So important has been the rÔle played by the pianoforte in the evolution of music that it is possible in these chapters on a pianoforte recital to give a general survey of the art, and thus prepare the reader to enjoy not only what he will hear at such a recital, but enable him to approach it with a more comprehensive knowledge than that would imply. This is one reason why I elected to lead with the chapters on the pianoforte instead of with those on the orchestra, as usually is done, because the orchestra is something “big.” In point of fact, however, the pianoforte, so far as its influence is concerned, is quite as “big,” if not, indeed, bigger than the orchestra; for often, in the evolution of music (as I pointed out in the previous chapter), this instrument, which is so sufficient in itself, has led the orchestra. In reviewing a pianoforte recital it therefore is quite possible to review many phases of musical history.

Take as an example a composition by Bach, one of the preludes and fugues from “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” with which a pianoforte recital is quite apt to open. The selection illustrates a whole epoch in music which Bach rounded off and brought alike to its climax and its close. You will be apt to find this 49 fugue rather complicated and, I fear, somewhat unintelligible, and this makes it necessary for me to point out at once that in some respects music has had a curious development. A Wagner music-drama, a Richard Strauss tone poem, seem elaborate and complicated affairs compared with a Beethoven sonata or symphony. Yet even the most advanced work of a Wagner or Strauss is neither as complicated nor as elaborate as a fugue by that past master of his art, Johann Sebastian Bach, who, although he was born in 1685 and did not live beyond the middle of the following century, was so far ahead of his age that not even to this day has he fully come into his own. The result is that the early classicists, Haydn and Mozart, who belong in point of time to a later epoch, may more readily be reckoned as “old-fashioned” than Father Bach. When at a recital you listen to a fugue by Bach and find it hard and labored—many people regard it simply as a difficult species of finger exercises—you think that is because it is so very ancient, something in the same class with Greek or Sanscrit. In point of fact it is because in some respects it is so very modern.

Were it not for the importance of preserving an orderly historical sequence in a book of this kind, and that Bach usually is found at the beginning of a recital program, it would be almost more practical, and certainly far easier, for the author to leave Bach until later. When you write of Mozart, or of Beethoven and the moderns, you can depend upon more or less familiarity with their works on the part of your readers, whereas, comparatively few laymen know much about Bach. They associate the name with all that is formal 50 and labored. Yet among my acquaintances is a young woman who was brought up in a very musical family, and who, having as a child heard her mother play the preludes and fugues of the “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” finds Bach as simple as the alphabet. But hers is a most exceptional case. The appreciation of Bach, as a rule, comes only with advanced age. My music teacher used to say to me: “You rave over Schubert and Wagner now, but when you get to be as old as I am you will go back to Father Bach.” While I cannot say that his prophecy has come true, while I still am ultra-modern in my musical predilections, my musical gods being Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Richard Strauss and, above all, Wagner, I should consider myself unfit to write this book if I failed to realize the debt modern music owes to Bach, and that the more modern the music the greater the debt.

Bach in Modern Music.

One of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of the art—and a generalization like this is as much in place in discussing pianoforte music as elsewhere, because the instrument has had so much to do with the evolution of music—is the gap between Bach and modern music. While the following must not be taken too literally, it is true in general that Bach had little or no influence on the age that immediately came after him, the classical age of music, that age which we sum up in the names of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the age of the sonata and the symphony. The three masters mentioned probably would have developed and 51 composed much as they did had Bach never lived. But when a more modern composer, a romanticist like Wagner, wanted to enrich the means of musical expression handed down to him from the classical period, he reached back to Bach and combined Bach’s teeming counterpoint with the harmonic system which had been inherited from Beethoven. To understand just what this means, to appreciate the influence Bach has had upon modern music and why he had little or none on the classical composers, it is necessary for the reader to have at least a reasonably clear conception of what that counterpoint is and wherein it differs from harmony; for with Bach counterpoint reached its climax, and all the possibilities of the style having been exhausted by him, music of necessity took a turn in another direction under the classicists and developed harmonically instead of contrapuntally; so that it can be said that modern music derives its counterpoint from Bach, its harmony from Beethoven, and its combination of the two systems from Wagner.

