Music-Study in Germany: The Classic Memoir of the Romantic Era

211 Pages·2011·1.12 MB·English

by  Amy Fay

MUSIC-STUDY IN GERMANY
The Classic Memoir of the Romantic Era
AMY FAY
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
FRANCES DILLON
MANNES COLLEGE OF MUSIC
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Mineola, New York
Copyright
Copyright © 1965, 2011 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note This Dover edition, first published in 1965 and reprinted in 2011, is an unabridged
and corrected republication of the work first published by A.C. McClurg & Company, Chicago, in 1880.
The original front matter was replaced by a new introduction written specially for the Dover edition by
Frances Dillon.
International Standard Book Number
eISBN-13: 978-0-486-26562-9
Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation
26562501
www.doverpublications.com
PREFACE.
In preparing for the public letters which were written only for home, I have
hoped that some readers would find in them the charm of style which the
writer’s friends fancy them to possess; that others would think the description of
her masters, and especially Liszt, amid their pupils worth preserving; and that
piano students would be grateful for the information that such an analysis of the
piano technique of the greatest artists has been made, that any earnest pupil can
with comparative ease and certainty conquer the difficulty of the piano-forte
which includes all others—the SCALE.
How much of Herr Deppe’s piano “method” is original with himself, pianists
must decide. That he has at least made an invaluable résumé of all or most of
their secrets, my sister believes that no student of the instrument who fairly and
conscientiously examines into the matter will deny.
M. F. P.
CHICAGO, Dec, 1880.
“The light that never was on sea or land.”—WORDSWORTH. “Pour admirer assez
il faut admirer trop, et un peu d’illusion est nécessaire au bonheur.”—
CHERBULIEZ.
Introduction to the Dover Edition
Music-Study in Germany is an important book. It is the result of letters written
by Amy Fay during her residence in Germany to her family in America,
covering the years from 1869 until 1875. In a casual, lively manner, she
describes her student days in vivid detail; her perceptive comments and
observations show acute insight into the culture and mores of the places where
she lived and the people she met in the principal music cities of Germany.
Born in 1844 in Bayou Goula, a plantation on the banks of the Mississippi,
Amy Fay lived there until her fifth birthday. Her father, the Rev. Dr. Charles
Fay, a distinguished graduate from Harvard, a scholar and linguist, advocated a
thorough classical education for his family. Cognizant of the limited curriculum
of the schools in that period when studies remained rudimentary in character, Dr.
Fay personally supervised the teaching of languages to his family. Amy, the
third of his children, learned to converse, read and write in Latin, Greek, German
and French. Her mother, Mrs. Charlotte Fay, daughter of Bishop John Henry
Hopkins of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Vermont, was a self-taught
pianist. She diligently pursued her study of the more popular piano literature of
the Romantic composers. Endowed with an acute ear, a facile technique, and
musical discernment, Mrs. Fay broadened her piano repertoire extensively and
brought a rich musical environment to her family. Mrs. Fay was guided by the
theory that the younger children are when they begin to study, the easier it is to
develop their minds. She undertook the tutoring of Amy in music, drawing and
expository writing. Successful in initiating a strong musical interest in her
children, she considered music to play a dominant role. With gentle guidance
and intelligent suggestions, her children were made aware of the cultural and
social value of musical participation. Amy Fay, the most talented and the most
innately endowed, responded more readily than the other children. Inheriting her
mother’s aptitude for the piano, Amy, at five, was able to extemporize and
perform at a high level of technical and musical proficiency. It became quite
obvious that Bayou Goula was hardly capable of providing the proper cultural
environment for a family endowed with such intellectual curiosity and artistic
needs. Upon request for a transfer, Dr. Fay was granted a parish in St. Albans,
Vermont. There, Amy Fay’s education was continued in academics and piano
repertoire, as well as in the socially accepted middle-class New England
refinements and artistic accomplishments. The formative period of her life was
spent during the turbulent years of the Civil War and the post-bellum
adjustment, an era when music creativity as an art form was at a standstill.
