How music grew, from prehistoric times to the present day

If you have ever seen a sculptor modeling in clay you know that his great problem is to keep it from drying, because only in the moist state can it be moulded into shape. In the same way, we have seen in following the growth of music, that no matter how beautiful a style of composition is, as soon as it becomes set in form, or in other words as soon as it hardens, it changes. Let us look back to the period of the madrigal. You remember that the early madrigals were of rare beauty but later the composers became complicated and mechanical in their work and the beauty and freshness of their compositions were lost. The people who felt this, reached out for new forms of expression and we see the opera with its arias and recitatives as a result. The great innovator Monteverde, broke this spell of the old polyphonic form, which, like the sculptor’s clay, had stiffened and dried.

The same thing happened after Bach brought the suite and fugue to their highest. The people again needed something new, and another form grew out of the suite, the sonata of Philip Emanuel Bach, Haydn and Mozart. The works of these men formed the Classic Period which reached its greatest height with the colossus, Beethoven. As we told you, he used the form inherited from Haydn and Mozart, but added much of a peculiar power which expressed himself. But again the clay hardened! Times and people changed, poetry, science and philosophy led the way to more personal and shorter forms of expression. Up to Bach’s time, music, outside of the folk-song, had not been used to express personal feeling; the art was too young and had grown up in the Church which taught the denial of self-expression.

In the same way, the paintings up to the time of the 16th century did not express personal feelings and happenings, but were only allowed to be of religious subjects, for the decorating of churches and cathedrals.

Beethoven, besides being the peak of the classic writers, pointed the way for the music of personal expression, not mere graceful expression as was the fashion, which was called the “Romantic School” because he was big enough to combine the sonata form of classic mould with the delicacy, humor, pathos, nobility and singing beauty for which the people of his day yearned.

This led again to the crashing of the large and dried forms made perfect by Beethoven and we see him as the bridge which leads to Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann and we see them expressing in shorter form every possible human mood.

Beethoven was great enough to bring music to maturity so that it expressed not only forms of life, but life itself.

How and what did he do? First, he became master of the piano and could from childhood sit down and make marvelous improvisations. He studied all forms of music, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration. At first he followed the old forms, as we see in the first two symphonies. In the third symphony, the Eroica, he changed from the minuet (a relic of the old dance suite) to the scherzo, an enlarged form of the minuet with more chance for musical expression,—the minuet grown up. In sonatas like The Pathetique, he used an introduction and often enlarged the coda or ending, to such an extent that it seems like an added movement, so rich was he in power in working over a theme into beautiful musical speech.

Later we see him abandoning set forms and writing the Waldstein Sonata in free and beautiful ways. Even the earlier sonatas like The Moonlight and its sister, Opus 27, No. 2, are written so freely that they are called Fantasy Sonatas, so full of free, flowing melody has the sonata become under his hand.

His work becomes so lofty and so grand, whether in humorous or in serious vein, that when we compare his compositions to those of other men, he seems like one of the loftiest mountain peaks in the world, reaching into the heavens, yet with its base firmly standing in the midst of men.

A Composer of Instrumental Music

Beethoven was distinctly a composer of instrumental music, although he wrote the opera Fidelio, also the Ninth Symphony in which he made great innovations in symphonic form and introduced the Choral.

Up to this time, composers in the Classic School had paid more attention to the voice and to the soloists in the concertos than to the orchestra. Thus we see men like Mozart leaving a space toward the end of the movement in a concerto for the soloist to make up his own closing salute to his audience before the orchestra ended the piece. These cadenzas became acrobatic feats in which the players wrote the most difficult “show-off” music. Beethoven, with his love for the orchestra and his feeling that the soloist and the orchestra should make one complete unit, wrote the cadenza himself and thereby made the composition one beautiful whole rather than a sandwich of the composer, soloist and composer again.

Fancy all this from a man who, when he multiplied 14 × 26 had to add fourteen twenty-sixes in a column! We saw this column of figures written on a manuscript of Beethoven’s in an interesting collection, and the story goes that Beethoven tried to verify a bill that was brought to him in the midst of a morning of hard work at his composing.

Besides his symphonies, concertos and sonatas in which are light moods, dark moods, gay and sad moods, spiritual heights and depths, filling hearers with all beauty of emotion,—he wrote gay little witty things, like the German Dances, The Fury over the Loss of a Penny (which is really funny), four overtures, many English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Italian folk-song settings. He also wrote one oratorio called The Mount of Olives, two masses, one of which is the magnificent Missa Solemnis, one concerto for the violin that is the masterpiece of its kind, and the one grand opera Fidelio.

