 Chapter 3 of Chopin's Man and His Music. This is a LibriFox recording. All LibriFox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriFox.org. Recording by Shaleefa Mulchem. Chopin, The Man and His Music by James Hanneker. Chapter 3. England, Scotland and Berlases. The remaining years of Chopin's life were lonely. His father died in 1844, chest and heart complained. His sister Emilia died of consumption, ill omen sees, and shortly after, Jan Modocinski died. Titus Wojcowski was in far off Poland on his estates, and Chopin had but a grigmana and fontanat from Friday. They, being Polish, he preferred them, although he was diplomatic enough not to let others see this. Both François and Guttmann whispered to Niques at different times that each was a particular soul, the alter ego of Chopin. He appeared to give himself to his friends, but it was usually a surface of action. He had coaxing, crookedish ways, playful ways, that cost him nothing when in good spirits, so he was more loved than loving. This is another trait of the man which, allied with his fastidiousness and spiritual brusquery, made him difficult to decipher. The loss of Tsar completed his misery, and we find him in poor health when he arrived in London, for the second and last time, April 21st, 1848. Mr. A. J. Hebkins is a chief authority on the details of Chopin's visit to England. To this amiable gentleman and learned a dried hair on pianos, François, Joseph Bannet and Niques are indebted for the most of their facts. From them the curious may learn also is to learn. The story is not especially noteworthy, being in the main record of ill healths, complainings, lamentations and not one signal artistic success. War was declared upon Chopin by part of the musical world. The criticism was compounded of pure malice and stupidity. Chopin was angered but little. He was too sick to care now. He went to an evening party, but missed at the McCready dinner, where he was to have met Sacré, Berlioz, Mrs. Procter and Sir Julius Benedict. With Benedict he played a Mozart duet at the Duchess of Sutherlands. Whether he played at court, the Queen can tell, Niques cannot. He met Jenny Lint Goltschmidt and liked her exceedingly, as did all who had the honour of knowing her. She sided with him, womanlike, in the Sartre fair, a cove of which had floated across the channel, and visited him in Paris in 1849. Chopin gave two mutinés at the houses of Adelaide Campbell and Lord Falmar's, during twenty-third and July seventh. They were very ruchershy, so it appears. Viadol Garcia sang. The composer's face and frame were wasted by illness, and Mrs. Solomon spoke of his long, attenuated fingers. He made money, and that was useful to him, for Drs. Bill and living had taken up his savings. There was talk of his settling in London, but the climate, not to speak of the unmusical atmosphere, would have been fatal to him. Wagner succumbed to both, study-fighting that he was. Chopin left for Scotland in August, and stopped at the house of his pupil, Miss Sterling. Her name is familiar to Chopin's students, for the two nocturnes, Opus 55, are dedicated to her. He was nearly killed with kindness, but continually bemoaned his existence. At the house of Dr. Lichinsky, up home, he lodged in Edinburgh, and for so wee that he had to be carried up and down stairs. To his adoptive good-wife, he replied in answer to his question, Jorges-San is your particular friend? Not even Jorges-San. And is he to be blamed for evading tiresome reminders of the past? He confessed that his excessive thinness had caused Sann to address him as, my dear carves, charming as it not. Miss Sterling was doubtless in love with him, and Princess Xatoriska followed him to Scotland to see if his health was better. So he was not altogether deserted by the women. Indeed, he could not live without their little flatteries and agreeable attentions. It is safe to say that a woman was always within coal of Chopin. He played at Manchester on the 28th of August, but his friend Mr. Rosburn, or was present, says, his playing was too delicate a great enthusiasm, and I felt truly sorry for him. On his return to Scotland, he stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Sally Swab. Mr. Jake Cousord Haddon wrote several years ago in the Glasgow Herald of Chopin's visit to Scotland in 8048. The tone code was in the poorest hells, but with characteristic tenacity played at concerts and paid visits to his admirers. Mr. Haddon found the following notice in the back files of the Glasgow Courier. M. Chopin has the honour to announce that his matinée musicale will take place on Wednesday, the 27th of September, in the Merchant Hall, Glasgow, to commence at half-past two o'clock. Tickets, limited to number, half a guinea-each, and full particulars to be had from Mr. Murell Wood, 42 Buchanan Street. He continues, The net profits of this concert are said to have been exactly sixty pounds, a ridiculously low sum, when we compare it with the earnings of later-day virtuosity, may still more ridiculously low, when we recall the circumstance that for two concerts in Glasgow sixteen years before this, Paganini had one thousand four hundred pounds. Murell Wood, who has since died, said, I was then a comparative stranger in Glasgow, but I was told that so many private carriages has never been seen at any concert in the town. In fact, it was a county people who turned out, was a few of the elite of Glasgow society. Being a morning concert, the citizens were busy otherwise, and half a guinea was considered too high a sum for their wives and daughters. The late Dr. James Hadoick of Glasgow tells in his reminiscences that on entering the hall he found it about one third full. It was obvious that a number of the audience were personal friends of Chopin. Dr. Hadoick recognised the composer at once as a little, fragile-looking man, and pale grey suit, including frack coat of very tentacle-tentant texture, moving about among the company, conversing with different groups and occasionally consulting his watch, which it seemed to be no bigger than a knacket stone on the forefinger of an alderman. Whiskillers, beardless, fire of hair, and pale and thin of face, his appearance was interesting and conspicuous, and when, after a final glance at his manager, Orloge, he ascended the platform and pleased himself at the instrument. He had once commanded attention. Dr. Hadoick says it was a drawing-room entertainment, more piano than forte, so not without occasional episodes of both strengths and grandeur. It was perfectly clear to him that Chopin was marked for an early grave. So far as can be ascertained, there are now living only two members of that Glasgow audience of 1848. One of the two is Julius Selichmann, the veteran president of the Glasgow Society of Musicians, who, in response to some inquiries on the subject, writes as follows, Several weeks before the concert, Chopin lived with different friends or pupils on their invitations in the surrounding counties. I think his pupil, Miss Jane Sterling, had something to do with all the general arrangements. Mure Wood managed the special arrangement of the concert, and I distinctly remember him telling me that he never had so much difficulty in arranging a concert as on this occasion. Chopin constantly changed his mind. Wood had to visit him several times at the house of Admiral Napier at Millicombe Park, near Johnstone, but scarcely had to return to Glasgow, when he was summoned back to alter something. The concert was given in the Merchant Hall, Hutchinson Street, now as a county building. The hall was about three-quarters filled. Between Chopin's playing, Madame Adilasio de Macritte, daughter of a well-known London physician, sang, and Mr. Mure accompanied her. Chopin was evidently very ill. His touch was very feeble, and while the finish, grace, elegance and delicacy of his performances were greatly admired by the audience, the want of power made his playing somewhat monotonous. I do not remember the whole programme, but he was in court for his well-known Mazzurka and B-flat, Op. 7, No. 1, which he repeated with quite different nuances from those of the first time. The audience was very aristocratic, consisting mostly of ladies, among whom was it then Duchess of Argyll, and his sister, Lady Blentire. The other survivor is George Russell Alexander, son of the proprietor of the Cieto Rial, Dunnup Street, who, in a letter to the writer, remarks especially upon Chopin's pale, cadaverous appearance. My emotion, he says, was so great that two or three times I was compelled to retire from the room to recover myself. I have heard all the best and most celebrated stars of the musical firmament, but never one has left such an impress on my mind. Chopin played Octobre Falls in Edinburgh and returned to London in November after Barry's visits. We read of a Polish ball and concert at which he played, but the affair was not a success. He left England in January 1849, and hardly glad he was to go. Do you see the kettle in this meadow? he asked, en route pour Paris. C'est plus d'intelligence que des Anglais, which was not nice of him. Perhaps Emily Twitski, to whom he made some remark, took as earnest a pure bit of nonsense, and perhaps he certainly disliked England and the English. Now the curtain prepares to fall on the last drary finale of Chopin's life. A life not for a moment heroic, yet lived according to his lights and free from the soredit and the soil of vulgarity. Jules Jeanneur said, he lived ten miraculous years with the press ready to fly away, and he knows that his servant Daniel had always to carry him to bed. For ten years he had suffered from so much illness that a relapse was not noticed by the world. His varied death was at first received with incredulity, for as Stephen Haller said, he had been reported dead so often that a real news was doubted. In 1847 his legs began to bother him by swelling, and M. Matthias described him as a painful spectacle, the picture of exhaustion, the backbend had bowed, but always amiable and full of distinction. His purse was empty, and his lodgings in the Rue Chaillot were represented to his affraud man as being just half their cost, the balance