This conjecture seems the more plausible, from the fact that there was a pronounced ironic and comic vein in Chopin's character. The accounts of his melancholy, in fact, like those of his ill-health, have been too much exaggerated. He was often in a cheerful mood. Sometimes he would amuse himself for a whole evening playing blind-man's buff with the children. As a mere child he had formed the habit of mimicking and caricaturing pianists and other distinguished men. Liszt often suffered from this mischievous habit, but he did not complain, and even seemed to enjoy it. Of Chopin's wit, two specimens may be cited. A rich Parisian one day invited him to dinner, with the intention of getting him to entertain the guests afterward. In this case, however, the host had reckoned without the guest, for, when asked to play, Chopin exclaimed, "But, my dear sir, I have eaten so little." The other instance occurs in one of his letters, where he says of the pianist Aloys Schmitt, that he was forty years old, and his compositions eighty-a bon mot worthy of Heine.
There was much, indeed, in common between Chopin and Heine. Nothing is more characteristic of Heine than the way in which he works up our sentimental feelings only to knock us on the head with a comic or grotesque line at the end. Similarly, Chopin, after improvising for his friends for an hour or two, would suddenly rouse them from their reveries by a glissando-sliding his fingers from one end of the key-board to the other. In almost all of Chopin's or Heine's poems there is this peculiar mixture of the sad and the comic veins-even in the scherzos, which represent the gay and cheerful moods of Chopin's muse.
Another point between these two poets is their elegance of style, and their ironic abhorrence of tawdry sentimentality and commonplace. Heine is the most elegant and graceful writer of his country, and Chopin the most elegant and graceful of all composers. Not a redundant note or a meaningless bar in all his compositions. Heine owed his formal finish to French influences, but Chopin did not need them, for the Poles are as noted as the French for elegance and grace. He avoided not only the modulatory monotony of the classical school, but, especially, the commonplace endings which marred so many classical compositions. "All's well that ends well," is a rule that was generally ignored by composers till Chopin taught them its value and effect. Chopin's pen always stopped when his thoughts stopped, and he never appends a meaningless end formula as if to warn the audience that they may now put on their hats. On the contrary, some of his later compositions, especially of the last period, end with exquisite miniature poems, connected in spirit with the preceding music and yet distinct-separate inspirations. I refer, especially, to the endings of his last two nocturnes and to the final bars of the mazurka, opus 59, No. 3.
George Sand has given us a vivid sketch of Chopin's conscientiousness as a composer. "He shut himself up in his room for entire days," she says, "weeping, walking about, breaking his pen, repeating and changing a bar a hundred times, and beginning again next day with minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page, only to go back and write that which he had traced at the first essay." As regards his creativeness, George Sand says that "it descended upon his piano suddenly, completely, sublimely, or it sang itself in his head during his walks, and he made haste to hear it by rushing to the instrument." I have already mentioned the fact that when he wrote his last mazurka he was too weak to try it on the piano. In one of his letters he speaks of a polonaise being ready in his head. These facts indicate that he composed mentally, although, no doubt, during the improvisations, many themes occurred to him which he remembered and utilized. When he improvised he did not watch the key-board, but generally looked at the ceiling. Already as a youth he used to be so absorbed that he forgot his meals; and, in the street, he was often so absent-minded that he very narrowly escaped being run over by a wagon. Visions of female loveliness and patriotic reminiscences inspired many of his best works. Sometimes the pictures in his mind became so vivid as to form real hallucinations. Thus it is related that one evening when he was alone in the dark, trying over the A major polonaise which he had just completed, he saw the door open and in marched a procession of Polish knights and ladies in mediæval costumes-the same, no doubt, that his imagination had pictured while he was composing. He was so alarmed at this vision that he fled through the opposite door and did not venture to return. Another illustration of the relations between genius and insanity.
The foregoing remarks on Chopin's compositions suffice, I think, to show how absurd is the prevalent notion that he is the composer for the drawing-room, and that his pieces reflect the spirit of fashionable Parisian society. They do, perhaps, in their elegant form, but certainly not in their spirit. The frivolous aristocratic circles that heard Chopin could never have comprehended the depth of his emotional life. The pianists for them, the real drawing-room composers were Kalkbrenner, and Field, and Thalberg, with their operatic fantasias. Chopin is the composer for the few, and he is the composer par excellence for musicians. From him they can get more ideas, and learn more as regards form, than from anyone else, except Bach and Wagner. In comparing his last works with his first, and noting their progress, the mind tries in vain to conceive where he would have led the world had he lived eighty instead of forty years. One thing is certain: he would have probably written more for other instruments. His pianoforte concertos belong to his early period, and betray a lack of experience in the treatment of the orchestra. But he wrote two pieces of chamber music which have never been excelled-a 'cello sonata and a trio. The 'cello sonata was the last of his larger works, and in my opinion it is superior to any of the 'cello sonatas of Mendelssohn, Brahms, and even Beethoven and Rubinstein. The trio, though an earlier work, is, like the 'cello sonata, admirably adapted to the instruments for which it is written. I once belonged to an amateur trio club. Our tastes naturally differed on many points, but in one thing we all agreed: we always closed our entertainment with this Chopin trio. It was the climax of the evening's enjoyment. Yet, only a few years ago, the leader of one of the principal chamber music organizations in New York admitted to me that he had never heard of this trio!-an incident which vividly illustrates the truth of my assertion that Chopin's genius is still far from being esteemed at its full value.
II
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HOW COMPOSERS WORKToC
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Forty years ago Robert Schumann complained that the musical critics had so much to say about singers and players, while the composer was almost entirely ignored. To-day this reproach could hardly be made, for although vocalists still receive perhaps a disproportionate share of attention, compositions, new and old, are also discussed at great length in the press. Nevertheless, I believe that the vast majority of those who attend an operatic performance in New York, and are delighted with "Siegfried" or "Faust," have but vague and shadowy notions as to the way in which such an opera is composed. My object here is to illustrate the way composers work, and to prove that the creating of an opera is perhaps the most difficult and marvellous achievement of the human intellect.
Professor Langhans notes, in his history of music, that in the Middle Ages, as late as Luther's time, it took two men to compose the simplest piece of music: one who conceived the melody, and the other who added the harmonic accompaniment. The theoretical writer, Glareanus, deliberately expressed his opinion, in 1547, that it might be possible to unite these two functions in one person, but that one would rarely find the inventor of a melody able to work it out artistically. We have made much progress in music within these three hundred years, and to-day every composer is not only expected to invent his own harmonies and accompaniments to his melodies, but, since Wagner set the example, composers are beginning to consider it incumbent on them to write their own librettos; and, what is more remarkable, if we examine biographies of musicians carefully we find that, even before Wagner, not a few composers assisted in the preparation of their operatic texts; and this remark applies even to some of the Italian composers, who were proverbially careless regarding their librettos. Rossini was, perhaps, too indolent to devote much attention to his texts, and he was apt to postpone even the musical work to the last moment, so that he sometimes had to be locked up in his room by his friends, to enable him to finish his score by the date named in his contract. Yet it is worthy of note that during the composition of what Rossini's admirers commonly regard as his best and most characteristic work-the "Barber of Seville"-he lived in the same house with his librettist. "The admirable unity of the 'Barber,' in which a person without previous information on the subject could scarcely say whether the words were written for the music or the music for the words, may doubtless," as Mr. Sutherland Edwards suggests, "in a great measure be accounted for by the fact that poet and musician were always together during the composition of the opera; ready mutually to suggest and to profit by...