Thus we have told you about the bridge to the “Romantic Movement” which will follow in the next chapter.

Beethoven could have said with Robert Browning’s “Abt Vogler”

The Ancestry of the Pianoforte

We feel so familiar with the Pianoforte that we call it piano for short and almost forget that it is dignified by the longer name. We forget too, that Scarlatti, Rameau and Bach played not on the piano but on its ancestors, and that Byrd, Bull and Gibbon did not write their lovely dance suites for the instrument on which we play them today.

The Pianoforte’s family tree has three distinct branches,—strings, sounding board and hammers. First we know the piano is a stringed instrument, although it hides its chief characteristic, not under a bushel, but behind a casing of wood.

Where Stringed Instruments Came From

We have seen the stringed instrument developed from the bow when primitive man winged his arrow in the hunt, and heard its twang. Later desiring fuller tone, the sounding board grew, when early peoples sank bow-like instruments and reeds into a gourd which increased and reflected the sound as the metal reflector behind a light intensifies it.

Strings to produce sound, must be rubbed, like the bow drawn across violin strings, plucked as the mandolin or the harp is plucked, or struck with a hammer as was the dulcimer.

In the ancient times there were two instruments much alike, the psaltery and the dulcimer, both with a triangular or rectangular sounding box across which are stretched strings of wire or gut fastened to tuning pins. The difference between these two “relatives” is that the psaltery is plucked with fingers or a plectrum, and the dulcimer is struck with hammers. So the psaltery is the grandfather of the virginal, spinet, clavecin, and harpsichord, while the dulcimer is the remote ancestor of the pianoforte.

The first record we find of a dulcimer is a stone picture near Nineveh, of an Assyrian king in 667 B.C., celebrating a triumphal procession. This dulcimer, suspended from the neck of the player, is being struck with a stick in his right hand, while his left palm on the string checks the tone. Here we have the first stringed instrument which was hammered and muffled, two important elements in the piano.

In Persia the dulcimer was called the santir and is still used under different names in the Orient and other places. In Greece and other countries it was called the psalterion, and in Italy, the dolcimelo. Later, the Germans had a sort of dulcimer called the Hackbrett, probably because it was “hacked” as the butcher hacks meat! We see the dulcimer in many shapes according to the fancy of the people who use it. The word comes from dulce—the Latin for “sweet” and melos—the Greek for “melody.”

As people grew wiser and more musical, they padded their hammers or mallets; this gave the idea for the padded hammer of the piano for checking the tone as our Ninevehan did with his left palm.

Should you ever listen to a gypsy band, you will hear the dulcimer or cembalo.

The third element in the making of the piano is the keyboard.

It is evident that the piano keyboard and the organ keyboard are practically the same. The water organs of the Greeks and Romans had keyboards, but as the Christian Church forbade the use of organs as sacrilegious, keyboards were lost for almost a thousand years.

The keyboard seems to have developed from the Greek monochord used in the Middle Ages to give the pitch in convent singing. It was tuned with a movable bridge or fret pushed back and forth under the strings and fingers. First it was stretched with weights hung at one end. It was a simple matter to add strings to produce more tones, later tuning pins were added and finally a keyboard. This was the whole principle of the clavichord. (We might say that the monochord and dulcimer are the Adam and Eve of the pianoforte family.)

The Clavichord

In the clavichord, each key drove a metal tangent against a string and was held there as was the bridge of the monochord. The tone was dependent on the place where the tangent struck. The string vibrated on one side of the tangent, but the other part of the string was deadened by a strip of cloth. The strings were about the same length and often two or three keys operated the same string so that it was possible to make a very small instrument. In the 16th century, it usually had twenty keys; in the 18th century, four octaves or fifty keys, but of course there were less than fifty strings! Later, every key had its own string and these were called bundfrei or unfretted clavichords, while the others were called gebunden or fretted. The clavichord was usually small enough to carry under the arm, although sometimes it was made with legs. Should you be in New York you must see the collection of beautifully ornamented clavichords and harpsichords at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Crosby Brown Collection.

Bach liked the clavichord better than the harpsichord and the early pianos that blossomed in his day. Because of the pressure of the tangent, it was possible to get a delicately graded tone when the key was pressed, a wavy, rocking, pulsating effect, which made each player’s performance very individual, but to us, now, it sounds thin and metallic. The word “clavichord” comes from clavis—a key, and chord—a string. Clavichords and also virginals were often played in pairs, no doubt for richer effect and for volume.

