How to Appreciate Music

How to Appreciate Music is a book by Gustav Kobbé. Kobbé was an American music critic and author, here presenting musicological analysis of some of the greatest classical composers throughout history. Excerpt: «What you will notice about these compositions of Chopin—and I say „these compositions“ deliberately, although I have not named any (for it makes no difference what pieces of his are on the program, the effect will be the same)—is the fact that in none of them is there the slightest suggestion of anything but pianoforte music. Chopin's great achievement so far as the pianoforte is concerned is the fact that he liberated it completely from orchestral and choral influences, and made it an instrument sufficient unto itself, brought it into its own in all its beauty of tone and expression and enlarged its capacity; sought out its soul and reproduced it in tone, as no other composer had done before him or has done since. The recognition of the true piano tone seems to have been instinctive with him. It appears in his earliest works. Nothing he ever wrote suggests orchestra or voice. For the beautiful singing quality he brings out in much of his music is a singing quality which belongs to the noble instrument to which he devoted himself. Not once while listening to a Chopin composition do you think to yourself, as you do so often with classical works, like the Beethoven sonatas, „How well this would sound on the orchestra!“ 119Yet Chopin is as sonorous, as passionate, as pleading, as melancholy and as rich in effect, although he is played only on the black and white keys of the pianoforte, as if he were given forth by a hundred instrumentalists, so thoroughly did he understand the instrument for which he wrote. He was the Wagner of the pianoforte.»