MUSIC

Chopin, Schumann, Liszt & the Piano

Meeting chaired by Rex Valentine

Dr Robert Blackburn

BRLSI Member & former Principal Lecturer in Music, & Asst Dean,

Faculty of Art & Music, Bath Spa University

23 November 2004

This was a talk on the three major, very different pianist composers of the early Romantic era in Europe. It was extensively illustrated on a new upright Yamaha pianoforte, specially hired by the BRLSI for this session. It was thus the first such occasion for the society.

The speaker sketched the Polish, German and Hungarian backgrounds of these three celebrated figures, all household names, setting out the reasons for the immense significance of the piano in the development of European music between c 1800 and c 1850, both domestically and in the salon and concert-hall. The greater part of the output of all three composers, which later became part of the standard repertoire, dates from the 1830s and 1840s. As is generally known, Chopin died prematurely in 1849 from tuberculosis, aged only 39, while Schumann died at 46 in 1856, following long-heralded mental collapse. Only Liszt, who possessed an exceptional constitution, lived into old age, dying at 75 in 1886, even outliving Wagner (his eventual son-in-law) by over three years.

Chopin and Liszt, in particular, became renowned as models for contrasting pianistic ‘types’. Chopin was reflective, poetic and ultra-sensitive, while Liszt was the great master of pure keyboard virtuosity, untrammeled technical mastery, and Mephistophelean bravura. Or so tradition has it. Liszt is usually bracketed in mesmeric (even satanic) effect with the Italian violinist-composer Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840) who strictly speaking belonged to an older generation. In fact, of course, the two types overlapped very considerably in practice. Chopin’s music is far more masculine than some people think, and requires great physical strength and control in performance. Equally, much of Liszt’s piano music is intensely poetic, meditative and inward looking. All three composers produced their music naturally by way of spontaneous improvisation at the keyboard, working at the ‘composed’ version with varying degrees of difficulty and stress. There was a constant tendency to revision and correction, which applied to both large and small-scale formal designs.

Three representative pieces were played by way of introduction. They were:

The contrast in melodic and harmonic styles was made apparent through the different personalities and approaches of the three great masters. This was evident despite common factors such as key-relationships and the use of standard keyboard figurations, such as scalic runs in either hand, left or right-hand arpeggios or broken chords, ornamentation, decorative patters, or rhythmic foregrounding in one hand or the other.

All three composers tackled larger forms, notably the piano sonata, but their works bearing the title ‘sonata’ tended towards idiosyncrasy, even the problematic, as was inevitable in the post-Beethoven era when the classical ‘sonata-principle’ was fast fading. Schumann’s in U minor (G minor) is the only one of three by him at all regularly played. Chopin’s very early student work, Op 4, is (perhaps wisely) forgotten, but his two mature sonatas, in B flat minor Op 35 (containing the famous Funeral March (Marcia Funebre) and in B minor Op 58 are staples of the modem standard repertoire. Liszt’s single contribution to the genre, the one-movement (three-section) B minor Sonata of 1852, was widely misunderstood and disliked in its day. However, throughout the modem era, it has been played by virtuosi everywhere, and is nowadays regarded as one of the great canonic piano compositions of the 19th century.

Chopin avoided the pictorial, the narrative or the overtly programmatic in all his works. This is the case even where, as in the Nocturnes or in one-off pieces such as the Barcarole, Op 60 or the Berceuse, Op S7, a particular mood or generalised atmosphere was being evoked. His works were often heavily based on dance-forms (waltz, mazurka, polonaise) or were single shorter pieces of great virtuosity designed to highlight a particular technical feature or problem (the 24 Studies, Op 10 & 25) or the very short salon pieces which Chopin called Preludes, following J S Bach. The 24 Preludes in all the major and minor keys, Op 28 (1836-9) are one of the most influential groups of pieces of the whole period, and remain so to this day. Chopin’s other large -scale multi-section works, the four Scherzi and the four Ballades have, again, remained unwavering cornerstones of the repertoire.

Schumann and Liszt both leaned towards the illustrative and pictorial in their music. Their imaginations were much more fired by literature than was Chopin’s, at least in terms of its effect on the music. Unlike Chopin, both became important composers of orchestral music and choral works, as well as songs or Lieder for solo voice and piano accompaniment. Schumann’s 200 songs, in particular, are ranked in greatness alongside the magnificent solo piano works of the 1830s, while his extensive chamber music includes many beautiful and important pieces, such as the three string quartets, Op 41, and the E flat Piano Quintet, Op 44. Schumann attempted virtually all the genres current in his day, while Liszt single-handedly invented the programmatic orchestral symphonic poem.

