3

GENIUS OF THE PIANO

FREDERIC CHOPIN AND THE ART OF THE PIANO

4

5

GENIUS OF THE PIANO

Frederic Chopin and the Art of the Piano

ALAN KOGOSOWSKI

© Alan Kogosowski 2010

Cover design by Gerald Szubin

6

“Genius for the pianoforte should be - like genius in general - a gift which takes a new road and accomplishes unprecedented things: things which it takes others a little time to learn. ‘Such pianoforte geniuses were Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt; they perceived new means, solved the problems of new effects, created ‘improbable difficulties’ and wrote a literature of their own. ‘It can be asserted confidently that in this sense nothing has been added since. It is indeed a very astonishing fact that other people have the power to do that which only one could do formerly. But he who stands alone when he appears in public and is only imitated later on by others, who compels pianoforte builders to consider new principles and who creates a new literature in which experienced pianists do not find their way at once, has a lawful right to the title ‘genius of the pianoforte’.”

- Ferruccio Busoni, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, Berlin, March 1912

“Education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul.”

- Plato, The Republic, Bk.III, Ch. 12 (c. 375 b.c.)

7

GENIUS OF THE PIANO CHOPIN’S ÉTUDES AND THE ART OF THE PIANO

Frederic Chopin stands at the heart of the history of the piano, its development, its cultural significance, and the way it is played. Furthermore, his Etudes – central to his approach to the piano and its technique – were composed at a crucial moment in the development of the modern era.

The series was begun when Chopin was was nineteen, a student in one of the far reaches of the old Napoleonic Empire, a country under the domination of Russia. Soon he would travel to Vienna, which for fifty years had been the centre of the musical world, there to continue his work while meeting some of the participants who remained from a great era which had just passed. In the midst of revolution, he would continue his journey and settle finally in Paris, just at the moment the city of light suddenly became the world centre for the passionate young Romantic generation of artists, writers, composers and musicians. Chopin was to be the jewel in the crown of this generation.

Continuing steadily throughout this journey was the creation of the Etudes, culminating in 1837, at which point Chopin became linked with one of the celebrities of the age in a liaison which captured the imagination of the world. Genius of the Piano traces the influences which surrounded Chopin during the significant historical period in which he lived and in which composed his Etudes, an epoch of unparalleled vibrancy in European cultural history.

When the lives of great artists are approached biographically, the reader is occasionally left wondering why a particular artist’s personal story is worth telling more than that of someone else. The essential ingredient – the talent, the genius, the contribution to civilization – is often treated as a separate subject from the artist’s life story. Genius of the Piano examines the biography of Frederic Chopin from the inside out – from the motivations and resulting creations of the composer, biography emerging naturally from an exploration of the artist’s inner life, which, after all, is the true life of an artist.

As the story and nature of Chopin himself is revealed through an exploration of his Etudes, the many interesting personalities both intimately and tangentially involved with the story come alive through an appreciation of their creations. Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Berlioz; Paganini, Bellini, Rossini and Meyerbeer; Balzac, Sand, Hugo, Heine and Delacroix; and of course Bach, Mozart and Beethoven; great pianists and singers, as well as relevant political figures, emerge vividly through their works, their talents and abilities, their personalities thus revealed and illuminated.

Chopin and Liszt. Chopin and George Sand. Iconic relationships. Names which are inextricably linked in the collective imagination of our culture. Without disturbing the aura which surrounds these celebrated relationships, Genius of the Piano looks at the facts behind the legend. What did Liszt actually learn from Frederic Chopin? How strong was the bond between Chopin and George Sand? The truth is no less glamorous than the myth, but of course it’s more complicated, more human and rather more interesting.

8

In that momentous year of 1831, Robert Schumann, like Chopin only twenty-one years old at the time, not yet having heard of this new composer, wrote a delighted and imaginative newspaper article – the first of hundreds of perspicacious reviews, of most of the composers and performers of the era – which began with the words “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” Although he was very perceptive, acquiring his enthusiastic impression of Chopin simply from looking at a printed score by an unknown composer, Schumann was only saying what the world would soon discover, and what it has thought ever since with undiminished certainty.

We take this as our starting point – the year in which Chopin had just completed his first two Etudes, landmarks in the history of piano playing, though both together require no more than four minutes to play. Chopin had just departed from his home and family with those two Etudes in his luggage, carefully copied out by his elder sister Louise and dated November 2nd, 1830 – the single most significant date in the composer’s life, for on that day, Frederic Chopin set off from Warsaw to conquer the world, not realizing that he would never again see his beloved homeland.

Without Frederic Chopin there would have been no ‘pianism’ – i.e. refined and virtuosic piano playing – as we know it. The art of piano playing was created virtually from whole cloth by Chopin during his early twenties. For a pianist, the works of Chopin are as the plays of Shakespeare are to an actor – indispensable, informing everything else we do, and self-contained as an oeuvre, sufficient as a body of work on its own to occupy an entire performing career if a pianist so chooses. He is the only such composer for the piano, and one of only three or four such composers at all.

None of the great pianists would have been possible without Frederic Chopin. None of their expertise, none of their craft, none of their aura, none of their ‘sound’. Even Franz Liszt, who created the image we have of a concert pianist, and who was the first pianist to give concerts entirely by himself; Liszt, who established the concept of the artist musician as hero performer, and who taught and inspired generations of great pianist, would not have developed as a pianist in the way he did without his friend Frederic Chopin.

All of the great pianists – even if they were, or are, primarily specialists in the music of Bach or Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms, Liszt or Rachmaninoff – have studied and played the oeuvre of Chopin as an integral part of their repertoire. Just to name the most famous – Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Josef Lhévinne, Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Wilhelm Backhaus, and, perhaps closest of all to the style and heart of Chopin, Dinu Lipatti.

The most original and inspired master of the piano, as well as one of the truly immortal composers, Chopin’s influence is as fresh and strong today as it was when he first amazed the world back in 1831. His music is as powerful as ever, because of the timelessness of what it tells us about ourselves and about our world. It is quintessentially Romantic music, but it is somehow all the more universal for that. As Artur Rubinstein said, it arouses the same delight and recognition in audiences in Japan and China as in Europe and America.

9

ALAN KOGOSOWSKI

Alan Kogosowski’s stature as an articulate and persuasive communicator as well as a pianist of rare ability and charisma has been acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Chopin in the Hands of a Master’ declared the Chicago Sun-Times. Decorated by the Polish branch of the Knights of Malta and the Vatican for his Chopin recitals in London, his performances have created the same excitement among his audiences as did those of his illustrious predecessors Ignaz Paderewski and Artur Rubinstein. Kogosowski was invited to perform on numerous occasions for members of the Royal Family – for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, for Prince Charles and Princess Diana, for the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and for Princess Alexandra.

In the Schubertiade concert series at Sotheby’s in London, which he created and hosted for ten years, Kogosowski presented musicians and singers from around the world, whom he introduced, accompanied and together with whom he performed. It was at these musical evenings in London that Kogosowski developed his own style of welcoming an audience into the world of the musician, and of making his listeners feel as if they were his partners in the journey of musical exploration, an involved and essential part of the musical and artistic experience.

As a throwback to the multi-leveled activities of pianists of the past, Alan Kogosowski has introduced two major works to the concert repertoire. He orchestrated the Trio Elégiaque in D minor by Rachmaninoff, a work the composer thought about in orchestral terms but never orchestrated himself – thereby creating a new concerto, the Concerto Elégiaque in D minor. This was premiered by Kogosowski as soloist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its chief conductor Maestro Neeme Järvi. The recording of this work became a best-seller, going ‘straight to the top of our list”, said the American Record Guide, which considered the work worthy of being regarded as Rachmaninoff’s ‘Fifth’ Piano Concerto.

The success of this Rachmaninoff orchestration led to a consummate reconstruction and orchestration of Chopin’s unfinished Third Concerto, a work which the composer tried to settle down to completing for ten years, during the same period he was writing the Etudes. Chopin eventually published the first movement as a piano solo, and the other two movements as incomplete solos. This realisation was also premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Frederic Chopin in October 1999.

Several television films have been made of Alan Kogosowski playing the music of Chopin. Kogosowski plays Chopin at the Guildhall captured a recreation of the last public performance given by Frederic Chopin himself, which took place in 1848 at the Guildhall in the City of London. More recently, Kogosowski created a series of six programmes on Chopin’s life and music, filmed live in London, with introductions to all the music, as well as superimpositions of evocative imagery. Frédéric Chopin – A Life to Remember premiered in 2003 and was singled out by The New York Times as an ‘Outstanding Documentary.’ The series is available as a double-DVD set from www.kogosowski.com.

Also available is the ‘Hand-book’ for computer users and everyone else using their hands, How to Prevent RSI – The Michelangelo Code.

10

Alan Kogosowski’s special understanding of the workings of the hand and of piano technique is due to several exceptional teachers. First, Leo Shalit, old-school cultivated European gentleman from Riga, with a distinguished pianistic backround and a deep understanding of the piano and its literature, who attended masterclasses of Rachmaninoff’s colleague Alexander Goldenweiser in the inter-war years, inculcated in the young Kogosowski a feeling for ‘dead-weight’ looseness and suppleness, a crucial element in the manner of playing developed by Chopin and Liszt. The outstanding Australian teacher, Roy Shepherd, a student of Alfred Cortot, further enhanced this feeling for suppleness – “souplesse”, as Chopin always encouraged.

Next, Michel Block, superlative, refined French pianist steeped in the pianism of Chopin and Rachmaninoff and a protégé of Alexis Weissenberg, a master of it, took this grounding in suppleness and demonstrated how it must be understood and monitored on an ongoing basis. He showed Kogosowski the essential key to all piano technique (see The Philosopher’s Stone of Technique, chapter 10 Genius of the Piano).

Finally, Roger Woodward, challenging, original Australian pianist, trained initially by a pupil of Rachmaninoff, later studying in Warsaw, showed Kogosowski the crucial role of ‘hand positions’ – the over-riding importance of correct positioning of the body and hands in everything we do. If we position ourselves correctly, then we can truly relax, and turn our attention to the next thing on the agenda; the fingers will automatically find their mark with the exact degree of nuance and musicality.

The distinction between ‘musical’ and ‘technical’ has been a commonplace since the time of Mozart and Clementi, and while some pianists – we are people, after all – may be more tasteful, refined, emotional or passionate than others, the distinction is misleading, and completely useless. Not only is musicality serviced by technique, but the two are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable. Technique is the means by which we produce the sounds we wish to hear. Michel Block said “fifty per cent of technique is in the ear,” by which he meant that half of any given technical question consists of accurately defining exactly what sounds one wishes to produce.

The same applies to the ethos of the music: if we don’t know where it came from, what circumstances and ideas gave it birth, and what it was intended to express, then a major part of it is lost on us, though great music does have an intrinsic universality. It is the need for listeners to understand both elements that inspired the writing of the companion book to Mastering the Etudes, Genius of the Piano.

11

Genius of the Piano

CONTENTS

1 “HATS OFF, GENTLEMEN, A GENIUS!” 17

2 AS THE PRINTING PRESS TO POETRY 32

3 A NEW VOICE FOR THE SOUL 58

4 THE KING AND THE EMPEROR; MEPHISTO STILL PLAYS THE VIOLIN 98

5 DREAM VISIONS - PARIS; DARKNESS AT NOON; A KINDRED SPIRIT 144

6 NOVEL SOUNDS; CANNON BESIDE FLOWERS 177

7 LIKE A PRINCE; A TALE OF TWO WOMEN, PART 1 210

8 A DIFFERENT KIND OF WOMAN 250

9 VISIONS OF THE NIGHT 294

10 THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE OF TECHNIQUE; ON A LARGER CANVAS 321

11 WIND IN THE TREES; PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS PERFORMER AND TEACHER 342

12 AN INTELLECTUAL ARISTOCRACY AMONG ARTISTS -

“PHILISTINES MUST KEEP AWAY!” 365

12

Epilogue - CHOPIN’S INHERITORS; THE GOLDEN AGE OF PIANISTS 406

Appendix - Contemporary personalities 424

Chopin’s friends, acquaintances, key figures of French Romanticism

and artistic life of Paris during the 1830s

Chronological list of Chopin’s works 438

Selected bibliography 445

Index 448

13

List of Illustrations

Chopin at the piano, age 15, drawing by Elise Radziwill Page 22 Adalbert Żywny 25 Chopin, age 11 26 Josef Elsner 27 Chopin, age 18 28 Cristofori’s patent drawing for piano mechanism; Cristofori’s pianoforte 37 Johann Christian Bach, by Thomas Gainsborough 40 Young Mozart 41 Wolfgang, Nannerl and Leopold Mozart 42 Muzio Clementi 45 John Field 46 Beethoven, age 25 49 Salle Pleyel, from l’Illustration, journal universel’, June 9, 1855 52 Chopin at the piano, by Jakob Gőtzenberger, 1838 53 Henrietta Sontag 60 Constantia Gladkowska 63 Giuditta Pasta 67 Giovanni Rubini 67 Mario and Grisi singing Parigi O Cara, by George du Maurier 68 Chromatic Galop by the Devil of Harmony, by Lablache and Habeneck 70 Vincenzo Bellini 72 Maria Malibran 77 Pauline Viardot Garcia, by Maurice Sand 80 Rossini, 1816 82 Olympe Pélissier, by Vernet 85 Rossini, 1830s, when Chopin knew him 85 Rossini, photograph by Nadar, 1860 86 Jenny Lind 88 Louis Philippe and his Five Sons, by Vernet 91 Meyerbeer 94 Maria Callas 97 Liszt at 28, photograph, 1841 99 Liszt at 28, drawing, 1841 100 Kalkbrenner 105 Herz 108

14

Liszt being embraced by Beethoven in the Redoutensaal, Vienna 111 Liszt, age 11 112 Hummel 113 Schubert, age 24, by Leopold Kupelwieser 114 Czerny 118 Cherubini 120 Une matinée chez Liszt, by Josef Kriehuber, 1840 122 Ferdinand Hiller 123 Concert Hall of the Paris Conservatoire 126 Paganini, age 37, by Ingres 129 Gounod 133 The Debut in London of Niccolò Paganini, by Daniel Maclise, 1829 134 Clara Wieck, age 16 141 Nicholas and Justyna Chopin 146 Ludwyka, Emilia and Isabella Chopin 147 Les Champs Élysées from the top of the Arc de Triomphe 148 Betty de Rothschild, by Ingres 150 James de Rothschild 151 E. T. A. Hoffmann, self-caricature 158 Edgar Allan Poe, daguerreotype, 1848 159 “I don’t want to be buried alive” 160 Chopin, photograph, 1848 162 Mendelssohn, age 24 164 Mendelssohn, 1830s 166 Chopin playing at Radziwill Salon, by Henryk Siemiradzki 167 Cécile Mendelssohn 170 Johann Sebastian Bach 172 Johann Strauss and Joseph Lanner 180 Johann Strauss II and Johannes Brahms 181 Balzac, daguerreotype, 1848 185 Dumas, photograph by Nadar 189 Marie Duplessis, la dame aux camélias 190 Liszt at the Piano (with Dumas, Hugo, Paganini, Rossini, Sand, d’Agoult), 1840 193 Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide, 1832 195 Heine 198 Mickiewicz 202 Chopin, drawing by Delacroix, 1838 208 Beethoven 214

15

Josephine von Brunswick 214 Delphine Potocka, by Delaroche 215 Adam Czartoryski 218 Marie Wodźinska 220 Chopin, age 25, watercolor by Marie Wodźinska 222 ‘My Sorrow’ 223 Marie d’Agoult, by Henri Lehmann, 1843 225 Liszt, by Lehmann, 1843 226 Hamlet broods, Faust suffers; Dante’s Inferno 228 Wagner at home, by Beckman, 1880 229 Thalberg, age 23 232 Thalberg, 1850s 235 Liszt, age 24, drawing by Ingres 238 Blandine, Cosima and Daniel Liszt 239 Cosima 239 Cosima, c.1910 240 Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein in 1847 242 Liszt in 1847, portrait by Miklós Barabás 243 Caroline de Saint-Criq 245 Carolyne in her apartment in Rome, 1875 247 Liszt with his pupils at Weimar 248 Liszt 248 George Sand, portrait by Auguste Charpentier 251 George Sand in man’s attire 252 Aurélien de Sèze 253 Marie Aurore Dupin de Francueil 255 Alfred de Musset, self-caricature, 1834 257 George Sand, drawing by Alfred de Musset 258 Pietro Pagello 259 Aurore Dudevant 262 Valldemosa, drawing by George Sand 265 Nohant 268 Chopin at writing desk, drawing by George Sand 269 Maurice and Solange, drawings by George Sand 269 Liszt and Sand, Balzac and Sand, at Nohant, drawings by Maurice Sand 270 Pierre Leroux 272 Ledru-Rollin with George Sand 274 George Sand, photograph by Nadar 282

16

Jane Stirling, by Deveria 284 Chopin’s Death, by Barrias 289 Solange, drawing by Clésinger 291 Chopin’s grave, Père Lachaise, Paris, photo by Marcus Rose 293 Chopin, 1830s portrait by Ary Scheffer 299 Liszt, 1830s portrait by Ary Scheffer 300 Berlioz 302 Berlioz conducting, caricature by Doré 305 Wagner, photograph, 1870s 306 Berlioz, caricature by Vernet 308 Berlioz, portrait by Signol, 1832 313 Harriet Smithson, portrait by George Clink, 1822 314 Harriet Smithson and Charles Kemble in Romeo and Juliet, 1827 315 Marie Pleyel, by Kriehuber, 1839 318 Liszt, age 21, by Deveria 320 Delacroix, self-portrait, 1837 323 Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, by Delacroix 328 Liberty Leading the People, by Delacroix 329

Chopin by Delacroix, 1838 331 George Sand by Delacroix, 1838 335 Chopin photograph 341 Chopin, portrait by Ary Scheffer, 1847 349 Chopin’s drawing room 351 Schumann 363 Moscheles 367 Brahms with two of Schumann’s daughters 372 Leschetizky 378 Anton Rubinstein in ideal playing posture 387 Godowsky 393 Schumann 398 Paderewski 404 Rubinstein 407 Nicholas and Anton Rubinstein 411 Rachmaninoff 414 Josef and Rosina Lhévinne 415

17

Chapter Two

AS THE PRINTING PRESS TO POETRY

George Bernard Shaw – who in order to earn a living wrote newspaper reviews

as one of history’s great music critics – once said that the invention of the piano was to music what the invention of the printing press was to poetry. He was, of course, referring to the dissemination of music to a much wider public than had ever been possible before. Shaw could have added that without Frederic Chopin the piano would not have been able to make the contribution it did to the art of music, or indeed to the culture of modern times.

The piano became much more than a wonderful new musical instrument, one that could be played without the accompaniment of any other musicians. It did in fact fulfill a role similar to that of the printing press in literature, although its full potential in this regard did not become evident up until Chopin’s time. From the second quarter of the 19th century, the piano was to the dissemination of music, and culture in a wider sense, very similar to the television set and recording devices in every home today. No sooner was a symphony, grand opera or comic opera composed, there was a ‘piano reduction’, or arrangement, made and published, simultaneously with the first performances. These piano versions came off the presses and were snapped up across Europe as quickly as we get the latest movies and information off the internet. They were played in the home everywhere, families and friends gathered round the piano sharing in the latest delight.

In the absence of television news programmes and documentaries, these sheet-music missives from the outside world were a great deal more than simple home entertainment. Music in the home was a potent form of contact with the wider world, keeping people up-to-date with social trends, fashions, political currents. With the symphonies of Beethoven one could keep abreast of the heroic thrust of the Romantic movement, with its philosophical ideas aimed at bringing about social equality and justice. With Rossini’s comic operas or those of Offenbach one could be involved in the latest social satire of the day, from Beaumarchais’ incendiary comedies to the overwrought politics of the second Empire in France. With Gilbert and Sullivan one became a participant in the amusing pomposities of English upper middle class life. Johann Strauss allowed you to share in the carefree social life of fashionable and glamorous Vienna. And all this was accomplished through the magical piece of furniture with eighty-eight keys – though it had a few less then.

As well as being a potent means of bringing the world into one’s home, in the manner of a television or computer, the piano also acted as a social engine, or catalyst. The enormous social significance of the piano is examined in depth in ‘Men, Women and Pianos’ by Arthur Loesser, elder brother of Frank Loesser, the composer of Guys and Dolls, and consequently “the Arthur of two Loessers.” In this entertaining and richly erudite work, the author declares, with some justification, that “the history of the pianoforte and the history of the social status of women can be interpreted in terms of one another.”

18

At the end of the 18th century and into the 19th, the prosperous classes, which very much included the new middle class, saw to it that their daughters were well educated in pursuits which confirmed the family’s social standing. As well as the absolute essentials – writing letters and diaries in an educated style and drawing in a finished, almost professional, manner, there was needlework and embroidery, various crafts involving embellishment with assorted fabrics, flower arranging as an art form, and above all, music – most specifically singing and playing the piano. During the long evenings at home by candle-light, a young lady could provide music, especially songs, for everyone in the family, as well as guests, to enjoy and participate. Rather more social and friendly, really, than what we’ve become accustomed to. Most importantly, music was a tangible confirmation of the family’s social status, because it was on display.

Jane Austen, herself a very competent pianist, received sheet music by mail every week at her father’s parsonage in rural Hampshire, then later at her brother Edward’s house. She copied out a large quantity of borrowed music for her own use.

The piano became a central prop for the perennial quest in Jane Austen’s novels – the attempt to catch the right man. There are many instances in her novels of young ladies of marriageable age finding the piano bench the most conducive spot from which to balance the demands of having to charm potential suitors with the proprieties of social and family life.

At various times, several Austen characters claim to be passionately fond of music, and are then found to be frauds – for instance, the handsome young Frank Churchill in Emma. Perhaps that shows what Jane Austen thought of the significance of musical appreciation as an indicator of character.

In Pride and Prejudice, written semi-autobiographically by the twenty-one year-old Jane in 1796–7, originally entitled ‘First Impressions’, we learn from Mr. Bingley, in response to Mr. Darcy’s enquiry, that “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word ‘accomplished’.” The redoubtable Lady Catherine de Bourgh claims that “If I had ever learnt (the piano), I should have been a great proficient.” Mr. Darcy speaks with affectionate praise of his own sister’s proficiency: “I assure you, madam, that she practices very constantly.” “So much the better,” replies Lady Catherine. “It cannot be done too much; and when I next write to her I shall charge her not to neglect it on any account. I often tell young ladies that no excellence in music is to be acquired without constant practice. I have told Miss Bennet several times, that she will never play really well unless she practices more…”

As we shall discover, Lady Catherine, despite her customary self-assurance, was wrong. Practice can be done too much, something which Chopin cautioned against. And most importantly of all, as he was always at pains to make his students understand, practice will help not one whit without understanding. An excess of uninformed ‘practice’ won’t improve one’s excellence, and will most likely result in tendinitis and carpal tunnel problems.

Seeing the piano occupied such an important place in the social fabric of Europe as it entered the most glorious century of its history, the era in which so many artistic and intellectual strands would come to a pinnacle and reach a climax, let us pause to examine this new instrument.

19

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the piano occupied a place in many respects similar to that of the computer in the late twentieth century – a brilliant new invention which had only very recently become an integral part of daily life for a newly emerging society, one formed by new economic and political circumstances. And long before the dot.com boom there was the piano boom. Piano manufacture became a huge industry, with literally hundreds of companies in the second half of the 19th century. One in every four homes in Paris in Chopin’s time had a piano. Therefore, before we go any further with our exploration of the fabulous software produced for the piano by Frederic Chopin, let’s take a look at the hardware and examine the development of the piano itself, and how it determined what could be played upon it and how.

The first thing to understand about a keyboard instrument is that unlike every other instrument, and of course the greatest instrument of all, the human voice, it’s mechanical – a machine, very much like a computer, and like a computer, it is operated by our two hands at a keyboard with keys and levers. In the spirit of the industrial age, and in line with the invention of so many machines which would transform modern life, the development of the piano – a modern, mechanical instrument, produced like a computer or a car, not in a workshop but in a factory, a ‘fabrique’ or ‘Fabrik’, by the assembly of a collection of parts – during the first half of the 19th century was completely natural and appropriate.

All non-keyboard instruments are primarily dependent on our breath or on the natural movement of our arms, even if the fingers often have to work almost as assiduously on stringed instruments and wind instruments they do on the piano. The movements of the arm and body in playing stringed instruments – which have been around for centuries – and the limitations of our breath when playing wind instruments – which have been with us since Creation – are natural and provide a warning system for our body in its propensity to strain itself – something playing the piano will never do because of its completely mechanical nature.

Unlike most machines, however, the piano does have a soul. The combined effect of its parts, consisting of seasoned wood, iron, strings and felt, varies from one instrument to the next, even within the same make, and of course its software consists for the most part of the most beautiful thoughts and sounds ever dreamt up by the mind of man. But it is a machine. You can read a newspaper while you’re playing the piano – a procedure actually recommended by the renowned German pianist and teacher Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who thought the action of the fingers should be treated completely independently of musical and artistic requirements – in as mechanical a way, in fact, as that of the action of the hammers in striking the strings. Perhaps the piano’s mechanical nature is the reason so many violinists look upon it with mild contempt, or indifference, regarding it’s existence as an inescapable bore, its invention having been necessitated exclusively by their unavoidable need for an accompaniment.

Kalkbrenner was as wrong about the presumed mindless nature of piano technique as Lady Catherine was about the need for ‘constant practice’ in order to acquire excellence. It is impossible to separate the technical and the musical – the mechanical and the considered – when playing the piano. They are inextricably intertwined and mutually dependent, despite what many musical ‘purists’ like to say. One often hears that such and such is a great ‘musician’ and someone else ‘merely a technician’. This, of course, is nonsense.

20

When he first arrived in Paris, Frederic Chopin, aged twenty-two, seriously considered studying with Kalkbrenner, famous for his cool precision and exquisite evenness of touch. But he soon changed his mind, at the urging of everyone, particularly his new friend Felix Mendelssohn, who told Chopin he already played better than Kalkbrenner any day. Nobody ever combined musicianship with technical know-how more organically and inseparably than Frederic Chopin, and this was apparent to everyone from the very beginning. Those who attended his first concert in Paris, which took place at the Salle Pleyel in February 1832, three months after he arrived, spoke of new vistas which could only have been suggested by this unusual combination of qualities.

For instance, the leading critic in Paris – who also happened to be professor of counterpoint and harmony at the Paris Conservatoire – Joseph Fétis, wrote, in La Revue Musicale, “Here is a young man who, surrendering himself to his natural impressions and taking no model, has found, if not a complete renewal of piano music, at least a part of that which we have long sought in vain, namely an abundance of original ideas of a kind to be found nowhere else… ”

Fétis was speaking of the form of Chopin’s compositions, but as the only works of his own Chopin performed on that occasion were the F minor concerto, played as a solo, and the ‘Là ci darem la mano’ variations – both very conventional works in terms of form – Fétis was obviously mesmerised by the pianistic texture of these works, and this was evidently blended in the impression he received with the forms of the compositions themselves.

Liszt, who was also in the audience, experienced a very similar reaction: ‘The most enthusiastic applause didn’t seem to do justice to our enchantment at this talent who revealed a new kind of poetic feeling and such innovations in the form of his art.” Mendelssohn, writing in 1835, said, “There is something so thoroughly original and at the same time so very masterly in his playing that he may be called a really perfect virtuoso.”

The never-ending argument in the piano world about technique-versus-musicality was best summed up by Vladimir Horowitz, who correctly pointed out that both were not only necessary, but inseparable:

“Playing the piano is a combination of brain, heart and means. And all three should be even. If one falls short of the others, the music suffers. Without brains you are a fiasco; without means you are an amateur; without heart, you are a machine. It has its dangers, this occupation.”

Chopin lived just at the time the piano was becoming the quintessential musical instrument of the new age. He understood as no one else the over-riding problem of the mechanical nature of the piano sitting side-by-side with the artistic objectives of the pianist. To deal with this problem he produced his manifesto of piano technique – the Etudes – in order to take full advantage of the possibilities that the instrument offered, in a way that would make the piano not the despised stepchild in the instrument world, but on the contrary, the prince of instruments.

When Chopin was growing up, the piano was at that very moment in the course of being transformed from a wooden box with strings and hammers into the instrument we know today – from a Model T Ford to a Rolls Royce.

21

The piano had first appeared a century before Chopin’s birth, around the year 1700, the invention of Bartolomeo Cristofori, instrument maker to the rich, music-loving Grand Prince of Florence, Ferdinando de Medici. Cristofori had been appointed in 1688 to care for the prince’s harpsichords, and later on to look after all his musical instruments. An inventory of 1700 mentions an “arpicembalo” – an instrument ‘resembling a harpsichord’ – “del piano e forte” – ‘with soft and loud’, “newly invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori, with hammers and dampers, two keyboards and a range of four octaves.”

However, the harpsichord was at its zenith during the first half of the 18th century and the piano would be treated as little more than a curiosity for a long while, only starting to emerge as a popular and worthy instrument in its own right in the latter part of the century, around 1780. Music written for the harpsichord could also be played on the ‘fortepiano’, as the piano was known throughout the 18th century, but the first music considered suitable for the fortepiano alone was not composed until the mid-1770s, by Clementi and Mozart, Clementi’s first sonatas, his Op. 2, published in 1773, probably taking the palm, followed by Mozart’s sonatas of 1774.

Most people think of the piano as a development from the harpsichord – known as clavecin in French and cembalo in Italian. But beyond the fact that they’re both shapely wooden boxes with strings inside, and they’re both played via a keyboard, there’s little musical similarity, and the technique required to play them, beyond the basic fact that it centres almost entirely on the fingers, is quite different. This lack of similarity, in both respects, is due to the difference in the action by which their respective keyboards activate the strings – one by plucking with quills, the other by striking with hammers.

The piano’s rationale had a completely different origin to the string-plucked harpsichord. It was that of the dulcimer, which emerged from Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages – an instrument in which the strings, stretched over a wooden frame or box, were struck with hand-held hammers. The dulcimer is still used in Hungary, where it is known as the cimbalon.

Cristofori called his invention ‘cembalo con piano e forte’ – “harpsichord with soft and loud,” or ‘gravecembalo col piano e forte’ – a big harpsichord with soft and loud – indicating at once the step-child nature in which the new instrument was treated as well as its novel and completely unique characteristic as a keyboard instrument – the ability to play soft and loud in a graduated manner. The harpsichord, and its smaller cousins the virginal and the spinet which had been in use since the 16th century, allowed for no variation of tone quality or level of sound through finger touch. (the joke ‘Bach had twenty children and he practiced on a spinster in the attic’ borrows the historically accurate anecdote of the boy Handel practising on a spinet, or small clavichord, in the attic, against his father’s wishes).

Harpsichords had acquired two keyboards, with occasionally even three, and in conjunction with a swelling device operated by a pedal, which would open slats like those of a Venetian blind, the degree and character of tone could be varied considerably. But there was no possibility of varying the level or quality of sound of the individual notes, as the plucking mechanism by which the strings were sounded had an unvarying degree of force. The player’s power of expression was thus fixed and limited.

22

The harpsichord’s main use – the great keyboard works of Couperin, Bach, Handel and Scarlatti notwithstanding – was as an accompanying instrument in chamber or ensemble music, and as a support for voices in opera, cantata and oratorio, supplying the bass line and harmonies by way of a ‘figured bass’ – the same kind of thing popular musicians refer to today as ‘chords’; essential but hardly requiring any expression or finesse of touch.

Cristofori invented the means by which the strings could be struck, by mechanically controlled hammers, with a system of levers which ensured that the hammers rebounded immediately by means of a lever on a spring, known as an ‘escapement’, as well as a ‘damper’, which fell upon the string when the hammer was released, thereby stopping the vibration of sound. Remarkably, within a decade and a half, Cristofori established all the essential elements of the piano’s action, including, in 1722, the una corda mechanism, which made the hammers strike only one instead of the two strings with which Cristofori fitted each note. The new action opened the way to the possibility of limitless varieties of tone, depending on the pressure, or force, with which one struck the notes, and thus satisfied the underlying aim of the new invention – the ability to achieve ‘expressivity’.

We can see Cristofori’s patent-style drawing of his hammer mechanism, with its interconnected levers. This was included with a lengthy article published in Venice in 1711 in the influential Giornale dei letterati d’Italia.

We can also see from the 1720 Cristofori pianoforte – the oldest of three which survive, owned by the Metropolitan Museum – that the instrument was already very much in the form it would take for most of the 18th century, with a substantial dynamic range and a sensitive touch. The frame, however, was light and fragile, similar to that of a harpsichord, and not at all equal to the strength of the action, and the force of which the hammers were capable.

23

The Giornale article, written, by the poet and journalist Scipione Maffei – in such an expository and laudatory manner that one suspects it might have been a kind of ‘info-ad’ article – would be much reprinted over the next few years, and translated into German in 1725, inspiring the development of the new instrument north of the Alps. Describing the virtues of Cristofori’s invention, it pointed out that whereas bowed instruments – the long-established violin family – created “differentiation and alternation of sound”, the harpsichord was entirely incapable of doing any such thing. With the new “piano e forte,” the player could control, by applying different degrees of force to the keys, “not only the volume, but also the diminution and variety of the sound, as if on a cello.”

The essay was pleased to inform readers that one could experience the effect of “the soft and the loud” that one heard from the best musicians “in the grand concerts in Rome – either in the propositions and responses, or when the level of sound is allowed to drop little by little, through artful diminution, and then suddenly return at full blast.” By “propositions and responses” the writer was referring to the possibility of contrast between one section and another, and also to the availability of contrast within individual phrases and counter-melodies. These possibilities would come eventually, in Chopin’s hands a century later, to almost rival the variety of contrasts available to the human voice. Through “artful” means, Chopin would aspire to do just that – imitate the voice, and make the piano speak with every nuance and inflection of which the voice is capable.

The forte-piano – ‘loud-soft’, as it was called throughout the 18th century – was slow to catch on. It never caught on at all in Italy, the country of its origin. The Italians confined their musical enthusiasms almost exclusively to opera and to the violin. To this day, there are hardly even any symphony orchestras in Italy, and the great Italian pianists can be counted on a few fingers, but Italy’s contribution to opera and to the art of the violin, as well as the invention of the piano, are surely laurels enough in the history and development of Western music.

As the early fortepianos were the same size and shape as harpsichords, they didn’t at first seem all that different. But the new instrument in fact represented a complete departure. What it did so clearly, right from the beginning, was allow the player to differentiate melody from accompaniment, one of the aspects of “propositions and responses.”

Johann Sebastian Bach’s demonstration, in his manifesto of keyboard harmony, The Well-Tempered Clavier, that the system of keyboard tuning whereby the tones and semitones were evenly spaced and fixed – in contrast to the tuning of stringed and wind instruments – would eventually mean that the piano, which could also clearly differentiate melody and accompaniment, could be an entirely self-sufficient instrument, one which required no assisting instruments. What was lacking in terms of singing potential was gained in precision of modulation and transposition, and thereby complete harmonic and textural independence.

Bach tried out a few ‘pianofortes’ when he visited Dresden in 1736. He thought they were pleasant but weak in the treble and had too heavy and stiff a touch. The maker, Gottfried Silbermann, was the most celebrated organ builder and harpsichord manufacturer of his time, building forty-seven organs in Saxony. Silbermann had begun to make fortepianos in 1726 on the model of Cristofori’s action, following the publication of the Giornale article in Hamburg the previous year.

24

According to a colleague, Silbermann was “angry with Mr. Bach for a long time.” Nevertheless, Silbermann made improvements over the following years with Bach in mind. Eleven years after their first encounter, Bach played on Silbermann’s pianos again, this time for Frederick the Great, a passionate musician and collector, who owned fifteen of Silbermann’s pianos. Bach had come to Potsdam to see his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who had been appointed harpsichordist to the emperor in 1740. Frederick, who was just then playing the flute with his orchestra – his favourite occupation – exclaimed “Gentlemen, old Bach is here!” Bach was sixty-two at the time – not that ‘old’, but perhaps the king simply meant Bach ‘senior’. He didn’t allow old Bach time to change his traveling clothes, hurrying him into the music room. Bach improvised on one of the fortepianos upon a theme by Frederick, producing a six-part fugue, which he later continued to develop when he got home to Leipzig, in the process creating A Musical Offering, dedicated to Frederick. This time, Bach was pleased by Silbermann’s instruments, which had undergone much improvement in the intervening decade.

