Various

“ Colors of sound, intervals, rhythms, qualities of melody, keys, all had for him a symbolism, sometimes mysterious, sometimes definite. He regarded himself as a poet, speaking a language more suggestive than words. In those who listened to his music he expected an imagination quick to feel the life in it, to respond to it, to interpret it. Countless anecdotes reveal the close association Beethoven felt to exist between his music and the world of nature, of human life, of the spirit rising in spite of fate. Most are perhaps not to be relied upon. ”

“ It would be wholly mistaken to think of Chopin as a composer of only sad or turbulent music. A whole list of masterpieces could be chosen from those of his compositions which are gay without arrière-pensée, which are witty and vivacious, and clear as happy laughter. It is perhaps this very spirit which saves his music always from heaviness, which makes it in the last analysis more healthy and more sane than much of that of Schumann or Brahms. Never are his moods heavy, stagnant, or inert. Intense as they may be they are swift-changing and vivid. ”

“ Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,—of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. ”

“ Scarlatti aimed, confessedly, to startle and to amuse by his harpsichord pieces. He cautioned his friends not to look for anything particularly serious in them. It is hard to dissociate an ideal of pure and only faintly colored beauty from Couperin. But in the music of Bach one seldom misses the ring of a strong and even an impetuous need of self-expression. In the mighty organ works, and in the vocal works, one may believe with him that he sang his soul out to the glory of his Maker; but in the smaller keyboard pieces sheer delight in expressing himself is unmistakable. ”

“ The epoch has, on the other hand, more than an historical significance. It brought into music the expression of three geniuses of the highest order. Each has its own special charm, its own character, its own power. One should not be valued by comparison with the others. What Haydn gave, what Mozart gave, and what Beethoven gave, all are of lasting beauty and of lasting worth. From Haydn the common joys and a touch of the common sorrows of people here under the sun; from Mozart a grace that is more of the fairies, a voice from other stars singing a divine melody ”

“ It may, indeed, be asked whether these last works are sonatas, whether they be not some new form. Yet the steps by which they evolved are clear, and in them all there are manifold traces of their origin. There is no other literature for the pianoforte comparable to them in scope and power. The special quality of their inspiration each must judge for himself, whether it move him, appeal to him, suit his taste in beauty of sound. But to that inspiration no one can deny a grandeur and nobility, a heroic proportion unique in pianoforte music. ”

“ Therefore there is no phrase which is not in accord with the spirit and the law of the piece in which it is written, nothing which, written then for the sake of display, may make a feeble show in the light of modern technique. There is no abandonment to melody at the cost of other qualities; nor even a momentary forgetfulness of the pleasure of the ear in the exercise of the mind. Nothing has come into music in the course of two hundred years which can stand between us and a full appreciation of their beauty. ”

“ It needs no training of the ear to enjoy or to appreciate Liszt’s music. Merely to hear it is to undergo its forceful attraction. Back of it there stands Liszt, the pianist and the virtuoso, asserting his power in the world of men and women. However much or little he may be an artist, he is ever the hero of pianoforte music. So it seems fitting to regard him last as composer of nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, veritably epics in music from the life of a fiery, impetuous people. Rhythms, melodies, and even harmonies are the growth of the soil of Hungary. ”

“ There is no awkwardness, no tentativeness, no striving for effect. No note is unwisely placed. The treatment of both pianoforte and orchestra leaves nothing to be desired, either when the one is set against the other or when both are intimately blended. Though it in no way suggests the virtuoso, it is perfectly suited to the piano, bringing out unfailingly the very best the instrument is capable of. Thus it stands unique among Schumann’s compositions. There must be many to whom it stands for an ideal realized. To them it will be unique among concertos, the most excellent, the perfect type. ”

“ Indeed, he received the pianoforte coldly. His keyboard music was probably conceived, the brilliant for the harpsichord, the more intimate for the clavichord. And towards the end of his life he gave utterance to his belief that the only function of music was to stir the emotions and that the player who could not do that might as well not play.
In turning to the best of his sonatas one turns to profoundly beautiful music, music that unquestionably has the power to stir the heart. The great spirit of the father has breathed upon it and given it life. ”

“ From then on he enjoyed a brilliant fame, not only as a player, but as a composer as well. And for what was his playing admired? For the remarkable clearness and evenness of his touch, for one thing. So was the playing of Dussek, of Cramer, of Field, of Moscheles, of Kalkbrenner, of Ferdinand Hiller, of any number of others. Clearness and evenness of touch did not distinguish one great player from another then, more than it does now. Yet they are qualities endlessly bespoken by all biographers for their favorite pianists.
Hummel seems to have had in addition a grace of style not so common. ”