being paid by the countess Obreskov, a Russian lady. Like a romance is ascending by Mr. Darling, of twenty-five thousand far, but it is nothing less, too. The noble-hearted scotch woman heard of Chopin's needs through Madame Rubio, a pupil, and the money was raised. That packet containing it was mislaid or lost by the porches of Chopin's house, but found after the woman had been text with keeping it. Chopin, his future assured, moved to Place Vendon, number twelve. There he died. His sister Louise was sent for, and came from Poland to Paris. In the early days of October he could no longer sit upright without a board. Goodman and the countess Delfine Potocca, his sister, and Monsieur Gauveur were constantly with him. It was Togenev who spoke of the half-hundred countesses in Europe who claimed to have helped the dying Chopin and their arms. In reality, he died in Goodman's, raising that pubos hand to his mouth, and mammering, showily, as he expired. So Largeson was there, but not her mother, who called and was not admitted, so they say. Goodman denies having refused her admittance. On the other hand, if she had called, Chopin's friend would have kept her away from him, from the man who told François two days before his death. She said to me that I would die in no arms but hers. Surely, unless she was monstrous in her egotism, and she was not, Gaugeson did not hear this sad speech, without tears and boundless regrets. Blas, all things come too late for those who wait. Tadonovsky relates that Chopin gave his last orders in perfect consciousness. He begged his sister to burn all his aetheric compositions. I owe it to the public, he said, and to myself to publish only good things. I kept to this resolution all my life. I wish to keep to it now. This wish has not been respected. The posthumous publications are, for the most part, feeble stuff. Chopin died October 17, 1849, between three and four in the morning, after having been shrived by the Abbey Jelovisky. His last word, according to Gavain, was, plus, on being asked if he suffered. Regarding the touching and slightly melodramatic deaths that seen on the day previous, when Delphine Potocca sang Stradella and Mozart, or was it Marcelo, Liszt, Karozovsky and Gutmann disagree. The following authentic count of the last hours of Chopin appears here for the first time in English, translated by Mr. Hugh Craig. In Liszt's well-known work on Chopin, 2nd edition, 1879, Manchin is made of a conversation that he held with the Abbey Jelovisky, respecting Chopin's deaths, and in his biography of Chopin some sentences from letters by the Abbey are quoted. These letters, written in French, have been translated and published in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung, to which, if they were given by the Princess Marie Hornelord, the daughter of Princess Caroline St. Wittgenstein, Liszt's universal acuity and executor, who died in 1887. For many years, so runs the document, the life of Chopin was but a breath. His frail, weak body was visibly unfitted for the strength and force of his genius. It was wonder how in such a weak state he could live at all, and occasionally act with the greatest energy. His body was almost diaphanous. His eyes were almost shadowed by a cloud from which, from time to time, the lightnings of his glance flashed. Gentle, kind, bubbling with humour, and every way charming, he seemed no longer to belong to earth, while unfortunately he had not yet sought of heaven. He had good friends, but many bad friends. These bad friends were his letters, that is, his enemies, men and women without principles, or rather with bad principles. Even his unrivaled success, so much more subtle and thus so much more stimulating, than that of all other artists, carried the war into his soul and checked the expression of face and of prayer. The teachings of the fondest, most pious mother became to him a recollection of his childhood's love. In the place of faith, doubt had stepped in, but only that decency, innate in every generous heart, hindered him from indulging in sarcasm and mockery over holy things, and the consolations of religion. While he was in this spiritual condition, he was attacked by the pulmonary disease that was soon to carry him away from us. The knowledge of this cruel sickness reached me on my return from Rome. With beating heart I hurried to him, to see once more the friend of my youth, who saw was infinitely dearer to me than all his talent. I found him not sinner, for that was impossible, but weaker. His strength sang, his life faded visibly. He embraced me with affection and with tears in his eyes, thinking not of his own pain, but of mine. He spoke of my poor friend, Edward Water, whom I had just lost, you know how. He was shot a martyr of liberty at Vienna, November 10th, 1848. I availed myself of his softened mood, to speak to him about his soul. I recalled his thoughts to the pride of his childhood, and of his beloved mother. Yes, he said, in order not to offend my mother, I would not dine without the sacraments, but for my part I do not regard them in the sense that you desire. I understand the blessing of confession insofar as it is the unburdening of a heavy heart into a friendly hand, but not as a sacrament. I am ready to confess to you, if you wish it, because I love you, not because I hold it necessary. Inna, a crowd of anti-religious speeches filled me with terror and care for this elect soul, and I feared nothing more than to be called to be his confessor. Several months passed with similar conversations so painful to me, the priest and the sincere friend. Yet I clung to the conviction that a grace of God would obtain the victory over this rebellious soul, even if I knew not how. After all my exertions, prayer remained my only refuge. On the evening of October 12th, I had with my brethren retired to pray for a change in Treban's mind. When I was summoned by orders of the physician, it feared that he would not live through the night. I hastened to him. He pressed my hand, but made me at once to depart, while he assured me he loved me much, but did not wish to speak to me. Imagine, if you can, what a night I had passed. Next day was the 13th, the day of St. Edward, the patron of my poor brother. I sit miles for the repose of the soul, and prayed for Treban's soul. My God! I cried. If the soul of my brother Edward is pleasing to thee, give me this day the soul of Lidegh. In double distress I then went to the melancholy abode of our poor sick man. I found him at breakfast, which was served as carefully as ever, and after he had asked me to partake, I said. My friend, today is the name day of my poor brother. I do not let to speak of it, he cried. Dearest friend, I continued. You must give me something for my brother's name day. What shall I give you? Your soul. Ah, I understand. Here it is. Take it. At these words unspeakable joy and anguish it seized me. What should I say to him? What should I do to restore his face, how not to lose, instead of saving this beloved soul? How should I begin to bring it back to God? I flung myself on my knees, and after a moment of collector my thoughts, I cried in the depths of my heart, draw it to thee, thy self my God. Without saying a word, I held out to our dear Implet the crucifix. Rays of divine light, flames of divine fire streamed, I might say, visibly from the figure of the crucified Saviour, and at once illumined, the soul and kenneled the heart of Shri Bhair. Burning tears streamed from his eyes, his face was once more revived, and with unspeakable fervour, he made his confession and received a holy supper. After the blessed fiatikam, penetrated by the heavily consecration in which the sacraments for false and high souls, he asked for extreme unction. He wished to pay lavishly the sacristan who accompanied me, and when I remarked that a supper centred by him was twenty times too much, he replied, Oh no! for what I have received is beyond prize. From this hour he was ashamed. The death's struggle began and lasted four days. Patience, trust in God, even joyful confidence never left him, in spite of all his sufferings till his last breath. He was really happy, and called himself happy. In the midst of the sharpest sufferings, he expressed only ecstatic joy, touching love of God, thankfulness that I had let him back to God, contempt of the world and its good, and a wait for a speedy death. He blessed his friends, and when after an apparently last crisis, he saw himself surrounded by his proud, that day and night filled his chamber, he asked me, Why do they not pray? At these words all fell on their knees, and even the Protestants joined in the litanies and prayers for the dying. Day and night he held my hand, and would not let me leave him. No, he will not leave me at the last moment, he said, and leaned on my breast, as a little child in a moment of danger, hights itself in its mother's breast. Soon he called upon Jesus and Mary, as a fervid that reached to heaven. Soon he kissed a crucifix and an excess of face, hope and love. He made the most touching utterances. I love God and man, he said. I am happy so to die, do not weep my sister. My friends do not weep, I am happy. I feel that I am dying. Farewell, pray for me. Exhausted by deathly convulsions, he said to the physicians, Let me die, do not keep me longer in this world of exile. Let me die. Why do you prolong my life when I have renounced all things and God has enlightened my soul? God calls to me, why do you keep me back? Another time, he said, O lovely science, that only lets one suffer longer, could it give you back my strength, qualify me to do any good, to make any sacrifice, but a life of painting, of grief, of pain to all who love me, to belong such a life. O lovely science. Then he said again, You love me suffer cruelly, perhaps you have erred about my sickness, but God errs and not. He punishes me, and I bless him therefore. O how good is God to punish me here below, O how good God is. His usual language was always elegant, with well-chosen words, but at last to express all his thankfulness, and at the same time all the misery of those who die unreconciled to God, he cried, Without you I should have