Part 10

foreign tones, sounded more distinctly by the hands, he at once imparts to the harmony a curious opacity and thickness which it is almost impossible to describe, but which affords a pleasant contrast to the uniform clearness of purely consonant chords. The fourth and the sixteenth notes in the bit of Chopin already cited (Figure XV) illustrate this device. The effect of such dissonant tones may be likened to the effect of mixtures and body-colors in painting; they afford relief from the monotony of consonance just as those afford relief from the monotony of the pure colors. They provide the musical picture with chiaroscuro and atmosphere, softening the sharpness of its lines, spreading over it, so to speak, a delicate translucent haze. Used to excess, of course, they make a mere smutch, a meaningless, chaotic daub; the music reverts to primitive noise; the nice point is to use them just enough to gain depth, solidity, light and shade, without blackening and confusing the whole impression.[22]

Now Chopin is one of the supreme masters in the coloristic use of the dissonance. His nocturnes, especially the first, seventh, eighth, and fourteenth, may fairly be said to inaugurate by this means a new era in music, comparable in many respects to the era of impressionism in painting. Their tremulous, vaporous harmonies seem to come from no common piano, but from some wind-swept Æolian harp. Take, for instance, such a passage as the following, at the end of the third nocturne:--

[Illustration: score]

[Illustration: score]

Figure XVII.

Here it is as if, after placing on his canvas the two main chords of the cadence, dominant and tonic, he took, while the colors were still wet, a brush, and with the softest imaginable touch drew it across the entire face of the picture. The grace-notes, most of which, it will be noted, are dissonant to the main harmony, are no more meant to be heard individually than the spots of paint in a Monet are meant to be seen individually; they are a running of the colors, blurring the otherwise too bald outline. Chopin's scores are full of these delicate veilings and obscurations. In a majority of cases they are produced, as in this instance, by the right hand, above a clear harmony in the lower register. But sometimes, more daringly,[23] he assigns the web of dissonance to the left hand, in the middle register or even in the bass, thus gaining an extraordinary lurid gorgeousness of coloring. The passage in the third ballade, beginning at the change of signature to four sharps (Figure XVIII), is an instance.

[Illustration: score]

And later

[Illustration: score]

Figure XVIII.

Or again, as in the "Meno mosso" of the Scherzo, opus 39, both hands first deliver bold, clear chords, and then weave a shimmer of light above them. In all such cases, it is obvious that the dissonances in question do not belong to the essential melodic and harmonic lines of the composition; they are, as Mr. Hadow says, "effects of superficies, not effects of substance," and may be compared to those local blurs made by a draughtsman's stump in a charcoal sketch, or, as before suggested, to those surprisingly rich mixed tints produced in impressionistic paintings by a multitude of minute brush-strokes.

The at first sight very elaborate modulations of Chopin which have provoked so much discussion are but a further application of the same principle. They are really not modulations at all, in the classic sense of transitions from one key to another having a structural value, but rather amplifications of the groups of grace-notes that constantly embroider the tunes. Their function is sensuous rather than structural, and we might describe them by coining the word "grace-chords." Of the twelfth measure of the second nocturne, for example, Mr. Hadow well says that "when we see it on paper it seems to consist of a rapid series of remote and recondite modulations, but when we hear it played ... we feel that there is only one real modulation, and that the rest of the passage is an iridescent play of color." Another striking instance is the following measure in the "Polonaise-Fantaisie," a composition in which effects of this sort abound.

[Illustration: score] Figure XIX.

The pedantic scholiast would say that the composer here modulated, with startling speed, through the keys of B-flat, C, D, and A-minor; but all that the mind grasps is the two chords at the beginnings of the measures, connected by a gorgeous pageant of inarticulate sound. The sketch is being rubbed with the draughtsman's stump again, this time with even finer temerity and more splendid result than before.

It is a lesson in the meaning of that much-abused word "originality" to observe that Chopin arrived at all these novel effects, which differentiate his style so strikingly from those of the conservatives and the virtuosos of his day, simply by discerning through a superior sensitiveness, and working out with a matchless skill, the peculiar potentialities of the medium at his hand. Realizing as no one else had done that the piano compensates for its inability to bring out the beauties of pure line (due to the non-sustainment of single tones), by the wealth of color made available through the pedal's fusion of many tones, both consonant and dissonant, in one composite impression, he shrewdly arranged his campaign accordingly. He adjusted all his technical resources, both as a composer and as a pianist, in the interests of the greatest possible transfusion and intermixture of impressions. This is the secret of his harmonic scheme, so chromatic and full of dissonance; of his lavish melodic embroidery; of his _tempo rubato_, by which the outline of meter itself, so arithmetical and inexorable, is gently relaxed; of his curious soft, light touch, which seemed to glide over rather than strike the keys--"so insinuating and gossamer a touch," says an ear-witness, "that the crudest and most chromatic harmonies floated away under his hand, indistinct yet not unpleasing"; and this is the secret of his lavish use of the damper pedal, equalled, among his contemporaries, only by that of Schumann.[24]

