Part 2 (1/2)
is a good example, the theme, the melody, stands out from the accompaniment, which is subordinate. Counterpoint, on the other hand, rests on the combination of several themes, each of equal importance.
This is the reason why, when there is a fugue or other complicated contrapuntal work on the program of a pianoforte recital, the average listener is apt to find it dry and uninteresting. His ear readily can distinguish the themes of a sonata, which usually are heard one at a time and stand out clearly from the accompaniment, but it has not been trained to unravel the themes of the fugue as they travel along together. Counterpoint, the term being derived from the Latin _contra punctum_, which means point against point or note against note, when complicated, as in a fugue, is about the most elaborate kind of music there is, and a person who is unable to grasp a fugue may console himself with the thought that, excepting for the elect, it is a pretty stiff dose to swallow at the very beginning of a recital.
There are, however, simpler pieces of counterpoint than a fugue.
Sometimes, as in the charming little ”Gavotte” by Padre Martini, which now and then figures among the lighter numbers on the programs of historical recitals, the contrapuntist combines a theme with itself, or, rather, ”imitates” it, which is a simple form of the canon.
Another form of canon is the round of which ”Three Blind Mice” is a familiar example. How many people, when singing this, have realized that they were being initiated into that mysterious thing known as counterpoint? A comparatively simple form of counterpoint is well ill.u.s.trated by a dapper little piece in Bach's ”Two-Part Inventions,”
in which the spirited theme given out by the right hand answers itself a bar later in the left, an ”imitation” which crops out again and again in the piece and gives it somewhat the character of a canon.
[Music ill.u.s.tration]
For any one who wishes to become acquainted with Bach there is nothing better than these ”Two-Part Inventions,” especially the fascinating little piece from which I have just quoted, compact, buoyant and gay, even ”pert,” as I once heard a young girl characterize it; a perfect example of old Father Bach in moments of relaxation when he has laid aside his periwig and is amusing himself at his clavichord.
What a Fugue Is.
Bach's fugues, and especially his ”Well-Tempered Clavichord,”
forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the keys, form the climax of contrapuntal music. Goethe once said that ”the history of the world is a mighty fugue in which the voice of nation after nation becomes audible.” This is a freely poetic definition of that highly complicated musical form, the fugue. Let me attempt to ill.u.s.trate it in a different way.
Imagine that a composer who is an adept in counterpoint places four pianists at different pianofortes, and that he gives a different theme to each of them, or a theme to one and modified versions of it to the others. He starts the first pianist, after a few bars nods to the second to join in with his theme, and so on successively with the other two. It might be supposed that when the second player joins in, the two themes sounding together would make discord, which would be aggravated by the addition of the third and fourth. But, instead, they have been so conceived by the contrapuntist that they sound well together as they chase and answer each other, or run counter to and parallel and enter into many different combinations, sometimes flowing along smoothly, at other times surging and striving, yet always, in the case of a truly great fugue, borne along by a momentum as inexorable as the march of Fate. Of course, it must not be supposed, because I have called four pianists into action in order to emphasize how distinct are these themes, which yet, when united, are found to blend together, that several players are required for the performance of a complicated piece of counterpoint like a fugue. What is demanded of the player is entire independence of the fingers, so that he can clearly differentiate between the themes and enable the hearer to distinguish them apart, even in their most complicated combinations.
An edition of Bach's ”Well-Tempered Clavichord” by Bernardus Boekelman prints the themes in different colors, so that they are easy to trace through all their interweaving, and is interesting to study from.
The Fugue and the Virtuoso.
In his book, ”Beethoven and His Forerunners,” Daniel Gregory Mason devotes a paragraph toward dispelling the mystery regarding the fugue that prevails with the public, and points out that ”the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above; then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically a.s.serted by the various voices in quick succession (_stretto_), and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end.”