Music in America had not yet attained a distinctive voice of its own; it still,
and for some time after, reechoed the style and manner of the Europeans—and
not the representative best. For that, one needed competent and well-disciplined
performing organizations: choral societies, orchestras, music educators and
music leaders in the community and institutions. These were to come. America
was engaged in expanding industrially and economically, and the forces
conducive to the full exploitation and expansion of its cultural resources had not
yet achieved their full artistic consciousness and intellectual potential. The
ubiquitous Yankee was preoccupied with getting rich quick. Young America
was undergoing a complete economic transformation. Industry was
revolutionized by inventions and the unparalleled natural resources that were
available. This was an era of technological growth in which the New World
achieved political power and world recognition. The emergence of the arts, on
the other hand, suffered neglect during these fitful times.
The music written by our native composers, within their limited capabilities,
satisfied the popular demand for tear-filled sentimental ballads. The
development of America’s literature outstripped that of America’s music.
Novelists, poets and essayists told of its people who toiled courageously on
native grounds building a new world. Walt Whitman’s robust proclamation
reached heights of indigenous creativity when he heard America singing. A self-
portrait of genuine validity emerged with the flowering of an American literary
heritage. Music, on the other hand, maintained and fanned the dying embers of
cheap Romanticism, assimilating the tawdry and the artificial. The authentic
American music was its folk-song in which people dramatized the building of
the country.
With the rise of the parvenu in the newly risen “genteel society” it was more
expedient to import European performing artists and music teachers than to
develop our own. Those artists who were transplanted found and exploited rich
musical markets here, influencing composers who molded their artistic
endeavors to conform with Central European art. Orchestras were conducted by
Europeans and only European music was played. Music flourished and was
patronized solely with the label “from abroad.”
It was William Henry Fry (1815–1864), an American composer, who
published a statement in the Musical World in 1853 in which he publicly
denounced the New York Philharmonic Society for not having performed a
single composition by a native American during the eleven years of its existence.
An indignant reply from the president of the Philharmonic began a lively
controversy which revealed that the Society’s claim of patronizing American
composers in performance actually had been fulfilled “twice at public rehearsal.”
George F. Bristow (1825–1898), another American composer and performer,
joined the controversy through a published letter in which he wrote, “As one
exception makes a rule stronger, so this single stray fact shows that the
Philharmonic Society has been as anti-American as if it had been located in
London during the Revolutionary War, and composed of native-born British
tories.”
Although many Americans were composing, the tradition of German writing
and teaching was evident in their works. Those affluent Americans who pursued
the serious study of music went abroad. And the country to which they went was
Germany.
Amy Fay’s family, too, decided that New England, where she had gone to
study at the age of nineteen to further her musical development, seemed to offer
her little. There were few competent native American music educators and few
fully developed musical institutions to attract young talented students who might
wish to pursue their studies here. Following in the footsteps of William Mason,
whose European musical education made him the first American performer to
concertize extensively in his native country, Amy Fay came to the realization
that her education would never be complete until she studied abroad. Upon the
advice of John Knowles Paine (1839–1906), later known as the dean of
American composers, with whom she studied Bach, Amy Fay went to Europe to
refine her musical taste and improve her technique.
The place was Germany—the nerve-center of musical culture in the world. Its
busy concert halls, opera, orchestras, soloists and teachers brought fame and
good fortune to the country and its people. Here, master teachers founded
conservatories, studios and learned societies, attracting students from all parts of
the world. Virtuoso teachers’ hours were filled with American students. While
the Germans loved the American dollar, they often thought little of the person
who brought it. Almost anything and anybody that came from the New World
was considered somewhat base and savage. For America to the European “was
an expanse of uncertainties, filled with Indians, merchants, and manufacturers,
lacking Old World culture and always warring against themselves.”
The middle nineteenth century was an era of piano performance wizardry.
Methods, treatises, inventions, fanciful contraptions to improve technique were
the frenzied preoccupation of the day. Contests, marathons, multi-piano recitals
added to the flamboyancy of the concert artists and audiences. The instrument
reached its highest peak of mechanical development since the advent of
Cristofori’s first piano about 1709.
Although there was some generally bad teaching on both sides of the ocean,
the frenetic successes of the great pianists of the day inspired many serious
students to travel thousands of miles to get the “magic.” They were magnetically
attracted to the teachers who were known to produce piano virtuosi. Amy Fay
was told to study with Carl Tausig (1841–1871), who was said to be “. . . a
young man who plays the piano like forty thousand devils.”
