because of the superabundance of producers in every department of art and literature, and because the actual needs of the world are small in proportion to the total output, a sifting results whereby is preserved only that most typical of its kind. thus of a thousand melodies popular in their hour, one is added to a people's treasury of song. a stirring, national anthem, or a perfect poem of tender feeling or contagious flame, may alone preserve the memory of a prolific author. much of what the world once deemed great in art, as in all else, has gone to the limbo of little things. of the surprising bulk of poems which byron at thirty-six left behind him, most of the ?childe harold,? displaying the range and fire of his yet undimmed imagination, and the freshness and amplitude of his characteristic, eloquent description, will live; but ?lara? and ?cain? and such must mingle with the trodden dust. so in the domain of music; many old-time authors of supposed masterpieces are superceded by others of like calibre and claim. only of him who in his department creates a new type, or perfects an old one, can anything approaching longevity be predicted.
to but one popular poet was it given to interpret in a hundred lyrics the heart of his peasant scotland. to but one english dramatist to create for our sympathy lear, cordelia, othello and desdemona, and to evoke from his fecund brain the philosophical musings of hamlet, the whimsical humor of falstaff, the gossamer beauties of ?midsummer night's dream,? and the terrible realism of macbeth and richard. to but one epic poet was it given to breathe a quickening breath into the pale shades of those mighty dead, hector, agamemnon, achilles, and many an otherwise forgotten hero. to but one musician was it given to perfect in ?the well-tempered clavichord? the great organ fugue, to but one master of his art to show the attainable in those purely classical forms, the symphony and the sonata.
but what in a summary are the features of chopin warranting his present vogue, and assuring his future fame? they are many, and each is an unimpeachable witness to his worth.
prior to his day, bach and beethoven had explored the known world of harmony. they knew the geography of its vast continents, the choreography of its countries, the topography of its mountains and valleys and plains. they had measured its waterways, had sounded its seas, had sailed by its limiting shores; and then ludwig spohr, suspecting other lands beyond the uncharted west, had ventured as from gibraltar even to the azores, or the canaries, the fortunate islands of old. schumann had gone even farther, but not to the utmost of daring for this was the deed of chopin. he, the columbus of composers, gave to harmony a new world. he, and he alone, first dreamed and then beheld its isles of paradise, tropic and enticing, embowered and restful, fit for lone and pensive musing till suddenly the sun is darkened, the winds make wail, and a dread note of thunder foretells the bursting storm. many times a voyager, many times an explorer, he brought continually, for the world's wonder and delight, the fantastic, the weird, the exquisite. ah! his was no haphazard sailing on the ocean of sound; no rudderless drifting with wind and tide! every appliance of the skilled navigator, the quadrant, the sextant, the compass, were his guides. in day or in night he knew the altitude of the sun or else of the polar star. he had calculated to a nicety the deflections of the needle. though seemingly lost was he on the limitless waves, latitude and longitude, to the fraction of a degree, were clear to his never-beclouded mind. he it was who opened the way for all future discoverers and, inevitably, for rash and turbulent adventurers, even for richard strauss that cortes, that pizarro of them all.
an erudite originality, and the passionate abandon of the author of ?norma,? characterize chopin the melodist. in the new world by him discovered, his own before-mentioned world of the ideal, were birds of rare and differing plume, winged with the delicate greens of half-grown forest leaves, or breasted with the morn's red kindling ere the sun, or throated with the orange of the fading eve, or mottled with the melancholy grey which tells the night. and some there were a purity of white more spotless than the farthest, feathery cloud; and some whose tufty blue was borrowed from no sky like ours. of these creatures of the composer's realm, each was vocal with the mood whereof his beauty was the symbol. amidst the morning wood, one lifted to the sun a brief yet brilliant song of transport; another's notes were cadenced from beside the splash of shaded waterfalls when noon was burning all the fields. another at the day's down-sinking breathed a tender plaint, or trembled forth a melancholy, sweet farewell; and when the round and tropic moon had touched the listening groves to silver, a rarer than the nightingale would warble from the branching palms.
