The experience of recording

The modern recording studio is a very different place from the studios of the early twentieth century, and the process of making records has changed very greatly. Until the introduction of tape recording around 1950, pianists, like other musicians, recorded onto a wax disc one side at a time. The maximum length was about four and a half minutes by the 1930s, shorter in the early days. Recordings could not be edited, and they could not even be played back at the time without destroying the wax master. Before the advent of electrical recording in the mid 1920s, the frequency range was very limited in both bass and treble, making a concert grand piano sound more like a small upright.

The first important pianists to make records were Alfred Grünfeld in Vienna in 1899, and Raoul Pugno in Paris in 1903. But for several years into the twentieth century the principal work of the studios was vocal recording. Because the acoustic recording horns were very directional, the piano used for accompaniment was raised up to the same level as the singer's head. In 1902, Caruso's accompanist Salvatore Cottone played on an upright piano set up on a platform of packing cases. Pugno's recordings were made under similar conditions. Even when solo piano recording became established, and grand pianos were routinely used in the studio, the pre-electric recording still had limitations.

In 1972 a well-known pianist confided to an interviewer that his favourite composer was Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). In a later interview he declared that he ‘had doubts about Beethoven’ and that he didn't think Chopin was ‘a very good composer’; in fact the whole core of the pianorecital repertory was ‘a colossal waste of time’.

Such heretical statements could come only from Glenn Gould, whose groundbreaking performances of J. S. Bach (and indeed of Orlando Gibbons) demonstrate a profound understanding and love of contrapuntal writing. Gould dismissed nineteenth-century music purely on the grounds that Romantic composers treated the piano as a ‘homophonic instrument’. Leaving aside the breathtaking inaccuracy of that statement, it presumably achieved its main purpose to challenge complacent notions about piano repertory and canon.

Repertory

What are these notions? Ask any pianist about his or her ‘repertoire’ and out will come a list of works by composers from J. S. Bach to Bartók – that is, if your pianist is at all interested in his or her own century; many will not venture much beyond Brahms. Beethoven will perhaps be predominant, then Mozart and Schubert, some Haydn, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and possibly some Mendelssohn. Choice of repertory is in part influenced by examination requirements, from elementary to diploma level; it is what is taught in our conservatories, whose syllabuses reflect and reinforce prevailing custom. On the other hand, the diversity of the recording industry, particularly since the arrival of CDs, means that we now have more choice of what to listen to than ever before.

Introduction

Nationalism used to be portrayed, mistakenly, as an offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, portrayed, moreover, almost exclusively as an eastern European phenomenon. We can see now that Weber's Der Freischütz and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen are German nationalist in concept in much the same way that Mikhail Glinka's (1804–57) A life for the Tsar and Modest Musorgsky's (1839–81) Boris Godunov are Russian nationalist works. However, it is true that musical nationalism seems most apparent in those countries where there had been virtually no previous traditions of art music, such as one can point to in France, Italy or the German-speaking areas of western Europe. This is, of course, not to say that music was uncultivated in eastern Europe. Far from it: the Slavonic peoples have for the most part been intensely musical. Bohemian instrumentalists were justly celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as in most countries, eastern Europe enjoyed a rich cultural heritage of folk song and dance. Nor should we ignore the importance of church music, which had a strong impact on nineteenth-century Russian music. Since eastern European folk music and church music are much less familiar to western ears they seem to have acquired an exoticism and mystique that formerly contributed to the myth of musical nationalism as a purely eastern phenomenon. And one might add that in the nineteenth century social and political forces were strong factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments: political unrest was endemic throughout Europe, particularly between about 1830 and 1870.

Throughout the multifarious developments in the field of composition during the twentieth century, the piano has clearly retained its high profile, and its central role in European-style music making. The divide between broadly ‘popular’ and so-called ‘serious’ music, however, has widened irrevocably and, even though the boundaries may fluctuate from time to time, this has come about through changes in Western society.

It is undeniable that the distinct personality of twentieth-century popular music reflects the stylistic contribution of African–American idioms. While such idioms originally developed unhindered, the last one hundred years have seen a gradual but remarkable takeover of the popular field. The arrival of a powerful sheet-music publishing industry was followed (in chronological order of their greatest impact) by radio, sound films, commercial recording and television. Although in each medium the powers that be initially resisted black composers and performers, they eventually capitulated and thereafter played a crucial role in spreading previous minority preferences among the mainstream.

Further consideration of this fascinating process lies outside the scope of the present volume, but two other factors must be borne in mind. Firstly, those responsible for each musical innovation were not merely the elite who form the breeding ground for innovation in any artistic sphere, but a performing minority within a racial minority. Thus, despite the accelerated rate of change brought about by technological developments, the dissemination of musical innovation was a three-stage process.