croaked, Clapedon, like a pig. While dying, he still called on the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Kissed the crucifix and pressed it to his heart with a cry, Now I am at the source of blessedness. This died to bear, and it drews, His death was the most beautiful concerto of all his life. The words he obey must have had a phenomenal memory. I hope that it was an exact one. His story is given in its entirety because of its novelty. The only thing that makes me feel the least skeptical is that La Mara, the pan name of a writer on musical subjects, translated these letters into German. But everyone agrees that Japan's end was serene. Indeed, it is one of the musical desperates of history. Another was Mozart's. His face was beautiful and young in the flower-covered coffin, says Liszt. He was buried from de Madeleine, October 30th, as a ceremony befitting a man of genius. The B-flat minor funeral march, orchestrated by Henri Rebert, was given, and during the ceremony, if you will really, played on the organ the E and B minor preludes. The Paul bearers were distinguished men, Maillabere, de Lacroix, Blaisle, and Franchon. At least Dierville Gauthier so reported it for his journal. Even at his grave in Père-Lachaise, no two persons could agree about Chopin. This controversy is quite characteristic of Chopin, but was always the calm centre of argument. He was buried in even clothes, his concert dress, but not at his own request. Fiatowski, the portrait painter, told this to Niques. It is a Polish custom for the dying to select their grave-clothes, yet Lombrozo writes that Chopin in his will directed that he should be buried in a white high, small shoes, and short breeches, adusing this as an evidence of his insanity. He further adds, he abandoned the woman whom he tenderly loved, because she offered a chair to someone else before giving the same invitation to himself. Here we have a song story, raised to the dignity of a diagnosed symptom. It is like the art of nonsense. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Chopin, The Man and His Music This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by M. J. Frank Chopin, The Man and His Music by James Honaker Chapter 4 The Artist Chopin's personality was a pleasant persuasive one without being so striking or so dramatic as Liszt's. As a youth his nose was too large, his lips thin, the lower one protruding. Later Marshal has said that he looked like his music. Delicacy in a certain aristocratic bearing, a harmonious ensemble, produced a most agreeable sensation. He was of slim frame, middle height, fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs, delicately formed hands, very small feet, an oval, softly outlined head, a pale, transparent complexion, long, silken hair of a light chestnut color scattered on one side, tender brown eyes, intelligent rather than dreamy, a finely curved aquiline nose, a sweet, subtle smile, graceful and varied gestures. This precise description is by Nix. Liszt said he had blue eyes but he has been overruled. Chopin was fond of elegant, costly attire and was very correct in the matter of studs, walking sticks and cravats. He was a steel musician we read of but a gentleman. Barely as told Leguet to see Chopin for he is something which you have never seen and someone you will never forget. An orchidaceous individuality this. With such personal refinement he was a man punctual and precise in his habits. Associating constantly with fashionable folk his naturally dignified behavior was increased. He was an aristocrat there is no other word and he did not care to be hail fellow well met with the musicians. A certain primness and asperity did not make him popular. While teaching his manner warmed the earnest artist came to life all halting of speech and polite insincereities were abandoned. His pupils adored him. Here at least the sentiment was one of solidarity. Delenz is his most censorious critic and did not really love Chopin. The dislike was returned for the poll suspected that his pupil was sent by Liszt to spy on his methods. This I heard in Paris. Chopin was a remarkable teacher. He never taught but one genius, little Filch, the Hungarian lad of whom Liszt said when he starts playing I will shut up shop. The boy died in 1845 aged 15. Paul Gunsburg who died the same year was also very talented. Once after delivering in a lovely way the master's E minor concerto Filch was taken by Chopin to a music store and presented with the score of Beethoven's Fidelio. He was much affected by the talents of this youthful pupil. Lindsay Sloper and Brinley Richards studied with Chopin. Carolyn Hartman, Gutmann, Liesberg, Georges Matias, Mamazelle O'Meara, many Polish ladies of rank, Delphine Potokka among the rest, Madame Striker, Carl Mikugli, Madame Rubio, Madame Peruzzi, Thomas Telafson, Casimir Vernik, Gustav Schumann, Werner Steinbrecher, and many others became excellent pianists. Was the American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschok ever his pupil? His friends say so, but Niek's does not mention him. Ernst Power questions it. We know that Gottschok studied in Paris with Camille Stamati and made his first appearance there in 1847. This was shortly before Chopin's death when his interest in music had abated greatly. No doubt Gottschok played for Chopin for he was the first to introduce the Poles' music in America. Chopin was very particular about the formation of the touch, giving Clemente's preludes at first. Is that a dog barking? was his sudden exclamation at a rough attack. He taught the scale staccato and legato beginning with E major. Ductility, ease, gracefulness were his aim. Stiffness, harshness annoyed him. He gave Clemente, Marshala's, and Bach. Before playing in concert he shut himself up and played. Not Chopin, but Bach, always Bach. Absolute finger independence and touch discrimination and color are to be gained by playing the preludes and fugues of Bach. Chopin started a method, but it was never finished and his sister gave it to the princess Charterisca after his death. It is a mere fragment. Janotha has translated it. One point is worth quoting. He wrote, No one notices inequality in the power of the notes of his scale when it is played very fast and equally as regards time. In a good mechanism the aim is not to play everything with an equal sound, but to acquire a beautiful quality of touch and a perfect shading. For a long time players have acted against nature and seeking to give equal power to each finger. On the contrary, each finger should have an appropriate part assigned it. The thumb has the greatest power being the thickest finger and the freest. Then comes the little finger at the other extremity of the hand. The middle finger is the main support of the hand and is assisted by the first. Finally comes the third, the weakest one. As to this Siamese twin of the middle finger some players try to force it with all their might to become independent. A thing impossible and most likely unnecessary. There are then many different qualities of sound just as there are several fingers. The point is to utilize the differences and this in other words is the art of fingering. Here it seems to me as one of the most practical truths ever uttered by a teacher pianists spend thousands of hours trying to subjugate impossible muscles. Chopin, who found out most things for himself, saw the waste of time and force. I recommend his advice. He was ever particular about fingering but his innovations horrified the purists. Play as you feel, was his motto. A rather dangerous precept for beginners. He gave to his pupils the concertos and sonatas all carefully graded of Mozart, Scarlatti, Phil, Dusek, Hummel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber and Hiller and of Schubert the forehand pieces and dances. List he did not favor which is natural list having written nothing but brilliant paraphrases in those days. The music of the later list is quite another thing. Chopin's genius for the pedal his utilization of its capacity for the vibration of related strings the overtones I refer to later. Rubenstein said The piano bard, the piano rhapsodist, the piano mind, the piano soul is Chopin. Tragic, romantic, lyric, heroic, dramatic, fantastic, soulful, sweet, dreamy, brilliant, grand, simple. All possible expressions are found in his compositions and all are sung by him upon his instrument. Chopin is dead only 50 years but his fame has traversed the half century with ease and bids fair to build securely in the loves of our great grandchildren. The six letters that comprise his name pursue every piano that is made. Chopin and modern piano playing are inseparable and it is a strain upon homely prophecy to predict a time when the two shall be put asunder. Chopin was the greatest interpreter of Chopin and following him came those giants of other days List, Taussig and Rubenstein. While he never had the pupils too mold as had List Chopin made some excellent piano artists. They all had or have, the old guard dies bravely, his tradition. But exactly what the Chopin tradition is, no man may dare say. Anton Rubenstein, when I last heard him, played Chopin inimitably. Never shall I forget the ballads, the two polineses in F sharp minor and A flat major, the B flat minor prelude, the A minor winter wind, the two C minor studies and the F minor fantasy. Yet the Chopin pupils assembled in judgment at Paris when he gave his historical recitals refused to accept him as an interpreter. His touch was too rich and full, his tone too big. Chopin did not care for List's reading of his music, though he trembled when he heard him thunder in the aeroic a polineses. I doubt if even Carl Taussig, impeccable artist, unapproachable Chopin player, would have pleased the composer. Chopin played as his moods prompted and his playing was the despair and the delight. Chopin played as his moods prompted and his playing was the despair and delight of his hearers. Rubenstein did all sorts of wonderful things with the coda of the Bacharole, such a page. But Sir Charles Hallet said that it was clever but not Chopin-esque. Yet Hallet heard Chopin at his last Paris concert, February 1848, play the two