“ Outwardly they all show the same restlessness and tumultuousness. But the passion of the later works is deeper if not more calm than that of the earlier, and the expression of it is more varied and full of contrasts. Works like the fourth Scherzo, the fourth Ballade, and the Barcarolle have an under meaning so hard to grasp that perhaps the majority of those who study them or hear them find fault with the structure and say they are rambling. There is in all his music a reserve which puts it beyond the touch of most who would play it. ”

“ If we leave our study of pianoforte music with a laugh it is only because we may be supremely happy in the possession of so much music that need not be hidden before the raillery of any wit, no matter how sacrilegious. Into the hands of Claude Debussy we give the art of writing for the pianoforte. His is the wisest and most sensitive touch to mold it since the day of Chopin. Whatever the music he writes may be, it has conferred upon the instrument once more the infinite blessing of a proper speech. ”

“ The harmonies are rich, the counterpoint melodious, the theme whispered as a recollection from the first land of familiar tonic and dominant. Then clearly we are held for a moment to enjoy E-sharp minor before we play back again, with fragments of the theme, to our well-known dominant and tonic. Off again on motives we cannot fail to recognize, as if we were again to wander afield in harmonies. But, no; we sink firmly upon a swelling G-sharp, our dominant again, the best known note of our theme. The captive harmonies rise and fall. Movement they have, but escape is impossible. ”

“ The development section is long and varied, astonishingly modern; and the return to the first theme, prepared by a long pedal point and a crescendo, is not a little fiery and dramatic. The second movement, an andante in G major, and the quick final movement in D again, round off a work which for clearness of form, for balance in proportions, and for a certain fine and healthy charm, is wholly admirable. Above all there is about all his work a real grace which, superficial as it may be, is a precious and perhaps a rare quality in pianoforte music, a quality both of elegance and amiability. ”

“ The imagination is nowhere more finely used than in the short pieces called the Kinderscenen. Each of these pieces gives proof of Schumann’s power to become a part, as it were, of the essence of things, to make himself the thing he thought or even the thing he saw. They are not picture music, nor wholly program music. They are more a music of the imagination than of fact. Schumann has himself become a child in spirit and has expressed in music something of the unbound rapture of the child’s mind. ”

“ Is the unity here merely one which great familiarity with the work as a whole may account for? One can point to no logical incompleteness in any one of the movements. Is their union in our mind essentially one of association? It is more than that. There is a single emotion underlying the work as a whole, which must seek further and different utterance than the first movement affords it; which the second movement may belie but not extinguish; to which only the fantastic coda of the last movement gives ultimate release.
In both these sonatas there is a unity which cannot be destroyed. ”

“ In the latter the A major section is extraordinarily beautiful and without a parallel in music. The last set is perhaps as a whole the most remarkable. There are three intermezzos and one rhapsody. In many measures of the first intermezzo the harmonies seem to unfold from a single note, to be shed downward like light from a star. The music drifts to a melody full of human yearning, rises again in floating harmonies, drifts slowly downward, too heavy with sadness. In the second and third the mood is happier, cool in the second, smiling in the third. ”

“ Their glory is, like the beauty of the preludes, a glory of harmony. The long, rapid runs may have lost their power to thrill ears that have heard the studies of Liszt; but the chords which lie under them have a majesty that seems to defy time.
There are several ‘concertos’ and ‘sonatas’ of which to say much is to repeat what has already been said of other forms of his music. Both are obviously indebted to Vivaldi for style, or the external features of style, as well as for form. ”

“ Such works were not, we may be sure, written for the practice of his pupils, as so many of Haydn’s and Mozart’s sonatas had been. Most of them contained some measure of the outpouring of his own heart and soul, sometimes not less tremendous than the content of his symphonies. Each was to him in the nature of a great poem, an epic; most have a distinct life and spirit of their own. Into this poetic life must one plunge who would understand. There is a great mood to be caught, an emotion, sometimes an idea. Beethoven thought deeply about the meaning of his art. ”

“ At the present day they are put into the hands of babes and sucklings, in whose touch, however, there is no wisdom. Yet if ever music needed a wise hand, it is these simple pieces; and a lack of wisdom has made them trivial to the world.
The art of the pianist should be, as Emanuel Bach declared, that of drawing from his instrument sounds of moving beauty, beautiful in quality, in line and in shading. ”

“ Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music. ”

“ But what a place it held, and how inextricably is it woven with the development of nearly all the music that now seems the freest speech of passion and imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico Scarlatti, François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the sons of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and the child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music they wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer voice through our pianoforte ”

