodic invention. Bach had. Witness his
chorals, his masses, his oratorios! But the Berlioz ball had to be kept
a-rolling; the formula was too easy; so Liszt named his poems, named his
notes, put dog-collars on his harmonies--and yet no one whistled after
them. Is it any wonder?

Tchaikovsky studied Liszt with one eye; the other he kept on Bellini and
the Italians. What might have happened if he had been one-eyed I cannot
pretend to say. In love with lush, sensuous melody, attracted by the
gorgeous pyrotechnical effects in Berlioz and Liszt and the pomposities
of Meyerbeer, this Russian, who began study too late and being too lazy
to work hard, manufactured a number of symphonic poems. To them he gave
strained, fantastic names--names meaningless and pretty--and, as he was
short-winded contrapuntally, he wrote his so-called instrumental poems
shorter than Liszt's. He had no symphonic talent, he substituted Italian
tunes for dignified themes, and when the development section came he
plastered on more sentimental melodies. His sentiment is hectic, is
unhealthy, is morbid. Tchaikovsky either raves or whines like the people
in a Russian novel. I think the fellow was a bit touched in the upper
story; that is, I did until I heard the compositions of R. Strauss, of
Munich. What misfit music for such a joyous name, a name evocative of
all that is gay, refined, witty, sparkling, and spontaneous in music!
After Mozart give me Strauss--Johann, however, not Richard!

No longer the wheezings, gaspings, and short-breathed phrases of Liszt;
no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and
drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms,
Liszt--and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is
a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts;
his early songs are sometimes singable; it is his perverse, vile orgies
of orchestral music that I speak of. No sane man ever erected such a mad
architectural scheme. He should be penned behind the bars of his own mad
music. He has no melody. He loves ugly noises. He writes to distracting
lengths; and, worst of all, his harmonies are hideous. But he doesn't
forget to call his monstrosities fanciful names. If it isn't _Don Juan_,
it is _Don Quixote_--have you heard the latter? [O shades of Mozart!]
This giving his so-called compositions literary titles is the plaster
for our broken heads--and ear-drums. So much for your three favorite
latter-day composers.

Now for my _Coda_! If the art of today has made no progress in fugue,
song, sonata, symphony, quartet, oratorio, opera [who has improved on
Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Name! name! I say],
what is the use of talking about "the average of today being higher"?
How higher? You mean more people go to concerts, more people enjoy music
than fifty or a hundred years ago! Do they? I doubt it. Of what use huge
places of worship when the true gods of art are no longer worshiped?
Numbers prove nothing; the majority is not always in the right. I
contend that there has been no great music made since the death of
Beethoven; that the multiplication of orchestras, singing societies, and
concerts are no true sign that genuine culture is being achieved. The
tradition of the classics is lost; we care not for the true masters.
Modern music making is a fashionable fad. People go because they think
they should. There was more real musical feeling, uplifting and sincere,
in the Old St. Thomaskirche in Leipsic where Bach played than in all
your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts. I'll return to
the charge again!

    Dussek Villa-on-Wissahickon,
      Near Manayunk, Pa.




II

OLD FOGY GOES ABROAD


Before I went to Bayreuth I had always believed that some magic spell
rested upon the Franconian hills like a musical benison; some mystery of
art, atmosphere, and individuality evoked by the place, the tradition,
the people. How sadly I was disappointed I propose to tell you,
prefacing all by remarking that in Philadelphia, dear old, dusty
Philadelphia, situated near the confluence of the Delaware and
Schuylkill, I have listened to better representations of the _Ring_ and
_Die Meistersinger_.

It is just thirty years since I last visited Germany. Before the
Franco-Prussian War there was an air of sweetness, homeliness, an
old-fashioned peace in the land. The swaggering conqueror, the arrogant
Berliner type of all that is unpleasant, _modern_ and insolent now
overruns Germany. The ingenuousness, the _naïve_ quality that made dear
the art of the Fatherland, has disappeared. In its place is smartness,
flippancy, cynicism, unbelief, and the critical faculty developed to the
pathological point. I thought of Schubert, and sighed in the presence of
all this wit and savage humor. Bayreuth is full of _doctrinaires_. They
eagerly dispute Wagner's meanings, and my venerable notions of the
_Ring_ were not only sneered at, but, to be quite frank with you,
dissipated into thin, metaphysical smoke.

In 1869 I fancied Reinecke a decent composer, Schopenhauer remarkable,
if somewhat bitter in his philosophic attitude towards life. Reinecke is
now a mere ghost of a ghost, a respectable memory of Leipsic, whilst
Schopenhauer has been brutally elbowed out of his niche by his former
follower, Nietzsche. In every _café_, in every summer-garden I sought I
found groups of young men talking heatedly about Nietzsche, and the
Over-Man, the _Uebermensch_, to be quite German. I had, in the innocence
of my Wissahickon soul, supposed Schopenhauer Wagner's favorite
philosopher. Mustering up my best German, somewhat worn from disuse, I
gave speech to my views, after the manner of a garrulous old man who
hates to be put on the shelf before he is quite disabled.

_Ach!_ but I caught it, _ach!_ but I was pulverized and left speechless
by these devotees of the Hammer-philosopher, Nietzsche. I was told that
Wagner was a fairly good musician, although no inventor of themes. He
had evolved no new melodies, but his knowledge of harmony, above all,
his _constructive_ power, were his best recommendations. As for his
abilities as a dramatic poet, absurd! His metaphysics were green with
age, his theories as to the syntheses of the arts silly and
impracticable, while his Schopenhauerism, pessimism, and the rest sheer
dead weights that were slowly but none the less surely strangling his
music. When I asked how this change of heart came about, how all that I
had supposed that went to the making of the Bayreuth theories was
exploded moonshine, I was curtly reminded of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche again, always this confounded Nietzsche, who, mad as a hatter
at Naumburg, yet contrives to hypnotize the younger generation with his
crazy doctrines of force, of the great Blond Barbarian, of the Will to
Destroy--infinitely more vicious than the Will to Live--and the inherent
immorality of Wagner's music. I came to Bayreuth to criticize; I go away
praying, praying for the mental salvation of his new expounders, praying
that this poisonous nonsense will not reach us in America. But it will.

The charm of this little city is the high price charged for everything.
A stranger is "spotted" at once and he is the prey of the townspeople.
Beer, carriages, food, pictures, music, busts, books, rooms, nothing is
cheap. I've been all over, saw Wagner's tomb, looked at the outside of
_Wahnfried_ and the inside of the theater. I have seen Siegfried
Wagner--who can't conduct one-quarter as well as our own Walter
Damrosch--walking up and down the streets, a tin demi-god, a reduced
octavo edition of his father bound in cheap calf. Worse still, I have
heard the young man try to conduct, try to hold that mighty Bayreuth
orchestra in leash, and with painful results. Not one firm, clanging
chord could he extort; all were more or less arpeggioed, and as for
climax--there was none.

I have sat in Sammett's garden, which was once Angermann's, famous for
its company, kings, composers, poets, wits, and critics, all mingling
there in discordant harmony. Now it is overrun by Cook's tourists in
bicycle costumes, irreverent, chattering, idle, and foolish. Even Wagner
has grown gray and the _Ring_ sounded antique to me, so strong were the
disturbing influences of my environment.

The bad singing by ancient Teutons--for the most part--was to blame for
this. Certainly when Walhall had succumbed to the flames and the
primordial Ash-Tree sunk in the lapping waters of the treacherous Rhine,
I felt that the end of the universe was at hand and it was with a sob I
saw outside in the soft, summer-sky, riding gallantly in the blue, the
full moon. It was the only young thing in the world at that moment, this
burnt-out servant planet of ours, and I gazed at it long and fondly, for
it recalled the romance of my student years, my love of Schumann's
poetic music and other illusions of a vanished past. In a word, I had
again surrendered to the sentimental spell of Germany, Germany by night,
and with my heart full I descended from the terrace, walked slowly down
the arbored avenue to Sammett's garden and there sat, mused and--smoked
my Yankee pipe. I realize that I am, indeed, an old man ready for that
shelf the youngsters provide for the superannuated and those who
disagree with them.

I had all but forgotten the performances. They were, as I declared at
the outset, far from perfect, far from satisfactory. The _Ring_ was
depressing. Rosa Sucher, who visited us some years ago, was a flabby
_Sieglinde_. The _Siegmund_, Herr Burgstalles, a lanky, awkward young
fellow from over the hills somewhere. He was sad. Ernst Kraus, an old
acquaintance, was a familiar _Siegfried_. Demeter Popovici you remember
with Damrosch, also Hans Greuer. Van Rooy's _Wotan_ was supreme. It was
the one pleasant memory of Bayreuth, that and the moon. Gadski was not
an ideal _Eva_ in _Meistersinger_, while Demuth was an excellent _Hans
Sachs_. The _Brünnhilde_ was Ellen Gulbranson, a Scandinavian. She was
an heroic icicle that Wagner himself could not melt. Schumann-Heink, as
_Magdalene_ in _Meistersinger_, was simply grotesque. Van Rooy's
_Walther_ I missed. Hans Richter conducted my favorite of the Wagner
music dramas, the touching and pathetic Nuremberg romance, and, to my
surprise, went to sleep over the _tempi_. He has the technique of the
conductor, but the elbow-grease was missing. He too is old, but better
one aged Richter than a caveful of spry Siegfried Wagners!

I shan't bother you any more as to details. Bayreuth is full of
ghosts--the very trees on the terrace whisper the names of Liszt and
Wagner--but Madame Cosima is running the establishment for all there is
in it financially--excuse my slang--and so Bayreuth is deteriorating. I
saw her, Liszt's daughter, von Bülow, and Wagner's wife--or rather
widow--and her gaunt frame, strong if angular features, gave me the
sight of another ghost from the past. Ghosts, ghosts, the world is
getting old and weary, and astride of it just now is the pessimist
Nietzsche, who, disguised as a herculean boy, is deceiving his
worshippers with the belief that he is young and a preacher of the
joyful doctrines of youth. Be not deceived, he is but another veiled
prophet. His mask is that of a grinning skeleton, his words are bitter
with death and deceit.

I stopped over at Nuremberg and at a chamber concert heard Schubert's
quintet for piano and strings, _Die Forelle_--and although I am no trout
fisher, the sweet, boyish loquacity, the pure music made my heart glad
and I wept.




III

THE WAGNER CRAZE


The new century is at hand--I am not one of those chronologically stupid
persons who believes that we are now in it--and tottering as I am on its
brink, the brink of my grave, and of all born during 1900, it might
prove interesting as well as profitable for me to review my musical
past. I hear the young folks cry aloud: "Here comes that garrulous old
chap again with his car-load of musty reminiscences! Even if Old Fogy
did study with Hummel, is that any reason why we should be bored by the
fact? How can a skeleton in the closet tell us anything valuable about
contemporary music?"

To this youthful wail--and it is a real one--I can raise no real
objection. I am an Old Fogy; but I know it. That marks the difference
between other old fogies and myself. Some English wit recently remarked
that the sadness of old age in a woman is because her face changes; but
the sad part of old age in a man is that his mind does not change. Well,
I admit we septuagenarians are set in our ways. We have lived our lives,
felt, suffered, rejoiced, and perhaps grown a little tolerant, a little
apathetic. The young people call it cynical; yet it is not
cynicism--only a large charity for the failings, the shortcomings of
others. So what I am about to say in this letter must not be set down as
either garrulity or senile cynicism. It is the result of a half-century
of close observation, and, young folks, let me tell you that in fifty
years much music has gone through the orifices of my ears; many artistic
reputations made and lost!