Large instruments developed slowly because before the 11th century, wire-drawing (making) was not known, so all keyed string instruments were strung with gut.

Harpsichord

The harpsichord, we like to call the “Jack and Quill” instrument—for it is played by keys, jacks and quills which pluck its strings, instead of pressing or hammering. This is like a keyboarded zither, and is shaped something like our grand piano.

Each key has a string. Pressing the key pushes a jack, from whose side projects a small quill or spine which twangs the string. When the key is released, the quill slips back into the first position and a damper falls upon the string. The strings vary in length according to the pitch for the harpsichord has no tangent to divide off the string as had the clavichord and monochord. Thus the harpsichord on account of its long and short strings is not square like the clavichord but is shaped more like the harp and the grand piano.

Some one said that the harpsichord tone was “a scratch with a note at the end of it.” And yet, when we hear Wanda Landowska play the harpsichord today, it sounds very beautiful indeed. Smaller varieties are called virginals and spinets. Perhaps the spinet is named for its inventor Spinetti, or perhaps the word comes from “spinet” meaning spine, a thorn or point. The virginal comes from the word virgo—meaning maiden and was the popular instrument for the “ladies” of the day. There were larger harpsichords, too, with two and three keyboards and very many varieties, both small and large. The clavichord and the harpsichord were known from the 15th century and were associated with the organ until the 17th century, when the Ruckers family developed harpsichord making into a fine art. The first mention of the harpsichord, is in the “Rules of the Minnesingers” (1404).

The First Pianofortes

Early in the 18th century, music ceased to be just pretty sounds, and musicians wanted instruments on which they could express deeper feelings and began to look around for some way to make the harpsichord meet this need.

It came about in this way. Pantaleone Hebenstreit, a fiddler at the Saxon court played a dulcimer which he enlarged by adding to it a second system of strings. He tuned it in equal temperament, as Bach had the clavichord, and used hammers on it which produced very beautiful and loud tones. Louis XIV saw this, and liking it, called it the Pantaleone. But, shortly after this, Gottlieb Schroeter heard it and said, “only through hammers can the harpsichord become expressive.”

So in 1721 Schroeter submitted to the King of Saxony his idea of a harpsichord which could play soft and loud or in Italian piano and forte (the fortepiano or loud-soft instrument). But as he had none made he did not get credit for the invention until after much argument, based on accounts in his diary. As always, when a thing is needed someone will invent it.

The man who actually made the first pianoforte was an Italian, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1653–1731) of Padua; and the Frenchman Marius, and the German, Christoph Gottlieb Schroeter, followed suit. In 1709, Cristofori exhibited harpsichords (gravicembali) with hammer action capable of producing piano and forte effects. He advertised it in the paper as a gravicembali col piano e forte. By 1711, the fame of his invention had spread into Germany. In February, 1716, Marius in France tried to improve the harpsichord with hammers which he called the clavecin à mallets, and made two types.

Schroeter about this time made the two kinds also. The piano had little standing, however, until Gottfried Silbermann took advantage of Bach’s criticism of his pianos and made a grand type.

The next experimenters in pianos were, Frederici of Gera (died in 1779), who made the square. Spaeth, who made grands and George Andreas Stein in Augsburg, who was trained by Silbermann, invented the Viennese action on which a light touch was possible and for this reason Mozart used it.

Burkhardt Tschudi, a piano maker in London, had a Scotch assistant, James Broadwood, who became his partner (1770). Later the firm became John Broadwood and Sons, which it has remained. It was the first to use the damper and the soft pedals. For some time they used Zumpe’s style of square piano but later made their own. This house used the Cristofori action which made a more solid and heavier tone than the Viennese action, and was known as the English action, excellent for large rooms and concerts. These actions suited the different methods of piano playing.

Stein’s daughter Nanette Streicher, a marvelous player and a cultivated woman, upon inheriting her father’s piano business moved to Vienna and for forty years was considered an expert in the piano world. Thayer, in his life of Beethoven says: “In May, Beethoven, on the advice of medical men, went to Baden, whither he was followed by his friend Mrs. Streicher ... who took charge of his lodgings and his clothes, which appear to have been in a deplorable state.” Thayer says that Beethoven always preferred the piano of Stein to any others. Beethoven wrote to Nanette: “Perhaps you do not know, though I have not always had one of your pianos, that since 1809 I have invariably preferred yours.”

