Franz Liszt
by James Huneker · English · Gutenberg #39754 · 703,953 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Franz Liszt
Author: James Huneker
Release date: May 21, 2012 [eBook #39754]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANZ LISZT ***
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FRANZ LISZT
[Illustration: The Youthful Liszt]
FRANZ LISZT
BY
JAMES HUNEKER
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1911
[Illustration]
TO
HENRY T. FINCK
"Genie oblige."--F. LISZT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LISZT: THE REAL AND LEGENDARY 1
II. ASPECTS OF HIS ART AND CHARACTER 34
III. THE B-MINOR SONATA AND OTHER PIANO PIECES 59
IV. AT ROME, WEIMAR, BUDAPEST 78
V. AS COMPOSER 103
VI. MIRRORED BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES 201
VII. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF LISZT 327
VIII. LISZT PUPILS AND LISZTIANA 353
IX. MODERN PIANOFORTE VIRTUOSI 418
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE 439
INDEX 443
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Youthful Liszt _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Liszt's Birthplace, Raiding 8
Adam Liszt--Liszt's father 12
Anna Liszt--Liszt's mother 12
Daniel Liszt--Son of Liszt 16
Blandine Ollivier--Daughter of Liszt 16
Cosima von Buelow--Daughter of Liszt 20
Liszt, about 1850 36
Liszt at the piano 40
The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein 50
A Matinee at Liszt's 66
Countess Marie d'Agoult 80
Liszt in his atelier at Weimar 100
Pauline Apel--Liszt's Housekeeper at Weimar 328
Liszt and His Scholars, 1884 358
Liszt's Hand 404
Last Picture of Liszt, 1886, Aged Seventy-five Years 416
The Final Liszt Circle at Weimar--Liszt at the Upper Window 436
I
LISZT: THE REAL AND LEGENDARY
I
Franz Liszt remarked to a disciple of his: "Once Liszt helped Wagner,
but who now will help Liszt?" This was said in 1874, when Liszt was well
advanced in years, when his fame as piano virtuoso and his name as
composer were wellnigh eclipsed by the growing glory of Wagner--truly a
glory he had helped to create. In youth, an Orpheus pursued by the
musical Maenads of Europe, in old age Liszt was a Merlin dealing in
white magic, still followed by the Viviens. The story of his career
is as romantic as any by Balzac. And the end of it all--after a
half century and more of fire and flowers, of proud, brilliant
music-making--was tragical. A gentle King Lear (without the consolation
of a Cordelia), following with resignation the conquering chariot of a
man, his daughter's husband, who owed him so much, and, despite
criticism, bravely acknowledged his debt, thus faithful to the end (he
once declared that by Wagner he would stand or fall), Franz Liszt died a
quarter of a century ago at Bayreuth, not as Liszt the Conqueror, but a
world-weary pilgrim, petted and flattered when young, neglected as the
star of Wagner arose on the horizon. If only Liszt could have
experienced the success of poverty as did Wagner. But the usual
malevolent fairy of the fable endowed him with all the gifts but
poverty, and that capricious old Pantaloon, the Time-Spirit, had his
joke in the lonesome latter years. As regards his place in the musical
pantheon, this erst-while comet is now a fixed star, and his feet set
upon the white throne. There is no longer a Liszt case; his music has
fallen into critical perspective; but there is still a Liszt case,
psychologically speaking. Whether he was an archangel of light, a
Bernini of tones, or, as Jean-Christophe describes him, "The noble
priest, the circus-rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in equal
doses of real and false nobility," is a question that will be answered
according to one's temperament. That he was the captain of the new
German music, a pianist without equal, a conductor of distinction, one
who had helped to make the orchestra and its leaders what they are
to-day; that he was a writer, a reformer of church music, a man of the
noblest impulses and ideals, generous, selfless, and an artist to his
fingertips--these are the commonplaces of musical history. As a
personality he was an apparition; only Paganini had so electrified
Europe. A _charmeur_, his love adventures border on the legendary;
indeed, are largely legend. As amorous as a guitar, if we are to
believe the romancers, the real Liszt was a man of intellect, a deeply
religious soul; in middle years contemplative, even ascetic. His
youthful extravagances, inseparable from his gipsy-like genius, and
without a father to guide him, were remembered in Germany long after
he had left the concert-platform. His successes, artistic and
social--especially the predilection for him of princesses and noble
dames--raised about his ears a nest of pernicious scandal-hornets. Had
he not run away with Countess D'Agoult, the wife of a nobleman! Had he
not openly lived with a married princess at Weimar, and under the
patronage of the Grand Duke and Duchess and the Grand Duchess Maria
Pawlowna, sister of the Czar of all the Russias! Besides, he was a Roman
Catholic, and that didn't please such prim persons as Mendelssohn and
Hiller, not to mention his own fellow-countryman, Joseph Joachim.
Germany set the fashion in abusing Liszt. He had too much success for
one man, and as a composer he must be made an example of; the services
he rendered in defending the music of the insurgent Wagner was but
another black mark against his character. And when Wagner did at last
succeed, Liszt's share in the triumph was speedily forgotten. The truth
is, he paid the penalty for being a cosmopolitan. He was the first
cosmopolitan in music. In Germany he was abused as a Magyar, in Hungary
for his Teutonic tendencies--he never learned his mother tongue--in
Paris for not being French born; here one recalls the Stendhal case.
But he introduced into the musty academic atmosphere of musical Europe a
strong, fresh breeze from the Hungarian _puzta_; this wandering
piano-player of Hungarian-Austrian blood, a genuine cosmopolite, taught
music a new charm, the charm of the unexpected, the improvised. The
freedom of Beethoven in his later works, and of Chopin in all his music,
became the principal factor in the style of Liszt. Music must have the
shape of an improvisation. In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of
which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern, are the extremes of his
system. His orchestral and vocal works, the two symphonies, the masses
and oratorios and symphonic poems, are full of dignity, poetic feeling,
religious spirit, and a largeness of accent and manner though too often
lacking in architectonic; yet the gipsy glance and gipsy voice lurk
behind many a pious or pompous bar. Apart from his invention of a new
form--or, rather, the condensation and revisal of an old one, the
symphonic poem--Liszt's greatest contribution to art is the wild,
truant, rhapsodic, extempore element he infused into modern music;
nature in her most reckless, untrammelled moods he interpreted with
fidelity. But the drummers in the line of moral gasolene who controlled
criticism in Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso
with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. Even the piquant
triangle in his piano-concerto was suspected as possibly suggesting the
usual situation of French comedy.
The Liszt-Wagner question no longer presents any difficulties to the
fair-minded. It is a simple one; men still living know that Wagner, to
reach his musical apogee, to reach his public, had to lean heavily on
the musical genius and individual inspiration of Liszt. The later Wagner
would not have existed--as we now know him--without first traversing the
garden of Liszt. This is not a theory but a fact. Beethoven, as Philip
Hale has pointed out, is the last of the very great composers; there is
nothing new since Beethoven, though plenty of persuasive personalities,
much delving in mole-runs, many "new paths," leading nowhere, and much
self-advertising. With its big drum and cymbals, its mouthing or melting
phrases, its startling situations, its scarlet waistcoats, its hair-oil
and harlots, its treacle and thunder, the Romantic movement swept over
the map of Europe, irresistible, contemptuous to its adversaries, and
boasting a wonderful array of names. Schumann and Chopin, Berlioz and
Liszt, Wagner--in a class by himself--are a few that may be cited; not
to mention Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal.
Georg Brandes assigns to Liszt a prominent place among the Romantics.
But Beethoven still stood, stands to-day, four square to the universe.
