Part 6 (2/2)

Now, when we examine Chopin's harmony, we are at once struck with an apparent contradiction. We feel that, in its broader aspects, it is wonderfully pure and lucid, flowing along an established course, deviating but little from the simpler and more ordinary progressions.

Yet every now and again we come across pa.s.sages, the sight of which is enough to make orthodox professors of music 'stare and gasp;'--pa.s.sages which seem to break with resolute and unflinching defiance the elementary rules that stand at the beginning of our text-books. Worst of all, these apparent solecisms, the commission of which by any other hand would be wholly intolerable, offer themselves to our notice as though they were the most natural and regular forms of expression. They are not obvious slips, like the 'misprint' in the Ninth Symphony; they are not importations from some alien musical language, like the occasional extravagances of Grieg or Dvorak; on the contrary, they take our recognised system of harmonic laws, and literally honour it more in the breach than the observance. Are consecutive fifths and octaves forbidden? There is, in one of the etudes, a delightful pa.s.sage, which consists exclusively of the prohibited intervals.[43] Are consecutive major thirds justly regarded as harsh and dissonant? Chopin, at his dreamiest and most contemplative, can employ them with unfailing effect.[44] Is the dominant seventh a chord which, to all well-regulated ears, demands instant resolution? The twenty-first Mazurka rejects the claim, and sends one floating down four bars of chromatic scale with no hope of rest until it reaches the bottom. And the manner of composition which these instances exemplify can be traced in plenty of other phrases, less extreme, perhaps, but not less audacious. In parts of the fourth and sixth Nocturnes we can find harmonic schemes which it is probable no other musician would have ever dared to devise, schemes which set at naught our established distinctions of concord and discord, which display in unbroken series artifices that are usually kept for single isolated points of excitement, and which, nevertheless, are as undoubtedly intentional as they are undeniably successful in their aim.

There is no s.h.i.+rking the difficulty. Here is a composer who is brought up on Bach, and whose general sense of harmony is as pure and sincere as that of his great master. Here are pa.s.sages, written by him with obvious care and deliberation, the acceptance of which would seem impossible without throwing discredit on the harmonic code. And, as climax of bewilderment, the code is right and the pa.s.sages are beautiful. It may certainly appear for the moment as though there were no solution in view unless we take a despairing refuge in some Hegelian identification of opposites.

Now, the impression which harmony produces is that of a third dimension in Music. It is the element of solidity and substance on which the melody rests. In a Chorale, for instance, the tune describes a sort of pattern on the superficies of the work, and the chords sustain and support it from underneath. And just as certain tunes can give us the effect of breadth, that is, of wide sweep over their superficial area, so certain harmonisations give us the effect of ma.s.siveness, that is, of strength and bulk in its substratum. It is not, of course, pretended that the artistic value of a composition can be summed up in so crude a metaphor: nothing more is attempted than to represent the one factor in the case, which is germane to the present purpose. Further, all the harmonic rules have been devised with a view to making the solid body of the Music as firm and compact as possible. They deal with the substratum, not with the superficies; with the perpendicular aspect, not with the horizontal. The law of consecutives is not held to be broken if in an orchestral piece a violin phrase is doubled by the violoncello or the ba.s.soon: such a device gives us the lines of the pattern in duplicate, and lies altogether outside the material on which the pattern is superimposed. So in these disputed pa.s.sages of Chopin. They are not really harmonic at all, they lie in the same plane as the melody, and, for their support, imply a separate and distinct scheme of chords, which the ear can always understand for itself.

A few examples may help to make this clearer. In the twelfth bar of the well-known Nocturne in E flat (Op. 9, No. 2), there is a connecting pa.s.sage which, when we see it on paper, seems to consist of a rapid series of remote and recondite modulations. When we hear it played in the manner which Chopin intended, we feel that there is only one real modulation, and that the rest of the pa.s.sage is an iridescent play of colour, an effect of superficies, not an effect of substance. Precisely the same impression is produced in the middle section of the sixth Nocturne, and in the return to the opening theme at the end of the fifteenth. So it is with these apparent consecutives. They are not ungrammatical, because, like the Emperor Sigismund, they are 'supra grammaticam:' they do not defy harmonic laws because they belong to a different jurisdiction: in a word, they are to be treated not as harmonisations of their theme, but rather as new forms of melodic extension. Their real harmony is implied, not expressed: a construction to be understood from the general context and tenour of the pa.s.sage: and it is because the general tenour is unmistakable that these 'sense constructions' are fully justified. Chopin's harmonic system, in short, is like a river--its surface windswept into a thousand variable crests and eddies, its current moving onward, full, steadfast and inevitable, bearing the whole volume of its waters by sheer force of depth and impetus.