But for Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest of all organists and harpsichordists, the fortepiano remained but a curiosity. It was his son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, who became the first important composer for the fortepiano, and who wrote the first great treatise on the playing of keyboard instruments, “Versuch űber die wahre Art das Klavier zu spielen” – ‘Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments’, Part 1 of which appeared in 1753, three years after the death of Johann Sebastian, and Part 2 nine years later.

The great harpsichordist, or ‘clavecinist’, François Couperin, had published a graceful and humorous instruction book on harpsichord playing, L’Art de toucher le clavecin, in 1716, dedicated to the six year-old king Louis XV, but Carl Philipp Emmanuel’s monumental opus was a major overview of all keyboard performance practice, and it became very famous, being used as a reference work for generations, especially for the correct interpretation of ornaments, but also for systems of fingering, the realization of figured-basses, how to accompany, and the style and manner in which to play keyboard instruments with taste and refinement in general. “Whatever I understand of the pianoforte I learned from this book,” Clementi, the first great fortepiano player, would say many years later.

The Versuch addressed players of all keyboard instruments, particularly the harpsichord and the clavichord – the latter being Carl Philipp Emmanuel’s preferred instrument, because of its delicate expressivity. The clavichord was an older instrument, small and ethereal-sounding, which neither plucked nor struck the strings, but produced its sound by a pressure-stroke from below, delivered by small pieces of metal called tangents, which vibrated and ‘stopped’ the strings like a violinist’s finger.

But the new instrument was also recognized: Carl Philipp Emmanuel had become very familiar with the fortepiano thanks to his employer’s substantial collection of Silbermann pianos, and he himself gave performances on the instrument, including the sonatas he composed from the early 1740s until his death in 1787: “The more recent pianoforte, when it is sturdy and well built, has many fine qualities, despite its deficiency in sustaining tone, although its touch must be carefully worked out, as much as possible in a singing manner – a task which is by no means easy, if we desire not to leave the ear empty, or to disturb the noble simplicity of the cantabile by too much noise.”

25

Chopin was still endeavouring – successfully – to do exactly the same thing three quarters of a century later, namely ‘work out the touch as much as possible in a singing manner’, without disturbing ‘the noble simplicity of the cantabile by too much noise’ – or percussiveness – a task which was still ‘by no means easy’.

The first ever public “Piano Forte” concert was given in London in 1768, sixty years after the instrument’s invention by Cristofori, and seventeen years after J. S. Bach’s death, by Carl Phillip Emmanuel’s much younger brother Johann Christian. Living in England for two decades as a concert and opera director and music teacher to the family of George III, famously painted by the musically inclined Gainsborough, Johann Christian, the eighteenth and youngest surviving child of Johann Sebastian, was known as “The English Bach.”

Johann Christian Bach, by Gainsborough

A handsome and graceful man with charm and tact, Johann Christian Bach, who had studied with his older brother Carl Philipp Emanuel, and then the famous Padre Martini in Bologna, was something of a black sheep, especially after his conversion to Catholicism, which estranged him from his deeply Lutheran family. After a decade in Italy, during which he became organist at Milan Cathedral, Johann Christian came to London, where, with Cecilia Grassi – the Italian opera singer he later married – by his side, he became the leading musical personality in England, an admired composer and keyboard virtuoso, and the adored mentor of the boy genius Mozart, who with his family spent fifteen months in London when he was nine.

J. C. Bach was the leader of the new style galant, a complete departure from his father’s polyphonic High Baroque style, which had by then been consigned to history, and he was the most important single influence upon Mozart’s life with regard to his development as a composer. Gainsborough’s portrait shows J. C. to have been handsome and clever looking, very different in appearance from the rest of his family.

26

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It was in fact Mozart who really put the fortepiano on the map. Mozart was also an accomplished performer on the violin and other keyboard instruments, but during the mid-1770s, in his early twenties, the fortepiano became his preferred vehicle for displaying his own performing talents. Mozart’s twenty-seven piano concertos, and his twenty piano sonatas, were the first major body of work to be composed specifically for the fortepiano. Written for his own use as a performer, Mozart’s concertos would remain unsurpassed for idiomatic pianistic writing, as well as beauty, and for their elegant way of highlighting the abilities of a star performer.

Mozart took a keen interest in the development of the instrument, being particularly impressed by the pianos of the Austrian maker Andreas Stein, whose pianos, starting around 1770, were the first where the action and the stringing in the frame were reasonably matched. At the same time, Stein invented what was to become known as the “Viennese” action, the most important feature of which was the consistent incorporation of a well co-ordinated ‘escapement’. The hammers were light, the touch shallow, not unlike that of a clavichord, and the strings were able to sustain the hammer action, thereby producing a charming, ‘singing’ tone.

Mozart derived great pleasure and interest when visiting Stein at his workshop in Augsburg during the course of his travels, and wrote home to his father about Stein’s pianos, in a letter dated October 17, 1777, which is an important document regarding the development of the pianoforte: “Before I had seen any of his make, Späth’s claviers had always been my favourites. But now I prefer Stein’s, for they dampen so much better than the Regensburg instruments. When I play vigorously, whether I leave the finger down on the note or lift it up, the tone ceases the moment I have sounded it. I can touch the keys any way I wish, the tone will always be even; it never jars, it will never come out too loud or too soft or perhaps even fail to sound at all; in a word, everything is even…

27

“His instruments have this distinguishing feature: they are made with an escape action… Only one maker in a hundred bothers about this, but without an escapement it is impossible for a note not to jingle or leave a vibration after being struck. When you touch the keys, his hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you leave the keys down or release them.

“He himself told me that when he has finished making one of these claviers, he sits down and tries all kinds of passages, runs and jumps, and he polishes and works away at it until it can do anything. For he labours only in the interest of music, and not for his own profit; otherwise he would be finished almost immediately. He often says: ‘If I myself were not such a passionate lover of music and had not myself some slight skill on the clavier, I should long ago have lost patience with my work’.

“And his claviers really do last. He guarantees that the sounding-board will neither break nor split. When he has finished making one for a clavier, he places it in the open air, exposing it to rain, snow, the heat of the sun and all hell, in order that it may crack. Then he inserts wedges and glues them in to make the instrument very strong and firm. He is delighted when it cracks, for he can then be sure that nothing more can happen to it. Indeed, he often cuts into it himself and then glues it together and strengthens it in this way…

“The device too which you work with the knee is better on his than on other instruments. I have only to touch it and it works; and when you shift your knee the slightest bit, you do not feel the least reverberation.” (The device to which Mozart refers is the forerunner of the pedal, which Stein pioneered in conjunction with the escapement. This was initially a lever underneath the piano case which one pressed with the knee, thereby raising the dampers and prolonging the sound independently of whatever the fingers did.)

Leopold answered his son’s enthusiastic letter by saying he was glad Mr. Stein’s pianos were good, but they were too expensive.

Mozart, aged 23, and sister Nannerl, 28, with father Leopold, and mother on the wall,

by Johann Nepomuk de la Croce, 1779

28

Mozart also had plenty to say about Stein’s precocious daughter Nanette, and his observations throw a useful light on his attitudes to pianoforte technique and style:

“About his little girl. Anybody who sees and hears her play and does not burst out laughing must, like her father, be made of stone (‘like her father’ is a pun on the word Stein, which means ‘stone’ in German). Mr. Stein is completely silly about his daughter. She is eight years old and learns everything only from memory… Instead of sitting in the middle of the keyboard, she sits right up by the treble, as it gives her more chance of flopping about and making grimaces. She rolls her eyes and smirks. When a passage is repeated, she plays it slower the second time. If it has to be played a third time, then she plays it even more slowly.

“She raises the arm as high as possible, and if the notes in a passage are stressed, the arm, not the fingers, do this, and that too, with great emphasis and clumsy manner.. She may succeed, for she has great talent, but by this method she will not make progress, for she will never acquire great rapidity… She will never get that which is the most essential, the hardest, and the principal thing in music, tempo – because from infancy she has done her utmost not to play in time.

“Mr. Stein and I talked about this for two hours at least. I have almost converted him, and he now asks my advice about everything… he sees and hears that I do not make grimaces and yet play with such expression that, as he himself confesses, no one up to the present has been able to get such good results out of his pianofortes. Everyone is amazed that I can always keep strict time. What these people cannot grasp is that in tempo rubato in an adagio, the left hand should go on playing in strict time. With them the left hand always follows suit.”

The observations about playing in time and about the importance of the left hand maintaining strict time in tempo rubato are particularly interesting, as the concept, and even the term tempo rubato, are generally thought of as the property of Chopin, and are certainly associated mainly with him. But here it is, being described by Mozart in exactly the same way in which it would be used by Chopin, sixty years earlier.

“Even in his tempo rubato,” according to Chopin’s pupil Carl Mikuli, “one hand – that having the accompaniment – always played on in strict time, while the other, singing the melody, either hesitating as if undecided, or, with increased animation, anticipating with a kind of impatient vehemence… maintained the freedom of expression from the fetters of strict regularity.”

Mozart himself adopted the expression tempo rubato – which, of course, describes a completely natural phenomenon, namely the progress of music over time according to natural rhythm, the way we breathe – from Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach. “He is the father, we are the children,” said Mozart. In the Versuch, Bach had written, “As soon as the upper part begins slavishly to follow the bar, the essence of rubato is lost, for then all other parts must be played in time. Other instrumentalists and singers, when they are accompanied, can introduce the tempo (tempo rubato) much more easily than the solo clavierist.”

The controversy about technique-versus-musicality among pianists – as if one could only have one or the other, having to make some kind of pact with the devil by which one sacrificed one’s musical feeling in exchange for technique – emerged full-blown right at the very beginning of the piano’s history.

29

The representatives of the respective sides were Mozart – the ‘musical’ one – and the energetic, extroverted Italian who had settled in England, Muzio Clementi – somewhat unfairly categorized, because of the vitality of his playing, as the king of ‘technical’ virtuosity, the Horowitz of his day. Clementi became a substantial composer, and his many sonatas – around seventy for the piano alone, with another thirty for violin and piano – probably influenced Beethoven as much, or more, than did those of Mozart or Haydn, a debt Beethoven freely acknowledged. The sonatas were largely neglected by posterity, overshadowed by Clementi’s composition of the first great set of piano Etudes, published in 1817. This famous set of studies, entitled Gradus ad Parnassum – ‘Steps to Parnassus’ (Parnassus being the home of the muses, and this title often given to dictionaries of Latin and Greek) – combined technical instruction with expressivity, and was to be constantly used for the training of piano students thenceforth. It was always the first prescribed by Chopin for his own pupils.

Clementi’s sonatas, completely neglected, would be championed in the 1950s by Vladimir Horowitz, who was delighted to discover them when his wife Wanda brought back the scores from Italy, as well as the sonatas of Scarlatti. Horowitz found in Clementi’s short and dramatically effective sonatas a stimulating Classic-Romantic alternative to the obligatory Beethoven sonata for concert programmes.

Clementi’s reputation as being first and foremost a virtuoso performer rather than a composer was due to the fact that his strikingly effective compositional style, with its adventurous modulations and proto-Romantic manner, developed only in mid-life, after his performing days were over, and well after his famous encounter with Mozart, which took place in Vienna, when he was just twenty-eight years old and Mozart twenty-four.

The music-loving emperor of Austria, Joseph II, was keen to compare the two leading executants on the fortepiano, somewhat to Mozart’s reticence. When Clementi visited the city in January 1781, Joseph immediately arranged an evening at which the two were invited alternately to perform their compositions and, most of all, to improvise on a variety of themes. The emperor was in a high state of excitement, canvassing opinion, and even taking bets around him. Years later, Joseph was still pondering the question. He asked the composer Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf about Mozart and Clementi: “What is your opinion? Be honest”. Dittersdorf replied, “Clementi’s way of playing is art alone. Mozart’s is art and taste.” To which the emperor responded, “That’s just what I said!”

After this celebrated occasion, significant because of its historical timing at the real starting point of the piano as a virtuoso solo performing instrument – 1780 – Clementi spoke admiringly of Mozart’s singing touch and exquisite taste, qualities which he apparently emulated thereafter. He lived forty years beyond Mozart, till the early days of Chopin and Liszt, and his most famous pupils would be John Cramer, John Field and Friedrich Kalkbrenner. Another student was the celebrated opera composer of Chopin’s time Giacomo Meyerbeer.

A man of vitality and extroversion, as well as keen business sense, Clementi established a piano manufacturing and music publishing business in 1799, and gave lessons to the teenaged Irish pianist John Field in return for his working for him in the factory, apparently exceedingly long hours, as a piano demonstrator and salesman. After Clementi’s death in 1832, the piano firm became known as Collard and Collard.

30

Muzio Clementi

Clementi told his student Ludwig Berger, who would be the piano teacher of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn in Berlin, that “he had achieved a more melodic and noble style of performance after listening attentively to famous singers, and also by means of the perfected mechanism of English pianos, the construction of which formerly stood in the way of a cantabile and legato style of playing.”

But Mozart was discomfited by Clementi, despite the fact that the tone of their ‘duel’ had been friendly, and as part of the proceedings they played a duet. Mozart was particularly irritated by Clementi’s prowess with passages in double notes, which were the Italian visitor’s speciality. Any pianist today will likewise be caught between fascination and envy of anyone who can play Chopin’s Etude in thirds well, or Liszt’s octave passages, and just like Mozart, be eager to point out that that’s all they can do!

“I implore my sister not to practise these passages too much,” Mozart wrote to his sister Nannerl two years later, about Clementi’s sonatas, “so that she may not spoil her quiet, even touch, and that her hand may not lose its natural lightness, flexibility and smooth rapidity. For after all, what is to be gained by it? Supposing that you do play sixths and octaves with the utmost velocity – which no-one can accomplish, not even Clementi – you can produce only an atrocious chopping effect and nothing else whatsoever.

“Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians. He writes Presto over a sonata or even Prestissimo and Alla breve, and plays it himself Allegro in 4/4 time. I know this is the case for I have heard him do so. His star passages are thirds; but he sweated over them day and night in London. Apart from this he can do nothing, absolutely nothing, for he has not a farthing’s worth of taste or feeling; he is a mere mechanicus.”

31

It must be reiterated, however, in fairness to Mozart, that Clementi’s style of playing, by his own admission as well as repute, changed considerably, later becoming positively distinguished and admired for its legato and cantabile. As Clementi himself pointed out, this transformation coincided with the change in the pianoforte, something with which he was intimately involved. Clementi lived happily in England, becoming rich from his piano business as well as property, and married twice, in his fifties, his first wife dying in childbirth. He visited the Continent periodically in order to sell his pianos, taking his young demonstrator John Field with him on his first extended tour, in 1802 – 3. Like a true English gentleman, Clementi made his home in the country, and his final resting place was to be Westminster Abbey.

Field did not return to England with Clementi. He liked Russia, and settled in St. Petersburg in 1803, at the age of twenty-one, becoming a fashionable teacher. The Irishman would be based there for the next thirty years, often touring Europe. Apart from his seven piano concertos and four sonatas, Field, with his individual expressive style, initiated the form of the Nocturne, later taken up so distinctively by Chopin. Field was the first performer to make consistent use of the sustaining pedal for widespread chords, and for general artistic effect. He also established the primacy of a cantabile line, simple or ornamented, with a supportive accompaniment in the left hand, thereby laying the ground for Chopin.

John Field, precursor of Chopin

From Mozart’s illuminating letters about Andreas Stein and his daughter, and those about Clementi and his style of playing, we can see the essential elements of Mozart’s own style – clear, undemonstrative, no raised arm movements, hands close to the keys, light, flexible, fleet, above all ‘singing’; though Beethoven told Carl Czerny that Mozart’s playing was “neat and clean, but rather empty, flat and antiquated.” We can also see the relation of that style to the kind of piano available to Mozart, a piano which underpinned the “Viennese School” of piano playing.

32

By 1800, a decade after Mozart’s death, Andreas Stein’s escapement had become standard, and was now known as the “Vienna action”. Stein himself had died a year after Mozart, but his firm continued in the hands of his son Matthaűs Andreas and daughter Nanette. There was a marked contrast between the two leading streams of piano manufacturers in the early 19th century, the Viennese and the English. In his celebrated Méthode, Kalkbrenner described it well: “The Viennese pianists are particularly distinguished for their precision, the clarity and rapidity of their execution. Thus the instruments manufactured in that city are extremely easy to play… English pianos have a fuller sound and a heavier keyboard action. The players of that country have adopted a larger style and the beautiful way of singing that distinguishes them, and it is indispensable to use the large pedal in order to conceal the inherent dryness of the piano. Dussek, Field and J. B. Cramer, the leaders of that school which was founded by Clementi, use the pedal when harmonies do not change.”

The many differences between the actions of the Viennese pianos and the English ones revolved mainly around a lighter action in the Viennese models, which was conducive to velocity of performance, as well as charm and elegance. In the Viennese action the hammer was fixed to the key itself, effecting a crisper dampening action when the hammer engaged with the escapement.

But the really big difference between the Viennese and English pianos was the relationship between the key and hammer action and the frame, soundboard and case. The English pianos were altogether more massive and stronger, allowing for a richer, fuller tone, hence ‘singing’ – cantabile – playing, and a sonorous solidity in bass chords, necessary for the works of Beethoven. English pianos also had ‘trichord’ stringing – three strings to each note – throughout, brass in the bass, steel in the treble, adding to the brilliance as well as the depth of sound. Beethoven was unabashed about his preference for English pianos.

The leading Viennese manufacturer at the turn of the 19th century was the firm of Johann Streicher, run by ‘Nanette Streicher, née Stein’, who had separated her and her husband’s operation from that of her brother in 1802. The ‘Vienna action’ had a shallow key fall and small hammers, and its lightness allowed for a fluency which suited the music of the Viennese composers, above all Mozart and Haydn. Hammers in both the Viennese and English pianos were covered with leather; various materials were experimented with, including cloth over leather, and leather over felt, but all-felt hammers, which dampened the more dissonant harmonics and produced a mellower tone, would not appear until 1826, when the Parisian piano manufacturer Jean Henri Pape introduced them.

In the 1790s, the young pianoforte virtuoso Ludwig van Beethoven – a close friend of Nanette Streicher, who looked after him in Vienna like a sister, bringing him food, taking away his washing, checking on things with his many landladies – was champing at the bit for a more powerful instrument, and this was to come to him from the leading English manufacturer, Broadwood and Sons.

The Broadwood company had been founded in 1728 by the Swiss harpsichord maker Burkhard Tschudi, for the manufacture of harpsichords. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War between Prussia and most of the rest of Europe, a number of German craftsmen settled in London during the 1760s. Among them was Johann Christoph Zumpe, a pupil of Gottfried Silbermann, who came as a young man to work for Tschudi, and then set up his own shop at Great Pulteney street.

33

Zumpe, who pronounced his name ‘Zumpy’ as in ‘Grumpy’, introduced to England the manufacture of the square piano, a small domestic instrument which had been invented by another Silbermann pupil, Christian Ernst Friederici. Square pianos, which incorporated a simplified form of the Cristofori action, became enormously popular and fashionable during the late 18th century and the first part of the 19th above all in England – where the clavichord had never caught on. Jane Austen would certainly have played on a square piano. Chopin seems to be playing one in the youthful drawing of him by Elise Radziwill, but it’s hard to tell because we can only see the keyboard and the front legs. The square piano was improved and increased in size by Broadwood, and it remained in general use during the first half of the 19th century, eventually being completely replaced by the upright piano, which had begun life in the 1820s in a variety of shapes and sizes, including the ‘lyre’, ‘giraffe’ and ‘pyramid’. Steinway produced its last square piano as late as 1888.

There was enormous demand for domestic pianos of all kinds from the time of Jane Austen’s youth through the first decades of the 19th century. Broadwood and Sons catered to all these requirements as the market leader in England, but Broadwood was to become really celebrated as the manufacturer of the heavier, fuller grand fortepiano, the instrument which we would recognize as a ‘grand piano’. The word ‘grand’ was first used in 1777, when the London piano maker William Stodart took out a patent for an ‘English Grand Action’.

The firm of ‘Shudi and Broadwood’ had come into existence in 1770, the year of Beethoven’s birth, when young John Broadwood, who was employed by Tschudi – now Shudi – and had married his daughter the year before, went into partnership with him. John Broadwood himself was very inventive, and took out several patents for new developments in the 1780s, including one in 1783 for pedals to operate the dampening mechanism – the ‘sustaining pedal’ – in place of the former knee levers.

Broadwood’s manufacture of pianos – square pianos – began in 1773, the year Shudi died, and grand pianos in 1781. In 1795 the firm became John Broadwood and Son’, and in 1807, ‘John Broadwood and Sons’. It’s like a family business that starts out manufacturing and selling typewriters and moves on naturally in the next generation to word processors, then computers. Members of the family still sat on the board of the company in the second half of the twentieth century.

Like Mozart, Beethoven had started out as a virtuoso performer rather than a composer. His dramatic, Romantically charged improvisation at the keyboard astonished absolutely everyone. We can get some idea of how exciting this must have been from the cadenzas he wrote for his own concertos – notably the first, third and fourth. By the time he came to write his fifth concerto, the Emperor, Beethoven had decided to write the cadenzas into the composition as an integral part of the work, so that there was no possibility of a tame, lack-lustre performance. Far and away the strongest performer of his time, Beethoven’s playing was full of fire and vitality. Czerny recalled that Beethoven’s playing was “marked by enormous energy, strength, incredible bravura and fluency.”

One of the most salient features of Beethoven’s performances was a constant barrage of broken strings. The Bohemian flautist and composer Anton Reicha, a friend of Beethoven from his Bonn days, then in Vienna, who would later settle in Paris and give composition lessons to Berlioz, Liszt, Gounod and Franck, reports that once, around 1795, when Beethoven played at court,

34

“He asked me to turn pages for him. But I was mostly occupied in wrenching the strings of the pianoforte which snapped, while the hammers stuck among the broken strings. Beethoven insisted on finishing the concerto (it was a concerto by Mozart) and so back and forth I leapt, jerking out a string, disentangling a hammer, turning a page, and I worked harder than Beethoven.”

The fortepiano of Beethoven’s youth, especially the Viennese model, was still very much a chamber instrument with little resonance or carrying power, and a limited variety of sound quality. It had a range of no more than five octaves, little more than Cristofori’s four-and-a-half octaves. This began to change dramatically during the first years of the 19th century, coinciding with the turning point of Beethoven’s career.

Beethoven in 1795, age 25

Beethoven was always unhappy with his pianos. In 1796, he wrote to Johann Streicher, “there is no doubt that as far as the manner of playing it is concerned, the pianoforte is still the least studied and least developed of all instruments – often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp. I am delighted, my dear fellow, that you are one of the few who realize that, providing one feels the music, one can also make the pianoforte sing.”

During his middle years there were steady improvements, with increases in the size of the keyboard and sturdiness of construction, particularly from the English manufacturers, but the broken strings never stopped with Beethoven. Ironically, were it not for his deafness, and his consequent focus on composition instead of performing, and, of course, the intensity of that focus, Beethoven would almost certainly not have developed into the overwhelming composer we know. Goethe wrote to his friend, the composer Carl Zelter, in 1812, “one must pity him for the loss of hearing which, however, is perhaps less harmful to him from a musical than a social viewpoint.” To his wife he wrote, “Never have I met such a concentrated, forceful and fervent artist. I can well understand that he must have a strange relationship to the world.”

Broadwood led the way in increasing the size and range of the piano keyboard, averaging five and a half to six octaves by 1800. The first six-octave piano – a Broadwood of course – had been played at a concert in London in 1794 by the star virtuoso Jan Ladislav Dussek, the first full-time touring celebrity concert performer. “Le beau Dussek” – ‘beau’ in his early years, but not so beau later on, becoming very fat – was also the first pianist to perform with his profile to the audience, the first instance being a concerto performance in Prague in 1804.

35

A student of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Dussek, who composed about fifty piano sonatas, anticipating the characteristics of Romantic piano music, was greatly admired for his ‘singing’ style and conceptual projection. Dussek’s performances in 1808 in Paris, where he had first come in 1786, soon acquiring the patronage of Marie Antoinette, and now that of Talleyrand – in whose house he would live for the remaining three years of his life as a permanent houseguest – caused a furore. The critic Joseph Fétis, who was to laud the appearance of Chopin a little over twenty years later, wrote, “The broad and noble style of this artist, his method of singing on an instrument which possessed no sustained sounds, the neatness, delicacy and brilliance of his playing in short, procured him a triumph of which there had been no previous example.”

Nanette Streicher was not to be outdone without a fight, and in 1816 she began producing pianos with a six-and-a-half-octave range. In December 1817, Thomas Broadwood sent Beethoven a birthday present of the latest model Broadwood, a sturdy grand more resonant than anything up until that time, with a similar range. The piano came by sea around Gibraltar to Venice, then north over the mountains to Vienna. Beethoven was thrilled, and enormously proud of his Broadwood, even though he could by then hear hardly a thing. Over the remaining nine years of his life he would pound it in a futile attempt to hear the music he was composing, until all the strings were broken and tangled up like a bramble bush; there was no need, after all, to remove the broken strings if you were deaf and if you weren’t going to give a concert.

The range of the piano now completely outstripped that of any other instrument by a long way. Within the next ten years, the range would steadily increase further, finally reaching the standard seven octaves in 1836, the year that Chopin completed his 24 Etudes. With every addition of a note or two, Beethoven became so excited he would compose a new sonata using the expanded range. This was cutting-edge technology, 19th century-style, comparable in our time to Microsoft bringing out new programmes. The hardware was improving, and in Beethoven’s hands the software kept pace. It was, in fact, the power of Beethoven’s music, more than anything, which inspired manufacturers to develop the range and scope of the pianoforte.

In 1821, when Beethoven, at fifty, was at his apex, and Frederic Chopin was eleven, the French piano maker, Sébastien Érard, patented a “double escapement,” or “repetition,” action, which would become the standard grand piano action thereafter, and so it is to this day. This improvement upon the Stein-Streicher Vienna action allowed for a repetition lever to have the mechanism in place to allow repetition of a key before it was completely released. That meant that there was a resistance and a kick in the final moment before the key went right down, thus allowing the pianist much more control of the sound produced, and much quicker repetition of the note.

The double escapement meant that the hammer didn’t need to be fully raised before it repeated the note, so it was no longer necessary to strike the keys in a cut and dried, brittle fashion. A lot of early 19th century piano music incorporated repeated notes frequently, as a means of emulating the tremolando of a violin, but quicker repetition would mean much more than simply being able to play repeated notes faster. In a broader sense, it would signify a major development for the ease and fluidity with which the piano could be played. The year after the introduction of the crucial ‘double escapement’ action, Érard started manufacturing grand pianos with the modern seven-octave range, that range only being increased eventually by another third of an octave.

36

Érard, of German origin, came from Strasbourg, and had arrived in Paris in 1768 at the age of sixteen, getting a job working for a harpsichord manufacturer. The Duchesse de Villeroi became young Érard’s patroness, and she gave him his own workshop in her hôtel de ville, where in 1777 he produced the first piano ever made in France. Unable to handle all the commissions he received, Sébastien sent for his brother Jean Baptiste, with whom he developed his own instrument manufacturing business, producing harps as well as pianos, rue de Bourbon, in the Faubourg St. Germain. In 1786 the company opened a branch in London, and the Érard brothers stayed in London throughout the Revolutionary period (good idea), not returning to Paris until 1796. The solid English style of piano manufacture influenced Érard’s grand pianos. In 1803, the brothers gave Beethoven a piano, which he used for many years. Sébastien lived in London for another extended period, 1808 to 1812.

Enormously inventive, Sébastien Érard introduced not only the double escapement (his crowning achievement, at the age of seventy) but also the ‘celeste pedal’, an alternative to the una corda method for damping the strings, now obsolete, which, instead of moving the hammers along so that just one string – una corda – was struck, employed a strip of felt. In 1810, during his second residence in London, Sébastien introduced the double-action harp – the standard harp still in use today. The double action of the harp is as essential to the modern harp as the double escapement is to the piano, and the two are not dissimilar. The seven pedals on the harp – one for each note of the octave – each have two notches, and each pedal can be depressed to two levels – or notches – shortening the strings to the degree of a semitone or a tone. The name Érard is as important to harpists as it is to pianists.

Also, simultaneously with Broadwood, Érard developed metal bracing for the piano frame, using iron tension bars in the treble. The need for metal support for the wooden case – which kept the possibilities of the pianoforte in a box, so to speak – was steadily becoming increasingly necessary as bigger, stronger pianos were sought.

After a while, Érard had competition from a new name, one which is central to our story. Ignaz Pleyel, the twenty-fourth child of a poor schoolmaster in the village of Ruppersthal near Vienna, studied piano under the Bohemian composer Johann Baptist Vanhall, and composition with Haydn, who became his friend. Renowned in his day, Vanhall, who had studied with his contemporary, Karl Ditters von Ditterdorf, in Vienna, composed over a hundred symphonies and a similar number of string quartets, as well as twenty-five masses. Vanhall, Dittersdorf, Mozart and Haydn would on occasion play string quartets together. Pleyel himself became a most prolific composer, beginning at nineteen with a puppet opera which was performed with Haydn’s help at Esterház. Pleyel produced twenty-nine symphonies and sixty-four string quartets, as well as quintets, piano and violin concertos, and piano sonatas, all in a spirited and inventive style. Niccolò Paganini’s first public performance, as a boy of eight in a church in Genoa in 1790, was of a concerto by Pleyel. In 1792 Pleyel saw his mentor Haydn in London when they both conducted concerts there. Some of Pleyel’s works are still occasionally played in France, especially by violinists.

At age twenty-six, Pleyel became deputy maître de chapelle, or kapellmeister, at the cathedral of Strasbourg, and six years later, in 1789, maître de chapelle. Not the best of times to land a job in France, Pleyel only narrowly escaped the guillotine, and in 1795, after the Terror, he moved to Paris and opened a music shop. Soon afterwards, he entered the music publishing field, his first major project being the publication of the first complete edition of Haydn’s eighty-four string quartets.

37

Pleyel soon launched the concept of pocket editions of music, which he sold at ‘des prix bon marché’ – popular prices. In 1807, responding to the great demand, Pleyel began manufacturing pianos, and from then on this became the major part of his business. ‘Great demand’ is putting it mildly: within another generation, one in every ten of the one million residents of Paris played the piano! An 1845 survey estimated that there were 60,000 pianos in Paris alone.

Ignaz Pleyel died just one month after Frederic Chopin came to Paris, Sébastien Érard having died three months earlier. But Pleyel had handed over the reins of his business seven years before, in 1824, to his son Camille. A very accomplished pianist himself, Camille Pleyel moved with the times and allied his flourishing company with the new generation of celebrity pianists. The first among them, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, became a part-owner in the Pleyel piano company, and from this he became rich – not from from his many concerts or his heavy teaching schedule (Kalkbrenner was the busiest and most fashionable piano teacher in Paris). After Kalkbrenner joined the company, the Pleyel piano became the instrument of choice for many of the virtuoso performers in Paris, though Érard held its ground well into the twentieth century.

Camille Pleyel went even further in combining piano manufacture with the music and concert business. In 1830, with much fanfare, the company opened a beautiful concert hall, the Salle Pleyel, at 9 rue Cadet, in the 9th arrondissement, which was available for rent to the public, and nine years later another hall was opened.

Salle Pleyel, ‘l’Illustration, journal universel’, June 9, 1855

The two halls, running concurrently, presented around two hundred concerts a year – all using Pleyel pianos of course. Pleyel’s example was followed by other piano manufacturers, with a Salle Érard, a Salle Gaveau, and in New York, Steinway Hall, which was New York’s main concert hall until the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891.

The alliance of art and commerce continued to develop as a natural business practice in America till the mid-twentieth century, piano companies identifying themselves with famous performers, and organizing their concerts and tours with their own pianos. The culmination of this kind of partnership between classical music, technology and commerce, was the association between 1937 and 1954 of NBC’s new radio and television broadcasting technology with the celebrated name and talent of Arturo Toscanini. Camille Pleyel was to the Paris of the 1830s rather like David Sarnoff was to America in the 1930s and 40s, and Pleyel more than anyone created this type of modern promotional business style in music.

38

It was into this world that the twenty-one year-old Frederic Chopin arrived in the autumn of 1831. The instrument had finally become definitively known as a piano, although the English quaintly went on calling it ‘pianoforte’ throughout the 19th century. Chopin had been accustomed to Viennese pianos in Poland when he was growing up. His farewell concert in Warsaw, on October 11th, 1830, at which he played his new E minor concerto, was given on a Streicher piano. Chopin’s choice of wording in his own description of this concert seems to indicate the lightness of the Viennese piano: “… Then My Highness played the first allegro of the E minor concerto, which I reeled off on a Streicher piano; the bravos were deafening… ”

Now, in Paris, Chopin felt comfortable with the Pleyel piano, which suited his elegant touch and refined sound, while Liszt preferred the somewhat sturdier, more English-style Érard. The most important of Chopin’s few public concerts took place at the main Salle Pleyel, from his very first, which took place on February 26th, 1832.

Chopin’s own piano at home in Paris would be a Pleyel grand, a light-actioned, clear-sounding piano with no great depth of volume, but with a pearly finesse. He also had a Pleyel upright, which he almost preferred, with its more intimate sound and even lighter action. During lessons – he taught on average for four or five hours each day – Chopin would have his students play the grand, while he himself would be seated at the upright, giving examples.

Chopin at home, by Jakob Gőtzenberger, 1838

Camille Pleyel became a close friend of Chopin, from his first appearance in Paris. Soon afterwards, he dedicated the three Nocturnes, Op. 9, to Pleyel’s new young wife. Marie Pleyel was the leading woman pianist of her generation, considered by some to be the female counterpart of Liszt, and would be rivaled only by Clara Wieck, who was still a girl at this time. The two women were very different pianists, though they became friends: Marie was an exciting, Lisztian style pianist, whereas Clara, having been a brilliant pianist in her youth, became the doyenne of ‘musical’ pianists.

39

Pleyel’s marriage was not a success, as we shall see in a future chapter, getting off to a bad start when Marie’s outraged former fiancé, Hector Berlioz – who only found out that he had become ‘former’ after the fact – set off in a fury with loaded pistols from Rome, where he had only recently arrived to take up his Prix de Rome scholarship. But Chopin’s Nocturnes were a miraculous success, taking Field’s simple model and transforming it into an ethereal, transcendant kind of pianistic magic which, as Liszt would say of Chopin’s music in this vein, is “like nothing on earth.”

Chopin’s twenty-four Préludes, completed at Majorca during his fateful sojourn there, on a Pleyel upright sent from Paris, was dedicated to Camille Pleyel in its French edition. Pleyel paid Chopin properly, and was well aware of the uniqueness of his friend’s genius. The two visited London together in 1837, the coronation year of Victoria, and Pleyel, having distanced himself from his wife, lived there for a while.

Chopin’s name became inextricably linked with Pleyel pianos. He even issued an endorsement, published to this day by Pleyel, which sounds remarkably like modern American endorsements for Steinway pianos: “Quand je me sens en verve et assez fort pour trouver mon propre son á moi, il me faut un piano de Pleyel” – ‘When I’m on form and strong enough to achieve my own individual sound, I need a Pleyel piano.’

Pleyel pianos were, from the start, very precise in their action, yielding the possibility of both delicate sound and rapid ‘attack’. Perhaps it was Ignaz Pleyel’s Austrian origin which inspired this Viennese-style clarity and lightness of the mechanism. Ignaz’s motto was “Quand on a pour vocation la musique, la perfection doit être permanente” – ‘When one’s vocation is music, perfection has to be a constant’. Because of their precise and clear quality, Pleyel pianos have appealed to many musicians trained in, or influenced by, the French school, including César Franck, Debussy, Grieg, Ravel, de Falla and Stravinsky.

Chopin’s taste in pianos has been elucidated for us by Liszt: “While Chopin was strong and healthy, during the first years of his residence in Paris, he used to play on an Érard piano. But after his friend Camille Pleyel made him a present of one of his splendid instruments, remarkable for their metallic ring and very light touch, he would play on no other maker’s. If he was engaged for a soirée at the house of one of his Polish or French friends, he would often send his own instrument, if there did not happen to be a Pleyel in the house. Chopin was very partial to Pleyel’s pianos, particularly because of their silvery and somewhat veiled sonority, and of the easy touch which permitted him to draw from them sounds… marrying crystal to water.”