Forte passages in the Bacharole pianissimo and with all sorts of dynamic finesse. This is precisely what Rubenstein did and his pianissimo was a whisper. Von Bülow was too much of a martinet to reveal the poetic quality, though he appreciated Chopin on the intellectual side. His touch was not beautiful enough. The Slavic and Magyar races are your only true Chopin interpreters. Witness List the Magnificent, Rubenstein a passionate genius, Taussig who united in his person all the elements of greatness, Essipauer fascinating and feminine, the poetic Paderefsky, de Pacman the fantastic, subtle Josephi and Rosenthal a phenomenon. A world great pianist was this Frederick Francois Chopin. He played as he composed uniquely. All testimony is emphatic as to this, scales that were pearls, a touch rich, sweet supple and singing, and a technique that knew no difficulties. These were part of Chopin's equipment as a pianist. He spiritualized the timbre of his instrument until it became transformed into something strange, something remote from its original nature. His pianissimo was an enchanting whisper. His Forte seemed powerful by contrast so numberless were the gradations. So widely varied his dynamics. The fairy-like quality of his play, his diaphanous harmonies, his liquid tone, his peddling, all were the work of a genius and a lifetime. And the appealing humanity he infused into his touch gave his listeners a delight that bordered on the supernatural. So the accounts critical professional and personal read. There must have been a hypnotic quality in his performances that transported his audience wherever the poet willed. Indeed the stories told were an air of enthusiasm that borders on the exaggerated on the fantastic. Crystalline pearls falling on red hot velvet. Or did Scudo write this enlist? Infinite nuance and the mingling of silvery bells. These are a few of the least exuberant notices. Was it not Heine who called Thalberg a king, List a prophet, Chopin a poet, Hertz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pliella Sibyl, and Daener a pianist? The limpidity, the smoothness and ease of Chopin's playing were after all on the physical plane. It was the poetic melancholy, the grandeur, above all the imaginative lift that were more in evidence than more sensuous sweetness. Chopin had, we know, his salon side when he played with elegance, brilliancy and coquetry, but he had dark moments when the keyboard was too small, his ideas too big for utterance. Then he astounded, thrilled his auditors. They were rare moments. His mood versatility was reproduced in his endless colorings and capricious rhythms. The instrument vibrated with these new nameless effects like the violin in Paganini's hands. It was ravishing. He was called the aerial, the undeen of the piano. There was something imponderable, fluid, vaporous, evanescent in his music that eluded analysis and eluded all but hard-headed critics. This novelty was the reason why he has been classed as a gifted amateur. And even today is he regarded by many musicians as a skillful inventor of piano passages and patterned figures instead of what he really is, one of the most daring harmonists since Bach. Chopin's elastic hand, small, thin, with lightly articulated fingers, was capable of stretching tenths with ease. Examine his first study for confirmation of this. His wrist was very supple. Stephen Heller said that it was a wonderful sight to see Chopin's small hands expand and cover a third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about to swallow a rabid whole. He played the octaves in the a-flat pollinets with infinite ease but pianissimo. Now where is the tradition when confronted by the mighty crashing of Rosenthal in this particular part of the pollinets? Of Carl Taussig, Weitzman said that he relieved the romantically sentimental Chopin of his Weltschmerz and showed him in his pristine creative vigor and wealth of imagination. In Chopin's music there are many pianists, many styles, and all are correct but they are poetically musical, logical, and individually sincere. Of his rubato I treat in the chapter devoted to the Massurcas, making also an attempt to define the soul of his playing and music. When Chopin was strong he used a play-el piano. When he was ill an air-ard, a nice fable of lists. He said that he liked the air-ard but he really preferred the play-el what could not he have accomplished with the modern grand piano? In the artist's room of the Maison play-el there stands the piano at which Chopin composed the preludes, the G-minor nocturne, the funeral march, the three supplementary etudes, the A-minor Massurca, the Terrentelle, the F-minor fantasy, and the B-minor scherzo. A brass tablet on the inside lid notes this The piano is still in good condition as regards tone and action. Michouli asserted that Chopin brought out an immense tone in Cantebiles. He had not a small tone but it was not the orchestral tone of our day. Indeed how could it be with the light action and tone of the French pianos built in the first half of the century? After all it was quality, not quantity that Chopin sought. Each one of his ten fingers was a delicately differentiated voice and these ten voices could sing at times like the morning stars. Rubenstein declared that all the pedal marks are wrong in Chopin. I doubt if any edition can ever give them as they should be for here again the individual equation comes into play. Apart from certain fundamental rules of managing the pedals, no pedagogic regulations should ever be made for the more refined Nuan Siren. The portraits of Chopin differ widely. There is the Airy Scheffer, the Vigneron, praised by Matthias, the Bovee Medallion, the Duval Drawing, and the Head by Kriotowski. Delacroix tried his powerful hand at transfixing an oil the fleeting expressions of Chopin. Felix Barillas, Franz Winterhalter, and Albert Greffle are others who tried with more or less success. Anthony Colberg painted Chopin in 1848 to 49. Kliotowski reproduces it. It is mature in expression. The Klessinger head I have seen at Perlachès. It is mediocre and lifeless. Kriotowski has caught some of the Chopin spirit in the etching that may be found in volume one, a NIEX biography. The Winterhalter portrait in Mr. Haddow's volume is too hebraic, and the Greffle is a trifle ghastly. It is the dead Chopin, but the nose is that of a predacious bird, painfully aquiline. The Ekko-Muschischny Warsaw of October 1899 in Polish, printed a picture of the composer at the age of seventeen. It is that of a thoughtful, poetic, but not handsome lad, his hair waving over a fine forehead, a feminine mouth, large aquiline nose, the nostrils delicately cut, and about his slender neck a bironic collar. Altogether a novel likeness. Like the Chopin interpretation, a satisfactory Chopin portrait is extremely rare. As some difficulty was experienced in discovering the identity of Countess Delphine Potoka, I applied in 1899 to Mr. Jawslaw Desilinski, a pianist of Buffalo, New York, for assistance. He is an authority on Polish and Russian music and musicians. Here are the facts he kindly transmitted. In 1830 three beautiful Polish women came to Nice to pass the winter. They were the daughters of Count Komar, the business manager of the wealthy Count Potoki. They were singularly accomplished. They spoke half the languages of Europe, drew well, and sang to perfection. All they needed was money to make them queens of society. This they soon obtained, and with it high rank. Their graceful manners and loveliness won the hearts of three of the greatest of noblemen. Marie married the Prince de Beauvoir Crown. Delphine became Countess Potoka. And Natalie marquiones Medici Spada. The last name died young, a victim to the zeal in favor of the cholera stricken of Rome. The other two sisters went to live in Paris and became famous for their brilliant elegance. Their sumptuous hotels or palaces were thrown open to the most prominent men of genius of their time. And hither came Chopin to meet not only with the homage due to his genius, but with a tender and sisterly friendship which proved one of the greatest consolations of his life. To the amiable Princess de Beauvoir he dedicated his famous Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, Opus 44, written in the brilliant Bravura's style for pianists of the First Force. To Delphine, Countess Potoka, he dedicated the loveliest of his valses, Opus 64, No. 1, so well transcribed by Giuseppe into a study in thirds. Therefore the picture of the Grafin Potoka in the Berlin Gallery is not that of Chopin's devoted friend. Here is another Count Tarnofsky story. Chopin liked and knew how to express individual characteristics on the piano, just as their formerly was a rather widely known fashion of describing dispositions and characters in so-called portraits, which gave to ready wits a scope for parading their knowledge of people and their sharpness of observation. So he often amused himself by playing such musical portraits. Without saying whom he had in his thoughts he illustrated the characters of a few or of several people present in the room and illustrated them so clearly and so delicately that the listeners could always guess correctly who was intended and admired the resemblance of the portrait. One little anecdote is related in connection with this which throws some light on his wit and a little pinch of sarcasm in it. During the time of Chopin's greatest brilliancy and popularity in the year 1835 he once played his musical portraits in a certain Polish salon where the three daughters of the house were the stars of the evening. After a few portraits had been extemporized one of these ladies wished to have hers Madame Delfine Potoka. Chopin in reply drew her shawl from her shoulders, threw it on the keyboard and began to play, implying in this two things. First, that he knew the character of the brilliant and famous queen of fashion so well that by heart and in the dark he was able to depict it. Secondly, that this character and this soul is hidden under habits, ornamentations, and decorations of an elegant worldly life through the symbol of elegance and fashion of that day and the presence of the piano through the shawl. Because Chopin did not label his works with any but general titles, ballads, scourtsy, studies, preludes and the like, his music sounds all the better, the listener is not pinned down to any precise mood, the music being allowed to work its particular charm without the aid of literary crutches for unimaginative minds. Dr. Nyx gives specimens of what the ingenious publisher without a sense of humor did with some Chopin's compositions. Adieu of Arsovie, so was named the Rondo Opus I. Hommage au Mozart, the variations Opus II. La Gaïté, introduction and pollinés Opus III for piano and cello. La Possiana, what a name, the Rondo à la Massure, Opus V. Mourmours de la Seine, Nocturne's Opus IX. Les Zephyres, Nocturne's Opus XV. Invitation à la Valsse, Valsse Opus XVIII. Souvenir d'Andalousie, Bolero, Opus XIX, a Bolero which sounds Polish. Le Banquet infernal, the first scherzo Opus XX, what a misnomer. Ballade en wort, the G minor ballad. There is a polyglot mess for you. Les Plantives, Nocturne's Opus XXII. La Meditation, second scherzo, B-flat minor. Meditation it is not. Il Lamento et la Consolazione, Nocturne's Opus XXXII. Les Soupirs, Nocturne's Opus XXXII. Les Favorites, Polonaise's Opus XXXIV. The C minor polonaise of this Opus was never, is not now, a favourite. The Mazurkas generally received the title of Souvenir de la Pologne. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Chopin, October 17th, 1899, a medal was struck at Warsaw, bearing on one side an artistically executed profile of the Polish composer. On the reverse, the design represents a lyre surrounded by a laurel branch, and having engraved upon it the opening bars of the Mazurka in A-flat major. The name of the great composer with the dates of his birth and death are given in the margin. Patarewski is heading a movement to remove from Paris to Warsaw the ashes of the pianist, but it is doubtful if it can be managed. Paris will certainly object to losing the bones of such a genius. Chopin's acoustic parallelisms are not so concrete, so vivid as Wagner's, nor are they so theatrical, so obvious. It does not, however, require much fancy to conjure up the drums and tramplings of three conquests in the aeroica polonaise or the F-sharp major impromptu. The rhythms of the cradle song and the barcarole are suggestive enough, and if you please there are dew drops in his cadenzas and there is the whistling of the wind in the last A minor study. Of the A-flat study Chopin said, Imagine a little shepherd who takes refuge in a peaceful grotto from an approaching storm. In the distance rushes the wind and the rain while the shepherd gently plays a melody on his flute. This is quoted by Kleszynski. There are word whisperings in the next study in F minor, whilst the symbolism of the dance, the waltz, miserca, polonaise, menuetto, bolero, shottish, croccoyac, and terrentella is admirably indicated in all of them. The bells of the funeral march, the willow-wisp character of the last movement of the B-flat minor sonata, the dainty butterfly study in G-flat, opus 25, the aeolian murmurs of the E-flat study in opus 10, the tiny prancing silvery hoofs in the F major study, opus 25, the flickering flame-like C major study number 7, opus 10, the spinning in the D-flat vaults, and the cyclonic rush of chromatic double notes in the E-flat minor scherzo. These are not studied imitations, but spontaneous transpositions to the ideal plane of primary natural phenomena. Chopin's system, if it be a system of cadenzas, fioreture embellishment, and ornamentation, is perhaps traceable to the East. In his folk music studies, Mr. H. E. Crebiel quotes the description of a rhapsodical embellishment called a lop, which, after going through a variety of ad libitum passages, rejoins the melody with as much grace as if it had never been disunited, the musical accompaniment all the while keeping time. These passages are not reckoned essential to the melody, but are considered only as grace notes introduced according to the fancy of the singer, when the only limitations by which the performer is bound are the notes peculiar to that particular melody and a strict regard to time. Chopin founded no school, although the possibilities of the piano were canalized by him. In playing, as in composition, only the broad trend of his discoveries may be followed, for his was a manner not a method. He has had for followers Liszt, Rubenstein, Mikuli, Zaremsky, Noakovsky, Xaver-Gervinska, Sansin, Schultz, Heller, Mikodey, Moritz Moschkovsky, Patorevsky, Stoyevsky, Arensky, Lechessitsky, the two Vienovskys, and a whole group of the younger Russians, Liedov, Skryabin, and the rest. Even Brahms, in his F-sharp major sonata and E-flat minor scherzo, shows Chopin's influence. Indeed, but for Chopin, much modern music would not exist. But a genuine school exists not. Penselt was only a German who fell asleep and dreamed of Chopin. To a Fallbergian euphony he has added a technical figuration not unlike Chopin's and a spirit quite teutonic in its sentimentality. Rubenstein calls Chopin the exhalation of the Third Epic in art. He certainly closed one. With a less strong rhythmic impulse and formal sense, Chopin's music would have degenerated into mere overperfumed impressionism. The French piano school of his day, indeed of today, is entirely drowned by its devotion to cold decoration and to unemotional ornamentation. Manorisms he had, what great artist has not. But the Greek in him, as in Heine, kept him from formlessness. He has seldom a landscapist, but he can handle his brush deftly before nature if he must. He paints atmosphere, the open air it even tied with consummate skill, and for playing fantastic tricks on your nerves in the imagination of the superhuman, he has a peculiar faculty. Remember that in Chopin's early days, the bironic pose, the grandiose and the horrible prevailed, witnessed the pictures of Inge and Delacroix. And Richter wrote with his heart strings saturated in moonshine and tears. Chopin did not altogether escape the artistic vices of his generation. As a man he was a bit of poseur, but on one side of his face, the side which he turned to his audience, is a note of phoppery, but was ever a detester of the sham artistic. He was sincere, and his survival when nearly all of Mendelssohn, much of Schumann, and half of Berlioz have suffered any clips, is proof positive of his vitality. The fruit of his experimentings in tonality we see in the whole Latter-day School of Piano, Dramatic, and Orchestral Composers. That Chopin may lead to the development and adoption of the new enharmonic scales, the homotonic scales, I do not know. For these, M.A. de Bertha claimed the future of music. He wrote, Now vaporously illumined by the crepuscular light of a magical sky and the boundaries of the major and minor modes, now seeming to spring from the bowels of the earth with sepulchral inflections. Melody moves with ease on the serried degrees of the enharmonic scales. Lively or slow, she always assumed in them the accents of a fatalist impossibility, for the laws of arithmetic have preceded her and there still remains, as it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity. M. Collie, or passionate, she preserves the reflected lines of a primitive rusticity which clings to the homotones in despite of their artificial origin. But all this will be in the days to come when the flat keyboard will be superseded by a janko, mini-baint, clavier contrivance when Mr. Crabiel's oriental srutis are in use and Mr. Apthorpe's nullatonic order, no key at all, then too a new Chopin may be born, but I doubt it. Despite his idiomatic treatment of the piano, it must be remembered that Chopin, under son tags in Paganini's influence, imitated both voice and violin on the keyboard. His lyricism is most human, while the portamento, the slides, trills and indescribably subtle turns are they not of the violin? Wagner said to Mr. Dan Ruther, see Fink's Wagner and his works, that Mozart's music and Mozart's orchestra are a perfect match, and equally perfect balance exists between Palestrina's choir and Palestrina's counterpoint, and I find a similar correspondence between Chopin's piano and some of his etudes and preludes. I do not care for the Lady Chopin. There is too much of the Parisian salon in that, but he has given us many things which are above the salon. Which latter statement is slightly condescending? Recollect, however, Chopin's calm depreciation of Schumann. Mr. John F. Runciman, the English critic, asserts that Chopin thought in terms of the piano and only the piano. So when we see Chopin's orchestral music or Wagner's music for the piano, we realize that neither is talking his native tongue, the tongue which nature fitted him to speak. Speaking of Chopin and the sick man, Mr. Runciman is most pertinent. These inheritors of rickets and exhausted physical frames made some of the most wonderful music of the century for us. Schubert was the most wonderful of them all, but Chopin runs them very close. He wrote less, far less than Schubert wrote. But for the quantity he did write, its finish is miraculous. It may be feverish, merely mournful, cadaver or tranquil, and entirely beautiful. But there is not a phrase that is not polished as far as a phrase will bear polishing. It is marvelous music, but all the same it is sick, unhealthy music. List's estimate of the technical importance of Chopin's works, writes Mr. W. J. Henderson, is not too large. It was Chopin who systematized the art of peddling and showed us how to use both pedals in combination to produce those wonderful effects of color which are so necessary in the performance of his music. The harmonic schemes of the simplest of Chopin's works are marvels of originality and musical loveliness. And I make bold to say that his treatment of the passing note did much toward showing later writers how to produce the restless and endless complexity of the harmony in contemporaneous orchestral music. Heinrich Pudor and his strictures on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin. Wagner is a thoroughgoing decadent and offshoot an epigonus, not a progonus. His cheeks are hollow and pale, but the Germans have