Hence it is that of all musicians he is most at the mercy of his interpreters. Beethoven's _Adelaide_ is 'so beautiful' that not even Mr du Maurier's tenor 'can make it ridiculous:' but there are few of us who have not seen Chopin crushed out of recognition in the grasp of some conscientious and heavy-handed pianist. These surface-effects lose all their charm if they are played with stress and insistance, if they are forced down into a third dimension, which they were never intended to fill. There is much of Chopin's music in which solidity of execution is as fatal as strictness of time; in which the phrases are essentially light, wayward, aerial, demanding for their interpretation not only the most flexible sympathy of feeling, but the daintiest delicacy of touch.

Even Moscheles, great musician as he was, found himself baffled by the new style. 'Chopin has just been playing to me,' he writes, 'and now for the first time I understand his music. The _rubato_, which, with his other interpreters, degenerates into disregard of time, is with him only a charming originality of manner: the harsh modulations which strike me disagreeably when I am playing his compositions no longer shock me, because he glides over them in a fairy-like way with his delicate fingers. His _piano_ is so soft that he does not need any strong _forte_ to produce his contrasts: and for this reason one does not miss the orchestral effects which the German school requires from a pianoforte player, but allows oneself to be carried away as by a singer who, little concerned about the accompaniment, entirely follows his emotion.' We of the present day may express ourselves with more warmth of approbation; but if we wish to understand Chopin, this is the standpoint from which we must regard him.

The second point for consideration is the almost incomparable power which Chopin displays in his use of accessory figures. By figure, in this sense, is meant a certain group of notes, having a clearly defined curve and rhythm, and maintained, with such changes as the harmony necessitates, through a phrase, or a paragraph, or even a complete work. In the use of this device there are two difficulties against which a composer has to contend. On the one hand, the group, if it is to command any part of the hearer's attention, must exhibit a distinct character, almost a distinct melody of its own; on the other hand, it will fail of its purpose unless it is sufficiently plastic to be adapted to different context and different requirements. Now, it is obvious that the more allegiance is claimed by the first of these conditions, the more skill is needed in order to satisfy the second. A figure which consists merely of simple _arpeggios_ or of plain repeated chords can suffer any degree of harmonic alteration without loss of continuity; but as its intrinsic interest is heightened, either by elaboration of curve or by peculiarity of rhythm, so it becomes more individual, and therefore, under a change of circ.u.mstance, more difficult to adjust.

Thus it not infrequently happens that a composer is forced to remodel his scheme because the group of notes which he has devised to support the first strain of his melody proves unsuitable to the next; or because a curve, that can adequately fill a bar of uniform harmony, may lose all fitness when applied to a bar in which the harmony changes. In Schumann's _Widmung_, for instance, the beautiful accompaniment figure wavers in the third bar, and breaks down altogether in the fourth; not because the composer wishes to put forward a new pattern, for he retains the rhythm of the old, but because nothing short of a total alteration of curve will satisfy the harmonic conditions of the tune.

But, so far as concerns this particular exhibition of skill, we never feel that Chopin is at the mercy of his materials. His simplest figures are interesting, his most elaborate are moulded to his use with an entire and unhesitating mastery. Under his hand the stubborn edges grow smooth, the obdurate lines become pliant and tractable, the recurrent shape preserves its unity without appearing wearisome or monotonous. The Prelude in F sharp minor (No. 8) is perhaps the most astonis.h.i.+ng instance in music of this particular form of decorative effect; and hardly less remarkable are the etude in E flat minor (Op. 10, No. 6), the Prelude in G major (No. 3), and the Prelude in F sharp major (No.

13). Indeed, Chopin's method of ornament is altogether his own; sensuous it may be in origin, evoked, at any rate in part, by an imperious craving for the pleasure of beautiful sound, but yet raised to the true artistic level by its refinement of taste and its finished accuracy of detail. It is no small matter that a type of art which appeals so frequently to sense and emotion should never be either vulgar or trivial or commonplace; that there should be nothing meretricious in its sentiment, nothing indolent in its expression; that with every incentive to a lax and careless Hedonism it should yet maintain an ideal of unswerving labour.

So far Chopin's music has been treated from the creative side. It now remains to add a few words on the peculiar tact and intelligence with which he employs his medium. In pictorial art this quality is of acknowledged importance: oil, water, pastel, have their own conditions and their own limitations, to overstep which is to invite failure; and it is recognised as an adverse criticism if we can say of an example in any one process that its effects could have been equally well produced by another.