Wagner construed Beethoven to suit his own grammar. Why, for example,
Berlioz should have been puzzled (or have pretended to) over the first
page of the Tristan and Isolde prelude is itself puzzling; the Frenchman
was a deeply versed Beethoven student. If he had looked at the first
page of the piano sonata in C minor--the Pathetic, so-called--the enigma
of the Wagnerian phraseology would have been solved; there, in a few
lines, is the kernel of this music-drama. This only proves Wagner's
Shakesperian faculty of assimilation and his extraordinary gift in
developing an idea (consider what he made of the theme of Chopin's C
minor study, the Revolutionary, which he boldly annexed for the opening
measures of the prelude to Act II of Tristan and Isolde); he borrowed
his ideas whenever and wherever he saw fit. His indebtedness to Liszt
was great, but equally so to Weber, Marschner, and Beethoven; his
indebtedness to Berlioz ended with the externals of orchestration. Both
Liszt and Wagner learned from Berlioz in this respect. Nevertheless, how
useless to compare Liszt to Berlioz or Berlioz to Wagner. As well
compare a ruby to an opal, an emerald to a ruby. Each of these three
composers has his individual excellences. The music of all three suffers
from an excess of profile. We call Liszt and Wagner the leaders of the
moderns, but their aims and methods were radically different. Wagner
asserted the supremacy of the drama over tone, and then, inconsistently,
set himself down to write the most emotionally eloquent music that was
ever conceived; Liszt always harped on the dramatic, on the poetic, and
seldom employed words, believing that the function of instrumental music
is to convey in an ideal manner a poetic impression. In this he was the
most thorough-going of poetic composers, as much so in the orchestral
domain as was Chopin in his pianoforte compositions. Since Wagner's
music-plays are no longer a novelty "the long submerged trail of Liszt
is making its appearance," as Ernest Newman happily states the case. But
to be truthful, the music of both Liszt and Wagner is already a little
old-fashioned. The music-drama is not precisely in a rosy condition
to-day. Opera is the weakest of forms at best, the human voice
inevitably limits the art, and we are beginning to wonder what all the
Wagnerian menagerie, the birds, dragons, dogs, snakes, swans, toads,
dwarfs, giants, horses, and monsters generally, have to do with music.
The music of the future is already the music of the past. The Wagner
poems are uncouth, cumbersome machines. We long for a breath of
humanity, and it is difficult to find it outside of Tristan and Isolde
or Die Meistersinger. Alas! for the enduring quality of operatic music.
Nothing stales like theatre music. The rainbow vision of a synthesis of
the Seven Arts has faded forever. In the not far distant future Wagner
will gain, rather than lose, by being played in the concert-room; that,
at least, would dodge the ominously barren stretches of the Ring, and
the early operas. The Button-Moulder awaits at the cross-roads of time
all operatic music, even as he waited for Peer Gynt. And the New
Zealander is already alive, though young, who will visit Europe to
attend the last piano-recital: that species of entertainment invented by
Liszt, and by him described in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso as
colloquies of music and ennui. He was the first pianist to show his
profile on the concert stage, his famous _profil d'ivoire_; before Liszt
pianists either faced the audience or sat with their back to the public.
The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein--one naturally drops into the Almanac de
Gotha when writing of the friends of Liszt--averred that Liszt had
launched his musical spear further into the future than Wagner. She was
a lady of firm opinions, who admired Berlioz as much as she loathed
Wagner. But could she have foreseen that Richard Strauss, Parsifal-like,
had caught the whizzing lance of the Klingsor of Weimar, what would she
have said? Put the riddle to contemporary critics of Richard II--who
has, at least, thrown off the influence of Liszt and Wagner, although he
too frequently takes snap-shots at the sublime in his scores. Otherwise,
you can no more keep Liszt's name out of the music of to-day than could
good Mr. Dick the head of King Charles from the pages of his memorial.
His musical imagination was versatile, his impressionability so lively
that he translated into tone his voyages, pictures, poems--Dante,
Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Obermann, (Senancour), even Sainte-Beuve (Les
Consolations,) legends, and the cypress-haunted fountains of the Villa
d' Este (Tivoli); not to mention canvases by Raphael, Mickelangelo, and
the uninspired frescoes of Kaulbach. All was grist that came to his
musical mill.
In a moment of self-forgetfulness, Wagner praised the music of Liszt in
superlative terms. No need of quotation; the correspondence, a classic,
is open to all. That the symphonic poem was secretly antipathetic to
Wagner is the bald truth. After all his rhapsodic utterances concerning
the symphonies and poems of Liszt--from which he borrowed many a
sparkling jewel to adorn some corner in his giant frescoes--he said in
1877, "In instrumental music I am a _reactionnaire_, a conservative. I
dislike everything that requires verbal explanations beyond the actual
sounds." And he, the most copious of commentators concerning his own
music, in which almost every other bar is labelled with a leading
motive! To this Liszt wittily answered--in an unpublished letter
(1878)--that leading motives are comfortable inventions, as a composer
does not have to search for a new melody. But what boots leading
motives--as old as the hills and Johann Sebastian Bach--or symphonic
poems nowadays? There is no Wagner, there is no Liszt question. After
the unbinding of the classic forms the turbulent torrent is become the
new danger. Who shall dam its speed! Brahms or Reger? The formal
formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on
the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The
symphonic poem is now a monster of appalling lengths, thereby, as Mr.
Krehbiel suggests, defeating its chiefest reason for existence, its
brevity. The foam and fireworks of the impressionistic school, Debussy,
Dukas, and Ravel, and the rest, are enjoyable; the piano music of
Debussy has the iridescence of a spider's web touched by the fire of the
setting sun; his orchestra is a jewelled conflagration. But he stems
like the others, the Russians included, from Liszt. Charpentier and his
followers are Wagner _a la coule_. Where it will all end no man dare
predict. But Mr. Newman is right in the matter of programme-music. It
has come to stay, modified as it may be in the future. Too many bricks
and mortar, the lust of the ear as well as of the eye, glutted by the
materialistic machinery of the Wagner music-drama, have driven the
lovers of music-for-music's-sake back to Beethoven; or, in extreme
cases, to novel forms wherein vigourous affirmations are dreaded as
much as an eight-bar melody; for those meticulous temperaments that
recoil from clangourous chord, there are the misty tonalities of
Debussy or the verse of Paul Verlaine. However, the aquarelles
and pastels and landscapes of Debussy or Ravel were invented by
_Urvater_ Liszt--caricatured by Wagner in the person of Wotan; all the
impressionistic school may be traced to him as its fountain-head. Think
of the little sceneries scattered through his piano music, particularly
in his Years of Pilgrimage; or of the storm and stress of the
Dante Sonata. The romanticism of Liszt was, like so many of his
contemporaries, a state of soul, a condition of exalted or morbid
sensibility. But it could not be said of him as it could of all the Men
of Fine Shades--Chateaubriand, Heine, Stendhal, Benjamin Constant,
Sainte-Beuve--that they were only men of feeling in their art, and
decidedly the reverse in their conduct. Liszt was a pattern of chivalry,
and if he seems at times as indulging too much in the Grand Manner set
it down to his surroundings, to his temperament. The idols of his
younger years were Bonaparte and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, while
in the background hovered the prime corrupter of the nineteenth century
and the father of Romanticism, J. J. Rousseau.
II
[Illustration: Liszt's Birthplace, Raiding]
The year 1811 was the year of the great comet. Its wine is said to have
been of a richness; some well-known men were born, beginning with
Thackeray and John Bright; Napoleon's son, the unhappy Duc de
Reichstadt, first saw the light that year, as did Jules Dupre, Theophile
Gautier, and Franz Liszt. There will be no disputes concerning the date
of his birth, October 22d, as was the case with Chopin. His ancestors,
according to a lengthy family register, were originally noble; but the
father of Franz, Adam Liszt, was a manager of the Esterhazy estates in
Hungary at the time his only son and child was born. He was very
musical, knew Joseph Haydn, and was an admirer of Hummel, his music and
playing. The mother's maiden name was Anna Lager (or Laager), a native
of lower Austria, with German blood in her veins. The mixed blood of her
son might prove a source of interest to Havelock Ellis in his studies of
heredity and genius. If Liszt was French in the early years of his
manhood, he was decidedly German the latter half of his life. The Magyar
only came out on the keyboard, and in his compositions. She was of a
happy and extremely vivacious nature, cheerful in her old age, and
contented to educate her three grandchildren later in life. The name
Liszt would be meal or flour in English; so that Frank Flour might have
been his unromantic cognomen; a difference from Liszt Ferencz,
with its accompanying battle-cry of _Eljen!_ In his son Adam Liszt
hoped to realise his own frustrated musical dreams. A prodigy of
a prodigious sort, the comet and the talent of Franz were mixed up by the
superstitious. Some gipsy predicted that the lad would return to his
native village rich, honoured, and in a glass house (coach). This he
did. In Oedenburg, during the summer of 1903, I visited at an hour or
so distant, the town of Eisenstadt and the village of Raiding (or
Reiding). In the latter is the house where Liszt was born. The place,
which can hardly have changed much since the boyhood of Liszt, is called
Dobrjan in Hungarian. I confess I was not impressed, and was glad to get
back to Oedenburg and civilisation. In this latter spot there is a
striking statue of the composer.