Broadwood built a piano specially for Chopin when he came to London in 1848, a piano more in the style of a Pleyel than a normal Broadwood. It has a shallow touch and a light action similar to the Viennese pianos, with a touch weight of 2½ ounces, as opposed to the 4 ounces which became standard in the latter part of the 19th century.

Like Érard, Pleyel also always manufactured harps, and in the latter part of the 19th century introduced various innovations, invented by members of the family, which aimed at chromaticizing the harp by non-mechanical means. Pleyel’s factory occupied five hectares in Paris, and the company was for quite some time the biggest manufacturer in the world. There’s still a métro stop named for the place where the piano factory stood, ‘Carrefour Pleyel’, and the largest concert hall in Paris today is the present-day Salle Pleyel, located at the top of the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, near the Arc de Triomphe – built in 1927 by the descendants of Ignaz and Camille Pleyel.

40

The increasing demand for the piano as a concert, as well as domestic, instrument, and the growing number and size of halls, required a much bigger sound than could ever have been supplied by the fortepiano, or by the pianos of Chopin’s time. For the increase in tension which would be required on the strings by a larger sound it would be essential to have a full metal frame inside the piano on which to fix and tighten the strings. This would also create the added advantage of keeping pianos in tune much longer.

A patent for such a frame, “to which the strings of the piano forte are attached, of cast iron, wrought-iron, brass composition metal, or some other metal, or compound of metals, suitable to this purpose,” was taken out in 1825 by a Boston craftsman by the name of Alpheus Babcock. It seems natural that it was an American who came up with the engineering development which was to allow the quantum leap for the piano from a comparatively fragile chamber instrument to a ‘concert grand’ capable of filling large halls with a penetrating, ringing sound. Babcock went to work in the 1830s for Jonas Chickering, who had founded his well-known piano company in Boston in 1823, and Chickering made a commercial success of Babcock’s idea, becoming the first to build pianos with iron frames in 1840. From then onward, strings could be heavier, longer, stronger. Liszt had a Chickering in his study at Weimar in his later years.

Seven years after Chopin’s death, Henry Bessemer would invent the process of inexpensively producing malleable steel in large quantities, the culture-revolutionizing ‘Bessemer process’, which, by blowing air through molten pig iron over an open hearth while maintaining enough heat to maintain liquidity, would make available the supply of vast amounts of steel for the construction of bridges, shipbuilding, railways, skyscrapers – and piano strings.

Finally, in 1859, Henry Steinway Jr. would patent the first ‘cross-strung’ grand piano, an idea which had been in use since the 1820s for uprights so that they might sound more like grands. Introduced by the inventive manufacturer Jean Henri Pape in 1828, with the need to accomodate longer strings in the smaller case of an upright, the strings were somewhat fanned out, and the bass strings crossed over those of the treble. By adopting this idea for grand pianos, the sound of concert pianos would become louder, richer, and, as a welcome bonus, more blended across the different areas of the range, something which had always been a persistent and nagging problem. The combination of cross-stringing with other innovations already in use, such as felt-covered hammers, the split bridge, the one-piece iron frame and the full modern range of 71/3 octaves – eighty-eight keys – together with a mysterious extra quality consisting of the sum of the elements, would create the “Steinway sound.”

Since the late nineteenth century, Steinway has been in a class by itself, the only piano responding consistently with strength and clarity in the large concert halls of the 20th century, Carnegie Hall being the first and most famous such hall. It is universally taken for granted that if a concert hall has a piano, it will be a Steinway. Occasionally a pianist may have an individual preference of piano for a recital; but for a concerto – needing to ring out over an orchestra and into a large hall – only a Steinway is really possible. Why this is so is hard to understand, as the innovations introduced during the 19th century were adopted by all piano manufacturers. There are no longer any structural differences between ‘English’ and ‘German’ pianos. Bösendorfer amazingly went on producing pianos with the long outdated ‘Viennese action’ until 1913, but since that time there is no basic difference in any piano make.

41

Yet nearly all pianists feel like Thomas Edison, who wrote to Steinway in 1890, “I have decided to keep your grand piano. For some reason unknown to me it gives better results than any other so far tried. Please send bill with lowest price.” From the man with 1,000 patents, who knew how everything worked – from the gramophone to the light bulb? Perhaps he was hoping for a discount for a neatly worded endorsement.

The best German piano, Bechstein, once Steinway’s greatest rival, founded in Berlin in 1856 by Friedrich Wilhelm Bechstein, is also still produced. Bechstein was always the ideal piano for the home, with its beautiful, rich and refined sound, but it was hardly ever used in concertos, lacking the power of a Steinway. In the style of Pleyel, the sons of Friedrich Bechstein opened a recital hall in London in 1901 – ‘Bechstein Hall’, in Wigmore street, which in 1917 was renamed Wigmore Hall. Similarly, Blűthner, founded in Leipzig in 1853 by Julius Ferdinand Blűthner, always very popular in England because of its pretty sound, is fine for the drawing room but completely inadequate in a concert hall.

Bősendorfer pianos, warmly endorsed by Liszt in his later years, have a certain cachet for collectors – largely because of their cost, as only a very limited number is produced annually, by a small group of expert craftsmen in Vienna. Bösendorfer’s characteristic sound, sonorous in the middle register, is well suited to the music of Beethoven, who died just one year before Ignaz Bösendorfer founded his company in Vienna, but they are ineffective in a concerto situation in a large hall, despite their size, which is slightly larger than the standard ‘concert grand’. The carrying power is absent, especially in the treble, and that is what is most essential for playing with, and being heard above, an orchestra.

Yamaha has produced pianos since the 1880s, and is far and away the largest international producer, turning out ten times as many pianos as Steinway annually, but they have tended to be neither refined enough for recitals nor penetrating enough for concertos. Of late, that situation has changed, and Yamaha concert grands have become the closest thing to a Steinway – imitation the truest form of flattery.

Chopin died ten years before Steinway patented the all-important ‘overstrung grand piano frame’, but a significant portion of his music was composed with the resulting richer sound in mind, and is hardly playable on the instrument of his time – music such as the last three Etudes, the Polonaises, Ballades and Scherzos, the Fantasy in F minor, and the Polonaise-Fantasy. When we see Chopin’s Pleyel grand in the musical instrument collection of the Paris Conservatoire we are immediately struck by the apparent fragility of the small wooden piano which looks as if it would almost certainly fall to pieces if we were to play the ‘Winter Wind’ Etude or one of his Polonaises on it.

It comes as something of a surprise to a non-French pianist when visiting France to find that Pleyel pianos are still proudly manufactured there – one would be virtually unaware of these pianos anywhere else in the world. Despite the beautiful craftsmanship, one would not encounter one in any piano store outside France today, and certainly not any concert hall. Today the factory is located at Alès, near Nîmes, in the south of France.

42

We see, then, that the ‘piano’ was really a very new thing when Chopin was growing up. Before the addition of the iron frame, which only made its first appearance mid-way during Chopin’s all-too-brief adult career, it was hardly at all what we would recognize today as a ‘grand piano’. The piano’s pivotal years were the mid-1820s, when Érard and Pleyel were manufacturing their new instruments with the essential ‘repetition’ action. While that was going on in Paris, Frederic Chopin was studying composition at the Warsaw Conservatory, and, on his own, developing the technique for playing the new instrument.

Chopin’s style of playing, original as it was, didn’t develop in a vacuum, of course. His pianistic style and technique can be traced back to Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach – who was a very expressive player on his preferred keyboard instrument, the clavichord, as well as the new fortepiano – then to Clementi, with his precision and fluidity, and finally Hummel and Field, both of whom developed the suave, floating, dove-tailed, expressive style of pianism which Chopin was to turn into something wondrous.

Chopin certainly recognized the greatness and importance of Beethoven, but pianistically, Beethoven was the central figure in a completely different stream, one of overt energy, directness and forcefulness – qualities of pianism which were alien to Chopin’s nature and style.

Beethoven’s energetic pianistic style would continue in the compositions of Liszt – which Chopin absolutely hated, while at the same time having boundless admiration for his friend’s urbanely wonderful playing. But that, as they say, is another story – one that will take more than a chapter.

Whereas Beethoven’s pianism was best served by the sturdy pianos produced by Broadwood and Sons, and likewise Liszt’s forthright playing found its best expression through the similarly solid Érard pianos, as well as those of Bösendorfer later on, Chopin’s style of pianism was perfectly matched and complemented by the Pleyel piano, with its light, pearly, velvety, suave sound – a kind of updated, souped-up Mozartian sound.

In the next chapter we shall find Chopin taking the piano, with all its new developments, and turning it into an instrument capable of almost – though not quite – simulating the human voice, or at any rate, taking a good shot at it. Although it was still much smaller in every way than the modern grand piano, there was enough there for Chopin to try to emulate the bel canto voices he heard often at the Paris Opéra. We will meet some of the great singers and opera composers Chopin knew and admired, and thus come to know and come to understand an important area of Chopin’s world, one not often closely explored. It was Frederic Chopin who gave us the ability to play the piano with a ‘singing’ tone, through careful manipulation of the sonorities of the notes and imitation of the breathing and phrasing patterns of the human voice.

43

Chapter 3

A NEW VOICE FOR THE SOUL

The greatest compliment you can pay any pianist is to say that he ‘has’

a ‘singing tone’, as if ‘a singing tone’ were some kind of gift or personality trait which some pianists mysteriously possess and others don’t. This obviously hybrid and thus inadequate expression carries the implication – the underlying real compliment which is intended – that the pianist is not merely a ‘technician’ but ‘an artist’. The separation of these two elements, however, is as possible as the separation of a pound of flesh from Antonio without killing him.

For a pianist to be considered an artist, everyone understands that he has the skill, knowledge and inclination to make the instrument ‘speak’, or sing – singing being speaking’s florid cousin, or sister. It was Frederic Chopin, above all other pianists and composers, who made the art of playing the piano akin to the art of singing, and ingrained the idea in our culture that a real pianist was one who could sing, and speak, through the piano, as if with a human voice. And this takes not only artistry, but a great deal of ‘technique’.

In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci, having defined the attributes of sight as “darkness, light, brilliance, matter and colour, form and position, distance and proximity, motion and rest,” goes on to say “a painter must represent two principal things: man, and what passes in his soul. The first is easy, the second is hard.”

Chopin understood the attributes of sound similarly, and he dissected them comprehensively in his Etudes. He understood that music must represent all the many varied qualities of sound, and at the same time, most important of all, “what passes in a man’s soul.” Like Leonardo, Chopin understood that art must first represent man, and that in music this can only be done through the imitation, simulation or emulation of the human voice.

When he played at the Salle Pleyel in 1841, La France Musicale compared Chopin to Schubert, who, at a similarly young age, had virtually created the ‘art song’ – a genre henceforth known as ‘lied’:

“The one has done for the pianoforte what the other has done for the voice… Listen how he dreams, how he weeps, with what sweetness, tenderness and melancholy he sings, how perfectly he expresses the gentlest and loftiest feelings… Chopin is unique as a pianist – he should not and cannot be compared with anyone.”

By the time Chopin had completed his studies at the Warsaw Conservatory in 1829, the piano was beginning to assume the form of the instrument which we would recognize today, though it was still much smaller and lighter. As well as having quick and clear repetition of the notes for fast passages, it was now in a position, through the many recent developments in the mechanism and quality of its construction, to start to try to approach vocal-style expression.

44

Vocal art was important to Chopin for more than one reason. In his final year at the Conservatory, he had fallen in love with a fellow student, a soprano by the name of Constantia Gladkowska, like Chopin just nineteen.

Constantia was really beautiful, with full-faced, regular features and exquisite blonde hair, plus a great deal of charm. The daughter of one of the superintendants of the Royal Castle in Warsaw, she was one of the leading students of the professor of singing and head of the dramatic department at the Conservatory, Soliva. Soliva and Joseph Elsner – Chopin’s professor and mentor – had disagreed since the Conservatory’s founding in 1821, and finally, in 1826, the year both Chopin and Constantia entered the school, the two professors had divided the musical side of the Conservatory from the dramatic arts, each directing his own area.

Constantia was much admired at the Conservatory, and Chopin had tried to get up his courage for almost a year before addressing her. In their final year at the Conservatory, their friendship blossomed, and they performed together, Frederic accompanying Constantia and her mezzo-soprano friend, Miss Wolków, so as to camouflage his true feelings for Constantia alone. They made plans: he would write a great Polish opera for her, they would give concerts together, and, of course, they would live happily ever after.

“I have an ideal,” wrote Chopin to his friend, Tytus Wojciechowski, “and I have served her faithfully for half a year. I dream about her, and the Adagio of my concerto is bound up with those dreams.” Chopin is referring to his F minor concerto, the first one composed, but published only six years later, in Paris, with the ‘Adagio’ second movement renamed ‘Larghetto’, and the concerto ever since known as ‘No. 2’.

Tytus was Chopin’s best friend from schooldays, but he now lived away from Warsaw, managing his family estate at Poturzyn, with its wheat and sheep, mill and distillery. Chopin wrote Tytus all his excited emotions about Constantia, very openly and in a most passionate tone, in contrast to the discreet decorum which he maintained with Constantia herself.

This correspondence has given rise to much discussion about ‘transferral of emotion’ and an ‘alter ego’ situation with Tytus, who was a very vigorous, athletic, decisive person whom Chopin adored. Chopin could also share his musical thoughts with Tytus, who played the piano. But all this scholarly analysis and dissection of letters, looking for deeper meanings, usually neglects the fact that these people were all just twenty years old! And besides, Chopin was always guarded and hesitant, and would have much more easily confided in a third party than in the object of his love.

In July of 1830, Constantia made her operatic debut at the Warsaw National Theatre, in the title role of L’Agnèse, by Paër, the Italian composer who had accompanied Napoleon to Poland in 1806 and gone on to become director of the Italian Opera in Paris. Chopin wrote to Tytus, “Gladkowska has almost no defects. She makes a better impression on the stage than in the concert hall. I won’t say anything of her excellent dramatic acting, for there is nothing to say; as for her singing, except for some of her F sharps and Gs in the upper register, we could not wish for anything better. You would be delighted with her phrasing, and her inflections are perfect.” At the same time, Constantia’s friend and fellow student Miss Wolków made her own debut, in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, and Chopin wrote to Tytus, “and Mlle. Wolków sang delightfully out of tune.”

45

But Constantia and her friend were still only students. The celebrated soprano Henrietta Sontag was at that moment visiting Warsaw to give eight concerts, concurrently with Paganini, who was in the city for a two-month visit with ten concerts, both as part of the coronation festivities of the Czar as king of Poland. Still only twenty-four herself, but already famous all over Europe, particularly in Vienna, Prague and London, Sontag had been a favourite of Beethoven and Weber. She was just twenty-one when Beethoven died, but then, she had made her debut at six! Her official operatic debut had taken place at the age of fifteen with the Prague Opera, following her studies at the Prague Conservatoire, after which she went to study and sing in Vienna. Chopin was introduced to Sontag by his friend and supporter Prince Anton Radziwill, and the two struck up a warm friendship. Sontag’s voice had a crystalline beauty, and was unusually brilliant in the upper registers.

Chopin wrote to Tytus, “Her embroideries are of a completely new kind. She creates an enormous impression with them, yet it is a different impression from that made by Paganini… She seems to exude from the stage a scent of the freshest flowers; she caresses voluptuously, she strokes, but she rarely moves one to tears.” None the less, “her diminuendi could not be more exquisite; her portamenti are beautiful; her scales, particularly her ascending chromatic ones, are superb.” The taste, charm and impeccable technique of Sontag’s singing paralleled the very elements which characterised Chopin’s playing. Sontag, charming and beautiful, liked young Chopin, and he took to visiting her. “She has infinitely more grace off stage than on. In morning attire she is a million times prettier and more pleasant than in an evening gala dress.” Always the gentleman, he assured Tytus that apart from talk on the sofa, he “did not engage in anything else.”

One day the two aspiring young singing stars of the Conservatory sang for Sontag in her apartment. Chopin wrote to Tytus that Sontag “told them that their voices are strained; that their method is good, but that they should produce their tones in a different way lest they lose their voices completely after two years. In my presence, she told Wolków that she had much facility, many beautiful devices, but une voix trop aiguë, and urged them to come to see her more often, so she could show them her own methods as far as possible. This is more than natural kindness.”

Henrietta Sontag

46

Sontag, who was given the daunting collection of German names at her birth Henrietta Gertrude Walpurgis, later became simply Countess Rossi, and died in Mexico at the age of forty-nine. We can see her warmth and beauty in her engraving.

Three weeks before he left Poland, Chopin gave his last concert in Warsaw, which took place at the National Theatre. As was the custom, Chopin invited guest artists to take part. And who did he invite for this key concert in his life, the première of his great E minor concerto and his farewell to Warsaw? Mlles. Gladkowska and Wolków, of course, with maestro Soliva as conductor.

“I was not the slightest bit nervous, and I played as I play when I’m alone. It went well. The hall was full… Goerner’s Symphony came first. Then My Highness played the allegro of the E minor Concerto, which I reeled off on a Streicher piano. The bravos were deafening… Soliva, very pleased, conducted, on account of his ‘Aria with Chorus’, which Mlle. Wolków sang, dressed in blue and looking like an angel. After this aria came the adagio and rondo (the second and third movements of the concerto)… Soliva then conducted the aria for Mlle. Gladkowska (from Rossini’s La Donna del Lago), dressed in white with roses in her hair… she sang it as she has never sung anything before… I went on to play the Potpourri on Polish Airs (Fantasia on Polish Airs, Op. 13).”

On November 1st, 1830, the day before he left Poland, Frederic and Constantia met secretly in a park in central Warsaw and exchanged rings, their meeting known only to a few friends. Constantia wrote in Chopin’s album – people commonly had ‘albums’ in those days, instead of computer diaries – “Never forget that we in Poland love you. In foreign lands they may appreciate and reward you better, but they cannot love you more!” Another by-gone convention is the way people would avoid using the first person singular when writing, substituting ‘we’ when they meant ‘I’ (as in ‘We are nor amused’).

There was a last-minute surprise for Chopin before he left Warsaw forever. At the coach stop on the outskirts of the city, in the suburb of Wola, Joseph Elsner had arrived ahead of him with a group of his fellow students from the Conservatory, a male-voice choir, which proceeded to sing a farewell cantata with guitar accompaniment which Elsner had composed specially:

“Born among the Polish fields, may your talent bring you fame wherever you go; and whether you dwell on the banks of the Spree, Tiber or Seine, let there be heard in your music, according to the good old Polish custom, those melodies which delight us here: the Mazurka and the beloved Krakowiak.”

Chorus: Although you leave our native land Still will your heart remain with us, And the memory of the genius within you. And so, from the bottom of our hearts we say, ‘Good luck, wherever you go!’

47

Constantia’s premonition was to prove correct – Frederic Chopin would be fully appreciated on the world stage, and Paris would become his second home. What she or he did not foresee was that events would unfold in such a way that the practical reality of Poland would recede for Chopin into a patriotic ideal and a reminiscence of an idyllic childhood.

Chopin’s father had written, unsuccessfully, to the Minister of Education the year before, seeking assistance for his son’s trip abroad, “so that he may learn from the best models, in Germany, Italy and France, a journey which might last three years.”

Three years it was not to be. Chopin would never see his beloved home again, nor Constantia. Fate was to play a strong hand in the next short while. Very soon after Chopin left – within a couple of weeks – events took a dramatic turn in Poland, inspired by recent developments in France, namely the ‘July Revolution’ of 1830 and the overthrow of the old Bourbon monarchy once and for all. Tytus had accompanied Chopin as far as Vienna, but he immediately turned back to join in the fighting which had broken out in Warsaw.

But Tytus was tall, robust and decisive, while Chopin was slight, very unrobust, and indecisive. In truth, there was little that he could do back in Warsaw, and he knew he could serve his country much better by continuing on in his quest for international recognition. And for the time being, the turmoil back home had subsided. It would take the better part of a year, with a long and not very fruitful stay in Vienna, but eventually, Chopin did finally arrive in the city “on the banks of the Seine.”

On Christmas Day, 1830, seven and a half weeks after he had left Warsaw, during which time revolutionary fighting had broken out in the city, Chopin wrote from Vienna to his friend in Warsaw, Jan Matuszynski,

“One passage in your letter made me miserable. Is she really changed? Has she been ill?... perhaps the shock of what happened on the 29th has caused it. God forbid that it should be my fault. Reassure her; tell her that as long as there is breath in my body… until I die… and even after my death when my ashes shall be strewn under her feet… Shall I go to Paris? The people here advise me to wait. Shall I come back to Poland?... Advise me what to do.”

Just over a year later, Constantia married a kindly, respected, wealthy landowner, Jozef Grabowski, whom she had met while Chopin was in Vienna, settled down on his country property and had five children. Louise Chopin nervously wrote her brother the news of Constantia’s marriage.

Half a century later, Constantia, widowed and blind – she had become blind all of a sudden in 1845, at the age of thirty-five, from an affliction of the optical nerve – claimed to be surprised to learn how strongly Chopin had felt about her when the first major biography, Life of Chopin, by Moritz Karasowski, which appeared in the late 1870s, was read to her. “I doubt whether he would have made as good a husband as my honest Joseph,” she said. “Frederic was rather too flighty, temperamental, full of fantasies.” Constantia died in 1889, forty years after Chopin. A few days before her death she burned all her letters from Chopin, as well as other souvenirs of him. Perhaps she had not been all that unaware. On her gravestone there is no mention of honest Joseph, but instead Frederic Chopin, “Youthful friend”, and Constantia is called “Muza Fryderyka Chopina” – ‘Frederic Chopin’s muse’.

48

Constantia Gladkowska

At various times throughout his adult life Chopin wrote heartfelt songs, nineteen altogether, all in Polish, set to poems by Polish writers. He published none of these, and they seem like personal jottings not intended for the public. They were eventully gathered together by Chopin’s friend and helper, Julius Fontana, and published as a collection ten years after his death, with the opus 74. The first edition of the songs was taken from the album of Marie Wodźinska, the eighteen year-old Polish girl to whom Chopin became engaged in 1836. A couple of the songs – A Maiden’s Wish and My Sweetheart – would become very popular in Poland, and also with virtuoso pianists through the transcriptions of six of the songs made for solo piano by Liszt, which were published as ‘Chants Polonais’. These songs by Chopin are unprepossessing and touchingly simple, but their meaning is clear and direct.

One of the most touching of the songs is the very simple but passionately nostalgic one called “The Ring”, to a poem by Chopin’s contemporary and friend Stefan Witwicki. The date on this particular song is September 8th, 1836 – five years practically to the day since Chopin, in Stuttgart, on his way to Paris, heard of the fall of Warsaw, and found himself helpless to do anything. Witwicki wrote to Chopin at that time, urging him to continue on his mission: “You left Poland to acquire glory for your country!” These are the words to ‘The Ring’:

“Once again you stand before me clad in youthful pride, With my boyish heart I offered calling you my bride. Then a tiny ring was given by your youthful lover, And you promised you would wear it till life was over And you promised you would wear it till life was over.

Now while far away I wander, cruel fate regretting, Thou hast wed another, ring and me forgetting. Yet my truest heart’s affection from you never can sever, You and that dear ring are cherished in my thoughts forever, You and that dear ring are cherished in my thoughts forever.”

49

In Paris, Chopin’s home away from home was the Paris Opéra, where he continued the pattern established in Warsaw of spending nights at the Opera with Constantia. Sometimes she was on stage at the National Theatre, with Chopin proudly and nervously seated in a box, and sometimes they were in the audience together.

Chopin was a connoisseur of fine singing, but in Paris in the 1830s you didn’t have to be an expert to know that at the Opéra you were hearing some of the greatest singers ever. Chopin went to the Opéra regularly, and became friendly with many of the leading personalities in that world. He lived close by the Opéra, as this area was the fashionable heart of the new Paris. Chopin learned from the great singers’ art, from their refined phrasing and perfect tone production, as we see most particularly in his Nocturnes, but also in some of the Etudes he was composing at the time, and in fact everything he ever wrote. Chopin was to be the principal exponent of the idea that the piano could and should be used to simulate the human voice, emulating all its nuances and inflections.

“Singers may be divided into two classes,” wrote Thomas Beecham in his memoir, A Mingled Chime, “those who are born and those who are made. The former, who are to be numbered on the fingers of both hands, are only too well aware of their unique place in the universe, while the latter, who are legion, are equally unaware of their limitations. Geniuses like Patti or Chaliapin make their appearance no more than once in fifty years and seem from the outset to be endowed with a natural instinct for singing, acting, and all else that has to do with their craft, to which the technical lore of the school has little to add. But the vast majority must work laboriously to attain even a condition of competence, whether it be in subduing the intractability of the voice itself, or mitigating the disability of mediocrity.”

Those words apply to every age, yet there was a constellation of great singers concentrated in Paris in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As usual in the history of social and artistic culture, this was the result of a combination of factors, a coming together of several historic strands.

One of these strands was the great blossoming of bel canto opera, which flourished for a brief shining period, from the beginning of the 1830s. Its natural home, of course, was Italy, and its stars were mostly Italians, but Paris was its hub. Just as the term ‘Hollywood film’ came to describe a type of silver screen magic that flourished during the second quarter of the twentieth century, quickly becoming part of the cultural landscape, and almost as quickly becoming a rare artform which could not be sustained, the designation bel canto was applied to a type of opera which was composed and produced in Italy and Paris in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and in a similar way, blazed like a comet, dominating the cultural landscape, seeming as if it would go on forever, but in a very short while it became an artefact of history, and nobody knew what happened to it, or how to get it back.

Bel canto came naturally to Italians, but nevertheless as a genre it was new. Bel canto simply means ‘beautiful singing’, and the expression was used to define a style of opera which emphasized the lyrical qualities of vocal art, including beautiful tone and vocal flexibility, in contrast to the stolid, more declamatory style of opera popular in the previous two centuries. The vogue in opera, as in French theatre, had been for classical tragedies – from Orpheus, the subject of the first real opera, in 1607, by Claudio Monteverdi, as well as the famous version by Gluck composed in 1762, to Iphigenia and other mythical heros and heroines from classical Greek mythology.

50

In the early 19th century, the subjects of choice for opera composers acquired more ordinary human forms and resonances, and, following the fashion of Romantic melodramatic literature, led by Sir Walter Scott, Friedrich Schiller and Victor Hugo – as well as using these writers’ plot lines – not-too-distant historical settings, mostly 16th and 17th century. The cast of characters would be caught up in the currents of dramatic historical tides, from Elizabethan politics to Protestant and Catholic turmoil, but at their heart the plots would be familiar to viewers of television soap operas – this term in fact deriving from the combination of the character of opera of this period with 20th century soap company sponsors.

The plots of bel canto operas revolved invariably around love, jealousy, murder, suicide, insanity, intrigue and treachery, usually all together, and the tenor and soprano – the hero and heroine – were always at the centre of the storm, with the baritone nearly always the envious villain. In Romantic fiction the young couple’s starring roles would be characterised respectively by chaste beauty and dashing heroism – Rebecca and Ivanhoe. In bel canto opera these characteristics applied in even greater measure, opera having to reduce the salient traits of its characters to the basic essentials, in addition to which the protagonists were the possessors of superhumanly beautiful and agile voices.

The exquisitely nuanced, supremely elegant vocal style which became the distinguishing feature of bel canto opera was certainly present in the comic operas of Mozart and Rossini. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro of 1787 and Rossini’s Barber of Seville, written in 1816 upon the same subject, required all the flexibility of voice which bel canto opera would demand. But it was the addition of Romantic melodrama around 1830 which created the new and distinct genre, identified only afterwards as ‘bel canto opera’.

The two leaders in the field were Gaetano Donizetti, who wrote sixty operas during his not very long life, and Vincenzo Bellini, who lived an even shorter life, and wrote only half a dozen operas, all of them gems. Donizetti’s first big success with this type of opera was Anna Bolena in 1830, which made an enormous impact all over Europe. This was followed by Maria Stuarda, Lucrezia Borgia – based on Victor Hugo’s drama – and in 1835, his masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor, based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. There was a huge vogue for Scott, and Donizetti’s liberal use of his works gave rise to the legend that his great-grandfather was a Scot called Donald Izett, who went to Italy, married an Italian, settled in Bergamo and became Signor ‘Don-izetti’.

From 1840, Donizetti composed in Paris, starting with the opéra comique La Fille du Régiment, then, the same year, for the Opéra, the French grand opera La Favorite – the piano arrangement of which was made by the young unknown Richard Wagner, who was then staying in Paris. In 1843, Donizetti composed his comic opera Don Pasquale, to his own libretto, for the Théâtre Italien, at the invitation of his mentor, Rossini.

Bellini composed only a handful of operas, beginning with Il Pirata in 1827. Bellini’s career at its height – during the first half of the 1830s – was based in Paris, coinciding with Chopin’s first years there and with the period in which he was composing the Etudes. The two composers became firm friends during the last year of Bellini’s tragically short life, 1835.

51

During his brief half-decade career in Paris, Bellini composed almost all his operas, beginning in 1830 with I Capuletti ed i Montecchi – ‘The Capulets and the Montagues’, followed by three absolute masterpieces of the genre – La Sonnambula in 1831, Norma, also in 1831, and his final opera, I Puritani, in 1835. These were all soon produced in London, New York and Philadelphia. Norma was the sensation of the season during Chopin’s first year in Paris. It was the seminal bel canto opera, and Chopin regarded it as the ideal opera.

‘Bel canto’ was to become enshrined by history as a style of singing technique, but in fact the term applied not so much to the style of singing as to the nature of the operas themselves and the quality of the music they contained. After all, the attributes of good singing and the principles of technique which it requires are the same whatever one sings. At the time of bel canto opera’s heyday, the 1830s, there was no thought of stylistic pigeon-holing or specialization when it came to vocal art and technique. The great singers were simply trying to sing as perfectly and as beautifully as possible, and fulfill whatever the music demanded in terms of range or dexterity. And the music of the day was the melodramatic, impassioned, yet always elegant, music of bel canto opera.

But it’s easy to see how this confusion between the style of the music and the technique required to sing it got started and how it continued. Bel canto singers could handle a much greater range than today’s singers, largely because bel canto implied a much lighter and more flexible approach than today’s almost unnaturally full-bodied vocal projection.

Thus the voice was more agile, usually capable of a considerably wider compass – up to three octaves in at least one famous example, Chopin’s friend Pauline Viardot-Garcia, followed closely by her celebrated sister Maria Malibran – and a much greater range of nuance. The larger sound required of singers by the music of Verdi and Puccini, and most of all, Wagner, would demand greater weight and force in vocal projection, and would produce an impressively rich sound, but it was a historical mistake for the operatic world to think of beautiful, elegant singing founded upon perfect technique as a particular and specialized style of singing.

With the juggernaut of Verdi and Wagner beginning just two decades after the birth of bel canto opera, the categorisation of bel canto as a style of singing led to its being thought of as archaic, along with the style of the operas – which did indeed soon become old-fashioned, with their costume-drama formulas and soap-opera clichés. But the baby was virtually thrown out with the genre, and the skills of the great bel canto singers were almost lost. It came as a revelation when these were revived over a century later by Maria Callas and others.

The reigning queen of the Paris Opéra in 1831 – the Callas of the era – was Giuditta Pasta. Pasta created the role of Norma at La Scala in December 1831, and starred in its Paris Opéra premiere the following year. Chopin would go to hear her in this role repeatedly. Pasta was famous for her extended vocal compass, as well as her highly developed dramatic qualities. Chopin admired her unreservedly. Born Giuditta Negri, of a Jewish family, near Como, to which she always returned as home with her opera tenor husband, Pasta had been before the public in Paris, where she studied, since 1815, when she was seventeen. She also appeared regularly in London, and from 1821, at the Théâtre Italien in Paris.

52

Giuditta Pasta as Norma

Giuditta Pasta’s tenor counterpart was Giovanni Battista Rubini. Rubini had been well established as the leading tenor in Paris for almost two decades when Chopin arrived, though he was still in his thirties. Rubini toured all over Europe, becoming immensely rich from his performances. In the way of most tenors, Rubini’s acting abilities weren’t all that marvellous – rather limited and wooden in fact. But his voice was phenomenally beautiful and his technique completely effortless.

Giovanni Rubini

Chopin writes about Rubini’s amazing technical displays, describing what was an essential part of the style of the music and its performance – “He produces his tones authentically and not in falsetto, and sometimes sings roulades for two hours – but sometimes embroiders too much and makes his voice purposely tremble; also, he continually trills, which brings him more applause than anything else.”

53

But he also wrote, and told his students, “If you want to play the long cantilena in my B flat minor Scherzo, go and hear Pasta or Rubini.”

In Chopin’s time, Rubini would be joined by Mario, whose voice was considered one of unrivalled softness and richness, and who also possessed fine acting abilities. For a while the two tenors’ careers overlapped, and they were both enormously popular. But in contrast to the two most famous tenors of our own time, the singing of both these men was supremely effortless and elegant. The physical appearance of Mario bore an amazing resemblance to the most famous tenor of the late 20th century.

‘Mario and Grisi singing Parigi O Cara’, by George du Maurier

‘Mario’ was the stage name of the Marchese Giovanni Matteo de Candia, who was of the Sardinian nobility. The same age as Chopin, Mario began his operatic career late, at twenty-eight, having served as an officer in the Sardinian army and then fled to Paris to avoid arrest because of his association with the famous Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini and his Young Italy party. After studying singing in Paris with the help and advice of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Mario made his debut in Meyerbeer’s phenomenally successful grand opera Robert le Diable in 1838. Mario would be constantly before the public in London and Paris till the 1860s.

Chopin appeared together with Mario in a grand gala for Queen Victoria in London in May 1848, in the ballroom of the Duke of Sutherland’s mansion, opposite Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, the intimacy of Chopin’s style was somewhat lost in the vastness of the setting.

54

In 1839 Mario performed onstage for the first time together with the brilliant dramatic soprano Giulia Grisi, first at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, then at the Théâtre Italien in Paris. For Giulia Grisi, who was also Chopin’s age, Bellini had written the part of Giulietta – Juliet – in I Capuletti ed i Montecchi, while her sister Giuditta, a fine mezzo-soprano, took the role of Romeo.

Giuditta retired from singing at twenty-nine when she married, and died in her thirties. But Giulia reigned for over three decades as the prima donna soprano in opera, with an annual Paris season and a London season each summer. For their cousin, Carlotta Grisi, the leading ballerina of the age, a besotted Théophile Gautier wrote the scenario for the ballet Giselle, in 1842, based on a medieval German folk tale.

Mario and Giulia Grisi married and appeared together in opera constantly for the next thirty years. In 1847 they starred in Covent Garden’s first season of Italian opera, and in 1854 toured the United States together. Though enormously popular, Mario ended his days in the 1880s in reduced circumstances, as a museum curator in Rome.

For her debut in Paris in 1832, Giulia Grisi had performed the demanding mezzo-soprano title role in Rossini’s Semiramide. The year before, she had taken the mezzo role of Adalgisa alongside Giuditta Pasta in the first production of Norma, at La Scala, however later on she would become one of the most famous exponents of the supreme soprano role of Norma. Enormous flexibility and range was the hallmark of Giulia Grisi – the sort of range that was matched in modern times only by Maria Callas, who would sing the classic mezzo roles of Rosina and Carmen as well as the extraordinary soprano roles of Lucia and Norma.

Chopin appeared alongside Giulia Grisi in January, 1842, at a spectacular private concert for five hundred guests at the home of Baron James de Rothschild and his young wife Betty, leading hosts in the social and cultural world of Paris. Four years after Norma, Bellini wrote his final masterpiece, I Puritani, for what was universally considered to be the dream team of Grisi, Rubini – later replaced by Mario – the bass baritone Antonio Tamburini and the bass Luigi Lablache. This team was so successful that these singers were thereafter known as the ‘The Puritani Quartet’, and enjoyed enormous celebrity as such, comparable to that of ‘The Three Tenors’ in our own time. This gorgeous opera was in fact designed as something of a vehicle for great singers with wide ranges and extraordinary coloratura command. Forget high Cs – the tenor in Puritani must sing two high Ds as well as a high F! For the same team of Grisi, Mario, Tamburini and Lablache – the ‘Puritani Quartet’ – Donizetti composed his comic opera masterpiece Don Pasquale eight years later.

