MUSIC AND MANNERS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY. IF the reader
can make a meal off trifle or sponge-cake, this is the book for him. Mr. CHORLEY is gifted with fluency—not devoid of fancy, or even of grace, though smacking of the milliner and the green-room—with a good deal of reading in the history, of music, even if it be, as we suspect, somewhat superficial : but his Music and Manners in France and Germany is tedious, from its deficiency in matter, solidity, strength, and variety ; for though various enough as far as change of scene and the form of the topics are concerned, the essential character of the subjects is either similar or treated in a similar way. We might add, that much of the book is unreal, were it not that the things described or discussed have existed—are entities —just as an artificial flower, a player's crown, an old beau's wig, or the mock jewellery of a foreign equivocal, are entities : personal impres- sions, rather than informing criticisms, of' operas, concerts, and music-parties, varied by stories of Continental histrios and Parisian gentlemen of the press, have not stuff sufficient to carry one through three volumes ; especially as Mr. Cnormsr, without actual hyperbole, writes of them as if they were moving principles of life, and does not draw a sufficient distinction between the exercise of the art and the personal character of the artist. A tumbler may exhibit very extraordinary feats ; but, although admiring the public performances, we can dispense with notices of the private life and facetike of Mr. Merriman.
There are, no doubt, other and better things in the volume : some sketches of German scenery and German manners, a few de- scriptive anecdotes of a few musical composers, and occasional cri- ticisms on operas and on various instrumentalists : but even these are slight. In short, to carry out our opening simile, the book is better fitted for a variety after a meal than to make a meal upon. Any of the chapters would have read well enough as a periodical article ; but, coming before one in three volumes, they illustrate the ne quid nimis. They are like a person playing for hours on a fiddle or a piano without leaving any distinct impression on his auditors when done.
The want of plan or coherence in the work may contribute some- thing to this unsatisfactory result, as well as its lack of solid matter. It is not a book of travels, scarcely the result of travels, but a series of independent morcealar out of various excursions. Of the nine sections, three relate to France ; and, amid much that is tedious or trivial, these contain the best passages in the book, in a critically-descriptive account of "Robert le Diable," and "Lea Huguenots," of the French singers NOURRIT and DIJPREZ, and of the career and character of LISZT. The six other divisions relate to Germany ; of which, "Notes on Nuremburg" and "Three Days in the Harz Country" are merely travelling-memoranda made on the road ; " The Brunswick Festival" gives an account of a musical gathering in honour of MENDELSSOHN ; "Glimpses of Berlin" contains a description of Mr. CHORLEY'S Visits to that city, and of his grievous disappointment with its opera,—part of the sub- stance of which we seem to have met with before ; the subjects of the " Leipsic Fair" and "Two Visits to Dresden" are indicated by their titles,—an account of the musical-parties and subscription- concerts at Leipsic being the most interesting part of the former article, and a description of a certain Herr SCHNEIDER'S organ- playing forming the principal incident at Dresden.
The best passages in the book—those which convey the highest idea of Mr. CHORLEY'S descriptive powers, and leave the strongest or perhaps the only distinct impression on the reader, are his sketches of NOURRIT and DUPREZ as singers, and his narrative of the de- cline of Norm:iris powers, and of those feelings which subse- quently led to his suicide. These, however, are too long to quote ; but we will take from them a graceful and amiable reflection on THE UNCERTAINTY OF VOCALISM.
I have often thought that the conditions of decay and change fall upon none so cruelly as on the singer. His powers are more evanescent and short-lived than those of the tragedian or comic actor : an unlucky journey, an open window, or a fit of too sedulous practice, may extinguish them in the very midst of his career. Nor does fashion show greater mobility anywhere than in music : who can be sure that the style which pleased ten years since will suffice to please today ? I have seen Pasta—now all but an extinct star, though some fifteen years younger than Mars or the Siddons of Germany, Madame Schrowler—at the close of a superb performance of Medea, throughout which her voice refused to second her, weeping bitter tears of vexation, as she exclaimed, " Is it not terrible to possess all the energy I ever had, and yet not be able to sing ? " I shall never forget an evening passed by the side of an artiste, scarcely five-and .twenty, whom the sudden loss of voice had degraded from a high position upon the Italian stage to the minor theatres of a provincial town ; from laurel crowns at Milan to hisses at —. I shall never forget the impression made by the wretchedness of her young face, :which Nature had meant should be gracious and sprightly, and by the corroding tones of her voice as she spoke of past and present days, careless who listened, with a desperate indifference. But I can imagine Nourrit's sensations during his last weeks in Paris to have been even more acute than these. Besides the natural pride of an artist, he possessed in its fullest extent the bravoure—no English word will express it—of a Frenchman. His glory had been won in stirring times for both characters. But fourteen years had elapsed since his first ap- pearance in Gluck's lphigenie ; when his singing in the delicious part of Pylade at once made him a favourite with the public ; eleven years only since his success in Les Deux Salem had been so brilliant, as, according to some biographers, to drive from the stage his own father—the son's true progenitor in impatience of rivalry.
Here is a specimen of musical criticism from the " Brunswick Fes- tival."
MENDELSSOHN'S PIANOFORTE-PLAYING.
