In 660 Easy Lessons

MUSIC

Music is incorporeal, it has no purpose beyond itself, and it ceases to exist the instant it is made. Nevertheless, it cannot escape the influence of the ethical atmosphere of the age in which it is engendered. Neither music nor the manner of its performance.

From the end of the eighteenth century until the dawn of the twentieth, middle-class people were devoted to the expression of humane sentiment; they got jags on such words as “enlightenment,” “liberty,” “brotherhood.” Extreme ebullitions of personal emotion — weeping, swooning, flying into a “passion,” speaking with intense pathos — were all highly esteemed as evidences of a humane disposition, were widely indulged in and pretended to. Dying of a “broken heart,” real or fictional, was a favorite object of empathetic contemplation. See Isolde. These, together with a number of more or less congruous trends such as an eager misunderstanding interest in medieval times, and a faddish preoccupation with old wives’ tales about goblins, giants, witches, Nibelungs, and undines, formed an aesthetic ideology vaguely termed “romanticism.”

In music, instruments were built for expanded capacities, for greater ranges of pitch, and especially for greater ranges of intensity. Pianos were extended from five octaves to seven; they were given stouter and more numerous strings, capable of withstanding the impact of heavier hammers, as well as metal frames to support the increased tension involved — all to make use of the full muscular capacity of a pianist’s arms. Moreover, an ingenious double-escapement action was perfected to make the hammer strike the string more sensitively, and make it more delicately responsive to the player’s fingers. All this to let him make hushed whisperings, tender pettings, and delicious momentary fainting fits in addition to crashing climaxes. Also, pianists indulged in much rubato — that is, a loosening of rhythmic pulse with hurryings and retardings and occasional titillating little hesitations, all for the sake of expressive emphasis.

Disenchantment with this frame of mind began early in our present century, and we have now reached an opposite pole. Science and technology are the divinities of our day. We thrill to astronautics and are indulgent toward electric toothbrushes. Discourses on certain vagaries of the inscrutable human nature are peppered with numerals and are given fancy abstract names such as “economics” or “sociology,” thus pretending that they are sciences and therefore worthy of special respect. Science and technology require coldblooded precision, and it seems that anything, including music, treated with cold-blooded precision is, by the working of a contagious magic, entitled to the approval vouchsafed the reigning idols.

A century ago one praised a pianist’s performance by calling it “warm,” “full of feeling,” “soulful,” “free,” “imaginative.” Nowadays the approving adjective is “cool.”

The most obvious limitation of the piano as a musical instrument is the fact that, once he has struck a key, the player has no further control over the tone except to let it fade or to silence it. Thus the tendency is for all successions of tones to sound like detached plunks. The piano makers of the world have, throughout a century, tried hard to mitigate this circumstance, and they have succeeded in prolonging considerably the period of a piano tone’s resonant fading. Good pianists have also been able, by clever overlapping of successive tones, by a judicious use of the pedal, and especially by subtle inflections of tonal volume, to create a plausible illusion of melodic continuity. Critics and other listeners have responded appreciatively, and with monotonous persistence have praised pianists for their “singing tone.” It is an extravagant flattery since a piano, unlike a violin or clarinet, cannot truly sing, seeing that every successive tone must be produced by a separate impulse. But the term testifies to the potency of the illusion achieved. One hears little these days of “singing tone” on a piano. By contrast, when the piano is being used as an instrument within an orchestra, it is characteristically relegated to the percussion section. Indeed, the piano music of some of the most generally accepted recent composers — for instance, Prokofiev and Bartók — abounds in primarily percussive sonorities.

Furthermore, there has been a widespread characteristic revival of the piano’s long-obsolete baroque predecessor, the brisk-toned nuanceless harpsichord — a revival partly due to the recent flourishing of musicology.

All this might be accepted as a normal pattern of cultural change, except for one curious thing: people still like to hear nineteenth-century music. On Sundays they continue to enjoy singing the sweet decorous hymns their great-grandparents enjoyed. Sousa’s marches still induce elation among members of our armed services. “Swanee River” and “The Last Rose of Summer” still arouse pleasant feelings among many persons. At concerts, sizable audiences of paying patrons — as distinguished from small fraternal gatherings of avant-gardists—sit with respectful incomprehension and wavering attention during performances of compositions by living composers of the far left, then bring forth sighs of relief when something by Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Richard Strauss comes along, feeling that now they will get their money’s worth.

So pianists continue to play music by Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt, on an instrument which has not been substantially improved for a century, but some of the younger ones don’t quite seem to get with it. They seem to have a fear of “exaggeration” or “distortion.” But judicious exaggeration and distortion — in the right places, to be sure — are part of the romanticist frame of mind in which this music was thought up. Indeed, I have found that certain expressive distortions are occasionally notated by composers in some of their scores. Not in words, but in note values and rests. I say some of the younger pianists, for there are exceptions.

The contrast between the older and the newer style might be observed by comparing the playing of Glenn Gould, for example, with that of Artur Rubinstein. The latter’s tones often seem to melt lovingly into one another; the former’s mostly seem to achieve a stimulating separateness. It is true, the two pianists prefer different sorts of music. It is doubtful whether Rubinstein would ever care to play Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which Gould has delivered with such exhilarating distinctness and rhythmic verve; and I cannot imagine Gould immersing himself ecstatically in the scented vapors of a Chopin Nocturne. Again, Earl Wild does a plausibly attractive job with the Chopin Ballades, yet does not, through sophisticated nuances, quite arrive at the exquisite morbidity that one might occasionally wish to savor in these pieces.

One must make ample allowance, of course, for individual temperament. Performers of the past, too, have differed widely from one another. Josef Hofmann devoted most of his performances to the romanticist composers. He was one of the most perfect pianists who ever played, yet he could never achieve the peculiar magic, with the same music, as did Paderewski, who was occasionally heard to commit unintentional inaccuracies. One of the most fascinating pianists was Ferruccio Busoni, who died in 1924. Breathtaking were his performances of Liszt’s works, and of his own Bach transcriptions. Yet, at the time, one felt estranged by some of the alien-sounding accents that he imposed on compositions of Beethoven and Chopin.

There are older pianists of today who seem to make the best of both worlds, notably Vladimir Horowitz, who has delivered the Prokofiev Toccata with shattering impact, and on another occasion spun the last page of Schumann’s Arabesque into an ethereal opalescent sunset that lingered in the memory for years.

Will the romantic style of piano playing ever come back into vogue? It is conceivable, in view of the cyclic nature of fashions. All long-lasting fashions are grounded in certain fundamentals of the psyche and will return. But few of us will live to see the completion of this particular rotation; and besides, the romanticism of the future will not be quite the same as that of the past. No resurrection without translation.