Tamburini, like the tenors, was renowned for the extreme flexibility and suppleness of his incredibly beautiful voice, which was legendary, as well as his versatility. Tamburini was celebrated for the role of Figaro in The Barber of Seville. Famous all over Italy as a young man, Tamburini made his London and Paris debuts in 1832, when he was thirty-two. Berlioz wrote, after hearing him in Naples in 1831, “What a man! An actor of wit and poise, voice admirable, method impeccable, unbelievable ease of delivery, power and sweetness combined – everything. It’s superb.” That’s a pretty good description of the elusive bel canto style itself.

Lablache, who called himself both Luigi and Louis, was a Neapolitan with an Irish mother and a French father. An attractive combination, continuing on through the generations – his great-great-grandson would be the screen actor Stewart Granger (born James Lablache Stewart; screen name to avoid confusion with James Stewart).

55

The same age as Rubini – half a generation older than Chopin, Liszt, Mario and Grisi – Lablache sang with enormous success all over Europe in both comic and tragic roles. While living in London for a year, 1836-37, he gave singing lessons to the nineteen year-old princess Victoria. Lablache had a big voice, one of great flexibility and range, and his powers of characterisation, as well as his musicianship, were much admired. One of his most famous roles was the comic basso part of Leporello in Don Giovanni.

But Lablache could do everything. His first great success in England was in Donizetti’s dramatic Anna Bolena in 1830. Schubert had written lieder for Lablache, and they were both torch-bearers at Beethoven’s funeral. In the 1830s, Paris became the centre of Lablache’s activities. He earned a great deal of money and bought a château in France, though he returned often to Naples. One of Lablache’s daughters married Sigismond Thalberg, the pianist who caused a sensation in Paris in the 1830s and who, for a short while rivaled Liszt.

Like so many talented people in those days, Lablache was a gifted caricaturist. There’s a marvellous one he drew, together with the conductor François Habeneck, of his friend Liszt, in action, in 1843, hands flying all over the place, entitled Chromatic Galop by the Devil of Harmony – the highly entertaining ‘Grand Galop Chromatique’ being Liszt’s ubiquitous finale in his concerts at that time – with Lablache and Habeneck in the picture. Lablache looks a very clever and amused fellow indeed.

Chromatic Galop by the Devil of Harmony, by Lablache (left) and Habeneck (right)

56

Lablache was a great personality, and much in the social whirl. Of the many stories told of him, one in particular, which did the rounds all over Paris, deserves retelling. One evening, after a performance, Lablache was taking a walk, as was his habit, along the Seine, when he came across a down-and-out fellow croaking out a tune in the most painful manner, with his arm outstretched hoping for contributions. “Why are you doing that?”, asked Lablache. “Surely you can’t be having much success.” Whereupon the great man began to sing for him, in such a beautiful manner that a crowd soon gathered, and before long the beggar had a fortune in his cap, and was able to retire.

Apart from Bach and Mozart, the only composer generally considered to have influenced Frederic Chopin in any appreciable way was Vincenzo Bellini, the master of bel canto opera. The two composers were close in aesthetic spirit, and they were to become friends. Born in Sicily, a decade older than Chopin, Bellini arrived in Paris around the same time as the twenty-one year-old Pole. The two were rather similar in several ways. Most importantly, they shared a gift for creating melodic lines which were pure and sensuous at the same time. Pure in style, sensuous in expression.

Chopin and Bellini were not so similar in personality, however. With a full-blooded Sicilian temperament, Bellini could fly into a rage with his librettist, the admirable Felice Romani, or with his singers. He demanded that Romani replace verses until he was satisfied, and pushed singers relentlessly to act more convincingly. “You’re an animal,” Bellini shouted at poor Rubini during one rehearsal. Perhaps that doesn’t sound so abrasive in Italian as it does in English, especially if coming at a tempestuous moment during a rehearsal – Toscanini expressed himself similarly with his musicians at rehearsals, but was nevertheless loved by them. Bellini went on: “You’re not putting half your spirit into the part. Throw yourself with all your soul into the character you are singing.” Rubini, like most tenors the possessor of a repertoire of gestures stretching the gamut from A to B – extended Arm to clasped Breast – responded lamely, “I know what you want but I can’t do it.”

Chopin was very fond of Bellini, and his death came as a great blow to him. Donizetti would also be on friendly terms with Chopin – the Frederic Chopin Society in Warsaw has in its possession a warm letter written by Donizetti to Chopin during his first year in Paris, 1840. But between Chopin and Bellini, however, there was a special bond.

It was Rossini who brought Bellini to Paris and paved the way for his success there, as he would do for Donizetti a few years later, in 1838. In August 1829, the twenty-seven year-old Bellini wrote to an uncle in Sicily: “After the Parisian triumph of Guillaume Tell, the celebrated Rossini, while passing through Milan, called on the lady of the house I live in. Having learned that I was in the same house, he expressed a desire to see me. Nobody yet knew that he was in Milan and I was therefore greatly surprised when a servant opened my door to announce him. I was in my shirtsleeves and did not have the time to slip into a jacket. Trembling with joy, I ran to meet him full of apologies for my unseemly attire.

“‘You begin where others end’, the maestro told me. That same evening he went to hear Il Pirata at La Scala, and he returned the next day. But nobody saw him because he was hidden away in a box. He told all of Milan that in my opera he had found a structure and a completeness worthy of a mature composer.

57

“Yesterday, at lunch, I met him again with his wife. He said: ‘You must love, love very strongly, because I find great feeling in you’. Now, everybody in Milan talks about Il Pirata and Rossini and about Rossini and Il Pirata, because people say only what he likes to hear. I was very fortunate to have known such a great man.”

Vincenzo Bellini

The play Norma, by the French writer Alexandre Soumet, was produced with enormous success in 1831 at the Odéon Theatre in Paris, and just six months later, Bellini’s opera upon the play premièred at La Scala, then at the Paris Opéra. The story had all the right ingredients: a mélange of classical tragedy – Norma being a kind of Medea – with contemporary revolutionary concerns about nationalism and freedom from oppression.

Although the style of Norma is fundamentally old-fashioned, with set-piece arias and ensembles based on simple harmonic structures, the music is glorious, and the simplicity of the architecture serves to underscore the purity of the melodic inspiration, nowhere more so than in Norma’s sublime aria Casta Diva. The first Norma, Giuditta Pasta, did not at first want to sing this aria because “she found it ill-adapted to her abilities.” But Bellini brought her round. “Pasta roused the audience’s enthusiasm,” he wrote of a performance he himself conducted in Bergamo in 1832, “by those delicate changes with which she knew how to decorate her singing, by her noble presence, by her controlled passion… and her power as an actress.”

58

“Those delicate changes with which she knew how to decorate her singing” reminds us of descriptions of Chopin’s playing – he never repeated phrases in exactly the same way, but always varied his playing by every nuance available. “Controlled passion” is another similarity, not to mention “noble presence”.

The part of Norma is one of the most demanding of all soprano roles. Norma immediately became the yard-stick role for prima donna dramatic sopranos, and has remained so ever since, from Giuditta Pasta and Giulia Grisi to Rosa Ponselle, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. Callas found in this role one of her greatest vehicles, recreating it, appropriately, at the Paris Opéra in 1961.

In 1833 Bellini settled in Paris, the year after Chopin, and Rossini saw to it that the Théâtre Italien commissioned him to write an opera. The result was his most ambitious work, I Puritani, or, to give it its full title, I Puritani di Scozia, in 1835. Handicapped by a poor libretto, based on the French play Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers – which in turn was based loosely on Walter Scott’s historical novel Old Mortality, concerning the last great burst of national fighting in Scotland – plot line is not I Puritani’s strong suit. The contretemps between Gualtiero Valton (Lord Walton Walton), his brother Giorgio (George Walton), Elvira, her true love Arturo Talbo (Lord Arthur Talbot) and her spurned suitor Riccardo Forto (Sir Richard Forth), together with a walk-on part for Enrichetta (Henrietta, Queen of England, widow of Charles 1st), can become farcical if not handled carefully.

But never was there more sublime music. All Bellini’s operas are characterised by great beauty of melody, but I Puritani is in a class of its own. The demands on all the singers are extraordinary, but those upon the soprano and tenor are of the highest order. These roles require incredibly wide vocal ranges and complete coloratura powers, and therefore the opera is very rarely performed today. Performances of I Puritani were always extraordinary events, reserved for special occasions, such as the opening of the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 and the Manhattan Opera House in 1907 – when it starred the most exquisite tenor of the era, Alessandro Bonci, Caruso’s very different rival, in his American debut.

A few months after the premiere of I Puritani, Bellini fell ill and died suddenly of a chronic illness, amebiasis, at the age of thirty-three – one last thing in common with Chopin, who would die of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine. Rossini wrote to a friend in Palermo, where Bellini was born, “I have the satisfaction of telling you that his burial took place amid general love and a pomp which would have been worthy of a king: two hundred voices sang the funeral mass and the foremost artists in the capital vied with each other to sing in the choruses. After the mass, we set off for the cemetery and a military band escorted the cortège. I can assure you that the crowd of people, the sadness depicted on every face, cannot be described. The weather was dismal because of the rain that never stopped all day long, but it discouraged no-one, not even me (Rossini was a famous hypochondriac)… Everything was carried out perfectly and, still in tears, I had the joy of rendering to my poor friend the affection he had shown me.”

It’s a sad thing to walk through Père Lachaise cemetery and come across the monument where Bellini was buried, the names of his operas engraved on its sides, somewhat overgrown – his body was later removed to Palermo – and only a few paces further on see the white marble muse grieving over Chopin’s well-tended but lonely grave, one which mysteriously always seems to have a few fresh flowers upon it.

59

Bellini’s compositional style was marked by enterprising harmony and skilled handling of the orchestra, but it was the elegance and luminosity of his melodies which placed him in a class of his own. Bellini said melodies “came to me, and I wrote them down,” but he also said that he struggled to find “the accent and tone of voice that Nature gives a man at the height of passion.” This dichotomy is not unlike that which George Sand would report about Chopin’s working methods. She said Chopin heard his melodies in the wind, and would write them down immediately and easily. However, he would then struggle for weeks at the piano, trying to refine the melodies in minute ways, usually ending up with the same thing he had originally written down.

For Verdi, Bellini was the master of “long, long, long melodies, such as no-one before him produced.” Donizetti was heard to murmur “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,” as he came out of a theatre.

Berlioz, in his Mémoires, relates hearing I Capuletti ed i Montecchi – which, as a true Shakespearean, he consistently calls I Montecchi ed i Capuletti – Bellini’s first really great success, in Florence during his stay in Italy in 1831:

“The two voices singing as one, as though in perfect union, give the melody an extraordinary force and bold impetus; and whether it was the context in which the phrase occurred and the manner in which it was then brought back and repeated, or the sudden effect of the unison, so unexpected and so apt, or the beauty of the tune itself, I was carried away in spite of myself and applauded enthusiastically.”

‘In spite of himself’ because the opera itself was a “bitter disappointment” to the dramatically-minded Berlioz: “Everyone was saying how good the music was; but the libretto too was well spoken of. What a subject for an opera! (Berlioz was to write one of his most inspired works on the same play, the symphonic cantata Roméo et Juliette).

“In due course the principals appeared. Of these, all sang out of tune with the exception of two women, one of whom, who was tall and substantial, played Juliet. The other, who was short and thin, played Romeo. (Opera lovers will be amused by this observation, as mezzo-sopranos are nearly always slimmer than sopranos; the dramatic point of Aida is usually undercut by the fact that the spurned Amneris, a mezzo soprano – and not really bad – is almost always more attractive than the usually fat Aida, for whom the hero is willing to give up the throne and die, which he does.)

“What! After all these years, to do it again and write Romeo’s part for a woman – as though there was some law that Juliet’s lover must always appear shorn of his manhood; as if the Romeo who slays the furious Tybalt… and later bursts the gates of Juliet’s tomb… and the passions which consume him – his despair when he is exiled, his terrible numb resignation at the news of Juliet’s death, his frenzy as the poison begins to work – were the common attributes of eunuchs: Why a woman, in the name of all that was musical?

“Or was there some idea that two women’s voices sound better?… The opera contained no ball at the Capulets’, no Mercutio, no garrulous nurse, no grave and tranquil hermit, no balcony scene, no sublime soliloquy for Juliet as she takes the hermit’s phial, no duet in the cell between the banished Romeo and the disconsolate friar, no Shakespeare, nothing – a squandered opportunity. Yet this wretched libretto carved out of Shakespeare’s great play is the work of a distinguished poet, Felice Romani!”

60

When Norma premièred in London in 1833, the critic of the Times perceived an altogether new departure, claiming that Bellini had ascended “to a genre of composition more elevated than anything else he has done up to now, and succeeded in obtaining an effect full of nobility and beauty.” In Norma, despite the old-fashioned basic structure, Bellini did indeed come close to creating a form of music-drama, “a new kind of music,” he said, “where words and song would come together.”

Wagner greatly admired Norma, “this beautiful opera. Bellini is one of my predilections. His music is all heart, closely, intimately joined with the words.” It is one of music’s great mysteries comparing Wagner’s generous appreciation of other composers with his miserable personality; he couldn’t have been more correct when he said that Bellini’s music is “all heart.”

‘Nobility and beauty’ are also the dominant constants in Chopin’s music. From the beginning, Chopin’s melodic style was widely considered to have been strongly influenced by Bellini. During his first year in Paris, the twenty-one year-old went repeatedly to the Opéra to see Norma. Liszt was also profoundly influenced by the Italianate melodic lines of Bellini, and who wrote one of his more important ‘operatic fantasies’ on this opera, Reminiscences of Norma, in 1843.

Norma was Chopin’s favourite opera, and it’s possible to make comparisons between melodies like Casta Diva and such as the long heavenly melody of the slow movement of his F minor concerto. No other composer ever wrote works for the piano where single notes were held so long, in a completely vocal manner – Chopin uses the device of long melodic trills and above all wide-ranging left-hand accompaniments – and where a slow melody, as the one in this movement, or the slow movement of the 3rd Sonata, or the Nocturnes, or Berceuse, is accompanied by an unwavering constant motif in the left hand, in the manner of Bellini’s effective, and perfectly suited, orchestral accompaniments for his beautiful arias.

The Adagio of the F minor concerto is in fact often cited as an example in this context. This was an important piece for Chopin, one for which, according to Liszt, as he tells us in his biography of his friend, “he had a marked fondness and which he frequently liked to repeat (play). “The decorative designs belong to the author’s finest manner, and the principal phrase shows an admirable breadth… The whole piece is of an ideal perfection, its feeling radiant and compassionate by turn. It brings to mind a magnificent, light-bathed landscape… appropriate to a melancholy scene, perhaps a hopeless misfortune enfolding the human heart amidst nature’s matchless splendour – with contrast maintained by a fusion of tones and a softened diminution of hues that prevent any harshness or roughness from disturbing the moving impression thus produced. At the same time, joy is tempered and sorrow is sweetened.”

The only problem with the argument of a direct Bellini/Chopin connection being proven here is that the F minor Concerto, whose slow movement, with its long, seamless melody so much like an aria in Bellini’s best vein, was written in Warsaw in 1829, when the composer was nineteen – two years before Bellini wrote Norma, and before Chopin had heard anything at all by Bellini. Liszt is fanciful when, in describing Chopin’s end and his burial near Bellini, he postulates that “the desire to know this great master, in whose admiration he had been raised, was one of the reasons that led Chopin to Paris in 1831.” Rossini was celebrated when Chopin was growing up, but Bellini was as yet unknown. Rather than try to establish direct connections, it’s probably better – and true – to say the two composers were similar in their artistic aesthetic.

61

The Paris Opéra was experiencing a golden age with the flowering of bel canto opera. The Opéra – the ‘Académie National de Musique’ – had been languishing for some time, coasting on its reputation as the scene of Gluck’s series of French operas of the 1770s – Iphigénie en Aulide, Armide, Iphigénie en Tauride, and French versions of Orfeo and Alceste. These had put the Paris Opéra on the map, bringing together the Italian lyrical style with the French taste for choruses and ballets, and the French declamatory style with a moving dramatic simplicity. Aiming to “restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression,” as he wrote in the preface to Alceste, Gluck influenced Mozart, Cherubini, Beethoven, Spontini and Berlioz, but the Paris Opéra hadn’t had anything new of its own for quite some time, nothing much really since Spontini’s immensely successful La Vestale of 1807.

The French desire for spectacle never subsided, and now in the early 1830s the combination of Italian vocal superstars with romantic librettos and grand presentation brought a new high water mark. ‘Grand opera’ – a term used to define opera which was entirely set to music, as opposed to opéra-comique, which included spoken dialogue, but which in effect came simply to connote lavish productions – also took the stage, launched in 1828 by Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici. This opera, much admired by Wagner for its dramatic intensity, is unique in the repertoire for having as its heroine someone who cannot make a sound – a mute – yet it established the character of grand opera, with its high-flown melodrama and its theme of revolt against tyrannical oppression. Based on a historical insurrection in Naples in 1647 led by a fisherman called Tommaso Aniello (the opera’s alternative title was Masaniello) – a kind of Boston tea party revolt of the common people against their Spanish rulers, sparked by a tax on fruit – La Muette de Portici was so effective that its performance in Brussels in 1830 was the spark of the revolution which established Belgian independence.

Meanwhile, around the corner from the Opéra, the Théâtre Italien, under the directorship of Rossini, was offering an alternative season, featuring mainly operas by Rossini, of whom the public could not get enough. Of the 174 performances at the Théâtre Italien in 1825, 129 were of operas by Rossini. Largely thanks to Rossini, the Théâtre Italien was riding a crest of popularity and fashionability. According to the memoirs of the comtesse d’Agoult, who was to become Liszt’s mistress, the balconies of the Théâtre Italien were not off-limits to the daughters of the old families from the Faubourg St. Germain, “because Italian singers were not excommunicated, and no-one could understand the words of their libretto.”

The two queens of the Théâtre Italien were Henrietta Sontag, Chopin’s friend from Warsaw, now known as ‘Henriette’, and the sensational Spanish contralto Maria Felicità Malibran, who was called ‘la Malibran’. Malibran, who moved to Italy the year after Chopin arrived in Paris, thereafter appearing only occasionally in Paris, was celebrated for the phenomenal range of her magnificent voice, which extended from a natural contralto to a soprano, and it was amply matched by her acting abilities. Chopin considered Malibran second only to Giuditta Pasta, queen of the Opéra. Malibran sang with great success in London, Paris, Italy and New York.

Like Bellini and Chopin, Malibran was to die absurdly young – at twenty-eight – in 1836, after a fall from a horse in Manchester. She didn’t want to worry anyone and told no-one about it, continuingd her stage appearances, but over the next month she was overcome by dizzy spells, and five weeks after the accident she died.

62

This was during the first year of Malibran’s marriage to the Belgian violinist Charles de Bériot, with whom she had lived since 1830, her first marriage having finally been annulled in 1836. De Bériot, one of the most influential violin virtuosos of the era, composed a number of concertos as well as a famous and popular méthode called ‘Violin School.’ Their son Charles was to be a fine pianist, composer and professor at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught Ravel and Granados.

Malibran as Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello, by Decaisne, 1831

Three months after Chopin arrived in Paris, we find this note from Rossini: “To Maria Malibran, celebrated composer, singer, player of instruments, painter, fencer, orator, etc., etc., etc. – “Dear Marietta, I called on you at home to seduce you and take you to lunch… I waited for a long time, but Oh God! the return of your servant spoiled everything by telling me that you were in the country. Next topic: Baron Delmar would like to have you tomorrow evening at his Society to sing a couple of pieces – I warn you that this is not a concert, although it will become one for your piece… you would be doing me a tremendous favour. There will be only Rubini, Lablache and you, who were born to be an ornament for every garden. I embrace you with tears as always, your most affectionate friend, G. Rossini. At your house, Jan. 14, 1832”. Of course, Rossini wanted Maria’s services for his soirée, but there’s no doubt of his affection for the beautiful superstar he’d known since she was a little girl.

63

One of Chopin’s dearest and most loyal friends was Maria Malibran’s sister, the operatic mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot-Garcia, who was only ten when Chopin arrived in Paris, and just fifteen when her famous sister died. Pauline Garcia was to become almost as celebrated as her legendary sister.

Pauline also had an unusually extended vocal range – a famous three octaves, which put most soprano roles as well as those for mezzo well within her powers. However, it was her intensity of character, intelligence and perception rather than beauty of voice which distinguished her. A brilliant linguist, an excellent painter, Pauline was also a very fine pianist who took lessons from Liszt, and a composer of operas and songs who studied composition with Anton Reicha, the prolific Czech composer and eminent teacher who had been Beethoven’s friend. Reicha was professor of composition at the Conservatoire, where his students included Berlioz, Gounod and César Franck; he had taught the teenaged Liszt privately.

Pauline married the impresario Louis Viardot, twenty years her senior, in 1841, when she was twenty. Viardot was then manager of the Théâtre Italien, and he henceforth became Pauline’s manager. Chopin met this fascinating young woman that year at George Sand’s country house, Nohant, and they became instant friends, playing through operas of all periods together on the piano. The following season Chopin and Pauline gave a concert together at the Salle Pleyel. Dramatically gifted and intelligent, warm and generous, Chopin and Sand both adored her, Sand coming to think of her as practically a daughter.

Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot-Garcia had both been taught by their father, the famous Spanish tenor, composer, conductor and singing teacher Manuel Garcia, though Pauline was only eleven when he died in Paris in 1832. For Manuel Garcia, Rossini had written the part of Count Almaviva in The Barber of Seville. Garcia himself came from Seville, and co-incidentally was born the same year as Beaumarchais’ play upon which the opera was based was first produced, 1775. Manuel Garcia’s singing was universally praised for its intelligence and vivacity. His numerous operas also enjoyed considerable success, but after he settled in Paris in 1808, where his daughter Maria was born that year, Garcia became much more celebrated as an opera singer. He travelled widely, appearing in Madrid, Italy, and London, where he established a school of singing.

In 1825 Garcia formed a family opera company, including his twenty year-old son, also named Manuel, and his daughter Maria, and took it to New York and Mexico. Pauline, also born in Paris, was only four at that time, but she would join the family troupe too before very long. Rossini’s charming note to the great Maria Malibran, whom he calls ‘Marietta’, was written to someone he had known since she was eight, when her father had starred in the première of his greatest opera.

The great Manuel Garcia may have died during Chopin’s first year in Paris, but his dynasty had only just begun. The younger Manuel – brother of Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot – born in Madrid in 1805, was to become the most important singing teacher of the 19th century, with an overwhelming reputation. For the first part of his career he taught at the Paris Conservatoire – during the years Chopin lived in Paris – and then, for over half a century, at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he lived till the age of 101 in 1906.

64

Manuel Garcia’s ‘Traité complet de l’art du chant’ – “Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing,” published in 1847, incorporated the vocal principles of his famous father, and this manual was of great importance to the singing world. Garcia also achieved considerable fame by inventing an instrument with which one could look into the larynx – the ‘laryngoscope’ – which he presented to the Royal Society in 1855. This kind of close anatomical observation of exactly what lay behind vocal technique was comparable to Frederic Chopin’s exploration of what physically underpins piano technique. With the advent of Verdi and Wagner, followed by Ponchielli, Puccini, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, with their demands for unnaturally large sound, and consequently often forced vocal production, singers of succeeding generations would have done well to look to the singers of the bel canto epoch and the careful studies which they and their teachers made of the physical capacities of the voice.

For one thing, with the exception of Giuditta Pasta, who apparently sang “with diminished powers” in the latter part of her career, and Maria Malibran, who died tragically young, almost all the singers of the bel canto era enjoyed careers spanning many decades, and experienced few of the vocal difficulties encountered by many singers today. Today’s strained vocal chord problems were virtually unknown to these singers, the way carpal tunnel problems – epidemic among pianists these days – were hardly known to pianists at that time, because of the prevailing lightness and elegance of approach, of both singers and pianists. The first requirement for singers of the bel canto era, before anything else, was perfect technique – technique blended completely and inextricably with art, each inspiring and fashioning the other.

The second Manuel’s son, Gustave, became a successful operatic baritone, and taught singing at both the Royal Academy and the Royal College of Music. He died in 1925 at the age of eighty-eight, and his son, Albert, also a baritone, taught at the Royal College of Music, the Guildhall School and Trinity College of Music, living until 1946. That’s almost two centuries of singing Garcias.

Pauline Garcia herself lived well into the twentieth century – until 1910, the year after the first airplane flight across the English Channel. It’s startling to reflect that her father had starred in the world première of The Barber of Seville in 1816, the year after the battle of Waterloo, and her legendary sister had died in 1836 – seventy-four years before! Pauline’s close friend Frederic Chopin had died sixty-one years earlier. At Chopin’s own request, Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Luigi Lablache had taken part in Mozart’s Requiem at his funeral at the Madeleine, which took place on October 28th, 1849. The huge façade of the Madeleine was completely draped with black velvet, in the centre of which were embroidered in silver the initials FC. Three thousand people attended, and the rue Royale was choked off by the crowd gathered outside. It was a major public event of wide interest as well as one of mourning, with the Mozart Requiem being sung by two such illustrious singers – an occasion matched only by the state funeral at the Invalides, nine years before, of Napoleon, at which Lablache also participated in the Mozart Requiem, as he had done thirteen years before that at the funeral in Vienna of Beethoven.

During the greater part of the nineteenth century, Pauline Viardot-Garcia was a most celebrated and admired lady. Remarkably cultivated, Pauline was on terms of intimate friendship throughout her life with many of the leading artists and intellectuals in Paris, even though she retired from the stage in 1863. That year she and her husband moved to Baden Baden, because of Viardot’s open opposition to the regime of Napoleon III, and they returned to Paris in 1871.

65

Pauline Viardot-Garcia, by Maurice Sand

Though she was happily married to Louis Viardot, the young Ivan Turgenev, most poetic of Russian novelists, became obsessed with Pauline in 1843, when they were both in their early twenties, and followed her on her singing tours around Europe. He stayed for long periods in her house in Paris with her and Viardot, moving in as virtually part of the household. Turgenev’s daughter by a seamstress was brought up together with the Viardot children. Pauline was the love of Turgenev’s life.

Turgenev’s mother, a rich, controlling and tyrannical lady, but perhaps in this instance not all that unreasonable, broke with her son as a result of his behaviour, and he lived a classic Parisian bohemian existence until her death in 1850, when he came into a handsome inheritance. He then bought a house in Paris, where he lived for the next thirty years, much admired and liked in the French literary world, particularly by Flaubert and Maupassant. Turgenev was the first Russian author to be widely appreciated in Europe, but ironically, he was severely criticized in Russia, and his work was positively disliked by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Turgenev’s novels owed more to an earlier era, reflecting the poetic influence of Pushkin, rather than the more modern psychological approach of his contemporaries. His novels are, for the most part, reworkings in one form or another of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. It’s the subtle poetic atmosphere above all else which counts in Turgenev’s novels.

66

Turgenev loved Pauline Viardot-Garcia all his life, and his work was deeply affected by her. In light of this passion, it’s interesting to note that with only one real exception – the young nihilist Bazarov, the central figure in his masterpiece Fathers and Sons – practically all of Turgenev’s characters of any strength, attractiveness or interest are women.

Hector Berlioz also fell madly in love with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, while working with her in 1859 on his production of Gluck’s Orphée. The same year, Pauline also sang Cassandra in the only performance during Berlioz’s lifetime of excerpts from the first part of The Trojans, which took place in Baden.

As a talented composer with a particular interest in folk song, beginning with Spanish songs, Pauline arranged a number of Chopin’s mazurkas as songs, which she sang for many years in her concert tours across Europe. These were popular for a long while. Surprisingly, Chopin himself didn’t object to them in the least.

Song arrangements of Chopin’s music have always been popular, from Pauline’s mazurka arrangements to the E major Etude, which appeared in various versions, the French one called “Tristesse,” a name which became commonly attached to the Etude itself. Then there was “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”, based upon the theme of Fantasy-Impromptu, and “Till the End of Time”, to the theme of the A flat Polonaise – huge popular hits, and very effective in their way.

Chopin’s melodies are eminently singable – and for clearly definable reasons. Firstly, there’s the frequent yearning, upward-moving shape of his phrase shapes, usually followed by a slightly crest-fallen cadence, bringing a tinge of sadness – but never self-pity. The melody of Fantasy-Impromptu is one of the many examples of this type of melody. Then there’s the downward phrase, dropping a full sixth, sometimes even an octave, then rising by degrees – hopefully, yearningly, almost reaching the intended peak, but never quite making it – as for instance the theme of the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude or that of the D flat Nocturne, or, very notably, the second subject of the Third Sonata. Chopin’s melodies, because of these characteristic and distinctive shapes, are the kind of melodies one can hum over and over without ever tiring of.

Tthe most successful Italian opera composer before Verdi, Gioacchino Rossini, lived in Paris during a large part of his life – in the very same street as Chopin, the fashionable Chaussée d’Antin, right near the Opéra – and was king of the adjacent Théâtre Italien. Rossini was universally famous as the composer of the ultimate comic opera, one of the biggest successes in operatic history – The Barber of Seville, which he had written in just three weeks back in 1816, when he was twenty-four. He had by then already composed a dozen operas, several, such as Tancredi and The Italian Girl in Algiers – both written at age twenty-one – enormous successes.

When The Barber of Seville played in Vienna for the first time, Rossini earned so much he called on Beethoven to give him a gift of 3,000 florins. In Beethoven’s city, Rossini was embarrassed at having earned literally a fortune from one huge success when the great man had never been paid a fraction of the amount for anything. From its first appearance, The Barber of Seville played all over Europe as the most popular and delightful show anybody had ever seen, but Vienna in particular was seized by Rossini mania. Rossini’s style suited the Viennese down to their champagne glasses, with its light and effervescent gaiety.

67

The Viennese would have to wait another half century for their own native-born son who could compose with this much infectious gaiety and charm, when the Barber would become a Gypsy Baron and the would-be philandering count husband who really loves his beautiful wife would be transformed into a would-be philandering husband in Die Fledermaus.

Beethoven, who could certainly be gruff and aloof, as well as sweet and charming occasionally, absolutely loved The Barber of Seville and welcomed Rossini warmly. Much was made of this public relations coup for the young Italian composer, so much so that Schumann would write, “The butterfly flew in the way of the eagle, who moved aside lest he might have crushed the insect with the beating of his wings.” Elsewhere he writes, “It would be one-sided of us to condemn Rossini, but the encouragement with which he meets is so great, out of all comparison with that bestowed on German efforts. Rossini is an admirable scene-painter, but take away the artistically managed light, and the alluring stage distance, and see what remains!” Schumann here betrays the underlying reason for his resentment of Rossini, whom nobody – least of all he himself – ever pretended to be anything other than a man of the theatre, a master of show-business 19th century style.

Rossini stayed in Vienna for four months in 1822 and was fêted like a hero. Everyone from Metternich down was humming, whistling or singing Rossini’s tunes. Vienna wasn’t alone. All of Europe was captivated by Rossini’s melodies. In Venice, in 1813, when Rossini was just twenty-one, a law was passed banning the citizens from singing, humming or whistling the principal aria from Tancredi, a magnificent love song. As Mozart said about little Nanette Stein, one has to be made of stone not to smile – or hum – when one hears Rossini. Even Schumann had to admit that The Barber of Seville was “witty, enlivening music.”

The success of il Barbiere was followed in 1817 with that of La Cenerentola, and over the next six years Rossini would compose sixteen operas. In Poland that year, seven year-old Frederic Chopin published his first piano composition – a Polonaise in G minor, and a few years later, in 1824, he would compose a set of Variations for flute and piano on La Cenerentola. Also during his teens, he used a theme from Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra – ‘The Thieving Magpie’ – as the central episode of another youthful Polonaise.

The composer of The Barber of Seville, 1816

68

Like Chopin, Rossini was absolutely devoted to the music of Mozart, his deft skill, lightness of touch, gift for spontaneous melody and musical good humour all reflecting this passion. In The Barber of Seville he perhaps surpassed his idol’s The Marriage of Figaro – based on Beaumarchais’ sequel to Le Barbier de Séville – in some of these qualities, though Rossini’s opera is a much more lightweight work. And he completely eclipsed Giovanni Paisiello’s fine opera on the same subject, which had enjoyed great popularity for over twenty-five years. The gaiety and absurdity in Rossini’s opera are matched by a consistently magical lyricism, both tender and vivacious. Beethoven told Rossini that he should compose only opera buffe – comic operas – because he had such a natural gift for it. With an uncanny ability for writing music which was consistently light, witty, effervescent and enchanting, Rossini also had a keen understanding of the singer’s art.

Rossini wrote his operas on commission from opera companies and impresarios, for specific singers, and he produced the music just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, usually within a matter of weeks, always working together with the singers. “Give me a laundry list,” said Rossini, “and I’ll set it to music.” He would recycle arias from different operas and resize them to fit the taste and abilities of his client. He would transplant whole sections from one opera to another. The famous overture to The Barber of Seville had been used twice already, and was inserted at the last minute because Rossini hadn’t yet composed an overture. Hence, no part of the overture figures in the course of the opera. Five major numbers in il Barbiere were simply lifted from other operas. And Rossini had no objection at all to allowing the first Almaviva, Manuel Garcia, to insert an aria of his own composition into Barbiere at its première. Rossini’s outwardly easy-going approach extended to the performance practice of the singers. Reviewing a performance of The Barber in 1847, starring Pauline Viardot-Garcia as Rosina, Schumann reports that “Viardot transformed the entire opera into a great variation; she scarcely left one melody untouched. What a false view of the liberty of a virtuoso! Yet this is her best character.”

La Cenerentola, as well as the strong and successful Otello, and nearly all of Rossini’s operas from then on, were composed specifically for the famous Spanish contralto Isabella Colbran, who was generally understood to be the mistress of the most powerful impresario in Italy, Domenico Barbaja. Barbaja, from humble beginnings, had risen – via gaining control of the concession for the gambling which took place during intermissions at La Scala – to become ‘Prince of Impresarios’, in the words of Alexandre Dumas. He engaged the twenty-four year-old Rossini to compose two operas a year from 1815 till 1823, one each for the theatres he managed at Naples – the San Carlo – and Milan – La Scala. Barbaja also managed the two Italian opera theatres in Vienna.

The first opera Rossini wrote for Barbaja and his star was Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, in 1815. Colbran soon became Rossini’s mistress, but Barbajo couldn’t give up his goldmine, and he accepted the inevitable with a shrug. Seven years later, in between performances, with Barbaja’s blessing, Rossini and Colbran were married, and the following year Rossini gave her Semiramide for her swansong. A decade later, Rossini and Isabella would be legally separated, but this separation caused them both much grief and depression. Rossini’s name was the last word on Isabella’s lips when she died in 1845. After Isabella’s death, Rossini married his mistress of fifteen years, Olympe Pélissier, who had been an extraordinarily beautiful and enchanting artists’ model and notable figure in Parisian society, establishing a fashionable salon. Rossini and Olympe remained tenderly devoted to each other for nearly forty years.

69

Olympe Pelissier, by Horace Vernet

In 1824, Rossini, the leading world figure in opera yet still just thirty-two, recently married to Isabella Colbran, had moved to Paris, where he was appointed musical director of the Théâtre Italien, and then, in 1827, composer to the king, Charles X, with the delightful title of Inspecteur-Général du Chant en France – ‘Inspector General of Singing in France’. If a government agency can regulate patisseries, as they do in France, then why not regulate singing? In any event, Rossini’s inspecting duties were not very arduous for him – his contract required the composition of five new operas over ten years, at 15,000 francs each (equivalent to $60,000 today), plus a pension.

Rossini when Chopin knew him

70

Rossini also produced French versions of several of his earlier Italian works across the road at the Opéra. The French stream of his oeuvre climaxed with the production, in 1829, of his huge grand opera William Tell. At five hours’ running time, William Tell would nearly always be cut in performance – usually from five acts to four – by meshing two of the acts, but sometimes by leaving one act out altogether. The Parisian public always regarded opera as first and foremost an entertainment, and therefore the Opéra, without any compunction, developed the habit of presenting Act 2 of William Tell by itself, using it as a curtain-raiser for something else. This practice went on for many years. Once, when told that the second act of William Tell was to be given at the Opéra, the composer replied “What – the whole of it?”

