by Old Fogy
THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE – January 1888
If the
great Solomon had lived in these latter days, he would probably have made his
famous utterance, “Vanitas, vanitas rerum est vanitas,” much stronger; for
surely this piano-banking age, with its plethora of piano music, is enough to
provoke the spleen of the inspired Hebrew Psalmist himself.
For
some time past there have been paragraphs going the rounds of the musical
papers to the effect that an early concerto of Liszt, hitherto unpublished, had
come to light among his effects, and that Bernard Stavenhagen his favorite
pupil, was preparing it for public performance.
This work is in E minor and is aptly named “Malediction," for this
posthumous resurrecting of works is a malediction, and, with the exception of
Bach and Schubert, is a pretty ungrateful task.
Now, to cap the climax, an earlier concerto still, said to be in F
major, has been unearthed, and the question arises, where is this thing going
to end? We all know how unwise it was to
publish, after Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s death, so many of their unimportant
and even poor compositions. But how much
worse in Liszt’s case, particularly as we are told these two concertos belong
to his early or virtuoso period.
There
ought to be a society formed for the prevention of cruelty to artists, and the
publishing of posthumous works sternly prohibited. The world has seldom profited by them, and
certainly the reputation of the artist, in nine cases out of ten, suffers. The great Hungarian pianist was only too
prolific during his lifetime with his pen, and one shudders at the bare
possibility of a string of posthumous publications a la Hugh Conway, whose
novels have increased even more rapidly since his death than during his
lifetime. With a constant influx of
pianists and piano music, the musical world threatens to become pianized. How subversive all this is to the principles
of true musical art need not be pointed out.
So serious is the situation that Gounod and several other eminent
musicians have taken up the cudgels against the legion of pyrotechnical piano prestidigitators,
who, like the Huns of old, threaten to bury our modern musical Rome in a storm
of cacophony and celluloid.
In some
cities the local authorities have even stepped in to abate the piano nuisance,
and if they could only interfere and prevent their too frequent appearance in
the concert room, a long-suffering public would rise up and chant a hosanna of
gratitude. It has simply become
unbearable, this constant inartistic piano drumming, and now, since “technic
made easy” has become a household word, we are violently assaulted by young
persons of both sexes—generally the female—who labor under the idea that
digital dexterity means music, and who, since that Columbus of the Piano,
Liszt, showed them how easy it was to stand the technical egg on its bottom,
have been outvying their master ever since by trying to stand one egg on
another one. In a word, prodigious
technical feats, and not music, is the sole aim and ambition of these so-called
virtuosos. The one evil feature about
the Hoffmann recitals (and he is a
genuine musical wonder) is that the public palate, like little Oliver Twist’s,
continually asks for “more.” It is not
for the intrinsic musical quality of this little boy’s playing that one-half
his audiences care a rush, but the spectacle of a child of his tender years
manipulating the keyboard as he does; and a wonder it is, but it only excites
the public mind a wrongful direction.
One-armed pianists, one-legged pianists (pedestrial, they dub
themselves, we believe), pianists without arms (we were almost tempted to say
pianists without brains, but we have such an enormous multitude of that class
that the market is overstocked), will soon occupy the musical arena, to the
exclusion of everything artistic. This
unhealthy craving for the sensational and the marvelous is a bad sign, not to
speak of the infinite harm it does to the lad himself, who will, like the
famous little Hungarian, Filstsch, Chopin’s pupil, wear himself out before he
is in his teens. In a word, it is time
to cry halt to all this sort of thing, and also to attempt to stem the rising
torrent of pianism which threatens to submerge the musical world. The piano is a great instrument as far as it
goes, but it is responsible for an immense amount of unmusical players—besides,
there can always be too much of a good thing.
Yours in Disgust,
Enjoy Peter Toth and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra performing Liszt's "Malediction" (two parts):
