Chopin and Other Musical Essays | Page 9

he wore at night. Fortunately, he did not go so far as Schumann, who made similar experiments with his hands and thereby disabled one of them for life. What prompted Chopin to search for these widely extended chords was his intense appreciation of tonal beauty. To-day everybody knows how much more beautiful scattered, and widely extended harmonies are than crowded harmonies; but it was Chopin's genius that discovered this fact and applied it on a large scale. Indeed, so novel were his chords, that at first, many of them were deemed unplayable; but he showed that if his own system of fingering was adopted, they were not only playable, but eminently suited to the character of the instrument. The superior beauty of scattered intervals can be strikingly demonstrated in this way. If you strike four or five adjacent notes on the piano at once, you produce an intolerable cacophony. But these same notes can be so arranged by scattering them that they make an exquisite chord in suspension. Everything depends on the arrangement and the wideness of the intervals. Chopin's fancy was inexhaustible in the discovery of new kinds of scattered chords, combined into harmony by his novel use of the pedal; and in this way he enriched music with so many new harmonies and modulations that he must be placed, as a harmonic innovator, on a level with Bach and Wagner.
These remarks apply especially to Chopin's later compositions; but his peculiarities are already distinctly traceable in many of his earlier works; and Elsner, his teacher, was sufficiently clear-sighted and frank to write the following words: "The achievements of Mozart and Beethoven as pianists have long been forgotten; and their pianoforte compositions, although undoubtedly classical works, must give way to the diversified artistic treatment of that instrument by the modern school." Mr. Joseph Bennett quotes this sentence in his Biography of Chopin, and adds an exclamation point in brackets after it, to express his surprise. Mr. Bennett is considered one of the leading London critics; yet I must say that I have never seen so much ignorance in a single exclamation point in brackets. Note the difference between Elsner and Bennett. Elsner adds to the sentence just quoted, that the other works of Mozart and Beethoven--their symphonies, operas, quartets, etc., "will not only continue to live, but will, perhaps, remain unequalled by anything of the present day." This is genuine discriminative criticism, which renders unto C?sar what is C?sar's due: whereas, Mr. Bennett is guided by the vicious old habit of fancying that because Mozart and Beethoven are great masters, therefore they must be superior to everybody in everything. Is it not about time to put an end to this absurd Jumboism in music?
The fact is, we are living in an age of division of labor and specialism; and those who, like Robert Franz and Richard Wagner, devote themselves to a single branch of music have a better chance of reaching the summit of Parnassus than those who dissipate their energies in too many directions. Chopin was the pianoforte genius par excellence, and in his field he stands above the greatest of the German composers, whatever their names. Mendelssohn once wrote to his mother that Chopin "produces effects on the piano as novel as those of Paganini on the violin, and he performs marvels which no one would have believed to be possible." Mendelssohn benefited to a slight extent by Chopin's example, but he did not add anything new to the treatment of the pianoforte. Nor does even Liszt mark an advance on Chopin from a purely pianistic point of view. Paradoxical as it may seem, Liszt, the greatest pianist the world has known, was really a born orchestral composer. He was never satisfied with the piano, but constantly wanted to convert it into an orchestra. His innovations were all in the service of these orchestral aspirations, and hence it is that his rhapsodies, for example, are much more effective in their orchestral garb than in their original pianoforte version. The same is true of many of Rubinstein's pianoforte works--the Bal Masqué, for instance, which always has such an electric effect on Mr. Theodore Thomas's audiences. Not so with Chopin. Liszt remarks, somewhere, that Chopin might have easily written for orchestra, because his compositions can be so readily arranged for it. I venture to differ from this opinion. Chopin's Funeral March has been repeatedly arranged for orchestra--first by Reber at Chopin's funeral (when Meyerbeer regretted that he had not been asked to do this labor of love); and more recently by Mr. Theodore Thomas. Mr. Thomas's version is very clever and effective, yet I very much prefer this sublime dirge on the piano. In a small room the piano has almost as great a capacity for dynamic shading as the