So, you see a woman could keep house and be a manufacturer as well, even in the early 19th century!

Then came Sebastien Erard (1752–1831) who made the first French piano in 1777. Erard invented many new things for the piano and formed a company in England. This firm was advertised on the hand bill announcing Liszt’s concert in Paris when he was twelve years old.

Added to these names is Ignaz Josef Pleyel (1757–1831), who also made a piano with a very sympathetic tone which Chopin made famous from 1831. The Pleyel and the Erard are still the leading pianos of France.

For some years the pianoforte went through many changes. As you are not learning to make a piano, you will have to take it for granted that there were many many steps taken from this time on to make the modern piano. However, the thing that held it back was the all-wood frame which could not stand the strain of the tightly drawn strings and it was a long time before the makers gave up the beautiful wood for the sturdier metal. About the time of Beethoven, playing the piano became a more complicated thing than it had been, and a grown up instrument was needed, so musical instrument makers had to “step lively” to keep pace with the music. At every concert, and often in the middle of a piece, the player would have to stop to retune the instrument on which he was playing. Therefore, all energy was bent to making the frame of the piano rigid, the strings more elastic and the pins firmer, and the metal frame was used.

All these special things were accomplished in later years. Some of the inventors were John Isaac Hawkins, an Englishman, who patented the upright pianoforte in 1800 in the United States, William Allen, a Scotchman, who introduced metal braces in 1820 and Alpheus Babcock, who patented the iron frame in a single cast, in Boston, in 1825. It was an American, Jonas Chickering, of Boston, who invented the complete iron frame for the concert grand, and at present, after many years, the instrument which seventy-five years ago bent under the pull of the strings, can now stand the strain of thirty tons! Chickering made pianos as early as 1823.

After this there was much experimentation in pianos, culminating here, in the pianos made by Steinway and Sons the ancestor of which was the firm of Heinrich Englehard Steinweg, of Brunswick, Germany, starting as organ makers. In 1848 Heinrich’s sons went to New York City and changed their name to Steinway, where Theodore, the eldest, continued the firm as Steinway and Sons.

Of course, the methods of stringing and tuning a piano have taken years to develop—all of which we cannot go into in this book. Now, instead of twenty strings, as we saw them in the clavichord, we have 243 strings to produce 88 tones.

So now we have the harpsichord with hammers “grown up” into the pianoforte, with its myriad parts, no longer made by hand, but carefully manufactured by machinery and the finest of them are American.

Piano Buying Created a Holiday in the 18th Century

“When the pianoforte was completed and ready to be delivered at the house of the impatient purchaser (in Germany) a festival took place; the maker, was the hero of the hour, and accompanied the piano followed by his craftsman and apprentices, if he had any. (In those days the pianos took months and months to make, for they were made by hand and the makers received cash in part payment and the rest was made up in corn, wheat, potatoes, poultry and firewood!)

“The wagon which conveyed the precious burden was gaily decorated with wreaths and flowers, the horses magnificently decked out, a band of music headed the procession, and after the wagon followed the proud maker, borne on the shoulders of his assistants; musicians, organists, schoolmasters and dignitaries marching in the rear. At the place of destination the procession was received with greetings of welcome and shouts of joy. The pastor of the place said a prayer and blessed the new instrument and its maker. Then the mayor or the burgomaster of the place delivered an address,—dwelling at great length upon the importance of the event to the whole community, and stating, perhaps, that the coming of such a new musical instrument would raise their place in the eyes of the surrounding country. Then followed speeches by the schoolmaster, doctor, druggist, and other dignitaries, and songs by the Männerchor (men’s chorus) of the place. Amidst the strains of the band, the pianoforte was moved to its new home. A banquet and a dance closed the happy occasion.” (From Reminiscences of Morris Steinert by Jane Marlin.)

“The Piano and Pneumatics”

It is very difficult to know just when this important instrument first was invented. It seems to have started with a mechanical organ and many were the experimenters among whom was John McTammany, a soldier in the Civil War who while disabled turned his mind to mechanics and became one of the great pneumatic (air power) experts. And so, just as we arrive at the beautiful instrument, the piano, comes another instrument far more complicated, whose possibilities are still in its infancy. At present the automatic piano is operated by bellows and pneumatic tubes (which look together like a bunch of gray spaghetti) and through which the air is exhausted and acts in such a way that the piano hammers fall against the piano strings. Into these instruments are placed perforated music rolls which travel over a tracker bar full of holes, each one having its rubber spaghetti tube. When the bellows work and the perforation of the roll passes over a perforation of the tracker bar, the air is released and its exhaustion causes the hammer to fall on the strings. This sounds simple,—but it is not!

