Music
Mr. Arthur Rubinstein’s Recital
During the last few months the Wigmore Hall has been the scene of some very notable recitals given by pianists of the first rank. They had several interesting points in common. Their audiences consisted largely of professional musicians, their programmes were generally of a severe and far from popular type. Yet in spite of the somewhat exclusive character of both programmes and audiences, so well adapted, one might think, to the intimate atmosphere of a small hall, intimacy was exactly the quality that in all cases was entirely absent from the performances. Both with Busoni and Cortôt, and lastly with Mr. Arthur Rubinstein, it was impossible to avoid feeling that one was at much too close quarters. The difference between such players as these and the more intimate type of pianist is moral rather than physical. Some players give the impression that they are playing for themselves alone, and that it is by mere accident that we happen to overhear them; the others seem almost to assume that their audience will not listen to them unless its attention is gripped and consciously dominated by the overmastering compulsion of a powerful personality. If we are soothed and charmed by the intimate players, we may indeed be uplifted and transported by the men of might, but there is at the same time the chance that we may be crushed and exhausted.
Mr. Arthur Rubinstein is certainly to be counted among the great pianists, but not yet among the greatest. He is a player of outstanding ability, but not of outstanding personality. He lacks Cortôt’s inspiring animation, and, still more, the monumental intellectuality of Busoni. A conventional programme, or an almost conventional one, was the index of an almost conventional mind. The usual Bach-Somebody, the usual heavy Chopin; no Beethoven (thank goodness!), some modern French and Spanish, a Liszt Rhapsody to end up with. What saved the programme were the Spanish pieces and Liszt’s Funérailles. If Mr. Rubinstein had had the courage to offer a programme as individual as those of Busoni he might have given himself a better chance of asserting his own individuality.
To begin with the two extremes: the Bach transcription at the beginning and the Liszt Rhapsody at the end are long out of date. Liszt’s arrangements of Bach’s organ works may have been very wonderful fifty years ago or more when there were not many organs in England on which the originals could be played, even if there were the organists to play them. To-day they are familiar to all of us. Moreover, the modern big pianists play them too easily. They seek to reproduce, as far as they can, the effect of the organ, and sometimes achieve a very remarkable uniformity of tone, as faultlessly regular as any given row of pipes can produce. But this uniformity of the organ’s tone-colour is just the obvious deficiency of that instrument, and the exact reproduction of it on the pianoforte very easily tends to reproduce no more than the relentless accuracy of the mechanical piano-player. Mr. Rubinstein played his Bach-Liszt with intelligence and skill, and even succeeded in suggesting a certain organ-like effect of sonority by means of an ingenious method of pedalling; but in these days we should prefer either a more astounding miracle of transcription or, still better, the direct simplicity of Bach unadorned. Again, if it is still necessary to end a recital with a display of fireworks there are surely more showy things available now than Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies; and if we want Liszt for his own musical thoughts, we want something that represents him in a more serious mood. For the Funérailles Mr. Rubinstein deserves sincere gratitude.
Liszt’s Hungary is only less difficult to believe in than Chopin’s Poland. It is true that Hungary exists, and true that in Hungarian cafés one may still hear the tunes which Liszt embellished, but such underlying truth as the Rhapsodies possess is completely disguised by their tawdry romantic theatricality. As for Poland, “if she had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her,” for Paris of the eighteen-thirties. That Poland, populated entirely by devout and amorous aristocrats, is the musician’s Mrs. Harris—no, his Countess Harricka. Certainly the robust vigour of Mr. Rubinstein’s playing make short work of the languor and swagger of the Scherzo in B flat minor and the Polonaise in A flat. All pianists are expected to play Chopin; but there are not many works of Chopin that will stand the strain of interpretation in the modern virtuoso’s manner. The Barcarole is one of the few which by virtue of its serene and classical beauty has still been able to survive it.
Modern Spanish Music
One composer stood out with unexpected prominence from Mr. Rubinstein’s programme—Isaac Albeniz. Albeniz is hardly to be counted among the moderns. His training as a composer was mainly German, and he came to a certain extent under English influences as well. Like Chopin, he was primarily a pianist and a composer for the pianoforte. His songs, a few of which have been heard recently in London, are pianoforte pieces with a voice thrown in. He lives almost entirely by virtue of the volume of Spanish pictures entitled Iberia. Mr. Rubinstein has spent a considerable time in Spain, and it is clear that he has succeeded to a wonderful extent in absorbing the musical spirit of the country. There was a depth of poetry and passion about his playing of the Evocation and Triana which he never attained in any other item of his programme. Spanish music has at last begun to come into its own. We can trace its development clearly in the successive stages represented by Albeniz, Granados, Turina, and De Falla. Granados, like Albeniz, writes on a harmonic system that is predominantly German, in that German influences are the foundation of almost all nineteenth-century music. Turina, a pupil of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, has affinities with the French intellectuals. He is the chief Spanish representative of chamber music. De Falla is more definitely one of the moderns. All four are pianists—Turina less obviously so than the other three.