[Illustration: Anna Liszt
Liszt's Mother]
It is a thrice-told tale that several estimable Hungarian magnates
raised a purse for the boy, sent him with his father to Vienna, where he
studied the piano with the pedagogue Carl Czerny, that indefatigable
fabricator of finger-studies, and in theory with Salieri. He was
kissed by the aged Beethoven on the forehead--Wotan saluting young
Siegfried--though Schindler, _ami de_ Beethoven, as he dubbed himself,
denied this significant historical fact. But later Schindler pitched
into Liszt for his Beethoven interpretations, hotly swearing that they
were the epitome of unmusical taste. The old order changeth, though not
old prejudices. Liszt waxed in size, technique, wisdom. Soon he was
given up as hopelessly in advance of his teachers. Wherever he appeared
they hailed him as a second Hummel, a second Beethoven. And he
improvised. That settled his fate. He would surely become a composer. He
went to Paris, was known as _le petit Litz_, and received everywhere. He
became the rage, though he was refused admission to the Conservatoire,
probably because he displayed too much talent for a boy. He composed an
opera, Don Sancho, the score of which has luckily disappeared. Then an
event big with consequences was experienced by the youth--he lost his
father in 1827. (His mother survived her husband until 1866.) He gave up
concert performances as too precarious, and manfully began teaching in
Paris. The revolution started his pulse to beating, and he composed a
revolutionary symphony. He became a lover of humanity, a socialist, a
follower of Saint-Simon, even of the impossible Pere Prosper Enfantin.
His friend and adviser was Lamenais, whose Paroles d'un Croyant had
estranged him from Rome. A wonderful, unhappy man. Liszt read poetry and
philosophy, absorbed all the fashionable frenzied formulas and
associated with the Romanticists. He met Chopin, and they became as twin
brethren. Francois Mignet, author of A History of the French Revolution,
said to the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Liszt: "In the brain of this
young man reigns great confusion." No wonder. He was playing the piano,
composing, teaching, studying the philosophers, and mingling with
enthusiastic idealists who burnt their straw before they moulded their
bricks. As Francis Hackett wrote of the late Lord Acton, Liszt suffered
from "intellectual log-jam." But the current of events soon released
him.
[Illustration: Adam Liszt
Liszt's Father]
He met the Countess d'Agoult in the brilliant whirl of his artistic
success. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her contemporaries
declare she was not of a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de
Flavigny, at Frankfort-on-Main in 1805. Her father was the Vicomte de
Flavigny, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich
banker, originally from Amsterdam and a reformed Hebrew. She had
literary ability, was proud of having once seen Goethe, and in 1827 she
married Comte Charles d'Agoult. But social sedition was in the air. The
misunderstood woman--no new thing--was the fashion. George Sand was
changing her lovers with every new book she wrote, and Madame, the
Countess d'Agoult--to whom Chopin dedicated his first group of
Etudes--began to write, began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt
appeared. He seems to have been the pursued. Anyhow, they eloped. In
honour he couldn't desert the woman, and they made Geneva their
temporary home. She had in her own right 20,000 francs a year income; it
cost Liszt exactly 300,000 francs annually to keep up an establishment
such as the lady had been accustomed to--he earned this, a tidy amount,
for those days, by playing the piano all over Europe. Madame d'Agoult
bore him three children: Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. The first named
married Emile Ollivier, Napoleon's war minister--still living at the
present writing--in 1857. She died in 1862. Cosima married Hans von
Buelow, her father's favourite pupil, in 1857; later she went off with
Richard Wagner, married him, to her father's despair--principally
because she had renounced her religion in so doing--and to-day is
Wagner's widow. Daniel Liszt, his father's hope, died December, 1859, at
the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatised the birth of his children,
had educated them, had dowered his daughters, and they proved all three
a source of sorrow.
[Illustration: Blandine Ollivier
Daughter of Liszt]
He quarrelled with the D'Agoult and they parted bad friends. Under the
pen name of Daniel Stern she attacked Liszt in her souvenirs and novels.
He forgave her. They met in Paris once, in the year 1860. He gently told
her that the title of the souvenirs should have been "Poses et
Mensonges." She wept. Tragic comedians, both. They were bored with one
another; their union recalls the profound reflection of Flaubert, that
Emma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps
other ladies had supervened. Like Byron, Liszt was the sentimental hero
of the day, a Chateaubriand Rene of the keyboard. Balzac put him in a
book, so did George Sand. All the painters and sculptors, Delaroche and
Ary Scheffer among others made his portrait. Nevertheless, his head was
not turned, and when, after an exile of a few years, Thalberg had
conquered Paris in his absence, he returned and engaged in an ivory
duel, at the end worsting his rival. Thalberg was the first pianist in
Europe, contended every one. And the Belgiojoso calmly remarked that
Liszt was the only one. After witnessing the Paderewski worship of
yesterday nothing related of Liszt should surprise us.
[Illustration: Daniel Liszt
Son of Liszt]
In the meantime, Paganini, had set his brain seething. Chopin, Paganini
and Berlioz were the predominating artistic influences in his life; from
the first he appreciated the exotic, learned the resources of the
instrument, and the value of national folk-song flavour; from the second
he gained the inspiration for his transcendental technique; from the
third, orchestral colour and the "new paths" were indicated to his
ambitious spirit. He never tired, he always said there would be plenty
of time to loaf in eternity. His pictures were everywhere, he became a
kind of Flying Hungarian to the sentimental Sentas of those times. He
told Judith Gautier that the women loved themselves in him. Modest man!
What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine
called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an
advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl, and Doehler--a
pianist. Scudo wrote that Thalberg's scales were like pearls on velvet,
the scales of Liszt the same, but the velvet was hot! Louis Ehlert, no
mean observer, said he possessed a quality that neither Tausig nor any
virtuoso before or succeeding him ever boasted--the nearest approach,
perhaps, was Rubinstein--namely: a spontaneous control of passion that
approximated in its power to nature ... and an incommensurable nature
was his. He was one among a dozen artists who made Europe interesting
during the past century. Slim, handsome in youth, brown of hair and
blue-eyed, with the years he grew none the less picturesque; his mane
was white, his eyes became blue-gray, his pleasant baritone voice a
brumming bass. There is a portrait in the National Gallery by Lorenzo
Lotto, of Prothonotary Giuliano, that suggests him, and in the
Burne-Jones picture, Merlin and Vivien, there is certainly a transcript
of his features. A statue by Foyatier in the Louvre, of Spartacus,
is really the head of the pianist. As Abbe he was none the less
fascinating; for his admirers he wore his _soutane_ with a difference.
Useless to relate the Thousand-and-One Nights of music, triumphs, and
intrigues in his life. When the Countess d'Agoult returned to her family
a council, presided over by her husband's brother, exonerated the
pianist, and his behaviour was pronounced to be that of a gentleman!
Surely the Comic Muse must have chuckled at this. Like Wagner, Franz
Liszt was a Tragic Comedian of prime order. He knew to the full the
value of his electric personality. Sincere in art, he could play the
grand seignior, the actor, the priest, and diplomat at will. Pose he had
to, else abandon the profession of piano virtuoso. But he bitterly
objected to playing the role of a performing poodle, and once publicly
insulted the Czar, who dared to talk while the greatest pianist in the
world played. He finally grew tired of Paris, of public life. He had
been loved by such various types of women as George Sand--re-christened
by Baudelaire as the Prudhomme of immorality; delightful epigram!--by
Marie Du Plessis, the Lady of the Camellias, and by that astounding
adventuress, Lola Montez. How many others only a Leporello catalogue
would show.