There are three kinds of automatic players,—one, the piano player, which is now practically extinct in this country, a cabinet which moves up to the piano, and with a series of keys corresponding to the keys on the piano which, when in action presses down the piano keys and the tune starts.

Then we have the player piano. In this, whether it be an upright or a grand piano, the machinery is inside the piano itself (instead of being in the outside cabinet), so that one can hardly tell at first glance whether it is an automatic instrument or not. The perforated roll is put on inside the piano.

All these piano player bellows work either by electricity or by the feet. So in the latter, one cannot help playing with “sole”!

The reproducing piano is the third type of player. This is magical, for it reproduces the player’s performance as he plays it himself. Therefore we can entice Paderewski, Bauer, Rachmaninoff and all the other great players into our own drawing rooms and hear them with their superb skill. These are usually operated by electricity, yet the Æolian Company and probably others, have a reproducing piano which is propelled by the pedals as were the old ones before the invention of the electric player. Furthermore, some of the reproducing pianos have a mechanism with which you yourself can interpret any piece you desire. This gives the music lover who has been denied the study of music a chance to enjoy interpreting great music.

It is an impossibility to overestimate the value of the player piano to the young student, to increase his auditory repertoire, for the music of the world is his for the turning of a lever!

For a long time, the mechanical player has been looked on as a step-child, to be made fun of and scorned. Today, the great critics and best musicians recognize its value which is not as a substitute for a piano but as an instrument in itself. Sir Henry J. Wood of England says: “I realize the value ... of the pianola ... for a good many of the people in our audiences ... are acquiring by its means a closer acquaintance with the great musical masterpieces.”

He says in another place, “It’s a foolish and a shortsighted policy to despise any means by which we may add to the sum total of musical appreciation.”

And Edwin Evans, English critic and writer, says: “The player piano relieves the musician of the technical difficulties of the keyboard.... It does not relieve him from the duty of thinking musicianly, on the contrary, ... it makes it a point of honor with him to give ... fuller employment to his brain and sensibility.... There are dozens of scores nowadays which it is an impossibility to read at the piano and very trying to read on paper. Here the player piano is a boon and a blessing for it unravels every mystery and solves every problem.”

Besides this, it can be played so skilfully by some that even musicians can be fooled as to whether human or mechanical fingers are playing. Gustave Kobbé said, in his Pianolist, something like this: “There are only about five professionals who can play the piano better than an accomplished pianolist.”

To prove its artistic worth further, Percy Grainger, Alfredo Casella and Igor Stravinsky and other great moderns are writing music especially for the player piano because they can use the whole eighty-eight notes with full orchestral effects, without stopping to think of the meagre ten fingers of man! So we see in the future the possibility of this becoming one of the creative instruments.

Other “Canned” Music

Then we have the phonographs and radio. These cannot be considered instruments in the same way as the player piano and reproducing piano, but are invaluable means of musical education and are doing, with the player piano, a marvelous work in introducing people to the great music of the world. Of course, it depends upon the way all these music carriers are used, for if you have poor music on them, it will mean nothing to you, but if you hear the “wear evers” on them, you will have a touch of heaven in your life, forever.

Pianists Come to View

As an outcome of the work of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, the piano appeared because of the need of a more powerful instrument than the harpsichord and clavichord. At this time there were two particular schools of piano playing,—the Viennese, light and delicate in tone, and the English school, producing a more solid and more brilliant tone.

The principal pianists of the Viennese school were Johann Hummel, who, as a boy of seven, was a pupil of Mozart, Franz Duschek, Mozart and Pleyel. Later Beethoven himself appeared, the profound pianist in this group, but also an advocate of Clementi’s methods.

The Clementi School is named from Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), the “Father of the Pianoforte.” He was a composer of piano pieces, especially of sonatas which are still of musical value. Who of us has not studied Clementi’s sonatinas? Besides being a great player, a teacher and a composer, Clementi published a work called Gradus ad Parnassum, piano studies, a form which sprang up because of the need to develop a technic for the new instruments when the piano was young.