It is easy to see the Spanish element that is common to the whole group. Anyone can recognise the rhythms and turns of phrase that are derived from Spanish national song and dance, the more so as all four have drawn their principal inspiration from popular sources. But it is to us foreigners that the Spanish local colour is most insistently obvious. In listening to the music of any particular school we may approach it in two ways. At first we are conscious of the school as a homogeneous group; we notice similarities and look out for more of them. This may easily lead us into error, for we are tempted thus to regard as essential characteristics things that in reality are only tricks of manner or stereotyped conventions of a particular place or period. If we are to form a reasonable judgment we must be prepared to ignore these and keep our ears open for differences. We must note not so much the local theme that is common to all the group as the diverse treatment of it which each separate composer affects. If there is anything really Spanish about these four composers that is of vital importance, it should be not the mere choice of a Spanish melody or rhythm as the foundation of their music, but the method on which the complete structure is designed and built up.
Here begin the difficulties of understanding even Albeniz and Granados. The Spanish themes appeal directly to the foreign ear, almost too directly; we might even dismiss them as cheap and obvious. It is the treatment of them that is individual. One’s first impression of Iberia and the Gozescas is that they are rambling and incoherent—yet it would be strange if a Latin composer should lapse into a Celtic indifference to form and logic. Mr. Rubinstein succeeded in making the Albeniz pieces not only poetical but lyrical. They tempt a pianist at first to play them at top speed; their style of piano-forte-writing suggests the rattling brilliance of the virtuoso. Mr. Rubinstein avoided the error; but it takes a very skilful pianist to do so.
It is not the local colour about Spanish music that we must respect, but its grave seriousness of intention. Spain has always remained artistically somewhat behind other countries, just as England has done; and Spain at the present moment, unlike England, is not anxious to be in a hurry over progress. Hence even De Falla, the most modern of the group, is possibly a little old-fashioned as compared with the modern French and Italian composers. Yet he is modern, in the sense that he is intellectual and anti-sentimental, as compared with Albeniz. This was very evident in his ballet, The Three-cornered Hat, which the Russians performed all too seldom. But his intellectuality and anti-sentimentality are distinguished and serene. He makes no experiments with the purely grotesque, he has no desire to make a complete and irrevocable breach with the art of the past, as some of the French and Italians appear to do. Even in a traditional idiom he has something genuinely new to say.
A Scriabin Recital
If anyone could have converted me to Scriabin it should have been Mr. Edward Mitchell, who gave a whole afternoon of his works on January 17th at the Westminster Central Hall, ranging from Op. 8 to Op. 72. Mr. Mitchell is a player of extraordinary persuasiveness. He evidently understands Scriabin, and is determined to make his audience understand him. He has a very efficient and vigorous technique, and plays with remarkable accuracy and assurance. No one could listen to his programme without learning a great deal about the composer to whom it was devoted. Yet in spite of a very well-chosen selection of pieces, in spite of considerable variety of touch and style, the concert left only an impression of deadly and morbid monotony. An afternoon of Scriabin recalled at once to memory the effect of a concert of Hugo Wolf’s songs, or of Elgar’s The Apostles. It was morbid and narcotic, a perpetual command to abrogate reason and abandon one’s brain to feeling, to emotion, to a mystical trance. The emotional force of such music is at times undeniable; what it sets out to achieve, the representation of moods and emotions, it achieves overwhelmingly. Scriabin has in the main three moods, a mood of violence and pain, a mood of comatose oppression, and a mood of struggle, the last of which is well illustrated by Vers la flamme. Perhaps this is all that some people require of music. Others demand a sense of dignity and nobility, with a conscious beauty of formal design.
Technically Scriabin can be summed up in a few words. His outlook on music is purely harmonic. Even in his early works he shows a partiality for certain well-known discords which he gradually comes to use so often that the resolution of them becomes superfluous. By this road we lead on to Stravinsky, Casella, and Malipiero. Melodic tone there is none. This melodic poverty is very apparent and easily demonstrable in the early works. Here Scriabin is obviously building, or trying to build, on Chopin. But while comparing Scriabin with Chopin, compare Chopin with Field. Chopin is clearly an advance on Field in every way—he has a much stronger melodic line, and a much deeper sense of harmonic values. But Scriabin is no advance on Chopin, only a retrogression from him. He can only imitate Chopin’s emotional climaxes. He appears to be more interesting harmonically, because he keeps Chopin’s discords and omits his concords, roughly speaking.
EDWARD J. DENT