Pianoforte

“ How, then, did the great organists of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century affect the growth of pianoforte music? By establishing certain forms, notably the fugue, which have been adapted to every kind of serious instrumental music and to the pianoforte with only less propriety than to the organ; by helping to lay the harmonic foundation of music which, as we have said, is the basis for all music down to the present day and is but now being forsaken; by discovering the effectiveness of certain styles of ornamentation and runs which are essentially common to all keyboard instruments. ”

“ The sound effects produced by the well-considered combinations of the wind instruments are of surprising beauty, and the pianoforte maintains its ground against its melodious rivals by means of its power of quicker motion. The whole work is clear and easy in each of its multitudinous details, and from beginning to end it is a true triumph of the art of recognising and adapting the peculiar euphonious quality of each instrument. ”

“ But its advantages and prerogatives approach the marvelous.
It gives a single man command over something complete; in its potentialities from softest to loudest in one and the same register it excels all other instruments. The trumpet can blare, but not sigh; contrariwise the flute; the pianoforte can do both. Its range embraces the highest and deepest practicable tones. Respect the Pianoforte!
Let doubters consider how the pianoforte was esteemed by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, who dedicated their choicest thoughts to it. ”

“ But the tone of the pianoforte is so fleeting that such a mixture ensures great brilliance and warmth without undue jargon, and is thus akin to the blending of strange colors by modern painters. Many people, in fact, play the pianoforte with too little, rather than too much, pedal; or with too much pedal used the wrong way! A definite attempt should be made to cultivate a feeling for color and warmth of tone; a hard, colorless tone on the pianoforte being a great blemish as it is so unnecessary. ”

“ The more he can do so, the smoother and pleasanter his playing will become. In so far as the tone of the pianoforte can be sensuous and warm, he can make it so in the measure in which he avoids giving prominence to the blows and thuds which ever threaten it perilously. The player who pounds is the player whose ear has not taken into account this harsh and unmusical accompaniment of noises. The player who can make the piano sing is he who, in listening to the mysterious vibrations of its after-sounds, has come to recognize and subdue those noises which too often interrupt and obscure them. ”

“ The very term Pianoforte implies a wealth of meaning; for a special glory of the instrument is its power of shading, its flexibility of utterance, from piano to forte or vice versa. The limits themselves, to be sure, are not so striking as in certain other instruments, e.g., the pianoforte cannot produce the almost ghostly whisper of which the clarinet is capable, nor can it equal the trumpet or the trombone in intensity or volume. ”

“ In the pianoforte the action assumes special importance from the capability this instrument has to express gradations of tone; and as the player's performance can never be quite consciously controlled—more or less of it being automatic—we are, through the faithful correspondence of the action with the touch, placed in direct relation with the very individuality of the player. It is this blending of conscious and unconscious expression of which the pianoforte action is the medium that produces upon us the artistic impression. ”

“ The playing of any instrument—be it ever so perfect, like that of Paganini on the violin, or Kalkbrenner on the piano—is, with all its charm, only the means, not the end of the tone-art. The achievements of Mozart and Beethoven as pianists have long been forgotten, and their pianoforte compositions, although undoubtedly classic works, must give way to the diversified, artistic treatment of that instrument by the modern school. ”

“ Let the [Pg 157] knowledge suffice that the fundamental principle of the pianoforte is as old as music itself, and that scientific learning, inventive ingenuity, and mechanical skill, tributary always to the genius of the art, have worked together for centuries to apply this principle, until the instrument which embodies it in its highest potency is become a veritable microcosm of music. It is the visible sign of culture in every gentle household; the indispensable companion of the composer and teacher; the intermediary between all the various branches of music. ”

“ The invention of a new instrument of music has, therefore, not unfrequently led to the adoption of new effects in compositions. Take the pianoforte, which was invented in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and which has now obtained so great a popularity; its characteristics inspired our great composers to the invention of effects, or expressions, which cannot be properly rendered on any other instrument, however superior in some respects it may be to the pianoforte. ”

“ It would far exceed the limits of this article to give a complete account of pianoforte playing and composition in Germany since Beethoven’s time. The influence of the piano on modern music has been greater than that of any other single instrument. It is not only the favorite of the amateur, but is par excellence the composer’s instrument. As almost every modern German composer has written for the piano, its literature is far more voluminous than that of any other instrument, and piano players are as countless as the sands of the sea. ”

“ In these he had shown himself a master of style in the combination of pianoforte with strings, and such mastery is no less evident in the quintet. The latter is more modern in spirit and in harmonies. There are three movements: a molto moderato, an adagio, and an allegro moderato. Of these the first is gloomy in character, and the second is elegiac. The third is founded upon a single figure which is varied again and again. The treatment of the piano is in the main light, so that the instrument does not overpower the strings. ”

“ The pianoforte is—in our time, perhaps—the best suited for his purpose, on account of the harmony and of the arrangement of orchestral works executable on the instrument. Most of our great composers were pianists, harpsichord players, or organists. There are, it is true, exceptions. Gluck's instrument was the violoncello; Spohr's, the violin. But even composers who are not pianists, generally, while composing for the orchestra, make use of the pianoforte.
The best musical performer is he who can play the most simple melody with the greatest expression ”

