Music

IT is with great pleasure that we notice a Sarabande and Scherzo for piano-forte by Stephen A. Emery. The Sarabande, in B-minor, is a most masterly piece of contrapuntul writing, and shows to what good purpose the composer has studied the piano-forte works of Sebastian Bach. Mr. Emery indeed seems to have caught something of the great master’s spirit in this little piece, and to have done more than merely imitate his musical forms. Apart from the excellence of the counterpoint, there is enough of originality and of the more modern musical essence in this Sarabande to stamp it as something better than a work of mere imitative cleverness. It is a composition that, to say the very least, shows great talent and sound musical culture, and there is not a note in it that we would willingly see changed. The Scherzo, in B-major, is thoroughly charming throughout, and, although more modern in form than the Sarabande, follows it naturally and easily. Here the composer shows that he has not confined his studies to the works of the older, contrapuntal masters, and in the last return of the theme he has made quite happy use of a syncopation evidently caught from Beethoven. The Caprice, Opus 18, is written in a freer style and is musicianlike, at times even charming in treatment, but does not as a whole strike us as coming quite up to the standard of some other of the composer’s works which have come under our notice.

We are forced to express far less satisfaction at Mr. Sloper’s “ Santley Album.” The “ Album ” is a series of six transcriptions of songs sung by Mr. Charles Santley, and as such will no doubt commend itself to many of the great baritone’s admirers. With the exception of the Tarantelle, La Danza, from Rossini’s Soirées Musicales, the songs themselves are at best very commonplace compositions, and have to thank Mr. Santley’s singing for whatever effect they may have made in the concert-room. That Mr. Santley should have sung them is by no means surprising, as it is but too familiar a fact that great singers have perhaps the greatest hold upon the generality of their audiences by means of very inferior songs ; but we are sorry to find that any one who has been associated in our minds with better things musically, as Mr. Sloper undoubtedly has been, should have thought it worth while to transcribe such music for the piano-forte. The manner, too, in which Mr. Sloper has performed his task is no better than the matter he has chosen to work upon. There is nothing in the transcriptions that places them above the rank of the usual piano-solo arrangements of operas and cantatas with which the music-market is flooded. As arrangements of fine music, however poorly done, such things are often welcome as means of studying the works of the great masters and of recalling to the mind impressions received on hearing the performance of some symphony or opera, but as specimens of pianoforte writing they fall even below the level of respectable mediocrity.

In his Fantaisie upon Russian airs Mr. Sloper has trodden upon dangerous ground. This as well as his Fantaisie upon “ Home, Sweet Home ” (when will pianists mercifully cease torturing that much - injured song ?) is written much more pretentiously than the Santley song transcriptions, and seems to invite comparison with Sigismund Thalberg’s Airs Russes Variés, Opus 17 ; a comparison very little to Mr. Sloper’s advantage. As far as the subject-matter is concerned, the two compositions are as nearly as possible identical, but in the manner of treatment Mr. Sloper cuts but a sorry figure beside Thalberg. In arranging the first little theme, which Thalberg has treated with all that easy grace and refinement so peculiar to himself, Mr. Sloper flounders about in the most woful manner among strangely crude harmonic progressions and bad counterpoint, such as second-rate organists often take refuge in in their improvisations while lying in wait for a musical idea. The musical idea, however, does not apparently come to Mr. Sloper, for he soon switches off through a series of every-day piano-forte commonplaces to the National Hymn. This he has harmonized little better than the preceding theme, though if we continue the comparison, we must admit that Thalberg’s treatment of the Hymn is also decidedly weak and far inferior to his handling of the other air. Mr. Sloper, after setting forth the Hymn in plain harmony, treats us to a painfully trivial variation, which at last comes to an end with a few bars of the conventional finale doubleshuffle business for both hands. We are at a loss to understand how anybody with the slightest claim to being a pianist could have written this Fantaisie. Putting aside the musical inanity of the composition itself, the manner in which it is put upon the instrument, the Claviersatz, as the Germans have it, is poor, thin, and unmusicianlike. If this is the best that Mr. Sloper can do, we hope that the cacoëthes scribendi is not a chronic malady with him, and that he does not often abandon the accompanist’s stool, at which post he has fairly won so many laurels, for the composer’s desk.

Ernst Perabo’s piano-forte arrangement of the Lachner “ Theme with Variations ” is quite a good rendering of the original. Of the twenty-three variations in the original Suite, Mr. Perabo has transcribed twelve in such a manner as to make us wish that he had done as much for the remaining eleven. To be sure, this would have made the movement almost inordinately long for a piano-forte piece, especially as the absence of orchestral coloring and of the contrasting of one body of instruments with another of different timbre robs the composition of much of its variety. The fear of too great monotony was, no doubt, Mr. Perabo’s reason for the cuts that he has made, and this consideration is by no means unworthy of attention ; but, on the other hand, the artistic unity of the whole suffers by such a dismemberment. This makes itself painfully felt at the end of the transcription, where Mr. Perabo closes with the twentieth variation, thus leaving the piece as it were with one foot in the air. Nevertheless, there is enough intrinsic beauty' in Lachner’s composition to make it very acceptable, even in this imperfect shape. Mr. Perabo has done his work well, considering the great difficulties that one meets on every hand in making effective piano-forte arrangements of modern orchestral works, especially of one of such intricate polyphonic structure as some of the variations in question. In order to make a thoroughly fine transcription, one must not only be a consummate master of the piano-forte, but also possess an exhaustive practical knowledge of the orchestra, — two qualities rarely to be found united in one individual. The finest efforts in this direction have been made by Franz Liszt, Hans v. Bülow, Carl Tausig, and Carl Klindworth, many of whose piano-forte transcriptions border on the miraculous. In listening to some of Liszt’s arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies and, as the Marchioness said, “making believe very hard,” we can almost cheat ourselves into believing that we hear the orchestra itself. It is no disparagement to Mr. Perabo to say that this is hardly the case with the transcription in hand; but if he has not succeeded in giving us those delicate hints at orchestral coloring which we find in Liszt’s transcriptions, he has at least given us an arrangement that is thoroughly claviermässig (we know of no English word that exactly expresses the idea) and quite playable.

Lysberg’s “Fairy Menuct” is a pretty, unpretentious little piece, well within the executive scope of almost anybody who may have dabbled in piano-forte playing.

Fritz Spindler’s “ Spring is here ” is one of the composer’s most showy efforts, though hardly up to the mark of some of his less pretentious compositions. Although Spindler deserves a higher rank as a composer than such wholesale musicmakers as Krug, Oesten, and the rest of that tribe, yet he at times seems almost to deserve the title of Musikfabrikant, which a fellow-townsman of his own bestowed upon him. He has undoubtedly great facility in composing, and his ideas, such as they are, flow easily and often gracefully from his pen ; but his themes are too often commonplace and trivial, and his treatment of them too much upon a stereotyped plan, to save his compositions from that close family resemblance which in time amounts to flat and unprofitable sameness. There is a certain refinement about everything he writes, and a direct, naïve simplicity of expression, that is not without its charm, and his treatment of the piano-forte is generally skilful. He has the knack of producing often quite brilliant effects by simple and easy means, and seems to possess every requisite for a first-class pianoforte writer, excepting genius.

Another quite brilliant piece of salon music is Eugène Ketterer’s Fantaisie on Thomas’s Mignon. This is much better than most compositions of its class, though it has the one great fault of all potpourris, namely, the want of any artistic unity in form. It begins quite strongly with the Bohemian March, then passes to a very good arrangement of the Pastorale and the fascinating little Danse des oeufs, and ends with a very brilliant and effective setting of the Polonaise. M. Ketterer has treated the piano-forte in a large, brilliant style, and the Fantaisie is not too difficult for amateurs who have acquired some facility in octave playing.

Francis Boott’s Maria Mater seems to us to be one of the very best of the composer’s works. Besides being a fine specimen of four-part vocal writing, the music is throughout in perfect keeping with the character of the words, — a rare merit in sacred music nowadays. We may be pardoned a short digression here, more fully to explain our meaning. In the old contrapuntal church music there is much that at first sight seems at variance with the religious character of the text. Much has been written, especially of late years, about the seeming incongruity of setting sentences like Kyrie eleison, Dona nobis pacem, and other parts of the mass, to music in strict fugue form and often with great contrapuntal elaboration. Even a man of Hector Berlioz’s musical insight has found nothing but what is ridiculous in many of the fugued choruses of Händel and Sebastian Bach, and his often too facile pen has held up much of the old sacred music to public ridicule. But though the old contrapuntal forms may appear to us to-day to be strangely unfit for the expression of religious sentiment, the spirit of the old church music is thoroughly devotional. We must look at what is behind the counterpoint, not at the counterpoint itself. In more modern sacred music we find less to shock us in the outward form, but we also find less of the devotional and purely religious spirit. Even in Mendelssohn we find that sentimentality too often takes the place of sentiment, and that what aims at being religious mysticism too often resolves itself into mere aimless, dreamy sensuousness. But in many of the composers of to-day, especially those of the French school, this realistic sentimentalism attains an excessive development, and in listening to the Eastern splendor of their harmony with its yearning augmented intervals and sensuous ninths and thirteenths, we often feel as if the Arabian Nights were the source of the inspiration, rather than the devotional words to which the music is set. Although Mr. Boott is avowedly a violent opponent of the old strict forms of composition, especially in sacred music, he has not fallen into this error. There is a healthy, tonic character in most of his music, which, if it shows how little influence his studies in Palestrina and the old Italian church masters have had upon his style, also shows that he has not given in to the prevailing tendency to sentimentalism of some of the modem schools, and in the composition in question he has kept clear of the sensational commonplaces of the modern Italian operatic school, which in some of his other works he has evinced a strong tendency to imitate. The employment of the chord of the augmented sixth in the last phrase but one (at all times a dangerous chord to have to do with) makes one for a moment fear that the conventional, operatic burst from darkness to sunshine, or rather from turneddown lamps to Bengal lights, is coming; but the resolution through a minor chord into a really grand diminished seventh, followed after a short silence by a calm, reposeful cadence, makes this crescendo one of the finest passages in the whole piece. The least successful part of the composition is the little bit of imitation, at the bottom of the fourth page, on the words tu nos ab hoste. This, although grammatically written, sounds cheap and commonplace beside the rest of the work. If the whole composition have a pervading fault, it is the too frequent recurrence of the perfect cadence, which, besides making the harmony a little monotonous, tends to separate the different phrases too much and to make them too independent of each other. But in spite of this there is much real beauty in the composition, and it gives us the hope that Mr. Boott will continue to write in this vein, which seems more congenial to him than the lighter forms of composition that he has attempted.