Clementi, at fourteen, went to England, where he lived all his life and became interested in the making of pianos. He was associated with the firm of Clementi and Company, later Collard and Collard, and it is said that he gave the Broadwoods much advice in the making of their “grand” piano. So we see Clementi as a founder of piano technic, and an instrument maker! He lived eighty years, during the last years of Handel and Scarlatti, and he survived Beethoven, Schubert and Weber. It is said that Mozart took a theme from a Clementi sonata for one of his operas. His pupils were quite famous: John B. Cramer, the composer of many important piano studies still in use; Johann L. Dussek, one of the first to invent and write down finger exercises, and there were many others.

There were two schools with Clementi at the head of one, and Mozart, of the other. With Hummel, a pupil of Mozart, the Classic School closed, and then Clementi’s ideas came to the fore in the new Romantic School.

The New Romantic School

One of the earliest of these new Romanticists was John Field, who was born in Ireland, visited London, had quite a career in Russia and foreshadowed Chopin in his playing. Then there was Ferdinand Ries, son of Beethoven’s early friend and teacher, Franz Ries; but the most famous of this period were Ignaz Moscheles and Frederick Kalkbrenner, a fluent composer and writer of studies. He was the first pianist to teach Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum.

Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) was a Bohemian and from about 1815, the most brilliant pianist in Germany, France, Holland and England. He was Mendelssohn’s teacher. Chopin wrote three études (studies) on an order from Moscheles. He is a very important figure in the growing up of piano music.

Carl Czerny (1791–1857) was another very important pianist and one of the few pupils of Beethoven. He was a follower of Hummel and Clementi and won great fame as a teacher in Vienna, where he lived. He wrote a great many pieces, about a thousand in all, making many arrangements of orchestral works and many piano studies, which we still use today. Beethoven encouraged him to make a piano version of his Fidelio. Czerny was the teacher of many able musicians.

Frederick Chopin, you will find out later (Chapter 24) changed piano music from the bravura to a poetic and deeper style. His touch and tone were so enchanting that he created a completely new fashion in piano playing which has not been lost. (See page 322.)

Clara Schumann (1819–1896), the wife of Robert Schumann, was the leading woman pianist of the day, in fact, of many days.

In the times of Mozart and of Liszt, improvising (before audiences and at parlor entertainments), was very popular and a part of a musical education; around 1795, after the Paris Conservatory was founded, it seemed to die out. However, organists today often improvise while waiting for the church service to begin. Dupré, one of the famous French organists, who has played in the United States, improvises whole sonatas on given themes.

After Chopin, Schumann and Schubert there was a great love of the short piano piece and as the piano was being developed more and more, it was natural that pianists should become numerous. So piano playing was heard in the concert hall and in the parlor where it was, to be sure, often light and frivolous and yet quite often,—serious and delightful. The light and decorated pieces were usually called salon music and today many are written which are classed as salon pieces. Cécile Chaminade, as delightful and clever as her pieces are, is a typical salon composer, Rubinstein, also, with such pieces as Melody in F, is a writer of salon pieces, and there are countless others.

Among the people who were prominent as pianists and composers in that day, especially in Poland, where Chopin was born, were Alois Tausig, a pupil of Thalberg and Josef Wieniawski, who was the teacher of the “Lion of Pianists,” Ignace Jan Paderewski.

Around Paris gathered many pianists among whom were Ignace Leybach an organist and composer at Toulouse, Henry Charles Litolff the famous publisher, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American pianist and the author of The Last Hope, and Eugene Ketterer. The following, with many others, centered around Vienna: Joseph Löw, Theodore Kullak, Louis Köhler, Gustav Lange and Louis Brassin.

Dashing Playing

A little later, due to the improvements of the piano, another school grew up called by some, the Bravura Pianists, because the pieces for these pianists were written to show off brilliant technic. Most of the people were flashy pianists, yet there were some very marvelous performers, for among them, Liszt himself figures and Thalberg, a Swiss, who was Liszt’s rival for piano honors.

Another set of pianists and composers was Henry Herz, Alexander Dreyschock, Emil Prudent and Adolph Henselt, a Bavarian, who was an amazingly poetic and beautiful player.

Practically all these pianists were prominent composers in their day.

About this time we see women coming into great prominence as professional pianists. The first one to interest us is Marie Felicité Denise (Moke) Pleyel, who was Miss Moke, the beloved of Berlioz and the lady whom he intended to kill but changed his mind! She was an inspiring teacher, a pupil of Herz, Moscheles and Kalkbrenner and was admired by Mendelssohn and Liszt.