the full red cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian, and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones. This morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet, caramel pole. This has a ring of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, who boasted of his Polish origin. Now listen to the fatidical pole for Zbyszewski. In the beginning there was sex. Out of sex there was nothing, and in it everything was. And sex made itself brain whence was the birth of the soul. And then, as Mr. Vance Thompson, who first Englished this mass of the dead, wrote, He pictures largely in great cosmic symbols, decorated with passionate and mystic fervors, the singular combat between the growing soul and the sex from which it feigned would be free. Arno halts of thus parodies, Pyszbyszewski. In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the victorious bacteria. Our blood lacks the white corpuscles. On the sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the frightful symphony of the flesh. It becomes objective in Chopin. He alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green meadows. He alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions. He alone rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls, all of which shows to what comically delirious lengths this sort of deleterious soul-proving may go. It would be well to consider this word decadent and its morbid implications. There is a fashion just now in criticism to over accentuate the physical and moral weaknesses of the artist. Lombroso started the fashion, Nordau carried it to its logical absurdity, yet it is nothing new. In Hazlet's Day he complains that genius is called mad by foolish folk. Mr. Newman writes in his Wagner that art in general and music in particular ought not to be condemned merely in terms of the physical degeneration or abnormality of the artist. Some of the finest work in art and literature, indeed, has been produced by men who could not from any standpoint be pronounced normal. In the case of Flaubert, of de Mopassant, of Dostoyevsky, of Poe, and a score of others, the organic system was more or less flawed, the work remains touched with that universal quality that gives artistic permanence even to perceptions born of the abnormal. Mr. Newman might have added other names to his list, those of Michelangelo and Beethoven and Swinburne. Really, is any great genius quite sane, according to Philistine standards? The answer must be negative. The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack. Instead of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an abnormal sense is lugged in, and though these imputations of degeneracy, moral and physical, have in some cases proven true, the genius of the accused one can in no wise be denied. But then, as Mr. Philip Hale asks, why this timidity at being called decadent? What's in the name? Havilok Ellis in his masterly study of jurors called Hoismans, considers the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called decadence. Technically, a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialization, the homogeneous and spencerian phraseology having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole. The second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts. Then he proceeds to show in literature that Sir Thomas Brown, Emerson, Pater, Carlisle, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman are decadents, not in any invidious sense, but simply in the breaking up of the whole for the benefit of its parts. Nietzsche is quoted to the effect that in the period of corruption in the evolution of societies we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times marked the operations of a community as a whole has now simply been transferred to the individuals themselves. And this aggrandizement of the individual produces an even greater amount of energy. And further, Ellis. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes. Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it. Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent. And St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art. We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great, but they need not be fool us. We are not called upon to air our moral indignation over the base end of the musical clef. I recommend the entire chapter to such man as Lombroso Levi, Max Nordow, and Heinrich Pudor, who have yet to learn that all confusion of intellectual substances is foolish. Oscar Bay states the Chopin case most excellently. Chopin is a poet. It has become a very bad habit to place this poet in the hands of our youth. The concertos and pollinés is being put aside. No one lends himself worse to youthful instruction than Chopin. Because his delicate touches inevitably seem perverse to the youthful mind, he has gained the name of a morbid genius. The grown man who understands how to play Chopin, whose music begins where that of another leaves off, whose tones show the supremus mastery in the tongue of music, such a man will discover nothing morbid in him. Chopin, a pole, strikes sorrowful chords which do not occur frequently to healthy normal persons. But why is a pole to receive less justice than a German? We know that the extreme of culture is closely allied to decay, for perfect ripeness is but the foreboding of corruption. Children, of course, do not know this. And Chopin himself would have been much too noble ever to lay bare his mental sickness to the world. And his greatness lies precisely in this, that he preserves the mean between immaturity and decay. His greatness is his aristocracy. He stands among musicians in his faultless vesture, a noble from head to foot. The sublimest emotions toward whose refinement whole generations had tended, the last things in our soul whose foreboding is interwoven with the mystery of judgment day, having his music found their form. Further on, I shall attempt, I write the word with a pitibular gesture, in a sort of Chopin variorum, to analyze the salient aspects technical and aesthetic of his music. To translate into prose into any language no matter how poetical, the images aroused by his music is impossible. I am forced to employ the technical terminology of other arts, but against my judgment. Read Mr. W. F. Appthorpe's disheartening dictum in, by the way, The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of music it never can be. It can never truly translate what is most essential and characteristic in its expression. It is but something that we have half unconsciously imputed to music, nothing that really exists in music. The shadowy miming of Chopin's soul has nevertheless a significance for this generation. It is now the reign of the brutal, the realistic, the impossible in music. Formal excellence is neglected and programmed music has reduced art to the level of an anecdote. Chopin neither preaches nor paints, yet his art is decorative and dramatic, though in the climate of the ideal. He touches earth and its emotional issues in Poland only, otherwise his music is a pure aesthetic delight, an artistic enchantment freighted with no ethical or theatric messages. It is poetry made audible, the soul written in sound. All that I can faintly indicate is the way it affects me, this music with the petals of a glowing rose and the heart of grey ashes. Its analogies to Po, Verlaine, Shelley, Keats, Heine and Mikiewicz are but critical signposts for Chopin is incomparable, Chopin is unique. Our interval, writes Walter Pater, is brief. Few pass it recollectively and with full understanding of its larger rhythms and more urgent colors. Many endure it in frivol and violence, the majority in bored, sullen submission. Chopin, the new Chopin, is a foe to ennui and the spirit that denies. In his exquisite, soul-sorrow, sweet world pain, we may find rich, impersonal relief. End of Chapter 4 Recording by M. J. Frank, Portland, Oregon Chopin, the man and his music, by James Honaker Chapter 5 Poet and Psychologist Part 1 Music is an order of mystic, sensuous mathematics, a sounding mirror, an oral mode of motion. It addresses itself on the formal side to the intellect. In its content of expression, it appeals to the emotions. Ribo, admirable psychologist, does not hesitate to proclaim music as the most emotional of the arts. It acts like a burn, like heat, cold or a caressing contact, and is most dependent on psychological conditions. Music, then, the most vague of the arts in the matter of representing the concrete, is the swiftest, sureest agent for attacking the sensibilities. The cry made manifest, as Wagner asserts, it is a cry that takes on fanciful shapes, each soul interpreting it in an individual fashion. Music and beauty are synonymous, just as their form and substance are indivisible. Havlop Alice is not the only esthetician who sees the marriage of music and sex. No utter art tells us such old forgotten secrets about ourselves. It is in the mightiest of all instincts. The primitive sex traditions of the race before man was, said music, is rooted. Beauty is a child of love. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has imprisoned in a sonnet the almost intangible feeling aroused by music, the feeling of having pursued in the immemorial past the root of aphinescence. Is it this guy's vast vaude or ocean sound, said his life self, and draws my life from me, and by instinct, ineffable decree, holds my breast, quailing on the bitter bound? Nay. Is it life or death? Thus sun the crowned, that met the tide of all emergency, now notes my separate wave, and to what sea, it's difficult to add his labour and the ground. Oh, what is this, that knows the road I came? The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, the lifted shifted steeps and all's away. That draws around me at last, this wind-warm space, and in regenerate rapture turns my face upon the diviates' covets of dismay. This, as your psychology, gives music its power, its steers straight for the soul through the cortical cells. During the last half of the 19th century, two men became rulers of musical emotion, Richard Wagner and Frédéric François Chopin. The music of the latter is a most raffeting gesture that art has yet made. Wagner and Chopin, the microcosm and the microcosm. Wagner has made the largest impersonal synthesis obtainable of the personal influences that thrill our lives, Christ Haflick Alice. Chopin, a young man, sleight of frame, furiously playing out upon the keyboard his soul, the soul of his nation, the soul of his time, is the most individual composer that has ever sat humming the looms of our dreams. Wagner and Chopin have a motor element of their music, that is fiercer, intenser, and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For them it is not the budistic void in which shapes slowly form and fade, their sarcical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age, they moulded their age, and we listen eagerly to them, to these vibrant prophetic voices so sweetly corrosive, bardic and appealing. Chopin being nearer the soil and the selection of forms, his style and structure are more naive, more original than Wagner's, while his medium, less artificial, is easier felt than the vast empty frame of the theatre. Through their intensity of conception and of life, both men touch issues, so widely dissimilar in all ales. Chopin had great melodic, and as great harmonic genius as Wagner. He made more themes. He was, as Rubenstein wrote, the last of the original composers, but his scope was not scenic. He preferred the stage of assault to the windy spaces of the music-drama. This is the interior play, the eternal conflict between body and soul. He viewed music through his temperament, and it often becomes so imponderable, so bodiless, as to suggest a forced dimension of the art. Space is obliterated. Whist it shall bear, one does not get, as from Beathorven, the sense of spiritual vastness of the overarching sublime. There is the pathos of spiritual distance, but it is pathos, not sublimity. His soul was a star and dwelt apart, so not in the Miltonic or Werswersian sense. A Shelley-like tenuity at times winks his thought, and he is a creator of a new thrill within the thrill. The charm of the dying fall, the unspeakable cadence of regret for the love that is dead, is in his music. Like John Keats, he sometimes sees jammed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in very lands forlorn. Chopin, subtle-sword psychologist, is more kind to Keats than Shelley. He is a greater artist than a thinker. His philosophy is of the beautiful, as was Keats, and while he lingers by the river's edge to catch up the song of the reeds, his gaze is often affixed on the querying planets. He is nature's most exquisite sounding board and vibrates to her with intensity, colour and vivacity that have no parallel. Stained with melancholy, his joy is never thought of the strong man rejoicing in his muscles. Yet his very tenderness is tonic. And his cry is ever restrained by an attic sense of proportion. Like Alfred de Vigny, he dwelt in a tour d'ivoire that faced to the west, and for him the sunrise was not, but o' the miraculous moons he discovered, the sunsets and clouds shine. His notes cast great rich shadows. These chains of blown roses drench him the dew of beauty. Pumpian colours are too restricted and flat. He divulges a world of half tones, some enfolding sunny spots of greenery, or singing in silvery shade, the song of chromatic ecstasy, others, huge fragments of waters like rebounding hail, and black upon black. Chopin is a colour genius of the piano. His eye was attuned to Hughes, the most fragile and attenuated. He can weave harmonies that are as ghostly as a luna rainbow, and luna-like in the libration are some of his melodies, glimpses, mysterious and vast as of a strange world. His utterances are always dynamic, and he emerges at times as if from Goya's tomb, and ashes with sardonic finger, nadre and dust. But this spirit of denial is not an abiding mood. Chopin flows in that of tone, oversaw's wearied with rankers and revolts, bridges, salty as strange seas of misery, and presently we are viewing a mirrored, a fabulous universe wherein deaths is dead, and love reigns lord of all. Part 2 N. said that every apoch is a sphinx which plunges into the abyss as soon as its problem is solved. Born in the very upheaval of the Romantic Revolution, a revolution evoked by the intensity of its motion, rather than by the power of its ideas, Chopin was not altogether one of the insurgents of art. Just when his individual soul germinated, who may tell? In his early music I discovered the roots and fibres of hummel and field. His growth, involuntary, inevitable, put forth strange sprouts, and he saw in the piano an instrument of two dimensions, a third, and so his music deepened and took on stranger colours. The keyboard had never sung so before. He forged his formula. The new, apocalyptic seal of melody and harmony was let fall upon it. Sounding scrolls, delicious arabesques, gorgeous and tinned, Marshall, Lyric, a resonance of emerald, a sobbing of fountains, as that Chopin of the gutter, Paul Verlaine, Hezid, the tear-crystallized midway, an arrested pearl where overheard in his music, and Europe felt a new shudder of sheer delight. The literary quality is absent, and so is the acical. Chopin may prophecy, but he never flames into the diverse tongues of the upper heaven. Compared with his passionate abandonment to the dance, Brahms is a loutsee of music, the great infant born with grey hair and with a slow smile of childhood. Chopin seldom smiles, and while some of his music is young, he does not raise in the mind pictures of fatuous romans of youth. His passion is mature, self-sustained, and never at a loss for the more proper. And with what marvellous vibration he gammets to passions, bestuning them with carnations and great white ubrosers, but the dark dramatic motive is never lost in the decorative wiles of this magician. As a man grew, he laid aside his pretty garlands, and his line became sterner. Its tracery is more gothic. He made Bach his chief god, and within the woven walls of his strange harmonies, he sings the history of a soul. A soul convulsed by antique madness, by the memory of awful things, a soul lured by beauty to secret glades wherein sacrifice of rites are performed, to the song's sound of unearthly music. Like Maurice de Guerin, Chopin patchily strove to decipher cutis enigma, and passionately demanded of the sphinx that he finds. Upon the shores of water-oceans, Afzay rolls the stones that hides them, o macca-raves. His name was as a stroke of a bell to the romances. He remained aloof from them, though in a sympathetic attitude. The classic is but a romantic dead, said an acute critic. Chopin was a classic without knowing it. He compassed for the dances of his land, what Bach did for the older forms. With en, he led the spirit of revolt, that enclosed his note of agitation in a frame beautiful. The colour, the lice perpetual escape from the formal, deceived his critics, shaman, among the rest. Chopin, like Flaubert, was the last of the idealists, the first of the realists. The newness of his form, his linear counterpoint, misled the critics, who accused him of the lack of it. Shaman's formal deficiency detracts from much of his music, and because of their formal genius, Wagner and Chopin will live. To Chopin might be addressed some middle-dark beladon's words. When your hand writes a perfect line, the cherubim descent to find pleasure therein as in a mirror. Chopin wrote many perfect lines. He is, above all, the faultless lyricist, the swim-burn, the master of fiery, many rhythms, the chanter of songs before sunrise, of the burden of the flesh, the sting of desire and large moulded lace of passionate freedom. His music is, to quote Thoreau, a proud, sweet satire on the meaners of our life. He had no feeling for the epic. His genius was too concentrated, and though he could be furiously dramatic, the sustained majesty of blank verse was denied him. With musical ideas he was ever gravid, with their intensity as apparent to their brevity, and it must not be forgotten that with Chopin the form was conditioned by the idea. He took up the dancing patterns of Poland because they suited his vivid inner life. He transformed them, idolised them, attaining to more prolonged phraseology and denser architecture in his belads and scherzi. But these periods are passionate, never philosophical. All artists are androgynous. In Chopin the feminine often prevails, but it must be noted that this quality is a distinguishing sign of masculine lyric genius, for when he unbends, coquets and may graceful confessions or whip his lyric loveliness at fade, then his mother's sex peeps out, a picture of the capricious, beautiful, tyrannical Polish woman. When he stiffens his soul, when Russia gets into his nostrils, from the smokin' flame of his polonaise, the tantalising despair of his mazurka, so testimony to the strong man's soul and rebellion. But it is often a physical muscarade. The sag of Malancholi, as soon felt, and the old Chopin, the subjective Chopin, wails afresh in melodic moodiness. That he could attempt far flights, one may see in his B-flat minor sonata, in his Scherzi, in several of the Balade, above all in the F minor fantasy. In this great work, the technical invention keeps pace with the inspiration. It coheres, there is not a flaw in the reverberating marble, not a rift in the idea. If Chopin, diseased to death's door, could erect such a palace of dreams what might not he have dared had he been healthy. But force from his misery came sweetness and strengths, like honey from the lion. He grew amazingly the last ten years of his existence, grew with the promise that recalls Keats, Shelley, Mozart, Schubert, and the rest of the early slaughtered angelic crew. His flame-like spirit waxed and waned in the gusty surprises of a disappointed life. To the earth for consolation he bent his ear and called to echoes of cosmic comedy, the far-off laughter of the hills, the lament of the sea, and the muttering of its steps. These things with tales of somber cloud and shining skies and whisperings of strange creatures dancing timidly in pevanine twilight, he traced upon the ivory keys of his instrument, and the world was richer for a poet. Chopin is