I repeat, I have witnessed the rise and fall of so many musical
dynasties; have seen men like Wagner emerge from northern mists and die
in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked
that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago
and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and
Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A
reformer--but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a
period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater
musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause--and shekels--and
knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian who
ever wrote for barrel-organ fame. Wagner became popular, the rage; and
today his music, grown stale in Germany, is being fervently imitated,
nay, burlesqued, by the neo-Italian school. Come, is it not a comical
situation, this swapping of themes among the nations, this picking and
stealing of styles? And let me tell you that of all the Robber Barons of
music, Wagner was the worst. He laid hands on every score, classical or
modern, that he got hold of.

But I anticipate; I put the _coda_ before the dog. When _Rienzi_
appeared none of us were deceived. We recognized our Meyerbeer
disfigured by clumsy, heavy German treatment. Wagner had been to the
opera in Paris and knew his Meyerbeer; but even Wagner could not
distance Meyerbeer. He had not the melodic invention, the orchestral
tact, or the dramatic sense--at that time. Being a born mimicker of
other men, a very German in industry, and a great egotist, he began
casting about for other models. He soon found one, the greatest of all
for his purpose. It was Weber--that same Weber for whose obsequies
Wagner wrote some funeral music, not forgetting to use a theme from the
_Euryanthe_ overture. Weber was to Wagner a veritable Golconda. From
this diamond mine he dug out tons of precious stones; and some of them
he used for _The Flying Dutchman_. We all saw then what a parody on
Weber was this pretentious opera, with its patches of purple, its stale
choruses, its tiresome recitatives. The latter Wagner fondly imagined
were but prolonged melodies. Already in his active, but musically-barren
brain, theories were seething. "How to compose operas without music"
might be the title of all his prose theoretical works. Not having a
tail, this fox, therefore, solemnly argued that tails were useless
appanages. You remember your Æsop! Instead of melodic inspiration,
themes were to be used. Instead of broad, flowing, but intelligible
themes, a mongrel breed of recitative and _parlando_ was to take their
place.

It was all very clever, I grant you, for it threw dust in the public
eye--and the public likes to have its eyes dusted, especially if the
dust is fine and flattering. Wagner proceeded to make it so by labeling
his themes, leading motives. Each one meant something. And the Germans,
the vainest race in Europe, rose like catfish to the bait. Wagner, in
effect, told them that his music required brains--Aha! said the German,
he means _me_; that his music was not cheap, pretty, and sensual, but
spiritual, lofty, ideal--Oho! cried the German, he means _me_ again. I
am ideal. And so the game went merrily on. Being the greatest egotist
that ever lived, Wagner knew that this music could not make its way
without a violent polemic, without extraneous advertising aids. So he
made a big row; became socialist, agitator, exile. He dragged into his
music and the discussion of it, art, politics, literature, philosophy,
and religion. It is a well-known fact that this humbugging comedian had
written the _Ring of the Nibelungs_ before he absorbed the
Schopenhauerian doctrines, and then altered the entire scheme so as to
imbue--forsooth!--his music with pessimism.

Nor was there ever such folly, such arrant "faking" as this! What has
philosophy, religion, politics to do with operatic music? It cannot
express any one of them. Wagner, clever charlatan, knew this, so he
worked the leading-motive game for all it was worth. Realizing the
indefinite nature of music, he gave to his themes--most of them borrowed
without quotation marks--such titles as Love-Death; Presentiment of
Death; Cooking motive--in _Siegfried_; Compact theme, etc., etc. The
list is a lengthy one. And when taxed with originating all this futile
child's-play he denied that he had named his themes. Pray, then, who
did? Did von Wolzogen? Did Tappert? They worked directly under his
direction, put forth the musical lures and decoys and the ignorant
public was easily bamboozled. Simply mention the esoteric, the
mysterious omens, signs, dark designs, and magical symbols, and you
catch a certain class of weak-minded persons.

Wagner knew this; knew that the theater, with its lights, its scenery,
its costumes, orchestra, and vocalizing, was the place to hoodwink the
"cultured" classes. Having a pretty taste in digging up old fables and
love-stories, he saturated them with mysticism and far-fetched musical
motives. If _The Flying Dutchman_ is absurd in its story--what possible
interest can we take in the _Salvation_ of an idiotic mariner, who
doesn't know how to navigate his ship, much less a wife?--what is to be
said of _Lohengrin_? This cheap Italian music, sugar-coated in its
sensuousness, the awful borrowings from Weber, Marschner, Beethoven, and
Gluck--and the story! It is called "mystic." Why? Because it is _not_, I
suppose. What puerile trumpery is that refusal of a man to reveal his
name! And _Elsa_! Why not Lot's wife, whose curiosity turned her into a
salt trust!

You may notice just here what the Wagnerians are pleased to call the
Master's "second" manner. Rubbish! It is a return to the Italians. It is
a graft of glistening Italian sensuality upon Wagner's strenuous study
of Beethoven's and Weber's orchestras. _Tannhäuser_ is more manly in its
fiber. But the style, the mixture of styles; the lack of organic unity,
the blustering orchestration, and the execrable voice-killing vocal
writing! The _Ring_ is an amorphous impossibility. That is now
critically admitted. It ruins voices, managers, the public purse, and
our patience. Its stories are indecent, blasphemous, silly, absurd,
trivial, tiresome. To talk of the _Ring_ and Beethoven's symphonies is
to put wind and wisdom in the same category. Wagner vulgarized
Beethoven's symphonic methods--noticeably his powers of development.
Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable engine, the Beethoven
symphonic method, to accompany a tinsel tale of garbled Norse mythology
with all sorts of modern affectations and morbidities introduced! It is
maddening to any student of pure, noble style. Wagner's Byzantine style
has helped corrupt much modern art.

_Tristan und Isolde_ is the falsifying of all the pet Wagner
doctrines--Ah! that odious, heavy, pompous prose of Wagner. In this
erotic comedy there is no action, nothing happens except at long
intervals; while the orchestra never stops its garrulous symphonizing.
And if you prate to me of the wonderful Wagner orchestration and its
eloquence, I shall quarrel with you. Why wonderful? It never stops, but
does it ever say anything? Every theme is butchered to death. There is
endless repetition in different keys, with different instrumental
_nuances_, yet of true, intellectual and emotional mood-development
there is no trace; short-breathed, chippy, choppy phrasing, and never
ten bars of a big, straightforward melody. All this proves that Wagner
had not the power of sustained thoughts like Mozart or Beethoven. And
his orchestration, with its daubing, its overladen, hysterical color!
What a humbug is this sensualist, who masks his pruriency back of poetic
and philosophical symbols. But it is always easy to recognize the cloven
foot. The headache and jaded nerves we have after a night with Wagner
tell the story.

I admit that _Die Meistersinger_ is healthy. Only it is not art. And
don't forget, my children, that Wagner's prettiest lyrics came from
Schubert and Schumann. They have all been traced and located. I need not
insult your intelligence by suggesting that the _Wotan_ motive is to be
found in Schubert's _Wanderer_. If you wish for the _Waldweben_ just go
to Spohr's _Consecration of Tones_ symphony, first movement. And Weber
also furnishes a pleasing list, notably the _Sword_ motive from the
_Ring_, which may be heard in _Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster_. _Parsifal_ I
refuse to discuss. It is an outrage against religion, morals, and
music. However, it is not alone this plagiarizing that makes Wagner so
unendurable to me. It is his continual masking as the greatest composer
of his century, when he was only a clever impostor, a theater-man, a
wearer of borrowed plumage. His influence on music has been deplorably
evil. He has melodramatized the art, introduced in it a species of
false, theatrical, _personal_ feeling, quite foreign to its nature. The
symphony, not the stage, is the objective of musical art.
Wagner--neither composer nor tragedian, but a cunning blend of
both--diverted the art to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great
force was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but
was always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school,
no descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The
twentieth century will find Wagner out. _Nunc Dimittis!_




IV

IN MOZARTLAND WITH OLD FOGY


The greatest musician the world has yet known--Mozart. The greatest?
Yes, the greatest; greater than Bach, because less studied, less
artificial, professional, and _doctrinaire_; greater than Beethoven,
because Mozart's was a blither, a more serene spirit, and a spirit whose
eyes had been anointed by beauty. Beethoven is not beautiful. He is
dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his
speech is the speech of a self-centered egotist. He is the father of all
the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what
they see therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness, and
ugliness. Beethoven, I say, was too near Mozart not to absorb some of
his sanity, his sense of proportion, his glad outlook upon life; but the
dissatisfied peasant in the composer of the _Eroica_, always in revolt,
would not allow him tranquillity. Now is the fashion for soul
hurricanes, these confessions of impotent wrath in music.

Beethoven began this fashion; Mozart did not. Beethoven had himself
eternally in view when he wrote. His music mirrors his wretched, though
profound, soul; it also mirrors many weaknesses. I always remember
Beethoven and Goethe standing side by side as some royal nobody--I
forget the name--went by. Goethe doffed his bonnet and stood uncovered,
head becomingly bowed. Beethoven folded his arms and made no obeisance.
This anecdote, not an apochryphal one, is always hailed as an evidence
of Beethoven's sturdiness of character, his rank republicanism, while
Goethe is slightly sniffed at for his snobbishness. Yet he was only
behaving as a gentleman should. If Mozart had been in Beethoven's place,
how courtly would have been the bow of the little, graceful Austrian
composer! No, Beethoven was a boor, a clumsy one, and this quality
abides in his music--for music is always the man. Put Beethoven in
America in the present time and he would have developed into a dangerous
anarchist. Such a nature matures rapidly, and a century might have
marked the evolution from a despiser of kings to a hater of all forms of
restrictive government. But I'm getting in too deep, even for myself,
and also far away from my original theme.

Suffice to say that Bach is pedantic when compared to Mozart, and
Beethoven unbeautiful. Some day, and there are portents on the musical
horizon, some day, I repeat, the reign of beauty in art will reassert
its sway. Too long has Ugly been king, too long have we listened with
half-cracked ear-drums to the noises of half-cracked men. Already the
new generation is returning to Mozart--that is, to music for music's
sake--to the Beautiful.

I went to Salzburg deliberately. I needed a sight of the place, a
glimpse of its romantic surroundings, to still my old pulse jangled out
of tune by the horrors of Bayreuth. Yes, the truth must out, I went to
Bayreuth at the express suggestion of my grandson, Old Fogy 3d, a
rip-roaring young blade who writes for a daily paper in your city. What
he writes I know not. I only hope he lets music alone. He is supposed to
be an authority on foot-ball and Russian caviar; his knowledge of the
latter he acquired, so he says, in the great Thirst Belt of the United
States. I sincerely hope that Philadelphia is not alluded to! I am also
informed that the lad occasionally goes to concerts! Well, he begged me
to visit Bayreuth just once before I died. We argued the thing all last
June and July at Dussek Villa--you remember my little lodge up in the
wilds of Wissahickon!--and at last was I, a sensible old fellow who
should have known better, persuaded to sail across the sea to a horrible
town, crowded with cheap tourists, vulgar with cheap musicians, and to
hear what? Why, Wagner! There is no need of telling you again what I
think of _him_. You know! I really think I left home to escape the
terrible heat, and I am quite sure that I left Bayreuth to escape the
terrible music. Apart from the fact that it was badly sung and
played--who ever does play and sing this music well?--it was written by
Wagner, and though I am not a prejudiced person--_ahem!_--I cannot stand
noise for noise's sake. Art for art they call it nowadays.