The Growth of Violin Music

The same things seem to have happened to violin playing and violin music at this time as happened to the piano. There was always the competition between writing fine, deep music and showy, spectacular music, which, when played, would please an audience. But the violin was the same then as it had been for years,—the only advance it had made was the perfecting of the bow by François Tourte, assisted by Giovanni Battista Viotti, Pugnani’s greatest pupil. We use his bow today. It has about one hundred white horsehairs, the tension of which is controlled by a screw at the nut in the finger grip. But the thing that did affect violinists and violin playing was the fact of the rise in the 19th century of the orchestra and chamber music. From the time that madrigals were first accompanied by instruments, we have heard about Chamber Music, but the string quartet in sonata form as we know it today, had as its father, Haydn, and Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805) as a godfather. The link between the Corelli School of violinists and this school was Viotti who was one of the first men to write a violin concerto in sonata form.

The violinists of this period were also given to bravura playing as were the pianists. This was a safe thing for great violinists like Paganini to do, but for the less gifted, it often developed into, not music at all, but musical calisthenics. Here is the group which appeared in the early 19th century: Rudolph Kreutzer, to whom Beethoven dedicated his famous Kreutzer Sonata; Andreas Romberg (1767–1821) who knew Haydn and Beethoven at Vienna and took Spohr’s place as concert master at Gotha. He wrote music somewhat in the style of Mozart. Then comes the “Wizard of the Bow,” Nicolo Paganini, standing alone and belonging to no school.

He was born in Genoa and began to play in public in 1795, when he was thirteen years old. A very pretty story is told of Paganini and the spider:

When Nicolo was a very poor and lonely student, he had a pet spider that used to listen to him practise. Every time Nicolo would touch the bow to the strings, out came Mr. Spider to listen attentively. Now there was a little girl, the daughter of a shop-keeper near by; she adored the great, tall, slender youth who spent most of the day and most of the night playing on his violin. She fell ill and died, and by a curious coincidence, the spider was killed. Paganini was so overcome by the loss of his admiring comrades that he left home at once and wandered from place to place, playing the guitar when he could not get work with his violin.

Later he played all over Europe and had the crowd with him for his matchless brilliancy in rapid work, his deep pathos and exceptional beauty of tone. He has probably never been surpassed in double stopping, chromatics and his pizzicati (plucking the strings). Isn’t it too bad the greatest violinist in the world lived before the gramophone was invented, so we have no records of his playing as we have of Mischa Elman, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Albert Spalding and Maud Powell!

In this period, Ludwig Spohr was of great importance. He was a friend of Mendelssohn and, curious enough, was an admirer (one of the early ones) of Wagner. He had been an intimate of Weber and played with Paganini at Rome and knew Rossini. His rank as a violinist was acknowledged. He did not stand for “fire works” but demanded fine music. He was always a classical musician, for his early love was Mozart. You will meet him again in the next chapter. He traveled all over Europe and met many great men and his autobiography is a rich store of anecdotes and interesting facts.

At this time too, there were many great violinists in France, Austria, Germany and Italy. We would like to write a whole volume on the brilliant pianists of the late 19th and 20th centuries such as Paderewski, De Pachman, Godowsky, Busoni, Rosenthal, Harold Bauer, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann, Rachmaninov, Teresa Carreño, Myra Hess, Guiomar Novaes, Katherine Bacon, John Powell, Percy Grainger, Levitski and innumerable others!

More about Radio

1927 witnessed the broadcasting of enchanting concerts by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky, The New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg, The New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch, Children’s Concerts under Ernest Schelling and many other organizations. The important broadcasting companies maintain superb musical organizations and there is growing up a valuable radio musical field for pleasure as well as for education. Mr. Damrosch’s musical lectures on the Ring have elicited nearly one million letters, from all parts of the world!

1929 sees the capitulation of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra to the value of radio in a series of broadcasts.

On many programs are heard the world’s greatest artists.

As with all things that are over-popular and over-used, the opera in the 18th century became trifling and empty, except for the work of some few geniuses.

The music of the ancient Egyptians and Chinese advanced very little, on account of fast and firm laws, and opera remained the same for a long time, because of the strict rules. For there were laws governing the kind of arias, the number of men’s parts and women’s parts, when and where ballets and choruses should come in, the number of acts and many another clogging rule. But, worst of all, the people in the audiences knew the rules so well that they made a fuss when any composer dared to depart from them. Such was the case when Gluck came on the scene, and when he left it, with all the changes he made, other rules became just as binding!