The unprecedented individuality of the style he thus developed profoundly impressed all observers. "In the marvellous art of carrying and modulating the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off," says Marmontel in his "Pianistes Célébres," "Chopin was entirely himself. He had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which only he knew the secret." "Imagine," writes Schumann in the _New Journal of Music_, "an Æolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly singing higher part were always audible, and you have an approximate idea of his playing." Liszt's testimony is that he "imprinted on all his pieces one knows not what nameless color, what vague appearance, what pulsations akin to vibration," and that "his modulations were velvety and iridescent as the robe of a salamander."

Nor do the scholastic musicians of the time fail to pay this pioneer the eloquent tribute of misunderstanding him. Moscheles, a man of the old _régime_, writes, after hearing him play, "The harsh modulations which strike me disagreeably when I am playing his compositions no longer shock me, because he glides over them in a fairylike way with his delicate fingers." This comment is most significant. Moscheles found Chopin's modulations harsh because he played them with the punctilious accuracy, the absolute literalness, which is appropriate to the music of line, but not to the music of color. In rendering a Bach fugue we cannot get each tone too distinct, since it is sure to be a part of some melody, a clear perception of which is necessary to our appreciation of the design. But Chopin's polyphony is not Bach's polyphony, as is illustrated by the former's Prelude, opus 28, no. 1. Both the right- and the left-hand parts here are melodic; but if both are played with an equally salient touch, the conflicts between the voices become unpleasant. The proper way is to let the lower part sink into the background, giving merely a certain depth and opacity to the general impression; the two melodies are as it were on different planes, the lower one more remote and heard but dimly as through a slight haze. So it is everywhere in Chopin. To play him too distinctly is as fatal an error as to examine a charcoal sketch with a magnifying glass, or to bend over a canvas of Monet and peer curiously at each spot of paint. One must stand off, and half close one's eyes, until the details are lost in the masses. In a word, here is a new type of art, demanding a new mode of apperception. If a Bach fugue and a Mozart quartet are the steel engravings of music, Chopin's pieces are its impressionistic paintings and pastels.

But it is time to pass to some other phases of the extraordinary sensibility and unerring taste of Chopin, thus evidenced by his originality in technique, as they showed themselves in his everyday life and in the more intellectual aspects of his art. The chief events of his short career may be very summarily recounted. Born in Zelazowa-Wola, a small village in Poland, in 1809, he studied music in Warsaw, and at twenty-two established himself as a pianist and teacher in Paris, where he passed most of his life. In 1837 ill health, which soon developed into the pulmonary disease of which he died, compelled him to seek a warmer climate, and he passed the winter in the island of Majorca with George Sand, the eminent novelist, and her children. Thus began a connection which lasted for ten years, and which has given rise to endless discussion. The true inner history of this love-affair will probably never be known, as the evidence is fragmentary and distorted by prejudice. It is obvious, however, that neither the composer nor the novelist (whose real name was Madame Dudevant, but who had obtained a divorce from her husband before she met Chopin) was sufficiently unselfish to sustain permanently such a relation; nor were their temperaments fundamentally congenial. They separated in 1847. By this time Chopin's consumption was far advanced, and after two more years of extreme feebleness, complicated by poverty, he died at Paris, October 17, 1849.

In physique Chopin was slender and of middle height, fragile even before disease had wasted him, but supple and elastic; his hands and feet were small, his gestures varied and full of grace; with his pale, almost sallow, complexion, his long, fine, chestnut-brown hair, parted at one side, his high aquiline nose, limpid yet bright eyes, and sweet half-melancholy smile, he impressed Moscheles as "exactly like his music, tender and _schwärmerisch_."[25] Liszt says that the timbre of his voice was subdued, and that his movements had such a distinction and his manners such an impress of good society that one treated him unconsciously like a prince. In the matter of dress he was as fussy as a woman, sparing no pains (to the friends who served him in these affairs) to secure just the distinguished mean between the insignificant and the ostentatious. "I forgot," he writes from Nohant, George Sand's country estate, to his friend Fontana, "to ask you to order for me a hat from my Duport, in your street, Chaussée d'Antin. Let him give the hat of this year's shape, not too much exaggerated, for I do not know how you are dressing yourself just now.... Call at my tailor's, on the Boulevards, and order him to make me at once a pair of gray trousers--something respectable, not striped, but plain and elastic. Also a quiet black velvet waistcoat, but with very little and no loud pattern, something very quiet but very elegant. Should he not have the best velvet of this kind, let him make a quiet, fine silk waistcoat, but not too much open."

