Traditional Beethoven Playing

How often of late years we hear this expression: Will some one who claims to know kindly tell us what it means? For one, I confess myself, after a decade of careful, thoughtful investigation, utterly unable to find out. We hear one pianist extolled as a wonderful Beethoven player, as a safe, legitimate, trustworthy champion of the good old classical traditions; and another equally eminent artist condemned as wholly unworthy to lift for the public the veil of awe and deep mystery enshrouding the sublimities of this grandest of tone-Titans. The late von Bülow, for instance, was well-nigh universally conceded to be the representative Beethoven player of the age, for no better reasons, so far as I can discover, than that he was generally admitted to be a failure in the presentation of most works of the modern school, and that cold, calculating, cynical intellectuality was the predominant feature of his personality and his musical work, which made him the driest, most unideal, uninteresting pianist of his generation, in spite of his phenomenal technic, memory, and mental power.

On the other hand, Paderewski, with all his infinitely magnetic personality, his incomparable beauty of tone and coloring, his blended nobility and refinement of conception, is decried as a perverter of taste, a destroyer of traditions and precedents, because, forsooth, he plays Beethoven too warmly, too emotionally, too subjectively.

De grace, messieurs, what does it all signify? Are we then to accept perforce as final, in spite of our better instincts, the dictum of the long since petrified Leipsic School, which holds technic of the hand and head, not only as the supreme, but as the sole element in musical art-which relegates all emotion and its expression to the despised limbo of sickly sentimentality, and which epitomizes its highest encomium of an artist in the words "He allows himself no liberties"-that is to say, he plays merely the notes, with the faultless precision and soulless monotony of a machine? Is this, then, traditional playing of Beethoven, or any other composer? Is it art at all? If there is any such thing as an authentic, authoritative musical standard concerning any given composition, upon what does or should it rest? Surely either upon the way its composer rendered it, or desired it rendered, if that can be ascertained, or upon the way it was given by its first great public interpreter. Let us examine the scanty available data concerning Beethoven's piano works from this point of view. How did Beethoven himself play his own works?

This question reminds one of the century-old dispute among scholars as to the propriety of the so-called English pronunciation of Latin, an absurdity on the face of it. Fancy talking of the English pronunciation of French or German! Of course, we do not know and have no means of learning exactly how the old Latins did pronounce their language in all the niceties of detail, but one thing we do know with absolute certainty, and that is that they did not Anglicize it, for the one good reason that our language did not come into existence until centuries after the Latin tongue was dead. Similarly, as there is no one now living who can remember and tell us just how Beethoven did play any given sonata, and as, unfortunately, the phonograph was not then invented to preserve for us the incalculably precious records of his interpretations, we have no means of ascertaining just what his conceptions were, even supposing they had been twice alike, which they probably were not. But this we may be sure of, beyond a question or a doubt: He did not play them according to von Bülow. Furthermore, there is no ground for believing that his performances were at all such as the conservative sticklers for classic traditions insist that our renditions of Beethoven must be to-day. We know this from a study of the life and characteristics of the man, from the internal evidence of his works, and from the reports given us by his contemporaries of his manner of playing them and their effect upon the hearer.

Beethoven was preëminently a romanticist, in the content, if not always in the form of his works; a man of pronounced, self-loyal individuality and intense subjectivity, who wrote, and consequently must have played, as he felt, and not in accordance with prescribed rules and formulas; a man who can reply without immodesty when criticized for breaking a preëstablished law of harmony, "I do it," with the calm confidence in the divine right of genius to self-utterance in its own chosen way which always accompanies true greatness and has been the infallible compass of progress in all ages. The man who was the fearless, outspoken champion of artistic sincerity and profound earnestness, whose scorn of shallow, pedantic formulas was as uncompromising as it was irrepressible, whose watchword was universality of content, who believed that music could and should be made to express every phase of human emotion, who could venture on the unheard-of innovation of beginning a sonata with a pathetic adagio, and introducing a chorus into the last movement of a symphony, in open defiance of all established tradition, who was repeatedly accused by the critics of his day of being unable to write a correct fugue or sonata, and whose music was declared to be that of a madman by leading musicians even as late as the beginning of our century-this is surely not the man whose artistic personality can be fairly represented by a purely intellectual, stiffly precise, though never so scholarly reading of his printed scores. How is that better than the bloodless plaster casts of the living, breathing children of his genius? The printed symbols represent audible sounds and the sounds symbolize emotions. The mere sounds with the emotions left out are no more Beethoven's music than the printed notes if never made audible.

Of his own playing, we are told that it lacked finish and precision, but never warmth and intensity; that, like his nature, it was stormy, impetuous, impulsive, at times even almost brutal in its rough strength and fierce energy; that he often sacrificed tone quality and even accuracy in his complete abandonment to the torrent of his emotions, but never failed to stir to their profoundest depths the hearts of his hearers. Is this the man, this hero of musical democracy, this giant embodiment of the Titanic forces of primitive Nature, this shaggy-maned lion, with the great, warm, keenly sentient human heart, whose nearest prototype among modern players is Rubinstein; is this the man with whom originated the severely classical school, the cold, prim, stately interpretations which we are told to reverence as traditional, in which the head is everything, the heart nothing-form all-important, and feeling a deplorable weakness? It is impossible, incredible!

I honestly believe that if Beethoven himself could revisit the world and appear incognito in the concert-halls of our musical centers to give us an ideal, authoritative rendition of his great works, one-half of his audience and nine-tenths of his critics would hold up their hands in holy horror at his untraditional and un-Beethoven-like readings, and would declare that while he was an interesting and magnetic artist, and an enjoyable player of the lighter, more emotional modern school, his renderings of the revered classics were dangerously perverting to the public taste and could not be sufficiently condemned.

But if not with Beethoven himself, with whom did these so-called traditions originate? Was it with the first great public interpreters of his works, who introduced them to the world of concert-goers and so earned the right to have their readings respected? Who was the first, most enthusiastic, courageous, and efficient champion of Beethoven's piano works? Who did most to introduce them to the concert audiences of Europe, to force for them first a hearing, then a reluctant recognition? Who first and oftenest dared to present Beethoven's serious chamber music to the frivolous sensation-loving Parisians, and to risk his unprecedented popularity with them upon the venture? Who but Franz Liszt! For nearly two decades, during the whole of his phenomenal career as a virtuoso, the vast weight of his musical influence and example, the incalculable force of his fervid, magnetic personality, and his inexhaustible resources as an executant, were all brought to bear in behalf of his revered Beethoven, in the effort to render his best piano works familiar and popular with the European public. It is safe to say that during that period Liszt introduced more Beethoven sonatas to more people than all other pianists combined. He then established such traditions as there may be regarding the proper interpretation of these works; and surely no one who heard him play, no one who is even slightly familiar with his life, characteristics, and art ideals, will think for a moment of classing him with the conservative school, with the inflexible, puritanical adherents to cut-and-dried theories and the cold dead letter of the law as represented by the printed notes.

But we are told that precisely these printed notes and signs should be our only and all-sufficient guide. We are commanded to stick to the text and not to presume to take personal liberties with so sacred a thing as a Beethoven composition. I wonder if the advocates of this idea, which does so much credit to their bump of veneration and so little to their artistic insight, ever took the trouble to examine the text of these same Beethoven compositions in the earliest editions, as they came first from his own hand; and if so, whether they noticed the conspicuous absence of marks of expression. When they urge that Beethoven probably...