Rossini’s wit was the delight of Paris, and he was much-quoted. There was the young composer who brought him two compositions, to which Rossini responded quickly after hearing the first, “I like the other one better.” A famous gourmet with an enormous appetite, Rossini, when asked by one hostess when he would dine with them again, replied “Right away if you wish, madam!” In a more serious, but nevertheless characteristic way, Rossini once said he knew only two kinds of music: good music and boring music.

In 1836, Felix Mendelssohn wrote to his mother from Frankfurt: “Yesterday I went to see Hiller, and do you know who I came face to face with? Rossini, huge and fat, in his gayest, friendliest mood. I have met few men who can be as witty and amusing as he can when he feels like it. And we did nothing but laugh. He is getting to be a Bach enthusiast. He admires Germany and says that the evening he spent on the Rhine he drank so much wine that the waiter had to take him to his room or he would never have been able to find it. He told us the most amusing stories, not only about the Parisian composers, but also about himself and his music. He showed an almost excessive respect for all those present, so that one might have been tempted to take him at his word if one did not have eyes to see the astute expression on his face. He exudes intelligence, vivacity and elegance with his every gesture and every word. Anyone who is not convinced that he is a genius should listen to him only once to change his mind.”

Rossini returned in 1836 to Bologna, where he had studied singing and piano as a child, to be president of the Liceo Musicale, where he also taught singing. After twelve years, he moved to Florence, but in 1855 returned to Paris, where he was once again the nucleus of a glittering social artistic on-going party, centred at his apartment in the Chausée d’Antin, where Chopin lived in the 1830s, Rossini was one of the great hosts of Paris. He virtually defined the expression ‘bon vivant’. And ‘Tournedos Rossini’, the French response to Beef Wellington, allowed the French a stand-off with, if not a victory over, the English at last. Every photograph of Rossini, for example the one by Nadar, shows him with a clever and amused twinkly look. A delightful man, with abundant generosity and kindness, Rossini built a magnificent villa, a classic small château, at Passy, to which everyone came – the aristocracy, the financiers, and all of Europe’s composers. One of his favourites, Jacques Offenbach – Paris’ answer to Johann Strauss in the 1860s – was paid the highest compliment that could be bestowed by Rossini: “the little Mozart of the Champs Elysées.”

These later years, when chronic health problems miraculously subsided, were a glorious Indian summer for Rossini. He developed a practice of giving magnificent festive evenings every Saturday night, to which everybody in Paris hoped to be invited. The house was always full and overflowing into the street.

71

Rossini photographed by Nadar, early 1860s

At these parties one could meet the likes of Liszt, Wagner, or Adelina Patti. The last Saturday evening took place a week before he suffered a heart attack at age seventy-six, in 1868. The pope sent a special nuncio to administer last rights, and Rossini was buried at Père Lachaise near Chopin and Bellini. At the request of the Italian government, his body was removed ten years later to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, and was laid beside those of Michelangelo and Galileo.

William Tell had brought Rossini’s career as the world’s most famous opera composer to an abrupt and unexpected halt after thirty-six operas, at the age of thirty-seven, while at the height of his powers, not yet half way through his life. Theories for this mystery have abounded, the first and most oft-repeated being the supposedly disappointing reception of William Tell, Rossini’s last and by far his grandest opera.

But for one thing, William Tell’s reception wasn’t a total disaster. The overture instantly became the pop piece par excellence, and didn’t need to wait for the Lone Ranger. Liszt’s arrangement of it was one of his great showpieces. As for the rest of the opera, Rossini was a veteran of the music business, one who knew his profession inside out, a ‘pro’ if ever there was one, and the most famous opera composer in the world, so it’s unlikely that he would have been fazed by a temporary disappointment for long. Also, while he stopped composing, Rossini nevertheless continued to work very much in the music business, as director of the Théâtre Italien, and this side of the business is even more political and aggravating than that of a composer.

In fact, soon after William Tell premiered in 1829, Rossini’s life was made difficult by a couple of factors, first and foremost his health. He suffered terrible attacks of neurasthenia, as well as insomnia and an inability to digest food. He was bedridden for several years during his stay in Florence. He was also a hypochondriac – “I have all of women’s ills; all that I lack is the uterus.”

Then there was his five-year legal battle with the French government following the July Revolution of 1830 over the cancellation of his contract with Louis Philippe’s predecessor, Charles X. Eventually Rossini won the continuation of his annual pension of 6,000 francs, but not the five-opera commission. Rossini had become a rich man from his operas, so he didn’t need to work. At his death he was very much a millionaire. He claimed to be lazy, and his mode of composition had never been one where he exercised any great philosophical, soul-searching, energies. Composing was as easy and natural for him as playing the piano was for his friend Franz Liszt.

72

Perhaps the real reason for Rossini’s premature retirement from composing was that he felt the times were changing and his style of music would no longer be accepted. Rossini’s aesthetic belonged to another era, being characterized by elegance, wit and clarity. The Romantic extravagances of Meyerbeer and early Verdi were not at all to his taste. His sound world was very much that of Mozart. As far back as 1817, when he was still only twenty-five, Rossini wrote that “Haydn had already begun to corrupt purity of taste by introducing strange chords, artificial passages and daring novelties… After him, Cramer, and, finally, Beethoven, with their compositions lacking in unity and natural flow, and full of artificial oddities, corrupted taste in instrumental music completely.”

The interest of all Paris was excited in 1842 when Rossini’s first work in thirteen years was performed, an excellent Stabat Mater, the composition of which had occupied him through the 1830s. The work was then taken on tour around Europe. In Bologna, the performance was conducted by Donizetti, who was introduced to the orchestra by Rossini: “Gentlemen, I introduce to you a great composer and conductor. I have entrusted the Stabat Mater to him because he is the only person able to interpret it the way I wrote it.” But this was a one-off, and no opera followed William Tell. In his later years he began to write again, but only short piano pieces and some chamber music, plus a Petite Messe Solenelle.

The piano pieces he collected and published as ‘Sins of My Old Age’, some of these pieces later turned into the sparkling ballet La Boutique Fantasque by Respighi for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, choreographed by Léonide Massine. Rossini himself wrote, “Good Lord, I was born for comic opera. Very little knowledge and a little heart, that’s all.”

Maybe Rossini gave up composing operas because despite his Mozartian facility, it was simply too exhausting the way he did it, involving himself in every aspect of production, always dealing personally with singers, musicians and management. Most of his operas were composed in his twenties, under circumstances humorously related (albeit in fictionalized form) by Stendahl in Life of Rossini, written when the composer was only thirty years old but already a legend: “One after another he visited every town in Italy, spending two or three months in each. As soon as he set foot in the place, he would be welcomed, banqueted and generally adulated by every dilettante in the neighbourhood, so that the first two or three weeks would be gaily frittered away in the consumption of gala dinners, spiced with sighs and shrugs over the unspeakable imbecility of the librettist.

“Finally Rossini begins to refuse invitations. To study the vocal potentialities of the company, he commandeers a piano and makes them sing; and on such occasions the observer may witness the depressing spectacle of a great composer compelled to distort and mutilate the finest flights of musical inspiration for the simple reason that the tenor cannot reach the note some noble vista of creative imagination has suggested, or else because the prima donna invariably sings off pitch in the course of transition from one key to the next!

“Despite every protest, his new-found acquaintances refuse to leave him in peace for a single instant during the whole of the livelong day. He dines and sups with them; he returns late at night, his friends convoying him back to his lodgings, all singing at the tops of their voices some song he has improvised during the course of the evening. Toward three in the morning he scribbles down his inspirations, hastily and without a piano, on odd scraps of paper, and tosses them aside until morning.

73

“It was part of his contract that he appear the first three nights of the new opera. Then, having received his miserable pay and attended a grand farewell dinner given in his honour by all his new friends, which is to say, the entire population of the town, he set out for the next town large enough to have a theatre, there to compose, cast and put on another opera.”

Sounds like a Fellini town, with little difference for the intervening couple of centuries. Although Vie de Rossini may have been written on commission from a publisher, Stendahl’s enthusiasm for Rossini and all things Italian was undeniable and unbounded. “Napoleon is dead (he had died the year before), but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world, and from Moscow to Naples, London to Vienna, Paris to Calcutta, his name is on every tongue.”

Among Manuel Garcia’s students was another singer the same age as Pauline Viardot-Garcia who also became a good friend of Chopin, though only towards the end of his life – one of the most famous and beloved personalities of the 19th century, the sensational “Swedish nightingale,” Johanna Maria Lind.

Jenny Lind came to Paris in 1841 when she was twenty-one, to study with Manuel Garcia. Right from the start, Jenny was renowned for her remarkable vocal control, agility and florid cadenzas, but most of all for the purity and naturalness of her singing. This quality was doubtless a product of her sincere piety, which led her to quit the operatic stage at twenty-nine, in 1849, for moral reasons.

Jenny Lind

74

Jenny Lind lived in London from 1847, and would settle there permanently. Verdi wrote I Masnadieri, upon Schiller’s The Brigands, for her London debut that year. Chopin wrote to his friend Albert Grzymala from London in 1848, “I have just come back from the Italian Theatre; I saw Jenny Lind and the Queen. Both made a great impression. So did old Wellington. He sat under the royal box like an monarchic old dog in his kennel. Jenny Lind had saved a place for me. This Swedish lady does not glow with ordinary light – there is something of the aurora borealis about her.” A few weeks before he died, Jenny came to visit Chopin in Paris and sang to him for an entire evening.

After she retired from the stage in 1849, Jenny Lind appeared in concerts and oratorio, beginning in 1850 with a phenomenally successful tour of the U.S. organized by the great entrepreneur of the age, Phineas Taylor Barnum, a concert tour which attracted enormous audiences. Jenny married her twenty-one year-old accompanist of this tour, Otto Goldschmidt, a pupil of Mendelssohn, in 1852. Goldschmidt later became a composer and conductor, and in 1856 the couple settled in Britain, where Jenny was adored for her moral character and for her charitable gifts. Together, Jenny and her husband founded the Bach Choir in 1875, Jenny leading the sopranos herself and Otto conducting. During the last years of her life, in the 1880s, Jenny was the first professor of singing at the newly established Royal College of Music, while her old teacher, Manuel Garcia, was professor and her husband Otto was vice principal at the Royal Academy of Music on the other side of Hyde Park.

Despite all the dedicated efforts of Manuel Garcia, Jenny Lind and others, we might recall Beecham’s words, and consider that the effects of the teaching of singing, like that of the piano, can go only so far. All of the singers we have mentioned were truly extraordinary artists who happened to live at the same time. It was largely because of the culture of bel canto opera in the 1830s that these singers, from Italy, Spain, and one from Sweden, flourished in Paris, alongside pianists from Vienna, one from Hungary and one very special one from Poland.

Jenny Lind’s last operatic appearance, in 1849, was in a revival of Robert le Diable. The name of the composer of this uniquely successful opera – Meyerbeer – crops up often in the biography of Chopin. Meyerbeer was the king of opera in Paris in the 1830s. Meyerbeer’s operas hardly get a hearing today, but he and his collaborator Eugène Scribe, the most popular and prolific playwright of the era, were like Rodgers and Hammerstein when Chopin lived in Paris. Meyerbeer and Scribe both became rich from their productions, and their collaboration was one of the phenomenons of the era.

Robert le Diable premiered in Paris in 1831 with enormous success, and it set the standard for French grand opera. The following year, it ran simultaneously at three theatres in London. Even South Pacific never did that. Upon the phenomenal success of Robert le Diable, Meyerbeer decided to base himself in Paris, and he would preside over the most brilliant and glamorous era of French ‘grand opera’. Meyerbeer, who went by the Italian form of Jacob, ‘Giacomo’, was born Jacob Liebmann Meyer, and came from a wealthy Berlin Jewish family called Beer, had started out as a virtuoso pianist, and took lessons in London from the great Muzio Clementi, the father of piano-playing. Meyerbeer came by the first name Giacomo honestly enough, as he had lived in Italy for fifteen years, from the age of twenty-five, trying to establish himself as a composer of Italian opera. After the sensational success of Robert le Diable, however, French opera became his focus, and Paris his home.

75

Produced on an extremely lavish scale, Robert le Diable appealed to the Romantic taste for medievalism, the supernatural and the macabre. The subject of the opera, not to be confused with the historical duke of Normandy, Robert 1st, known as ‘The Magnificent’ or ‘The Devil’, the father of William the Conqueror, is based on a 12th century French romance concerning a legendary son of a Duke of Normandy, born in answer to prayers to the devil, who is wracked by evil impulses, for which he seeks the Pope’s help, and ends up, after heavenly apparitions, delivering Rome from Saracen attack. Robert le Diable was the rage of Paris. Liszt wasn’t allowed off any concert stage before he’d played his dazzling arrangement of the Danse Infernale from Robert le Diable. Whatever the advertised programmme, audiences would clamor for “Robert! Robert! ” Liszt wasn’t the only one: even Chopin produced a ‘Grand Duo for piano and cello on Themes from Robert le Diable’, written with his friend Auguste Franchomme, first cellist of the Opéra orchestra.

“It is essentially a work for the most refined of circles,” wrote Schumann. “It seems to me that Chopin must have sketched it throughout, while Franchomme said a gentle ‘yes’ to everything; for whatever Chopin touches takes his form and spirit, and even in this small salon style he asserts himself with a grace and elegance, compared to which all the finish of other brilliant writers is lost on the winds. If the whole of ‘Robert le Diable’ were filled with such ideas as Chopin has selected from it for his duo, it would need re-baptism. And Chopin’s fantastic finger plays hither and thither, veiling, unveiling, so that ear and heart long retain the tones… Is it necessary for us to add that we recommend this duo with our whole heart?”

Chopin published this piece in 1833, as a piano duet as well. Also that year, he published his Variations Brillantes on a Theme from Hérold’s Ludovic, Op. 12, for piano solo. Louis Hérold, composer of a dozen light comic operas for the Opéra-Comique over the previous fifteen years, the most successful of which were Zampa in 1831 and Le Pré aux Clercs in 1832, had died at the age of forty-one in January of that year, and his last opera, Ludovic, was completed by François Halévy and premiered in May. Hérold also composed much piano music, including four piano concertos. Of Chopin’s variations Schumann writes, “Even in this style, we must award the prize to Chopin… he cannot conceal or deny his lofty mind in any position; what he is surrounded by takes its colour from him, and accomodates itself, be it ever so coy, to his master-hand. Still, it must be confessed that these variations ought not to be compared to his original works.”

With the premiere of Norma and Robert le Diable, the publication of Victor Hugo’s first famous works, and the premières of his revolutionary plays at the Odéon, and then the Paris début, at the Opéra, of the most brilliant instrumentalist the world had ever heard, Niccolò Paganini, 1831, the year Chopin came to Paris, was a pivotal one for the cultural life of Paris. All of this cultural and social activity was to a great extent initiated and encouraged by the election in July 1830 of the duc d’Orléans, Louis Philippe, draped in the Republican tricolor flag – as “King of the French, by the Grace of God and the Will of the People,” ending a long period of conservative reaction and political disorder. In the wake of the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, the range of parties from far right to extreme left was so great that political chaos had always been a threat. Louis Philippe, the ‘Citizen King’, was the only possible compromise, and he was to preside as a constitutional monarch over the first period of stability in France in over a generation, one which was to be a brief golden age of such stability, accompanied by unprecedented prosperity and cultural blossoming.

76

Louis Philippe had spent nearly three years in America as a young man, and his political outlook was greatly influenced by the Jeffersonian model of a Constitution. He lived with his two brothers in Philadelphia from 1797 – 99, and loved America, but returned to France upon Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1799. However, he found that, although it would be another four years before the little corporal declared himself Emperor, Napoleon was already well beyond listening to anyone. But Louis Philippe would never take up arms against Napoleon and fight other Frenchmen, as did some émigrés. Instead he adopted a quiet and rather bourgeois life, living for many years in Twickenham, a picturesque spot beside the Thames just outside London, where he was able to indulge his love of all things English.

The sight of the king strolling by himself in the street, dressed in a normal suit, with a furled umbrella, shaking hands with whoever wished to approach him, provoked scepticism, and even contempt, not only from the other monarchs in Europe, but among the king’s naturally querulous fellow citizens. Czar Nicholas called Louis Philippe the “king of the grocers.” Nevertheless, this image became the symbol of the régime, a régime which was to be a more or less liberal one, and times were good in France for the monied classes under Louis Philippe.

Chopin was applauded with wild enthusiasm when he played for the king and his court in 1838 at the Palais Royale, his residence in Paris. Louis Philippe had made himself very popular by opening up the precincts of this huge palace – which belonged to the Orléans family, of which he was the head – to the public, with walkways and arcades, as we still know it today. Chopin again played for the king in October 1839, in a grand concert at St. Cloud, the palace just outside Paris which also belonged to the Orléans family. The king sent Chopin a silver goblet as a gift a few days later, which he proudly displayed on his mantlepiece, paying no attention to the antipathy of many of the liberal intellectuals around him, for whom Louis Philippe became more and more the focus of anti-establishment feeling. The pianist Moscheles, with whom Chopin shared the evening at St. Cloud, wrote: “I am convinced that Chopin’s playing, full of fire and élan that did not weaken for a moment throughout the performance, must have had a very stimulating effect on his listeners.”

The painting by Horace Vernet of Louis Philippe and his five sons in military splendour, shows them riding out of the gate of Versailles.

77

Vernet, one of the most successful painters of the era, and his father Carle, were protégés of the very anglophile king from the time he was duc d’Orléans, and this was perhaps the main reason for their concentration on sporting and equestrian pictures. Louis Philippe became more English than the English. Vernet’s studio, as depicted in the painting My Studio, was a popular meeting place for artists and writers who were Bonapartist and Orléans supporters, as well as sportsmen.

Tragically the king’s eldest son and heir, Ferdinand, the new duc d’Orléans, would die in a riding accident in 1842, and that was to be the beginning of a long downward spiral for Louis Philippe, his régime coming more and more to be seen as conservative after all, and finally being ousted unceremoniously in 1848. In the end, Louis Philippe proved too obstinate politically, fundamentally conservative and unable to keep up with the changing times, and he lost his support and his throne. Under his régime the old aristocracy of land had been replaced by a new one of money, with huge fortunes being made in banking and industry. “The millionaires had become the nobles,” in the words of Pierre Leroux, both figuratively and literally, after Napoleon had established a system of reward for plain business and financial accomplishments in 1806, known as la Nouvelle Noblesse. Leroux was one of the leaders of the socialist movement which blossomed in the 1840s because of the misfortunes of the great mass of the population, acerbated by crop failures and an economic downturn that created enormous unemployment and produced a wave of bankruptcies.

Nevertheless, Louis Philippe was a good man, charitable and generous, and during the first half of his reign – the 1830s, Chopin’s great decade in Paris, the decade of the Romantics, the first decade of the modern era – he genuinely represented the interests of the middle classes, as his political platform had claimed he would.

And the middle classes liked nothing better than going to the Opéra for a spectacular show, lavishly produced, just as the middle classes a century-and-a-half later would enjoy going to The Phantom of the Opera, more as a socio-cultural phenomenon than out of love for the musical theatre. Meyerbeer’s five-act historical extravaganza Les Huguenots catered ideally to this taste.

Les Huguenots, with libretto again by Scribe, a master dramatic craftsman, premiered in 1836, and like Meyerbeer’s other operas, was soon produced in London, New Orleans, and New York. Set in the midst of the deadly rivalry between Catholics and Protestants at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Les Huguenots was in a class of its own for spectacular grand opera, set in the château of Chenonceau as well as a big Paris square on the banks of the Seine, and famously requiring the services of no less than seven star singers of exceptional range and ability. With its opulence and extravagance, Les Huguenots was the opera which symbolized the age.

For nearly a century, Les Huguenots was to be one of the great vehicles for big opera companies wishing to show off their stars and their capacity for mounting magnificent productions. Half a century after its first performance, it was one of the operas chosen for the first season of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, alongside I Puritani. Ticket prices at the Met for Les Huguenots in the 1890s were $7 for the good seats – an unheard of price for a ticket at that time, but necessary in order to cover the expense of casts of legendary singers which included the de Reszke brothers, Nellie Melba, Lilli Lehmann, Pol Plançon, Victor Maurel, and, in the productions of the following decade, Enrico Caruso.

78

Les Huguenots would be performed at the Met at various times in French, Italian and German, and might have stayed in the active repertoire in the 20th century if not for the near impossibility and prohibitive cost of casting seven extraordinary singers in one production. But in the 19th century the requirement of an opulent, luxurious production was exactly what made Les Huguenots a magnet for opera companies.

Meyerbeer’s collaborator, Eugène Scribe, also wrote the libretto, in 1835, for Jacques Halévy’s five-act grand opera La Juive. Halévy – who was born Fromental Elias Lévy – wrote over thirty operas and became a most respected figure in the French musical establishment, professor of composition at the Conservatoire, teacher of Gounod and Georges Bizet – the latter marrying his daughter Geneviève. La Juive, Halévy’s only lasting operatic success, survived into the twentieth century, with a famous revival at The Metropolitan Opera in 1918 starring Caruso in his last new role, one for which he prepared assiduously by going to hear great cantors in synagogues around New York.

La Juive, concocted of episodes from both Ivanhoe and The Merchant of Venice, with superb choral writing and imaginative orchestration, as well as real psychological depth in the characterizations, stood alongside Les Huguenots as the ultimate in French Romantic grand opera. Halévy was greatly influenced by Meyerbeer, but was overshadowed by him, even though one can recognize many of the orchestral effects from La Juive in Les Huguenots – which wasn’t composed until the following year.

As an indication of the kind of show one expected to see when one went to the Paris Opéra during the mid-1830s, we need look no further than the stage directions for La Juive, quoted in ‘The Original Staging Manuals for Twelve Parisian Operatic Premières’, by M. L. Palianti. At the central set-piece, where dignitaries of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire parade in front of the Cathedral of Constance, we have “the emperor’s trumpeters, preceded by three mounted guards richly armed and equipped, one banner-bearer, twenty cross-bow carriers, one flag-bearer, cardinals and bishops followed by their pages and clergymen, several guild officials, one hundred soldiers richly armed and dressed in coats of mail and armor, six trumpeters with instruments decorated in richly emblazoned hoods, six more trumpeters, six flag-carriers, twenty more cross-bow carriers, Cardinal Broghy on horseback, under a magnificent canopy carried by four heralds, three armed heralds on horseback, twenty pages of the emperor, the Emperor Sigismond in dazzling armor on a horse harnessed and in armor with all imaginable luxury.”

Hard as it is to imagine, with productions like this, tickets at both the Opéra and the Théâtre Italien at the time cost no more than between two and ten francs – the top price equivalent to forty dollars today. Costs of production have certainly become inflated in our time, but even so, it’s virtually impossible to mount such productions today, no matter how expensive the tickets, just as it is to make films on a genuinely grand scale, no matter how inflated the budget.

After Les Huguenots, Meyerbeer composed nothing until 1849, when he produced, with much fanfare, Le Prophète, another historical tragedy based on a factual episode in European history, with book once again by Scribe. Le Prophète, turgid and overblown, was not in the same class as Les Huguenots, but the theme of 16th century religious turmoil provided the same opportunity for lavish spectacle as did Les Huguenots and La Juive. Chopin, by that time very ill, attended the première of Le Prophète in April of that year – six months before his death.

79

Although Chopin liked Robert le Diable, and also enjoyed Les Huguenots, Le Prophète was decidedly not for him, but he made the effort to be at the opening night because the lead role was being sung by his dear friend Pauline Viardot-Garcia, and he had always been friendly with Meyerbeer himself.

Later, Meyerbeer composed, in a lighter vein, Dinorah, based on a Breton legend, and finally, in 1864, he returned to grand opera with the story of Vasco da Gama, in L’Africaine. Meyerbeer died while this opera was in rehearsal.

Meyerbeer, king of grand opera

Ironically, Meyerbeer was in fact helpful to Richard Wagner at the beginning of his career. When the ambitious young composer, still unknown, came to Paris in 1842, Meyerbeer, as the most powerful man in opera, was his natural choice for a protector. Wagner was to find completely devoted supporters in Liszt, and Ludwig II of Bavaria, and Meyerbeer was also generous, if not right away. Wagner, being Wagner, expected much, especially as his first opera, Rienzi – the reason for his visit to Paris – was clearly modeled on Meyerbeer’s grandiloquent style. Though a moderate success, it was perceived to be derivative (it was). Meyerbeer was unaware of any resentment on Wagner’s part, as the following year, when he was appointed director of the Royal Opera in Berlin, he actively promoted Wagner’s second opera, The Flying Dutchman, a work in which Wagner’s own voice emerged clearly.

Wagner’s ravings against a Jewish monopoly of the music world, as well as an imagined conspiracy against the purity of German culture in general, had not yet been formulated, and in any case this was a theoretical rather than a practical stance, surfacing mainly in his vitriolic book Judaism in Music. Wagner was happy to know Meyerbeer and be helped by him. Later he would entrust the première of his crowning work, The Ring, as well as that of Parsifal, to the Jewish conductor Hermann Levi, whom he admired and liked. He also admired and acknowledged much to Heinrich Heine, whose Jewishness was well known.

80

And then, there was the matter of Ludwig Geyer, the Jewish actor who was Wagner’s step-father and even possibly his true father, a man Wagner admired and never denied. Despite his epic self-centredness, Wagner was whole-heartedly appreciative of other composers’ work, especially Beethoven, who was a god to him, as he was to almost every other musician of the 19th century.

Though judged superficial by succeeding generations, and rarely performed in the twentieth century – for logistical as much as artistic reasons – Meyerbeer exerted a considerable influence on the development of opera. His conception of big character scenes, the dramatic style of his vocal writing, his effective handling of ensembles and arias, and his sense of the spectacular became the foundation of ‘grand opera’, in the shape of Don Carlo, Aida, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Turandot. Meyerbeer’s original sense of orchestration – particularly his use of wind instruments – inspired the virtuoso master of orchestration, Hector Berlioz. Meyerbeer was one of the first composers to make use of the saxophone, invented in Paris in 1845 by the Belgian, Adolphe Sax.

Not only posterity, but contemporary connoisseurs also, however, thought a little Meyerbeer went a long way. “There’s more music in a single Prélude by Chopin than there is in an entire opera by Meyerbeer,” said George Sand. Schumann became apoplectic in a long essay on Les Huguenots: “‘To startle or tickle’ is Meyerbeer’s maxim, and he succeeds in it with the rabble. And as for the chorale, which sets Frenchmen beside themselves, I declare that if a pupil brought such a lesson in counterpoint to me, I should certainly beg him to do better in future… It is easy to point, in Meyerbeer, to Rossini, Mozart, Hérold, Weber, Bellini, even Spohr; in short, to the whole musical repertory. But one thing belongs to him alone – that famous, unbearable, bleating rhythm, which appears in almost every theme of the opera. Only envy and hatred can deny that the work contains many better things, many noble, sublime emotions… but what is all this compared to the commonness, distortion, unnaturalness, immorality, unmusical character of the whole?

“There is Nevers, a profligate, who loves Valentine, then gives her up, then accepts her as his wife; Valentine herself, who loves Raoul, marries Nevers, swears she loves him, and then betroths herself to Raoul; Raoul, who loves Valentine, rejects her, falls in love with the Queen, and finally takes Valentine to wife – and then the Queen, the queen of all these dolls! And people are pleased with this, because it looks prettily, and comes from Paris!”

There is a lot of bombast in Meyerbeer’s operas, but there are still many things to admire – ‘many better things, many noble, sublime emotions’, as Schumann admits. The breathtakingly beautiful duet between tenor and soprano, Raoul and Valentine, near the end of Les Huguenots, is one of several highlights of which he acknowledges as having “flow of idea and musical workmanship,” besides much else that even he finds “interesting,” and, above all, “effective.” With le Prophète, however, Schumann gave up, and simply put a black cross for his review – which is not entirely derogatory of the music alone, as Le Prophète concerns a false prophet of a spurious 16th century German Christian sect.

One commentator, the critic and writer Percy Scholes, has remarked, as only an Englishman could, that Meyerbeer “had high ability, and, if vulgar, had the courage of his vulgarity, hence was effective.”

81

No-one ever had less vulgarity in his soul than Frederic Chopin, and thus there was little in common artistically between the two composers, although personally they were on the friendliest of terms. Meyerbeer was completely enthralled by Chopin’s talent, and was a frequent visitor to his home. Of one particular evening at Chopin’s apartment in the mid-1830s, one of many such evenings, Liszt writes,

“Seated beside Heine was Meyerbeer, who has long since exhausted all admiring exclamations (about Chopin). Harmonist of cyclopaean structures, he passed long moments of rare delight as he followed the detail of arabesques enwrapping Chopin’s thoughts as in a light translucence”.

After Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Louis Lablache had sung in the Mozart Requiem at Chopin’s funeral at the Madeleine, it was Meyerbeer, representing the musical world, together with Prince Adam Czartoryski, representing Poland, who led the long procession, three miles, along the Grand Boulevard and on beyond Place de la République, to Père Lachaise cemetery.

It is significant to note that Chopin’s Etudes, the ultimate compendium of every possible pianistic difficulty and technical refinement, were finally completed, and the second half published, in 1836, while the two pinnacles of operatic vocal art, I Puritani and les Huguenots, were produced in 1835 and 1836 respectively. Both of these operas are practically never seen today because of their demand for star casts with every possible refinement of vocal technique – singers with the widest possible ranges who are capable of surmounting all vocal difficulties with ease and elegance. Also interestingly, the composers of both operas, Bellini and Meyerbeer, were both good friends of Chopin.

Bel canto opera was eclipsed by the heavier, more dramatic operatic styles which soon succeeded it in the 1840s and 50s, from Verdi and Wagner through ‘Verismo’ opera, then Puccini and Richard Strauss. Its rediscovery in the 1950s and 60s was led by Maria Callas, under the tutelage of the great conductor Tullio Serafin, and she was followed in this bel canto revival by Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé. Callas was universally acclaimed as the pioneer of a new era – a great renaissance of bel canto – but it turned out that she was simply an artist in a class of her own.

It’s interesting to note how dismissively Bellini and Donizetti are dealt with in reference books up until the 1960s. The entire entry for Bellini in the 1964 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music consists of thirty words, in contrast to the 150-word entry on the next page for William Sterndale Bennett, the worthy but now forgotten Mendelssohnian English composer, conductor and teacher, principal of the Royal Academy of Music, whose greatest claim to fame was his introduction of the St. Matthew Passion to England in 1854.

Bellini’s entire entry reads, “Celebrated and highly popular composer of opera of the days when vocal melody and vocal agility were its most valued constituents. Friend of Chopin, who admired his melodic gift.” Donizetti gets ten words more: “Composed 60 operas, many of which enjoyed performances all over the civilized world; had a gift of tune and knew how to write for singers in the days when opera was, above all, a display of vocal tone and technique.”

82

Vocal melody and vocal agility may not be everything in music, but they’re pretty good for starters, and not bad for continuers either, notwithstanding the outdated librettos and theatrical conventions of bel canto opera. After all, it’s not as if today’s operatic conventions, with minimalist plots, minimalist sets and non-existant costumes, are all that much fun. The music in bel canto opera is indeed largely a foil for the vocal lines, a showcase for exceptional, beautiful, singing. But it fulfilled this task admirably, and it did rise to the occasion when required by the dramatic thrust of the story, especially when interpreted by artists such as Maria Malibran, Giuditta Pasta, Giulia Grisi or Maria Callas.

Maria Callas giving a masterclass, Osaka, 1973

Now we’ve seen how much Frederic Chopin reflected in his writing for the piano and in his musical style the great culture of opera and singing which he found in Paris, and which he loved so much all his life, in the next chapter we will look at the cult of instrumental virtuosity, led by Paganini and Liszt, which also fascinated the musical world of the time, as it does every age, but this one especially, for a variety of reasons. We will see how Chopin was influenced by, and in turn played an essential part in, the development of the art of the virtuoso performer. We will begin our acquaintance with one of the most celebrated friendships in musical history – that of Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt, and examine Liszt’s place in the history of the piano, the pianistic culture from which he came, and his unique personality, with its blend of showbusiness panache and genuine seriousness of purpose. We shall also meet Niccolò Paganini, the unique wizard of the violin, who virtually invented the persona of the modern virtuoso instrumental performer.

83

Chapter 4

THE KING AND THE EMPEROR;

MEPHISTO STILL PLAYS THE VIOLIN

When twenty-one year old Frederic Chopin arrived in Paris in the autumn of

1831 he had under his arm his first two Etudes, carefully copied out by his sister Ludwika – or Louise, as she was also called – in the days before he left Warsaw ten months earlier. She rushed to finish them as he was about to board the coach which would take him on his great adventure, and at the bottom of the manuscript she wrote the date November 2nd, 1830. On that day Frederic Chopin left Poland for ever, although at the time he had no idea that his life would turn out that way.

In their combined span of just under five minutes, those two Etudes contain most of what anyone would ever need to know about the physical process of playing the piano, and much else besides – so-called ‘musical’ elements of tone quality, touch and style, as well as panache, excitement and beauty thrown in for good measure.

It seemed destined and natural that Chopin should very soon meet and befriend Franz Liszt, who at twenty was already a celebrity, and who within the next decade and a half would become established as the most famous concert pianist in history. And it was also completely natural that Liszt should instantly recognize the genius of Frederic Chopin, and want to learn everything he could from him, most especially everything he was demonstrating in his growing number of Etudes.

Franz Liszt was unique. He was the 19th century’s version of an electrifying, devilish, Horowitzian concert pianist crossed with an Errol Flynn-style movie star. He had immense personal charm, charisma, glamour, was beautifully handsome, virile, suave, and astonishingly gifted. Everything about Liszt seemed to personify the Romantic age and the vitality of youth. Sweet and garrulous by nature, Liszt developed something of a Byronic image during the time Chopin knew him – partly because of his Romantic looks, partly because of the extravagance of his talent, and partly because of his voracious Renaissance-style appetite for ideas.

Despite the extraordinary looks and talent, however, Liszt seems to have been just about the sanest musician who ever lived. That slightly crazy streak present to a greater or lesser degree in all performing artists existed very little in Franz Liszt; a little harmless vanity is the worst one can say of him. But as a personality he captured the spirit of the age as did no-one else.

The ambiguous figure of George Gordon Byron loomed very large over the Romantic era for several reasons, all of them inseparable. The first was the romantic melancholy, as well as satiric brilliance, of his poetry, typified in the first instance by Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the latter in Don Juan. Liszt was an avid reader of this Romantic literature.

84

Secondly, Byron’s passionate championship of political liberalism caught the Romantic imagination at its crest. And last, but certainly not least, came his celebrated good looks, which Liszt surpassed.

The marvellous daguerrotype of Liszt made in 1841 captures the charismatic air he exuded, the dashing looks, the unique head of hair, as well as his plain niceness. He was twenty-nine when this picture was taken – at the height of his and Chopin’s success in Paris – and it shows what an amazing profile he had. Beautiful clothes too. We see the silk cravat and diamond stick-pin in other pictures of the period, such as the drawing of him in 1842. We can easily understand why audiences wanted to see him in profile, or just see him at all. As the first primitive photograph ever captured of a human being was part of the image entitled ‘Paris Boulevard’, taken in 1839, this is an extraordinary image for us to see.

Liszt in 1841, at 28 (one of the first-ever photos)

Liszt was not the first pianist to perform in profile to the audience. That distinction belonged to the Czech virtuoso Jan Ladislav Dussek – ‘le beau Dussek’ – during the first decade of the century. But the notion was just made for this beautiful and extroverted man. Liszt was, however, the first pianist to give concerts entirely by himself, without ‘assisting artists’. “Le concert, c’est moi,” Liszt’s remark, was witty not only for its reference to the famous declaration by the Sun King, but also because the word ‘concert’ means something in the plural, and ‘moi’, of course, is singular.

A new word was needed. After a short while in 1839 during which Liszt described his solo performances as ‘soliloquies’ on the piano, he soon settled on the word ‘recital’, which still wasn’t ideal – ‘What’s he going to do?’, asked some critics, ‘recite on the piano?’ – but that’s the way it was to remain for ever after.

85

‘Soliloquy’ was in fact a more accurate description of this new form of entertainment, and the allusion to Hamlet most likely appealed to Liszt, but it was a bit too precious, and it didn’t really indicate that the performance might include serious music as well as the usual nonsense expected of virtuosos.