these all were the teachers that made chopin a melodist; but he was more than a melodist, more than the harmonist we have indicated; he was a great, national tone-poet whose romantic measures characterized his poland better than did the lines of her chiefest versifiers. the individuality of chopin the composer was distinguishable as that of beethoven and wagner. he was above the mere perfector of types. his scherzos, his preludes, his ballades, his fantaisies are original conceptions. on the rhythm of the polish dance he reared his dainty mazurkas. graceful and ethereal, they yielded like the slender pine to every swaying wind. framed to endure, no blast could overthrow them. on the same national foundation uprose his polonaises, an architecture of his own devising. fantastic but not grotesque, uniquely and wholly expressive, those solid structures argued immovability, but the tempest proved them pliant and yet enduringly based as the deep-rooted giants of the wood.
the master of the mechanical difficulties of bach and clementi, must encounter others quite different in the etudes of chopin. the mind of such a one follows not swiftly the odd and rapid chromatics swarming through certain of them. his muscles tire in the midst of extended and unusual chords filling whole pages. his fingers, trained to anticipate conventional harmonic successions in the passage work, are here hindered by the unusual become the usual, the exception become the universal rule; and yet the musical worth of these intractable measures, whose like abounds everywhere in chopin, compels the pianist of our day to conquer them.
but, more important than the mechanical, there is in chopin a mental technique peculiar to himself. it informed his playing with an ineffable charm which haunted the memory of pupils and listeners, and yet lives, a tradition of the old paris days.
unlike shakespeare and beethoven, the pole was not privileged to sound the harp of universal life; therefore the universal note is denied him, and therefore his chief interpreters may not be chosen from the gifted of every nation. it cannot be denied that for the music of the vehement, unreasoning passion which in an instant transforms the shaft of love to the stiletto, the italian temperament is alone adequate. it is acknowledged that for the rendition of the semi-barbaric native rhythms, the wild, lawless onrushings and the tearful, or dreamy, or voluptuous lingerings of hungarian music, the blood of the magyars must surge from the heart to the finger tips.
these examples prove that the mental technique of our composer, a matter of phrasing and pedaling and accent, and, most intangible of requirements, the chopin rubato, is most easily and completely mastered by the slav genius. of the world's goodly company of virtuosi, only a few exponents of the polish musician wholly reveal his invaluable contributions to art.
in her own eyes the amazonian sand towered a genius in every way superior to the sickly and effeminate-mannered chopin, but she attained not to the duty of a great novelist. no permanent types have sprung from her ambitious and busy pen. those fretting, fuming, shadow-chasing byronic heroes and heroines have lived their mortal days, and discriminating time denies them an immortality vouchsafed the works of the man she abandoned.
chopin's career as composer ends with the sand affair. of what followed little remains to be told. an unimportant visit to london and edinburgh where broken health and spirits were serious obstacles to brilliant artistic success. a few friendships formed, a few old ones cemented, then back to paris which first he entered a sojourner. yes, back to paris, the gay and frivolous and cynical paris, that dances to the waiting grave and laughs and scoffs until the sad receiving of the tomb.
and now at last the untimely end. he who had blended the sheen of stars with the rainbow mist of waterfalls; he who had swung the forging hammer, and rivalled the delicate, meshy gold of vulcan; he who had prisoned the loud thunder, the swift lightning, the angry, the plaintive, the whispering wind; he who had outridden the ocean's fury, and slept on the polished breast of mountain lakes; he, the endymion of melancholy groves beloved of luna; he, the portrayer of battles dread with the doings of conquering foes, was himself to yield, leaving for our musical heritage the gloom and glory of his works.
let us draw near, but not to the concert hall, and the applauding crowd greeting the advent of the young polish virtuoso. yes, let us draw near, but not to the dazzling salon and yonder listening group, the elite of fashion and culture and fame, gathered around the erard. let us draw nearer than these; nearer than the studio of the composer, and the wrapt company of the inner circle: sand and hiller and heine and meyerbeer and delacroix and liszt, who himself has described the scene. ah, let us, with hushed hearts and noiseless foot-fall, approach and enter, for this is the place of parting where human angels neglect no ministration of love and soothing song as a finished life sinks, like the master's diminuendo, to waken and swell and rush and thunder, filled with the vigor of immortal day.