I fled Bayreuth. I reached Munich. The weather was warm, yet of a
delightful balminess. I was happy. Had I not got away from Wagner, that
odious, _bourgeois_ name and man! Munich, I argued, is a musical city.
It must be, for it is the second largest beer-drinking city in Germany.
Therefore it is given to melody. Besides, I had read of Munich's model
Mozart performances. Here, I cried, here will I revel in a lovely
atmosphere of art. My German was rather rusty since my Weimar days, but
I took my accent, with my courage, in both hands and asked a coachman to
drive me to the opera-house. Through green and luscious lanes of foliage
this dumpy, red-faced scoundrel drove; by the beautiful Isar, across the
magnificent Maximilian bridge over against the classic _façade_ of the
Maximilineum. Twisting tortuously about this superb edifice, we tore
along another leafy road lined on one side by villas, on the other
bordered by a park. Many carriages by this time had joined mine in the
chase. What a happy city, I reflected, that enjoys its Mozart with such
unanimity! Turning to the right we went at a grand gallop past a villa
that I recognized as the Villa Stuck from the old pictures I had seen;
past other palaces until we reached a vast space upon which stood a
marmoreal pile I knew to be the Mozart theater. What a glorious city is
Munich, to thus honor its Mozart! And the building as I neared it
resembled, on a superior scale, the Bayreuth barn. But this one was of
marble, granite, gold, and iron. Up to the esplanade, up under the
massive portico where I gave my coachman a tip that made his mean eyes
wink. Then skirting a big beadle in blue, policemen, and loungers, I
reached the box-office.

"Have you a stall?" I inquired. "Twenty marks" ($5.00), he asked in
turn. "Phew!" I said aloud: "Mozart comes high, but we must have him."
So I fetched out my lean purse, fished up a gold piece, put it down, and
then an inspiration overtook me--I kept one finger on the money. "Is it
_Don Giovanni_ or _Magic Flute_ this afternoon?" I demanded. The man
stared at me angrily. "What you talk about? It is _Tristan und Isolde_.
This is the new Wagner theater!" I must have yelled loudly, for when I
recovered the big beadle was slapping my back and urging me earnestly to
keep in the open air. And that is why I went to Salzburg!

Despite Bayreuth, despite Munich, despite Wagner, I was soon happy in
the old haunts of the man whose music I adore. I went through the Mozart
collection, saw all the old pictures, relics, manuscripts, and I
reverently fingered the harpsichord, the grand piano of the master. Even
the piece of "genuine Court Plaister" from London, and numbered 42 in
the catalogue, interested me. After I had read the visitors' book,
inscribed therein my own humble signature, after talking to death the
husband and wife who act as guardians of these Mozart treasures, I
visited the Mozart platz and saw the statue, saw Mozart's residence, and
finally--bliss of bliss--ascended the _Kapuzinberg_ to the Mozart
cottage, where the _Magic Flute_ was finished.

Later, several weeks later, when the Wagner municipal delirium had
passed, I left Salzburg with a sad heart and returned to Munich. There I
was allowed to bathe in Mozart's music and become healed. I heard an
excellent performance of his _Cosi Fan Tutti_ at the _Residenztheater_,
an ideal spot for this music. With the accompaniment of an orchestra of
thirty, more real music was made and sung than the whole _Ring Cycle_
contains. Some day, after my death, without doubt, the world will come
back to my way of thinking, and purge its eyes in the Pierian spring of
Mozart, cleanse its vision of all the awful sights walled by the
dissonantal harmonies of Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, and Richard
Strauss.

I fear that this letter will enrage my grandson; I care not. If he
writes, do not waste valuable space on his "copy." I inclose a picture
of Mozart that I picked up in Salzburg. If you like it, you have my
permission to reproduce it. I am here once more in Mozartland!




V

OLD FOGY DISCUSSES CHOPIN


Since my return from the outskirts of Camden, N. J., where I go fishing
for planked shad in September, I have been busying myself with the
rearrangement of my musical library, truly a delectable occupation for
an old man. As I passed through my hands the various and beloved
volumes, worn by usage and the passage of the years, I pondered after
the fashion of one who has more sentiment than judgment; I said to
myself:

"Come, old fellow, here they are, these friends of the past forty years.
Here are the yellow and bepenciled Bach _Preludes and Fugues_, the
precious 'forty-eight'; here are the Beethoven Sonatas, every bar of
which is familiar; here are--yes, the Mozart, Schubert, and Schumann
Sonatas [you notice that I am beginning to bracket the batches]; here
are Mendelssohn's works, highly glazed as to technical surface, pretty
as to sentiment, Bach seen through the lorgnette of a refined, thin,
narrow nature. And here are the Chopin compositions." The murder is
out--I have jumped from Bach and Beethoven to Chopin without a twinge of
my critical conscience. Why? I hardly know why, except that I was
thinking of that mythical desert island and the usual idiotic question:
What composers would you select if you were to be marooned on a South
Sea Island?--you know the style of question and, alas! the style of
answer. You may also guess the composers of my selection. And the least
of the three in the last group above named is not Chopin--Chopin, who,
as a piano composer pure and simple, still ranks his predecessors, his
contemporaries, his successors.

I am sure that the brilliant Mr. Finck, the erudite Mr. Krehbiel, the
witty Mr. Henderson, the judicial Mr. Aldrich, the phenomenal Philip
Hale, have told us and will tell us all about Chopin's life, his poetry,
his technical prowess, his capacity as a pedagogue, his reforms, his
striking use of dance forms. Let me contribute my humble and dusty mite;
let me speak of a Chopin, of the Chopin, of a Chopin--pardon my tedious
manner of address--who has most appealed to me since my taste has been
clarified by long experience. I know that it is customary to swoon over
Chopin's languorous muse, to counterfeit critical raptures when his name
is mentioned. For this reason I dislike exegetical comments on his
music. Lives of Chopin from Liszt to Niecks, Huneker, Hadow, and the
rest are either too much given over to dry-as-dust or to rhapsody. I am
a teacher of the pianoforte, that good old keyboard which I know will
outlive all its mechanical imitators. I have assured you of this fact
about fifteen years ago, and I expect to hammer away at it for the next
fifteen years if my health and your amiability endure. The Chopin music
is written for the piano--a truism!--so why in writing of it are not
critics practical? It is the practical Chopin I am interested in
nowadays, not the poetic--for the latter quality will always take care
of itself.

Primarily among the practical considerations of the Chopin music is the
patent fact that only a certain section of his music is studied in
private and played in public. And a very limited section it is, as those
who teach or frequent piano recitals are able to testify. Why should the
_D-flat Valse_, _E-flat_ and _G minor Nocturnes_, the _A-flat Ballade_,
the _G minor Ballade_, the _B-flat minor Scherzo_, the _Funeral March_,
the two _G-flat Etudes_, or, let us add, the _C minor_, the _F minor_
and _C-sharp minor studies_, the _G major_ and _D-flat preludes_, the
_A-flat Polonaise_--or, worse still, the _A major_ and _C-sharp minor
Polonaises_--the _B minor_, _B-flat major Mazurkas_, the _A-flat_ and
_C-sharp minor Impromptus_, and last, though not least, the
_Berceuse_--why, I insist, should this group be selected to the
exclusion of the rest? for, all told, there is still as good Chopin in
the list as ever came out of it.

I know we hear and read much about the "Heroic Chopin", and the "New
Chopin"--forsooth!--and "Chopin the Conqueror"; also how to make up a
Chopin program--which latter inevitably recalls to my mind the old
_crux_: how to be happy though hungry. [Some forms of this conundrum lug
in matrimony, a useless intrusion.] How to present a program of Chopin's
_neglected_ masterpieces might furnish matter for afternoon lectures now
devoted to such negligible musical _débris_ as Parsifal's neckties and
the chewing gum of the flower maidens.

As a matter of fact, the critics are not to blame. I have read the
expostulations of Mr. Finck about the untilled fields of Chopin. Yet his
favorite Paderewski plays season in and season out a selection from the
scheme I have just given, with possibly a few additions. The most
versatile--and--also delightful--Chopinist is Pachmann. From his very
first afternoon recital at old Chickering Hall, New York, in 1890, he
gave a taste of the unfamiliar Chopin. Joseffy, thrice wonderful wizard,
who has attained to the height of a true philosophic Parnassus--he only
plays for himself, O wise Son of Light!--also gives at long intervals
fleeting visions of the unknown Chopin. To Pachmann belongs the honor of
persistently bringing forward to our notice such gems as the _Allegro de
Concert_, many new mazurkas, the _F minor_, _F major_--_A minor
Ballades_, the _F-sharp_ and _G-flat Impromptus_, the _B minor Sonata_,
certain of the _Valses_, _Fantasies_, _Krakowiaks_, _Preludes_,
_Studies_ and _Polonaises_--to mention a few. And his pioneer work may
be easily followed by a dozen other lists, all new to concert-goers, all
equally interesting. Chopin still remains a sealed book to the world,
notwithstanding the ink spilled over his name every other minute of the
clock's busy traffic with Eternity.

A fair moiety of this present chapter could be usurped by a detailed
account of the beauties of the Unheard Chopin--you see I am emulating
the critics with my phrase-making. But I am not the man to accomplish
such a formidable task. I am too old, too disillusioned. The sap of a
generous enthusiasm no longer stirs in my veins. Let the young fellows
look to the matter--it is their affair. However, as I am an inveterate
busybody I cannot refrain from an attempt to enlist your sympathies for
some of my favorite Chopin.

Do you know the _E major Scherzo, Op. 54_, with its skimming,
swallowlike flight, its delicate figuration, its evanescent hintings at
a serious something in the major trio? Have you ever heard Pachmann
_purl_ through this exquisitely conceived, contrived and balanced
composition, truly a classic? _Whaur_ is your Willy Mendelssohn the
_noo_? Or are you acquainted with the _G-sharp minor Prelude_? Do you
play the _E-flat Scherzo_ from the _B minor Sonata_? Have you never shed
a furtive tear--excuse my old-fashioned romanticism--over the bars of
the _B major Larghetto_ in the same work? [The last movement is pure
passage writing, yet clever as only Chopin knew how to be clever without
being offensively gaudy.]

How about the first _Scherzo in B minor_? You play it, but do you
understand its ferocious irony? [Oh, author of _Chopin: the Man and his
Music_, what sins of rhetoric must be placed at your door!] And what of
the _E-flat minor Scherzo_? Is it merely an excuse for blacksmith art
and is the following _finale_ only a study in unisons? There is the
_C-sharp minor Prelude_. In it Brahms is anticipated by a quarter of a
century. The _Polonaise in F-sharp minor_ was damned years ago by Liszt,
who found that it contained pathologic states. What of it? It is
Chopin's masterpiece in this form and for that reason is seldom played
in public. Why? My children, do you not know by this time that the
garden variety of pianoforte virtuoso will play difficult music if the
difficulties be technical not emotional, or emotional and not spiritual?

_The F-sharp minor Polonaise_ is always _drummed_ on the keyboard
because some silly story got into print about Chopin's aunt asking the
composer for a picture of his soul battling with the soul of his pet
foe, the Russians. Militant the work is not, as swinging as are its
resilient rhythms: granted that the gloomy repetitions betray a morbid
dwelling upon some secret, exasperating sorrow; but as the human soul
never experiences the same mood _twice_ in a lifetime, so Chopin never
means his passages, identical as they may be, to be repeated in the same
mood-key. Liszt, Tausig, and Rubinstein taught us the supreme art of
color variation in the repetition of a theme. Paderewski knows the
trick; so do Joseffy and Pachmann--the latter's _pianissimi_ begin where
other men's cease. So the accusation of tonal or thematic monotony
should not be brought against this _Polonaise_. Rather let us blame our
imperfect sympathies and slender stock of the art of _nuance_.