“ It is precisely at this time that technique first properly arises as an art; and their zeal in the attempt to solve the new problem was great indeed. They discover new possibilities of expression, they disclose new effects in the capacities of the pianoforte, and they reveal an inventive power in these new paths which offers the most surprising beauties. We must consider them from the right side, and never forget that the development of the piano could never have taken place so naturally and organically unless its technical advance had gone on in parallel lines with its spiritual progress. ”

“ II. Adagio sostenuto, E major, 4-4. There is a short introduction with sustained harmonies for strings. These harmonies are soon reinforced by wind instruments. The pianoforte enters with a figure over which the flute and then the clarinet announce the theme on which the movement is built. The opening phrase for the clarinet has much significance in this respect. The pianoforte now has the theme, and the accompaniment of a broken chord figure is given to violins (pizzicato) and clarinets. The pace is quickened for the working out of the subject and for episodic material. ”

“ There is something clear and transparent in the style, for all the impetuous, highly rhythmical, and impassioned material. And the effectiveness of the pianoforte in the combination is truly astonishing, considering how relatively simple it all is. In the first movement of the quartet in D, for example, the duet that is half canon between the cello and piano in the statement of the second theme, and shortly after, following a two measure trill, the almost Mozartian figuration given to the pianoforte while the strings develop the possibilities within this second theme ”

“ Here, however, it may be observed that in addition to its constant use as an instrument for the concert hall and the home, and for the delight of great audiences and the joy of the amateur player and his familiar circle, many of the great composers, even when writing orchestral works, have used the pianoforte for their first sketches, testing their harmonies on it, and often, no doubt, while groping over the keys in search of the psychical note, hit upon accidental improvements and new harmonies. ”

“ It is doubtless the conventional and domestic character of the pianoforte that leads us to train our children to play upon it rather than upon the violin. The pianoforte is available for casual music, for accompaniments to songs, for dance music, and so forth. ”

“ At L we have some further development of the second theme, the melody being in the strings with a background of broken triplet chords on the pianoforte. We now reach at M—molto più lento—the most poetic variation of the work. All the 'cellos, dolce e sostenuto, sing the second theme in the rich key of F-sharp major, the closing phrases answered by the wood-wind; while the pianoforte supports them with coloristic, arabesque-like broken chords containing a melodic pattern of their own. ”

“ The pianoforte being essentially a harmonic instrument, composers have spent a great part of their skill in devising rapidly moving figures which would keep its harmonies in vibration. Such harmonies have either constituted a music in themselves, or have furnished a vibrant background behind a melody or an interweaving of several melodies. The shape of the figures has been determined by harmony and the figures have been blended into a general effect by the use of the pedal. ”

“ The value of the piano as an instrument of musical expression will always be the subject of discussion. It has undoubtedly two great shortcomings, which place the pianist under serious disadvantages. It cannot sustain tone, and the tones which can be produced on it will ever be more or less marred by unmusical noises which cannot often be avoided. But these very shortcomings make possible some peculiar beauties and a peculiar vitality which characterize pianoforte music alone. ”

“ Space prevents more than the mere mention of other works in which the pianoforte takes a prominent part:—The Concerto in F minor, Op. 19 (played by Sterndale Bennett himself “at the concerts [Pg 270] of Leipsic”) ; the violoncello and piano duet, Op. 32; the Sextett for two violins, viola, violoncello and contrabasso, with pianoforte, Op. 8; the pianoforte Trio in A, Op. 26; and, not least important, from the point of view of this book, the twelve songs, the accompaniments of which are of ideal beauty.]
Chopin’s Hand. ”

“ And together with those rather gross piano-works the piece par excellence characteristic of the period, the brilliant piano-concerto with its prancing instrument embedded in the pomp and clangor and ululation of the band, has lost in favor steadily. The modern men no longer write concerti. When they introduce a pianoforte into the orchestra, they either, like Brahms, treat it as the premier instrument, and write symphonies, or, like Scriabine and Strawinsky, reduce it to the common level. ”

“ It is very likely, as Sir Hubert says, that most modern composers have used the pianoforte a good deal—not so much to help them to find out their ideas, as to test the details and intensify their musical sensibility by the excitant sounds, the actual sensual impression of which is, of course, an essential element in all music. ”

“ In such all-embracing power the piano is in the twilight chamber a strange and dear tale-teller, a Rhapsode for the intimate spirit, which can express itself in it by improvisation, and an archive for the historian to whom it unrolls the whole life of modern music in its universal speech from a point of view which gives us the whole in the average. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ “As usual, he submitted to the interminable entreaties and finally was dragged almost by force to the pianoforte by the ladies. Angrily he tears the second violin part of one of the Pleyel quartets from the music-stand where it still lay open, throws it upon the rack of the pianoforte, and begins to improvise. We had never heard him extemporize more brilliantly, with more originality or more grandly than on that evening.
“But throughout the entire improvisation there ran in the middle voices, like a thread, or cantus firmus, the insignificant notes, wholly insignificant in themselves, which he found on the page of the quartet, which by chance lay open on the music-stand; ”