The same law is valid in musical art. The orchestra, the string quartett, the organ, the pianoforte, are so diverse in tone and so disparate in character, that they admit no community of treatment, and hardly even a close community of idea. An arrangement may sometimes be condoned as a _tour de force_, it may sometimes be allowed as a preparation or a means of study, but to regard it as possessing any absolute value is to convict the original work of a serious imperfection. It is, therefore, a high testimony to the exact.i.tude of Chopin's writing that it has almost entirely escaped the sacrilegious hand of the transcriber. Some of the Mazurkas are occasionally adapted for the voice, one or two of the Nocturnes misused to the service of the violin or the violoncello: but by far the greater number of Chopin's compositions are too obviously suited to the piano for any other medium to be regarded as possible. His very narrowness gave him concentration: his want of sympathy with all other instruments enabled him to devote his whole attention to the one that he understood. And, as a result, he gives us Pianoforte Music which, considered as a pure expression of technical intelligence, is almost without rival in the history of the art. No other composer has ever surpa.s.sed the unerring judgment to which we owe these wide-spread _arpeggios_, these wonderful liquid ripples of chromatic scale, these showers of sparkling notes which fall, as Liszt said, 'like dew drops' on some bend of phrase or turn of cadence.

Beethoven, of course, understood the piano as fully as he understood everything else: but since Beethoven's time musicians, and especially romantic musicians, have a little tended to blur and obliterate these necessary distinctions, and to merge a due recognition of piano technique into their overmastering desire for emotional significance.

Hence the fatal error of trying to extract orchestral effects from the keyboard, an error into which Schumann falls occasionally, and Liszt habitually, but from which Chopin may be regarded as entirely free. In a word, he appreciates both the capacities and the limitations of his material, and, while he draws from it every tone that it can legitimately produce, he never strains it beyond the due and fitting bounds of its proper individuality. It may be noted that Mendelssohn had something of the same gift, but in pianoforte music, Mendelssohn's thought is shallower than that of Chopin, and, therefore, more easily kept within its range. Indeed, since 1827, there has been no composer who could unite such poignancy of feeling with so exact an estimate of the means at his disposal.

To sum up, Chopin can claim no place among the few greatest masters of the world. He lacks the dignity, the breadth, the high seriousness of Palestrina and Bach and Beethoven: he no more ranks beside them than Sh.e.l.ley beside Shakespear, or Andrea beside Michael Angelo. But to say this is not to disparage the value of the work that he has done. If he be not of the 'di majorum gentium,' he is none the less of the Immortals, filled with a supreme sense of beauty, animated by an emotional impulse as keen as it was varied, and upholding an ideal of technical perfection at a time when it was in danger of being lost by the poets or degraded by the _virtuosi_. In certain definite directions he has enlarged the possibilities of the art, and though he has, fortunately, founded no school--for the charm of his music is wholly personal--yet in a thousand indirect ways he has influenced the work of his successors. At the same time, it is not as a pioneer that he elicits our fullest admiration. We hardly think of him as marking a stage in the general course and progress of artistic History, but, rather, as standing aside from it, unconscious of his relation to the world, preoccupied with the fairyland of his own creations. The elements of myth and legend that have already gathered round his name may almost be said to find their counterparts in his music; it is etherial, unearthly, enchanted, an echo from the melodies of Kubla Khan. It is for this reason that he can only make his complete appeal to certain moods and certain temperaments. The strength of the hero is as little his as the vulgarity of the demagogue: he possesses an intermediate kingdom of dreams, an isle of fantasy, where the air is drowsy with perfume, and the woods are bright with b.u.t.terflies, and the long gorges run down to meet the sea. If his music is sometimes visionary, at least it is all beautiful; offering, it may be, no response to the deeper questions of our life, careless if we approach it with problems which it is in no mind to resolve, but fascinating in its magic if we are content to submit our imagination to the spell. And precisely the same distinction may be made on the formal side of his work. In structure he 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. There have been higher ideals in Music, but not one that has been more clearly seen or more consistently followed. There have been n.o.bler messages, but none delivered with a sweeter or more persuasive eloquence.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] The Ballade, which originally ended in F major, was altered to its present conclusion by an afterthought. See the review of it in Schumann's _Collected Works_.

[43] etude in D flat, Op. 25, No. 8.

[44] etude in A flat, without Opus number.

ANTONIN DVORaK.

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt.

GOETHE.

I

DAYS OF PREPARATION

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