There is another reason why the meaning of counterpoint should be explained and the difference between counterpoint and harmony be made clear to the reader now. Nearly all the early music, the music that preceded Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and that sometimes is to be found on recital programs, is contrapuntal—written in counterpoint. As I have said before, it would be much easier to start with the sonata form, with harmony instead of counterpoint, for of the two harmony is the simpler. But we must “face the music”—the music of the old contrapuntal composers—and 52 the best way to do this is to explain what harmony and counterpoint are and wherein they differ.

Harmony and Counterpoint.

A melody or theme is a rational progression of single tones. Here is the melody or theme with which Beethoven begins the familiar “Moonlight Sonata”:

It is a melody, but it does not constitute harmony, for harmony is the rational combination of several tones, as distinguished from the rational progression of single tones which constitute melody. But when Beethoven adds an accompaniment to his theme and it becomes:

the passage also becomes harmony, since it is an example of the rational combination of several tones. As has often been pointed out in books on music, and probably often will have to be pointed out again, because as a mistake it is to be classed with the hardy perennials, melody is not harmony, but only a part of it. When, however, a composer conceives a theme or melody he usually does so with the purpose of combining it with an accompaniment that shall support it and throw it into bold and striking relief. Composers of the contrapuntal school, on the other hand, conceived a theme, not for the purpose of supporting it with an accompaniment, but in order to combine it with another or with several other equally important themes. That, in a general way, is the difference between harmony and counterpoint.

In harmony, then, or, more strictly speaking, in music composed according to the harmonic system, of which the “Moonlight Sonata” is a good example, the theme, the melody, stands out from the accompaniment, which is subordinate. Counterpoint, on the other hand, rests on the combination of several themes, each of equal importance. This is the reason why, when there is a fugue or other complicated contrapuntal work on the program of a pianoforte recital, the average listener is apt to find it dry and uninteresting. His ear readily can distinguish the themes of a sonata, which usually are heard one at a time and stand out clearly from the accompaniment, but it has not been trained to unravel the themes of the fugue as they travel along together. Counterpoint, the term being derived from the Latin contra punctum, which means point against point or 54 note against note, when complicated, as in a fugue, is about the most elaborate kind of music there is, and a person who is unable to grasp a fugue may console himself with the thought that, excepting for the elect, it is a pretty stiff dose to swallow at the very beginning of a recital.

There are, however, simpler pieces of counterpoint than a fugue. Sometimes, as in the charming little “Gavotte” by Padre Martini, which now and then figures among the lighter numbers on the programs of historical recitals, the contrapuntist combines a theme with itself, or, rather, “imitates” it, which is a simple form of the canon. Another form of canon is the round of which “Three Blind Mice” is a familiar example. How many people, when singing this, have realized that they were being initiated into that mysterious thing known as counterpoint? A comparatively simple form of counterpoint is well illustrated by a dapper little piece in Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” in which the spirited theme given out by the right hand answers itself a bar later in the left, an “imitation” which crops out again and again in the piece and gives it somewhat the character of a canon.

For any one who wishes to become acquainted with 55 Bach there is nothing better than these “Two-Part Inventions,” especially the fascinating little piece from which I have just quoted, compact, buoyant and gay, even “pert,” as I once heard a young girl characterize it; a perfect example of old Father Bach in moments of relaxation when he has laid aside his periwig and is amusing himself at his clavichord.

What a Fugue Is.

Bach’s fugues, and especially his “Well-Tempered Clavichord,” forty-eight preludes and fugues in all the keys, form the climax of contrapuntal music. Goethe once said that “the history of the world is a mighty fugue in which the voice of nation after nation becomes audible.” This is a freely poetic definition of that highly complicated musical form, the fugue. Let me attempt to illustrate it in a different way.