not only the poet of the piano, he is also the poet of music, the most poetic of composers. Compared with him, Bach seems to make of solid polyphonic prose, Beethoven, a scooper of stars, a master of growling storms, Mozart, a weave of gate-hapestries, Schurman, a divine stammerer. Schurbert, alone of all the composers, resembles him in his lyric prodigality. Both were masters of melody, but Chopin was a master-workman of the two, and polished, after bending and beating, his theme fresh from the fire of his forge. He knew that to complete his wailing illiates, the strong hand of the reviser was necessary, and he also realized that nothing is more difficult for the genius than to retain his gift. Of all natures, the most prone to pessimism, procrastination and vanity, the artist is most apt to become enewed. It is not easy to flame always at the focus, to burn fiercely with the central fire. Schurman uses this, and cultivates his ego. He saw, too, that a lot of beauty, for beauty's sake, was fascinating, but led to the way called madness. So he rooted his art, gave it the earth of Poland, and its deliqueness is put off to the day, when a new system of musical esotism will have rooted to the old, when the ugly shall be king, and melody the handmaiden of science. But until that most grieves and undesired time, he will catch the music of our souls, and give it cry and flesh. Part 3 Schurbar is the open door in music. Besides having been a poet, and giving vibratory expression to his concrete, he was something else. He was a pioneer. Pioneer, because in youth, he had bowed to the tyranny of the diatonic scale, and savoured the illicit joys of the chromatic. It is briefly curious that Schurbar is regarded purely as a poet among musicians, and not as a practical musician. They will swear him a phenomenal virtuoso, but your musician, orchestral, and theoretical, raises at the eyebrow of the supercilious, if Schurbar is called creative. A cunning finger smiths, a mould of decorative patterns, a master at making new figures. All this is granted. But speak of Schurbar's past breaker in the harmonic forest, that true forest of numbers, as a forger of melodic metal, the sweetest, purest, and temper, and lo! you are regarded as one mentally asque. Schurbar invented many new harmonic devices. He untied the cord that was restrained within the octave, leading it into his dangerous, but delectable land of extended harmonies, and how he chromaticised the prudish, rigid garden of German harmony, how he moistened it with the flashing, gentle waters until it grew bold and brilliant with promise. A French theorist, Albert Lavignac, calls Schurbar a product of the German romantic school. This is hitching the star to the wagon. Schurbar influenced Schurman. It can be proven a hundred times, and Schurman understood Schurbar else he could not have written the Schurbar of Degarnoval, which quite out Schurbar's Schurbar. Schurbar is a musical soul of Poland. He incarnates its political passion. Versus Laugh, by adopting a Parisian, he is open door, because he admitted into the west eastern musical ideas, eastern tonalities, risms, infiny, the slavic, all that is objectionable, decadent, and dangerous. He inducted Europe into his mysteries and seduction of the Orient, his music lies wavering between the east and the west, a neurotic man, his disused trembling, his sensibilities aflame, the offspring of a nation doomed to pain and partition. Schurbar was quite natural for him to go to France. Poland had ever been her historical client, the France that overheated all Europe. Schurbar, born after two revolutions, the true child of insurrection, chose Paris for his second home. Revolts at easily upon his inherited aristocratic instincts. No proletarian is quite so thorough a revolutionist as a born aristocrat, witness Nietzsche, and Schurbar, and the bloodless battle of the romantics, and the silent warring of slav against Tudon, Gaul and Anglo-Saxon, will ever stand as protagonist of the artistic drama. All that followed, the breaking up of the old hard and fast boundaries on the musical map, is due to Schurbar, a pioneer, he has been rewarded as such for his allied ignorement or bland condescension. He smashed the portals of the convention that forbade a man bearing his sword to the multitude. The psychology of music is the gainer thereby. Schurbar, like Vilazquez, could paint single figures perfectly, but to great, masked effects, he was a stranger. Wagner did not fail to profit by his marvellously drawn sword portraits. Schurbar taught his country the paitis of patriotism and showed Grieg the value of a national awe. He practically recreated the harmonic charts. He gave voice to the individual, himself a product of a nation dissolved by overwrought individualism. As Schurman assures us, his is the proudest and most poetic spirit of his time. Schurbar, subdued by his familiar demon, was a droid specimen of Nietzsche's ubermensch, which is but an amazons oversaw shorn of her wings. Schurban's transcendental scheme of techniques is the image of a supernormal lift in composition. He sometimes robs music of its corporeal vesture and his transcendentalism, lies not alone in his striving after strange tonalities and rhythms, but in seeking the emotionally reckoned eyed. Self-tomanted, ever a dweller on the threshold, he saw visions that outshone the glories of her sheesh and his nerve-swept soul ground in its mills, exceeding fine music. His vision is of beauty. He persistently groved at the hem of her robe, but never sought to transpose or to tone the commonplace of life. For this he reproved Schubert. Such intensity cannot be purchased, but at the cost of breasts of sanity, and his picture of life is not so high, wide, sublime, or awful as bead-hovens, yet it is just as inevitable, sincere and as tragically poignant. Stanislav Przybyrczewski, in his Tourpsychologie des Individuums, approaches the morbid Schubert. The Schubert who threw open to his world the east, who waved his chromatic wand to Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saint, Goldmark, Rubinstein, Richard Strauss, Dvorak, and all Russia, with his continental composers. This Polish psychologist, a fulgurant expounder of Nietzsche, finds in Schubert face and mania the truest stigma of the mad individualist, the individual who, in the first instance, is normed but an oxidation apparatus. Nietzsche and Schubert are the most outspoken individualities of the age. He forgets Wagner. Schubert himself is the finest flowering of a morbid and rare culture. His music is a series of psychoses. He has the Zienzucht of a marvelously constituted nature. The shrill dissonance of his nerves, as seen in the psychological outbursts of the B-minus Gerzo, is the agony of a tortured soul. The piece is Schubert's Iliad, in it are the ghosts that lurk near the hidden alleys of the soul, but here come out to leer and exalt Orla, the Orla of Guy de Maupassant, the sinister doppelganger of mankind, which races with him to the gall of eternity, perhaps to outstrip and master him of the next evolutionary cycle, master as does man, the brute curation. This Orla, according to Blicz Bicevsky, conquered Schubert and became vocal in his music. This Orla has mastered Nietzsche, who, quite mad, gave the world that Bible of the Übermensch, the dancing Loic Rose-Brom, also sprach Zarathustra. Nietzsche's discipline is half-right. Schubert's moods are often morbid, his music often pathological. Beethoven, too, is morbid, but in his kingdom so vast, so varied, the mood is lost or lightly felt. While in Schubert's province it looms a maleficient opus tree, with flowers of evil and its leaves glycering with essentials. But so keen for symmetry, for all the term formal beauty implies, a chaperre that seldom does its morbidity madden, is for loctiousness poison. His music has its morose, but also its upland, where the gale blows strong and true. Perhaps all art is, as the incorrigible Norder declares, a slight deviation from the normal, so rebore scoffs at the existence of any standard of normality. The butcher and the candlestick maker have their orla, their secret soul convulsions, which they set down to taxation, the vapours, or weather. Schubert has surprised the musical melody of the century. He is its chief spokesman, after the vague, mild, noble dreams of Bar and Shelley and Napoleon, the awakening fan to those disillusioned souls, Wagner, Nietzsche and Schubert. Wagner sought in the apical rehabilitation of a vanished Valhalla, a surcease from the world-pane. He consciously selected his anodyne, and in the meister-singer, touched a consoling earse, Schubert and Nietzsche, temperamentally finer and more sensitive than Wagner, to one musical, to the other intellectually, sang themselves in music and philosophy, because they were so constituted, their nerves rode some to their deaths. Neiser found a serenity and repose of Wagner, for Neiser was a sane, and both suffered mortally from hyperastasia, the penalty of all sick genius. Schubert's music is the aesthetic symbol of a personality nurtured on patriotism, pride and love, that it is better expressed by the piano, is because of that instrument's idiosyncrasies of effervescent tone, sensitive touch, and wide range in dynamics. It was Schubert's lyre, the orchestra of his heart, from it he exhorted music the most intimate since Sappho. Among lyric moderns, N. Closely resembles the pole. Both sang because they suffered, sang ineffable and ironic melodies. Both will endure, because of their brave sincerity, their surpassing art. The musical, the psychical history of the 19th century, would be incomplete without the name of Frédéric François Schubert. Wagner externalised its dramatic soul. In Schubert, the mad lyricism of the time spirit is made eloquent. According to his music, modulated to the pose of his age, he is one of its heroes, a hero of whom Swinburne might have sung. O strong winged soul was prophetic, lips hot with the blood beads of song, with tremor of hard strings magnetic, with thoughts as thunder and throng, with consonant ardour of chords, pierce man's soles as with swords, and hails them hearing along. End of chapter 5