Part 3 (2/2)

I'hts, and I've listened eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, ree is the one, the only art

I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled--doesn't Walt Whitman say that somewhere?--I've even rioted in Verdi Ah, you are surprised! You fancied I knew my Czerny _et voila tout_? Let amut of musical co Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I aer_ is the very apex of a ood in Auber In a word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and thead seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni

Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not for an instant impose on me Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who not only absorb a deadhis inter violently self-conscious, I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's ner left me cold? Why did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart o, I cried aloud, ”Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless limbs of these classicists, these modern men Bach--once, last, and all the ti nose I dipped into all composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations If ranted talent, the man reared a solid structure If no Bach, then no matter how brilliant, howdown the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's hastily erected palace Whether it is Perosi--ears by Bach and doesn't understand or study hini or Massenet, or any of the new school, the result is the same Bach is the touchstone Look at Verdi, the Verdi of _Don Carlo_ and the Verdi who planned and built _Falstaff_ Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale--surely one of theoperatic codas in existence--that carries eneral texture of the work, its led roar of buttermilk Falls, that draws me to _Falstaff_ It is because of Bach that I have forsworn ust at his overpowering sensuousness The web he spins is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so aders_

Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test for modern piano music The monophonic has been done to the death by a whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of students Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the quick In the raded considerably since the days of Bach We have, to be sure, built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been invented, or rather re-discovered--for in Bach all were latent--but, confound it, children! these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait for me Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion I like movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic life It is only in a few latter-day cos, that thrills

How did I discover that Bach was in the very heart of Wagner? In the si the _E-flat minor Prelude_ in the first book of the _Well-te of _Gotterda_

Pretty smart boy that Richard Geyer to know his Bach so well! Yet the resemblance is far fetched, is only a hazy similarity The triad of E-flat ner had been browsing on Bach; on this particular prelude had, in fact, got a starting point for the Norn ner, the more I found Bach, and the more Bach, the better the ly fresh, vital quality of hisSchumann loved Bach and built his best music on him, Mendelssohn re-discovered him, whilst Beethoven played the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ every day of his life

All _my_ pupils study the _Inventions_ before they play Cleht are these two- and three-part pieces! Take my word for it, if you have reat, insolent forty-eight sweet-teues and overcome them Study Bach say I to every one, but study hireatest pianist the world has yet heard, edited about twenty preludes and fugues froave his pupils _after_ they had played Chopin's opus 10 Strange idea, isn't it? Before that they played the _Inventions_, the sylish Suites_--Klindworth's edition of the latter is excellent--and the _Partitas_ Then, I should say, the Italian concert and that excellent three-voiced fugue in Arather than deep in feeling, but how effective, how brilliant!

Don't forget the toccatas, fantasias, and capriccios Such works as _The Art of Fugue_ and others of the sa clothes, earnest if not exactly inspired

But in his ularly happy welding of reater than any of the organ works, with the possible exception of the _G reater than its accoue_ In it are the hareritated, passionate, desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashi+on as to beggar imitation?

Let us turn to the _Well-tempered Clavichord_ and bow the knee of submission, of admiration, of worshi+p I use the Klindworth, the Busoni and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny I think it was the latter who once excited e when I found the C sharp eous proceeding pales, however, before the infaious Gaul!--to place upon the wonderful harar tune Gounod deserved oblivion for this I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude ues, but a few hours'

study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated with _its_ beauties We have all played and loved the _C minor Prelude_ in Book one--Cramer made a study on memories of this--and who has not felt happy at its wonderful fugue! Yet a few pages on is a ue in C sharp ate Juue_ with its assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering, gossiping one in E minor If you are in the raceful prelude than the eleventh in F? Its gerhth A ue in G There's a subject for you and what a jolly length!

Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, froain Did you ever hear Rubinstein play the _B-flat Prelude and Fugue_? If you have not, count soht as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then celestial silence Has any modern co, as much sorrow as may be found in the _B-flat minor Prelude_? It is the matrix of all modern”, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by the es did not experience! But before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the enantly

Touching on his technics, I ers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is spiritual as well as ent daily study of Bach will forer exercises But play him as if he were human, a contee in _rubato_ I would rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin Play Bach as if he still composed--he does--and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of performance He would alter all that if he were alive today

I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print The story was related to ot it from Mendelssohn Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons, headed by the naughty Friedood old father Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the bellows-bloay, and started in to give the Master a surprise They tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a long rope fastened to the outside knob they pulled the door open and shut, and of course the wind ran low Johann Sebastian--who looked more like E M Bow ivory He rose and went softly to the rear Discovering no blower, he investigated, and began to gently haul in the line When it was all in several boys were at the end of it Did he whip them? Not he He locked the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade theel of e_ fugue How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is quaint enough Letsome words of Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: ”If you want music for your own and music's sake--look up to Bach If you wantis full of meat--look up to Bach”

Look up to Bach Sound advice Profit by it

XI

SCHUMANN: A VANIshi+NG STAR

Themeteors of November minded me of the musical reputations I have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into ineffectual twilight Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age, one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their superb boastings, and to kno short-lived is all art, music the most evanescent of them all When I was a boy the star of Schulory! what a planet swilorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the ro, neine, and made us drunk with joy How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn!

Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified--the Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision

Schubert was a divinely aard stast virtuosi They were rapturous days and we fed full upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshi+ne and mush

What the lads and lassies of ideal predilections needed was a man like Schus to his visions to give theed in poetry by the hair, and called the coerical case, a literary man turned composer--Schumann, I say, topsy-turvied all the newly born and, without knowing it, diverted for the time music from its true current He preached Brahner--he was the forerunner to Wagner, for he was the first composer who fashi+oned literature into tone

Doesn't all this sound revolutionary? An old fellow likeold-fashi+oned what he once saw leave the bank of ly fresh!+ Yet it is so I have lived to witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the eclipse of Wagner Can't you read the handwriting on the wall? _Dinna ye hear the slogan_ of the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in literary or artistic eist_ Schue The inside he called Bachian--but it wasn't In variety of key-color perhaps; but structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficient reason

Schureat structure models before him; he heeded them not