But here I am pinning myself down to one composition, when I wish to
touch lightly on so many! The _F minor Polonaise_, the _E-flat minor
Polonaise_, called the _Siberian_--why I don't know; _I_ could never
detect in its mobile measures the clanking of convict chains or the
dreary landscape of Siberia--might be played by way of variety; and then
there is the _C minor Polonaise_, which begins in tones of epic grandeur
[go it, old man, you will be applying for a position on the Manayunk
_Herbalist_ soon as a critic!] The _Nocturnes_--are they all familiar to
you? The _F-sharp minor_ was a positive novelty a few years ago when
Joseffy exhumed it, while the _C-sharp minor_, with its strong climaxes,
its middle sections so evocative of Beethoven's _Sonata_ in the same
key--have you mastered its content? _The Preludes_ are a perfect field
for the "prospector"; though Essipoff and Arthur Friedheim played them
in a single program. Nor must we overlook the so-called hackneyed
valses, the tinkling charm of the one in _G-flat_, the elegiac quality
of the one in _B minor_. The _Barcarolle_ is only for heroes. So I do
not set it down in malice against the student or the everyday virtuosos
that he--or she--does not attempt it. The _F minor Fantaisie_, I am
sorry to say, is beginning to be tarnished like the _A-flat Ballade_, by
impious hands. It is not for weaklings; nor are the other Fantaisies.
Why not let us hear the _Bolero_ and _Tarantella_, not Chopin at his
happiest, withal Chopin. Emil Sauer made a success of other brilliant
birdlike music before an America public. As for the _Ballades_, I can no
longer endure any but _Op. 38_ and _Op. 52_. Rosenthal played the
beautiful _D-flat Study_ in _Les Trois nouvelles Etudes_ with signal
results. It is a valse in disguise. And its neighbors in _A-flat_ and _F
minor_ are Chopin in his most winning moods. Who, except Pachmann,
essays the _G-flat major Impromptu_--wrongfully catalogued as _Des Dur_
in the Klindworth edition? To be sure, it resumes many traits of the two
preceding _Impromptus_, yet is it none the less fascinating music. And
the _Mazurkas_--I refuse positively to discuss at the present writing
such a fertile theme. I am fatigued already, and I feel that my antique
vaporings have fatigued you. Next month I shall stick to my leathery
last, like the musical shoemaker that I am--I shall consider to some
length the use of left-hand passage work in the Hummel sonatas. Or shall
I speak of Chopin again, of the Chopin mazurkas! My sour bones become
sweeter when I think of Chopin--ah, there I go again! Am I, too, among
the rhapsodists?




VI

MORE ANENT CHOPIN


I had fully intended at the conclusion of my last chapter to close the
curtain on Chopin and his music, for I agree with the remark Deppe once
made to Amy Fay about the advisability of putting Chopin on the shelf
for half a century and studying Mozart in the interim. Bless the dear
Germans and their thoroughness! The type of teacher to which Deppe
belonged always proceeded as if a pupil, like a cat, had nine lives.
Fifty years of Chopin on the shelf! There's an idea for you. At the
conclusion of this half century's immurement what would the world say to
the Polish composer's music? That is to say, in 1955 the unknown
inhabitants of the musical portion of this earth would have sprung upon
them absolutely new music. The excitement would be colossal, colossal,
too, would be the advertising. And then? And then I fancy a chorus of
profoundly disappointed lovers of the tone art. Remember that the world
moves in fifty years. Perhaps there would be no longer our pianoforte,
our keyboard. How childish, how simple would sound the timid little
Chopin of the far-away nineteenth century.

In the turbulent times to come music will have lost its personal flavor.
Instead of interpretative artists there will be gigantic machinery
capable of maniacal displays of virtuosity; merely dropping a small coin
in a slot will sound the most abstruse scores of Richard Strauss--then
the popular and bewhistled music maker. And yet it is difficult for us,
so wedded are we to that tragic delusion of earthly glory and artistic
immortality, to conjure up a day when the music of Chopin shall be stale
and unprofitable to the hearing. For me the idea is inconceivable. Some
of his music has lost interest for us, particularly the early works
modeled after Hummel. Ehlert speaks of the twilight that is beginning to
steal over certain of the nocturnes, valses, and fantasias. Now Hummel
is quite perfect in his way. To imitate him, as Chopin certainly did,
was excellent practice for the younger man, but not conducive to
originality. Chopin soon found this out, and dropped both Hummel and
Field out of his scheme. Nor shall I insist on the earlier impositions
being the weaker; _Op. 10_ contains all Chopin in its twelve studies.
The truth is, that this Chopin, to whom has been assigned two or three
or four periods and styles and manners of development, sprang from the
Minerva head of music a full-fledged genius. He grew. He lived. But the
exquisite art was there from the first. That it had a "long foreground"
I need not tell you.

What compositions, then, would our mythic citizens of 1955
prefer?--can't you see them crowding around the concert grand piano
listening to the old-fashioned strains as we listen today when some
musical antiquarian gives a recital of Scarlatti, Couperin, Rameau on a
clavecin! Still, as Mozart and Bach are endurable now, there is no
warrant for any supposition that Chopin would not be tolerated a half
century hence. Fancy those sprightly, spiritual, and very national
dances, the mazurkas, not making an impression! Or at least two of the
ballades! Or three of the nocturnes! Not to mention the polonaises,
preludes, scherzos, and etudes. Simply from curiosity the other night--I
get so tired playing checkers--I went through all my various editions of
Chopin--about ten--looking for trouble. I found it when I came across
five mazurkas in the key of C-sharp minor. I have arrived at the
conclusion that this was a favorite tonality of the Pole. Let us see.

Two studies in _Op. 10_ and _25_, respectively; the
_Fantaisie-Impromptu_, _Op. 66_; five _Mazurkas_, above mentioned; one
_Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 1_; one _Polonaise, Op. 26, No. 1_; one _Prelude,
Op. 45_; one _Scherzo, Op. 39_; and a short second section, a
_cantabile_ in the _E major Scherzo, Op. 54_; one _Valse, Op. 64, No.
2_--are there any more in C-sharp minor? If there are I cannot recall
them. But this is a good showing for one key, and a minor one. Little
wonder Chopin was pronounced elegiac in his tendencies--C-sharp minor is
a mournful key and one that soon develops a cloying, morbid quality if
too much insisted upon.

The mazurkas are worthy specimens of their creator's gift for varying
not only a simple dance form, but also in juggling with a simple melodic
idea so masterfully that the hearer forgets he is hearing a three-part
composition on a keyboard. Chopin was a magician. The first of the
_Mazurkas in C-sharp minor_ bears the early _Op. 6, No. 2_. By no means
representative, it is nevertheless interesting and characteristic. That
brief introduction with its pedal bass sounds the rhythmic life of the
piece. I like it; I like the dance proper; I like the major--you see the
peasant girls on the green footing away--and the ending is full of a sad
charm. _Op. 30, No. 4_, the next in order, is bigger in conception,
bigger in workmanship. It is not so cheerful, perhaps, as its
predecessor in the same key; the heavy basses twanging in tenths like a
contrabasso are intentionally monotone in effect. There is defiance and
despair in the mood. And look at the line before the last--those
consecutive fifths and sevenths were not placed there as a whim; they
mean something. Here is a mazurka that will be heard later than 1955! By
the way, while you are loitering through this Op. 30 do not neglect No.
3, the stunning specimen in D-flat. It is my favorite mazurka.

Now let us hurry on to _Op. 41, No. 1_. It well repays careful study.
Note the grip our composer has on the theme, it bobs up in the middle
voices; it comes thundering at the close in octave and chordal
_unisons_, it rumbles in the bass and is persistently asserted by the
soprano voice. Its scale is unusual, the atmosphere not altogether
cheerful. Chopin could be depressingly pessimistic at times. _Op. 50,
No. 3_, shows how closely the composer studied his Bach. It is by all
odds the most elaborately worked out of the series, difficult to play,
difficult to grasp in its rather disconnected procession of moods. To me
it has a clear ring of exasperation, as if Chopin had lost interest, but
perversely determined to finish his idea. As played by Pachmann, we get
it in all its peevish, sardonic humors, especially if the audience, or
the weather, or the piano seat does not suit the fat little blackbird
from Odessa. _Op. 63, No. 3_, ends this list of mazurkas in C-sharp
minor. In it Chopin has limbered up, his mood is freer, melancholy as it
is. Louis Ehlert wrote of this: "A more perfect canon in the octave
could not have been written by one who had grown gray in the learned
arts." Those last few bars prove that Chopin--they once called him
amateurish in his harmonies!--could do what he pleased in the
contrapuntal line.

Shall I continue? Shall I insist on the obvious; hammer in my truisms!
It may be possible that out here on the Wissahickon--where the summer
hiccoughs grow--that I do not get all the news of the musical world. Yet
I vainly scan piano recital programs for such numbers as those C-sharp
minor mazurkas, for the _F minor Ballade_, for that beautiful and
extremely original _Ballade Op. 38_ which begins in F and ends in A
minor. Isn't there a legend to the effect that Schumann heard Chopin
play his _Ballade_ in private and that there was no stormy middle
measures? I've forgotten the source, possibly one of the greater
Chopinist's--or _Chopine_-ists, as they had it in Paris. What a
stumbling-block that A minor explosion was to audiences and students
and to pianists themselves. "Too wild, too wild!" I remember hearing the
old guard exclaim when Rubinstein, after miraculously prolonging the
three A's with those singing fingers of his, not forgetting the pedals,
smashed down the keyboard, gobbling up the sixteenth notes, not in
phrases, but pages. How grandly he rolled out those bass scales, the
chords in the treble transformed into a _Cantus Firmus_. Then, his
Calmuck features all afire, he would begin to smile gently and lo!--the
tiny, little tune, as if children had unconsciously composed it at play!
The last page was carnage. Port Arthur was stormed and captured in every
bar. What a pianist, what an artist, what a _man_!

I suppose it is because my imagination weakens with my years--remember
that I read in the daily papers the news of Chopin's death! I do long
for a definite program to be appended to the _F-major Ballade_. Why not
offer a small prize for the best program and let me be judge? I have
also reached the time of life when the _A-flat Ballade_ affects my
nerves, just as Liszt was affected when a pupil brought for criticism
the _G minor Ballade_. Preserve me from the _Third Ballade_! It is
winning, gracious, delicate, capricious, melodic, poetic, and what not,
but it has gone to meet the _D-flat Valse_ and _E-flat Nocturne_--as
the obituaries say. The fourth, the _F minor Ballade_--ah, you touch me
in a weak spot. Sticking for over a half century to Bach so closely, I
imagine that the economy of thematic material and the ingeniously spun
fabric of this _Ballade_ have made it my pet. I do not dwell upon the
loveliness of the first theme in F minor, or of that melodious approach
to it in the major. I am speaking now of the composition as a whole. Its
themes are varied with consummate ease, and you wonder at the corners
you so easily turn, bringing into view newer horizons; fresh and
striking landscapes. When you are once afloat on those D-flat scales,
four pages from the end nothing can stop your progress. Every bar slides
nearer and nearer to the climax, which is seemingly chaos for the
moment. After that the air clears and the whole work soars skyward on
mighty pinions. I quite agree with those who place in the same category
the _F minor Fantaisie_ with this _Ballade_. And it is not much played.
Nor can the mechanical instruments reproduce its nuances, its
bewildering pathos and passion. I see the musical mob of 1955 deeply
interested when the Paderewski of those days puts it on his program as a
gigantic novelty!

You see, here I have been blazing away at the same old target again,
though we had agreed to drop Chopin last month. I can't help it. I felt
choked off in my previous article and now the _dam_ has overflowed,
though I hope not the reader's! While I think of it, some one wrote me
asking if Chopin's first _Sonata in C minor, Op. 4_, was worth the
study. Decidedly, though it is as dry as a Kalkbrenner Sonata for
Sixteen Pianos and forty-five hands. The form clogged the light of the
composer. Two things are worthy of notice in many pages choked with
notes: there is a menuet, the only essay I recall of Chopin's in this
graceful, artificial form; and the Larghetto is in 5/4 time--also a
novel rhythm, and not very grateful. How Chopin reveled when he reached
the _B-flat minor_ and _B minor Sonatas_ and threw formal physic to the
dogs! I had intended devoting a portion of this chapter to the
difference of old-time and modern methods in piano teaching. Alas! my
unruly pen ran away with me!




