Chopin: The Man and His Music, James Huneker [free e books to read online txt] 📗

It is the relief of a major key after prolonged wanderings in the minor. It is a nice nocturne, neat in its sorrow, yet not epoch-making.

The one following has “the impression of an improvisation.” It has also the merit of being seldom heard. These two nocturnes are dedicated to Mlle. J. W. Stirling.

Opus 62 brings us to a pair in B major and E major inscribed to Madame de Konneritz. The first, the Tuberose Nocturne, is faint with a sick, rich odor. The climbing trellis of notes, that so unexpectedly leads to the tonic, is charming and the chief tune has charm, a fruity charm. It is highly ornate, its harmonies dense, the entire surface overrun with wild ornamentation and a profusion of trills. The piece—the third of its sort in the key of B—is not easy. Mertke gives the following explication of the famous chain trills: [Musical score excerpt]

Although this nocturne is luxuriant in style, it deserves warmer praise than is accorded it. Irregular as its outline is, its troubled lyrism is appealing, is melting, and the A flat portion, with its hesitating, timid accents, has great power of attraction. The E major Nocturne has a bardic ring. Its song is almost declamatory and not at all sentimental—unless so distorted—as Niecks would have us imagine. The intermediate portion is wavering and passionate, like the middle of the F sharp major Nocturne. It shows no decrease in creative vigor or lyrical fancy. The Klindworth version differs from the original, as an examination of the following examples will show, the upper being Chopin’s:

[Musical score excerpt]

The posthumous nocturne in E minor, composed in 1827, is weak and uninteresting. Moreover, it contains some very un-Chopin-like modulations. The recently discovered nocturne in C sharp minor is hardly a treasure trove. It is vague and reminiscent The following note was issued by its London publishers, Ascherberg & Co.: The first question, suggested by the announcement of a new posthumous composition of Chopin’s, will be “What proof is there of its authenticity?” To musicians and amateurs who cannot recognize the beautiful Nocturne in C sharp minor as indeed the work of Chopin, it may in the first place be pointed out that the original manuscript (of which a facsimile is given on the title-page) is in Chopin’s well-known handwriting, and, secondly, that the composition, which is strikingly characteristic, was at once accepted as the work of Chopin by the distinguished composer and pianist Balakireff, who played it for the first time in public at the Chopin Commemoration Concert, held in the autumn of 1894 at Zelazowa Wola, and afterward at Warsaw. This nocturne was addressed by Chopin to his sister Louise, at Warsaw, in a letter from Paris, and was written soon after the production of the two lovely piano concertos, when Chopin was still a very young man. It contains a quotation from his most admired Concerto in F minor, and a brief reference to the charming song known as the Maiden’s Wish, two of his sister’s favorite melodies. The manuscript of the nocturne was supposed to have been destroyed in the sacking of the Zamojski Palace, at Warsaw, toward the end of the insurrection of 1863, but it was discovered quite recently among papers of various kinds in the possession of a Polish gentleman, a great collector, whose son offered Mr.

Polinski the privilege of selecting from such papers. His choice was three manuscripts of Chopin’s, one of them being this nocturne. A letter from Mr. Polinski on the subject of this nocturne is in the possession of Miss Janotha.

Is this the nocturne of which Tausig spoke to his pupil Joseffy as belonging to the Master’s “best period,” or did he refer to the one in E minor?

The Berceuse, op. 57, published June, 1845, and dedicated to Mlle.

Elise Gavard, is the very sophistication of the art of musical ornamentation. It is built on a tonic and dominant bass—the triad of the tonic and the chord of the dominant seventh. A rocking theme is set over this basso ostinato and the most enchanting effects are produced.

The rhythm never alters in the bass, and against this background, the monotone of a dark, gray sky, the composer arranges an astonishing variety of fireworks, some florid, some subdued, but all delicate in tracery and design. Modulations from pigeon egg blue to Nile green, most misty and subtle modulations, dissolve before one’s eyes, and for a moment the sky is peppered with tiny stars in doubles, each independently tinted. Within a small segment of the chromatic bow Chopin has imprisoned new, strangely dissonant colors. It is a miracle; and after the drawn-out chord of the dominant seventh and the rain of silvery fire ceases one realizes that the whole piece is a delicious illusion, but an ululation in the key of D flat, the apotheosis of pyrotechnical colorature.

Niecks quotes Alexandre Dumas fils, who calls the Berceuse “muted music,” but introduces a Turkish bath comparison, which crushes the sentiment. Mertke shows the original and Klindworth’s reading of a certain part of the Berceuse, adding a footnote to the examples: [Two musical score excerpts from Op. 57, one from the original version, one from Klindworth’s edition]

[Footnote: Das tr (flat) der Originale (Scholtz tr natural-flat) zeigt, dass Ch. den Triller mit Ganzton und nach Mikuli den Trilleranfang mit Hauptton wollte.] The Barcarolle, op. 60, published September, 1846, is another highly elaborated work. Niecks must be quoted here: “One day Tausig, the great piano virtuoso, promised W. de Lenz to play him Chopin’s Barcarolle, adding, ‘That is a performance which must not be undertaken before more than two persons. I shall play you my own self. I love the piece, but take it rarely.’ Lenz got the music, but it did not please him—it seemed to him a long movement in the nocturne style, a Babel of figuration on a lightly laid foundation.