Imagine that a composer who is an adept in counterpoint places four pianists at different pianofortes, and that he gives a different theme to each of them, or a theme to one and modified versions of it to the others. He starts the first pianist, after a few bars nods to the second to join in with his theme, and so on successively with the other two. It might be supposed that when the second player joins in, the two themes sounding together would make discord, which would be aggravated by the addition of the third and fourth. But, instead, they have been so conceived by the contrapuntist that they sound well together as they chase and answer each other, or run counter to and 56 parallel and enter into many different combinations, sometimes flowing along smoothly, at other times surging and striving, yet always, in the case of a truly great fugue, borne along by a momentum as inexorable as the march of Fate. Of course, it must not be supposed, because I have called four pianists into action in order to emphasize how distinct are these themes, which yet, when united, are found to blend together, that several players are required for the performance of a complicated piece of counterpoint like a fugue. What is demanded of the player is entire independence of the fingers, so that he can clearly differentiate between the themes and enable the hearer to distinguish them apart, even in their most complicated combinations. An edition of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavichord” by Bernardus Boekelman prints the themes in different colors, so that they are easy to trace through all their interweaving, and is interesting to study from.

The Fugue and the Virtuoso.

In his book, “Beethoven and His Forerunners,” Daniel Gregory Mason devotes a paragraph toward dispelling the mystery regarding the fugue that prevails with the public, and points out that “the actual formal rules, despite the awe they have immemorially aroused in the popular mind, are few and simple. After the first announcement of the subject by a single voice, it is answered by a second voice, at an interval of a fifth above; then again stated by a third voice, and answered by a fourth. This process goes on until each voice has 57 had a chance to enunciate the motif, after which the conversation goes on more freely; the subject is announced in divers keys, by divers voices; episodes, in a congruous style, vary the monotony; at last the subject is emphatically asserted by the various voices in quick succession (stretto), and with some little display or grandiloquence the piece comes to an end.”

Further along in the same book Mr. Mason has a page of apostrophe to the Bach fugues. When he characterizes them as “the first great independent monuments of pure music,” and refers to their “consummate beauty of structure,” he pays them an eminently just tribute. But when he speaks of the “profundity, poignancy and variety of feeling they express,” I am inclined to quote his own qualifying sentence from the next page of his book: “It is true, nevertheless, not only that the fugue form makes the severest demands on the attention and intelligence of the listener, but also that, because of the ecclesiastical origin and polyphonic style, it is incapable of the kind of highly personal, secular expression that it was in the spirit of the seventeenth century to demand.” The same is even more true of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The progress of music toward individual freedom of expression on the part of the composer, and equally so on the part of the interpreter, has been steady, and when, through the very perfection which Bach imparted to counterpoint, it ceased to attract composers as a means of expression because he had accomplished so much there was nothing more left for them to do along the same lines, the progress I have indicated received a great lift and stimulus.

What Counterpoint Lacks.

The lack of highly personal expression in contrapuntal compositions explains why most concert-goers find them less attractive than modern music. The “D Minor Toccata and Fugue” or the “Chromatic Fantasie and Fugue” by Bach, even in the arrangements of Tausig and Liszt, on the program of a pianoforte recital, are tolerated because of the modern pieces that come later. Nine out of ten persons in the house would rather omit them. Why deny so obvious a fact, especially when it is easy enough to explain? To follow a contrapuntal composition intelligently requires a highly trained ear. Moreover, in such a work as a Bach fugue the individuality of the player is of less importance than in modern music. Yet a virtuoso’s individuality is the very thing that distinguishes him from other virtuosos and attracts the public to his concerts, while those of other players may be poorly attended. I firmly believe in personality of the virtuoso or singer or orchestral conductor, for in it lies the secret of individual interpretation, the reason why the performance of one person is fascinating or thrilling and that of another not. Modern music affords the player full scope to interpret it according to his own mood and fancy, to color it with his own personality, whereas contrapuntal music exists largely for itself alone. It is music for music’s sake, not for the sake of interpreting some mood, some feeling, or of painting in tone colors something quite outside of music. The player of counterpoint is restricted in his power of expression 59 by the very formulas of the science or art of the contrapuntist. We may marvel that Bach was able to move so freely within its restricted forms. But I think it true that it is far more interesting for a person even of only moderate proficiency as a player to work out, however awkwardly, a Bach fugue for himself on the pianoforte than to hear it played by some one else, however great; for, cheap and easy as it is to protest in high-sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.

The Mission of the Player.