far from the charm of english vales and meadows; far from the skylark and the cloud he saw and loved above their freshening green; afar from all the sweet allurements of his native isle he sleeps, the english shelley, where the blue of italy is bending o'er the ruined olden, and the risen new whose ancient and eternal name is rome. and close beside, where winter spreads the flowers of northern june, is lying adonais, poet wept in tearful poesy, the youthful keats whom beauty, in the guise of death, drew to her own enamoured breast.
walled from the covetous human waves, safe from the encroaching human tide, père la chaise, a mass of bloom and verdure, lies asleep while the parisian metropolis roars and surges on. of all the multitudes here gathered to the silence, one at least is alien for never a branch is moaning, never a breeze, for polish liberty; and never a bird is inspired by such sad, sweet threnody; and never a strip of polish sky, clear, or cloud-bedarkened, or heavy with the drops of sorrow, is bending o'er chiseled marble of a tomb. amidst the dead of every high and noble calling, the dead whose deeds enhance the fame of france, that alien's dust is in the jealous keeping of a nation richer because of poland and her greatest bard.
sixty years have gone since the october day when, within the walls of the madelaine, the master's funeral measures dirged his death. since that memorable time many pianoforte composers, men of talent and men of genius, have arisen. these, by their indebtedness to the years of chopin's productivity, prove him the one epoch-making composer for their instrument since beethoven, and the one probably without a successor in kind.
the certainty that the principal sonatas of beethoven, and the ballades and other chief works of chopin, overtop all else written for the piano, provokes the question, which of these composers is foremost in this realm of music? the question at once lends itself to argument. evidently chopin abounds in technical difficulties unattempted by beethoven, and these difficulties are a proof of worth because in fact the unusual but necessary conveyers of a message new to the musical world. it must be conceded that chopin's daring chromaticisms, transitions and modulations are the inevitable expressions of a genius novel but not forced. then again, chopin wrote for the piano not as he found it, but with prophetic knowledge of its future possibilities; to the extent of all this he outrivals beethoven.
it must not be supposed that harmonic complexity is of itself superior to broad and bold simplicity. this truth handel well knew. he, the master of fugue, with all contrapuntal devices at command, is renowned for a doric beauty the despair of the byzantine and the rococo. as a harmonist, beethoven felt not the urge of the unusual; the immense possibilities which he perceived in bach were enough for his grand and stately measures. taking from that unexhausted mine, he cut and polished; then, brilliant on their every facet, he strewed the gems along his pages. because of his many-sided excellence, we hold beethoven a harmonist superior to chopin, himself a delver in the bachian mine. the music of chopin is recognizable almost from the opening bar, but, as a creator and developer of characteristic themes, beethoven is unequalled. while chopin is one of the most inspired melodists, beethoven sings himself more into the soul.
although a solitaire, beethoven was really a man of widest, deepest sympathies. against his own bosom he felt the heart beat of humanity, and, love-enlightened, he divined that heart, even its total meaning. the heaven-reaching heights of joy, and the black profound of woe, and every intermediate, throbbed contagious into his own breast. therefore is he the universal man, interpreter of his own ideal world and interpreter of nations, while, on his human side, the intense chopin is the epitome of poland. that this universal man was not containable within the possibilities of the pianoforte, was plainly no fault of his; nevertheless, that much of the universal which informs the chief sonatas of beethoven, entitles them to supremacy over the greatest of the other.
as the second of pianoforte composers, what giants chopin leaves in his rear! haydn, mozart, schubert, von weber, mendelssohn, schumann, and behind them many of lesser stature, hummel, clementi, moscheles and such; and, still further back, the great average, the ephemeral multitude. of all their pushing of pens, little will remain when, on some distant to-morrow, the stirred pulse and the suffused eye prove the tone-poems of the polish musician an unfading charm, an undimmed worth, an eternal beauty, in the realms of art.