Aspects of keyboard style were discussed and illustrated, and central interpretative questions of tempo and rubato raised. The essential character of a piece, whether of brief or longer duration, was seen as fundamental to its perception by the listener. Examples from Schumann were taken from the DavidsbundlertOnze (Dances of the League of David against the Philistines) Op 6 (1837) and again from Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage (the three Petrarch Sonnets). Chopin’s seemingly suE generis harmonic and melodic style, deriving in part from stylistic involvement in .J.S.Bach and Mozart, and in part from the practice of contemporary Italian operatic bel canto, was briefly compared with the more conservative style of his friend Felix Mendelssohn, one of the most successful composers of the era, in worldly terms. Several of Chopin’s Preludes Op 28 were played to demonstrate the composer’s stylistic poise and adventurous individuality, even in a very short compass. The openings of the Third Ballade (in A flat, OpAl) and the Second Scherzo (in B flat minor, OpJl) were offered as examples of his harmonic subtlety and linear control, and of his explosive use of harmonic rhythm (allied to rapid tempo) respectively.

The general bibliography on Chopin, Schumann and Liszt is, of course, very large, and still growing. Liszt has benefited from his general rise in critical esteem since 1945, with Sacheverell Sitwell’s noteworthy study Liszt (1955, Dover reissue 1967) and Humphrey Searle’s The Music of Liszt (1961), of special interest in being the work of a practising (serial) composer. These were followed by the substantial three-volume critical biography Franz Liszt by the British -born musicologist Alan Walker (Faber, 1983ff). Derek Watson’s Master Musicians volume Liszt came in 1989, while 1990 saw the publication of Adrian Williams’ important documentary Portrait of Liszt by himself and his contemporaries (OUP). In addition, numerous recordings of Liszt’s music entered the LP and CD catalogues, many of works never before made available in recorded performance. Pride of place among these must undoubtedly go to the achievement of the Australian pianist Leslie Howard in tackling the whole of Liszt’s piano oeuvre on disc, including the neglected late pieces, and the dozens of opera and song transcriptions and fantasias.

Schumann benefited in the English-speaking world, as did Hugo Wolf, from the brilliant writings of the late Eric Sams (d.2004), whose The Songs of Robert Schumann (Methuen, 1969) remains one of the indispensable studies of this composer. Other notable contributions are Schumann & his World (ed. R Larry Todd, Princeton UP, 1994); the accompanist Gerald Moore’s Poet’s Love (Hamish Hamilton, 1981), a study of the Schumann song-cycles; and Peter Ostwald’s ground-breaking Schumann: Music and Madness (Gollancz, 1985), the work of a music-loving professional psychiatrist. Robert Schumann by John Daverio (OUP. 1994) is the most recent and up-to-date scholarly critical biography by a gifted American who devoted his short life to the study of 19th century Romantic composers. Schumann’s own writings, a selection of which were published in English as On Music & Musicians (Dennis Dobson, 1947 /1956) have their own special flavor, and are unparalleled elsewhere.

The modern study of Chopin has managed to overcome the many popular and often sentimental biographies of this composer who, with Liszt, received epic Hollywood treatment in the l940s -perhaps inevitably. Professor Jim Samson (now at Royal Holloway College, University of London) is probably the leading contemporary European Chopin scholar, whose The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (ed. J Samson, 1992), The Music of Chopin (Cambridge UP, 1994) and Chopin (OUP, Master Musicians scenes, 1996) have set new standards of scholarship and perception.

General interest in Chopin is variously served by In Search of Chopin, a personal, idiosyncratic work by the great French pianist Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) tr. Cyril & Rena Clarke (Peter Nevill, 1951), Gerald Abraham’s still useful Chopin’s Musical Style (OUP, 1968), Maurice J.E. Brown’s Chopin: an Index of his Works in Chronological Order (Macmillan,1972, 2nd ed.) and a seminal study by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, entitled Chopin, pianist & teacher as seen by his Pupils, tr by Naomi Shohet with Krysia Osostowicz & Roy Howat, & ed. by Roy Howat (Cambridge UP,1986, repr. 2004).

Finally, the whole period has been discussed in great detail by Charles Rosen in his monumental The Romantic Generation (Harper Collins 1996). This covers other composers as well, such as Schubert, Weber, Bellini, Mendelssohn, Berlioz & Meyerbeer. It is a study on the grand scale, some 723 pages, copiously illustrated with music examples in the text, and based on the 1995 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Everything Rosen writes is stimulating, informative & thought provoking, & The Romantic Generation, a worthy successor to his The Classical Style (W W Norton, 1971, new ed. 1997) more than lives up to expectations.