We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the worshiper of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a snowball, who revels in counterpoint—the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the “composer’s intentions” and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much 60 from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.

While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making virtuosos—Paganini on the violin, Liszt on the piano. Within about the same period covered by the careers of these two there have been half a dozen or even more composers, each of whom marks an epoch in some phase of the art. “The interpretive artist,” says Henry G. Hanchett in his “Art of the Musician,” “deserves a place no whit beneath that of the composer. No two composers have influenced musical progress in America more strongly than have Anton Rubinstein by his playing, and Theodore Thomas, who was not a composer.”

Music as a Science.

But, to return to Bach and the other contrapuntists, music owes them an immense debt on the technical side. And right here, so universal are the deductions that can be drawn from the program of a pianoforte 61 recital, it should be pointed out that music differs from other arts in having for its basis a profound and complicated science, a science that concerns itself with the relations of the notes of the musical scale to each other. Upon this science are based alike the “coon song” and the Wagner music-drama. What is true of “Tristan” is true also of “Bedelia.” Each makes its draft upon the science of music; the music-drama, of course, in a far greater degree than the song. This science has its textbooks with their theorems and problems, like any other science, and theoretical musicians have produced learned and useful works on the subject which the great mass of laymen, many virtuosos, and indeed the average professional musician, may never have heard of, let alone have read. For a person not intuitively predisposed toward the subject would find the science of music as difficult to master as integral calculus; nor, in order to appreciate music, or even to interpret it, is it necessary to be versed in this science. A virtuoso can play a chord of the ninth, the listener can be thrilled by the virtuoso’s playing of the chord of the ninth, without either of them knowing that there is such a thing as the chord of the ninth.

Science versus Feeling.

In fact, the person who is so well versed in the science of music that he can mentally analyze a composition while listening to it is apt to be so absorbed in the mere process of technical analysis that he misses its esthetic, its emotional significance. Thus a person may 62 be very musical without being musical at all. He may have profound knowledge of music as a science and remain untouched by music as an art, just as a physicist may be an authority on the laws of light and color, yet stand unmoved before a great painting. With some people music is all science, with others all art, and I think the latter have the better of it. A musical genius is equipped both ways. The great composer employs the science of music as an aid in giving expression to his creative impulse. He makes science of service to the cause of art. Otherwise, while he might produce something that was absolutely correct, it would make no artistic appeal whatsoever. Thousands of symphonies have been composed, performed and forgotten. They were “well made,” constructed with scientific accuracy from beginning to end, but had no value as art; and music is a profound science applied to the production of a great art.

The composer, then, masters the science of music and bends it to his genius. If he is a great genius, he soon will discover that certain rules which his predecessors regarded as hard and fast, as inviolable, can be violated with impunity. He will discover new tone combinations, and thus enrich the science and make it serve the purposes of the art with greater efficiency than before he came upon the scene. And always the composers who have grown gray under the old system, the system upon which the new genius is grafting his new ideas, and the theorists and critics, who are slaves of tradition, will throw up their hands in horror and cry out that he is despoiling the art and robbing it of all that is sacred and beautiful, whereas he is adding to its scope 63 and potency. Did not even so broad-minded a composer as Schumann say, “The trouble with Wagner is that he is not a musician”? So far was Wagner ahead of his time! While the great composer nearly always begins where his predecessors left off, he is sure to outstrip them later on. Even so rugged a genius as Beethoven is somewhat under Mozart’s influence in his first works, and Wagner’s “Rienzi” is distinctly Meyerbeerian. But genius soon learns to soar with its own wings and to look down with indifference upon the little men who are discharging their shafts of envy, malice and ignorance.

That “Ear for Music.”