VII

PIANO PLAYING TODAY AND YESTERDAY


How to listen to a teacher! How to profit by his precepts! Better
still--How to practice after he has left the house! There are three
titles for essays, pedagogic and otherwise, which might be supplemented
by a fourth: How to pay promptly the music master's bills. But I do not
propose indulging in any such generalities this beautiful day in late
winter. First, let me rid the minds of my readers of a delusion. I am no
longer a piano teacher, nor do I give lessons by mail. I am a very old
fellow, fond of chatting, fond of reminiscences; with the latter I bore
my listeners, I am sure. Nevertheless, I am not old in spirit, and I
feel the liveliest curiosity in matters pianistic, matters musical.
Hence, this month I will make a hasty comparison between new and old
fashions in teaching the pianoforte. If you have patience with me you
may hear something of importance; otherwise, if there is skating down
your way don't miss it--fresh air is always healthier than esthetic
gabbling.

Do they teach the piano better in the twentieth century than in the
nineteenth? Yes, absolutely yes. When a young man survived the "old
fogy" methods of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the past century,
he was, it cannot be gainsaid, an excellent artist. But he was, as a
rule, the survival of the fittest. For one of him successful there were
one thousand failures. Strong hands, untiring patience and a deeply
musical temperament were needed to withstand the absurd soulless
drilling of the fingers. Unduly prolonged, the immense amount of dry
studies, the antique disregard of fore-arm and upper-arm and the
comparatively restricted repertory--well, it was a stout body and a
robust musical temperament that rose superior to such cramping pedagogy.
And then, too, the ideals of the pianist were quite different. It is
only in recent years that tone has become an important factor in the
scheme--thanks to Chopin, Thalberg and Liszt. In the early sixties we
believed in velocity and clearness and brilliancy. Kalkbrenner, Herz,
Dreyschock, Döhler, Thalberg--those were the lively boys who patrolled
the keyboard like the north wind--brisk but chilly. I must add that the
most luscious and melting tone I ever heard on the piano was produced by
Thalberg and after him Henselt. Today Paderewski is the best exponent of
their school; of course, modified by modern ideas and a Slavic
temperament.

But now technic no longer counts. Be ye as fleet as Rosenthal and as
pure as Pachmann--in a tonal sense--ye will not escape comparison with
the mechanical pianist. It was their astounding accuracy that extorted
from Eugen d'Albert a confession made to a friend of mine just before he
sailed to this country last month:

"A great pianist should no longer bother himself about his technic. Any
machine can beat him at the game. What he must excel in
is--interpretation and tone."

Rosenthal, angry that a mere contrivance manipulated by a salesman could
beat his speed, has taken the slopes of Parnassus by storm. He can play
the Liszt _Don Juan_ paraphrase _faster_ than any machine in existence.
(I refer to the drinking song, naturally.) But how few of us have
attained such transcendental technic? None except Rosenthal, for I
really believe if Karl Tausig would return to earth he would be dazzled
by Rosenthal's performances--say, for example, of the Brahms-Paganini
_Studies_ and, Liszt, in his palmy days, never had such a technic as
Tausig's; while the latter was far more musical and intellectual than
Rosenthal. Other days, other ways!

So tone, not technic alone, is our shibboleth. How many teachers realize
this? How many still commit the sin of transforming their pupils into
machines, developing muscle at the expense of music! To be sure, some of
the old teachers considered the second F minor sonata of Beethoven the
highest peak of execution and confined themselves to teaching Mozart and
Field, Cramer and Mendelssohn, with an occasional fantasia by
Thalberg--the latter to please the proud papa after dessert. Schumann
was not understood; Chopin was misunderstood; and Liszt was _anathema_.
Yet we often heard a sweet, singing tone, even if the mechanism was not
above the normal. I am sure those who had the pleasure of listening to
William Mason will recall the exquisite purity of his tone, the
limpidity of his scales, the neat finish of his phrasing. Old style, I
hear you say! Yes, old and ever new, because approaching more nearly
perfection than the splashing, floundering, fly-by-night, hysterical,
smash-the-ivories school of these latter days. Music, not noise--that's
what we are after in piano playing, the _higher_ piano playing. All the
rest is pianola-istic!

Singularly enough, with the shifting of technical standards, more
simplicity reigns in methods of teaching at this very moment. The reason
is that so much more is expected in variety of technic; therefore, no
unnecessary time can be spared. If a modern pianist has not at _fifteen_
mastered all the tricks of finger, wrist, fore-arm and upper-arm he
should study bookkeeping or the noble art of football. Immense are the
demands made upon the memory. Whole volumes of fugues, sonatas of
Chopin, Liszt, Schumann and the new men are memorized, as a matter of
course. Better wrong notes, in the estimation of the more superficial
musical public, than playing with the music on the piano desk. And then
to top all these terrible things, you must have the physique of a
sailor, the nerves of a woman, the impudence of a prize-fighter, and the
humility of an innocent child. Is it any wonder that, paradoxical as it
may sound, there are fewer great pianists today in public than there
were fifty years ago, yet ten times as many pianists!

The big saving, then, in the pianistic curriculum is the dropping of
studies, finger and otherwise. To give him his due, Von Bülow--as a
pianist strangely inimical to my taste--was among the first to boil down
the number of etudes. He did this in his famous preface to the Cramer
_Studies_. Nevertheless, his list is too long by half. Who plays
Moscheles? Who cares for more than four or six of the Clementi, for a
half dozen of the Cramer? I remember the consternation among certain
teachers when Deppe and Raif, with his dumb thumb and blind fingers,
abolished _all_ the classic piano studies. Teachers like Constantine von
Sternberg do the same at this very hour, finding in the various
technical figures of compositions all the technic necessary. This method
is infinitely more trying to the teacher than the old-fashioned,
easy-going ways. "Play me No. 22 for next time!" was the order, and in a
soporific manner the pupil waded through all the studies of all the
_Technikers_. Now the teacher must invent a new study for every new
piece--with Bach on the side. Always Bach! Please remember that.
B-a-c-h--Bach. Your daily bread, my children.

We no longer play Mozart in public--except Joseffy. I was struck
recently by something Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler said in this matter of
Mozart. Yes, Mozart is more difficult than Chopin, though not so
difficult as Bach. Mozart is so naked and unafraid! You must touch the
right key or forever afterward be condemned by your own blundering. Let
me add here that I heard Fannie Bloomfield play the little sonata,
wrongfully called _facile_, when she was a tiny, ox-eyed girl of six or
seven. It was in Chicago in the seventies. Instead of asking for candy
afterwards she begged me to read her some poetry of Shelley or
something by Schopenhauer! Veritably a fabulous child!

Let me add three points to the foregoing statements: First, Joseffy has
always been rather skeptical of too _few_ piano studies. His argument is
that _endurance_ is also a prime factor of technic, and you cannot
compass endurance without you endure prolonged finger drills. But as he
has since composed--literally composed--the most extraordinary
time-saving book of technical studies (_School of Advanced Piano
Playing_), I suspect the great virtuoso has dropped from his list all
the Heller, Hiller, Czerny, Haberbier, Cramer, Clementi and Moscheles.
Certainly his Exercises--as he meekly christens them--are _multum in
parvo_. They are my daily recreation.

The next point I would have you remember is this: The morning hours are
golden. Never waste them, the first thing, never waste your
sleep-freshened brain on mechanical finger exercise. Take up Bach, if
you must unlimber your fingers and your wits. But even Bach should be
kept for afternoon and evening. I shall never forget Moriz Rosenthal's
amused visage when I, in the innocence of my eighteenth century soul,
put this question to him: "When is the best time to study etudes?" "If
you must study them at all, do so after your day's work is done. By your
day's work I mean the mastery of the sonata or piece you are working at.
When your brain is clear you can compass technical difficulties much
better in the morning than the evening. Don't throw away those hours.
Any time will do for gymnastics." Now there is something for stubborn
teachers to put in their pipes and smoke.

My last injunction is purely a mechanical one. All the pianists I have
heard with a beautiful tone--Thalberg, Henselt, Liszt, Tausig,
Heller--yes, Stephen of the pretty studies--Rubinstein, Joseffy,
Paderewski, Pachmann and Essipoff, sat _low_ before the keyboard. When
you sit high and the wrists dip downward your tone will be dry, brittle,
hard. Doubtless a few pianists with abnormal muscles have escaped this,
for there was a time when octaves were played with stiff wrists and
rapid _tempo_. Both things are an abomination, and the exception here
does not prove the rule. Pianists like Rosenthal, Busoni, Friedheim,
d'Albert, Von Bülow, _all the Great Germans_ (Germans are not born, but
are made piano players), Carreño, Aus der Ohe, Krebs, Mehlig are or were
artists with a hard tone. As for the much-vaunted Leschetizky method I
can only say that I have heard but two of his pupils whose tone was
_not_ hard and too brilliant. Paderewski was one of these. Paderewski
confessed to me that he learned how to play billiards from Leschetizky,
not piano; though, of course, he will deny this, as he is very loyal.
The truth is that he learned more from Essipoff than from her then
husband, the much-married Theodor Leschetizky.

Pachmann, once at a Dôhnányi recital in New York, called out in his
accustomed frank fashion: "He sits too high." It was true. Dôhnányi's
touch is as hard as steel. He sat _over_ the keyboard and played _down_
on the keys, thus striking them heavily, instead of pressing and
moulding the tone. Pachmann's playing is a notable example of plastic
beauty. He seems to dip his hands into musical liquid instead of
touching inanimate ivory, and bone, wood, and wire. Remember this when
you begin your day's work: Sit so that your hand is on a level with,
never below, the keyboard; and don't waste your morning freshness on
dull finger gymnastics! Have I talked you hoarse?




VIII

FOUR FAMOUS VIRTUOSOS


Such a month of dissipation! You must know that at my time of life I run
down a bit every spring, and our family physician prescribed a course of
scale exercises on the Boardwalk at Atlantic City, and after that--New
York, for Lenten recreation! Now, New York is not quiet, nor is it ever
Lenten. A crowded town, huddled on an island far too small for its
inconceivably uncivilized population, its inhabitants can never know the
value of leisure or freedom from noise. Because he is always in a hurry
a New York man fancies that he is intellectual. The consequences
artistically are dire. New York boasts--yes, literally _boasts_--the
biggest, noisiest, and poorest orchestra in the country. I refer to the
Philharmonic Society, with its wretched wood-wind, its mediocre brass,
and its aggregation of rasping strings. All the vaudeville and
lightning-change conductors have not put this band on a level with the
Boston, the Philadelphia, or the Chicago organizations. Nor does the
opera please me much better. Noise, at the expense of music; quantity,
instead of quality; all the _tempi_ distorted and _fortes_ exaggerated,
so as to make effect. Effect, effect, effect! That is the ideal of New
York conductors. This coarsening, cheapening, and magnification of
details are resultants of the restless, uncomfortable, and soulless life
of the much overrated Manhattan.

Naturally, I am a Philadelphian, and my strictures will be set down to
old fogyism. But show me a noise-loving city and I will show you an
inartistic one. Schopenhauer was right in this matter; insensibility to
noise argues a less refined organism. And New York may spend a million
of money on music every season, and still it is not a musical city. The
opera is the least sign; opera is a social function--sometimes a circus,
never a temple of art. The final, the infallible test is the maintenance
of an orchestra. New York has no permanent orchestra; though there is an
attempt to make of the New York Symphony Society a worthy rival to the
Philadelphia and Boston orchestras. So much for my enjoyment in the
larger forms of music--symphony, oratorio and opera.

But my visit was not without compensations. I attended piano concerts by
Eugen d'Albert, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Rafael Joseffy. Pachmann I
had heard earlier in the season in my own home city. So in one season I
listened to four out of six of the world's greatest pianists. And it was
very stimulating to both ears and memory. It also affords me an
opportunity to preach for you a little sermon on Touch (Tone and Technic
were the respective themes of my last two letters), which I have had in
my mind for some time. Do not be alarmed. I say "sermon," but I mean
nothing more than a comparison of modern methods of touch, as
exemplified by the performances of the above four men, with the style of
touch employed by the pianists of my generation: Thalberg, Liszt,
Gottschalk, Tausig, Rubinstein, Von Bülow, Henselt, and a few others.

