FAULT AND VIRTUE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19945, 1 November 1934, Page 13

FAULT AND VIRTUE

THE JUDGMENTS OF CORTOT

PIANIST ON COMPOSERS

Eminent performers are not always eminent teachers, and it is still rarer to find a virtuoso who can excel when addressing not a single student but a class. For the art of the lecturer is essentially different from that of the player, and, indeed, not a few players succeed as teachers not by precepts but by example. Their words may be obscure; their performance is pellucid, writes F. Bonavia in the “Daily Telegraph.” Alfred Cortot would seem to be an exception to the general rule; extracts from his interpretation classes, reported in a musical review, make interesting reading. Like most of his compatriots, he misses no opportunity of inculcating a sense of our indebtedness to French musicians.

Chanibonnieres, the founder of the French clavecin school, was the first, he tells us, to give stylistic sense to the suite by alternating a slo wand a quick movement, contributing thus to the creation of the sonata. The gigue, he says, was known in Brittany before it was known in England. In this Cortot but follows the present fashion of Continental Europe, where most artistic activities are supposed to have a value as propaganda also. In all humility, let us confess that we should not think less nobly of France’s contribution to modern art and modern civilisation if the gigue had not practised first elsewhere. These are but motes. ' The solid, valuable reality of the teaching is in the criticism of the various pianoforte works he passes in review. In examining Busoni's arrangement of Bach’s Chaconne, for instance, Cortot shows not only the insight of the interpreter, bu the experience of the teacher familiar with the failings of young musicians. Every new variation, he says, should cause a new feeling of surprise; the energy embodied in the music should never degenerate and become hard, for it was Bach’s aim to combine the sonority of the organ with the phrasing peculiar to the violin. This is excellent and eminently practical information. Had Lost Faith Cortot is equally stimulating on the technical aspects of Mozart’s music. But I am inclined to question the historical accuracy of the following passage: “X admire Haydn and Mozart certainly. But they were slaves to an art In which they had lost all faith and lacked the courage of Beethoven,”

vho set aside the rules that obtained n his time. My reading of the character of Mozart and Haydn may be at fault; out I cannot see what warrant there is for asserting that they did not believe in the art they practised. There are not a few other statements that are equally challenging. But in the main Cortot's criticism of the great pianoforte composers is as eloquent as it is keen and stimulating. A remark which may cause some astonishment occurs in the course of Cortot’s criticism of Chopin. The only reason why the majority of pianists avoid the Fantasie Polonaise is. he says, because of the four concluding bars, which defeat the expection and the effort of a dashing close: “These bars, instead of providing a brilliant end, produce an effort of painful surprise and chill the applause a brilliant conclusion would arouse.” The procedure does not seem to be exceptional or foreign to Chopin; the example of the impromptus and the second ballade will occur to anyone’s mind. Yet Cortot, knowing pianists’ psychology better perhaps than any other man, unhesitatingly points to what seems a trifle as to the sole cause of failure. If Chopin can by so slight an error of judgment turn a successful into an unsuccessful work, musical composition would seem to be a singularly hazardous undertaking. Reveals Character Cortot is most convincing when he reveals the character of a composer or the nature of a piece of music in a single sentence. “Weber and Mendelssohn give us the picturesque and poetic qualities of virtuosity.” he says, and expresses a thought which must have been in the mind of many a musician who has tried to reconcile certain aspects of Mendelssohn. Cortot, himself an admirable virtuoso, does not undertake virtuosity as theorists are apt to do. Mere technical facility is an asset to many men. Some —and Beethoven was one of them—do their best work with labour. Mendelssohn undoubtedly owes his best strokes to that easy touch which even now makes it difficult for us to draw a clear line between his most and his least enviable achievements. The definition applies also to Weber, but only in respect of his piano music. The sonatas and the concertos are brlliant and picturesque. There is more than that in the finest scenes of “Freischutz.”

When, on the other hand, he would assign physical causes to the mystery of the creative mood, Cortot leaves us cold. We are told, for instance, that when Beethoven wrote the Appassionata he was the victim of a “nervous crisis.” He was irritated. “That this irritation is translated in the music and must be found therin is probable; that it reflects the disposition of the moment appears certain.”

That “moment” must have been singularly long if it lasted all the time Beethoven took to write the Appassionata! Who can define or discriminate between the state of exaltation that is the preface to the writing of a swift, tempestuous thing like, say, the scherzo of the ninth symphony and the equally exalted mood in which a Beethoven will write the cool, serene melody of the slow movement of the fourth? Our insight has its limitations beyond which neither Cortot nor others may go. Not Responsive Oddly enough a pianoforte composer like Schumann does not arouse the enthusiasm he might he expected to do. What Cortot tells us of him is true enough, but the general tone of his remarks is moderate in comparison with the lyrical praise bestowed elsewhere. A good deal of it concerns what Cortot considers to be the correct way of translating Schumann’s musical thought into practice. Only one sentence goes to the heart of things; “The work of Schumann is not only music, but confidential, intimate revelation of experience.” There is the secret of the fascination Schumann has exerted on generations of music-lovers, in spite of his heavy texture and his sentimentalities. We accept even the truly appalling repetitions of “Nussbaum” simply because it would seem cruel to refuse to listen to a voice so friendly and so sincese. Cortot, however, appears to assign to Schumann a position inferior to that of Liszt who “anticipated all the tonal discoveries of our time.” The protean character of activities fascinates him and imperils his critical judgment: “Liszt was a thinker, a rhapsodist, a virtuoso.” That he was a virtuoso who reigned in a kingdom of virtuosos will not be de-

nied; but the rhapsodist very frequently mistook facility for depth—especially in composing for his own instrument As for his being a thinker—that can only be accepted if the word is used in the narrowest sense. Liszt was a very impressionable artist who kept well abreast of, even anticipated, contemporary developments. He was not a thinker, as Wagner can be said to have been, who deliberately sought the relations between his own art, history and philosophy. If Wagner’s speculations became the despair of the philosopher—that is another matter which cannot be touched upon without entering deeply into controversial subjects. But Wagner had the instinct of logical deduction, the gift of ordering thought and ideas according to system, which Liszt lacked, except, of course, as these apply to the technique of music. To say that Liszt’s piano sonata is a “prodigious compromise between the dramatic style of Wagner and the psychological style of the later Beethoven sonatas” is to close one’s eyes to its deficiencies. The sonata owes something to both, and is more brilliant than either. But it never attains for a moment to the grandeur of Wagner, nor o the profound humanity of Beethoven.