And while I am on the subject of the scientific musician versus the music lover, the pedant versus the innovator, I might as well refer to those people who have in a remarkable degree what is popularly known as “an ear for music,” and who are able to remember and to play “by ear” anything they hear played or sung, even if it is for the first time. This ear for music, again, is something quite different from scientific knowledge of music or from the emotional sensitiveness which makes the music-lover. It is a purely physical endowment, and may—in fact, usually does—exist without a corresponding degree of real feeling for music. It is, of course, a highly valuable adjunct to a genuine musical genius like a Mozart or a Schubert and to a genuine virtuoso. It is related of Von BÜlow that his ear for music and his memory were so prodigious that once, while traveling in the cars, he read over the 64 printed pages of a new composition, and on arriving at his destination, played it, from memory, at his concert. William Mason, who studied with Liszt, witnessed his master perform a similar feat. The average untrained person with a musical ear, however, instead of being a genius, is apt to become a nuisance, playing all kinds of cheap music in and out of season—a sort of peripatetic pianola, without the advantage of being under control. Such persons, moreover, usually are born without a soft pedal.

Bach and the Weather Bureau.

This digression, which I have made in order to discuss the difference between music as a science and music as an art, a distinction which, I have pointed out, often is so marked that a person may be thoroughly equipped on the scientific side of music without being sensitive to its beauty as an art, seemed to me necessary at this stage. I am reminded by it of the distinction which Edmund Clarence Stedman, in his “Nature and Elements of Poetry,” so wittily draws between the indications of a storm as described by a poet and by the official prognostications of the Weather Bureau. Mr. Stedman quotes two stanzas:

“When descends on the Atlantic the gigantic Storm-wind of the Equinox, Landward in his wrath he scourges the toiling surges, Laden with seaweed from the rocks.”

And this stanza by a later balladist:

“The East Wind gathered, all unknown, A thick sea-cloud his course before; He left by night the frozen zone, And smote the cliffs of Labrador; He lashed the coasts on either hand, And betwixt the Cape and Newfoundland, Into the bay his armies pour.”

All this impersonation and fancy is translated by the Weather Bureau into something like the following:

“An area of extreme low pressure is rapidly moving up the Atlantic Coast, with wind and rain. Storm-center now off Charleston, S. C. Wind N. E.; velocity, 54. Barometer, 29.6. The disturbance will reach New York on Wednesday, and proceed eastward to the Banks and Bay of St. Lawrence. Danger signals ordered for all North Atlantic ports.”

Far be it from me to imply that contrapuntal music in general or Bach in particular represents the Weather Bureau. None the less is it true that Bach appeals more strongly to the scientific musician than to the music-lover who seeks in music a secondary meaning—love, passion, grief; the mood awakened by the contemplation of a forest landscape with its murmuring foliage, a boundless prairie, or the unquiet sea.

The technical indebtedness of modern music to Bach is so immense, and the artistic probity of the man himself was so wonderful, for he worked calmly on, in spite of what was worse than opposition—neglect—that I think the tendency on the part of Bach enthusiasts, 66 while not overrating the importance of the influence he has had during the past fifty years or more, is to underrate others as compared with him. When critics declare that one virtuoso or another is not a great Bach player, are they not ignoring what is a simple fact—that no player can make the same appeal through Bach that it is possible for him to make through modern music, and that, as a rule, when a virtuoso, however good a musician he may be, places Bach on his program, he does so not from predilection, but as a tribute to one of the greatest names in musical history? It seems to me that the extreme Bach enthusiasts can be divided into two classes—musicians who are able to appreciate what he did for music on its technical side, and people who want to create the impression that they know more than they really do.

The Bacon, Not the Shakespeare, of Music.

Bach’s greatest importance to music lies in his having treated it in the abstract and for itself alone, so that when he penned a work he did this not to bring home to the listener the significance of a certain mood or situation, but from pure delight in following out a musical problem to its most extreme development. Algebra makes mighty interesting study, but furnishes rather a poor subject for dramatic reading. This simile must, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, and merely as illustrating in a general way my contention that Bach’s great service to music was technical and intellectual. He was the Bacon, not the Shakespeare, 67 of music, and the contrapuntal structure that he reared is to the art what the Baconian theorem is to logic. We can imagine the roamer in the field of higher mathematics suddenly becoming excited as he sees the end of the path leading to the solution of some complicated problem in full view. Thus there may be moments when even the cube root becomes emotional, the logarithmic theory a dissipation, and differential calculus an orgy. So, too, Bach put an enthusiasm into his work that often threatens to sweep the student off his intellectuals and make him regard a fugue as a scientifically constructed fairyland. Moreover, there are Bach pieces in which the counterpoint supports the purest kind of melody, like the air for the G string which Thomas arranged for his orchestra with all the strings, save the double basses, in unison, and played with an effect that never failed to secure a repeat and sometimes a double encore.