The pianoforte-playing, then, was the chief treat. It is rarely that I have been so delighted without novelty or surprise having some share in the delight. The exact fulfilment of any anticipation is generally more or less blanking, though vanity and self-deceit refuse to allow it. It would have been absurd to expect much pianism, as distinct from music, in the performance of one writing so straightforwardly, and without the coquetries of embroidery, as Mendelssohn. Accordingly, his performance has none of the exquisite finesses of Moscheles, on the score of which it has been elsewhere said, that "there is wit in his playing"; none of the delicate and plaintive and spiritual seductions of Chopin, who sweeps the keys with so insinuating and gossamer a touch that the crudest and most chromatic harmonies of his music float away under his hand, indistinct yet not nnpleasing, like the wild and softened discords of the /Eolian harp ; none of the brilliant extravagances of Liszt, by which he illuminates every composition he undertakes with a living but lightening fire, and imparts to it a soul of passion or a dazzling vivacity, the interpretation never con- tradicting the author's intention, but more poignant, more intense, more glowing, than ever the author dreamed of. And yet, no one that has heard Mendelssohn's pianoforte-playing can find it dry—can fail to be excited and fascinated by it, despite of its want of all the caprices and colourings of his contemporaries. Solidity, in which the organ-touch is given to the piano without the organ ponderosity; spirit (witness his execution to the finale of the D minor Concerto) animating, but never intoxicating the ear ; expression, which making every tone sink deep, requires not the garnishing of trills and sppogiaturi, or the aid of changes of times, are among its outward and salient characteristics; but, within and beyond all these, though hard to be conveyed in words, there is to be felt a mind clear and deep, an appreciation of character and form which refers to the inner spirit rather than the outward details; the same which gives so exquisitely Southern a character to the Barcarole and the Gondola tune in Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, and its fresh, Ossianic, sea- wildness, to his overture to the Hebriden ("Isles of Fingal ") ; the same which enabled him, when little more than a boy, in the happiest piece of descriptive music of our time, to illustrate Sbakspere's exquisite fairy scenes neither feebly nor unworthily. Execution without grimace, fancy cheerful and ex- cursive but never morbid, and feeling under the control of a serene not sluggish spirit—I can came no nearer pleasing myself in a character than by these words, which are still far from doing justice to their subject. One word more, which is perhaps a half-definition : Mendelssohn's is eminently manly music ; and loses effect, beyond that of almost any other of his contemporaries, when attempted by female hands.
We will conclude with part of the sketch of a player better known just now in England.
CHARACTERISTICS OP LISZT.
M. Liszt, as an artist, is too unique aphrenomenon not to deserve a far more deliberate study than in England we have been willing to give his excellences and peculiarities. For not only must the most limited among the purists con- fess his prodigious mastery over his instrument ; a thing totally distinct from that creative genius which produces melody as the birds do thew trills, or the brooks their sweet laughter. M. Liszt's manner is not to be thoroughly un- derstood for better for worse, save by those who are familiar with the newer schools of European imagination. These must be willing to regard him not merely as the technical successor of Clementi and Hummel and Moscheles, but as one in whom the piano so far from being the end, is but the means of expressing certain emotions. i-he school in which M. Liszt has been trained— the literary and artistic associations which he has embraced so eagerly—encou- rage violent contrasts. Passions, according to its canons, must be allowed free way, a momentary distortion being better than a chilling restraint. Beauty must be exhibited, not in a perpetual flow of harmony, not the Venus be- jewelled and crowned and attended by her Graces, moving only to take new forms of "pomp and pleasure," but foiled by rude and menacing shapes—with a brawny and tempestuous Mars, as it were, at her side—nay, or even a fearful and misshapen dwarf, allowed to turn his face towards us, that the shudder with which we regard it may send us back to hers with a more exquisite relish.
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Let me attempt to enumerate a few of the mechanical peculiarities of M. Liszt's playing. In uniform richness and sweetness of tone he may have been surpassed. His manner of treating the piano, his total indifference to its wood and wire in his search for effect, could hardly fail to preclude that uniform care and finish, and resolution to please by every touch, which has charmed the world so deservedly in certain contemporary pianists. There is something, too, as regards physical conformation of hand, which may have been more genially bestowed on others than M. Liszt. But his varieties of tone are remarkable; and, as far as I have gone, unexampled. Sometimes—as, for in- stance, in Schnbert's Serenade, or Chopin's Mazurkas, or Moscheles' Study in G, Number 3 Book I.—he makes the strings whisper with an arial delicacy, or utter voices clear and tiny as the very finest harp-notes. Sometimes, as in the trio to his March Hongroise, the thing (to quote Wordsworth) "becomes a trumpet "; and a sound is extorted from the unwilling strings— for rumour declares that pianofortes find themselves heavily punished by such a novel method of intercourse—as piercing and nasal as the tone of a clarion. He makes use, too, of a double-bass stop, which is his own entirely ; and gives that effect of the softened and all-confounding roll of the drum which com- posers know to be so mysterious and profitable in incantation-scenes. The last of these changes as the old harpsichord-writers used to call variations, is the strangest, but also the least agreeable. With regard to the amount of difficulties vanquished, those who have least comprehended M. Liszt's mind have perhaps been the most wonder- stricken by his attributes. Rapidity and evenness of finger, consistent with the most self-controlling power of stopping or retarding a passage to introduce some freak of ornament, to improvise some shade of expression, gem') over in- tervals the most harassing and distant (the bass-chords of many of his arrangements extending over two octaves, and yet struck so certainly as almost to lose the effect of the arpeggio necessary to their production); the power of interweaving the richest and most fantastic accompaniments with a steadily moving yet expressive melody, (let me instance a trill passage in the "Lucia" fantasia, the maintenance of question and answer among the several parts into which the pianists now love to divide their passages as well as their cantilenas : add to these a rare variety, a control over all the intention, the coquetry, or the pathos, that a mind quick as lightning in its motions can throw into the least suggestive chains of notes ; add to these velocity, fire, and poignancy, in flights of octaves and in chromatic successions of chords. All these gifts, singly or in combination, are sternly or gamesomely under command of the moment's whim—or, to call it by its right name, the moment's poetical imagining.
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