“ The workmanship of all is delicate, whether it be deliberate or instinctive. There is in all a great appreciation of effects of contrast, of loud and soft, which are the very first of the peculiarities of the instrument; an appreciation of the sonority, rich but not noisy, which the pedal allows; of the charm of soft and distinct passage notes, of vigorous, percussive rhythm. All is perhaps in miniature; but the six pieces are the essence of German pianoforte music, both in quality and style; the very root and stock of the short pieces of Schumann and Brahms by which they are distinguished. ”

“ One would not believe, to hear the music played, into what desperate intricacies the pianist has had to cut his way. And all to hang a garland on a tune, but a tune that heats with the very heart of Spain, and a garland that is a cloak of all the colors ever seen at a bull-fight. Grieg is an expatriate beside Albéniz. Never has such intensity of national life, joy, passion, pride, and melancholy threatened to burst the very limits of sound.
Composers in England have not written a great deal for the pianoforte. ”

“ There is a lack of titles, there is no motto, there is even no mark of Florestan and Eusebius. This most whimsical, most subjective, and, in many ways, most beautiful and most complicated of Schumann’s creations, stands before us, then, with no clue to its meaning except its title. This, as we have said, refers us to a half-crazy, fantastical musician. There is more in the music than lunacy, full of vagaries as it is. There is much poetry, a clearness and sanity in diction, inconsequential as the thought may be, a mastery of the science of music. ”

“ There are the pompous oratorios from the west, light operas and tuneful trios and sonatas from the south, dry-as-dust fugues from the north, folk-songs gay and sad from the east. All whirling and churning before Maria Theresa, or her lovable son, or the intelligent courtiers about them. France will grow sick before the Revolution, Italy will become frivolous, Germany cold. Only Vienna loves music better than life. Presently up will come Haydn from Croatia, and Mozart from Salzburg, and Beethoven from Bonn. ”

“ These may be fairly compared with the ‘Songs without Words’ of Mendelssohn. How utterly different they prove to be, how virile and how genuinely romantic! They are not only the work of a creative genius of the highest order, they show an ever venturesome spirit at work on the keyboard. Take, for example, the ‘Fantasy Pieces.’ The first, called Des Abends, is as properly a song as any of Mendelssohn’s short pieces which are so designated. The very melody is inspired and new, rising and falling in the long smooth phrases which are the gift of the great artist, not the mere music-maker. ”

“ He had in attendance a clavecinist named Goldberg, a pupil of Bach’s, who, among other duties, had by his playing to wile away the miserable night hours of his unhappy patron. Hearing of the great Bach through Goldberg, Kaiserling requested him to write some harpsichord music of pleasant, cheerful character especially for these weary vigils. Bach composed and sent back a theme and thirty variations, which so pleased the count that he presented Bach with a goblet filled with one hundred Louis d’or.
One cannot but smile; the mere thought of thirty variations is soporific. ”

“ The scherzo is the second movement, and here again each instrument is allowed a full expression of its musical powers. The style is light, the rhythm syncopated. There is fascinating play at imitations. And in the trio the cello plays in rich double-stops. There is but a short adagio before the final allegro, only a brief but telling expression of seriousness, and then the allegro brings to full flower the quiet, concealed, so to speak, and tranquil happiness of the first movement. ”

“ The great works of chamber music, no matter how profound, speak in the language of intimacy. They show no signs of the need to impress or overwhelm an audience. Perhaps no truly great music does. But operas and even symphonies must be written with more or less consideration for external circumstances, whereas in the smaller forms, composers seem to be concerned only with the musical inspiration which they feel the desire to express. They speak to an audience of understanding friends, as it were, before whom they may reveal themselves without thought of the effectiveness of their speech. ”

“ Once more the despair breaks wildly forth, and yet again is hushed but not relieved. The sudden major in the ending can not take from the movement its quality of unconsoled sadness. The scherzo, in B minor, is built upon the constant imitation and play of a single merry figure. The trio is in G major, one of those seemingly naïve yet perfect movements such as Schubert alone could write. There is only the swing of a waltz, only the melody that a street gamin might carelessly whistle; but somewhere beneath it lies genius. ”

“ There must be melody and harmony of distinct and vivid character. These the concertos of the violin-composers oftenest lack; and therefore from the point of view of pure music, one finds in them a lack not only of originality but of strength.
Their short pieces stand a better chance of a longer life, because in them a slender idea is not stretched to fill a broad form, and because for a short time sheer beauty of sound, such as the violin is capable of, and dexterity of fingers are a sufficient delight to the ear. ”