But he found that he had made a mistake, and, after hearing it played by Tausig, confessed that the virtuoso had infused into the ‘nine pages of enervating music, of one and the same long-breathed rhythm, so much interest, so much motion, so much action,’ that he regretted the long piece was not longer.”

Tausig’s conception of the barcarolle was this: “There are two persons concerned in the affair; it is a love scene in a discrete gondola; let us say this mise-en-scene is the symbol of a lover’s meeting generally.”

“This is expressed in thirds and sixths; the dualism of two notes—persons—is maintained throughout; all is two-voiced, two-souled. In this modulation in C sharp major—superscribed dolce sfogato—there are kiss and embrace! This is evident! When, after three bars of introduction, the theme, ‘lightly rocking in the bass solo,’

enters in the fourth, this theme is nevertheless made use of throughout the whole fabric only as an accompaniment, and ON this the cantilena in two parts is laid; we have thus a continuous, tender dialogue.”

The Barcarolle is a nocturne painted on a large canvas, with larger brushes. It has Italian color in spots—Schumann said that, melodically, Chopin sometimes “leans over Germany into Italy”—and is a masterly one in sentiment, pulsating with amorousness. To me it sounds like a lament for the splendors, now vanished, of Venice the Queen. In bars 8, 9, and 10, counting backward, Louis Ehlert finds obscurities in the middle voices. It is dedicated to the Baronne de Stockhausen.

The nocturnes—including the Berceuse and Barcarolle—should seldom be played in public and not the public of a large hall. Something of Chopin’s delicate, tender warmth and spiritual voice is lost in larger spaces. In a small auditorium, and from the fingers of a sympathetic pianist, the nocturnes should be heard, that their intimate, night side may be revealed. Many are like the music en sourdine of Paul Verlaine in his “Chanson D’Automne” or “Le Piano que Baise une Main Frele.” They are essentially for the twilight, for solitary enclosures, where their still, mysterious tones—“silent thunder in the leaves” as Yeats sings—become eloquent and disclose the poetry and pain of their creator.

X. THE BALLADES:—FAERY DRAMAS

W. H. Hadow has said some pertinent things about Chopin in “Studies in Modern Music.” Yet we cannot accept unconditionally his statement that “in structure Chopin is a child playing with a few simple types, and almost helpless as soon as he advances beyond them; in phraseology he is a master whose felicitous perfection of style is one of the abiding treasures of the art.”

Chopin then, according to Hadow, is no “builder of the lofty rhyme,”

but the poet of the single line, the maker of the phrase exquisite.

This is hardly comprehensive. With the more complex, classical types of the musical organism Chopin had little sympathy, but he contrived nevertheless to write two movements of a piano sonata that are excellent—the first half of the B flat minor Sonata. The idealized dance forms he preferred; the Polonaise, Mazurka and Valse were already there for him to handle, but the Ballade was not. Here he is not imitator, but creator. Not loosely-jointed, but compact structures glowing with genius and presenting definite unity of form and expression, are the ballades—commonly written in six-eight and six-four time. “None of Chopin’s compositions surpasses in masterliness of form and beauty and poetry of contents his ballades. In them he attains the acme of his power as an artist,” remarks Niecks.

I am ever reminded of Andrew Lang’s lines, “the thunder and surge of the Odyssey,” when listening to the G minor Ballade, op. 23. It is the Odyssey of Chopin’s soul. That ‘cello-like largo with its noiseless suspension stays us for a moment in the courtyard of Chopin’s House Beautiful. Then, told in his most dreamy tones, the legend begins. As in some fabulous tales of the Genii this Ballade discloses surprising and delicious things. There is the tall lily in the fountain that nods to the sun. It drips in cadenced monotone and its song is repeated on the lips of the slender-hipped girl with the eyes of midnight—and so might I weave for you a story of what I see in the Ballade and you would be aghast or puzzled. With such a composition any programme could be sworn to, even the silly story of the Englishman who haunted Chopin, beseeching him to teach him this Ballade. That Chopin had a programme, a definite one, there can be no doubt; but he has, wise artist, left us no clue beyond Mickiewicz’s, the Polish bard Lithuanian poems. In Leipzig, Karasowski relates, that when Schumann met Chopin, the pianist confessed having “been incited to the creation of the ballades by the poetry” of his fellow countryman. The true narrative tone is in this symmetrically constructed Ballade, the most spirited, most daring work of Chopin, according to Schumann. Louis Ehlert says of the four Ballades: “Each one differs entirely from the others, and they have but one thing in common—their romantic working out and the nobility of their motives. Chopin relates in them, not like one who communicates something really experienced; it is as though he told what never took place, but what has sprung up in his inmost soul, the anticipation of something longed for. They may contain a strong element of national woe, much outwardly expressed and inwardly burning rage over the sufferings of his native land; yet they do not carry with a positive reality like that which in a Beethoven Sonata will often call words to our lips.” Which means that Chopin was not such a realist as Beethoven?

Ehlert is one of the few sympathetic German Chopin commentators, yet he did not always indicate the salient outlines of his art. Only the Slav may hope to understand Chopin thoroughly. But these Ballades are more