What Wagner Learned from Bach.

If we bear in mind that counterpoint is the artistic combination of several themes, each of equal or nearly equal importance, and that Bach was the greatest master of the contrapuntal school and forms its climax, we can, with a little thought, appreciate what his service has been to modern music. When Wagner devised his system of leading motives it was not for the purpose of employing them singly, like labels tacked onto each character, thing or symbol in the drama, but of combining them, welding them together, when occasion arose, in order to give musical significance and expression to each and every dramatic situation as the 68 story unfolded itself. A shining example of this is found in that wonderful last scene of “Die WalkÜre,” the so-called Magic Fire Scene. Wotan has said farewell to BrÜnnhilde; has thrown her into a profound slumber upon the rock; has surrounded her with a circle of magic flame which none but a hero may penetrate to awaken and win her. How is this scene treated in the score? In the higher register of the orchestra crackles and sparkles the Magic Fire Motive, the Slumber Motive gently rising and falling with the flames; while the superb Siegfried Motive (signifying that the yet unborn Siegfried is the hero destined to break through the fiery circle) resounds in the brass, and there also is a suggestion of the tender strains with which Wotan bade BrÜnnhilde farewell. The welding together of these four motives into one glorious whole of the highest dramatic significance is Wagnerian counterpoint—science employed in the service of art and with thrilling effect. Another passage from Wagner, the closing episode in the “Meistersinger” Vorspiel, often is quoted to show Wagner’s skill in the use of counterpoint, although he employs it so spontaneously that few people stop to consider how scientific his musical structure is. W. J. Henderson, in his capital book, “The Orchestra and Orchestral Music,” relates that on one occasion a professional musician was engaged in a discussion of Wagner in the corridor of the Metropolitan Opera House, while inside the orchestra was playing this “Meistersinger” Vorspiel.

“It is a pity,” said this wise man, in a condescending manner, “but Wagner knows absolutely nothing about counterpoint.”

At that very instant the orchestra was singing five different melodies at once; and, as Anton Seidl was the conductor, they were all audible.

Wagner scores, in fact, teem with counterpoint, but counterpoint that palpitates, that thrills with emotion. Note that Mr. Henderson speaks of melodies. Wagner’s leading motives are melodies, sometimes very brief, but always expressive, and not, like the themes of the old contrapuntists, conceived mainly for the sake of being combined scientifically with other themes equally adaptable to that purpose. Counterpoint may be, and usually is, something very dry and formal. But from the crucible of the master magician, Richard Wagner, it flows a glowing, throbbing, pulsating stream of most precious metal.

The Language of an Epoch.

In the difference between the counterpoint of Bach and the counterpoint of Wagner lies the difference between two epochs separated by a long period of time. With Bach counterpoint was everything; with Wagner merely an incident. It will help us to a better understanding of music if we bear in mind that the two great composers of each epoch spoke in the music of that epoch. Thus Bach spoke in the language of counterpoint. His themes, however greatly they may vary among themselves, all bear the stamp of motives devised for the purpose of entering into formal combinations and of being developed according to the stringent rules of counterpoint. Beethoven’s are more individual, more 70 expressive of moods and emotions. Yet about them, too, there is something formal. They, too, are devised to be treated according to certain rules—to be molded into sonatas. But with Wagner we feel that music has thrown off the shackles of arbitrary form, of dry rule and rote. His motives suggest absolute freedom of expression and development, through previously undreamed-of wealth of harmony and contrapuntal combinations which are mere incidents, not the chief purpose of their being. Each represents some person, impulse or symbol in a drama; represents them with such eloquence and power that, once we know for what they stand, we need but hear them again or recall them to memory to have the corresponding episode in the music-drama in which they occur brought vividly before our eyes. Bach’s language was the language of the fugue; Beethoven’s the language of the sonata. Fugue and sonata are musical forms. Wagner spoke the language of no form. His language is that of the free, plastic, unfettered leading motive—the language of liberated music, of which he himself was the liberator!