Pachmann is the same little wonder-worker that I knew when he studied
many years ago in Vienna with Dachs. This same Dachs turned out some
finished pupils, though his reputation, curiously enough, never equalled
that of the over-puffed Leschetizky, or Epstein, or Anton Door, all
teachers in the Austrian capital. I recall Anthony Stankowitch, now in
Chicago, and Benno Schoenberger, now in London, as Dachs' pupils.
Schoenberger has a touch of gold and a style almost as jeweled as
Pachmann's--but more virile. It must not be forgotten that Pachmann has
fine nerves--with such an exquisite touch, his organization must be of
supernal delicacy--but little muscular vigor. Consider his narrow
shoulders and slender arms--height of figure has nothing to do with
muscular incompatibility; d'Albert is almost a dwarf, yet a colossus of
strength. So let us call Pachmann, a survival of an older school, a
charming school. Touch was the shibboleth of that school, not tone; and
technic was often achieved at the expense of more spiritual qualities.
The three most _beautiful_ touches of the piano of the nineteenth
century were those of Chopin, Thalberg, and Henselt. Apart from any
consideration of other gifts, these three men--a Pole, a Hebrew, and a
German--possessed touches that sang and melted in your ears, ravished
your ears. Finer in a vocal sense was Thalberg's touch than Liszt's;
finer Henselt's than Thalberg's, because more euphonious, and nobler in
tonal texture; and more poetic than either of these two was Chopin's
ethereal touch. To-day Joseffy is the nearest approach we have to
Chopin, Paderewski to Henselt, Pachmann to Thalberg--save in the matter
of a robust _fortissimo_, which the tiny Russian virtuoso does not
boast.

After Chopin, Thalberg, and Henselt, the orchestral school had its
sway--it still has. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein set the pace for all
latter-day piano playing. And while it may sound presumptuous, I am
inclined to think that their successors are not far behind them in the
matter of tonal volume. If Liszt or Tausig, or, for that matter,
Rubinstein, produced more clangor from their instruments than Eugen
d'Albert, then my aural memory is at fault. My recollection of Liszt is
a vivid one: to me he was iron; Tausig, steel; Rubinstein, gold. This
metallic classification is not intended to praise gold at the expense of
steel, or iron to the detriment of gold. It is merely my way of
describing the adamantine qualities of Liszt and Tausig--two magnetic
mountains of the kind told of in _Sinbad, the Sailor_, to which was
attracted whatever came within their radius. And Rubinstein--what a man,
what an artist, what a _heart!_ As Joseffy once put it, Rubinstein's was
not a pianist's touch, but the mellow tone of a French horn!

Rosenthal's art probably matches Tausig's in technic and tone.
Paderewski, who has broadened and developed amazingly during ten years,
has many of Henselt's traits--and I am sure he never heard the elder
pianist. But he belongs to that group: tonal euphony, supple technic, a
caressing manner, and a perfect control of self. Remember, I am speaking
of the Henselt who played for a few friends, not the frightened,
semi-limp pianist who emerged at long intervals before the public.
Paderewski is thrice as poetic as Henselt--who in the matter of
emotional depth seldom attempted any more than the delineation of the
suave and elegant, though he often played Weber with glorious fire and
brilliancy.

At this moment it is hard to say where Paderewski will end. I beg to
differ from Mr. Edward Baxter Perry, who once declared that the Polish
virtuoso played at his previous season no different from his earlier
visits. The Paderewski of 1902 and 1905 is very unlike the Paderewski of
1891. His style more nearly approximates Rubinstein's _plus_ the
refinement of the Henselt school. He has sacrificed certain qualities.
That was inevitable. All great art is achieved at the expense--either by
suppression or enlargement--of something precious. Paderewski pounds
more; nor is he always letter perfect; but do not forget that pounding
from Paderewski is not the same as pounding from Tom, Dick, and Harry.
And, like Rubinstein, his spilled notes are more valuable than other
pianist's scrupulously played ones. In reality, after carefully watching
the career of this remarkable man, I have reached the conclusion that he
is passing through a transition period in his "pianism." Tired of his
old, subdued, poetic manner; tired of being called a _salon_ pianist
by--yes, Oskar Bie said so in his book on the pianoforte; and in the
same chapter wrote of the fire and fury of Gabrilowitsch ("he drives the
horses of Rubinstein," said Bie; he must have meant "ponies!")--critics,
Paderewski began to study the grand manner. He may achieve it, for his
endurance is phenomenal. Any pianist who could do what I heard him do in
New York--give eight encores after an exhausting program--may well lay
claim to the possession of the grand manner. His tone is still forced;
you hear the _chug_ of the suffering wires; but who cares for
details--when the general performance is on so exalted a plane? And his
touch is absolutely luscious in cantabile.

With d'Albert our interest is, nowadays, cerebral. When he was a youth
he upset Weimar with his volcanic performances. Rumor said that he came
naturally by his superb gifts (the Tausig legend is still believed in
Germany). Now his indifference to his medium of expression does not
prevent him from lavishing upon the interpretation of masterpieces the
most intellectual brain since Von Bülow's--and _entre nous_, ten times
the musical equipment. D'Albert plays Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as no
one else on this globe--and he matches Paderewski in his merciless abuse
of the keyboard. Either a new instrument, capable of sustaining the
ferocious attacks upon it, must be fabricated, or else there must be a
return to older styles.

And that fixed star in the pianistic firmament, one who refuses to
descend to earth and please the groundlings--Rafael Joseffy--is for me
the most satisfying of all the pianists. Never any excess of emotional
display; never silly sentimentalizings, but a lofty, detached style,
impeccable technic, tone as beautiful as starlight--yes, Joseffy is the
enchanter who wins me with his disdainful spells. I heard him play the
Chopin E minor and the Liszt A major concertos; also a brace of encores.
Perfection! The Liszt was not so brilliant as Reisenauer; but--again
within its frame--perfection! The Chopin was as Chopin would have had it
given in 1840. And there were refinements of tone-color undreamed of
even by Chopin. Paderewski is Paderewski--and Joseffy is perfection.
Paderewski is the most eclectic of the four pianists I have taken for my
text; Joseffy the most subtly poetic; D'Albert the most profound and
intellectually significant, and Pachmann--well, Vladimir is the _enfant
terrible_ of the quartet, a whimsical, fantastic charmer, an apparition
with rare talents, and an interpreter of the Lesser Chopin (always the
_great_ Chopin) without a peer. Let us be happy that we are vouchsafed
the pleasure of hearing four such artists.




IX

THE INFLUENCE OF DADDY LISZT


Have you read Thoreau's _Walden_ with its smell of the woods and its
ozone-permeated pages? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially
to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring
under the delusion that they are developing their individuality.
Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays among musicians! They
have been admonished so often in print and private that their ignorance
is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these ambitious ladies and
gentlemen rush off to the booksellers, to libraries, and literally gorge
themselves with the "ologies" and "isms" of the day. Lord, Lord, how I
enjoy meeting them at a musicale! There they sit, cocked and primed for
a verbal encounter, waiting to knock the literary chip off their
neighbor's shoulder.

"Have you read"--begins some one and the chattering begins, _furioso_.
"Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,"--"Tolstoi's _What is Art?_ certainly, he
ought to be electrocuted"--"Nordau! isn't he terrible?" And the
cacophonous conversational symphony rages, and when it is spent, the
man who asked the question finishes:

"Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in the _Kölnische
Zeitung?_" and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards
him whilst murmurs arise, "What an uncultured man! To talk 'shop' like a
regular musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but
was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The
newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame
for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a
second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and
dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory
and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly
something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program--I mean plots
for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one
once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England,
begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank
verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now
so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.

Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He had read everything before he
was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This
volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his
has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to
parse a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_. The Weimar crew all
imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a
sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of
bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through
a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with
excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room
for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man
with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose--came towards me. He wore a
monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort
affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_.

"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his
warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He
invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the
time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us.
I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an
outrageous manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they
sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint
purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore
semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and
affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats. When
Liszt left me--we studied together with Czerny--they trooped after him,
their garments ballooning in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was
the devotion of a pet ape.

I mention this because I have never met a Liszt pupil since without
recalling that day in Weimar. And when one plays I close my eyes and
hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding,
treacherous technic. Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch. The
old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, "Don't copy
my touch; it's spoiled." He had for so many years pounded and punched
the keyboard that his tactile sensibility--isn't that your new-fangled
expression?--had vanished. His "orchestral" playing was one of those
pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe,
and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons. I remember well
that Liszt, who was first and foremost a melodramatic actor, had a habit
of striding to the instrument, sitting down in a magnificent manner and
uplifting his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories. He was a master
hypnotist, and like John L. Sullivan he had his adversary--the
audience--conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific,
his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He
usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms
of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for a
barn-floor!

Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied.
In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris,
Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage. He wrote articles about
himself in the musical papers--a practice that his disciples have not
failed to emulate--and in an article on Thalberg displayed his bad taste
in abusing what he could not imitate. Oh yes, Liszt was a great thief.
His piano music--I mean his so-called original music--is nothing but
Chopin and brandy. His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed from Paganini,
and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped
himself to its hair. So in his piano music we find a conglomeration of
other men's ideas, other men's figures. When he wrote for orchestra the
hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz. I
never could quite see Liszt. He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious
Pole got rid of him and then he strung after Wagner. I do not mean that
Liszt was without merit, but I do assert that he should have left the
piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.

Let us consider some of his compositions.

Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not,
however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary
artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving
for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was
served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates,
the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through
the _Lucia_ fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff
before she mounts her bicycle.

And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to
flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the _Don Juan_
of Liszt and the _Don Juan_ of Thalberg! See which is the more musical,
the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic
extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies,
bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thing he could
lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the _Tannhäuser_
overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual
playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses
everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh
fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert,
Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you
that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form
like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of
one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had
evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the
raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors,
appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy.

The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most
commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes _à la_ Chopin; clever, I
admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up
into _Twelve Etudes Transcendentales_--listen to the big, boastful
title!--is better than the furbished up later collection. His three
concert studies are Chopinish; his _Waldesrauschen_ is pretty, but leads
nowhere; his _Années des Pèlerinage_ sickly with sentimentalism; his
_Dante Sonata_ a horror; his _B-minor Sonata_ a madman's tale signifying
froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of
the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious,
artificial and insincere. Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his
continual worship of God in his music is for me monotonously
blasphemous.

The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last. They are the nightmare curse of
the pianist, with their rattle-trap harmonies, their helter-skelter
melodies, their vulgarity and cheap bohemianism. They all begin in the
church and end in the tavern. There is a fad just now for eating
ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accompaniment of
a wretched gypsy circus called a Czardas. Liszt's rhapsodies
irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirty _table d'hôte_, where
evil-smelling dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced
by evil-tasting messes. If Liszt be your god, why then give me Czerny,
or, better still, a long walk in the woods, humming with nature's
rhythms. I think I'll read _Walden_ over again. Now do you think I am as
amiable as I look?




X

BACH--ONCE, LAST, AND ALL THE TIME


I'm an old, old man. I've seen the world of sights, and I've listened
eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, maddening
concourse of tones civilized Caucasians agree is the one, the only art.
I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled--doesn't Walt
Whitman say that somewhere?--I've even rioted in Verdi. Ah, you are
surprised! You fancied I knew my Czerny _et voilà tout_? Let me have
your ear. I've run the whole gamut of musical composers. I once swore by
Meyerbeer. I came near worshiping Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I
am willing to acknowledge that _Die Meistersinger_ is the very apex of a
modern polyphonic score. I adored Spohr and found good in Auber. In a
word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like
measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and the mumps.