His third artistic period began in 1847, his sojourn at Weimar. It was
the most attractive and fruitful of all. From 1848 to 1861 the musical
centre of Germany was this little town immortalised by Goethe. There the
world flocked to hear the first performance of Lohengrin, and other
Wagner operas. A circle consisting of Raff, Von Buelow, Tausig,
Cornelius, Joseph Joachim, Schumann, Robert Franz, Litolff, Dionys
Pruckner, William Mason, Lassen, with Berlioz and Rubinstein and Brahms
(in 1854) and Remenyi as occasional visitors, to mention a tithe of
famous names, surrounded Liszt. His elective affinity--in Goethe's
phrase--was the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who with her child had
deserted the usual brutal and indifferent husband--in fashionable
romances. Her influence upon Liszt's character has been disputed, but
unwarrantably. She occasionally forced him to do the wrong thing, as in
the case of the ending of the Dante symphony; _vide_, the new Wagner
Autobiography. Together they wrote his chief literary works, the study
of Chopin--the princess supplying the feverish local colour, and the
book on Hungarian gipsy music, which contains a veiled attack on the
Jews, for which Liszt was blamed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein was an intense,
narrow nature--she has been called a "slightly vulgar aristocrat," and
one of her peculiarities was seeing in almost every one of artistic or
intellectual prominence Hebraic traits or lineaments. Years before the
Geyer and the Leipsic _Judengasse_ story came out she unhesitatingly
pronounced Richard Wagner of Semitic origin; she also had her doubts
about Berlioz and others. The Lisztian theory of gipsy music consists,
as Dannreuther says, in the merit of a laboured attempt to prove the
existence of something like a gipsy epic in terms of music, the fact
being that Hungarian gipsies merely play Hungarian popular tunes in a
fantastic and exciting manner, but have no music that can properly be
called their own. Liszt was a facile, picturesque writer and did more
with his pen for Wagner than Wagner's own turbid writings. But a great
writer he was not--many-sided as he was. It was unkind, however, on the
part of Wagner to say to a friend that Cosima had more brains than her
father. If she has, Bayreuth since her husband's death hasn't proved it.
Wagner, when he uttered this, was probably in the ferment of a new
passion, having quite recovered from his supposedly eternal love for
Mathilde Wesendonck.
[Illustration: Cosima von Buelow
Daughter of Liszt]
A masterful woman the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, though far from
beautiful, she so controlled and ordered Liszt's life that he quite shed
his bohemian skin, composed much, and as Kapellmeister produced many
novelties of the new school. They lived on a hill in a house called the
Altenburg, not a very princely abode, and there Liszt accomplished the
major portion of his works for orchestra, his masses and piano
concertos. There, too, Richard Wagner, a revolutionist, wanted by the
Dresden police, came in 1849--from May 19th to 24th--disguised, carrying
a forged passport, poor, miserable. Liszt secured him lodgings, and gave
him a banquet at the Altenburg attended by Tausig, Von Buelow, Gille,
Draeseke, Gottschalg, and others, nineteen in all. Wagner behaved badly,
insulted his host and guests. He was left in solitude until Liszt
insisted on his apologising for his rude manners--which he did with a
bad grace. John F. Runciman has said that Liszt ought to have done even
more for Wagner than he did--or words to that effect; just so, and there
is no doubt that the noble man has put the world in his debt by piloting
the music-dramatist into safe harbour; but while ingratitude is no crime
according to Nietzsche (who, quite illogically, reproached Wagner for
_his_ ingratitude) there seems a limit to amiability, and in Liszt's
case his amiability amounted to weakness. He could never say "No" to
Wagner (nor to a pretty woman). He understood and forgave the Mime
nature in Wagner for the sake of his Siegfried side. There was no Mime
in Liszt, nothing small nor hateful, although he could at times play the
benevolent, ironic Mephisto. And in his art he mirrored the quality to
perfection--the Mephistopheles of his Faust Symphony.
Intrigues pursued him in his capacity as court musical director. The
Princess Maria-Pawlowna died June, 1859; the following October Princess
Marie, daughter of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, married the Prince
Hohenlohe, and Liszt, after the opera by Peter Cornelius was hissed,
resigned his post. He remembered Goethe and his resignation, caused by a
trained dog, at the same theatre. But he didn't leave Weimar until
August 17, 1861, joining the princess at Rome. The scandal of the
attempted marriage there is told in another chapter. Again the eyes of
the world were riveted upon Liszt. His very warts became notorious. Some
say that Cardinal Antonelli, instigated by Polish relatives of the
princess, upset the affair when the pair were literally on the eve of
approaching the altar; some believe that the wily Liszt had set in
motion the machinery; but the truth is that at the advice of the
Cardinal Prince Hohenlohe, his closest friend, the marriage scheme was
dropped. When the husband of the princess died there was no further talk
of matrimony. Instead, Liszt took minor orders, concentrated his
attention on church music, and henceforth spent his year between Rome,
Weimar, and Budapest. He hoped for a position at the Papal court
analogous to the one he had held at Weimar; but the appointment of
music-director at St. Peter's was never made. To Weimar he had returned
(1869) at the cordial invitation of the archduke, who allotted to his
use a little house in the park, the _Hofgaertnerei_. There every summer
he received pupils from all parts of the world, gratuitously advising
them, helping them from his impoverished purse, and, incidentally, being
admired by a new generation of musical enthusiasts, particularly those
of the feminine gender. There were lots of scandals, and the worthy
burghers of the town shook their heads at the goings-on of the
_Lisztianer_. The old man fell under many influences, some of them
sinister. He seldom saw Richard or Cosima Wagner, though he attended the
opening of Bayreuth in 1876. On that occasion Wagner publicly paid a
magnificent tribute to the genius and noble friendship of Liszt. It
atoned for a wilderness of previous neglect and ingratitude.
With Wagner's death in 1883 his hold on mundane matters began to relax.
He taught, he travelled, he never failed to pay the princess an annual
visit at Rome. She had immured herself, behind curtained windows and to
the light of waxen tapers led the life of a mystic, also smoked the
blackest of cigars. She became a theologian in petticoats and wrote
numerous inutile books about pin-points in matters ecclesiastical. No
doubt she still loved Liszt, for she set a spy on him at Weimar and thus
kept herself informed as to how much cognac he daily consumed, how many
pretty girls had asked for a lock of his silvery hair, also the name of
the latest aspirant to his affections.
What a brilliant coterie of budding artists surrounded him: D'Albert,
Urspruch, Geza Zichy, Friedheim, Joseffy, Rosenthal, Reisenauer, Grieg,
Edward MacDowell, Burmeister, Stavenhagen, Sofie Menter, Toni Raab,
Nikisch, Weingartner, Siloti, Laura Kahrer, Sauer, Adele Aus der Ohe,
Moszkowski, Scharwenka, Pachmann, Saint-Saens, Rubinstein--the latter
not as pupil--Borodin, Van der Stucken, and other distinguished names in
the annals of compositions and piano playing. Liszt's health broke down,
but he persisted in visiting London in the early summer of 1886, where
he was received as a demi-god by Queen Victoria and the musical world;
he had been earlier in Paris where a mass of his was sung with success.
His money affairs were in a tangle; once in receipt of an income that
had enabled him to throw money away to any whining humbug, he complained
at the last that he had no home of his own, no income--he had not been
too shrewd in his dealings with music publishers--and very little cash
for travelling expenses. The princess needed her own rents, and Liszt
was never a charity pensioner. During the Altenburg years, the
_Glanzzeit_ at Weimar, her income had sufficed for both, as Liszt was
earning no money from concert-tours. But at the end, despite his devoted
disciples, he was the very picture of a deserted, desolate old hero. And
he had given away fortunes, had played fortunes at benefit-concerts
into the coffers of cities overtaken by fire or flood. Surely, the
seamy side of success. "_Wer aber wird nun Liszt helfen?_" This half
humorous, half pathetic cry of his had its tragic significance.
