Classical Music

We set down below two of the commentaries which the Radio Orient station presents on classical music at half past seven every Wednesday and every Saturday evening:

Tonight I should like to present Chopin's First Polonaise, having broadcast dances by Liszt on Wednesday evening, because between these two musicians there is such a likeness of circumstance as draws their music close together. Chopin was born one year after Liszt, in the early years of the last century; both were enamored of the piano; both dreamed of a kiss from Beethoven enfolding beneath it the promises of glory; and the lives of both entered the history of literature laden with beauty, suffering, and greatness.

And though Liszt was Hungarian and Chopin Polish, both settled in France; she loved them and they loved her; from her they took delicacy and depth, and from their native homelands the power of invention...

Thus far the two geniuses go together. Now we leave Liszt to turn to Chopin, who is our subject this evening. We find that his personality was able to unite two currents in Western music — the one dry and intellectual, the other liquid and emotional — and formed of them a single current in which mind and feeling were balanced, the mind not dry nor the feeling liquid; and thereby he wrote a new page in the development of music. As for the stages of his emotional life, I shall not dwell on their telling, for this side belongs, as I have said, to the history of literature; but I will touch on one incident which had the greatest effect upon his music: his disappointment with Marie Veozinska, that beloved who left in the depths of his heart wounds that cannot be effaced. Its effect upon his music was that, as we listen to him, we have come always to feel shades of anxiety, of fretfulness, of love mingled with doubt, of softness hedged about with harshness, of hope sprouting in despair. He despairs of sickness as though he yearned for it; he loves life in mockery, and in mockery too he hates death; in his feeling there is an obscure clarity and an anxious tranquility. He is a bundle of contradictions — but contradictions which Chopin's genius was able to direct and to order until they fell into harmony and formed of themselves a new page in the history of music, reflecting the image of a particular romantic age and a manner of feeling gladness and pain which, however much we say it is a real, individual personality, is at the same time eternally human.

And though Chopin's music was at first denied its due, it occupies today the place that befits it, and there is universal acknowledgment that Chopin is the master of the piano without rival, having turned upon it all his powers and his thoughts until he was able to make of it a personal language, as we shall now observe; so that harmony in his hands became, for its perfection and its richness, like an elegant, unbroken melody — that is what I felt when I heard some of his pieces played by magical fingers last summer.

Nor may we forget, as we listen to him, that this genius charged his music, over and above his wide learning and his rare gift, with throbbing fragments of his own private life. And yet he does not give his pieces titles but numbers them, out of his conviction that they belong to pure music, which passes beyond subject matter. And now, Chopin's First Polonaise.

The first thing that comes to our mind when we listen to the piece I present this evening is the capacity of the composer Debussy for the invention of subjects. I have already broadcast his Blessed Damozel and The Sea; and here I present tonight a piece which, from the time he composed it until now, has been a cause of delight to thousands upon thousands of people in every land. Its title is "Children's Corner," and it is in truth a paradise of children. Debussy composed it in the attempt to embody in it the imagination of children in their hours of merriment, in ordered musical airs; and in this he reminds us of "The Nutcracker" of the composer Tchaikovsky, for each is an embodiment of the imagination of children, and each is splendid — except that Children's Corner lies nearer to hand than The Nutcracker, though it is without a story.

To be able to savor it, we must picture ourselves in a great hall, with the children seated in a corner of it, chattering together and playing with the various dolls in their hands. This one imagines that the señora in his hand is dancing upon the snow; that one fancies that his children wish to take a stroll in the moonlight; a third lines up the colored blocks in his hands as soldiers in fullest readiness for the march. Amid these imaginings arise the innocent squabbles of children, shot through now with weeping and now with laughter. All this Debussy embodies for us in airs of the descriptive, pictorial kind, rich in melody that varies in proportion as the scene varies, while keeping one and the same atmosphere from the beginning of the piece to its end.

In this kind of music we cannot but recall what Beethoven enjoined in his words on the Pastoral Symphony, when he insisted on the necessity of not going too far in binding each sound to the image or the state it represents, so that the pleasure of discovery may remain to the listener. And I — though I have given the basic outlines of this piece which we hear tonight, and offered some examples of what Debussy may have imagined of children's thinking when he composed that piece — have mentioned only a little of the much that the listener may gather when he listens closely to this excellent gem, even though it is not among the essential classics, even for Debussy.

For in Children's Corner there are sweet discoveries for the piano such as astonish men of experience and specialty, and in it there is such novelty and charm as astonishes every man. Who, for instance, would ever think of setting music to the walk of a cake, or to the amblings of the Abyssinian elephant, or to the dance of the snow! But Debussy is a skilled creator, who knows the keys of delight in people. And that the honored listeners may the more easily follow him along with their children, if they wish, I draw their attention to this: the music of the first quarter of this piece turns on the señora's promenade — and in her promenade, as in the promenades of people, there is lovely nature and enchanting natural sounds. The music of the second quarter turns on the dance of the snow — and in the dance of the snow there is a cold that turns to warmth, a softness of touch, and white melodies; and feeling has its colors, as connoisseurs know. In the third quarter is the walk of the cake — and who says a cake cannot walk? Every child imagines that the cake has legs that help it escape from him. And in the last quarter the music turns on the movings of the elephant; and this little elephant in the child's hand is a symbol of that huge animal — and if Debussy pictures it, he pictures it as the child sees it with his imagination, not with his eye.

After this introduction you will hear Debussy's Children's Corner.

Until next Wednesday, God willing.