Oskar Bie

“ The dull man is soon wearied by them, but the sensitive man instantly responds. At this point the Étude sinks down to the great mother of all music: like the fugue it springs directly out of Nature. With the consciousness of character the Étude grows tuneful. In the studies of Moscheles, in the Symphonic Études of Schumann, in Chopin’s studies, art creates what Nature created. From the technical theme rises a certain spiritual aroma, reminding us of a tune, a scene, a landscape; the tune condenses itself in the return of the technical motive ”

“ The Scarlatti style is a genuine product of the Italian musical emotion. The Italian is not born for heavy, contrapuntal, “vain ticklings of the ears”; nor, on the other hand, for too intimate effusions or symbolic mysteries. He is sensuous through and through; delight in playing and in sound is the very life of his music, as delight in outline and in colour is the very life of his painting. The intoxication of absolute tone runs through the masses of his churches, the operas of his theatre, the chamber-music of his salons. ”

“ The clavier was again the opponent of the orchestra, and concentrated the whole body of tone in its keys. An intimate, personal interpreter of musical emotions, it chooses to perform its functions in itself. Its consciousness of its own importance grows to a height. No longer will a clavecin-player when accompanist be the Cinderella among a company of proud sisters. “The clavierist,” cried Couperin indignantly, “is the last to be praised for his share in a concerto. What injustice! His accompaniment is the foundation of a building which supports the whole, and of which no one ever speaks!” ”

“ Almost all Schubert’s pieces retain something of the spirit of the time. Some are a kind of variations; others études, a third class dances; but they are constantly more than mere echoes of the time; they are founded on an inner genuineness, and much too full in expression to permit of being included under any category of the external. In Beethoven’s life we witnessed the way in which a world-embracing genius gradually threw off the traditional form; in Schubert we see how an intimate spirit gradually rises above the style of the time. ”

“ I have here no other aim than to view things under a certain species aeternitatis. What was done by Bird, Bull, Couperin, or Pasquini, though to-day perhaps only one in a thousand piano-players knows their names, was of more importance than a Polacca of Kalkbrenner or an Étude of Ludwig Berger. We have a fixed horizon; what is not within it remains outside it. Lives of entire and rich content, sorrows and joys of extreme intensity, may sink into oblivion; they are in history a mere grain in the quicksand. ”

“ For there is scarcely one who is so identical with his art as is Bach with music. A Michel Angelo does not include a Rembrandt, nor a Rembrandt a Monet; but in Bach there is a Beethoven, a Schumann, a Wagner. I believe that if the Almighty had wished to offer to men in sensible form what at that time was called music, he would then have given them the work of Bach. In it there are the deepest secrets of musical polyphony, as well as the most intense degrees of decadent expression; the mysticism of the Middle Ages is there no less than the perspective of the future. ”

“ He lives entirely in music. From the far land of invention float the melodies, eternally varying, giving colour to the harmonies, and pouring themselves out to their very last note. The ear cannot have enough of them, and, full of the holiest delight, pursues them to the end of their heavenly course. In Paradise there is no time; and these melodies are a prologue to eternity. Schubert died at thirty-one. His D minor quartet, one of the loveliest compositions ever written, leads us to imagine that he would have been the greatest musician of the century. ”

“ Old rubbish bears germs of new creations; released from the heavy burden of the words, the light play of the voices in the clavier-pieces introduces a fresh, youthful life that is full of promise for the future.
The isolation of the voice and of the instrument, the sensuous delight in sound, demands a chamber-music and a chamber-style. Chamber-music demands the Maecenas of the great house, and the wealthy amateur, who is so powerful a factor in every advance of art. ”

“ To this greatest of instrumental geniuses was revealed the great secret of pure music, which, precisely because it has no speech or language, speaks infinitely the more profoundly. Words obstruct it. When Beethoven, at the end of the Ninth Symphony, has recourse to the human voice, everyone feels that it was to him only the highest of all instruments, with which he can do yet more than with trombone or contrabass. It is the utmost triumph of the pure musician who can draw even the voice under his sway. ”