Another letter of the same time amply proves the truth of his biographer's statement that he had the "_coquetterie des appartements_." "Select wall-paper," he directs, "such as I had formerly, dove-color, only bright and glossy, for the two rooms, also dark green with not too broad stripes. For the anteroom something else, but still _respectable_. If there are any nicer and more fashionable papers that are to your liking, take them. I prefer the plain, unpretending, and neat ones to the shopkeeper's staring colors. Therefore pearl-color pleases me, for it is neither too loud nor does it look vulgar." In his later years, as health waned, the habit of luxury grew upon him. Near the end, just before leaving London for home, he writes another of his willing servitors, this time his friend Grzymala: "Please see that the sheets and pillows are quite dry, and cause fir-nuts to be bought; Madame Étienne is not to spare anything, so that I may warm myself when I arrive. I have written to D---- that he is to provide carpets and curtains. I shall pay the paper-hanger at once after my arrival. Tell Pleyel to send me a piano on Thursday; let it be closed and a nosegay of violets be bought, so that there may be a nice fragrance in the _salon_. I should like to find a little poesy in my rooms and in my bedroom, where in all probability I shall lie down for a long time."

The same fastidiousness is discernible in his musical and intellectual tastes. Liszt says that he ranked Mozart above all other masters, "because Mozart condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the steps which separate refinement from vulgarity." "Yet," adds Liszt, "his sybaritism of purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in 'Don Giovanni' he discovered passages the presence of which we have heard him regret." Next to Mozart came Bach, whose works were the only music he carried with him to Majorca, and whose exquisitely lucid style exercised an important formative influence on his own. His pupil Mikuli says it was difficult to tell which of the two composers he loved better. Beethoven he accepted only with reservations. "Certain parts of Beethoven's works," says Liszt, "seemed to him too rudely fashioned. Their structure was too athletic to please him; their wraths seemed to him too violent." Mendelssohn he considered "common"; of Schumann's "Carnaval" he remarked that it was not music; Meyerbeer and Berlioz he heartily disliked, though for different reasons; Liszt, according to Niecks, he often found "guilty of making concessions to bad taste for the sake of success," a sin which he "viewed with the greatest indignation." On the other hand, he liked the music of Bellini and Rossini, on account of its southern suavity and grace.

Chopin took slight interest in philosophy and literature, and detested argument, whether political or religious. "Of universality" says Niecks, "there was not a trace in him;" and the composer Stephen Heller, himself a man of marked cultivation, pronounced him "uneducated." What little we do learn of his reading, however, is most characteristic. His friend Gavard, who read to him, in his last illness, out of Voltaire's "Dictionnaire Philosophique," remarks: "He valued very highly the finished form of that clear and concise language, and that so sure judgment on questions of taste. Thus, for instance, I remember that the article on taste was one of the last I read to him." The graphologist will supplement these bits of evidence with the testimony of his handwriting, inimitably neat and small. His manuscripts are marvels of penmanship: the notes like pin-points, the slurs mere filaments of spider's web, the stems painstakingly vertical, even the erasures ornamental latticework, so that the whole is as much a drawing as a writing.

The least pleasing of all the manifestations of Chopin's exquisiteness is seen in his social habits. Here his refinement, his shrinking aversion to all that was crude, ugly, or grotesque, his sybaritic love of ease and elegance, made of him an ultra-aristocrat, a _précieux_,--one is often tempted to say, in good round English, a "snob." Dazzled by the brilliance and poisoned by the perfume of those _salons_ to which his talent gave him access, his taste, so unerring in matters of art, failed to distinguish between the genuine aristocracy of mind and the spurious aristocracy of wealth and fashion. It is at once pathetic and exasperating to see such a genius, of whom an honest, simple man like Delacroix could say, "he was the most true artist I have met," anxiously striving to be borne aloft by that _haute volée_ which was so immeasurably beneath him, limiting his society to that small section of humankind which proudly styled itself "_le monde_," and dedicating his leisure and his compositions, not to brother artists, but to the baronesses, countesses, and princesses who gave him their half-patronizing homage.[26] In his letters one too frequently comes upon passages like this, from Vienna: I have pleased the nobility here exceedingly. As a proof I may mention the visit which Count Dietrichstein paid me on the stage," or this from Paris, on his first arrival: "I move in the highest society--among ambassadors, princes, and ministers."