Liszt last touched the keyboard July 19, 1886, at Colpach, Luxemburg,
the castle of Munkaczy, the Hungarian painter. Feeble as he must have
been there was a supernatural aureole about his music that caused his
hearers to weep. (Fancy the pianoforte inciting to tears!) He played his
favourite Liebestraum, the Chant Polonais from the "Glanes de Woronice"
(the Polish estate of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein) and the sixteenth
of his Soirees de Vienne. He went on to Bayreuth, in company with a
persistent young Parisian lady--the paramount passion not quite
extinguished--attended a performance of Tristan and Isolde, through
which he slept from absolute exhaustion; though he did not fail to
acknowledge in company with Cosima Wagner the applause at the end. He
went at once to bed never to leave it alive. He died of lung trouble on
the night of July 31st or the early hour of August 1, 1886, and his last
word is said to have been "Tristan." He was buried, in haste--that he
might not interfere with the current Wagner festival--and, no doubt, is
mourned at leisure. His princess survived him a year; this sounds more
romantic than it is. [Madame d'Agoult had died in 1876.] A new terror
was added to death by the ugly tomb of the dead man, designed by his
grandson, Siegfried Wagner; said to be a composer as well as an amateur
architect. Victories usually resemble each other; it is defeat alone
that wears an individual physiognomy. Liszt, with all his optimism, did
not hesitate to speak of his career as a failure. But what a magnificent
failure! "To die and to die young--what happiness," was a favourite
phrase of his.
III
"While remaining itself obscure," wrote George Moore of L'Education
Sentimentale, by Flaubert, "this novel has given birth to a numerous
literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L'Education
Sentimentale re-written into twenty volumes by a prodigious
journalist--twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes
getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless
walking-sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them
into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to
forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original
spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and
prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known."
This particular passage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his
obligations to Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz--as, indeed, Flaubert owed
something to Chateaubriand, Bossuet, and Balzac--he invented a new form,
the symphonic poem, invented a musical phrase, novel in shape and gait,
perfected the leading motive, employed poetic ideas instead of the
antique and academic cut and dried square-toed themes--and was
ruthlessly plundered almost before the ink was dry on his manuscript,
and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came
to pass that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel,
first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the
public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Saens,
Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers
and a half-hundred besides of the new men, beginning with the name of
Richard Strauss--that most extraordinary personality of latter-day
music. And Liszt sat in Weimar and smiled and waited and waited and
smiled; and if he has achieved paradise by this time he is still
smiling and waiting. He often boasted that storms were his _metier_,
meaning their tonal reproduction in orchestral form or on the
keyboard--but I suspect that patience was his cardinal virtue.
Henry James once wrote of the human soul and it made me think of Liszt:
"A romantic, moonlighted landscape, with woods and mountains and dim
distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs." Liszt's music often
evokes the golden opium-haunted prose of De Quincy; it is at once
sensual and rhetorical. It also has its sonorous platitudes, unheavenly
lengths, and barbaric yawps.
Despite his marked leaning toward the classic (Raphael, Correggio,
Mickelangelo, and those frigid, colourless Germans, Kaulbach, Cornelius,
Schadow, not to mention the sweetly romantic Ary Scheffer and the
sentimental Delaroche), by temperament Liszt was a lover of the
grotesque, the baroque, the eccentric, even the morbid. He often
declared that it was his pet ambition to give a piano recital in the
_Salon Carre_ of the Louvre, where, surrounded by the canvases of Da
Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Veronese, and
others of the immortal choir, he might make music never to be forgotten.
In reality, he would have played with more effect if the pictures had
been painted by Salvator Rosa, El Greco, Hell-Fire Breughel, Callot,
Orcagna (the Dance of Death at Pisa), Matthew Gruenwald; or among the
moderns, Gustave Dore, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch,
Matisse or Picasso. Ugliness mingled with voluptuousness, piety doubted
by devilry, the quaint and the horrible, the satanic and the angelic,
these states of soul (and body) appealed to Liszt quite as much as they
did to Berlioz. They are all the apex of delirious romanticism;--now as
dead as the classicism that preceded and produced it--of the seeking
after recondite sensations and expressing them by means of the eloquent,
versatile orchestral apparatus. Think what roles Death and Lust play in
the over-strained art of the Romantics (the "hairy romantic" as
Thackeray called Berlioz, and no doubt Liszt, for he met him in
London); what bombast, what sonorous pomp and pageantry, what sighing
sensuousness, what brilliant martial spirit--they are all to be found in
Liszt. In musical irony he never had but one match, Chopin--until
Richard Strauss; Berlioz was also an adept in this disquieting mood.
Liszt makes a direct appeal to the nerves, he has the trick of getting
atmosphere with a few bars; and even if his great solo sonata has been
called "The Invitation to Hissing and Stamping" (thus named by
Gumprecht, a blind critic of Berlin, about 1854) the work itself is a
mine of musical treasures, and a most dramatic sonata--that is if one
accepts Liszt's definition of the form. Here we recall Cabaner's
music--as reported by Mr. Moore--"the music that might be considered by
Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to
understand."
Liszt's music is virile and homophonic, despite its chromatic
complexities. Instead of lacking in thematic invention he was, perhaps,
a trifle too facile, too Italianate; he shook too many melodies from
his sleeve to be always fresh; in a word, he composed too much.
Architecturally his work recalls at times the fantastic Kremlin, or the
Taj Mahal, or--as in the Graner Mass--a strange perversion of the
gothic. Liszt was less the master-builder than the painter; color, not
form, was his stronger side. And like Chateaubriand his music is an
interminglement of religious with moods of sensuality. An authority has
written that his essays in counterpoint are perhaps more successful than
those of Berlioz, though his fugue subjects are equally artificial; and
he fails to make the most of them (but couldn't the same be said of
Beethoven, or of the contrapuntal Reger?). Both the French and Hungarian
masters seem to have concocted rather than have composed their fugues.
All of which is the eternal rule of thumb over again. The age of the
fugue, like the age of manufactured miracles, is forever past. If you
don't care for the fugal passages and part-writing in the Graner Mass or
in the organ music, then there is nothing more to be said. Charles Lamb
inveighed against concertos and instrumental music because, as he wrote,
"words are something; but to gaze on empty frames, and to be forced to
make the pictures for yourself ... to invent extempore tragedies is to
answer the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime." This
unimaginative condition is the precise one from which suffered so many
early and too many later critics of Liszt's original music. If you are
not in the mood poetical, whether lyric, heroic, or epic, then go to
some other composer. And I protest against the parenthetical position
allotted him by musical commentators, mostly of the Bayreuth brood. The
Wagner family saw to it that the mighty Richard should be furnished with
an appropriate artistic pedigree; Beethoven and Gluck were called his
precursors. Liszt is not a transitional composer, except that all great
composers are a link in the unending chain. But, though he helped Wagner
to his later ideas and style, he had nothing whatever to do with the
Wagnerian music-drama or the Wagnerian attitude toward art. Berlioz,
Liszt, and Wagner are all three as different in conception and texture
as Handel and Haydn and Mozart; yet many say Handel and Haydn, or, worse
still, Mozart and Beethoven. Absurd and unjust bracketings by the
fat-minded unmusical.
In musicianship Liszt had no contemporary who could pretend to tie his
shoe-strings, with the possible exception of Felix Mendelssohn. And in
one particular he ranks next to Bach and Beethoven--in rhythmic
invention; after Bach and Beethoven, Liszt stands nearest as regards the
variety of his rhythms. His Eastern blood--the Magyar came from
Asia--may account for this rhythmic versatility. It is a point not to be
overlooked in future estimates of the composer.
