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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
11
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The Fifth and Last of a Series of Talks on Chopin and His Music, Whereinjs
Outlined the Nature and Character of the Great Polish Composer, Together
With Some Final Hints on How to Produce His Music on the Player-Piano
The wonderful Scherzos, the extraordinary
Fantasy in F minor, wherein Chopin reached and
stormed the heights, the two sonatas, great but
uneven, the two piano concertos, more interest-
ing for what they reveal of Chopin's limitations
than for their own content—none of these have
we tried to discuss in the brief papers on this
astonishing piano-poet which we have ventured
to set forth here. The literature of Chopin is
immense. Huneker, in "Chopin, the Man and
His Music," quotes seventy-seven books and
articles on the same subject and his book was
written seventeen years ago. Moreover, there
were, even in 1900, many contributions to the
Chopin Bibliography besides those our pre-
mier American critic mentions. Yet in spite of
all the delving of the diggers, we are as far as
ever from a proper understanding of this Pole's
astonishing music. Especially do we who play
the player-piano need to understand him better.
For mere passive listening to even the finest re-
production of Paderewski in the G major noc-
turne or Hoffman in the E flat major etude will
make us really know. our Chopin. We must
learn to reproduce him the best we can on our
own instruments; and depend on it, much more
good will come to us that way from even a very
imperfect trial of our musical capacities.
Now the player-pianist who is setting about a
trial of his strength with Chopin must take into
his faculties certain definite facts which are to
be regarded as conditional of any and all results
he may achieve. It is not easy always to trans-
late the ideas which musicians may entertain re-
garding the interpretation of music into terms
applicable to the player-piano. The conditions
are so very different that it is almost impossible
to think music in the same terms for manual and
music roll playing respectively. But the player-
pianist has the enormous advantage of being
able to think his music directly. He deals with
the raw material in a state of readiness. He is
not compelled to prepare it, as it were, through
the medium of expensively trained fingers. He
can think of his material in terms of its sub-
stance. He does not habitually confuse himself
by thinking always in terms of notation. For
various reason, then, the player-pianist can ap-
proach these matters more directly; and in the
present case, the task of rendering Chopin in-
telligible becomes easier. The musical quali-
ties of Chopin which should at once strike the
player-pianist are, first of all, his unfailing
wealth of fresh and fine tune-ideas, and secondly,
the very remarkable—nay, unique—nature of
his accompaniment ideas. Chopin was a Pole
and a very patriotic one. He thoroughly wor-
shiped his native land; yet he lived most of his
life in a thoroughly non-Polish atmosphere,
namely, in the ultra-refinement of the Parisian
intellectuals who, during the first decades of the
nineteenth century, clustered around George
Sand, De Musset, Delacroixe, Liszt and the Abbe
Lammenais. His art, as Huneker says, is typi-
cally refined and even alembicated; that is to say,
it smells always, even at its wildest, of careful
revision and polish. It is ofttimes wild, but
seldom sublime. It is ofttimes gracious and
tender, but seldom passionate with the sweep
of passion that one feels in ruder music some-
times. Chopin indeed sounds depths of passion;
but it is, after all, the passion of an educated and
civilized man.
Yet, this delicately chiseled art, this music
that is all beauty of workmanship, all glow of
finely focused rays, nevertheless is the music of
a Pole. Poland is the land of strange dance
rhythms, of peasants who dance to music of
minor keys and cry when they are happy. The
Polish women, flower of the tender regard and
chivalrous worship of their men, inspire the
ravishing mazes of the mazurka or the gorgeous
processions of the polonaise. The Polish heroes,
martial, stern and proud, stalk through every
page of those wonderful ballades in which
Chopin has interpreted the heroic poetry of
Mickiewicz. The Polish music, to any native
musician, in itself must provide a veritable mine
of melodic wealth. Chopin, in the dance rhythms
peculiar to his native land, has found such a
mine. But he has worked it with Parisian tools,
with civilized appliances; and the result is a
ravishing mixture of savage and gentle, raw and
refined elements, worked up with the most elabo-
rate art and gorgeously beautiful.
Chopin's Melody
In attemping to play Chopin on the player-
piano, the music lover should first recognize that
he is dealing with a master of melody. Suppose
one were to begin by trying to follow out the
intricacies of the Chopin tune through all his
nocturnes. The task would be found extremely
interesting and even fascinating. It would not
be difficult and in fact any one who will give
even a little of his time to such a work as this
will be amply repaid.
Consider the simplest of his melodies, like
that of the A flat Impromptu or the second noc-
turne. You will find that there is what can only
be described as a haunting quality about the
bare tunes. Chopin has a fancy for queer dis-
tances between his melody tones. He does not
stick to the plain diatonic scale, but wanders
off out of the key constantly; yet always with
perfect taste and always in a way to show that
any other imaginable tone combination would
have been wrong. You will find a sort of round-
ness in his tunes, meaning by that a flowing,
easy movement which gives you the impression
that although the melody is original and wholly
characteristic of its author, no other possible
way of working it out could be imagined. There
is nothing rugged in Chopin's ideas. He never
says a thing roughly. He is always a gentleman.
Yet his music is the music of a man who feels
just as deeply as Beethoven; but more person-
ally, perhaps more selfishly, and to whom world-
ideas are wholly foreign.
In playing a Chopin melody, you are reciting
poetic speech. Now, the poet's thought some-
times seems recondite or obscure, and you have
to read with greatest care in order to gain an
understanding of the meaning. You cannot al-
ways grasp the essential idea in poetry as quickly
as you would in prose. It is just v this which
makes the difference between intelligent and
non-intelligent handling of Chopin's music. You
are dealing with poetry and you must think
of his music poetically. Mainly, to the player-
pianist, this means gaining, from the start, a
clear conception of the way in which Chopin has
put his tunes together. One must listen care-
fully to a nocturne melody, for instance, play-
ing it over several times until the exact plan of
its workmanship is clear. It will be found that
Chopin is not obscure in his tonal plans; his art
lies in the lovely elaboration of decorative ma-
terial with which he clothes them.
This decoration of the melody by grace notes,
far stretched runs and similar devices is one of
the characteristic Chopin methods. It must al-
ways be remembered that Chopin decorates his
melodies with loving care as well as with en-
thusiasm; and the thread of melody can always
be traced through never so tangled a skein of
decorative elaborations.
Chopin's Harmony
The accompaniment forms which Chopin em-
ploys and which, when he introduced them, were
so largely novelties to the pianistic world, arise
out of two general causes. One was his extraor-
dinary command over the piano and his remark-
able originality in the technical treatment of fin-
gering. The other was his mixture of Polish
blood with Western training. Chopin had a
perfect hand for the piano and a very healthy
contempt for old-fogy notions as to the right
way to use the hands on the keyboard of the
piano. He showed us moderns many a trick. In
his studies he horrified the old-fashioned pro-
fessors by crossing the fingers over each other,
passing the thumb under the fourth finger, using
the thumb on black keys, and by numerous other
heresies. But the reason for all these novelties
was simply that Chopin wished to obtain
stretches in the left hand parts, skips from chord
to chord, extensions of chords and other powers
over the keyboard, in order that he might im-
prove his command over the piano and produce
musical effects which he wanted, which his artis-
tic sense demanded, but which the pedagogues
of his day did not suppose were possible.
Now the player-pianist need not worry about
the technical part of it, but he can revel in the
new beauties opened up to him. Especially he
(Continued on page 12)
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