A pupil of Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Tausig was an eccentric, impatient man
possessing an easily triggered, high-powered temper. An unhappy misanthrope,
he loathed piano teaching. Nevertheless, his conservatory had one of the highest
enrollments. Amy Fay describes him thus: “. . . he was a wonder ... he plays so
magnificently. I have seen him execute the most gigantic difficulties without
permitting himself a sign of effort beyond an almost imperceptible compression
of one corner of his mouth.”
This “effortless playing” was one of the magical ingredients the pianists
hoped to acquire. It is interesting to read the detailed presentation of the
restrictive methods to which Tausig, and two of Amy Fay’s other teachers,
Ehlert and Kullak, exposed their students. In each case they advocated the
Czerny-Reineke school, in which a quiet arm, a fixed wrist and exaggeratedly
highly raised fingers were typical. The scientific investigation of the
physiological properties applied to the law of levers seemed to be of no concern
to these teachers, whose argot was a lamentable bungle of ambiguity and who
had generations of students practicing with a coin on the back of their hands to
ensure a minimum of motion. (It was once said that the real exercise the pupils
were getting was not in the finger work but rather in picking the coin off the
floor.)
The reader who lives the six years of Music-Study in Germany may ask the
age-old query, “What particular method and who of all Amy Fay’s teachers
contributed the most towards her general piano playing education?” One
discovers that all her teachers, with the exception of Franz Liszt, laid persistent
stress on technique which tended to vitiate the whole art of music: the art of
expressiveness and musical responsiveness. Had these teachers, in their flurry of
new discoveries, pointed up the constitutive elements of music and the necessary
skills to merge and express the currents of the composer’s intentions, their
methods might have come to life.
Franz Liszt seems to have been the only teacher in Europe who championed
no specific technical approach, yet he conveyed the most to his piano classes. He
stressed that the heart of the problem in performance was understanding the
music and the composer, and exploiting the piano and its potentialities toward
that end. Liszt’s achievements as a performer, composer and teacher are
legendary. His personality was dramatic in the true Romantic sense, and it
seemed to his rhapsodic adolescent piano students at Weimar that his hypnotic
powers possessed an aura of wizardry. Amy Fay’s letters of 1873 describing her
lessons with Liszt are considered a miniature classic. Sentences, paragraphs and
pages have been reprinted in all languages by bibliographers, historians and
biographers. These descriptive letters are amazingly pictorial.
Unfortunately, because of Liszt’s itinerant life, her lessons were interrupted.
Liszt, who called this period in his life “une vie trifurquée” (a life split in three),
divided his time between Weimar, where he taught, the Villa d’Este in Rome,
where he composed, and Budapest, where he founded the new Academy of
Music.
Amy Fay, whose ambition—in which she had Liszt’s encouragement—was to
become a concert pianist, was planning a European debut. She heard of Ludwig
Deppe (1828–1890), a conductor-pianist. He was one of the first to interest
himself in weight and muscular relaxation, the principle of “muscular synergy,”
which counteracted the existing system of the last half century of keyboard
methodology. Soon an exodus of pupils found their way to his studios. It is a
known fact that Deppe’s theories were to be adopted by Matthay in England,
Steinhausen, Tetzel and Breithaupt in Germany, Jaell in France, Brugnoli in Italy
and Leschetizky in Austria, all teachers of famous pianists.
With Ludwig Deppe, Amy Fay finally achieved the high musical qualities she
had heard in the concerts of Tausig, Clara Schumann, Bülow, Joachim, Wagner
and others of whom she writes. She made a successful debut in 1875, when one
of the critics wrote, “. . . this young lady has studied with the greatest masters,
and has had the most perfect success everywhere in her concert tours!”
Upon her return to America, when asked whether a whole musical training
should be under one master only, she wrote, “. . . my experience teaches me that
though all masters can give you something, none can give you everything.”
Impressed mostly with Deppe’s approach to the keyboard, she implemented his
method in her studios in New York, Boston and Chicago. She developed some
famous pupils, amongst them John Alden Carpenter. Amy Fay is known to be
the first concert artist who played an entire piano concerto in America,
performing it with Theodore Thomas, her brother-in-law. She was applauded at
her concerts all over the United States and innovated a recital program known as
“Piano Conversations.” She wrote a few pieces, amongst them a hymn which
was sold extensively. To raise the standards of music in America, she became
actively engaged in administration as the first president of the Women’s
Philharmonic Society. She contributed articles and criticisms to Dwight’s
Journal of Music, Musical America, The Musical Courier and the Chicago
Tribune.