How then account for the rather indifferent fashion with which the Liszt
compositions are received by the musical public, not only here, but in
Europe? This year (1911) the festivals in honor of the Master's
Centenary may revive interest in his music and, perhaps, open the ears
of the present generation to the fact that Strauss, Debussy and others
are not as original as they sound. But I fear that Liszt, like any other
dead composer--save the few giants, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven--will be
played as a matter of course, sometimes from piety, sometimes because
certain dates bob up on the calendar. His piano music, the most grateful
ever written, will die hard, yet die it will.
Musicians should never forget Liszt, who, as was the case with Henry
Irving and the English speaking actors, was the first to give musicians
a social standing and prestige; before his time a pianist, violinist,
organist, singer, was hardly superior to a lackey. Liszt was the
aristocrat of his art; his essential nobility of soul, coupled with his
flaming genius, made him that. And he came from a cottage that seemed
like a peasant's. A point for your anarch in art.
Whatever the fluctuations of the chameleon of the Seven Arts, the best
music will be always beautiful; beautiful with the old or the new
beauty. Ugliness for the sheer sake of ugliness never endures; but one
must be able to define modern beauty, else find oneself in the
predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the
beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the
characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The
sting and glamour of the Liszt orchestral music has compelling quality.
Probably one of the most eloquent tributes paid to music is the
following, and by a critic of pictorial art, Mr. D. S. MacColl, now
keeper of the Wallace Collection in London. He wrote:
"An art that came out of the old world two centuries ago with a few
chants, love-songs, and dances, that a century ago was still tied to the
words of a mass or an opera, or threading little dance movements
together in a 'suite,' became, in the last century, this extraordinary
debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or
worshipped a god may not only ideally but through the response of his
nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of
struggle, rapture and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an
anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility unheard of. An amplified pattern
of action and emotion is given; each man fits to it the images he
will."
II
ASPECTS OF HIS ART AND CHARACTER
I
LISZT AND THE LADIES
The feminine friendships of Franz Liszt gained for him as much notoriety
as his music making. To the average public he was a compound of
Casanova, Byron and Goethe, and to this mixture could have been added
the name of Stendhal. Liszt's love affairs, Liszt's children, Liszt's
perilous escapes from daggers, pistols and poisons were the subjects of
conversation in Europe three-quarters of a century ago, as earlier Byron
was both hero and black-sheep in the current gossip of his time. And as
Liszt was in the public eye and ubiquitous--he travelled rapidly over
Europe in a post-chaise, often giving two concerts in one day at
different places--he became a sort of legendary figure, a musical Don
Juan. He was not unmindful of the value of advertisement, so the legend
grew with the years. That his reputation for gallantry was hugely
exaggerated it is hardly necessary to add; a man who, accomplished as
much as he, whether author, pianoforte virtuoso or composer, could have
hardly had much idle time on his hands for the devil to dip into; and
then his correspondence. He wrote or dictated literally thousands of
letters. He was an ideal letter-writer. No one went unanswered, and a
fairly good biography might be evolved from the many volumes of his
correspondence. Nevertheless he did find time for much philandering, and
for the cultivation of numerous platonic friendships. But the witty
characterisation of Madame Plater holds good of Liszt. She said one day
to Chopin: "If I were young and pretty, my little Chopin, I would take
thee for husband, Ferdinand Hiller for friend, and Liszt for lover."
This was in 1833, when Liszt was twenty-two years of age and the
witticism definitely places Liszt in the sentimental hierarchy.
La Mara, an indefatigable and enthusiastic collector of anecdotes about
unusual folk, has just published a book, Liszt und die Frauen. It deals
with twenty-six friends of Liszt and does not lean heavily on scandal as
an attractive adjunct; indeed La Mara (Marie Lipsius) sees musical life
through rose-coloured spectacles, and Liszt is one of her gods. For her
he is more sinned against than sinning, more pursued than pursuer; his
angelic wings grow in size on his shoulders while you watch. Only a few
of the ladies, titled and otherwise, mentioned in this book enjoyed the
fleeting affection of the pianist-composer. Whatever else he might have
been, Liszt was not a vulgar gallant. Over his swiftest passing
intrigues he contrived to throw an air of mystery. In sooth, he was an
idealist and romanticist. No one ever heard him boast his conquests.
Did Liszt ever love? It has been questioned by some of his biographers.
His first passion, however, seems to have been genuine, as genuine as
his love for his mother and for his children; he proved more admirable
as a father than he would have been as a husband. In 1823 as "le petit
Litz" he had set all musical Paris wondering. When his father died in
1827 he gave lessons there like any everyday pianoforte pedagogue
because he needed money for the support of his mother. Among his
aristocratic pupils was Caroline de Saint-Criq, the daughter of the
Minister of Commerce, Count de Saint-Criq. It must have been truly a
love in the clouds. Caroline was motherless. She was, as Liszt later
declared, "a woman ideally good." Her father did not enjoy the prospect
of a son-in-law who gave music lessons, and the intimacy suddenly
snapped. But Liszt never forgot her; she became his mystic Beatrice, for
her and to her he composed and dedicated a song; and even meeting her at
Pau in 1844, just sixteen years after their rupture, did not create the
disenchantment usual in such cases. Berlioz, too, sought an early love
when old, and in his eyes she was as she always had been; Stendhal burst
into tears on seeing again Angela Pietagrua after eleven years
absence. Verily art is a sentimental antiseptic.
[Illustration: Liszt, about 1850]
Caroline de Saint-Criq had married like the dutiful daughter she was,
and Liszt's heart by 1844 was not only battle-scarred but a cemetery of
memories. She died in 1874. They had corresponded for years, and at the
moment of their youthful parting, caused by a cruel and extremely
sensible father, they made a promise to recall each other's names at the
hour of the daily angelus. Liszt averred that he kept his promise. The
name of the lyric he wrote for her is: "Je voudrais m'evanouir comme la
pourpre du soir" ("Ich moechte hingehn wie das Abendrot").
Before the affair began with the Countess d'Agoult, afterward the mother
of his three children, Liszt enjoyed an interlude with the Countess
Adele Laprunarede. It was the year of the revolution, 1830, and the
profound despondency into which he had been cast by his unhappy love for
Caroline was cured, as his mother sagely remarked, by the sound of
cannon. He became a fast friend of Countess Adele and followed her to
her home in the Alps, there, as he jestingly said, to pursue their
studies in style in the French language. It must not be forgotten that
the Count, her husband, was their companion. But Paris wagged its myriad
tongues all the same. Liszt's affiliation with Countess Louis Plater,
born Graefin Brzostowska, the Pani Kasztelanowa (or lady castellan in
English; no wonder he wrote such chromatic music later, these
dissonantal names must have been an inspiration) was purely platonic,
as were the majority of his friendships with the sex. But he dearly
loved a princess, and the sharp eyes of Miss Amy Fay noted that his bow
when meeting a woman of rank was a trifle too profound. (See her
admirable Music Study in Germany.) The truth is that Liszt was a
courtier. He was reared in aristocratic surroundings, and he took to
luxury as would a cat. With the cannon booming in Paris he sketched the
plan of his Revolutionary Symphony, but he continued to visit the
aristocracy. In 1831 at Stuttgart his friend Frederic Chopin wrote a
"revolutionary" study (in C minor, opus 10) on hearing of Warsaw's
downfall. Wagner rang incendiary church bells during the revolutionary
days at Dresden in May 1849. Brave gestures, as our French friends would
put it, and none the less lasting. Liszt's symphony is lost, but its
themes may have bobbed up in his Faust and Dante symphonies. Who
remembers the Warsaw of 1831 except Chopin lovers? And the rebellious
spirit of Wagner's bell-ringing passed over into his Tetralogy. Nothing
is negligible to an artist, not even a "gesture." Naturally there is no
reference to the incident in his autobiography. If you are to take
Wagner at his word he was a mere looker-on in Dresden during what
Bakounine contemptuously called "a petty insurrection." Nietzsche was
right--great men are to be distrusted when they write of themselves.