The first ‘recital’ took place during a visit by Liszt to London in 1840, as part of a series of concerts in Britain arranged by the impresario Lavenu. The English journalists were baffled: “… he had announced a performance under the title ‘Pianoforte Recitals’, to be given by himself without any aid whatever,” wrote the Morning Herald. “As the thing was new in this country, even his friends were doubtful on the issue. However, his success was a triumphant one in every sense of the word.”

Liszt wouldn’t cross the Channel again for another forty-six years, returning in triumph during the last year of his life, by which time nobody could remember when it had been absolutely obligatory for pianists to appear with assisting artists.

However, although he was admired during his visit to England in 1840, Liszt was too much of a star for the English. Their fundamentally middle-class turn of mind didn’t allow them to enjoy Chopin’s genius as much as they might have either, when he ventured across the Channel in 1848. The English preferred the more cosy comforts of virtuous music-making German-style, and their hero was Felix Mendelssohn, whom they virtually adopted as an honorary Englishman.

Note the same cravat and stick-pin as in the photo

86

From the moment he encountered Chopin, Liszt became an ardent and passionate supporter of the unexpected and unique newcomer. At Chopin’s first concert in Paris, which took place at the Salle Pleyel in February 1832, four and a half months after his arrival, the majority of the audience consisted of Poles, his fellow countrymen having welcomed him warmly and supportively in Paris. But Liszt was also there, and he would recall that “The most enthusiastic applause didn’t seem to do justice to our enchantment at this talent who revealed a new kind of poetic feeling and such innovations in the form of his art.”

Nine years later Liszt was still Chopin’s most fervent admirer, and wanted everyone to know it. He decided to write a review for the Gazette Musicale of a concert Chopin was to give, once again at the Salle Pleyel. It was to be a splendid occasion, with ‘le tout Paris’ in attendance. The editor and chief critic of the journal, Ernest Legouvé, told Chopin during intermission that Liszt had asked to take over from him on this occasion.

It went without saying that Liszt’s review would be extremely flattering. But though they had been friends for nearly a decade, Chopin was annoyed, feeling that Liszt was trying to claim some of the limelight of a brilliant occasion not his own. “Liszt will proclaim you a king,” Legouvé told Chopin. “Yes,” replied Chopin, with a peevishness which surfaced whenever he felt uncomfortable, “within his own empire.”

Ernest Legouvé was a good friend of Chopin, as well as Liszt. A fine critic, he was also a successful poet and playwright, who, in collaboration with Eugène Scribe, wrote Adrienne Lecouvreur in 1849, and helped his close friend Hector Berlioz not only with money but also with the libretto for his great final opera The Trojans. Legouvé’s Soixante ans de souvenirs, published in 1886, makes fascinating and entertaining reading. It’s startling to consider that although he was three years older than Chopin, Legouvé lived into the twentieth century, until 1903.

The concert in April 1841 was a rare one by Chopin. By this time he had developed a decided aversion to performing in public, preferring to play only for friends in private or at salons. But the promise of a large financial return, and the opportunity to introduce important new works composed since his last public appearance in Paris, six years before, persuaded him to allow George Sand to organize and stage-manage a brilliant gala event. The four hundred who would attend were hand-picked by Sand, so Chopin was able to give a ‘public concert’ that was really very exclusive, thus being able to have his cake and enjoy it too. Newly settled into a secure and happy period of his life in the care of Sand, this was the high-water mark of Chopin’s career.

“The greatest news!,” wrote Sand excitedly to their very dear new friend, Pauline Viardot-Garcia. “Chip-Chip is going to give a grrrrrrand concert!” Eugène Delacroix, Chopin’s closest friend, stayed in bed for days beforehand nursing a throat infection – the bane of the last thirty years of his life – so that he could be well enough to escort Chopin from his apartment at rue Tronchet, behind the Madeleine, to the stage door of the Salle Pleyel. Camille Pleyel brought in a red carpet and masses of flowers for the grand staircase, giving the atmosphere more of a gala reception than a concert, and at 15 and 20 francs a ticket – approximately $60 – $80 today (surprisingly inexpensive by comparison with ticket prices for celebrities these days), Chopin ended by making 6,000 francs ($25,000) – a princely sum, which he could well use.

87

According to Liszt, “the most elegant women, the most fashionable young men, the most celebrated artists, the richest financiers, the most illustrious peers, the élite of society, a complete aristocracy of birth, fortune, talent and beauty” were there that night, and they heard, for the first time, works by Chopin of a new dramatic intensity – the two Polonaises Op. 40, the second being the famous “Military” Polonaise, the Ballade No. 2, the Scherzo No. 3, and four new Mazurkas, Op. 41. Unlike Liszt the previous season, Chopin did not break with tradition, inviting two ‘assisting’ artists – the soprano Laure Cinti-Damoreau and the violinist Wilhelm Ernst – to take part in the concert with him. Le concert ce n’est pas entièrement moi.

The following season Chopin gave another concert – the last public concert he would give until the year before his death. This time, he would introduce his beautifully svelte Third Ballade, the dreamy Impromptu in F sharp and four new Nocturnes. On that occasion, Pauline Viardot-Garcia would be his guest artist. Sadly, on that night, February 21, 1842, a freezing night in Warsaw, Chopin’s beloved old teacher, Adalbert Żywny, died.

Despite Chopin’s annoyance, Liszt only ever had the best intentions in everything he did, from helping almost every musician of the second half of the 19th century – an enormously time-consuming occupation which brought him very little in return, to becoming an abbé in the Church – a seemingly theatrical gesture but one which was sincerely supported by the direction of his whole lifetime.

His only ‘vice’ was that he did enjoy the limelight – in a charming kind of way. But this only added to his charisma. Anton Rubinstein wrote, in 1871, “We met as old friends sincerely attached to each other. I knew his faults – a certain pomposity of manner for one thing – but always esteemed him as a great performer-virtuoso.”

Also from Anton Rubinstein we gather that Liszt always wanted to be liked – an Achilles’ heel which could sometimes backfire, giving a false impression of insincerity.

Though the sincerity of his admiration for Chopin was never in any doubt, Liszt may indeed perhaps have wanted to share some of Chopin’s limelight. Not only did he assume the role of giving his blessing in print to the concert, but he rushed forward to the stage to assist Chopin when he had finished playing and appeared pale and exhausted, and tried to carry him from the piano!

In Liszt’s defence, it should be pointed out that Chopin usually was extremely exhausted after playing in public. According to Legouvé, “Dark rings appeared around his eyes, a feverish brightness lit up his face, his lips turned to a vivid red and his breath came in short gasps. He felt, we felt, that something of his life was flowing away with the music; he would not stop and we had not the strength to stop him. The fever which consumed him took possession of us all!” Without doubt, at the end of this concert Liszt was indeed alarmed by Chopin’s appearance.

But Chopin was displeased about what seemed to him like grandstanding. His father wrote from Warsaw, apparently trying to soothe his oversensitive son, “One thing I am curious about is to know if you have seen Liszt since his article and are you on as friendly a footing as you used to be? It would be a pity there were a cooling of your friendship.” A few months later he wrote to his son, “So you met Liszt at a dinner? I know how tactful you are – you are quite right not to break with him completely, in spite of all his boasting; after all, you were once friends.”

88

As for Liszt, he was certainly sorry that a froid had arisen between Chopin and himself. A little over a year later, while on tour in Germany, he sent a letter to Chopin via the critic Ludwig Rellstab, beginning “Cher ancien ami” – ‘Dear old friend’ – “I am especially anxious to send greetings and to seize this occasion to repeat again, at the risk of appearing monotonous, that my affection and admiration for you will always be the same, and that you can always make use of me in any way whatever.” Rellstab, the caustic Berlin critic, was about to visit Paris and was happy to be able to use this as his letter of introduction to Chopin. Rellstab had been gleefully spiteful about Chopin’s music for a number of years but was now anxious to make amends, as he had suddenly realized that he was in a minority of one.

Two years after this, in 1844, arriving in Warsaw, Liszt visited Chopin’s parents and gave them box tickets for his performance in the city. Nicholas wrote to his son after this and urged him to make up any differences he might still have with Liszt. This is the last known letter written by Nicholas Chopin, who died shortly afterwards.

The truth is that Chopin and Liszt didn’t really see each other much after 1841, a condolence visit by Liszt after Nicholas’ death being one of the few times, and this is perhaps the reason Liszt’s famous review has acquired such a degree of fascination. It’s unlikely that a misunderstanding over a glowing and obviously well-intentioned newspaper article caused a rift, if there ever really was one. The circumstances and personal situations of both men were changing. Liszt was now an international touring celebrity, constantly on the road. He would not settle down until 1847, and then it would not be in Paris but in Germany, where he would take up a completely new life as music director of the court orchestra and theatre at Weimar.

In addition, both Chopin and Liszt were subject to domineering women. As one commentator, Edward Waters, who translated Liszt’s biography of Chopin, put it, “There can be no doubt that women were disturbing factors in their lives.” George Sand and Marie d’Agoult – the mother of Liszt’s children – who had once been friends, were by 1841 mutually antagonistic; rather, Marie d’Agoult was spitefully jealous of Sand and Chopin, the latter whom she had once desired as more than just a social friend. The hostile atmosphere between the women made social contact between the men difficult.

Liszt said that he never heard Chopin utter a sharp word. And till the end of his life Chopin always referred to Liszt as “my friend Liszt.” So perhaps the fuss about the famous review was blown out of proportion by everyone.

When Chopin first met Liszt, the young star had none of the carefully groomed air of confident authority which we see in the photos, and for which he became renowned. He was, after all, only twenty years old – a year younger than Chopin, and eagerly looking about to see what the world had to offer.

One very good thing it had to offer was Frederic Chopin‘s friendship and talent, and, in the nicest possible way, Liszt took advantage of them. In return, Liszt, a generous, big-spirited person all his life in a profession not necessarily strong on generosity, shared whatever he had in the way of social and professional connections with his new friend. And his connections were many: everyone liked Liszt, and he knew everyone. He was a true Renaissance man, socially as well as artistically.

89

In the film A Song to Remember, which on the surface appears unrealistically glossy and glamorous, we see Liszt first encountering Chopin in the showroom of the famous music publisher and piano manufacturer Pleyel, and being delighted by, and full of enthusiastic admiration for, Chopin’s music. Their first meeting probably happened very much in this way, very soon after Chopin arrived in Paris. The only embellishment added by the film is the mature authority and self-assurance of Liszt’s character, necessitating a slightly older person, but this was simply the film’s way of establishing the fact that Liszt was already famous. And Liszt did like to play the grand seigneur, which irritated Chopin, as we know from his letters to his Polish friends. But as the film accurately shows, Liszt immediately and unreservedly understood the uniqueness of this strange newcomer.

Why strange? Chopin’s talent was certainly different, with its “strange and bold harmonies,” of which Liszt would write in that Salle Pleyel review, but his persona was quite different as well. There were many pianists in Paris at the time, pianists from everywhere – particularly from Germany and from Vienna. Paris then was like Los Angeles is today for movie-makers. There was a thriving piano culture in Paris, spurred on by the development in 1822 by Sébastian Érard of the crucial ‘repetition action’ of the piano, which allowed for much quicker repetition of the keys as well as increased control of the sound quality, and at the same time there was an enormous proliferation of pianos as a means of household and public entertainment for a newly affluent middle class.

Pianists since Mozart’s last years four decades earlier, and through Beethoven’s time, had been the biggest lions in the musical performer’s jungle. With no recordings or television, the public needed live entertainment, both high and low. By 1832, there were many fashionable pianists catering to the higher social echelons of entertainment-seekers. Most of them were cut from the same cloth – suave, elegant, technically polished social networkers shaking trills and scales out of their shirt cuffs like jugglers doing so many magic tricks.

In Chopin, Liszt encountered someone just as elegant and polished, socially as well as musically, but with a depth and originality which placed him in a completely different category, one all his own. Chopin was like an alien visitor to this brash new society, a visitor from an 18th century world of grace, charm and elegance, but also a darker world of Slavic depth, passion and melancholy brooding just beneath the surface. In that famous 1841 review, which Liszt couldn’t have imagined would cause such a fuss, he would write,

“Coming to France some ten years ago, Chopin, in the throng of pianists then swarming from everywhere, struggled for neither first nor second place. He was rarely heard in public; the essentially poetic nature of his talent was out of place there. Like those flowers which only release their fragrance at night, he needed an atmosphere of peace and calm to display freely the treasure of melody resting in him. Music was his language, the divine language in which he expressed a whole series of feelings that only a few could understand.

“As with that other great poet, Mickiewicz, his friend and compatriot, the muse of his homeland inspired his songs, and the laments of Poland lent to his tones a strange and mysterious poesy which, for those who have truly felt it, is like nothing else at all… There is in his music, if we mistake not, a numb and ceaseless suffering, a certain reluctance to outward communication, a sadness concealed beneath a show of gaiety – a complete individuality, indeed, remarkable and engaging to the last degree.”

90

At the top of the pianistic tree, leading the throngs of pianists who swarmed from everywhere when the twenty-one year-old Chopin arrived in Paris, was the extremely vain but perfectly friendly German-born Friedrich Wilhelm Kalkbrenner, considered by everyone – most of all himself – to be a supervirtuoso. A good-looking and talented man, Kalkbrenner’s playing was astonishingly clear and precise, and nobody questioned his prowess. Chopin admired his playing unequivocally. “It’s hard to describe to you his calm, his enchanting touch, his incomparable evenness and the mastery that is displayed in every note,” Chopin wrote home, after meeting “the first pianist of Europe.”

The blissfully pleased-with-himself Kalkbrenner kept everyone very entertained with statements such as “Louis Philippe has asked me to accept a peerage. I thanked him but I thought it better to refuse, not being a politician and feeling it necessary to preserve my independence.” However, Kalkbrenner did indeed like to wear medals.

Friedrich Kalkbrenner

In a review of a new set of 25 Etudes by Kalkbrenner, Schumann writes, “My curiosity was excited by the report that Kalkbrenner always praises his latest compositions highest, that he studies his own études as though he were a pupil of himself; yet I must confess that these études put me into a melancholy frame of mind… Kalkbrenner himself acknowledges that he has devoted a great part of his life to the mechanical cultivation of his hands; this would cause even a Beethovenian composer to deteriorate, putting lesser talent out of the question. And in age everything comes to light that the enamel of youth concealed; the lack of profound and varied knowledge, neglect of the study of great preceding models, etc.”

91

Poor Kalkbrenner, so innocently delighted by his own talent and friendly to everyone, seemingly unaware of how he was laughed at, though never with malice. In a review of Kalkbrenner’s Fourth Concerto, Op. 127, Schumann writes,

“A master like Kalkbrenner, who lays claim to the title of a cultivated man of the world, should prepare newer surprises for us… fancy the elegant Kalkbrenner facing a pistol while he writes “con disperazione” in the pianoforte part, or despairing on the border of an abyss, when he uses three trumpets for his adagio. It doesn’t become him; he has no talent for romantic daring, and though he should don the most diabolical of masks, everyone would recognize him by the kid gloves with which he held it.

“We must confess, however, that these comparisons apply only to the first movement; in the third he is completely himself again, and displays himself in all that natural virtuoso amiability which we prize so highly in him. Let him keep his old, well-deserved fame as one of the most masterly pianoforte composers for hand and finger – one who uses light weapons with the greatest possible dexterity – and let him delight us anew with his dazzling trills and flying triplets.”

Born during a coach ride between Kassel and Berlin in 1785, the son of the composer Christian Kalkbrenner, Kalkbrenner had studied at the Paris Conservatoire in the first decade of the century, and then lived in London for a decade, where he had studied with the great Muzio Clementi. He was now, however, a complete Parisian. Kalkbrenner became a director of the Pleyel piano company in 1824, the year after he settled in Paris, and this connection substantially influenced his life, as from this he became rich and ‘establishment’. Kalkbrenner was very much in demand as a teacher, with many pianists of Chopin’s generation among his students, wrote a famous Méthode pour apprendre le piano, and composed numerous Etudes and concertos, now all forgotten but which held a respected place in the repertoire for a long while.

Kalkbrenner offered to teach Chopin for three years after which, he said, the young man would be a finished pianist, and quite a good one too, he thought. Chopin was flattered and seriously considered the proposal, but his new friends Liszt and Mendelssohn, who knew the difference between a smooth professional and a sublime genius, talked him out of it. Chopin extricated himself diplomatically from his predicament by dedicating his great E minor Concerto to Kalkbrenner, who returned the compliment by composing his Variations, Op. 20, on a Mazurka by Chopin.

New in Paris, Chopin found an ally in Kalkbrenner, who graciously lent him his support for his debut concert, which took place at the Salle Pleyel on February 26th, 1832, five months after his arrival. Billed as a ‘Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert’, the centrepiece of the evening was the F minor Concerto played as a solo by the composer, who concluded the concert with his trusty variations on Là ci darem la mano. Along with Beethoven’s Quintet, Op. 29, and a vocal duet, the concert featured a work composed specially for the occasion by Kalkbrenner – a Grande Polonaise with Introduction and March for six pianos!

The idea of a Polonaise was a very considerate gesture indeed to the newcomer from Poland. Kalkbrenner himself took part as one of the performers, along with Chopin, Ferdinand Hiller, Camille Stamaty – a Parisian composer and teacher of Greek origin, Chopin’s age, Wojciech Sowinski – a Polish composer, musicologist and piano student of Czerny, and George Osborne – an Irish pianist and composer for the piano, and pupil of Kalkbrenner. “It’s a crazy notion,” wrote Chopin, though La Revue Musicale was appreciative in its review.

92

In December 1834 Kalkbrenner writes to Chopin: “My dear Chopin – We never see you nowadays. The countless distractions and pleasures of Paris make you forget your old friends. Come along to dinner with us tomorrow. You’ll find us with Liszt and a few other friends who will be delighted to see you. Addio. Fred. Kalkbrenner.”

Chopin’s pupil George Mathias, a professor at the Conservatoire, recalled in a conversation in 1878 with the American writer James Huneker that “Chopin often met Kalkbrenner, his antipodes in everything but breeding. Chopin’s coat was buttoned close and high, the buttons black; those of Kalkbrenner were of gold. How Chopin disliked the pompous old pianist with his affected airs and his stinginess! Mathias was gleeful when he spoke of Kalkbrenner’s offer to teach Chopin. ‘I believe it was he who needed lessons from Chopin’.”

The celebrated pianist, who during the 1840s lived in the same apartment complex as Chopin, George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas, died in 1849, the same year as Chopin, a victim of one of the periodic cholera epidemics which would hit Paris in that era. Kalkbrenner’s études continued to be played throughout the 19th century, and were prescribed as teaching pieces by such as Anton Rubinstein. Vladimir Horowitz learnt one of these as a youth, and could still play it from memory as an old man, preceding an impromptu drawing-room performance by saying “Let us see if a little Kalkbrenner lives on in me.” Today, Kalkbrenner’s most conspicuous memorial is Frederic Chopin’s dedication to him of his E minor concerto.

The leader of the fashionable younger pianists was the handsome and elegant dandy Henri Herz, born Heinrich Herz in Vienna – the darling of the Parisian salons. Herz and his older brother Jacob Simon Herz, also a piano teacher and minor composer, settled in Paris and taught until the 1880s, both living unusually long lives. Seven years older than Chopin, but, as so often in our story, someone who would outlive him by many decades, Henri Herz was the most prominent representative of a whole school of piano playing which prized facility, lightness, speed and purity of sound above all else, with a complete disregard for emotional depth or even good music: nothing that required any kind of ‘interpretation’. These ‘society’ pianists played only their own compositions: variations, marches, potpourris, paraphrases, morceaux, and some concertos, all designed to show off their executive talents. Kalkbrenner’s playing, according to Ernest Pauer, author of Dictionary of Pianists, was “as polished as a billiard ball.”

“Long live Herz!” writes Schumann. “Then we can use his compositions as dictionaries of musical terms, for he almost exhausts this part of the Italian language; scarce one note stands without its intention, its sign of expression; not a languishing measure without its ‘smorzando.’ Mr. Herz does not wish to be mistaken for a poet, though he chooses to give an interlineary verbal expression to his feelings at the same time as the musical one.”

Herz was one of the first pianists to visit America. The New York Tribune wrote of his American debut in 1846, “We should compare his execution to the most delicate flower-work which the frost fairies draw upon the window pane in their frolicsome hours of winter moonlight. His harmonies and combinations are so symmetrical, and his fingering is so rapid and precise, that one would think a bird had escaped from his fingers and went undulating and swinging through the air. But we must confess that we were not excited by his playing.”

93

Henri Herz, by the popular Parisian artist Deveria, 1832

Can there be any more damning words in the reviewer’s lexicon than “We were not excited by his playing” (even if the execution puts one in mind of the delicate flower-work which the frost fairies draw upon the window pane in their frolicsome hours of winter moonlight)?

À propos Herz’s American tour of 1846 – that same year Schumann wrote in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, “The public has lately begun to observe that there are too many virtuosos, and we think so too (‘we’ means I ), as we have frequently remarked in these pages. The virtuosos themselves seem to feel like this, if we may judge from a recently awakened fancy among them for emigrating to America; and many of their friends secretly hope they will remain over there; for, all in all, modern virtuosity has benefited art very little.”

The poet Heine, an astute connoisseur of music, and friend of Chopin, describes another pianist in the Herz mould – the Austrian, Theodore Döhler, a student of Czerny, twenty at the time, four years younger than Chopin: “His performance is most charming, evincing astonishing dexterity of finger, but giving no evidence of power or spirit. Delicate weakness, elegant impotence, interesting pallor. Some say he is among the last of the second-class pianists, others say he is the first among the third-class pianists.” Mendelssohn thought poor Döhler “very cold, calculating, and rather dull.”

94

Schumann, as usual, gives us the full picture, in a review of some new pieces by Döhler: “In two tolerably pretty rondos, Herr Th. Döhler shows that he is anxious for the name and fame of a Czerny the Second… It is sad and significant that so remarkable a pianist has accomplished so little as a composer… Beware, young artists, of baronesses and countesses, who are desirous of having compositions dedicated to them; he who wishes to be an artist must give up the idea of becoming a lady’s man… His Nocturne is not such a one as the troubadour might have sounded in his lady’s ear, after having imperilled his life in leaping over hedge and wall and moat, but rather a drawing room declaration of love, cold and sweet as the ice that is tasted there. Of course it is in D flat, çela va sans dire; and everything is charming, delightful.” A somewhat different kind of pianist, considered, by comparison, a ‘fiery’ one, and extremely popular at the time, was the German, Johann Peter Pixis, who divided his life between Germany and Paris. Renowned as a piano teacher as well as a prolific composer for the piano, Pixis appeared in performances everywhere. Chopin called on Pixis on his way to Paris, and wrote home, “Just imagine! He has with him a very pretty girl of sixteen whom, he says, he is going to marry. I met her at his house when I visited Stuttgart.” It’s a sad thought that although Pixis, whom Chopin refers to as “the old chap” (Pixis was then forty-three), was twenty-two years older than Chopin, he lived for another twenty-five years after Chopin’s death in 1849. Perhaps Chopin’s envious reaction to Pixis’ luck in love was due more to his owl-beaked face than to his great age, even though Chopin had quite a hooter himself.

Incidentally, Pixis’ marriage to the young lady Chopin met was very successful and lasted the rest of his life. Chopin dedicated to Pixis his beautiful showpiece for piano and orchestra, Fantasia on Polish Airs, which he had composed in 1828 when he was eighteen and performed in his debut concerts in Warsaw, Vienna and Paris, but which he didn’t publish until 1834, in Paris, when it appeared soon after the first book of Etudes with the opus number 13.

In contrast to all the smooth and flashy pianists was the young German Jewish pianist Ferdinand Hiller, Chopin’s contemporary, a student during his mid-teens of the great Johann Hummel in Weimar, and a serious and fine musician in the worthy Mendelssohnian style.

Hummel took his sixteen year-old pupil with him when he went to visit Beethoven just before he died. Hiller was given a lock of Beethoven’s hair when the great man died, and this little treasure, sealed in a locket, remained in the Hiller family for nearly two centuries, through wars and the Nazi era, finally finding its way in the 1990s to a research institute in Arizona where it was analyzed for DNA and proved conclusively what Beethoven died of (a whole range of ailments). It was Hiller who finally introduced Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto to Paris, at a concert organized and conducted by Berlioz in 1835 – a quarter of a century after its composition. Hiller was a close and loyal friend of Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Meyerbeer and Rossini.

As well as a pianist, Hiller was a respected composer, whose compositions included three piano concertos and three symphonies, as well as six operas, and well-written piano pieces, including numerous Etudes. Hiller was also a prominent conductor, and after living in Paris during the first half of the 1830s, he took music director positions in a number of cities, including Frankfurt – his birthplace, Milan, Leipzig, Dresden and Dűsseldorf.

95

Finally, in 1850, Hiller settled in Cologne, where he founded the Conservatory in that city, which he directed for the remaining thirty-five years of his life. Like Mendessohn, Hiller performed frequently in England. His books of music criticism and descriptions of the music and musicians of his time were prized for their insights, especially as Hiller, an affable man, was friends with literally everyone.

In December of 1833, Chopin, Liszt and Hiller performed Bach’s Concerto for three pianos together in a concert at the Conservatoire. Chopin had appeared together with Liszt earlier that year, in April, when they took part in a concert at the Salle Favart – home of the Théâtre Italien and the Opéra Comique – arranged by Berlioz as a benefit for his love, the actress Harriet Smithson, who had recently lost all her money in a short-lived attempt to run an English theatre company in Paris, and had then broken her leg stepping from a carriage. Chopin played a duet with Liszt in the concert, alongside the two Grisis, Rubini, Tamburini and several other famous musicians, as well as a vaudeville troupe. Chopin and Liszt appeared together again the next night, this time in a concert arranged by the Herz brothers, the four of them playing eight hands on two pianos.

In 1837 Chopin appeared with Henri Herz, Johann Pixis, Sigmund Thalberg, Carl Czerny and Liszt in an oddity. Kalkbrenner’s presumably rather dreadful Grande Polonaise for six pianos inspired a much better work, likewise for six pianists at six pianos, but of six individual variations – one by each pianist – on the rousing march from Bellini’s I Puritani. First performed at a special charity evening given by Liszt’s friend Princess Belgioiosa d’Este, the work was called ‘Hexameron’ – the sort of name P. T. Barnum might bestow on one of his exotic exhibits, a six-headed person perhaps. The lead in this affair was taken by Liszt – always generous and secure enough to share the limelight – who supplied the introduction, connecting links and finale. Thereafter Liszt played the work often by himself, sometimes with an orchestral accompaniment he later added. Chopin chose to remain hors de combat with an unvirtuosic variation – a languid, Nocturne-like interlude.

Franz Liszt, despite the image that posterity accorded him – a 20th century perception which developed as an inevitable reaction to the enormous vogue for showmen instrumentalists of the 19th – was the exact opposite of the predominant type of smooth, calculating, magic-trickster virtuoso.

“This artist has devoted his whole life to procure for you the joy you receive from him; you know nothing of the fatigue his art has cost him; he gives you the best he has, his heart’s blood, the essence of his being,” writes Schumann in one of his many appreciations of “my amiable friend.”

Wagner would express a similar opinion, with regard to Liszt’s faithful transcriptions of other composers’ works: “This wonderful man can do nothing without giving his heart and soul to the work in hand.”

Like Chopin, Liszt had come from eastern Europe, via Vienna, but he had left so early – as a child prodigy of nine – that he hardly knew his homeland and would never be able to speak Hungarian fluently, though he made an effort – in mid-life – to learn to speak it. French was his main language, and although he would spend much of his life in Germany and Italy, French would remain the only language in which he expressed himself with ease, though in the second part of his life he was surrounded by German-speakers.

96

A most courteous man, Liszt wrote literally thousands of letters over his lifetime, responding with warmth and consideration to anyone and everyone who approached him. During the second half of his life he was a universally known and admired figure, recognized far beyond the confines of the musical world, so that meant a great deal of correspondence, all over Europe, and it was nearly always in French. Liszt was in fact a debonair Parisian with an overlay of Viennese courtliness and charm, plus a helping of Hungarian passion and glamour thrown into the mix – not an unattractive combination.

Although still only twenty when Chopin met him, Liszt had been famous for quite some time. His talent as a boy had been much admired. Aged eleven, at a concert in the Redoutensaal in Vienna in 1823, he had been embraced by Beethoven himself.

That year, Liszt’s first published composition appeared, as part of the ambitious collection of variations, all on the same little waltz, commissioned by the composer and music publisher Anton Diabelli from fifty of the most prominent composers in Vienna. This collection was intended as an artistic snapshot of pianistic life in the centre of musical Europe at the beginning of the 1820s. It included a broad spectrum of composers – from elder statesmen of the Viennese music teaching fraternity to the salon virtuosos; from composers who were involved in the journalistic world to bureaucratic establishment composers; as well as the really important composers like Hummel and Schubert – right up to Beethoven, whose works Diabelli published. Diabelli’s project, which took five years to complete, was basically a public relations exercise to launch his own independent music publishing business, capitalising simultaneously on the brand new vogue for waltzes as well as that for piano variations, music in the home having recently become a big market indeed.

The project was completely successful. Diabelli was a canny businessman – Beethoven called him “Diabolus Diabelli” – and he pressed all the right buttons in this painstaking project, involving everyone who could help its success, and issuing the work under the title “Vaterländischer Kűnstlerverein” – ‘Fatherland (i.e. Austria) Artists’ Union’.

97

Unexpectedly, however, Beethoven, having at first been uninterested, pondered the idea for a long while and eventually produced an hour-long series of thirty-three variations of his own, which Diabelli published independently of the other fifty. Thus Diabelli’s name became immortalized not as that of a successful music publisher and minor composer – Diabelli composed, besides the little waltz upon which the fifty variations are based, numerous operettas, church music, piano works, guitar and flute pieces – but as the man behind the title of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” Op. 120. Beethoven’s variations were very different from all the others. Instead of embellishing the waltz with clever decorations, Beethoven dissected the piece into its minutest components, making it virtually disappear as a melody, in its place emerging every conceivable musical idea and form, from march, scherzo, minuet, ländler, siciliano, to fugue and fughetta, couched in every imaginable kind of musical treatment, the whole exhaustive journey finally bringing the listener to a nirvana-like place similar to that which Beethoven had recently created at the end of his final piano sonata, Op. 111.

After five years of gathering together all the various contributions, the entire collection was eventually published, and alongside Schubert and Hummel, Moscheles and Czerny, Franz Xaver Mozart, the Archduke Rudolf, and, of course, Beethoven, there appeared a very spirited and fluent variation by “Franz Liszt, a boy of 11 years,” who no doubt had some help from his teacher Carl Czerny – another contributor to the set, who not only supplied a variation but also a rousing coda to the whole collection.

Several of Liszt’s fellow contributors to Diabelli’s project are of interest and relevance to our story. Johann Nepomuk (Nepomuka in Czech) Hummel, a renowned piano virtuoso and fine composer, was extremely popular in his time. His playing was of the lighter, fleet, elegant Viennese variety, in contrast to that of Beethoven, and his many compositions were likewise masterfully elegant. Hummel’s best works – in particular his seven piano concertos, which form a bridge between Mozart and Chopin – were the classic models of Chopin’s youth. A glance at Hummel’s A minor concerto, for example, clearly reveals the inspiration behind Chopin’s concertos, especially in the decorative as well as structural passagework. Hummel’s concertos are remarkable for their poetic fluidity and startlingly brilliant piano writing – perhaps even a little too brilliant and facile, in the way of Saint-Saëns’ concertos – but they would unjustly be virtually forgotten by succeeding generations. Hummel also wrote a great deal of chamber music, some of it still occasionally heard, as well as nine operas. One short piece has remained in the pianist’s repertoire – the sparkling Rondo in E flat.

98

Though physically an exceptionally unattractive man – the portrait by von Wrenk bears this out – with an unfortunate chin and a coarse, slovenly appearance – in sharp contrast to his celebrated and unrivalled elegance as a performer – Hummel was a superlative pianist and masterful musician all round. As a child he had been a student of Mozart, and had lived in Mozart’s house in Vienna for two years. After Mozart’s death Hummel studied with Haydn and Salieri. At the time he contributed his variation – one of the better ones – to Diabelli’s project, Hummel had settled in Weimar as court music director / conductor, a position he held until his death in 1837.

Johann Nepomuk (Nepomuka) Hummel

Co-incidentally – and quite unexpectedly, as he was not at all trained or specifically prepared for such a task – Liszt would follow in Hummel’s footsteps in 1847 and take up exactly the same position, inaugurating a great expansion of his own musical horizons, as well as fostering wider historical movements in the art of music, by championing the orchestral works and operas of Berlioz and Wagner, as well as practically every other composer in Europe. Liszt would be largely based in Weimar until his death in 1886 at the age of seventy-five.

Franz Schubert, who had been shamefully taken advantage of by Diabelli as publisher of his lieder, was just twenty-five when he composed his variation, but had only five years remaining to live. His variation was more serious than most, forsaking brilliance for harmonic daring.

Liszt wouldn’t discover Schubert’s music until he was in his mid-twenties, but when he did it was love at first sight. He immediately made superb solo transcriptions of fifty of Schubert’s lieder, all completely in the service of the originals, as well as a less interesting but still effective piano-orchestra version of the Wanderer Fantasy. This crucial work, composed by Schubert the same year as his Diabelli variation, was the prototype for the romantic “tone-poem”, even though it was written for piano solo and conceived in four movements. The entire work is built upon a single theme, and that theme – from Schubert’s own lied, Der Wanderer – is used really as a motif, a motif which represents the existential adventures of the hero. This theme/motif, the building block of the work, undergoes enormous transformations, corresponding to his emotional journey – ‘telegraphing’ the route of this journey to the listener.

99

This was virtually the first time in history that a motif was employed as a consistent means of determining musical structure, and it would become one of the dominant compositional techniques over the next century, particluarly as the leitmotiv – ‘leading motif’ – with Liszt and Wagner leading the way.

Schubert in 1821, age 24, by Leopold Kupelwieser

Ignaz Moscheles, whom Chopin would come to know, admire and like, was an excellent all-round musician who was a virtuoso pianist of the ‘Viennese School’ – which meant his playing was brilliant but at all times neat and well-mannered. He was also a prolific composer – his music, like his playing, being superior but conventional. Beethoven was very fond of the thoroughly nice Moscheles. At Beethoven’s request and under his supervision, the twenty year-old Moscheles made the piano reduction of Fidelio in 1814 – one of the first instances of this practice. Moscheles remained on warm terms with Beethoven. One of the master’s very last letters was addressed to “My dear kind Moscheles!... With the most friendly sentiments I remain your friend who highly esteems you, Ludwig van Beethoven.”

Moscheles – whom we shall meet again – took up residence in London and Paris, composed eight piano concertos, chamber music, and many piano sonatas and études. Moscheles was one of the leading teachers of the 19th century, most famously of Felix Mendelssohn. Moscheles’ variation is neat, elegant and very pianistic.

The other famous piano teacher who was part of the Diabelli enterprise – one with a similar provenance and pedigree to that of Moscheles – was Carl Czerny. Czerny taught Franz Liszt between the ages of eight and twelve, contributed not only a very mellifluous variation but also the exciting finale to the whole collection. It’s amusing how similar Czerny’s finale sounds in its figurations and harmonic progressions to the climactic passages in a number of Liszt’s ‘operatic fantasies’. Many of these would be composed a decade later – in Paris during the 1830s, during the age of bel canto, though Liszt would continue to transcribe well-known excerpts from operas throughout his life – around seventy in all. However, in the early years the sheer delight of showing off was very much to the fore in Liszt’s ‘fantasies’.

100

Czerny’s variation, which starts out sweetly and harmlessly, develops into passages of difficult jumps which sound very much like a study for Liszt’s famous version of Paganini’s La Campanella.

Also of interest is the variation by the Bohemian composer, pianist and pedagogue, Johann Wenzel Tomaschek, or Jan Václav Tomášek, a contemporary of Beethoven. Tomaschek had studied law and philosophy at Prague University, as well as mathematics, aesthetics, history, anatomy and surgery, and taught himself music largely by reading theoretical works. He composed three operas, three masses, two requiems, a symphony, a piano concerto, chamber music, piano sonatas and other piano pieces, and in 1820 founded a music school in Prague. Tomaschek was a strong pianist, and his piano compositions have gusto as well as craftsmanship. An avid admirer of Beethoven, Tomaschek finally met his idol in 1814, and they had lengthy discussions about the state of pianoforte playing (Beethoven was not impressed with any developments since Clementi).