As I grew older my task clarified. Having admired Donizetti, there was
no danger of being seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni.
Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not
for an instant impose on me. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who
not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping
his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being
violently self-conscious, I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous
critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's music to
another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why
did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more
than Beethoven? At last, one day, and not many years ago, I cried aloud,
"Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless
limbs of these classicists, these modern men. Bach--once, last, and all
the time."

And so it came about that with my prying nose I dipped into all
composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the
exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations. If much Bach,
then granted talent, the man reared a solid structure. If no Bach, then
no matter how brilliant, how meteoric, how sensational the talents,
smash came tumbling down the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's
hastily erected palace. Whether it is Perosi--who swears by Bach and
doesn't understand or study him--or Mascagni or Massenet, or any of the
new school, the result is the same. Bach is the touchstone. Look at
Verdi, the Verdi of _Don Carlo_ and the Verdi who planned and built
_Falstaff_. Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale--surely one of
the most astounding operatic codas in existence--that carries me away.
It is the general texture of the work, its many voices, like the sweet
mingled roar of Buttermilk Falls, that draws me to _Falstaff_. It is
because of Bach that I have forsworn my dislike of the later Wagner, and
unlearned my disgust at his overpowering sensuousness. The web he spins
is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so admirable,
that I have grown very fond of _The Mastersingers_.

Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test
for modern piano music. The monophonic has been done to the death by a
whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they
wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of
students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the
quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have
retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure,
built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been
invented, or rather re-discovered--for in Bach all were latent--but,
confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait
for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like
movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic life. It is only in a few
latter-day composers that I find music that moves, that sings, that
thrills.

How did I discover that Bach was in the very heart of Wagner? In the
simplest manner. I began playing the _E-flat minor Prelude_ in the first
book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_, and lo! I was transported to the
opening of _Götterdämmerung_.

Pretty smart boy that Richard Geyer to know his Bach so well! Yet the
resemblance is far fetched, is only a hazy similarity. The triad of
E-flat minor is common property, but something told me Wagner had been
browsing on Bach; on this particular prelude had, in fact, got a
starting point for the Norn music. The more I studied Wagner, the more I
found Bach, and the more Bach, the better the music. Chopin knew his
Bach backwards, hence the surprisingly fresh, vital quality of his
music, despite its pessimistic coloring. Schumann loved Bach and built
his best music on him, Mendelssohn re-discovered him, whilst Beethoven
played the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ every day of his life.

All _my_ pupils study the _Inventions_ before they play Clementi or
Beethoven, and what well-springs of delight are these two- and
three-part pieces! Take my word for it, if you have mastered them you
may walk boldly up to any of the great, insolent forty-eight
sweet-tempered preludes and fugues and overcome them. Study Bach say I
to every one, but study him sensibly. Tausig, the greatest pianist the
world has yet heard, edited about twenty preludes and fugues from the
Clavichord. These he gave his pupils _after_ they had played Chopin's
opus 10. Strange idea, isn't it? Before that they played the
_Inventions_, the symphonies, the _French_ and _English
Suites_--Klindworth's edition of the latter is excellent--and the
_Partitas_. Then, I should say, the Italian concert and that excellent
three-voiced fugue in A minor, so seldom heard in concert. It is
pleasing rather than deep in feeling, but how effective, how brilliant!
Don't forget the toccatas, fantasias, and capriccios. Such works as _The
Art of Fugue_ and others of the same class show us Father Bach in his
working clothes, earnest if not exactly inspired.

But in his moments of inspiration what a genius! What a singularly happy
welding of manner and matter! The _Chromatic Fantasia_ is to me greater
than any of the organ works, with the possible exception of the _G
minor Fantasia_. Indeed, I think it greater than its accompanying _D
minor Fugue_. In it are the harmonic, melodic, and spiritual germs of
modern music. The restless tonalities, the agitated, passionate,
desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are
not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashion as
to beggar imitation?

Let us turn to the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ and bow the knee of
submission, of admiration, of worship. I use the Klindworth, the Busoni
and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny. I think
it was the latter who once excited my rage when I found the C sharp
major prelude transposed to the key of D flat! This outrageous
proceeding pales, however, before the infamous behavior of Gounod, who
dared--the sacrilegious Gaul!--to place upon the wonderful harmonies of
the master of masters a cheap, tawdry, vulgar tune. Gounod deserved
oblivion for this. I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude
myself that I prefer certain preludes, certain fugues, but a few hours'
study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated with _its_
beauties. We have all played and loved the _C minor Prelude_ in Book
one--Cramer made a study on memories of this--and who has not felt happy
at its wonderful fugue! Yet a few pages on is a marvelous _Fugue in C
sharp minor_ with five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a
little distance and you land in the _E flat Fugue_ with its
assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering,
gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been
written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in
F? Its germ is perhaps the _F major Invention_, the eighth. A marked
favorite of mine is the fifteenth fugue in G. There's a subject for you
and what a jolly length!

Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky
and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the _B-flat Prelude
and Fugue_? If you have not, count something missed in your life. He
made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the
air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then
celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is
packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in the _B-flat
minor Prelude_? It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.

I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any
particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by
the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience! But
before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so
freely, so profoundly, so poignantly.

Touching on his technics, I may say that they require of the pianist's
fingers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is
spiritual as well as material. The diligent daily study of Bach will
form your style, your technics, better than all machines and finger
exercises. But play him as if he were human, a contemporary and not a
historical reminiscence. Yes, you may indulge in _rubato_. I would
rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin. Play Bach as if he still
composed--he does--and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of
performance. He would alter all that if he were alive today.

I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print. The
story was related to me by a pupil of Reinecke, and Reinecke got it from
Mendelssohn. Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every
day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons,
headed by the naughty Friedmann, resolved to play a joke on their good
old father. Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the
bellows-blower away, and started in to give the Master a surprise. They
tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a long
rope fastened to the outside knob they pulled the door open and shut,
and of course the wind ran low. Johann Sebastian--who looked more like
E. M. Bowman than E. M. B. himself--suddenly found himself clawing
ivory. He rose and went softly to the rear. Discovering no blower, he
investigated, and began to gently haul in the line. When it was all in
several boys were at the end of it. Did he whip them? Not he. He locked
the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade them blow. They did.
Then the archangel of music went back to his bench and composed the
famous _Wedge_ fugue. How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is
quaint enough. Let me end this exhortation by quoting some words of
Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: "If you want music for
your own and music's sake--look up to Bach. If you want music which is
as absolutely full of meaning as an egg is full of meat--look up to
Bach."

Look up to Bach. Sound advice. Profit by it.




XI

SCHUMANN: A VANISHING STAR


The missing meteors of November minded me of the musical reputations I
have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into
ineffectual twilight. Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age,
one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their
superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most
evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just
on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely
into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the
romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us
drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn!
Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified--the
Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision.
Schubert was a divinely awkward stammerer, and Liszt the brilliant
centipede amongst virtuosi. They were rapturous days and we fed full
upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshine and mush.

What the lads and lassies of ideal predilections needed was a man like
Schumann, a dreamer of dreams, yet one who pinned illuminative tags to
his visions to give them symbolical meanings, dragged in poetry by the
hair, and called the composite, art. Schumann, born mentally sick, a man
with the germs of insanity, a pathological case, a literary man turned
composer--Schumann, I say, topsy-turvied all the newly born and, without
knowing it, diverted for the time music from its true current. He
preached Brahms and Chopin, but practised Wagner--he was the forerunner
to Wagner, for he was the first composer who fashioned literature into
tone.

Doesn't all this sound revolutionary? An old fellow like me talking this
way, finding old-fashioned what he once saw leave the bank of melody
with the mintage glitteringly fresh! Yet it is so. I have lived to
witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the
eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? _Dinna ye
hear the slogan_ of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in
literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of the
_Zeitgeist_. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he
called Bachian--but it wasn't. In variety of key-color perhaps; but
structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficient reason.
Schumann had the great structure models before him; he heeded them not.
He did not pattern after the three master-architects, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven; gave no time to line, fascinated as he was by the problems of
color. But color fades. Where are the Turners of yester-year? Form and
form only endures, and so it has come to pass that of his four
symphonies, not one is called great in the land where he was king for a
day. The B-flat is a pretty suite, the C-major inutile--always barring
the lyric episodes--the D-minor a thing of shreds and patches, and the
_Rhenish_--muddy as the river Rhine in winter time.

The _E-flat piano Quintet_ will live and also the piano
concerto--originally a fantasia in one movement. Thus Schumann
experimented and built, following the line of easiest resistance, which
is the poetic idea. If he had patterned as has Brahms, he would have
sternly put aside his childish romanticism, left its unwholesome if
captivating shadows, and pushed bravely into the open, where the sun and
moon shine without the blur and miasma of a _decadent_ literature. But
then we should not have had Schumann. It was not to be, and thus it is
that his is a name with a musical sigh, a name that evokes charming
memories, and also, I must admit, a name that gently plucks at one's
heart-strings. His songs are sweet, yet never so spontaneous as
Schubert's, so astringently intellectual as Robert Franz's. His opera,
his string quartets--how far are the latter from the noble,
self-contained music in this form of Beethoven and Brahms!--and his
choral compositions are already in the sad, gray _penumbra_ of the
negligible. His piano music is without the clear, chiseled contours of
Chopin, without a definite, a great style, yet--the piano music of
Schumann, how lovely some of it is!

I will stop my heartless heart-to-heart talk. It is too depressing,
these vagaries, these senile ramblings of a superannuated musician. Ah,
me! I too was once in Arcady, where the shepherds bravely piped original
and penetrating tunes, where the little shepherdesses danced to their
lords and smiled sweet porcelain smiles. It was all very real, this
music of the middle century, and it was written for the time, it suited
the time, and when the time passed, the music with the men grew stale,
sour, and something to be avoided, like the leer of a creaking,
senescent _beau_, like the rouge and grimace of a debile _coquette_. My
advice then is, enjoy the music of your epoch, for there is no such
thing as music of the future. It is always music of the present.
Schumann has had his day, Wagner is having his, and Brahms will be
ruler of all tomorrow. _Eheu Fugaces!_

There was a time, _mes enfants_, when I played at all the Schumann
piano music. The _Abegg_ variations, the _Papillons_, the
_Intermezzi_--"an extension of the _Papillons_," said Schumann--_Die
Davidsbündler_, that wonderful _toccata in C_, the best double-note
study in existence--because it is music first, technics afterward--the
seldom attempted _Allegro, opus 8_, the _Carnaval_, tender and dazzling
miniatures, the twelve settings of Paganini, much more musical than
Liszt's, the _Impromptus_, a delicate compliment to his Clara. It is
always Clara with this Robert, like that other Robert, the strong-souled
English husband of Elizabeth Browning. Schumann's whole life romance
centered in his wife. A man in love with his wife and that man a
musician! Why, the entire episode must seem abnormal to the flighty,
capricious younger set, the Bayreuth set, for example. But it was an
ideal union, the woman a sympathetic artist, the composer writing for
her, writing songs, piano music, even criticism for and about her.
Decidedly one of the prettiest and most wholesome pictures in the
history of any art.

Then I attacked the _F-sharp Minor Sonata_, with its wondrous
introduction like the vast, somber portals to some fantastic Gothic
pile. The _Fantasiestücke opus 12_, still remain Schumann at his
happiest, and easiest comprehended. The _Symphonic Variations_ are the
greatest of all, greater than the _Concerto_ or the _Fantasie in C_.
These almost persuade one that their author is a fit companion for
Beethoven and Chopin. There is invention, workmanship, and a solidity
that never for a moment clashes with the tide of romantic passion
surging beneath. Here he strikes fire and the blaze is glorious.