“ Opera and piano are necessarily and essentially hostile. In the Paris of that day, when absolute music, as well that of Berlioz as that of Chopin, is still a modest retiring flower, the crowd ran after the gentle titillation of the opera, and the mass of piano music moves in the operatic humdrum path. Among the Parisians as among the Italians there was assuredly not an operatic composer who did not invent at the piano and transfer his inventions from the piano to the opera. ”

“ He is the first of the Titans, the first of the great fragmentary natures, the first tone-artist who breaks the forms of music to pieces on the iron of his emotions. A strange Providence closes his outward ears, and thus gaining a clearer vision, he receives from Nature herself unheard-of inspirations. How this strange new man, this romantic raver, could be coupled with Haydn and Mozart is a wonder; but popular opinion accounts for it. Beethoven came to Vienna just as Mozart began to be missed. The world gave him the honour of attaching him to the classic school. ”

“ Madrigals of Elizabeth’s time are so familiar to us that Dr Ambros, of Prague, could produce them in Prague with great success, drawing from J. J. Maier’s German collection. That free geniality of the English in its ancient dress, which conceals all triviality, overcomes us even to-day. With the clavier-pieces it is the same. We are charmed with the extreme simplicity of their musical form, and we love them because they come before us in an archaic dress. They exhale an aroma whose popular sweetness mingles beautifully with the slight harshness of their naïve style. ”

“ All beautiful compositions notwithstanding, the piano is no concerto-instrument. In concertos the delicate ear is outraged. The piano will not adapt itself for new ideas in the hall, in the midst of virtuosity, or against the orchestra. It must become chaste; it must turn in faith to Bach’s Wohltemperiertes Klavier, the Old Testament, as Bülow called it, of the musician’s creed, and to Beethoven’s Sonatas, the New. ”

“ The piano-player of to-day hardly knows his name; and yet it is only two hundred years since men spoke of him in the same breath with Molière and Watteau. A genial, smiling, clean-shaven man—so the somewhat unsatisfactory portraits depict him—with half-length peruke, polite and yet slightly subtle, with a certain priestly sobriety of demeanour, his light fingers run over the hundred adornments of his spinet-pieces. He seems half astonished at his fame, and wholly ignorant that a whole art is one day to rear itself on his shoulders. ”

“ To grasp it, to assimilate it, until the many voices or even many themes of its development stand clearly before our eyes in their full characteristic value, is a feast for the musical epicure to which hardly anything else can be compared. Bach’s fugues are playable. They are not too easy; but they are so in the spirit of the clavier that the fingers soon lose their timidity, and the work is as a mirror in which they speedily recognise the necessary nature of their motion. ”

“ That carezzando, or stroking of the keys, was a favourite practice of Kalkbrenner and Kontski in Paris. To-day Risler remains perhaps alone in this school with his pure sensuous charm of touch.
If, in the whole great group of technical artists, which is bounded on the one side by Wölffl, Wanhal, Kozeluch, Eberl, in Mozart’s generation, and on the other by Thalberg and Liszt in ours, we should look for truly pre-eminent spirits, then we should have remaining Clementi, the father of all technique; Hummel, the inventor of the modern piano-exercise; and Czerny, the genius of teaching. ”

“ With its gracefully-bending walls, and its natural and yet characteristic shape, the grand piano, in many furnishing schemes of the insipid fifties or the glaring eighties, in many a jerry-built and cheaply appointed house, stood as the single solid and carefully wrought article in the place. The cottage, on the other hand, which too often is meant to be nothing but a piece of furniture, and which with its encasing wood-walls offers only too much opportunity to fashionable taste, has sunk deep into the domestic style, and even to-day has hardly freed itself from these false influences. ”