It was Tomaschek who coined the use of the term ‘Rhapsody’ in music, with his Rhapsodies for piano in 1813. This term would, as everyone knows, be taken up famously by Liszt, whose fifteen Hungarian Rhapsodies of the 1840s and 50s led many to believe he had invented the title, along with the term ‘recital’ for a solo musical performance – which he did invent. Tomaschek’s variation is in the form of a rhapsodically spirited Polonaise – the proud processional dance form which Chopin was to make his own.

Some of the other contributors to the Diabelli project are of curious interest, touching on the edges of our story. All of them fine musicians, most produced variations which conformed to the models later set out by Czerny in his treatise Anleitung zum Phantasieren – ‘A Guide to Improvisation’, his 1836 manual outlining all the standard formulas for figurations of a theme.

Franz Xaver Mozart, born in the last year of his father’s life, became a respected piano teacher in Lvov, Poland, and lived until 1844, teaching pianists who would be very much associated with Chopin, including his pupil and editor Carl Mikuli. Mozart was just fifty-three at his death, but the contrast in era from that of his father – 18th century ancien régime – to his own, with such modernities as train travel having by then become established, is startling.

Another contributor, the Archduke Rudolf, twelfth son of Emperor Leopold II, loved music intensely and took piano and composition lessons from his lifelong friend Beethoven. Rudolf’s variation is fugal, very learned but stolid. Also represented was Count Moritz von Dietrichstein, the handsome aristocrat responsible for court music as well as theatre in Vienna. Dietrichstein was the father – illegitimately, but devotedly – of Liszt’s pianistic rival of the 1830s, Sigismond Thalberg.

All the composers were Austrian or Bohemian, with the exception of Liszt, Johann Pixis – who lived in Vienna for a long while – and Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who happened to be visiting the city in 1824, just as Diabelli’s project was finally about to go to print, after five years’ work. Kalkbrenner was causing such a sensation with his concerts in Vienna that Diabelli invited him to be the last of the fifty contributors, in order to excite public interest in the project. We can hear right away in Kalkbrenner’s variation what it was that made him such an attractive artist: besides the flashiness there is a genuine panache and exhilaration in his brilliant runs and arpeggios.

101

The link between Liszt and Beethoven was, of course, Carl Czerny. Czerny had been taught for three years, from the age of ten, by Beethoven, when Beethoven was himself still a young piano virtuoso. Czerny remembered being taken to see the thirty year-old Beethoven one wintry day in 1800, and he found him, in an untidy room in Vienna, with shaggy, pitch-black hair which stood on end, a week’s growth of beard, and rough clothes of a hairy fabric, the whole effect making the nine year-old think of Robinson Crusoe. Beethoven left a similar impression on Goethe, who wrote, “I am astonished by his talent, but he is unfortunately an altogether untamed personality.” And to his wife, as we know, Goethe wrote “I can well understand he must have a strange relationship to the world.”

The rough-hewn virtuoso pianist and composer immediately took the boy on as his pupil, and though Czerny would later study with Hummel, who caused a sensation when he played in Vienna, he and Beethoven remained in close touch. Beethoven would entrust Czerny with the piano studies of his troublesome nephew Karl, to whom he was devoted as a very responsible uncle – a commitment which taxed him more than was reasonable – as well as the piano arrangements of such important works as the Leonora overtures. Czerny has left us some valuable insights into Beethoven’s playing, for example, that he used the pedal “far more than is indicated in his works.”

Twenty years after he first met Beethoven, Czerny was teaching the ten year-old Liszt, whom he nicknamed ‘Putzi’. The boy so delighted Czerny that soon after his lessons began he refused any further payment, even though the funds had been guaranteed by a group of Hungarian aristocrats.

Liszt’s father Adam was a land steward on the estate of Prince Miklós (Nicholas) Esterházy, near Raiding, the Hungarian village about thirty miles from Vienna where Liszt was born. Prince Nicholas’ grandfather, Nicholas Joseph – who had rebuilt the castle at Esterháza, near Vienna, in sumptuous Renaissance style, as a sort of Hungarian Versailles – was one of the greatest patrons of the arts in Europe since Lorenzo de Medici, and was similarly dubbed “The Magnificent”. Joseph Haydn was his director of music for thirty years. There was a theatre and opera house, and performers from all over Europe visited constantly.

Nicholas II, though not a very sympathetic character, was nevertheless, like his grandfather, a very artistically-minded man who continued in the same way, as well as founding a great collection of paintings in Vienna, which was later transferred to the Hungarian Academy in Budapest. In 1809, Napoleon invited the Hungarians to replace the Habsburgs with their own king, and Esterházy was approached, but he turned the invitation down and instead raised a volunteer regiment in support of the Habsburgs.

Liszt grew up in the culturally rich atmosphere of the Esterházy Versailles. Prince Nicholas erected a monument to Haydn, who had died in 1809, and the concerts and opera at Esterháza continued with undiminished gusto. Also, the village of Raiding was constantly visited by bands of wandering gypsies, and their music and aura of theatrical display undoubtedly left their mark on the future master showman.

While Liszt studied piano with Czerny in Vienna – where the family moved in 1820 – he took theory and composition lessons from Antonio Salieri, thirty years after the death of Mozart still a much respected composer. Salieri was Schubert’s teacher, and he had given counterpoint lessons to Beethoven, with whom he remained lifelong friends. Salieri had also been on the friendliest of terms with Gluck and Haydn.

102

In fact, everyone liked Salieri except Mozart – who also had a problem with Muzio Clementi, his arch-rival for the crown of keyboard virtuoso king. When the boy Liszt became his student, Salieri was coming to the end of exactly fifty years as Kapellmeister to the Viennese court, a position in which he had incurred Mozart’s distrust. Salieri was a prolific composer who had written forty operas, much church music, oratorios, cantatas and masses, and was a dedicated conductor and teacher.

The fable about Mozart being poisoned – in reality or in spirit – by Salieri’s intrigues was given credence five years after the Italian composer’s death in 1825 by a dramatic poem of Pushkin’s, and it has ever since overshadowed Salieri’s highly successful, if not inspired, career. The play by Peter Shaffer used this old story as an effective basis for a discourse on the divine nature of genius and the seemingly random way in which it alights on certain human beings. In the play, the talented Salieri has worked hard and put in his dues, yet a childish outsider surpasses him with ease. How is such an injustice to be explained? An interesting question for a playwright, but not a matter for a historian. Shaffer’s theatrical device served its purpose well, but in the process distorted the characters of both Mozart and Salieri: Mozart was not childish and Salieri was not demoniacal – one was a querulous independent genius, the other an urbane reliable professional.

Born in Vienna, Carl Czerny’s first piano instruction came from his Bohemian music-teacher father. Carl was a gifted boy and Beethoven was pleased to teach him for three years. By all accounts an exceptionally brilliant pianist, Czerny gave the first performance of the Emperor Concerto, which took place in Vienna in 1812, when he was twenty-one. The Emperor was dedicated to Beethoven’s friend Archduke Rudolf, a passionate and competent musician, but the glorious sound of the ultimate piano concerto seemed to warrant the ultimate appelation. Rudolf’s immortality would later be vouchsafed by the ‘Archduke’ Trio.

The Emperor concerto would be a favourite vehicle for Liszt in his maturity – important concertos of this nature being performed hardly at all in the days of Liszt’s youth. It wasn’t introduced in Paris until 1835, when it was first performed by Chopin and Liszt’s friend Ferdinand Hiller, a serious and unusual musician – but even after that, performances of such concertos would remain a rarity for some decades.

The Emperor was in fact the ideal piece for Liszt. Charles Hallé, a student of Chopin, who went on to establish the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, wrote that “Liszt was all sunshine and dazzling splendor, subjugating his hearers with a power that none could withstand… one of the transcendant merits of his playing was the crystal-like clearness which never failed him for a moment, even in the most complicated and, to anybody else, impossible passages; it was as if he had photographed the music in the minutest detail upon the ear of his listener. The power he drew from the instrument was such as I have never heard since, but never harsh, never suggesting ‘thumping’.” The emperor of pianists was indeed the perfect pianist for the Emperor Concerto, the qualities listed by Hallé – sunshine and splendour, crystal-like clearness, power without harshness – being exactly the ones required for Beethoven’s masterpiece.

Czerny couldn’t bear travel or public performance and stayed in Vienna virtually all his life, with just a couple of trips to Paris. He taught, ten to twelve hours a day, for half a century, and composed an enormous amount of music – variations, concertos, overtures, oratorios, masses, but most of all, a huge quantity of studies, or short Etudes, for the piano.

103

Carl Czerny, friend of Beethoven, teacher of Liszt

Incredibly industrious – there are 1000 published opus numbers by Czerny, with whole volumes such as School of Velocity, School of Virtuosity and School of the Left Hand, occupying single opus numbers! – he lacked originality or imagination, and nearly all his non-pedagogic compositions were soon forgotten. But his exhaustive compendiums of studies for the piano became standard issue for all piano students. Czerny’s name would become a by-word for ‘piano studies’. He composed literally thousands of them, and they were used for well over a century by piano teachers the world over.

Czerny did have a gift for identifying archetypes in piano technique, and for leading the student patiently and cleverly step by step. Moreover he could be endlessly inventive with phrase shapes and finger pattern formations. To take just one volume as an example, The Art of Finger Dexterity - Fifty Studies for the Piano, Op. 740 (!), which occupies 175 pages but only one opus number!, we start with Action of the Fingers, the Hand Quiet and progress through Clearness in Rapidity; Evenness in Double Passages; Light Action of the Left Hand; Exercise in Thirds (a prototype for Chopin’s ‘Thirds’ Etude); Flexibility of the Left Hand; Extension, with great Strength; Extension, the Hand Quiet; Double Octaves; Clearness in Running Passages; A Quiet Hand, the Fingers active to the utmost; Trills (a model for Liszt’s frequent use of trills in conjunction with melody lines, such as the middle section of La Campanella); Octave Skips, the Hand light; Trills in Thirds; Changing the Fingers on One and the same Key; Uniformity in raising the Hands (a model for the climactic passages of every concerto by Liszt and Tchaikovsky); Skill in Passing under the Thumb; Legato Melody with Broken Chords (a prototype for Chopin’s glorious E flat Prelude in arpeggios and a pale forerunner of the ‘Aeolian Harp’ Etude); Delicate and Distinct Touch in broken Chords (a foretaste of the pattern of Sinding’s Rustle of Spring); to Bravura Octaves and Bravura in Touch and Tempo.

104

Clarity and elegance were Czerny’s hallmarks, as well as expressiveness and tasteful improvisation. He made a great deal of money, which he left to charities upon his death in 1857, having remained a bachelor with no relatives, and was a devoted keeper of kittens – lots of them. Amazingly, having known Beethoven in his prime, Czerny was to reach into the twentieth century by being the teacher of many important pianists, among them Theodore Leschetizky, who, after Liszt, was the most influential teacher of the modern generation of pianists, many of whom were to be among the 20th century’s greatest – from Paderewski and Ignaz Friedman to Moiseiwitsch and Artur Schnabel.

Chopin visited Czerny in Vienna. They played duets together on two pianos. Czerny already seemed like a relic from another era – born in the 18th century, a student and friend of Beethoven, a conservative musician with a personal style of playing which was rather dry and pedantic, though he did have pianistic elegance – but in fact he was no older than forty at the time. With his ever-ready caustic wit, Chopin wrote home, “He’s a good fellow, warmer than any of his compositions.” Chopin’s cutting wit was simply a very French characteristic in his nature, and did not indicate any real unkindness.

For his part, Czerny would always appreciate and teach his pupils Chopin’s music, but, according to his most famous student, Theodore Leschetizky, he sometimes compared it to “sweetened water flavoured with paprika” – a backhanded compliment indeed. Czerny often referred to Chopin’s music as “famose Musik” – ‘celebrated music’, or ‘hits’, as we would say today.

Chopin wasn’t the only one who was surprised upon finding warmth in poor old Czerny. In one of his reviews, Schumann writes that ‘Herr Czerny has taken quite a romantic turn in his ‘Allegro Agitato’. Few would guess him to have been the composer of this piece… if the well-known face sometimes makes its sudden and striking appearance, nevertheless it is impossible to avoid remarking the change that has taken place in his later works. Who can tell what will be the result of this?”

Liszt may have been the greatest of all pianists, but that was not because he did anything specifically differently from other pianists. As a teenager he had practised all the exercises and scales which he learnt from Czerny, who was the only teacher he ever had. Nothing original, nothing with any penetrating thought behind it – simply methodical training of the fingers. Liszt said of Czerny that he cultivated “a well-exercised touch and correct execution in moderate time. He taught, in his usual systematic manner, artistic technique and correctness of rendering.”

Czerny complained that he would have liked to do much more with Liszt’s technical finish, but the boy’s father, according to Czerny, wanted to make money by touring his prodigious son, and took him away, “just at the critical time.” Liszt was twelve at the time.

This was an unfair assessment. Adam Liszt was a strong and determined man, tall and dignified, who had been a trusted steward of the Esterházys. He was a skilled musician himself, a good violinist, and had a clear idea of what he thought his son needed. What he wanted most of all for his son was that he should graduate from the Paris Conservatoire, and Paris was their objective – via a roundabout way, with concerts in several German cities – when they left Czerny in Vienna.

105

But the head of the Conservatoire, the Italian composer Luigi Cherubini – a good composer, proto-Romantic but conservative, extravagantly admired by Beethoven, who called him “the greatest living composer” – was a starchy bureaucrat, one who would not bend the regulations, and the regulations barred any foreigner from being admitted to the Conservatoire. Cherubini himself was a foreigner, but this detail made no difference to his decision. Berlioz, who was a student at the Conservatoire, was driven apoplectic by Cherubini, waxing hilariously sarcastic about him in his Memoirs, mercilessly mimicking his thickly accented French (‘Eef you must compose, why must you … etc.’). Berlioz wasn’t the only one in this regard – Gounod, another student at the Conservatoire, also reports on the grating accent.

Luigi Zenobio Carlo Salvatore

Cherubini

Chopin admired Cherubini and was rather fond of him, as perhaps was Berlioz too, despite all the aggravation. Cherubini lived in Paris from 1787 until his death in 1842 and was one of the central figures in the development of French opera in the wake of the Revolution, with such dramatic works as Medea, in 1797, where he incorporated spoken dialogue in tragedy in the manner of opéra-comique. Beethoven showed the influence of Cherubini in Fidelio, and the grandeur of Cherubini’s two Requiems, especially the D minor, foreshadows the Requiem by Berlioz.

A highly respected theorist and a master of counterpoint, Cherubini’s Cours de contrepoint et de la fugue – “Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue”, which came out in 1835, when he was seventy-five, with the assistance of his pupil Jacques Halévy, was carefully and closely studied by Chopin. He sent a copy of it to his old teacher Josef Elsner as a present; he habitually sent home items of interest.

106

The result of Liszt’s not being accepted into the Paris Conservatoire was that after leaving Czerny in Vienna at the age of twelve, he never had another piano teacher, or schooling of any kind, except for private lessons in composition with the composer Anton Reicha, Beethoven’s friend, now established in Paris. This explains why he was largely self-taught in so many areas, and why he was so fascinated by what he would learn from Chopin when he met him at age twenty. As a pianist, Chopin was also really self-taught, his only music teachers, Adalbert Żywny and Josef Elsner, being neither pianists nor piano teachers, but he did have a thorough general education at the Warsaw Lycée run by his father, and then the Warsaw Conservatory.

During his teens Liszt led an erratic, untutored, life, jumping from concert appearances – including three visits to England – to experiments in composition, including an opera, Don Sanche, performed at the Paris Opéra when he was fourteen, and a growing preoccupation with religion. Music, and art in general, became an almost mystical experience for the teenaged Liszt. He studied Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, spent much time in prayer, and imposed penances and fasts upon himself. His health began to decline, and then he begged to be allowed to enter a seminary in Paris. Alarmed, his pious but sensible father decided to put a stop to this drift, removing Franz’s religious books and taking him away for a rest to Boulogne-sur-Mer. “You belong to Art,” he said, “not to the Church.”

It was August, summer holiday time. Adam Liszt’s idea of a holiday for his overwrought son was right and proper, but Adam caught a severe gastric fever in Boulogne, and there he died and was buried – his distraught son still just fifteen. Many years later, Liszt, in his will, recalled his father’s deathbed words: “He said I had a good heart and did not lack intelligence, but he feared that women would trouble my life and bring me under their sway. This prevision was strange, for at that time, at the age of sixteen (he was actually fifteen), I had no idea what a woman was, and in my simplicity I asked my confessor to explain the sixth and ninth Commandments to me, for I was afraid I might have broken them without knowing I had done so.”

Liszt’s mother Anna, a devout woman born in lower Austria, to whom he would remain devoted and who he would support for the remaining forty years of her life, arrived in Paris within days. A month short of his sixteenth birthday, Liszt was only just able to furnish a simple apartment for the two of them at 7 bis rue Montholon, off rue La Fayette, just across the road from the church of St.Vincent de Paul, where he played the organ, and which stands in the square today called ‘Place Franz Liszt’.

Here young Liszt set up as a piano teacher, and soon made a good living, the demand for his lessons growing with his concert appearances. Liszt was to teach on-and-off for the rest of his life – many hundreds coming to him from all over Europe and from America in his later years for ‘finishing touches’ – but after he became financially secure from his concerts in his thirties he never again charged any student a penny. Chopin, by contrast, was meticulous and business-like about his teaching, which was his primary source of income.

Czerny, old-school piano teacher that he was, thought Liszt’s playing wayward, capricious and self-willed, even when he heard him perform as an adult in Paris. “Rather wild and confused in every respect, the enormous bravura notwithstanding,” he wrote at the time. However in the famous 1846 lithograph by the Viennese artist Josef Kriehuber, ‘Une Matinée chez Liszt’, when Liszt was thirty-five, we see Czerny, with Berlioz, looking at his old pupil with nothing but the greatest paternal pleasure.

107

‘Une Matinée chez Liszt’, by Josef Kriehuber (seated left), with Berlioz, Czerny and Ernst

Schumann tells us that “many portraits of Liszt were in circulation, and that by Kriehuber, who has most correctly seized his Jupiter profile, is excellent.” But this scene was captured a decade after the ‘wild and confused’ performances, and during those years Liszt had developed into a much more serious artist, having added – unusually for the time – Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin to his repertoire.

Czerny wasn’t alone in his opinion. Berlioz reviewed two concerts by Liszt at the Salle Érard in 1837 in the Gazette Musicale and remarked on his artistic growth, saying that whereas earlier his playing was exaggerated and rhythmically wayward, it had now acquired real stature.

When Liszt was first brought to him, Czerny wrote, his playing was “completely irregular, careless and confused, and he had so little knowledge of correct fingering that he threw his fingers all over the keyboard in an altogether arbitrary fashion. Nevertheless, I was amazed by the talent with which Nature had equipped him. I gave him a few things to sight-read, which he did, purely by instinct, but for that reason in a manner that revealed that Nature herself had here created a pianist…

“Never before had I so eager, talented or industrious a student. Since I knew from numerous experiences that geniuses whose mental gifts are ahead of their physical strength tend to neglect solid technique, it seemed necessary above all to regulate and strengthen his mechanical dexterity in such a way that he could not possibly slide into bad habits in later years…

“Since I made him learn each piece very rapidly, he finally became such a great sight-reader that he was capable of sight-reading even compositions of considerable difficulty, and so perfectly as though he had been studying them for a long time.

108

“I also tried to equip him with skill in improvising by frequently giving him themes on which to improvise.”

Liszt’s ability to sight-read with all the passion and definition required by the music included right away was an ability which would amaze professionals all his life, and one which Liszt modestly took for granted. “Liszt plays at sight what we toil over and in the end get nowhere with,” wrote Clara Schumann.

A generation later, the young Edvard Grieg came to Rome at Liszt’s invitation; having come across the twenty-six year-old composer’s violin sonata in F major, Liszt had written to him out of the blue: “It evidences a powerful, logically creative, ingenious, and excellent constructive talent for composition, which needs only to follow its natural development to attain high rank. I hope that you are finding in your own country the success and encouragement that you deserve.” Grieg brought Liszt several works, including his new A minor Concerto. Liszt took the score and sat down to play the music himself. “Without missing a note, how he played!” Grieg wrote to his mother. “With grandeur, beauty, genius, unique comprehension. I think I laughed, laughed like an idiot.” “Well, what do you expect?,” said Liszt with a smile. “An old hand like me ought to manage a bit of sight-reading, don’t you think?”

Schumann describes the occasion when Liszt first played Mendelssohn’s G minor Concerto, and his own Carnaval, in Dresden, “for the benefit of the pension fund for aged or invalid musicians, though he had given a concert for the poor in Dresden the day before… With the most friendly intentions, he had selected pieces by three composers residing here – Mendelssohn, Hiller and myself; Mendelssohn’s latest concerto, études by Hiller, and several numbers from an early work of mine, entitled ‘The Carnival’.

Ferdinand Hiller

“To the astonishment of many timid virtuosos, I must state that Liszt played these compositions almost at sight. He had a slight former acquaintance with the études and ‘The Carnival’, but he had never seen Mendelssohn’s concerto until a few days before the concert…

“Though certain traits in The Carnival may please certain persons, its musical moods change too rapidly to be easily followed by a general public, that does not care to be roused anew every moment. My amiable friend did not consider this; and though he played the work with such great sympathy and geniality that it could not fail to strike a few, the masses were not excited by it.

109

“It was different with Hiller’s études, that belong to a more recognized form… Mendelssohn’s concerto was already well known through its composer’s clear, masterly, reposeful playing. As I have already observed, Liszt played these pieces almost at sight; no one will be very well able to imitate him in this. He displayed his virtuosity in its fullest force, however, in the closing piece, the ‘Hexameron’, a cycle of variations by Thalberg, Herz, Pixis and Liszt himself. Everybody wondered where he found the strength to repeat half the Hexameron, and then his own galop (the ‘Grand Galop Chromatique’), to the delight of the enraptured public. How much I hoped that he would give us some of Chopin’s compositions, which he plays incomparably, with the deepest sympathy!”

In 1831, when the twenty year-old Liszt met twenty-one year old Frederic Chopin in Paris for the first time, Beethoven had been dead only four years, but the Mount Rushmore of composers was already very much an indispensable part of human history, enshrined as practically a god. His symphonies and sonatas were up there with the Bible – in a class of their own. So Liszt had been touched by divinity, having delighted Beethoven as a boy. He was to take this responsibility very seriously, and would be Beethoven’s greatest interpreter in his own time. Not only would Liszt play the sonatas better than anyone else – he’d play all the symphonies in his own piano transcriptions! Only two hands? No problem for Liszt. He was caricatured in the press with ten hands.

A turning point in Liszt’s personal and professional life was the project to build a monument to Beethoven in Bonn in 1838. Liszt spear-headed the campaign for funds by embarking on a consistent schedule of concerts such as he had never engaged in before – in the process leaving Marie d’Agoult, the mother of his children, and more or less inventing the ‘concert tour.’

Twenty years after their composition, Beethoven’s symphonies and concertos were being given their first performances in Paris and London. The reason they had taken so long to be heard was not for lack of interest, but simply because there was no means available for them to be generally heard. Before recordings, the only way you could hear a symphony was if an orchestra performed it at a hall near you. But there were hardly any full-time professional orchestras at that time. There was no Vienna Philharmonic, no New York Philharmonic – both orchestras founded in 1842; no Berlin Philharmonic – not till 1882; no London Symphony Orchestra – 1904. The only really significant established orchestra in Europe was the ‘Gewandhaus’ orchestra in Leipzig, which gave a celebrated series of regular concerts in the Gewandhaus – ‘Cloth Hall’ – in that city from 1781. Mendelssohn became its most famous director, in the 1830s, at the time Chopin knew him.

The only other way one could get to know a Beethoven symphony was through a piano arrangement. Liszt transcribed all nine symphonies for piano in two versions – solo and four hands. Even Chopin, whose relationship with Beethoven’s music was at best an uneasy one, took part in a performance of a Beethoven symphony, the seventh, arranged for four pianists at two pianos by his friend Charles Alkan, at a concert which Alkan himself organized, in March 1838. The other pianists were Alkan’s teacher, the distinguished professor of piano at the Conservatoire, Pierre Zimmerman – who idolized Chopin – and Chopin’s eighteen year-old pupil Adolph Gutmann.

110

Alkan, a good friend of Chopin’s, although his music must have appalled him, was superbly characterized by Schumann as being “of the ultra-romantic French school, and copies Berlioz on the pianoforte.” (Schumann hits it on the nail again!). Of Alkan’s Three Grand Etudes, Op. 15, Schumann writes, “One is startled by such false, unnatural art; in spite of his occasional abberations, Berlioz has a human heart – he is a voluptuary full of strength and daring.” In one of the études, ‘Le Vent’, “there is a chromatic howl over an idea from Beethoven’s A major Symphony.”

In London, the responsibility for bringing Beethoven’s orchestral music to the public was happily taken on by the Philharmonic Society (later ‘Royal Philharmonic Society’), which had brought eternal glory upon itself by sending the composer a very generous gift of 100 pounds – for which he was most grateful – during his final illness, in March 1827.

In Paris, the crusade of bringing the music of Beethoven to the public was taking place through the indefatigable efforts of one man, Antoine François Habeneck, the distinguished violinist and professor of violin at the Conservatoire, who founded the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. This famous series, which would run for many years, and be dedicated largely to the purpose of performing Beethoven’s symphonies, was inaugurated on March 9, 1828, one year after Beethoven’s death, with a performance of the Eroica Symphony.

Habeneck’s earlier attempts to present the Eroica in Paris had been greeted with laughter from the players. Habeneck himself conducted the fortnightly Sunday afternoon concerts, held every winter and spring, for twenty years, in the 1,000-seat hall of the Conservatoire, and they became famous throughout Europe for the unusual quality of the orchestral playing. A highly regarded violinist and violin teacher, Habeneck conducted with his violin bow from the first violin part.

There was great interest and excitement about these performances, for none more so than the young Hector Berlioz. Berlioz tells us in his memoirs that after the revelation of Shakespeare just six months before, when an English company had performed Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in their original versions in France for the first time, and “the lightning flash of that discovery revealed to me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest corners, and the meaning of grandeur, beauty, dramatic truth… I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry.”

About Habeneck’s proselytisation of Beethoven, Berlioz continues, “With all his serious defects as a musician (the main one being that he didn’t do enough to promote Berlioz’s music) and his shortcomings even in the service of his idol, he was a sincere and able conductor, and nothing can take away the glory of having been the man who made Beethoven’s works popular in Paris. It is thanks to his efforts that this splendid institution (the Conservatoire Concert Society), today famous throughout the civilized world (Berlioz was writing in 1865), was founded at all. It was a hard struggle; and before he could secure adequate performances, he had to persuade a large body of players to share his enthusiasm for totally unfamiliar music which had the reputation of being eccentric and difficult to play; he had to overcome an indifference which turned to hostility at the prospect of endless rehearsals and unremunerative toil stretching ahead.”

111

Berlioz would write some of the best analyses ever of Beethoven’s symphonies, and. more importantly, would base his own conception of orchestral music on them. This conception was to transform the orchestra and bring about what we know as the ‘symphony orchestra’. Beethoven remained a god for Berlioz throughout his life – the standard by which all orchestral music was to be measured. In his final concerts, in 1867 – 68, during his last tour of Russia, where he made such a significant impression, Berlioz conducted the Eroica, the Fourth, the Fifth and the Sixth symphonies.

Beethoven’s symphonies would always be the specialty of Habeneck’s Conservatoire concert series. After Habeneck’s death, the concerts continued for many years under a succession of conductors. As he died in 1849, Habeneck’s grave is situated a couple of metres from that of Frederic Chopin at Père Lachaise.

Chopin and Habeneck collaborated but a couple of times, Chopin’s performances with orchestra – all at the beginning of his career – being so very few. On April 4th, 1835, Chopin performed his E minor concerto with Habeneck conducting, at a grand concert for the benefit of Polish émigrés at the Théâtre Italien, around the corner from the Opéra. In the same concert, he also played a duet with Liszt, while their friend Adolphe Nourrit, the leading tenor of the Opéra, sang several songs by Schubert, and another friend, the violinist Wilhelm Ernst, also played.

Three weeks later, on April 26th, Chopin again performed with Habeneck, in one of his concerts at the Conservatoire. On this occasion, he played a much slighter work, but a favourite showpiece he had often played before, the Grande Polonaise Brillante, to which he had recently added an exquisitely beautiful solo introduction which he called Andante Spianato.

Concert hall of the Paris Conservatoire, pictured during a concert of the

Conservatoire Concert Society

112

Chopin played only once ever again with orchestra – in March 1838, having just turned twenty-eight – when he gave a performance of the E minor concerto in Rouen, a unique event which was greeted rapturously. Chopin agreed to this appearance to help his friend Antoni Orlowski, who had organized it as a benefit concert for himself.

Liszt was to take up conducting in a serious way at the age of thirty-six, taking charge of the opera theatre and court music directorship of Weimar – a role which had been filled by Hummel in the 1820s and 30s, but which under Liszt was to assume new significance, Weimar thenceforth becoming a major international centre for new music – especially that of his friends Berlioz and Wagner. It was to be a golden age which lasted a little over a decade. But Liszt would become so disillusioned by the intrigues around him when he was Grand Ducal Music Director in Weimar, having worked with all his heart and energy, that he would resign and enter a monastery, a little while later becoming an abbé in the Church.

At that time, Liszt wrote his will, in which he said, “At one time, some ten years ago, I dreamt of a new epoch for Weimar comparable to that of Karl August, an epoch in which Wagner and I were to be as Goethe and Schiller once were here. The meanness, not to say the villainy, of certain local circumstances, all sorts of jealousies and absurdities, elsewhere as well as here, have prevented the realization of this dream, which would have redounded to the honour of the present Grand Duke.”

‘The present grand Duke’ referred to by Liszt, Karl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar, many years later, in 1900, told the great Italian pianist Ferruccio Busoni – who himself had had some lessons with Liszt as a teenager – “Liszt was what a prince ought to be.”

In fact, Liszt left his directorial position in Weimar for a variety of reasons, more personal than professional, which we will explore in a later chapter. ‘Meanness, jealousies and absurdities’ come with the territory in any bureaucratic situation, as Liszt’s old composition teacher Salieri had discovered, and as Liszt himself had found when he encountered Cherubini. Liszt had really come to a crossroads, approaching fifty, and needed a change of scene and a change of life. Also, a wandering urge was an intrinsic part of his character – this gypsy-style characteristic was probably the closest Liszt really came to being ‘Hungarian’, except, of course, for the bravado of his performances.

But in 1831, the young prince wasn’t trying to change the world and he wasn’t planning on wandering anywhere far from Paris. With his fabulously easy technique and bravura showmanship, he industriously composed and performed brilliant arrangements of the latest sensations, which he used to dazzle his audiences – showpieces such as the overture to William Tell, the Danse Infernale from Robert le Diable, and other wonderful and exciting novelties. There was also his own Grand Galop Chromatique, a delightfully showy piece of nonsense, with which Liszt concluded nearly every performance he gave during the 1830s, and the obligatory item on many of his early programmes, ‘M. Liszt will perform extemporaneously on any given themes (these it is requested should be written).’

Then there was his amazingly skillful and faithful transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This inspired masterpiece, which introduced the idea of the programmatic symphonic tone-poem, had burst upon the Romantic imagination in 1830, and Liszt was immediately enamoured of the whole concept. Later, in Weimar, he would become the leading exponent of this type of orchestral composition, the very name ‘tone poem’ synonymous with his.

113

Both Berlioz and Liszt loved the concept of blending music with literary inspirations. In his whole life, Berlioz never wrote a piece of music which he called simply ‘symphony’, and certainly not ‘concerto’ or ‘sonata’. That did not mean, however, that music itself was for him any less the primary concern than it was for Beethoven or for Brahms. For Berlioz the literary connection was never at all rigid – he was not writing ‘programme music’ in the sense of following a script or storyline, but rather evoking the atmosphere of a book, poem or play.

The same approach was just as characteristic of Liszt. His ‘Dante Sonata’, for example, written in 1835, was based not on Dante, nor even upon ‘a reading of Dante’, but on a poem by Liszt’s friend, the prominent poet and politician Alphonse Lamartine, entitled Après une lecture de Dante – ‘After a reading of Dante’. For Liszt, as for Berlioz, it was rarely anything literal he wished to portray, in a programmatic sense, however in nearly all his compositions he sought to evoke an idea, thought, feeling or atmosphere – in this case an impression of the atmosphere evoked by Dante.

None of this kind of literary musical mélange was of any interest whatsoever to Chopin – with the sole exception of two of his Ballades, a literary connection at which he himself hinted, but upon which he refused to be pinned down. We will look at Chopin’s personal associations in the literary world – none of which influenced his music, apart from those two possible exceptions – in a later chapter.

The day before the première of Symphonie Fantastique, which took place on December 5th, 1830, at the Conservatoire, the nineteen year-old Franz Liszt called on Hector Berlioz. “It was our first meeting,” writes Berlioz in his Memoirs. “I spoke of Goethe’s Faust, which he confessed that he had not read, but which he soon came to love as much as I. We felt an immediate affinity, and from that moment our friendship has grown ever closer and stronger.” The day after, Berlioz wrote to his father, “Liszt, the well-known pianist, literally dragged me off to have dinner at his house and overwhelmed me with the vigour of his enthusiasm.” Liszt and Berlioz instantly became close and mutually understanding friends. Apart from one boyhood friend, Édouard Rocher, and Joseph Louis d’Ortigue, who succeeded Berlioz as music critic of the Journal des Débats, Liszt was the only non-relative Berlioz addressed as ‘tu’. Liszt transcribed Symphonie Fantastique with Berlioz’s approval – which shows just how close they were, as we would not expect Berlioz to look kindly upon arrangements of his supremely orchestral, and meticulously orchestrated, conceptions. Hallé tells us that “at an orchestral concert conducted by Berlioz, the March to the Scaffold, from Symphonie Fantastique, that most gorgeously orchestrated piece, was performed, at the conclusion of which Liszt sat down and played his own arrangement, for the piano alone, of the same movement, with an effect even surpassing that of the full orchestra, and creating an indescribable furore. The feat had been duly announced in the programme beforehand, a proof of his indomitable courage.”

Twenty-five years later, Liszt had become the leading propagandist for ‘Music of the Future’, meaning primarily the symphonic tone-poem, composing orchestral works himself and conducting a great deal of Berlioz, Wagner and many others. Unfortunately, after nearly three decades, the friendship between Liszt and Berlioz began to wane – partly because of Berlioz’s lack of interest in Liszt as a composer, partly because of Liszt’s increasing espousal of Wagner’s music as his ideal, Liszt becoming a kind of John the Baptist to Wagner as the messiah of music, and partly because of Liszt’s increasingly fervent Catholicism.

114

For the musical world of Paris, however, the most exciting single event of that season by far – an event of sensational impact – was the belated first appearance in Paris, on March 9th, 1831, at the Opéra, of the most dazzling instrumentalist the world had ever seen. Niccolò Paganini was more than just a brilliant violinist who happened to be better than all the others. Paganini was single-handedly responsible for the idea that an instrumental performer, as much as a composer, could be someone upon whom the gods smiled. This idea changed the nature of musical culture, from an art practised and enjoyed by an initiated few, as well as one designed specifically for religious use, to a spectator activity aimed at the public. Up until then, instrumentalists were thought of as ‘executants’, not ‘artists’ (singers were different). Mozart was considered an ‘artistic’ performer, to be sure, but the ‘taste’ of his playing was just a felicitous bonus. All performers were expected to do real artistic work as well – namely compose.