In 1830 Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) wrote:

His remarks could easily have been made twenty or thirty years previously, since his description summarises – albeit in a highly generalised fashion – so many of the essentials of piano making and playing for much of the period covered by this chapter.

‘Viennese’ and English grand pianos

Most English grand pianos of the late eighteenth century look much like the Backers grand of 1772, illustrated in Fig. 1.5. The anonymous and undated grand of Fig. 2.1 is typical of instruments made in the last two decades of the eighteenth century in southern Germany and Austria (generally referred to as ‘Viennese’ pianos). These two instruments therefore illustrate the essential differences in appearance of pianos by members of the English and ‘Viennese’ schools.

The concert grand to c.1860

Piano making in the years c.1825–60 was characterised by the development of ever more powerful and sonorous instruments. In order to achieve their aims, makers continued to experiment with all aspects of piano design and as each small change was made in one part of the instrument, modifications were inevitably required elsewhere. So, for example, greater string tension necessitated a stronger frame and heavier hammers, which in turn led to a deeper touch. However, a deeper touch made fast note repetition more difficult, so a new kind of action was invented. It was a combination of hundreds of such developments (each of them painstakingly patented by makers, and listed by piano historians) that led to the emergence, around 1860, of grand pianos which were essentially the same as those used on concert platforms today.

A wooden structure was sufficient to cope with the string tension on early grand pianos. Nevertheless, small amounts of metal were used by some makers to strengthen the most vulnerable parts of the piano's structure. The first Broadwood grands, for example, from the 1780s, had small hoops of metal between the wrestplank (the block of wood which holds the tuning pins) and belly rail (the substantial wooden frame member that runs across the width of the piano and supports the end of the soundboard nearest the player) in order to prevent the gap closing through which the hammers pass on their way to hit the strings. Viennese makers soon adopted the same practice having first used wooden supports for the same purpose.

Salon and concert hall

Britain was an early pioneer in the development of public concerts: they were well established throughout the country by c.1750. In France, concerts were equally popular but, as in other aspects of French life and culture, were centred mainly on the capital to a greater extent than were their British counterparts. Public concerts were less in evidence in Germany and Austria until the early nineteenth century, though by then the citizens of Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna were able to participate in a relatively thriving concert environment.

The salon is less easy to describe than a public concert. There had been a long tradition of intellectual gatherings of connoisseurs and aristocrats, but today ‘salon’ usually refers to ‘a part-intellectual and part-social gathering in a domestic (aristocratic or bourgeois) setting: a peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon principally found in the larger European capitals’. This is fine as far as it goes, though it is hardly comprehensive, since an all-embracing definition is far from easy. (It is therefore curious that most music dictionaries, including The New Grove, make no attempt to define ‘salon’.) When Amy Fay, the American piano student from Boston, studied with Liszt in Weimar during the 1870s, the salon in which she was invited to perform from time to time was a large room in the ducal palace. These essentially private functions were attended by highly intelligent and articulate, frequently titled, persons: here the depreciatory overtones sometimes suggested by ‘salon’ are inappropriate. The same is equally true of many of the Parisian salons throughout the nineteenth century.

After the fifty-seven performances of Days Without End in 1934, just enough to cover the Theatre Guild subscribers, Broadway would not see another O'Neill play until The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The twelve years between the play that affirmed a sunny faith in God and the play that revealed O'Neill's dark existentialism are referred to as O'Neill's “silence.” Many believed that O'Neill's supposed return to Catholicism, as revealed in Days Without End, marked the end of his artistic powers. Of course, O'Neill did not return to Catholicism, nor did he feel spiritual peace. Quite the contrary, during his absence from Broadway he was engaged in his most intense exploration of his country and himself. Beset by continual physical illness, troubled by his relations with his children and wife Carlotta, deeply disturbed by the miserable state of the world - with Hitler, the world's “iceman,” on the march - O'Neill, exhausted physically and perhaps spiritually, was at the end of his tortuous journey. He was ready to write the plays of his history Cycle, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed,” a task not completed, and to write the four last plays which crown his formidable career, plays of the highest accomplishment - The Iceman Cometh (1939), Hughie (1940), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1940), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943).

Like many other male writers, Eugene O'Neill created a world populated primarily by men. From the sea plays at the beginning of his career to such late works as The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, men dominate his theatrical space. A simple number count confirms that only about one-third of the onstage characters in O'Neill's dramas are female. It is also true that the playwright's conception of women is rooted in a traditional equation of “feminine” with “maternal” that limits his ability to cast women in subject positions rather than as objects of masculine desire. Still, O'Neill's female characters cannot all be easily pigeonholed into neat categories, and even his myriad Madonnas and whores frequently transcend the cultural and theatrical clichés he inherited.