Further along in the same book Mr. Mason has a page of apostrophe to the Bach fugues. When he characterizes them as ”the first great independent monuments of pure music,” and refers to their ”consummate beauty of structure,” he pays them an eminently just tribute. But when he speaks of the ”profundity, poignancy and variety of feeling they express,” I am inclined to quote his own qualifying sentence from the next page of his book: ”It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of the ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand.” The same is even more true of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The progress of music toward individual freedom of expression on the part of the composer, and equally so on the part of the interpreter, has been steady, and when, through the very perfection which Bach imparted to counterpoint, it ceased to attract composers as a means of expression because he had accomplished so much there was nothing more left for them to do along the same lines, the progress I have indicated received a great lift and stimulus.
What Counterpoint Lacks.
The lack of highly personal expression in contrapuntal compositions explains why most concert-goers find them less attractive than modern music. The ”D Minor Toccata and Fugue” or the ”Chromatic Fantasie and Fugue” by Bach, even in the arrangements of Tausig and Liszt, on the program of a pianoforte recital, are tolerated because of the modern pieces that come later. Nine out of ten persons in the house would rather omit them. Why deny so obvious a fact, especially when it is easy enough to explain? To follow a contrapuntal composition intelligently requires a highly trained ear. Moreover, in such a work as a Bach fugue the individuality of the player is of less importance than in modern music. Yet a virtuoso's individuality is the very thing that distinguishes him from other virtuosos and attracts the public to his concerts, while those of other players may be poorly attended. I firmly believe in personality of the virtuoso or singer or orchestral conductor, for in it lies the secret of individual interpretation, the reason why the performance of one person is fascinating or thrilling and that of another not. Modern music affords the player full scope to interpret it according to his own mood and fancy, to color it with his own personality, whereas contrapuntal music exists largely for itself alone. It is music for music's sake, not for the sake of interpreting some mood, some feeling, or of painting in tone colors something quite outside of music. The player of counterpoint is restricted in his power of expression by the very formulas of the science or art of the contrapuntist. We may marvel that Bach was able to move so freely within its restricted forms. But I think it true that it is far more interesting for a person even of only moderate proficiency as a player to work out, however awkwardly, a Bach fugue for himself on the pianoforte than to hear it played by some one else, however great; for, cheap and easy as it is to protest in high-sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.
The Mission of the Player.
We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the wors.h.i.+per of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a s...o...b..ll, who revels in counterpoint--the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the ”composer's intentions” and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.
While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making virtuosos--Paganini on the violin, Liszt on the piano. Within about the same period covered by the careers of these two there have been half a dozen or even more composers, each of whom marks an epoch in some phase of the art. ”The interpretive artist,” says Henry G.
Hanchett in his ”Art of the Musician,” ”deserves a place no whit beneath that of the composer. No two composers have influenced musical progress in America more strongly than have Anton Rubinstein by his _playing_, and Theodore Thomas, who was not a composer.”
Music as a Science.
But, to return to Bach and the other contrapuntists, music owes them an immense debt on the technical side. And right here, so universal are the deductions that can be drawn from the program of a pianoforte recital, it should be pointed out that music differs from other arts in having for its basis a profound and complicated science, a science that concerns itself with the relations of the notes of the musical scale to each other. Upon this science are based alike the ”c.o.o.n song”
and the Wagner music-drama. What is true of ”Tristan” is true also of ”Bedelia.” Each makes its draft upon the science of music; the music-drama, of course, in a far greater degree than the song. This science has its textbooks with their theorems and problems, like any other science, and theoretical musicians have produced learned and useful works on the subject which the great ma.s.s of laymen, many virtuosos, and indeed the average professional musician, may never have heard of, let alone have read. For a person not intuitively predisposed toward the subject would find the science of music as difficult to master as integral calculus; nor, in order to appreciate music, or even to interpret it, is it necessary to be versed in this science. A virtuoso can play a chord of the ninth, the listener can be thrilled by the virtuoso's playing of the chord of the ninth, without either of them knowing that there is such a thing as the chord of the ninth.
Science versus Feeling.