Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 5, No. 11 (1931-08)

302 The Phonograph Monthly Review Israfel Across The Gulf By R. D. DARRELL A return to Chopin; the Ballades and Mazurkas* One is loath to believe that the echo of Chopin’s magic music can ever fall upon unheeding ears. He may become old-fashioned, but like Mozart he will remain eternally beautiful. Chopin: The Man and His Music. S OME thirty years after Huneker con- cluded a chapter, “Chopin the Conque- ror,” with the above lines, it is no longer a rare heresy to affirm that Chopin has become old-fashioned. Those fettered to a fetish worship of the piano keyboard still make blind obeisance at his shrine, but their digi- tal fluency—or hankering for such dexterity —renders them untrustworthy critics. The well-rounded musician and the non-pianistic amateur alike have been growing steadily away from the slender, sensitive Pole, who like the Koran’s Israfel once had the sweet- est voice of all God’s creatures. In the last decade the break has been strongly marked. Even the pianists of the newer generation draw less and less upon the com- positions that once formed the bulk of every recital; the left wing intelligensia regard him as frankly old hat; his status in the post-war musical world is in danger of crys- tallizing as that of a sentimentalist—at best a superior example of that anathema, the salon composer. The causes for this radical reversal of the judgment of the best musical minds of a gen- eration ago are not far to seek. The grand Chopin tradition among pianists has de- clined leaving only a few ghosts of the giants of another day: the stiffening fin- gers and paling spirits of de Pachmann,Pad- erewski, and Rosenthal are now adequate at best for shadowy sketches of the glories of their past performances. With their pas- sing the “greater Chopin” is abandoned or botched, and the lesser Chopin, the indubit- able salon composer of the slighter preludes, nocturnes, waltzes, and impromptus is left (perhaps properly) to his fate in the hands of dilettantes and the myriads (now lessen- ing) of those who “study piano.” And even if the grand tradition had been kept alive, perhaps by the earlier perfection of the phonograph, the present drift would have been inevitable, for Chopin in his strength as well as in his weakness was the quintes- sence of Romanticism, and romantic quali- ties are sadly out of fashion in the day of a return to sterner, less idealistic, more intel- lectual types of feeling. It is not merely Strawinski who has gone back to Bach, it is the main current of musical life. Even Wagner’s position is no longer impregnable. Familiarity has raised to maturity its off- spring contempt, and the rich, once nourish- ing cream of a softer age is unmistakably “turning.” Between us and Israfel the gulf grows and we can say with Poe Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely—flowers, And the shadow of thy perfect bliss Is the sunshine of ours. The moderns have judged, but even they recognize the error of executing judgment too hastily. If there is one thing that the present musical generation prides itself on it is its electicism. And so we can turn with lively curiosity from our Bach and Mozart, Elizabethans and Gregorians, Bartok, Sibe- lius, and Strawinski to recall Chopin to the bar. The defendant’s own attorneys plead guilty to the charges of sentimentality and sticky emotionalism against the popular noc- turnes, etc., and rest their case on the great- er works with the plea to hear them again: surely something of the old fire remains to enkindle the imagination and the heart. Chopin has meant too much to the last gen- eration and to our own youth for his most potent magic to have lost all its old sorcery. ♦Chopin: The Ballades, etc. See page 311.