You saw the effort of Gluck to reform opera in order to arrive at truth and sincerity; you saw how Mozart dignified the forms that were being used by enriching them, by his sparkling humor, by his new musical devices and limitless outpourings of melody. Beethoven, too, made his one masterpiece, Fidelio, stand for sincerity rather than triviality, and now von Weber we see adding to opera the story of peasant life in Germany, combined with mystery and beauty. Yet, with all these forerunners of a newer opera, many composers had to work very hard and much time had to pass by until we reach the great change under Wagner’s genius.

Von Weber Writes Fairy Tale Opera

Because Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) had so great an influence on opera writers, we will start with him.

Weber was the founder of romantic German opera,—the opera that dealt with people and their feelings and the folk song of the German nation. He was the first to combine the story of everyday life with the charm of imagination. Being of a long line of barons and also a great pianist, he raised the position of musicians to a high level in society, so that after him, pianists and violinists were looked upon as artists and not as artisans.

He seemed to understand the life of his time, and suited his work to his surroundings so beautifully, that it immediately led away from the trivialities into which Italian opera had drifted, into something more worth while. He was a true romantic, as he put into his operas warmth of feeling, elegance and delightful melody. He had a lovely sense of what was dramatic or theatric, and he knew the orchestral instruments as well as he knew the piano, for which he wrote skilfully.

He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck, where Bach had lived, and showed great musical gifts when he was a little boy. And although he was delicate, his father dearly wanted him to be a second Mozart. Michael Haydn, brother of Papa Haydn taught him and Weber showed great ability at the piano and could sit down and improvise and read music at sight.

He was taught by Abbé Vogler in Vienna, who first introduced him to folk music, which he used with such pleasing skill later. (By the way, Abbé Vogler, a famous organist and teacher, was the Abt Vogler of Robert Browning’s poem.) Weber became conductor of the orchestra at Breslau at 18. But, being a delicate boy, he could not stand many of the things he did and he broke down in health.

Later he was unfortunate enough to become secretary to Duke Ludwig of Württemberg at Stuttgart who was not a fit companion for a young man. Weber mixed in the gay life of the Duke and his friends, fell into bad habits, and drifted into money difficulties. Strange to say, during this time he read much and even wrote some music encouraged by Danzi, his friend.

However, he got into a scrape trying to help his father out of a financial difficulty, angered the King and was banished in 1810; and though cleared of his guilt, he remained in exile for some time. Then deciding to turn over a new leaf, with a mind teeming with ideas, he settled down to work.

He soon became known for his compositions and was made Musical Director at the Prague Theatre, where he won popular favor by writing national songs. He undertook to organize a Dresden troupe, after having done a similar work in Prague, but he was annoyed by bad health and the jealousies of his rivals. Nevertheless, here he produced Der Freischütz, Enchanted Huntsman, which Berlin received in 1821 with wild enthusiasm, while Euryanthe, given almost at the same time, was not, in Vienna, very successful.

Weber’s operas, as the beginning of German romantic opera, are on the direct road to Wagner’s. Wagner inherited from Gluck and Weber, and Gluck inherited directly from the German Singspiel (sing-play) of the 18th century, which was a play composed of dances and songs not unlike the English masque and the French ballet and vaudeville. It came before opera in Germany, yet made the basis for a German school, for it used German song and German subjects. Mozart, too, was one of Weber’s musical fathers, especially in his Magic Flute.

We see Weber, now, as we saw Mozart, combining the supernatural with national or German melody, and using both imagination and realistic effects. His Oberon is full of fairy atmosphere and Der Freischütz is often uncanny and awesome. He keeps the spoken dialogue of the old Singspiel and in Der Freischütz deals for the first time with peasant life. His orchestration is lovely and his skill with it was so great that he is still looked upon as one of the important men in the development of the orchestra. He paints the individual characters beautifully by giving each one suitable music to sing.

He reached dramatic heights by his contrasts between mellow quietness and brilliant effects. He made use of all the resources on his instruments, their defects as well as their good points. No one had ever before written more weird music than in the scene of the Wolf’s Glen, in Der Freischütz.

His piano music, including many fine sonatas, was rich with new and brilliant effects and his Concertstück (Concert-piece) was the father of the symphonic poems which were later written by Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Richard Strauss. Thus did Weber give much to music’s growth.

Louis Spohr (1784–1854) who was later a kind friend to Wagner, wrote ten operas which belong, too, in the Romantic School of Weber. He, however, was best known for his violin concertos, written in the classic style of Haydn and Mozart. He wrote these because he lived in the time of the great piano and violin virtuosi (brilliant performers) in Vienna. His work is tiresome to us because of his many mannerisms.