With the Madame d'Agoult and Princess Wittgenstein episodes we are not
concerned just now. So much has been written in this two-voiced fugue in
the symphony of Liszt's life that it is difficult to disentangle the
truth from the fable. La Mara is sympathetic, though not particularly
enlightening. Of more interest, because of the comparative mystery of
the affair, is the friendship between George Sand and Liszt. Naturally
La Mara, sentimentalist that she is, denies a liaison. She errs. There
was a brief love passage. But Liszt escaped the fate of De Musset and
Chopin. Balzac speaks of the matter in his novel Beatrix, in which
George Sand is depicted as Camille Maupin, the Countess d'Agoult as
Beatrix, Gustave Planche as Claude Vignon, and Liszt as Conti.
Furthermore, the D'Agoult was jealous of Madame Sand, doubly jealous of
her as a friend of Liszt and as a writer of genius. Read the D'Agoult's
novel, written after her parting with Liszt, and see how in this Nelida
she imitates the Elle et Lui. That she hated George Sand, after a
pretended friendship, cannot be doubted; we have her own words as
witnesses. In My Literary Life, by Madame Edmond Adam (Juliette Lamber),
she said of George Sand to the author: "Her lovers are to her a piece of
chalk, with which she scratches on the black-board. When she has
finished she crushes the chalk under her foot, and there remains but the
dust, which is quickly blown away." "How is it, my esteemed and beloved
friend, you have never forgiven?" sadly asked Madame Adam. "Because the
wound has not healed yet. Conscious that I had put my whole life and
soul into my love for Liszt she tried to take him away from me."
One would suppose from the above that Liszt was faithful to Madame
d'Agoult or that George Sand had separated the runaway couple, whereas
in reality Liszt knew George Sand before he met the D'Agoult. What
Madame Sand said of Liszt as a gallant can hardly be paraphrased in
English. She was not very flattering. Perhaps George Sand was a reason
why the relations between Chopin and Liszt cooled; the latter said: "Our
lady loves had quarrelled, and as good cavaliers we were in duty bound
to side with them." Chopin said: "We are friends, we were comrades."
Liszt told Dr. Niecks: "There was a cessation of intimacy, but no
enmity. I left Paris soon after, and never saw him again." It was at the
beginning of 1840 that Liszt went to Chopin's apartment accompanied by a
companion. Chopin was absent. On his return he became furious on
learning of the visit. No wonder. Who was the lady in the case? It could
have been Marie, it might have been George Sand, and probably it was
some new fancy.
[Illustration: _After an oil painting by J. Danhauser_
Victor Hugo Paganini Rossini
Dumas George Sand Countess d'Agoult
Liszt at the Piano]
More adventurous were Liszt's affairs with Marguerite Gautier, the lady
of the camellias, the consumptive heroine of the Dumas play, as related
by Jules Janin, and with the more notorious Lola Montez, who had to
leave Munich to escape the wrath of the honest burghers. The king had
humoured too much the lady's extravagant habits. She fell in love with
Liszt, who had parted with his Marie in 1844, and went with him to
Constantinople. Where they separated no one knows. It was not destined
to be other than a fickle passion on both sides, not without its
romantic aspects for romantically inclined persons. Probably the closest
graze with hatred and revenge ever experienced by Liszt was the Olga
Janina episode. Polish and high born, rich, it is said, she adored
Liszt, studied with him, followed him from Weimar to Rome, from Rome
to Budapest, bored him, shocked him as an abbe and scandalised
ecclesiastical Rome by her mad behaviour; finally she attempted to stab
him, and, failing, took a dose of poison. She didn't die, but lived to
compose a malicious and clever book, Souvenirs d'une Cosaque (written at
Paris and Karentec, March to September, published by the Libraire
Internationale, 1875, now out of print), and signed "Robert Franz." Poor
old Liszt is mercilessly dissected, and his admiring circle at Weimar
slashed by a vigourous pen. In truth, despite the falsity of the
picture, Olga Janina wrote much more incisively, with more personal
colour and temperament, than did Countess d'Agoult, who also caricatured
Liszt in her Nelida (as "Guermann"), and the good Liszt wrote to his
princess: "Janina was not evil, only exalted." [I have heard it
whispered that the attempt on Liszt's life at Rome was a melodramatic
affair, concocted by his princess, who was jealous of the Janina girl,
with the aid of the pianist's valet.]
La Mara shows to us twenty-six portraits in her Liszt and the Ladies;
they include Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, Pauline Viardot-Garcia,
Caroline Unger-Sabatier, Marie Camille Pleyel, Charlotte von Hagn,
Bettina von Arnim, Marie von Mouchanoff-Kalergis, Rosalie, Countess
Sauerma, a niece of Spohr and an accomplished harp player; the Grand
Duchess of Saxony, Maria Pawlowna, and her successor, Sophie, Grand
Duchess of Weimar, both patronesses of Liszt; the Princess Wittgenstein,
Emilie Merian-Genast, Agnes Street Klindworth, Jessie Hillebrand
Laussot, Sofie Menter, the greatest of his women pupils; the Countess
Wolkenstein and Buelow, Elpis Melena, Fanny, the Princess Rospigliosi,
the Baroness Olga Meyendorff (this lady enjoyed to an extraordinary
degree the confidence of Liszt. At Weimar she was held in high esteem by
him--and hated by his pupils), and Nadine Helbig--Princess Nadine
Schahawskoy. Madame Helbig was born in 1847 and went to Rome the first
time in 1865. She became a Liszt pupil and a fervent propagandist. Her
crayon sketch drawing of the venerable master is excellent. In her
possession is a drawing by Ingres, who met Liszt in Rome, 1839, when the
pianist was twenty-eight years of age. We learn that Liszt never
attempted "poetry" with the exception of a couplet which he sent to the
egregious Bettina von Arnim. It runs thus, and it consoles us with its
crackling consonants for the discontinuance of further poetic flights on
the part of its creator:
"Ich kraxele auf der Leiter
Und komme doch nicht weiter."
II
A FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP
The perennial interest of the world in the friendships of famous men and
women is proved by the never-ceasing publication of books concerning
them. Of George Sand and her lovers how much has been written. George
Eliot and Lewes, Madame de Recamier and Chateaubriand, Goethe and his
affinities, Chopin and George Sand, Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult,
Wagner and Mathilde--a voluminous index might be made of the classic and
romantic _liaisons_ that have excited curiosity from the time when the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary down to yesteryear. Although
Franz Liszt, great piano virtuoso, great composer, great man, has been
dead since 1886, and the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein since 1887,
volumes are still written about their friendship. Indeed, in any
collection of letters written by Liszt, or to him, the name of the
princess is bound to appear. She was the veritable muse of the
Hungarian, and when her influence upon him as a composer is considered
it will not do to say, as many critics have said, that she was a
stumbling-block in his career. The reverse is the truth.
The most recent contributions to Liszt literature are the letters
between Franz Liszt and Carl Alexander, Archduke of Weimar; Aus der
Glanzzeit der Weimarer Altenburg, by the fecund La Mara; and Franz
Liszt, by August Goellerich, a former pupil of the master. To this we
might add the little-known bundle of letters by Adelheid von Schorn,
Franz Liszt et la Princesse de Sayn-Wittgenstein, (translated into
French), a perfect mine of gossip. Miss von Schorn remained in Weimar
after the princess left the Athens-on-the-Ilm for Rome and corresponded
with her, telling of Liszt's doings, never failing to record new
flirtations and making herself generally useful to the venerable
composer. When attacked by his last illness at Colpach, where he had
gone to visit Munkacszy, the painter, Miss von Schorn went to Bayreuth
to look after him. There, at the door of his bed-chamber, she was
refused admittance, Madame Cosima Wagner, through a servant, telling her
that the daughter and grand-daughters of Franz Liszt would care for him.
The truth is that Madame Wagner had always detested the Princess
Wittgenstein and saw in the Weimar lady one of her emissaries. Miss Von
Schorn left Bayreuth deeply aggrieved. After Liszt's death her
correspondence with the princess abruptly ceased. She tells all this in
her book. Even Liszt had shown her his door at Weimar several years
before he died. He detested gossips and geese, he often declared.
The interest displayed by the world artistic has always centred about
the episode of the projected marriage between the princess and Liszt.