Whether Wagner would have devised his system of leading motives without the wonderful structure of counterpoint left by Bach; whether Bach’s counterpoint, his combination of themes, suggested the system of leading motives to the greatest master of them all, we probably never shall know. The system, in its completeness, doubtless is Wagner’s own; but when he came to put it into practical effect he found the rich heritage left by Bach ready to hand. One of Wagner’s instructors in musical theory, and the one from whose teaching he himself declares he learned most, was Theodor 71 Weinlig, one of Bach’s successors as Cantor of the Thomasschule at Leipsic. Wagner quotes him as having said: “You may never find it necessary to compose a fugue, but the ability to do it often may stand you in good stead.” And the Cantor set him exercises in all varieties of counterpoint. There thus is presented the phenomenon of a composer who for nearly a century after his death had little or no influence on the course of music, suddenly becoming a potent force in its most modern development.

Bach in the Recital Hall.

Bach is so supreme in his own line that contrapuntal music, so far as the pianoforte is concerned, may be dismissed with him. HÄndel, too, it is true, was a master of the contrapuntal school, but he belongs to the chapter on oratorio. Bach’s pianoforte works in smaller form are the “Two-Part Inventions” already mentioned; the “Three-Part Inventions,” which go a step farther in contrapuntal treatment, and the “Partitas,” the six “French Suites” and the six “English Suites.”

These partitas and suites are the most graceful and charming efflorescence of the contrapuntal school, and much could be accomplished toward making Bach a popular composer if they figured more frequently on recital programs. They are made up of the dance forms of the day—allemandes, courants, bourrÉes, sarabandes, minuets, gavottes, gigues, with airs thrown in for good measure; the partitas and English suites furnished with more elaborate introductions, while the French suites begin with allemandes. Cheerful and even frisky as 72 some of the dance pieces in these compositions are, it must not be supposed that they were intended to be danced to when contrapuntally treated—no more than Chopin intended that people should glide through a ballroom to the music of his waltzes.

Besides “sonatas” for pianoforte with one or more other instruments, among them the six “Sonatas for Pianoforte and Violin” (the term sonata as employed here must not be confused with the classical sonata form as developed by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven), Bach composed concertos for from one to four pianofortes. Of these latter the one best known in this country is the so-called “Triple Concerto,” for three pianofortes with accompaniment of string quartet, which can at will be increased to a string orchestra. In 1873, during Rubinstein’s tour, I heard it played in New York, under Theodore Thomas’s direction, by Rubinstein, William Mason and Sebastian Bach Mills, and three years later by Mme. Annette Essipoff, Mr. Mason and Mr. Boscovitz. Mason, when he was studying under Liszt in Weimar in 1854, had performed it with two fellow-pupils, and Liszt had been very particular in regard to the manner in which they played the many embellishments (agrÉments) which were used in Bach’s time. Later, Mason found that whenever three pianists came together for the purpose of playing this concerto they were certain to disagree regarding “the agreements,” and usually wasted much time in discussing them, especially the mordent.

Rubinstein and the “Triple Concerto.”

Accordingly, when Mason played the “Triple Concerto” with Rubinstein and Mills, he came to the rehearsal armed with a book by Friedrich Wilhelm Marburg, published in Berlin in 1765, and giving written examples of all the agrÉments. “I told Rubinstein about my ancient authority,” says Mr. Mason in his entertaining “Memories of a Musical Life,” “adding that we should be spared the tediousness of a discussion as to the manner of playing.

“‘Let me see the old book,’ said Rubinstein. Running over the leaves he came to the illustrations of the mordent. The moment his eyes fell upon them he exclaimed: ‘All wrong; here is the way I play it!’” And that ended the usefulness of “the old book” for that particular occasion, the other two pianists adopting, without comment, Rubinstein’s method, which Mr. Mason intimates was incorrect.

When, at the rehearsal with Essipoff, the mordent came up for discussion she exclaimed: “‘I cannot play these things; show me how they are done.’ After repeated trials, however,” records Mr. Mason, “she failed to get the knack of playing them, as indeed so many pianists do; so at the rehearsal she omitted them and left their performance to Boscovitz and me.”

