Part 3 (1/2)

And that fixed star in the pianistic firroundlings--Rafael Joseffy--is forof all the pianists Never any excess of es, but a lofty, detached style, iht--yes, Joseffy is the enchanter ins me with his disdainful spells I heard him play the Chopin E minor and the Liszt A major concertos; also a brace of encores

Perfection! The Liszt was not so brilliant as Reisenauer; but--again within its fraiven in 1840 And there were refinements of tone-color undreamed of even by Chopin Paderewski is Paderewski--and Joseffy is perfection

Paderewski is the most eclectic of the four pianists I have taken for my text; Joseffy the most subtly poetic; D'Albert the nificant, and Pachmann--well, Vladimir is the _enfant terrible_ of the quartet, a whimsical, fantastic charmer, an apparition with rare talents, and an interpreter of the Lesser Chopin (always the _great_ Chopin) without a peer Let us be happy that we are vouchsafed the pleasure of hearing four such artists

IX

THE INFLUENCE OF DADDY LISZT

Have you read Thoreau's _Walden_ with its ses? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring under the delusion that they are developing their individuality

Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays a musicians! They have been adnorance is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these aentleorge theies” and ”is them at a musicale! There they sit, cocked and pri to knock the literary chip off their neighbor's shoulder

”Have you read”--begins soins, _furioso_

”Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,”--”Tolstoi's _What is Art?_ certainly, he ought to be electrocuted”--”Nordau! isn't he terrible?” And the cacophonous conversational syes, and when it is spent, the man who asked the question finishes:

”Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in the _Kolnische Zeitung?_” and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards him whilst murular , but was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons The newspapers, the ers and the artists before the public are to blame for this callow, shallow attempt at culture We read that Rosenthal is a second Heine in conversation That he spills epigrams at his meals and dribbles proverbs at the piano He has coreenroo or other Like Wagner, he writes his own progra Swinburne because solad, fad poet of England, begad! As for Sauer, we hardly knohere to begin He writes blank verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady Pianists are now so intellectual that they soet to play the piano well

Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all He had read everything before he enty, and had eions This volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his has been copied by h to parse a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_ The Weimar crew all i I was there once, a sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of bock-bier Ah, thronging h a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with excite ”Make room for the master! make way for the master!” and presently a venerable nac nose--came towards e shovel-shaped hat, the sort affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_

”It hed, his warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor He invitedthe tiathered about us

I call theentleeous manner They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows They wore semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats When Liszt left ether with Czerny--they trooped after hi in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was the devotion of a pet ape

I mention this because I have neverthat day in Weimar And when one plays I close my eyes and hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding, treacherous technic Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch The old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, ”Don't copy my touch; it's spoiled” He had for so many years pounded and punched the keyboard that his tactile sensibility--isn't that your new-fangled expression?--had vanished His ”orchestral” playing was one of those pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe, and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons I remember well that Liszt, as first and fore to the instru his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories He was a master hypnotist, and like John L Sullivan he had his adversary--the audience--conquered before he struck a blow His glance was terrific, his ”nerve” enormous What he did afterward didn't muchwith those flail-like ar taken for a barn-floor!

Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied

In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris, Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage He wrote articles about himself in the musical papers--a practice that his disciples have not failed to e displayed his bad taste in abusing what he could not ireat thief

His pianobut Chopin and brandy His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed froanini, and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped hiloures When he wrote for orchestra the hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz I never could quite see Liszt He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious Pole got rid of hiner I do not mean that Liszt ithout merit, but I do assert that he should have left the piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra

Let us consider soan with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not, however, faded in his time He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of co for a background a real New Jersey thunderstor Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch hiirl jigs this fatuous stuff before she mounts her bicycle

And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias Just co! See which is the h the gaan to paraphrase ner overtures and every nondescript thing he could lay his destructive hands on How he maltreated the _Tannhauser_ overture we know fro of it Wagner, being for transferred to the piano Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-for that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of one-half its value in a piano transcription By this time Liszt had evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the raiment of other men His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors, appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy

The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with He wrote etudes _a la_ Chopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up into _Twelve Etudes Transcendentales_--listen to the big, boastful title!--is better than the furbished up later collection His three concert studies are Chopinish; his _Waldesrauschen_ is pretty, but leads nowhere; his _Annees des Pelerinage_ sickly with sentimentalism; his _Dante Sonata_ a horror; his _B- froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious, artificial and insincere Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his continual worshi+p of God in his music is for me monotonously blasphemous

The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last They are the nightmare curse of the pianist, with their rattle-trap hararity and cheap bohein in the church and end in the tavern There is a fad just now for eating ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accoypsy circus called a Czardas Liszt's rhapsodies irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirty _table d'hote_, where evil-s dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced by evil-tasting ivewith nature's rhythain Now do you think I am as amiable as I look?

X

BACH--ONCE, LAST, AND ALL THE TIME