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Music-Study in Germany, a non-fiction book by Amy Fay |
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With Liszt - Chapter 23 |
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_ WITH LISZT CHAPTER XXIII Kullak as a Teacher. The Four Great Virtuosi, Clara Schumann, Rubinstein, Von Bülow, and Tausig.
I've been in a sort of mental apathy since I got back--the result, I suppose, of so much artistic excitement all summer. Of course I am practicing very hard, and I am taking private lessons of Kullak again. I played him my Rubinstein concerto two weeks ago and told him I wanted to play it in a concert. He says I need more power in it in many places, and by practicing it every day I hope I shall at last work up to it, as I've conquered the technical difficulties in it. There were two pages in it I thought I never could master. It is the same with all concertos. They are fearfully difficult things to play, and far more difficult, I think, than solos are, because the effort is so sustained. They are to me the most interesting things to listen to of all, and I can't imagine how you can think that piano and orchestra are "not made to go together." However, I never myself appreciated concertos until I came to Germany. Kullak is the most awfully discouraging teacher that can be imagined. When you play to him, it is like looking at your skin through a magnifying glass. All your faults seem to start out and glare at you. I don't think, though, that I ever fairly do myself justice when I play to him, because he has a sort of benumbing effect on me, and I feel to him something the way that Owen did to old Peter in Hawthorne's story of "The Artist of the Beautiful." I can't help acknowledging the truth of his observations even when I am wincing under them, and I yet feel at the same time that he does not wholly get at the soul of the thing. Kullak is so pedantic! He never overlooks a technical imperfection, and he ties you down to the technique so that you never can give rein to your imagination. He sits at the other piano, and just as you are rushing off he will strike in himself and say, "Don't hurry, Fräulein," or something like that, and then you begin to think about holding back your fingers and playing every note even, etc. Now I never expect to get that perfection of technique that all these artists have who have been training throughout their childhood while their hand was forming. Kullak's own technique is magnificent, but now that I've graduated, as it were, he ought to let me play my own way, and not expect me to play as he does, and then I could produce my own effects. That is just the difference between him and Liszt. Liszt's grand principle is, to leave you your freedom, and when you play to him, you feel like a Pegasus caracoling about in the air. When you play to Kullak, you feel as if your wings were suddenly clipped, and as if you were put into harness to draw an express wagon! However, I don't think it would be well to go to Liszt without having been through such a training first, for you want to know what you are about when you study with him. You must have a good solid basis upon which to raise his airy super-structures. Kullak I regard as the basis. You ask me in your letter to write you a comparison--a summing up--between Clara Schumann, Bülow, Tausig and Rubinstein, but I don't find it very easy to do, as they are all so different. Clara Schumann is entirely a classic player. Beethoven's sonatas, and Bach, too, she plays splendidly; but she doesn't seem to me to have any finesse, or much poetry in her playing. There's nothing subtle in her conception. She has a great deal of fire, and her whole style is grand, finished, perfectly rounded off, solid and satisfactory--what the Germans call gediegen. She is a healthy artist to listen to, but there is nothing of the analytic, no Balzac or Hawthorne about her. Beethoven's Variations in C minor are, perhaps, the best performance I ever heard from her, and they are immensely difficult, too; I thought she did them better than Bülow, in spite of Bülow's being such a great Beethovenite. I think she repeats the same pieces a good deal, possibly because she finds the modern fashion of playing everything without notes very trying. I've even heard that she cries over the necessity of doing it; and certainly it is a foolish thing to make a point of, with so very great an artist as Clara Schumann.--If people could only be allowed to have their own individuality! Bülow's playing is more many-sided, and is chiefly distinguished by its great vigor; there is no end to his nervous energy, and the more he plays, the more the interest increases. He is my favourite of the four. But he plays Chopin just as well as he does Beethoven, and Schumann, too. Altogether he is a superlative pianist, though by no means unerring in his performance. I've heard him get dreadfully mixed up. I think he trusts too much to his memory, and that he does not prepare sufficiently. He plays everything by heart, and such programmes! He always hits the nail plump on the head, and such a grasp as he has! His chords take firm hold of you. For instance, in the beginning of the two last movements of the Moonlight Sonata, you should hear him run up that arpeggio in the right hand so lightly and pianissimo, every note so delicately articulated, and then crash-smash on those two chords on the top! And when he plays Bach's gavottes, gigues, etc., in the English Suites, a laughing, roguish look comes over his face, and he puts the most indescribable drollery and originality into them. You see that "he sees the point" so well, and that makes you see it, too. Yes, it is good fun to hear Bülow do these things.--Perhaps the best summing up of his peculiar greatness would be to say that he impresses you as using the instrument only to express ideas. With him you forget all about the piano, and are absorbed only in the thought or the passion of the piece. Rubinstein you've heard. Most people put him next to Liszt. Your finding him cold surprised me, for if there is a thing he is celebrated here for, it is the fire and passion of his playing, and for his imagination and spontaneity. I think that Tausig, Bülow, and Clara Schumann, all three, have it all cut and dried beforehand, how they are going to play a piece, but Rubinstein creates at the instant. He plays without plan. Probably the afternoon you heard him he did not feel in the mood, and so was not at his best. As a composer he far outranks the other three. Tausig resembled Liszt more in that subtlety which Liszt has, and consequently he was a better Chopin player than anybody else except Liszt. I never shall forget his playing of Chopin's great Ballade in G minor the very first time I heard him in concert. It is a divine