Paganini composed – very well, his most notable works being the historically influential twenty-four Caprices for solo violin, twelve sonatas for guitar and violin, and five concertos for violin. But nobody thought of Paganini as a composer. Paganini was the ultimate performer – the first musician since Orpheus whose performing accomplishments were placed on a level with the creative ones of the gods. Paganini set the tone for all virtuoso instrumentalists from then on – a model which has hardly altered to the present day from the way in which he introduced it. It consisted, and still consists, of a carefully and skillfully balanced blend of complete expertise of craft together with an aloof, somewhat haughty aura of mystery and ‘otherness’. Instrumental virtuosos were henceforth perceived, like royalty, as being different from ordinary people, having been blessed by the gods and living in some enchanted zone.

Paganini in 1819, aged 37, by Ingres

115

Chopin was still making his way towards Paris, where he would arrive six months later, in September, but all his future friends – Liszt, George Sand, Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Rossini, Auber, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine and just about everyone else – were at the Opéra that night. Paganini was already nearly fifty, but his career had mostly been confined to Italy, where he had been music director for eight years to the Princess of Lucca, and had concentrated on romantic attachments and gambling. Now, in mid-life, he was in need of funds, and in 1828, at the age of forty-six, he had embarked on a three-year odyssey – the prototype of Liszt’s concert ‘tours’ – in which he performed all over Europe. These concerts made Paganini a very rich man, netting him a fortune with which he was able to buy a beautiful estate near Parma and still have plenty left over for gambling. The same year he appeared in Paris, he earned the fantastic sum of 16,000 pounds from a two-month tour of Britain, when 1,000 pounds was considered a handsome annual income for any gentleman.

At the beginning of this long series of concerts, in March 1828, Franz Schubert, in his thirty-first and final year, having heard Paganini perform in Vienna, urged a friend to come with him to the second performance: “I have heard an angel sing. I tell you, there will never again be such a man here.” After the first concert in Vienna, shops offered hats and clothing inspired by Paganini, restaurants served dishes named after him. The closest thing to this kind of phenomenon these days is the Pavarotti Pizza Parlor down the road from the present writer.

Such approval from Schubert indicates that there were several sides to Paganini, for Schubert would surely not have enjoyed one of the customary items on Paganini’s concert programmes – “Imitations of Barnyard Noises” – designed to show off the violinist’s unprecedented bag of tricks and sound effects. Perhaps this item was reserved for smaller towns on his itinerary. This was really just a picturesque description of solo improvisations (which, without the harmonising powers of keyboard instruments, and without any accompaniment, can indeed often sound like a collection of caterwauling barnyard sound effects).

The unique violinist did introduce a whole range of startling new techniques for the instrument: harmonics, pizzicato effects simultaneously with bowed legato passages, double and triple stops, passages in double notes, usually tenths, and a seemingly limitless variety of dynamics. He also redesigned the placement of the bridge on the violin, creating a more full-bodied sound that hitherto known.

And then there was his most famous trick of all – playing entire pieces on less than the standard-issue four strings. It was believed that Paganini, with a showman’s flair, made sure in advance that not all the strings on his Stradivarius would make it to the end of a concert. When they broke, mid-performance, he proceeded to thrill the audience, which was holding its breath, by heroically continuing the performance with the strings which remained, without interrupting the flow of the music in order to replace the departed ones. Eventually Paganini was performing on one lone string, like a high-wire acrobat crossing Niagara Falls on a rope. One of his most celebrated compositions was written to be performed on one string – the Fantasia on the G String, based on themes from Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto.

But as well as all the magic tricks, Paganini undoubtedly could make the violin sing. Rossini, in characteristic style, once said, “I wept only three times in my life. The first time was when my first opera failed. The second time was during a boating party, when a truffled turkey fell into the water. The third time was when I first heard Paganini play.”

116

Meyerbeer became a fanatical admirer, following him from town to town in Italy. “Imagine the most astounding effects that can be produced from a violin, and dream of the most extravagant prodigies that can be performed with the bow and with melody. Paganini surpasses all one’s imaginings with his realities.” The young violinist Wilhelm Ernst, who would become Paganini’s successor, and a friend of Chopin and Liszt, likewise followed him around Italy, closely studying his methods.

Chopin also fell under the spell of Paganini, two years before the Italian magician arrived in Paris. In May 1829, when the nineteen year-old Chopin was in his final year at the Warsaw Conservatory, Paganini had come to Warsaw to perform during the coronation celebrations of Czar Nicholas 1 as king of Poland, three years after his accession to the throne in Russia. The Czar’s arrival in Warsaw together with his family was almost overshadowed by that of Paganini, who gave ten sensational concerts over a three-week period, all in Warsaw’s largest hall, the National Theatre, each time crowded to its full capacity of 1,000, and he stayed in Warsaw two months.

Like everyone else, Chopin reacted to Paganini with complete amazement and unalloyed delight, though some of the stage affectations were not to his taste. Chopin was struck by the possibilities of instrumental execution being shown, for the first time, to be virtually limitless. This encounter with Paganini was the catalyst for Chopin beginning to compose his Etudes that year, and the first Etude demonstrates the Paganini effect clearly. Never was there a more assertive work composed for the piano, a bold and fearless statement of intention.

At the same time, Chopin also composed a little set of variations called Souvenir de Paganini, inspired by Paganini’s version of Carnival of Venice. Contrary to what one might expect of a souvenir of Paganini, this little work – not published till 1881 – is a dreamy piece of music in Chopin’s Nocturne style, anticipating the svelte pianism of the much later Berceuse in D flat.

Soon after he arrived in Paris and met Kalkbrenner, with whose playing he was temporarily smitten, Chopin wrote home to describe his enchantment. In order to convey the impact of the impression, he needed to invoke just one name: “If Paganini is perfection itself, Kalkbrenner is his equal, but in a quite different sphere. It’s hard to describe… that mastery which is obvious in every note.”

Apart from being the immediate impetus for Chopin beginning to compose his Etudes, Paganini also inspired an element of daring and bravura to be found throughout the course of the series – in the first Etude, in the furious fourth Etude, the next one, the glittering ‘Black Keys’ Etude, and the ‘Revolutionary’ and ‘Winter Wind’ Etudes being prime examples.

In 1838, Paganini, at age fifty-six already very weak and thin from the throat cancer which was to kill him two years later, appeared unannounced one day at Chopin’s door, 38 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, accompanied by one of his pupils, Madame Peruzzi. Paganini wished to hear Chopin play, which, of course, he did with pleasure. Though Paganini was now resident in Paris, Chopin had never met him, and was amazed and overcome with delight at the unexpected honour. It is perhaps a little surprising that Chopin and Paganini had not yet met as late as 1838, as Paganini had become quite a feature of the cultural social scene in Paris during the mid-1830s. The famous painting by Danhauser, Liszt at the Piano, depicts George Sand, Marie d’Agoult, Rossini, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo together with Paganini in Liszt’s room listening to him play Beethoven.

117

Growing up poor in Genoa in the late 18th century, Paganini had worked with ferocious perseverance as a boy to master the violin, his first teacher being his father Antonio, a talented amateur and a strict taskmaster. Niccolò practised without cease, and moreover worked passionately to develop new techniques and effects on the instrument. While still in his teens and early twenties, Paganini composed his famous set of twenty-four Caprices, Opus 1, for unaccompanied violin, which demanded a wide range of technical novelties, including pizzicato effects and harmonics, as well as new methods of fingering and also tuning.

At the age of eight, Niccolò played a concerto by Ignaz Pleyel in a church in Genoa and caused a sensation, thereafter becoming widely known as a boy wonder. When he was eleven, according to legend, having learned all he could from his father, Niccolò went to see the famous violin master Alessandro Rolla in Parma. Rolla had just completed his latest concerto, which the boy proceeded to play from sight so well that Rolla sent him away – “I have nothing to teach you, child.” In fact, Paganini did study with Rolla, as well as Gasparo Ghiretti, after his debut in 1793 at the age of eleven. Four years later he was touring northern Italy with his father, but when he came of age and was able to escape from his tyrannical father, he settled into a long-term life of gambling and romantic adventures.

Paganini’s 24 Caprices revolutionized the art of violin playing, which would never be the same again. Sleek virtuosity and a magician-like aura were to be the touchstones for violinists ever after, in a direct line through Wilhelm Ernst, Henryk Wieniawski, Pablo de Sarasate and Eugène Ysäye to the Paganini of the twentieth century, Jascha Heifetz. Paganini also wrote five violin concertos, the first of which is still one of the most popular violin concertos in the repertoire, and a classic of its kind, beautiful, ideally suited to showcasing the soloist, and excellently structured and orchestrated. The second vioin concerto is mainly famous for its last movement, La Campanella. As the concertos were written for Paganini’s own use as a performer, the remaining three were lost and only rediscovered in the 1960s.

Paganini was a figure of endless fascination, almost as much for his persona as for his playing. His appearance – gaunt, hollowed out, aquiline, spectral, with long, lank, dark hair – in conjunction with his diabolical talent, created the image of a Mephistophelian character, an intriguing image which excited the public imagination, and one which Paganini himself did little to discourage. ‘He must be in league with the devil to be able to play like that!’ was the idea, and though the times for such nonsense may have passed, the public loved it. It was rumoured that Paganini had murdered his mistress and her soul sang through his violin. It was also murmured that Paganini had been taught the violin by the devil visiting in human form.

When he appeared in Paris in 1831, Paganini was preceded by all the fantastic stories about his unorthodox life, as well as the reports of his abilities, and he felt obliged to write an open letter to La Revue Musicale denying categorically that he had taken instruction from the Devil, that he had murdered his mistress, or that he had spent several years in jail. Paganini was a publicity agent’s dream! – even though it would be another decade before P. T. Barnum would establish that distinctly American field of activity as a recognised profession. An austere man, Paganini was perhaps sincere in his protestations; “I am neither young nor handsome; on the contrary, I am rather ugly. But when women hear my music they begin weeping and I become their idol, and they lie at my feet.”

118

One of the reasons this unexpected public relations phenomenon was so potent was its timing. Gérard de Nerval’s French translation of Goethe’s Faust had only recently appeared, in 1827, and Part Two of the great work would be published in 1832, posthumously in the year Goethe died. Faust, and his fateful bargain with the violin-playing devil – Mephistopheles – quite simply obsessed the Romantics.

Everyone was reading Faust. It was the story of the 19th century, with its exhaustive philosophical searching and the constant striving of mankind symbolizing the era as did no other work of literature or art. The desperate search of man for redemption, in the face of the apparent futility, yet necessity, of love and learning, all the while pursued by the devil – who is inescapable because he is within us – was an irresistible parable for the Romantic generation. In the words of Jacques Barzun, in Berlioz and the Romantic Century,

“More than Werther… the figure of Faust seemed to embody the will of the moment… Learned, passionate, curious, tender, courageous, bewitched, and desperate, he stood for genius in all its greatness and misery. The ‘two souls within his breast’ showed him at once a sufferer and a doer.”

Berlioz was as mesmerized by Goethe as he was by Shakespeare and Beethoven, all three hitting him broadside in the same year upon their first real appearance in France (Part 1 of Faust had appeared in an earlier translation five years before). Berlioz would write a unique opera/cantata upon the subject, The Damnation of Faust.

Liszt was equally fascinated, and his most important composition was to be “A Faust Symphony,” an hour-long tone poem in three movements with tenor and chorus. He would also write four “Mephisto Waltzes,” the first being one of his most successful and characteristically idiomatic compositions. Wagner began to write a Faust Symphony, ending up with “A Faust Overture.” Schumann produced a cantata, “Scenes from Goethe’s Faust.” And Charles Gounod’s famous opera Faust would dominate the Paris Opéra throughout the second half of the 19th century.

Even in Gounod’s boiled-down version, the story represented the age as did no other, with its theme of iniquity, repentance and final redemption. Queen Victoria sat through it ninety-seven times over a forty-year period, and shortly before her death she invited a troupe of French singers to Windsor Castle so that she could hear it one last time. One American critic in the late 19th century referred to the Metropolitan Opera House as the ‘Faustspielhaus’ – a very clever pun on the then relatively new ‘Festspielhaus’ of Wagner in Bayreuth.

Charles Gounod

119

These are just the most famous musical incarnations of this literary phenomenon. There were many others, including one by Chopin’s patron Prince Anton Radziwill, a competent aristocratic amateur of a type long since vanished. One of the ten operas of Ludwig Spohr, the virtuoso violinist and distinguished conductor who was also a prolific, highly regarded composer, was Faust. But there was only one human incarnation, albeit a figurative one, and that was Paganini.

‘The Debut in London of Niccolò Paganini’, by Daniel Maclise (leading

Irish artist, newly arrived in London, age 21, star pupil at the Royal Academy)

This Mephistophelian image of Paganini was to have a distinct and long-term effect on the history of music, inspiring composers to introduce a devilish element into the music. There were transcriptions and original compositions by Liszt, Schumann, Brahms and Rachmaninoff, composed not just in Paganini’s name but also his spirit.

120

The greatest of these is undoubtedly Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – not only a masterly set of variations but a significant individualistic work which captures the dark and magical spirit of Paganini’s legend. Rachmaninoff happily endorsed a ballet version by the Diaghilev’s choreographer Michel Fokine, depicting in clear visual terms the Mephistophelian darkness of the Paganini legend.

The truth behind the forbidding image was that Paganini was a melancholy character who was beset by terrible depression. In the marvellously vibrant portrait by Ingres, drawn in Rome in 1819, while Paganini was still in his thirties, we see him looking dashing and confident, his violin held jauntily under his right arm, and if not exactly handsome, then certainly charming and very Italian, with piercing black eyes. He’s not thin at all, his hair isn’t long and straggly, but short and curly, and there’s no sign of the haggard and haunted look which so intrigued the public later on. It was obviously the long battle with throat cancer which so drastically altered his appearance.

Paris proved congenial to Paganini, as it does to everyone, and there he decided to take up residence from 1833 onwards. That year he heard Symphonie Fantastique, and a few weeks later, according to Berlioz’ memoirs, this man “with a long mane of hair, piercing eyes, and a strange and haggard face,” suddenly called upon him to ask him to write a viola concerto for him, as he had recently acquired “a marvellous viola, an admirable Stradivarius,” which he wanted to play in public.

Berlioz had been away in Italy at the French Academy in Rome when Paganini performed in Paris in 1831. The only other concert Paganini gave in Paris took place in 1833, but Berlioz missed that one too, due to illness. He heard him on only one occasion, in chamber music. So this honour came truly out of the blue. Berlioz couldn’t understand why Paganini, a very competent composer himself, who had already written five violin concertos, all of them perfectly tailored to his spectacular performing talents, didn’t want to compose his own viola concerto. But Paganini was insistent, saying “You are the only one I can trust for such a work.” He must have really liked the Symphony Fantastique.

Berlioz being Berlioz – proud, independent, clever, energetic, and ornery, not surprisingly didn’t give Paganini the ‘concerto’ he had hoped for. Instead, he produced a highly original work consisting of a series of picturesque orchestral tableaux with viola obbligato – the solo instrument being the central voice, but in no way a star soloist – which he called ‘Harold in Italy’.

Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage inspired the idea of a poet travelling in Italy and giving his impressions, but there was no other connection with Byron’s famous narrative poem. In what turned out to be in effect another pictorial symphony, the solo viola represents the voice of the poet, and the titles of the movements give the idea of the scenario without any further explanation – Harold in the Mountains: Scenes of Melancholy, Happiness and Joy; March of the Pilgrims; Serenade of a Mountaineer of the Abruzzi to his Mistress; and what self-respecting French 19th century symphonic work would be complete without a rousing orgy – in this case Orgy of the Brigands.

Like Symphonie Fantastique, Harold in Italy was a symphony-cum-symphonic poem, the new musical form being invented right here by Berlioz.

121

As might have been expected, Paganini was not happy with the interesting but unexpected result of his commission. In view of the highly original nature of Symphonie Fantastique, one would think he might have had an inkling that Berlioz wouldn’t write a standard concerto. “There are too many rests for me,” Paganini exclaimed. “I must be playing all the time.”

Five years later, Paganini finally heard Harold in Italy. Berlioz continues: “The concert was just over. Paganini, followed by his son Achilles, came up to me at the orchestra door, gesticulating violently. Owing to the throat affection of which he ultimately died, he had already lost his voice, and no one but his son could even guess what he was saying. He made a sign to the child, who got up on a chair, put his ear close to his father’s mouth, and listened attentively… Achilles got down and, turning to me, said, ‘My father desires me to assure you, sir, that he has never in his life been so powerfully impressed, and that if he did not restrain himself he would get down on his knees to thank you.’ I made a movement of incredulous embarrassment, but Paganini seized my arm and rattled out, ‘Yes, yes!’ with the little voice he had left.

“The next day I was alone and ill in my room when little Achilles entered and handed me a letter. I would have broken the seal but the child stopped me, saying, ‘There is no answer,’ and left the room. I read as follows: ‘I have heard your divine composition, so worthy of your genius, and beg you to accept, in token of hommage, 20,000 francs’ ($80,000 today). My wife coming in at that moment, and finding me with a letter in my hand and a disconcerted face, exclaimed ‘What’s the matter now? Some new misfortune? Courage! We’ve endured as much before.’ ‘No, no; quite the contrary. Paganini has sent me 20,000 francs.’ ‘Louis, Louis!’ she cried. ‘Come here! Come thank God with your mother for what He has done for your father.’ They fell on their knees by my bed, the mother praying. Would that Paganini could have seen the sight!”

Paganini’s gift to Berlioz became famous, and its motivation was the subject of considerable conjecture. One theory held that Paganini was concerned about his public image – the parsimonious Italian, in common with his compatriot Clementi over in London, was notoriously tight with money, and would refuse to play for charities. Liszt, who played for every charity which ever asked him, subscribed cautiously to this theory. There was also the belief that Paganini may have been acting on behalf of a rich friend of the struggling composer, who wished to remain anonymous – Armand Bertin, proprietor of the leading periodical Journal des Débats, for which Berlioz was a journalist over many years. This idea originated with Madame Bertin.

Paganini himself had this to say, in an interview published in the Journal de Paris in January, 1839: “I did it for Berlioz and for myself. For Berlioz, because I saw a young man of genius whose courage and strength might in the end have broken under the strain of the struggle which he had daily to carry on against jealous mediocrity, ignorance and indifference, and I thought: I must help him. For myself because later, when my claims to musical glory are reckoned, it will not be the least that I was the first to recognize a genius and bring him public acclaim… ”

One is inclined to believe him. In the first place, it was, after all, Paganini who had commissioned from Berlioz the composition of what emerged as Harold in Italy, five years before, even though he then rejected the work. Then, Paganini was generous with his regard for other artists: the unheralded visit to Chopin in 1838 was in a similar vein to that which the great violinist paid upon Berlioz in 1833.

122

Great wealth didn’t settle Paganini’s style of living. The varied liaisons, as well as the gambling, continued as ever. In 1837 Paganini became involved in a gambling casino venture in Paris – a fashionable establishment called the ‘Casino Paganini’. However, the authorities withheld the necessary licenses and Paganini lost 60,000 francs, which hurt considerably at that point in his life, his lucrative touring having long since ceased due to his ill health. This misfortune aggravated Paganini’s laryngeal tuberculosis, compounding the cancer with intense weariness, and it was around that time that he virtually lost his voice. After this failure, Paganini left Paris and went to live in Marseilles in 1839, dying the following year in Nice. Reports claimed that he spent the last hours of his life improvising feverishly on the violin.

Because Paganini had refused final sacrament, and because of all the nonsense about his having been ‘in league with the devil’, which had been such good publicity and had titillated the public, his body was denied burial for a full half-century, being shuffled about furtively from Nice to Villefranche because of the frightened local inhabitants, who claimed that violin sounds emanated from the coffin every night.

Berlioz, Schumann, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Ysäye, Sarasate, Heifetz, and countless others would be influenced by the Paganini phenomenon, but no-one was more completely transfixed and inspired by the diabolically gifted Italian than the young Franz Liszt. For the twenty year-old Liszt that night at the Opéra was a bombshell. “What a man! What an artist!” was Liszt’s reaction. The impact of Paganini transformed Liszt from an unprepossessing, sweet young man, “a charmingly simple boy, natural and unaffected,” according to the English pianist Charles Salaman, into a commanding figure of charisma and authority.

Liszt was a quick study. He instantly took in everything about Paganini – the bravado, the condescending manner, the calculated showbusiness effects, and, of course, the air of total authority. He was rather irritated by Paganini as a person, though. “A lonely, unhappy god,” he described him after the concert at the Opéra. But the presentation, and above all the mesmerizing technical accomplishment which Paganini displayed, was another matter. Though divinely gifted, Liszt had been trained in a dry and pedantically conservative school of pianism. Suddenly he saw that a musical performer could be like a god, and not necessarily a lonely one, but certainly someone who was capable of replicating any sounds that existed on earth.

When he met Chopin a few months later, Liszt would discover that a performer could also produce sounds which were positively unearthly. He was just as quick on the uptake with Chopin as he had been with Paganini, discovering pianistic finesse and refinement, and understanding it at a glance. Paganini and Chopin were in fact the two most decisive influences on Liszt as pianist – Paganini showed him bravura and showmanship, Chopin poetry and finesse. “Chopin, Paganini, and Madame Malibran: from these Liszt himself acknowledges that he has learned the most,” said Schumann.

The first thing Liszt did after experiencing the Paganini effect was embark on a rigorous schedule of self-improvement, not only in his playing, which he now realized was in need of an up-grade from his Czerny-style technique, but also in his general culture. Liszt wrote to Pierre Wolff, one of the earliest of an estimated two thousand pupils he would accept during his life, “My mind and my fingers are working like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them furiously.

123

“Furthermore, I work four or five hours a day at exercises – thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repeated notes, etc. If only I don’t go mad, you will find in me an artist! Yes, the sort of artist we need today. ‘I too am a painter!’ cried Michelangelo the first time he saw a masterpiece… Small and poor as your friend is, he never stops repeating the words of the great man after hearing the last Paganini concert.”

As an indicator of the enthusiasms of the time, it’s amusing to notice Byron, Hugo and Lamartine listed together with Homer, the Bible and Plato, and Hummel sandwiched between Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. Hummel was certainly a fine composer, but Liszt is really putting him in serious company!

The second part of Liszt’s new regime – five hours of thirds, sixths, octaves and tremolos – doesn’t quite sound like the best way to become ‘an artist – the sort of artist we need today’, and indicates that Liszt still needed to experience Chopin.

With Chopin, Liszt knew instantly that here was a completely new way, a genuinely artistic way of approaching the piano – not with the old Czerny style of finger exercise, but with a comprehensive understanding of the movements of the hand and of the means of achieving an unlimited range of pianistic sounds. He realized that Chopin’s Etudes were epoch-making, and he wasted no time learning them and discussing every detail with his extraordinary colleague.

Liszt would play these Etudes all his life. On one occasion, at home in his apartment in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, Chopin rushed to his desk to write to Ferdinand Hiller – without telephones then, notes were dashed off and delivered within the hour – “I write to you without knowing what my pen is scribbling because at this moment Liszt is playing my Etudes and transporting me out of my honest thoughts. I wish I could steal from him the secret of playing my own Etudes.” Liszt stopped playing for a moment to add his greetings, and Chopin concluded with “Heine sends his heartiest greetings… Best regards from Berlioz.”

When his first twelve Etudes were complete and published as a set in 1833, Chopin dedicated it, under the title Douze Grandes Études – ‘Twelve Grand Studies’ – to his friend – ‘à son ami Franz Liszt.’

Liszt wrote his own set of Twelve Etudes, which he published in 1835, though he revised them significantly fifteen years later. He gave them the very Lisztian title Douze Grandes Études d’Éxécution Transcendante – ‘Twelve Grand Studies in Transcendental Playing’. Liszt was certainly not trying to one-up his friend with the exuberant title; exuberant is just the way Liszt was. And if anyone of his generation ever aspired to be transcendental in anything and everything he ever did, it was surely Liszt. Chopin’s Etudes began in a sequence of related keys, and so did Liszt’s set, which continues the pattern throughout. However, apart from this formal procedure there’s very little else of similarity. As a pianist, Liszt got the point of Chopin’s Etudes completely, but as a composer he was on an altogether different track.

“Opinions regarding Liszt’s talent for composition vary so greatly,” writes Schumann. “There can be doubt, however, that we have here to do with a remarkable, variously gifted, and most inspiring mind. His own life is to be found in his music… He carried his powers as a pianist to an astonishing height, but remained somewhat behind as a composer, and it is probable that this disproportion will be felt even in his final works…

124

“While he endeavoured to present the ideas of French romantic literature, among whose celebrities he lived, in his music, he was incited by the appearance of Paganini to try the powers of his instrument to the verge of impossibility… A glance at Chopin, it would seem, brought him back to his senses. For Chopin is a master of form; under his wonderfully musical figuration we can always trace the thread of melody.”

Liszt’s famous ‘Transcendental Etudes’ are very mixed, and nowhere near as homogeneous or convincing a collection as Chopin’s. “We must not forget that these are études,” writes Schumann, “and that the difficulties and complications… are excused by the object of such compositions, namely the overcoming of the greatest difficulties.” Liszt was certainly pursuing a fixed image of virtuosity – virtuosity pushed to its limit. But more than that, Liszt is also concerned with extra-pianistic considerations – trying “to present the ideas of French romantic literature,” as Schumann succinctly and accurately put it.

And Schumann was exactly right when he said that Liszt’s “own life is to be found in his music,” and “There can be no doubt that we have here to do with a remarkable, variously gifted, and most inspiring mind.” In the Transcendental Etudes we see Liszt the musical incarnation of Byron, Liszt the incipient orchestrator in the grandiose style of his friend Berlioz, Liszt the visionary, Liszt the daredevil, most of all Liszt the passionate lover of life.

Mazeppa, the fourth of the series, is an overtly orchestral creation, a truly symphonic work depicting a heroic tale set to poetry by both Byron and Hugo. Liszt later arranged this work for orchestra as a symphonic poem, but nothing of orchestral effect or impact is lacking in the original piano version. If anything, the effort required and the sharpness of attack in the piano’s sound add even more vitality and excitement to the work. The same quality characterizes the eighth of the set, Wilde Jagd – ‘Wild Hunt’ – in Busoni’s opinion, “a work which displays the strongest orchestral colouring.” The orchestral colouring is indeed irresistible, however just as telling in Busoni’s phrase is the word ‘display’, a word which could never be used in connection with Chopin, but in Liszt describes an intrinsic element, a natural part of the whole.

Of the twelve, only a couple are really what we may describe as “pianistic” – odd as that sounds – which is to say perfectly tailored to the sound and means of the piano. No. 5, Feux-Follets – ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’, is a magically pianistic piece worthy of Chopin, combining the feeling of Chopin’s lighter, gossamer-sounding études, such as the second Etude, with that of his famous double-note étude, the one in thirds. But even Feux Follets is profoundly orchestral in its delicate yet richly colourful effects.

Also in this class, Chopinistic in its pianistic fitness, is the ninth of the set, Ricordanza – ‘Remembrance’, a beautiful, regret-filled musical poem with luscious filigree cadenzas, the whole piece a little on the sentimental side, but nevertheless enchanting and ‘Chopinesque’.

The tenth Transcendental Etude, in F minor, is also superbly pianistic, and interestingly, a direct ‘take’ on Chopin’s ninth Etude of Op. 10, also in F minor. The principal melody is virtually identical to Chopin’s, as is the insistent rhythm, but Liszt has amplified it to orchestral proportions and filled the piece with his own Byronic spirit. This is one of a number of instances where Liszt openly pays tribute to Chopin, other examples including the octave middle section of Funérailles (Polonaise in A flat), the Consolation in D flat (Nocturne in D flat), and the Concert Etude Un Sospiro (‘Aeolian Harp’ Etude).

125

The twelve Transcendental Etudes were dedicated “To Carl Czerny, as a mark of thanks, respect and friendship.” No other dedication could have been as appropriate. Czerny had cared for Liszt devotedly, and Liszt’s pianistic feats, imbued though they were with all his unparalleled boldness and daring, were firmly grounded in the pianistic patterns he had learnt from Czerny.

This traceable derivation was in marked contrast to Chopin, who created his own pianistic sound world, one unrelated to that of any other composer, springing organically and intrinsically from the musical patterns he alone envisaged. Liszt was no pianistic innovator. If anything, rather than saying anything special about pianistic issues, his Transcendental Etudes point the way forward towards the colourful and brilliant use of orchestration which would characterize music of the future.

Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes are like orchestral reductions, in common with a large part of Liszt’s pianistic output, although we are distracted and diverted by the boldness and sheer entertainment of the pianistic goings-on. There was in fact rather too much going on in Liszt’s 1835 Transcendental Etudes for any pianist to handle viably, and consequently he produced a more manageable version of the set in 1851, the final version which pianists have used ever since.

As well as the Transcendental Etudes, Liszt also wrote six Études d’Éxécution Transcendante d’Après Paganini – ‘Transcendental Studies after Paganini’, based on five of Paganini’s 24 Caprices plus the last movement of his second concerto, the celebrated showpiece La Campanella, which he had already arranged as Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur la Clochette de Paganini. These ‘Paganini Etudes’, skillful and imaginative, but nevertheless faithful, transcriptions of Paganini’s music, with Liszt’s own talents added into the mix in order to make the necessary adjustments for the pieces to sound and play pianistically, are lighter, more straightforward and elegant, and not in any way overblown. Consequently they are perhaps more effective in performance than the “Transcendental Etudes.”

Liszt’s Paganini Etudes were dedicated to a pianist who very much disliked the big orchestral style of the Transcendental Etudes, and who would later become quite antagonistic to her old friend because of his theatrical style, but who probably very much appreciated the pure and unaffected pianism demonstrated here, as she was a very nimble, fleet-fingered pianist in her youth – Clara Schumann.

Clara was at the height of her concert performing career in Germany when Liszt wrote his Paganini Etudes – she was sixteen. Liszt didn’t publish the Etudes in their final form, however, until sixteen years later, in 1851. But there may be another reason for the dedication to Clara, beyond the crisp, unaffected pianistic style of the Etudes. In 1829, when Clara Wieck was just ten, Paganini, visiting Leipzig, had met her and been astonished by her talent, and insisted on her presence at all his concerts. The unlikely pair became inseparable. Perhaps Liszt’s dedication of his Paganini Etudes to Clara was in recognition of this unusual friendship.

Maybe this is drawing too much of a connection, but Liszt did delight in the many and varied interconnections between music, art and life. Perhaps Liszt was subtly recognizing Clara’s husband Robert (to whom he would dedicate his great Sonata in B minor), who was such a devoted admirer and friend, and who also composed six Etudes upon Caprices by Paganini. Or perhaps he was just being nice to Clara, with a peace offering after she had scolded him for all his theatricality.

126

Clara’s concert career ceased entirely when she married Robert Schumann at the age of twenty-one, and she devoted herself to him and to their eight children. After his death in 1856 and after the children were grown, Clara re-emerged in a completely different persona from that of her youthful career: as the keeper of the flame of Schumann’s genius, always dressed in black widow’s clothes, and a somewhat self-righteous mother of the Art of Music – certainly more right, in her own opinion, than “my amiable friend,” as Robert had called Liszt, whom he adored (Clara had thought he was pretty swish, too).

Clara Wieck at 16, by Elwine von Leyser

Schumann’s review of Liszt’s ‘Paganini Etudes’ is not only exactly right, but characteristically self-effacing. Schumann had written his own set of transcriptions of six of the Paganini Caprices (mostly different ones than Liszt selected):

“I copied the original, perhaps to its injury, almost note for note, and merely enlarged a little harmonically… later I broke loose from a too closely imitative translation and strove to give the impression of an original pianoforte composition which, without separating itself from the original poetic idea, had forgotten its violin origin.”

Of Liszt’s version, he writes, “Here, there is, of course, no question of any pedantic imitation or a bare harmonic filling out of the violin part; the pianoforte is effective through other means than those of the violin. But to produce the same effects, through whatever means, was here a difficult task for the arranger. Everyone who has heard Liszt, however, knows that he understands all the means and effects of his instrument. It’s highly interesting to find the compositions of the greatest violin virtuoso of our century in regard to bold bravura, Paganini, illustrated by the boldest of modern pianoforte virtuosos, Liszt.

“A glance into the collection, on the wonderful, seemingly overturned scaffolding of notes, is sufficient to convince the eye that simplicity is not to be found here. It is as though Liszt had resolved to lay down all his experience in the work, to bequeath the secret of his playing to posterity; nor could he better evince his admiration for the great deceased artist than by this transcription, carefully worked out in the smallest detail, and reflecting the spirit of the original in the most truthful manner.

127

“Though Schumann’s arrangement (note – this article is written by Schumann) was intended to bring out the poetic side of the composition more, that of Liszt, without ignoring its poetry, rather aims at placing its virtuosity in relief. He correctly entitles the pieces ‘Bravura Studies’, such as may be performed in public for the purpose of display. To be sure, very few will be able to master them; perhaps only four or five in the world.

“But this need not restrain others from studying them: one does well to approach the highest point of virtuosity, though even at some distance… He who is able to master these Etudes, and in an easy, sportive manner such that they glide past the hearer – as they should – may travel securely round the world, to return crowned with the golden laurels of a second Liszt-Paganini.”

Ferruccio Busoni, not only a legendary pianist, but a scholar and an authority on the subject of Liszt, was also a considerable composer. His most important works were a huge piano concerto, well over an hour in length, with choral finale, and several operas, including Turandot in 1917 – seven years before Puccini’s version – as well as the unfinished opera Doktor Faustus of 1924, the year of his death – Faust still being the most potent subject for opera and theatre well into the twentieth century.

Busoni transcribed Liszt’s Paganini Etudes, i.e. transcriptions of transcriptions – Paganini certainly got people transcribing and variationing! On the surface souping them up yet further, Busoni’s versions don’t add very much difficulty to Liszt’s Paganini Etudes but make them sound even more difficult than they already are while actually reducing some of the more awkward difficulties. Like Liszt, Busoni’s compositional technique is more that of an orchestrator – seeking after aural results which are first and foremost effective. The impresion to the listener is of added technical difficulty, but in fact the Busoni versions are in many cases slightly easier to play than the originals.

Vladimir Horowitz was one of the greatest of all practitioners of this kind of musical stagecraft, making difficulties in virtuoso transcriptions – as well as his own spectacular arrangements and “fleshing out”, as he termed it, of works such as Pictures at an Exhibition or Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, or Liszt’s already difficult enough transcription of Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, or Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, or his own version (with the composer’s blessing) of Rachmaninoff’s second Sonata – sound nearly impossible while in fact actually simplifying them pianistically, in practical terms.

Achieving the maximum effect through the most convenient means has the advantage not only of making a performance sound smoother, but also of emphasizing ease, nonchalance and complete command. These qualities are essential for the effectiveness of any solo performance, by any type of performer: without them an audience can never feel completely confident and thereby give themselves over entirely to the performer and to the experience.

This eye on the practical as regards smooth and easy execution is an attribute which belongs only to those who are showbusiness-savvy, keenly aware of the effect they make upon an audience. It’s an attribute which cannot be taught, and partly for this reason leads to resentment from the legions of earnest musicians who haven’t a sense for the actual effect of their presentation – a consideration which they view as more the province of the trickster than the serious musician.

128

But they’re wrong, and it’s a clear case of sour grapes, unfortunately often lent credence by performers who try to be too effective. Horowitz’ youthful recording of one of the most difficult of the Liszt Paganini Etudes – No. 2 in E flat – without any modifications, either by Busoni or himself, is a dazzling illustration of Schumann’s ideal of playing virtuoso works “in an easy, sportive manner such that they glide past the hearer – as they should.” The fingerwork in this performance is sparkling and dazzling, as only Horowitz could achieve, but the immediate and lasting impression is one of consummate ease and elegance.

It’s not only in rearrangements of virtuoso works or transcriptions that we aim at the maximum effect through the minimum, or most convenient, means possible. It applies to everything physical we ever do. It should be our constant modus operandi. Liszt said that “technique is economy of movement” – however that simple but astute statement will require a whole chapter.

In the next chapter we will look at the surroundings in which Chopin now found himself – Paris at the beginning of the modern age, developing all around him into the city we know today, and being recorded by the new invention of photography. Chopin’s Etudes were developing in new musical as well as technical directions, and there are few parallels with which to compare these, except in music by composers working at a considerably later time, in a different musical climate. We’ll examine the impact of two writers who, oddly enough, did parallel this unique musical pathway – Ernst Theodore Hoffmann and Edgar Allen Poe. We’ll also meet Felix Mendelssohn, one of Chopin’s first great admirers, a friend with whom he shared much in common, particularly a love of the music of J. S. Bach.