“ Our step falls very heavy, and our judgment may easily be unduly harsh, when we have just parted with old Bach. This meeting with genius, which we celebrate in every bar—this earnest greatness which meets us at every turn, has made us very exacting in our demands for the higher beauty. In the first moment the “Galant” School seems to us a school of pigmies, until the sight has again adjusted itself, and the vision has again become awake to the miniature beauties of this smaller art. A good transition is provided by Handel, for, against Handel, Philip Emanuel Bach appears an astonishing genius. ”

“ The life of the great virtuosos is a reflection of the unrest inseparable from their calling. It is indeed no longer a life of adventure, as with Marchand and Froberger; there is method in the madness. The life of the executant, no less than the execution, has found its form. The concert-campaigns are the foundation; the warrior returns to his home at greater and greater intervals; until at last, when delight in recitals has waned along with the pliancy of the fingers, some resting-place or other is found—a share in a piano-manufactory or a steady round of instruction. ”

“ If Hummel was the great theoretician, Czerny was the great man of practice; a quite unique person, the hero of all piano-teachers, whose practical eye runs equally over all the possibilities of playing, and works them out in separate parts; the genius of the Étude. He it was who discovered the great secret that no separation of methods of fingering is of any avail in practice, but that the perfection of the fingers must be carried out solely on the basis of their mechanical gymnastic. It is useless to try to apply my five fingers to so many theoretically possible permutations ”

“ Only take the fugal form not as the end in itself, and not as a mere example of musical architecture—only take pains to discover the spirit of its unfolding—and we shall be astounded at the endless variety of the inward musical life which is profusely showered into this form. The essence of a fugue of Bach is just this freedom from all architecture, this suppression of all calculation in favour of the spiritual development. ”

“ A spinet stands on a smooth parquet, and the ladies sit around with their roguish eyes and tip-tilted noses, smiling at all the well-recognised allusions, as the then flourishing pastel-art has fixed them for us in light colours. It is light, entertaining music, in which the thoughts of their own accord run on bright and resplendent paths. Short pieces; courantes with their lively, scarcely broken triple-rhythms; allemandes in their decorous and interwoven quadruple time; minuets with their pretty, melodious triple rhythm ”

“ In households where there is no piano we seem to breathe a foreign atmosphere. To-day we need no longer explain the piano from the church or the theatre, from the ballet or the volkslied, from the artistic song or the violin; it has on the contrary become an active centre, which has given its form to our whole musical culture; nay, more, which has even given the stamp to our whole conception of music, not only in the minds of all amateurs, but in the minds of many professionals. ”

“ As we find in Bach the possibilities of all the great forms of the succeeding centuries, so we find in him also all the germs of future expression, rhythm, harmony, and melody. Nothing is more perverse than to regard this music as academic and expressionless. Expression is never absent from counterpoint except when it sacrifices impressionism to the mere display of technical mastery. We shall even to-day seek in vain for piano compositions more full of expression than some of the preludes contained in the Wohltemperiertes Klavier. ”

“ Chopin’s habit of conceiving his pieces as great wholes is precisely what renders an analysis of his works impossible. Chopin, with all the charms we know so well, with all his wide embracing harmonies, his spirited voice-outlines, is but one, and one whole: and this single Chopin takes now one, now another, isolated form, in which, from the original motives, ever fresh creations are fused together. In every piece he is entirely present. There are, it is true, a few weaker pieces of his youth ”

“ Rhythmical motives are plentiful; the smoothly flowing six-eight time; the same with accent completely displaced (as in bar 29, etc.) ; the vigorous dotted quaver and semiquaver of the Vivace; the prominent formula of the section in B flat in the same movement, etc. As before in the Appassionata, the boundaries between first and second themes fade away before the consciousness of their unity. The Sonata exhibits thematic in all its forms. The fugue half changes into the rondo, free in expression, lively in character. An unearthly sweep of music, born tone by tone, rolls over us ”