Introduction

In his introductory remarks to Lilian McCarthy's autobiography, Myself and My Friends (1933), Shaw wrote of the Court Theatre experience: “It did not seem an important chapter when we were making it: but now, twenty years after its close, it falls into perspective as a very notable one.”

When the Court Theatre venture was properly launched in the autumn of 1904 by Harley Granville Barker and J. E. Vedrenne, G. B. Shaw was' known as a minor novelist, a highly rated music and drama critic, and a failed playwright. A leading article in The Era (May 14, 1904) attributed his incontestable lack of success to his didacticism, his dehumanizing of characters, and his idiosyncratic egotism that revealed itself even more distastefully when his plays were performed rather than read. In March 1905, the leader in the same paper referred to “The Bernard Shaw Boom” at the Court Theatre. By 1907 when the Barker-Vedrenne partnership was planning a move to the larger Savoy Theatre after an artistic triumph and at least a respectable financial outcome at the Court, no less a theatrical knight than Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was extolling Shaw's virtues as a dramatist who had by this time been happily acknowledged by the presence of the King, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Prime Minister, and numerous notable politicians at his Court productions.

“The truth,” Eugene O'Neill wrote in 1926, in response to the first draft of Barrett Clark's biography of him:

And Clark later quoted Carlotta O'Neill's observation, made in 1933, that “he will never tell the truth about himself, because in so doing he would have to tell the truth about others close to him.” O'Neill did cooperate with Clark, though, and the biography, first published in 1926, includes an account of O'Neill's wanderings and his collapse with tuberculosis in 1912.

Rarely has a writer been so explicit about his literary preferences in a fictive work. Edmund Tyrone's bookcase in Long Day's Journey Into Night tells us what his alter ego, the young Eugene O'Neill, was reading round 1912. Significantly, Shakespeare is present only in the form of a picture. His collected works are found in the living room's other “large, glassed-in bookcase,” representing the contrasting taste of James Tyrone, Edmund's father. Naturally, O'Neill has arranged the two book collections to fit the generation conflict in the play: old versus new values.

O'Neill criticism falls essentially into two categories: (I) the reception of his plays in critical reviews following their performances, and (2) the interpretation and evaluation of his plays by scholars and historians. The former have obviously appeared in newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like Time, Newsweek, The Nation, and The New Yorker; the latter in scholarly journals and in books devoted to his life and works. From the early 1920s until the late 1930s - the period of O'Neill's heyday as a popular dramatist - journalistic reviews were the chief category, though some quasi-scholarly studies also appeared in that period, most notably Barrett H. Clark's Eugene O'Neill, which was originally published in 1926. With the appearance of Sophus Winther's O'Neill: A Critical Study in 1934, evaluation of the playwright as a (if not the) major American dramatist and a significant figure in world drama has come to predominate, though obviously reviews of individual productions in the United States and, increasingly, abroad continue to appear.

By the time Desire Under the Elms closed in the fall of 1925, Eugene O'Neill was firmly established as the leading artistic playwright of the American theatre. The “Triumvirate” of O'Neill, Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones had successfully reorganized the Provincetown Players into The Experimental Theatre, an off-Broadway company ready to stage virtually anything which O'Neill could conceive. Guided by the tenets of the Art Theatre movement which Macgowan promoted, O'Neill indulged his imagination, composing the historical extravaganzas “Marco Millions” and Lazarus Laughed and the allegorical The Great God Brown, and sketching out two studies of modern bourgeois America, Strange Interlude and Dynamo, as well. But Marco, Interlude and Dynamo were not produced by the Triumvirate but the Theatre Guild, a prestigious Broadway company whose embrace of O'Neill signalled his arrival as a popular dramatist.

What Richard Sewall suggests is the most salient characteristic of true tragedy is not its plots, themes, or subjects so much as the range of human feeling it incorporates in a single work, notably the “capacity for suffering” and the “stamina” of its central figures. To this I would add that it is not suffering and stamina alone, important as these qualities are in tragedy, which contribute to the greatness of a work but also the range of often contradictory feelings underlying the characters' statements and actions. In Sophocles' Antigone, it is not Antigone's monumental courage and fortitude in insisting on her brother's burial that contributes to our sense of who she is so much as it is that courage and fortitude set next to her equally monumental rigidity. Her heroism does not rule out this rigidity nor does the rigidity discredit the heroism. It is in taking those qualities together that we come to see her as tragic.