There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of a _soirée_ at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous atmosphere with painful vividness under our very nostrils. "It was for passionate admirers," writes Madame de Girardin, "the torment of Tantalus to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a _salon_, and not to hear him. The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his melodious caprices. There were some twenty of us, sincere amateurs, true believers, and not a note was lost, not an intention was misunderstood; it was not a concert, it was intimate, serious music such as we love; he was not a virtuoso who comes and plays the air agreed up and then disappears; he was a beautiful talent, monopolized, worried, tormented, without consideration and scruples, whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs.... Madame So-and-so said, 'Please, play this pretty nocturne dedicated to Mdlle. Stirling.'--The nocturne which I called the dangerous one.--He smiled, and played the fatal nocturne. 'I,' said another lady, 'should like to hear once played by you this mazurka, so sad and so charming.' He smiled again, and played the delicious mazurka. The most profoundly artful among the ladies sought expedients to attain their ends: 'I am practising the grand sonata which commences [_sic_] with this beautiful funeral march,' and 'I should like to know the movement in which the finale ought to be played.' He smiled a little at the stratagem, and played the finale of the grand sonata."

Decidedly, there is too sickly a flavor of the boudoir about the _salons_ in which "this beautiful talent ... whom one dared to ask for the most beloved airs" deigned to spend his time. We cannot wonder that in such a hothouse atmosphere the ugly weeds of his character throve almost as well as the delicate flowers, that under such long-continued coddling he grew vain, captious, pettily egotistical. It is distressing to note how much he is willing to ask of his friends Fontana and Grzymala, in the way of laborious and disagreeable commissions--errands to tailors, landlords, paper-hangers, and furniture-makers, and bickerings with publishers--and how he is content to repay them with a few perfunctory protestations of regard, nicely proportioned, in each case, to the magnitude of the favor exacted. Nor does he hesitate to speak slightingly, behind their backs, of such associates as Pleyel the publisher, Leo the banker, and even his fellow-countryman Matuszynski, at the same time that he is addressing them directly in the most cordial and even affectionate language. In short, it is impossible to deny that he was exacting, ungenerous, and disingenuous in his relations with comrades and friends.

In the more casual relations the same shortcomings revealed themselves in a malicious wit which was quite devoid of the magnanimity and exuberance of humor. His description of Thalberg, his rival as a virtuoso, is a little masterpiece of irony: "He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes potpourris on 'Masaniello,' plays the _forte_ and _piano_ with the pedal but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds." When Liszt, who in the consciousness of his splendor was inclined to patronize, volunteered to write a review of one of his concerts, he said, "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." To a wealthy Philistine who invited him to dinner, and as soon as the coffee was removed requested him to play, he responded sweetly, "Ah, but I have eaten so little!" Obviously Liszt is right in describing him as "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker."

But just as the sneer is physiologically the incipient uncovering of the teeth, in self-defence, of the animal at bay, so Chopin's sarcasms are the retaliations of a man constantly harassed, upon a dull and cruel world. He had to resort to innuendo because he was too fragile for rougher warfare. The needles of his wit had to be sharply pointed and dipped in venom, to make any impression on people accustomed to fight with sledge-hammers. All his weaknesses of character, indeed,--his malice, his extreme caution, his secretiveness, his vanity, even his snobbishness,--are in large measure but the necessary reflexes of inherent weaknesses of constitution, and may be explained, if not altogether condoned, as the normal reactions of a too sensitive nature, placed without protection in a sordid, difficult, phlegmatic world. Never, surely, was human being more delicately adjusted than Chopin to receive painful impressions at every point. His senses were so keen that as a child he cried at the mere sound of music; disease made him shrink from minute changes of temperature or slightly unfavorable conditions of weather, of which ordinary people are unconscious; imperious pride made him similarly susceptible to his social climate; and his high artistic ideal condemned him to constant disappointment even with his work. Peculiarly pathetic is the story of the last year of his life, when, unable to compose or to teach, almost penniless, and so weak that he had to be carried upstairs by his valet, he undertook an ill-fated concert tour in Scotland and England. It was a sad jest of destiny to bring this subtle artist, dying of consumption, into contact with a Manchester audience, in a large hall which his tone could not fill. He begged his friend Osborne not to be present--"My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective." Hueffer describes a similar

## scene in London, a Grand Polish Ball, at which "the people, hot from

dancing, who went into the room where he played, were but little in the humor to pay attention, and anxious to return to their amusement. He was in the last stage of exhaustion, and the affair resulted in disappointment." It was an excusable bitterness with which, on the way back to Paris, pointing at the cattle by the wayside, he murmured "Ça a plus d'intelligence que les Anglais." But, alas! to a temperament, like his, too delicately strung, the whole world, always and everywhere, is somewhat British.