composition, and his rendering of it was not only all warmth and fervour; it was also so wonderfully poetic that it fairly cast a spell upon the audience, and a minute or two went by before they could begin to applaud. It was like a dream of beauty suspended in the air before you--floating there--and you didn't want to disturb it. Tausig had an intense love for Chopin, and always wished he could have known him. I think that he had more virtuosity, and yet more delicacy of feeling, than either Rubinstein or Bülow. His finish, perfection, and above all his touch, were above anything. But, except in Chopin, he was cold, at least in the concert room. In the conservatory he seemed to be a very passionate player; but, somehow, in public that was not the case. Unfortunately, I had studied so little at that time, that I don't feel as if I were competent to judge him. He was Liszt's favourite, and Liszt said, "He will be the inheritor of my playing;" but I doubt if this would have been, for the winter before Tausig died, Kullak remarked to me that his playing became more and more "dry" every year, probably on account of his morbid aversion to "Spectakel," as he called it; whereas Liszt gives the reins to the emotions always. When I was in Weimar I heard a great deal about Tausig's escapades when he was studying there as a boy. They say he was awfully wild and reckless at that time, and Liszt paid his debts over and over again. Sometimes in aristocratic parties, when Liszt did not feel like playing himself, he would tell Tausig to play, and perhaps Tausig would not feel like it, either. He had the most enormous strength in his fingers, though his hands were small, and he would go to the piano and pretend he was going to play, and strike the first chords with such a crash that three or four strings would snap almost immediately, and then, of course, the piano was used up for the evening! Tausig's father once procured him a splendid grand piano from Leipsic, and shortly after, Tausig whittled off the corners of all the keys, so as to make them more difficult to strike, and his father had to pay a large sum to have them repaired. Another time he was presented with a set of chess-men, and the next day some one on visiting him observed the pieces all lying about the floor. "Why, Tausig, what has happened to your chess-men?" "Oh, I wanted to see if they were easily broken, so I knocked up the board." He seemed to be possessed with a spirit of destruction. Gottschal told me that one time when Tausig was "hard up" for money, he sold the score of Liszt's Faust for five thalers to a servant, along with a great pile of his own notes. The servant disposed of them to some waste-paper man, and Gottschal, accidentally hearing of it, went to the man and purchased them. Then he went to Liszt to tell him that he had the score. As it happened the publisher had written for it that very day and Liszt was turning the house upside down, looking for it everywhere. At that time he was living in an immense house on a hill here, that they call the Altenburg. Liszt occupied the first floor, a princely friend the second, and the top story was one grand ball-room in which were generally nine grand pianos standing. They used to give the most magnificent entertainments, and Liszt spent thirty thousand thalers a year. He lived like a prince in those days--very different from his present simplicity. Well, he was in an awful state of mind because his score was nowhere to be found. "A whole year's labor lost!" he cried, and he was in such a rage, that when Gottschal asked him for the third time what he was looking for, he turned and stamped his foot at him and said, "You confounded fellow, can't you leave me in peace, and not torment me with your stupid questions?" Gottschal knew perfectly well what was wanting, but he wished to have a little fun out of the matter. At last he took pity on Liszt, and said, "Herr Doctor, I know what you've lost. It is the score to your Faust." "Oh," said Liszt, changing his tone immediately, "do you know anything of it?" "Of course I do," said Gottschal, and proceeded to unfold Master Tausig's performance, and how he had rescued the precious music. Liszt was transported with joy that it was found, and called up-stairs, "Carolina, Carolina, we're saved! Gottschal has rescued us;" and then Gottschal said that Liszt embraced him in his transport, and could not say or do enough to make up for his having been so rude to him. Well, you would have supposed that it was now all up with Master Tausig; but not at all. A few days afterward was Tausig's birthday, and Carolina took Gottschal aside, and begged him to drop the subject of the note stealing, for Liszt doted so on his Carl that he wished to forget it. Sure enough, Liszt kissed Carl and congratulated him on his birthday, and consoled himself with his same old observation, "You'll either turn out a great blockhead, my little Carl, or a great master." Tausig had a great ambition to be a composer, and in his early youth he published a number of compositions. Later on he became intensely critical of his own work, and finally bought up all the copies he could lay hands on and burnt them! This is entirely characteristic of his sense of perfection, which was extreme, and may serve as an example to young composers who are ambitious of saying something in music, when very often they have nothing to say! Indeed, I am often amazed at the temerity with which men will rush into print, quite oblivious of the fact that it requires enormous talent to produce even a short piece of music that is worth anything. Only a genius can do it. Tausig, in my opinion, did possess exceptional genius in composition, though he left but few works behind him to attest it. Prominent among these are his unique arrangements of three of Strauss's Waltzes. He had a passion for philosophy, and was deeply read in Kant and Hegel. These "arrangements" betray his metaphysical and tentative turn, and could only have been the product of the highest mental force and culture. Calling the waltz itself the warp of the composition, then through its simple threads we find darting backwards and forwards a subtle, complicated and tragic mind, an exquisitely refined and delicate sentiment, and a piquante, aerial fancy, until finally is wrought a brilliant and bewildering transcription--transfiguration rather--of endless fascination and tantalizing beauty, which no one but a virtuoso can play and no one but a connoisseur can comprehend. In a peculiar manner his music leaves a stamp upon the heart, and to those who can appreciate it, Tausig, as a composer, is a deep and irreparable loss.--If he had not original ideas of his own, he certainly possessed the power of putting an entirely new face on those of others. _ |
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