The _F-minor Sonata_--the so-called _Concert sans orchestre_--a
truncated, unequal though interesting work; the _Arabesque_, the
_Blumenstück_, the marvelous and too seldom played _Humoreske_, opus 20,
every one throbbing with feeling; the eight _Novelletten_, almost, but
not quite successful attempts at a new form; the genial but
unsatisfactory _G-minor Sonata_, the _Nachtstücke_, and the _Vienna
Carnaval_, opus 26, are not all of these the unpremeditated outpourings
of a genuine poet, a poet of sensibility, of exquisite feeling?

I must not forget those idylls of childhood, the _Kinderscenen_, the
half-crazy _Kreisleriana_, true soul-states, nor the _Fantasie, opus
17_, which lacks a movement to make it an organic whole. Consider the
little pieces, like the three romances, opus 28, the opus 32, the
_Album for the Young, opus 68_, the four fugues, four marches, the
_Waldscenen_--Oh, never-to-be-forgotten _Vogel als Prophet_ and
_Trock'ne Blumen_--the _Concertstück, opus 92_, the second _Album for
the Young_, the _Three Fantasy Pieces, opus 111_, the _Bunte
Blätter_--do you recall the one in F-sharp minor so miraculously varied
by Brahms, or that appealing one in A-flat? The _Albumblätter, opus
124_, the seven pieces in fughetta form, the never-played _Concert
allegro in D-minor, opus 134_, or the two posthumous works, the
_Scherzo_ and the _Presto Passionata_.

Have I forgotten any? No doubt. I am growing weary, weary of all this
music, opiate music, prismatic music, "dreary music"--as Schumann
himself called his early stuff--and the somber peristaltic music of his
"lonesome, latter years." Schumann is now for the very young, for the
self-illuded. We care more--being sturdy realists--for architecture
today. These crepuscular visions, these adventures of the timid soul on
sad white nights, these soft croonings of love and sentiment are out of
joint with the days of electricity and the worship of the golden calf.
Do not ask yourself with cynical airs if Schumann is not, after all,
second-rate, but rather, when you are in the mood, enter his house of
dreams, his home beautiful, and rest your nerves. Robert Schumann may
not sip ambrosial nectar with the gods in highest Valhall, but he served
his generation; above all, he made happy one noble woman. When his music
is shelved and forgotten, the name of the Schumanns will stand for that
rarest of blessings, conjugal felicity.




XII

"WHEN I PLAYED FOR LISZT"


To write from Bayreuth in the spring-time as Wagner sleeps calmly in the
backyard of _Wahnfried_, without a hint of his music in the air, is
giving me one of the deepest satisfactions of my existence. How came you
in Bayreuth, and, of all seasons in the year, the spring? The answer may
astonish you; indeed, I am astonished myself when I think of it. Liszt,
Franz Liszt, greatest of pianists--after Thalberg--greatest of modern
composers--after no one--Liszt lies out here in the cemetery on the
Erlangerstrasse, and to visit that forlorn pagoda designed by his
grandson Siegfried Wagner, I left my comfortable lodgings in Munich and
traveled an entire day.

Now let me whisper something in your ear--I once studied with Liszt at
Weimar! Does this seem incredible to you? An adorer of Thalberg,
nevertheless, once upon a time I pulled up stakes at Paris and went to
the abode of Liszt and played for him exactly once. This was a
half-century ago. I carried letters from a well-known Parisian music
publisher, Liszt's own, and was therefore accorded a hearing. Well do I
recall the day, a bright one in April. His Serene Highness was at that
time living on the Altenberg, and to see him I was forced to as much
patience and diplomacy as would have gained me admittance to a royal
household.

_Endlich_, the fatal moment arrived. Surrounded by a band of disciples,
crazy fellows all--I discovered among the rest the little figure of Karl
Tausig--the great man entered the _saal_ where I tremblingly sat. He was
very amiable. He read the letters I timidly presented him, and then,
slapping me on the back with an expression of _bonhomie_, he cried aloud
in French: "_Tiens!_ let us hear what this admirer of my old friend
Thalberg has to say for himself on the keyboard!" I did not miss the
veiled irony of the speech, the word _friend_ being ever so lightly
underlined; I knew of the famous Liszt-Thalberg _duello_, during which
so much music and ink had been spilt.

But my agony! The _via dolorosa_ I traversed from my chair to the piano!
Since then the modern school of painter-impressionists has come into
fashion. I understand perfectly the mental, may I say the optical,
attitude of these artists to landscape subjects. They must gaze upon a
tree, a house, a cow, with their nerves at highest tension until
everything quivers; the sky is bathed in magnetic rays, the background
trembles as it does in life. So to me was the lofty chamber wherein I
stood on that fateful afternoon. Liszt, with his powerful profile, the
profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the
light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow,
nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this
picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my
memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with
malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied
being in this spectral atmosphere.

Yet urged by an hypnotic will I went to the piano, lifted the
fall-board, and in my misery I actually paused to read the maker's name.
A whisper, a smothered chuckle, and a voice uttering these words: "He
must have begun as a piano-salesman," further disconcerted me. I fell on
to the seat and dropped my fingers upon the keys. Facing me was the Ary
Scheffer portrait of Chopin, and without knowing why I began the weaving
Prelude in D-major. My insides shook like a bowl of jelly; yet I was
outwardly as calm as the growing grass. My hands did not falter and the
music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vain
Thalberg's _Art of Singing on the Piano_. I finished. There was a
murmur; nothing more.

Then Liszt's voice cut the air:

"I expected Thalberg's tremolo study," he said. I took the hint and
arose.

He permitted me to kiss his hand, and, without stopping for my hat and
walking-stick in the antechamber, I went away to my lodgings. Later I
sent a servant for the forgotten articles, and the evening saw me in a
diligence miles from Weimar. But I had played for Liszt!

Now, the moral of all this is that my testimony furthermore adds to the
growing mystery of Franz Liszt. He heard hundreds of such pianists of my
caliber, and, while he never committed himself--for he was usually too
kind-hearted to wound mediocrity with cruel criticism, yet he seldom
spoke the unique word except to such men as Rubinstein, Tausig, Joseffy,
d'Albert, Rosenthal, or von Bülow. A miraculous sort of a man, Liszt was
ever pouring himself out upon the world, body, soul, brains, art,
purse--all were at the service of his fellow-beings. That he was imposed
upon is a matter of course; that he never did an unkind act in his life
proves him to have been Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman:
"One who never inflicts pain." And only now is the real significance of
the man as a composer beginning to be revealed. Like a comet he swept
the heavens of his early youth. He was a marvelous virtuoso who mistook
the piano for an orchestra and often confounded the orchestra with the
piano. As a pianist pure and simple I prefer Sigismund Thalberg; but, as
a composer, as a man, an extraordinary personality, Liszt quite filled
my firmament.

Setting aside those operatic arrangements and those clever, noisy
Hungarian Rhapsodies, what a wealth of piano-music has not this man
disclosed to us. Calmly read the thematic catalog of Breitkopf and
Härtel and you will be amazed at its variety. Liszt has paraphrased
inimitably songs by Schubert, Schumann, and Robert Franz, in which the
perfumed flower of the composer's thoughts is never smothered by
passage-work. Consider the delicious etude _Au bord d'une Source_, or
the _Sonnets After Petrarch_, or those beautiful concert-studies in
D-flat, F-minor, and A-flat; are they not models of genuine piano-music!
The settings of Schubert marches Hanslick declared are marvels; and the
_Transcendental Studies!_ Are not keyboard limitations compassed?
Chopin, a sick man physically, never dared as did Liszt. One was an
æolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these
studies in their revised form; I content myself with the first sketches
published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen.
Later Liszt expanded the _croquis_ into elaborate frescoes. And yet they
say that he had no thematic invention!

Take up his B-minor sonata. Despite its length, an unheavenly length, it
is one of the great works of piano-literature fit to rank with
Beethoven's most sublime sonatas. It is epical. Have you heard Friedheim
or Burmeister play it? I had hoped that Liszt would vouchsafe me a
performance, but you have seen that I had not the courage to return to
him. Besides, I wasn't invited. Once in Paris a Liszt pupil, George
Leitert, played for me the _Dante Sonata_, a composition I heard thirty
years later from the fingers of Arthur Friedheim. It is the _Divine
Comedy_ compressed within the limits of a piano-piece. What folly, I
hear some one say! Not at all. In several of Chopin's Preludes--his
supreme music--I have caught reflections of the sun, the moon, and the
starry beams that one glimpses in lonely midnight pools. If Chopin could
mirror the cosmos in twenty bars, why should not a greater tone-poet
imprison behind the bars of his music the subtle soul of Dante?

To view the range, the universality of Liszt's genius, it is only
necessary to play such a tiny piano-composition, _Eclogue_, from _Les
Années de Pèlerinage_ and then hear his _Faust Symphony_, his _Dante
Symphony_, his Symphonic Poems. There's a man for you! as Abraham
Lincoln once said of Walt Whitman. After carefully listening to the
_Faust Symphony_ it dawns on you that you have heard all this music
elsewhere, filed out, triturated, cut into handy, digestible fragments;
in a word, dressed up for operatic consumption, popularized. Yes,
Richard Wagner dipped his greedy fingers into Liszt's scores as well as
into his purse. He borrowed from the pure Rhinegold hoard of the
Hungarian's genius, and forgot to credit the original. In music there
are no quotation marks. That is the reason borrowing has been in vogue
from Handel down.

The _Ring of the Nibelungs_ would not be heard today if Liszt had not
written its theme in his _Faust Symphony_. _Parsifal_ is altogether
Lisztian, and a German writer on musical esthetics has pointed out
recently, theme for theme, resemblance for resemblance, in this
Liszt-Wagner _Verhältniss_. Wagner owed everything to Liszt--from money
to his wife, success, and art. A wonderful white soul was Franz Liszt.
And he is only coming into his kingdom as a composer. Poor, petty,
narrow-minded humanity could not realize that because a man was a
pianist among pianists, he might be a composer among composers. I made
the error myself. I, too, thought that the velvet touch of Thalberg was
more admirable than the mailed warrior fist of Liszt. It is a mistake.
And now, plumped on my knees in Liszt's Bayreuth tomb, I acknowledge my
faults. Yes, he was a greater pianist than Thalberg. Can an
old-fashioned fellow say more?




XIII

WAGNER OPERA IN NEW YORK


With genuine joy I sit once more in my old arm-chair and watch the
brawling Wissahickon Creek, its banks draped with snow, while overhead
the sky seems so friendly and blue. I am at Dussek Villa, I am at home;
and I reproach myself for having been such a fool as ever to wander from
it. Being a fussy but conscientious old bachelor, I scold myself when I
am in the wrong, thus making up for the clattering tongue of an active
wife. As I once related to you, I recently went to New York, and there
encountered sundry adventures, not all of them of a diverting nature.
One you know, and it reeks in my memory with stale cigars, witless talk,
and all the other monotonous symbols of Bohemia. Ah, that blessed
Bohemia, whose coast no man ever explored except gentle Will
Shakespeare! It is no-man's-land; never was and never will be. Its
misty, alluring signals have shipwrecked many an artistic mariner,
and--but pshaw! I'm too old to moralize this way. Only young people
moralize. It is their prerogative. When they live, when they fathom good
and evil and their mysteries, charity will check their tongues, so I
shall say no more of Bohemia. What I saw of it further convinced me of
its undesirability, of its inutility.

And now to my tale, now to finish forever the story of my experiences in
Gotham! I declaimed violently against Tchaikovsky to my acquaintances of
the hour, because my dislike to him is deep rooted; but I had still to
encounter another modern musician, who sent me home with a headache,
with nerves all jangling, a stomach soured, and my whole esthetic system
topsy-turveyed and sorely wrenched. I heard for the first time Richard
Wagner's _Die Walküre_, and I've been sick ever since.

I felt, with Louis Ehlert, that another such a performance would release
my feeble spirit from its fleshly vestment and send it soaring to the
angels, for surely all my sins would be wiped out, expiated, by the
severe penance endured.

Not feeling quite myself the day after my experiences with the music
journalists, I strolled up Broadway,