TECHNIQUE AND THE ARTIST

Technique and the artist:  that is a question, of interest to the student of every art, which was brought home to me with unusual emphasis the other afternoon, as I sat in the Queen’s Hall, and listened to Ysaye and Busoni.  Are we always quite certain what we mean when we speak of an artist?  Have we quite realised in our own minds the extent to which technique must go to the making of an artist, and the point at which something else must be superadded?  That is a matter which I often doubt, and the old doubt came back to my mind the other afternoon, as I listened to Ysaye and Busoni, and next day, as I turned over the newspapers.

I read, in the first paper I happen to take up, that the violinist and the pianist are “a perfectly matched pair”; the applause, at the concert, was even more enthusiastic for Busoni than for Ysaye.  I hear both spoken of as artists, as great artists; and yet, if words have any meaning, it seems to me that only one of the two is an artist at all, and the other, with all his ability, only an executant.  Admit, for a moment, that the technique of the two is equal, though it is not quite possible to admit even that, in the strictest sense.  So far, we have made only a beginning.  Without technique, perfect of its kind, no one is worth consideration in any art.  The rope-dancer or the acrobat must be perfect in technique before he appears on the stage at all; in his case, a lapse from perfection brings its own penalty, death perhaps; his art begins when his technique is already perfect.  Artists who deal in materials less fragile than human life should have no less undeviating a sense of responsibility to themselves and to art.  But the performance comes afterwards, and it is the performance with which we are concerned.  Of two acrobats, each equally skilful, one will be individual and an artist, the other will remain consummately skilful and uninteresting; the one having begun where the other leaves off.  Now Busoni can do, on the pianoforte, whatever he can conceive; the question is, what can he conceive?  As he sat at the piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, of the Bechstein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other extraneous things, never of Chopin.  I saw the pianist with the Christ-like head, the carefully negligent elegance of his appearance, and I heard wonderful sounds coming out of the Bechstein piano; but, try as hard as I liked, I could not feel the contact of soul and instrument, I could not feel that a human being was expressing himself in sound.  A task was magnificently accomplished, but a new beauty had not come into the world.  Then the Kreutzer Sonata began, and I looked at Ysaye, as he stood, an almost shapeless mass of flesh, holding the violin between his fat fingers, and looking vaguely into the air.  He put the violin to his shoulder.  The face had been like a mass of clay, waiting the sculptor’s thumb.  As the music came, an