“The Well-Tempered Clavichord.”

Bach’s monumental work for pianoforte, however, is “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” consisting of forty-eight preludes and fugues in all keys. I find much prevalent ignorance among amateurs regarding the 74 meaning of “well-tempered” as used in this title. I have heard people explain it by saying that when a pianist had mastered the book he was “tempered” like steel and ready for any difficulties that other music might present! I even have heard a rotund and affable person say that “The Well-Tempered Clavichord” was so entitled because when you listened to its preludes and fugues it smoothed out your temper and made you feel good-natured! In point of fact, the word is difficult to explain in untechnical language. It relates, however, to Bach’s method of tuning his clavichord—another boon which he conferred upon music. In general, the system may be explained by the statement that certain tone intervals, which theoretically are pure, practically result in harmonic discrepancies, which Bach’s “tempered” system corrected. In other words, slight and practically imperceptible inaccuracies are introduced in the tuning in order to counterbalance the greater faults which result when tuning is absolutely correct from a theoretical point of view; just as, in navigating the high northern waters, you are obliged to make allowance for variations of the compass. The system was not actually the invention of Bach, but he did so much to promote its adoption that it is associated with his name. Before it was adopted it was impossible to employ all the major and minor keys on clavichords and harpsichords, and on the pianofortes, just beginning to come into use. It became possible under the tempered system of tuning, and was illustrated by Bach in “The Well-Tempered Clavichord,” each major and minor key being represented by a prelude and fugue.

Besides the system of tuning in “equal temperament,” Bach modernized the technique of fingering by introducing the freer and more frequent employment of the hitherto neglected thumb and little finger. The services of this great man to music, therefore, were threefold. He left us his teeming counterpoint, upon which modern music draws so freely; he promoted the system of tuning in equal temperament; and he laid the foundation of modern pianoforte technique, and so of modern virtuosity.

A King’s Tribute to Bach.

Besides being a great composer, Bach’s traits as a man were most admirable. He was uncompromising in his convictions, sturdy, honest and upright. His fixedness of purpose is shown by an anecdote of his boyhood. In his tenth year he lost his parents and went to live with an elder brother, who was so jealous of his superior talents that he refused him the loan of a manuscript volume of music by composers of the day. Obtaining possession of it without his brother’s knowledge, Bach secretly copied it at night by moonlight, the task covering something like six months. His reward was to have it taken away by his brother, who accidentally discovered him playing from it. Fortunately, this brother died soon afterward, and Bach recovered his treasure.

While it is true that Bach remained unappreciated by the great mass of his contemporaries, there were exceptions, a notable one being the music-loving king, 76 Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose service the composer’s second son, Philipp Emanuel Bach, entered in 1746. At the king’s earnest urging, Philipp Emanuel induced his father to visit Potsdam the following year. The king, who had arranged a concert at the palace, was about to begin playing on the flute, when an officer entered and handed him a list of the strangers who had arrived at Potsdam. Glancing over it, Frederick discovered Bach’s name. “Gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “old Bach is here!” And nothing would do save that the master must be brought immediately into the royal presence, before he even had time to doff his traveling clothes.

The king had purchased several of the pianofortes recently constructed by Gottfried Silbermann and had them distributed throughout the palace. Bach and the assemblage went from room to room, the composer playing and improvising on the different instruments. Finally he asked the king to set him a fugue theme, and on this he extemporized in such masterly fashion that all who heard him, the king included, broke out into rounds of applause. On his return to Leipsic, Bach dedicated to Frederick the Great a work which he entitled “The Musical Sacrifice” (or offering), which he based upon the fugue theme the king had given him.

No other instance of musical heredity is comparable with that afforded by the Bach family. Dr. Theodore Baker, in his “Biographical Dictionary of Musicians,” gives a list of no less than twenty Bachs, all of the same line, whom he deems worthy of mention, and who covered a period ranging from 1604 to 1845, 77 when the great Bach’s grandson and last male descendant, Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, died in Berlin. Thus for two hundred and forty-one years the Bach family was professionally active in music.

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