A dozen versions of the interrupted ceremony have been printed.
Bayreuth, which never loved Weimar--that is, the Wagner family and the
Wittgenstein faction--has said some disagreeable things, not hesitating
to insinuate that Liszt himself was more pleased than otherwise when
Pope Pius IX forbade the nuptials. Liszt biographers side with their
idol--who once said of his former son-in-law, Hans von Buelow, that he
had no talent as a married man. He might have lived to repeat the
epigram if he had married the princess. Decidedly, Liszt was not made
for stepping in double-harness.
Liszt, the most fascinating pianist in Europe, had been the most
pursued male on the Continent, and his meeting with the Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein at Kieff, Russia, in February, 1847, was really his
salvation. He was then about thirty-six years old, in all the glory of
his art and of his extraordinary virility. The princess, who was born in
1819, was living on her estate at Woronice, on the edge of the Russian
steppes. She was nevertheless of Polish blood, the daughter of Peter von
Iwanowski, a rich landowner, and of Pauline Podoska, an original,
eccentric, cultivated woman and a traveller. In 1836 she married the
Prince Nikolaus Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Russian millionaire and adjutant to
the Czar. It was from the first a miserable failure, this marriage. The
bride, intellectual, sensitive, full of the Polish love of art, above
all of music, could not long endure the raw dragoon, dissipated gambler
and hard liver into whose arms she had been pushed by her ambitious
father. She made a retreat to Woronice with her infant daughter and
spent laborious days and nights in the study of philosophy, the arts,
sciences, and religion. The collision of two such natures as Carolyne
and Liszt led to some magnificent romantic and emotional fireworks.
We learn in reading the newly published letters between Liszt and the
Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar that the pianist had visited Weimar
for the first time in 1841. The furore he created was historic. The
reigning family--doubtless bored to death in the charming, placid little
city--welcomed Liszt as a distraction. The Archduchess Maria Pawlovna,
the sister of the Czar of Russia and mother of the later Kaiserin
Augusta, admired Liszt, and so did the Archduke Carl. He was covered
with jewels and orders. The upshot was that after a visit in 1842 Liszt
was invited to the office of General Music Director of Weimar. This
offer he accepted and in 1844 he began his duties. Carl Alexander had
married the Princess Sophie of Holland, and therefore Liszt had a strong
party in his favour at court. That he needed royal favour will be seen
when we recall that in 1850 he produced an opera by a banished
socialist, one Richard Wagner, the opera Lohengrin. He also needed court
protection when in 1848 he brought to Weimar the runaway wife of Prince
Wittgenstein. The lady placed herself under the friendly wing of
Archduchess Maria Pawlovna, who interceded in vain with the Czar in
behalf of an abused, unhappy woman. Nikolaus Wittgenstein began divorce
proceedings. His wife was ordered back to her Woronice estate by
imperial decree. She refused to go and her fortune was greatly curtailed
by confiscation. She loved Liszt. She saw that in the glitter of this
roving comet there was the stuff out of which fixed stars are fashioned,
and she lived near him at Weimar from 1848 to 1861.
This was the brilliant period of musical Weimar. The illusion that the
times of Goethe and Schiller were come again was indulged in by other
than sentimental people. Princess Carolyne held a veritable court at the
Altenburg, a large, roomy so-called palazzo on the Jena post-road, just
across the muddy creek they call the River Ilm. The present writer when
he last visited Weimar found the house very much reduced from its former
glories. It looked commonplace and hardly like the spot where Liszt
wrote his symphonic poems, planned new musical forms and the
reformation of church music; where came Berlioz, Thackeray, George
Eliot, and George Henry Lewes, not to mention a number of distinguished
poets, philosophers, dramatists, composers, and aristocratic folk.
Carolyne corresponded with all the great men of her day, beginning with
Humboldt. The idea of the Goethe Foundation was born at that time. It
was a veritable decade of golden years that Weimar lived; but there were
evidences about 1858 that Liszt's rule was weakening, and after the
performance of his pupil's opera, The Barber of Bagdad, by Peter
Cornelius, December 15, 1858, he resigned as Kapellmeister. Dinglested's
intrigues hurt his unselfish nature and a single hiss had disturbed him
into a resignation. The daughter of Princess Wittgenstein married in
1859 Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, and in 1861 the Altenburg was
closed and the princess went to Rome to see the Pope.
At the Vatican the princess was well received. She was an ardent
Catholic and was known to be an author of religious works. Pius IX bade
her arise when she fell weeping at his feet asking for justice. She
presented her case. She had been delivered into matrimony at the age of
seventeen, knowing nothing of life, of love, of her husband. Wouldn't
his Holiness dissolve the original chains so that she could marry the
man of her election? The Pope was amiable. He knew and admired Liszt. He
had the matter investigated. After all it was an enforced marriage to a
heretic, this odious Wittgenstein union; and then came the desired
permission. Carolyne, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, born Ivanovska,
was a free woman. Delighted, she lost no time; Liszt was told to reach
Rome by the evening of October 21, 1861, the eve of his fiftieth
birthday. The ceremony was to take place at the Church of San Carlo, on
the Corso, at 6 A. M. of October 22.
What really happened the night of the 21st after Liszt arrived no one
truly knows but the principals. Lina Ramann tells her tale, La Mara
hers, Goellerich his; Eugen Segnitz in his pamphlet, Franz Liszt und Rom,
has a very conservative account; but they all concur if not in details
at least in the main fact, that powerful, unknown machinery was set in
motion at the Vatican, that the Holy Father had rescinded his permission
pending a renewed examination of the case. The blow fell at the twelfth
hour. The church was decorated and a youth asked the reason for all
the candles and bravery of the altars. He was told that Princess
Wittgenstein was to marry "her piano player" the next morning. The news
was brought by the boy to his father, M. Calm-Podoska, a cousin of
Carolyne, who, with the aid of Cardinal Catarani and the Princess
Odescalchi, begged a hearing at the Vatican. Cardinal Antonelli sent the
messenger bearing the fatal information. The princess was as one dead.
It was the end of her earthly ambitions.
How did Liszt bear the disappointment? At this juncture the fine haze of
legend intervenes. His daughter Cosima has said (in a number of the
_Bayreuther Blaetter_) that he had left Weimar for Rome remarking that he
felt as if going to a funeral. Other and malicious folk have pretended
to see in the melodramatic situation the fine Hungarian hand of Liszt.
He was glad, so it was averred, to get rid of the marriage and the
princess at the same stroke of the clock. Had she not been nicknamed
"Fuerstin Hinter-Liszt" because of the way she followed him from town to
town when he was giving concerts? But Antonelli was a friend of the
princess as well as an intimate of Liszt. We doubt not that Liszt came
to Rome in good faith. In common with the princess he accepted the
interruption as a sign from on high, and even when in 1864 Prince
Wittgenstein died the marriage idea was not seriously revived. Carolyne
asked Liszt to devote his genius to the Church. In 1865 he assumed minor
orders and became an abbe.
Pius IX, a lover of music, had on July 11, 1863, visited Liszt at the
Dominican cloister of Monte Mario, and to the Hungarian's accompaniment
had sung in his sweet-toned musical voice. Liszt was called his
Palestrina, but alas! in the churchly music of Liszt Rome has
never betrayed more than a passing interest; and to-day Pius X is
ultra-Gregorian. Liszt, like a musical Moses, saw the promised land but
did not enter it.
The friendship of the princess and Liszt never abated. He divided his
days between Weimar, Rome, and Budapest (from 1876 in the latter
city), and she wrote tirelessly in Rome books on theology, mysticism,
and Church history. She was a great and generally good force in the life
of Liszt, who was, she said, a lazy, careless man, though he left over
thirteen hundred compositions. Women are insatiable.
[Illustration: The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein]
III
LATER BIOGRAPHERS
The future bibliographer of Liszt literature has a heavy task in store
for him, for books about the great Hungarian composer are multiplying
apace. Liszt the dazzling virtuoso has long been a theme with
variations, and is, we suspect, a theme nearly exhausted; but
Liszt as tone poet, