Pianists Now and Then

IN these infant days of the twentieth century the pianist stands next to the singer among the princes of the musical world. But it was not always so. The singer was the first to mount the public throne and reign with the sceptre of sweetened sound. Next came the violinist, and after him the virtuosi of wind instruments. Early concert programmes show the names of singers, and flute, horn, and oboe players, but not of manipulators of the keyboard. The concert pianist of to-day, sweeping the keyboard of his grand and the heart-strings of his hearers with sinewy hands, emerged slowly from the humble state of a poor dependent, creeping with anxious offerings to the door of his princely patron. It was not till almost the middle of the eighteenth century that the performance of solo feats on the harpsichord began to attract public attention and to form the substance of concerts.

The pianist is a child of the organ, for in the beginning the clavichord, one of the forerunners of the piano, was used for the home practice of organists. From that state the instrument advanced to the dignity of becoming a home companion in the houses of the social elect. In 1529, for instance, Elena Bembo, daughter of the famous poet, Pietro Bembo, wrote to her father from the convent in which she was a pupil, asking that she might learn to play the monochord, the clavichord of that period. Bembo’s answer, preserved in Caffi’s Storia della Musica, and translated in Weitzmann’s History of Piano Forte Music, runs thus: —

“Touching thy request for leave to play the monochord, I answer that by reason of thy tender years thou canst not know that this playing is an art for vain and frivolous women. And I would that thou shouldst be the most amiable, and the most chaste and modest maiden alive. Besides if thou wert to play badly, thy playing would cause thee little pleasure and no little shame. But in order to play well, thou must needs give up ten or twelve years to this exercise, without even thinking of aught else. And how far this would befit thee, thou canst see for thyself, without my telling it. Should thy schoolmates desire thee to learn to play for their pleasure, tell them that thou dost not care to have them laugh at thy mortification. And content thyself with the pursuit of the sciences and the practice of needlework.”

The teacher at Elena’s convent was Adrian Willaert, the father of the great Venetian school of organists. He died laden with honors in 1562, and left behind him a splendid progeny of pupils who spread his doctrines through Italy and into other lands. But Willaert was not in any sense a piano virtuoso. The instrument of the time was nothing more than a small oblong box containing a few stretched wires, which were struck by brass uprights on the inner ends of the levers, the outer ends of which were depressed by the blows of the fingers. Not much could be done with this instrument, and yet from it developed the modern piano.

A lineal descendant of Willaert was the great Girolamo Frescobaldi, father of the Roman school of organ-playing. Frescobaldi was born in 1577 or 1578, and the days of his glory were from 1614 to 1640, He played in St. Peter’s in 1614 to an audience as large as that now drawn by a Yale-Harvard football game. He was the greatest organist and clavierist of the first half of the seventeenth century; but to us as we look back, he stands forth wholly a church performer. He was not a pianist in even the early sense of the term.

Nevertheless he was a sire of virtuosi, for the famous Johann Jakob Froberger, of Halle, was his pupil. Froberger was a protégé of the Kaiser Ferdinand III, who sent him to Rome to study. In 1662, having become the greatest organist and clavier player in Europe, Froberger obtained permission to go to England. Westward the star of keyboard virtuosity took its way. Froberger went as an organist, but he was the avant courier of those pianists who have swarmed across the channel from the Continent for the London season, and those who now come three thousand miles across the western ocean to gather the dollars of the sons of freedom.

England had not been without clavier ¹ performers before Froberger’s time. There is a pretty fable that the virginal, one of the early forms of the harpsichord, was so named in honor of the Virgin Queen, and there is a volume long called Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book, containing pieces by a coterie of English composers, including the good Dr. John Bull, who invented the theme stolen by Henry Cary for his God Save the King. But these men were all chapel-masters and private performers. Even Froberger made his sensation, not as a pianist, but as an organist.

On the way to England he was robbed and almost lost at sea. He went into Westminster Abbey to give thanks for his safety, and the organist offered him work as blower. When he blew, however, he neglected his duty and was discharged. He seized the opportunity a moment later to fill the organ with wind, and sound a few chords. A lady in the church had been his pupil. She said to herself, “It is Froberger’s style.” True enough, and so the organist was brought to the attention of the king, whom he much amazed with his feats upon the keyboard. Froberger must also have astonished some persons by his compositions. Mattheson, the German historian of musicians, says: “I possess an allemande by the formerly celebrated Froberger, intended to depict his perilous voyage on the Rhine. Therein is represented how one person hands the boatman his sword, and falls thereby into the water; there are twenty-six special notes, among them being a casus where the boatman gives the sufferer a shocking blow with his long pole.” Verily this was the Richard Strauss of his day.

Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, the English musical antiquarian, and his wife, must be thanked for giving contemporary music lovers some idea of the music played by these old-time virtuosi and of the instruments on which it was performed. One needs to hear a clavichord only once to realize that it could not have been used as a concert instrument. Its faint metallic tones are audible through a large room only when the resonance of the chamber is high and the auditors most attentive. The harpsichord, the instrument of a later period, was a little better suited to concert purposes. Its strings, plucked by the quills set in the uprights at the ends of the levers, gave forth a clear and penetrating twang. Under the fingers of such a virtuoso as Mrs. Dolmetsch the harpsichord becomes fascinating. But it was not the representative instrument of the period of Frescobaldi and his great pupil.

Those men, as we have seen, were organists. They played organ, wrote organ, thought organ. They made little discrimination between the technic of the organ and that of the clavier, and none at all in the character of the music written for the two. Their compositions were all cast in the churchly mould. The old ecclesiastical scales, with their solemn and even mournful characteristics, dominated the harmonic scheme, while the tonal architecture was that of the fugue, the great base of all the songs of the sanctuary in those days.

Only in their suites did these early masters succeed in escaping the thralldom of the Church, whose hand-maiden artistic music had been since the fourth century. In the suites the musicians found pleasure in alternating different kinds of dance movements. The gavotte, the galliard, the sarabande, the pavane, and others, contributed contrast and variety to these compositions. A still wider range was found by building one movement after the recitative of the opera, another after the fugued flights of the cathedral, and another after a dance. Thus were prefigured those larger and more elastic forms which led toward the splendid sonatas and symphonies of Beethoven.

But the suites of Froberger’s day were primitive, and even the resources of today’s piano cannot give them the semblance of anything more than experiments. It was after Froberger, in the period of the first of the world-renowned piano virtuosi, that the suite began to be firm in design and captivating in detail. This was in the days of the three giants of the keyboard, Domenico Scarlatti, George Frederick Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach. These were indeed extraordinary figures in musical history. They were not only amazing performers, but also master composers, pathfinders, and creators.

To-day critics and music lovers with one accord concede to Bach the leadership of the trio; but in their own time Scarlatti, by reason of his brilliant performances on the harpsichord, had the widest celebrity. And indeed, in so far as the technical resources of the harpsichord went, Scarlatti was as great an inventor as either of the others. Born in 1683, Scarlatti entered the world but two years before Bach and Handel. He was for a time a pupil of Handel, yet in the fullness of his maturity he introduced into his compositions wonderful running passages in double notes, wide leaps for one hand, and other figures not employed by other masters till long after his day.

In Rome Cardinal Ottoboni arranged a contest between Handel and Scarlatti. In harpsichord playing they were found evenly matched, but at the organ Handel was easily the victor. The nature of the contest well illustrates the conditions of the time. Pianists were under the patronage of some dignitary, and their performances were in salons, surrounded by perukes, swords, and voluminous skirts. The public concert with admission by ticket had not yet welcomed the piano virtuoso into its fold.

Bach never shared the glories which shone upon Scarlatti and Handel. He was a solitary laborer in the cloistered field of church music, and it was many years before his wonderful clavier works, The Well Tempered Clavichord and The Art of Fugue, became known outside of a few German towns. Yet he revolutionized piano-playing. He introduced a new system of tuning which made it possible to play in all the keys. By the old system composers for keyboard instruments were limited to a narrow range, and the enormous tonal flexibility of modern music was out of the question. Bach, too, systematically used the thumb in playing, and in doing so adopted a new position of the hand, more natural and powerful. The earlier players had not used the thumb. Bach refingered the scales and laid the foundation of the modern method of brilliant runs. Yet Bach was distinctively a composer of choral, orchestral, chamber music, and organ works, and his clavier playing was not a public performance.

It was after the deaths of Bach and Handel in the middle of the eighteenth century that the concert pianist, or harpsichordist, as he was then, came into existence. Concerts to which admission was charged were given as early as 1682 in London, and some Continental cities, but the clavier player was not a star at these entertainments. The famous Concerts Spirituels were established in Paris in 1725, but up to 1735 at least, the soloists seem to have been singers, violinists, and wind instrument virtuosi. Bach’s distinguished son, Karl Philipp Emmanuel, who revolutionized the method of harpsichord playing, and whose treatise on the art was authoritative, was not known as a concert virtuoso. He was soundly berated by contemporary critics, but for his compositions, not his playing. Dr. Burney, who met him in Hamburg in 1773, declared that if those critics could have heard Emmanuel Bach play his own works, “with a tenderness and vivacity peculiar to himself,” they would have formed a very different opinion of the music. But they had no such opportunities; the day of the piano virtuoso on the public platform had not come.

That is, it had not come for Emmanuel Bach. Yet it had dawned, and some of those who proclaimed their gratitude to him as their master received public plaudits for their playing. Both Haydn and Mozart declared that in clavier-playing they were children sitting at the feet of Emmanuel Bach. Even Beethoven, who was eighteen when this Bach died at seventy-four, was not insensible to his influence. Mozart, who lived from 1756 to 1791, was beyond doubt the first of the modern piano virtuosi. He reigned royally as a wonder-child. He played through Europe when still little more than a baby. He performed almost incredible feats on the keyboard. And he did these things over and over again, in public concerts to which admission was charged, and from which the returns were too often small.

Mozart’s father, who was not only his teacher, but also his manager and press agent, invented one method of advertising well known to the pianist of to-day. He made a “society idol ” of his boy. We find him writing home about the large sums spent in traveling, for he had to keep up appearances, and he and his two children moved only in the company of nobility. They hobnobbed with emperors. Little princes and princesses threw aside etiquette and kissed and played with little Mozart, who frankly offered to marry Marie Antoinette because she sympathized with him after a fall. The boy was voted a darling by all the titled women. His fame went forth from palaces. Then father Mozart gave public concerts, and the receipts amazed him. People came in chariots and afoot. Swords switched among laces and furbelows. Perukes wagged with wonder, and snuff-boxes snapped delight.

“ I saw him as a boy seven years old,” said Goethe to Eckermann, “when he gave a concert on one of his tours. I was myself fourteen, and I remember the little fellow distinctly, with his powdered wig and his sword.”

The advertising was not confined to the chatter of the great. A newspaper announcement of one concert in which Mozart’s sister was to appear with him reads thus: —

“The little girl, who is in her twelfth year, will play the most difficult compositions of the greatest masters; the boy, who is not yet seven, will play on the clavecin or harpsichord; he will also play a concerto for the violin, and will accompany symphonies on the clavier, the manual or keyboard being covered with a cloth, with as much facility as if he could see the keys; he will instantly name all notes played at a distance, whether singly or in chords played on the clavier, or on any other instrument, bell, glass, or clock. He will, finally, both on the harpsichord and the organ, improvise as long as may be desired in any key, thus proving that he is as thoroughly acquainted with the one instrument as with the other, great as is the difference between them.”

Mozart did not play the harpsichord throughout his career. While yet a juvenile prodigy he became acquainted with the piano, then a new instrument, and adopted it for concert use. The harpsichord, in which the strings were twanged by quills, was at best a thin-toned and inelastic medium for the utterance of such flowing melodies as those of Mozart, and the piano infinitely delighted him by reason of its ability to give loud or soft tones as desired, and by its sustaining power. The piano of his day, however, was feeble as compared with that of ours, and the brilliant, bold, even majestic effects of contemporaneous music are not to be found in the compositions with which he soothed his audiences.

Mozart’s playing was distinguished for its smoothness, fluent elegance, and perfect taste. He was opposed to all extravagant movements; he advocated a quiet position of the hand and a perfect equality of finger. He held that passages should flow like oil. The crystalline sparkle of the scale was the brightest radiance that flamed in the Mozart piano-playing. The time for the bigger effects had not yet come. Mozart himself never forgot his hearers. He was not of the metal to carve a path through opposition. He wooed and won the public by composing in a style which it could understand, yet he contrived to make good music.

The vocal style of the opera pervaded all his instrumental writings. The profound learning of the fugue lay behind it all, but it was concealed. Music now aimed to sing with a single voice, accompanied by a cheerful support of lucid harmonies. The intellectual exercise of listening to polyphonic composition, such as that of Bach, would have failed to attract the sunny populace of Vienna in the late years of the eighteenth century. Rubinstein describes good old Papa Haydn as bringing everyday to the court his musical bonbon. Mozart never failed to manufacture sweetmeats for the people, but he made them the finest sweetmeats ever known. Mozart defined for his children the form of the piano concerto and thus paved the way for the most dazzling exhibitions of modern virtuosity. He himself was the first of the great virtuosi to perform concert sonatas with orchestral accompaniment. What had gone before was uncertain and largely experimental.

The ground was now prepared for the fruitful harvest of the great classic period of piano-playing, of which Beethoven was the ripest product. But before Beethoven came Clementi, an explorer in the realms of piano technic and a performer of the greatest repute in his own day. Clementi lived much of his life in England, where pianos were built with heavier strings and more powerful hammers than those made in Vienna. Consequently he took advantage of the resources of the instrument and composed accordingly. His music is filled with crashing, sonorous chords, rapid successions of heavy groups of notes, and all the other devices which make for splendor of tone and brilliancy of style. In these matters he went as far as the imperfect piano of his time would let him. The instrument was a great advance over the Viennese piano, but it was infantile compared with the piano of today.

In 1781 Clementi had a meeting with Mozart in Vienna, and was deeply impressed by Mozart’s singing touch. After that time he endeavored to combine this style with the sonority of his own playing. Beethoven had a high admiration for Clementi as a composer for the piano, and indeed it must be said that this Italian was the first clearly to define the difference between the manners of playing the harpsichord and the piano. His concert tours were crowned with success, for the public concert of a virtuoso was now an established thing. Clementi’s concert career was long. It lasted from 1770 (the year of Beethoven’s birth) till 1810. He died in 1832, after spending the last years of his life in teaching and composing. When he was born, Handel was yet alive. When he died, Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert had passed before him.

Beethoven studied the technical ideas of Clementi thoroughly, and his compositions contain nothing that goes beyond them. It was by the adaptation of the technics of the piano to the utterance of noble and eloquent musical thought that Beethoven ushered in the dramatic era of piano-playing. Of the nature of Beethoven’s music no study need be made here. It is familiar to all music lovers. But Beethoven the virtuoso, the founder of a school of virtuosi, is less known. Yet he played often. Beethoven was without question a giant at the keyboard, but he was lacking in finish. Some of his contemporaries called him a rough performer, but all agreed that he had power. It is not astonishing that the fullness of his grandeur was not speedily appreciated at a time when John Baptist Cramer was regarded as the most elegant player in Europe. Cramer was a pupil of Clementi and was unsurpassed in delicacy of touch, in grace and fluency of style, in perfection of technic. Beethoven preferred him to all other pianists. So in general did Europe. But Cramer himself said in later years that all in all “ Beethoven was, if not the greatest, certainly one of the greatest and most admirable pianists that he ever heard, both as regards expression and dexterity.”

It was the dawn of a new day which blinded Beethoven’s contemporaries. Mozart had shone like a beautiful Apollo across the continent, and now followed Jupiter Tonans, blasting with lightnings and searing with thunderbolts. No wonder it seemed rough. How must Rubinstein have sounded after Tausig? A marvelous feature of Beethoven’s public performances, and still more of his private playing, was his improvisation. He could improvise a sonata movement on given themes, or a set of variations, as admirable as if they had been worked out with infinite care in months of thought. Improvisation was common among the piano virtuosi of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It began with Mozart’s public exhibitions. It ended perhaps with those of Josef Hoffman at the age of eleven. There is no public taste now for such feats.

Beethoven’s Titanic outbursts of power and passion were little suited to the gentle-toned pianos of his day. In an adagio or a largo he could touch all hearts, and in this style of playing he was conceded to be the master of all; but in flowing runs and ornamental passages the public preferred Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a pupil of both Mozart and Clementi, and a player of pearly limpidity and airy delicacy.

Beethoven’s career as a virtuoso began in Vienna in much the same manner as Mozart’s had begun. He played many times in the salons of the nobility, and his early compositions are dedicated to an imposing list of princes, princesses, and countesses. Public curiosity having been aroused, he appeared at a concert, playing his C major concerto. Salieri, the conductor of the opera, and Beethoven’s instructor in the art of writing for the voice, conducted, and the young virtuoso had a brilliant success. Two days before the concert the composition was uncompleted, and Beethoven wrote at top speed, with four copyists following him with the orchestral parts. At the rehearsal it was found that the piano was half a tone flat, whereupon Beethoven overcame the difficulty by playing his part throughout in C sharp. He was unconquerable at the keyboard.

Before Beethoven went to his final rest the modern breed of piano virtuoso had sprung into existence. Beethoven’s virtuosity was chiefly creative. His playing was only the fiery utterance of flaming thoughts. But now came a series of pianists, all of whom were composers, and most of whom were almost wholly brilliant wizards of the keyboard. The greatest master of the school, the founder of the line, indeed, was a true genius, and to this day his piano compositions chain the attention by their individuality. Even their purely ornamental parts are original in manner. This pianist was Karl Maria von Weber, whose fame rests especially upon his operas. Weber played successfully in concerts, but his achievements as a writer of lyric dramas quite overshadowed his piano-playing.

Contemporary with him, and immediately following him, there existed a line of virtuosi pure and simple, the first of the long series of modern magicians of the piano who have filled Europe and America with amazement at their feats of technic and expression. Karl Czerny (1791— 1857), was the first of these prestidigitateurs, and his performances impressed even Beethoven. Theodor Kullak, Sigismund Thalberg, Fumagalli (the wizard of the left hand), Alexander Dreyschock, his rival in this particular, Ignatz Moscheles, and Henry Litolff, were among the chief exponents of this style of playing. Their concerts brought together all the elements noticeable in the modern piano virtuoso’s entertainment, except that it did not occur to any of them to perform those feats of endurance which pianists of to-day regard as essential to their public appearances. It was Paderewski who introduced the extraordinary custom of playing two or three concertos and several solo pieces in one concert.

But these pianists were engaged in developing the resources of piano technic. Thalberg in his compositions introduced the use of widely extended arpeggios as the accompaniment to clearly marked melodies, and thus brought into vogue that rippling, running style of playing which has in recent years been relegated to the boarding school exhibition and the domain of the “piano-tuner’s run.”

Contemporary also with Beethoven was one pianist who deserves special mention because he was a pathfinder. This was John Field, a pupil of Clementi, born in 1782, died in 1837. Field was a master of the art of singing on the keyboard, and he invented the nocturne and other forms which cleared the way for Mendelssohn with his “Songs without Words,” and Chopin with his nocturnes, ballades, and valses, Schumann with his novelettes, and Liszt with his rhapsodies. Before Field every piano composition had to be a sonata, a rondo, or something else in one of the old classic forms. After Field, composers, like Weber, broke away from the old forms, and wrote as they fancied. Liszt wrote poetically of Field’s nocturnes, which he edited, and even now they are sometimes played in recital programmes. But they sound thin and infantile after those of Chopin.

Pianists from this period crowded the theatre of action. It was no longer a rarity to hear the compositions of the masters played dazzlingly. Europe teemed with virtuosi. The modern period of the concert pianist was at hand. Little, then, is left to say, but three men must be mentioned, because it was left for them to complete the exploration of the capacity of the piano as a musical medium of expression. These three men were Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.

Not only did these three masters enrich the domain of pianoforte literature by composing in the new forms already mentioned, but they introduced new styles and new methods of playing. They broadened and deepened the diction of the instrument. In the use of the pedals alone they almost transformed the piano. Real piano pedals — not the tentative attachments of the harpsichord — were invented by Broadwood in 1783, and some of the sonatas of Beethoven contain directions for their employment. But it was Chopin who systematically studied their capacities and showed how both could be used singly or in combination in the production of beautiful effects of tone color. Chopin also revolutionized fingering and showed pianists how to play passages in double thirds and arpeggios interspersed with passing notes, which would otherwise have appeared to be impossible.

Schumann wrote music so filled with strange and difficult rhythms and interlocking passages requiring the use of both hands in enunciating melodies, that a special technic was required for their performance. Then came Liszt, who set out to make the piano the rival of the orchestra in richness of tone, brilliancy, and sonority. He carried forward Chopin’s exploration of the powers of the pedals, and showed how to combine pedaling with all the different varieties of touch in producing varied tone color. He disclosed the full value of the loose wrist and the independent finger. In short, he brought piano technic to its present state of development. Nothing has been learned in that respect since the death of Liszt.

Of these three Chopin and Liszt belonged to the great army of public virtuosi. Schumann lamed his hand in trying to acquire independence of the third finger,and so was excluded from the field of the concert performer. Liszt and Chopin both approached closely to the estate of the piano virtuoso of to-day. In the heyday of their youth they were worshiped of woman, and envied of men. In their manhood they enacted shadowy tragedies of love, and burst the bonds of convention with as little scruple as a Byron or a Keats. Liszt’s career was the more brilliant of the two. To rise to such heights of celebrity that even a London cabman cried, “Three cheers for the Habby Liszt,” was something more than the contemporaneous piano virtuoso can accomplish. It would be impossible to conceive of a New York cabman viewing Paderewski with any feeling except disrespect for his hair.

But the great piano virtuoso of to-day is in many ways far in advance of Chopin and even of Liszt. Those masters never penetrated the fastnesses of the New World, nor carried the gospel of Beethoven to the antipodes. The modern piano virtuoso travels all over the world and sings the songs of Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt to all the peoples. He travels en prince. He has his private car, his chef, his valet, his secretary, and his personal manager, who relieves him of all responsibilities. He is garbed in purple and fine linen, unless he be D’Albert, in which case he wears Jaeger flannel from head to foot. He drinks the wines of Europe and feeds on the fat of the land.

He trains for his enormous tours as an athlete trains for a race. He plays eighty concerts in four months, and at each he performs a programme which would have driven Chopin or Mozart into a swoon. He memorizes the entire literature of the pianoforte. He plays two or three concertos with orchestra at each orchestral concert. He selects for his encore numbers Liszt rhapsodies which are Herculean feats in themselves. And he gathers coin at a pace that would have surpassed the maddest dreams of Mozart. When the youthful prodigies, Wolfgang and Nannerl, drew a hundred guineas at one concert, old Leopold Mozart went breathless. Paderewski plays in Carnegie Hall, New York, to five thousand dollars. The hall will not hold more.

The pianist of to-day performs on a marvelous instrument, splendid in its nobility of tone, majestic in its sonority. He plays the music which all those other men spent their lives in creating. He rests securely on the broad foundation reared by the line of laborers from Scarlatti, Handel, and Bach down to Liszt and Chopin. He is the heir of all the schools, the descendant of all the masters. He may possibly leave no such mark upon the page of musical history as Weber or Schumann did, but he plays better than they could. He has in him more of the pure virtuoso blood of Czerny and Thalberg than of Mozart and Chopin, and he flames across Europe and America, the comet of every season, the star of every firmament.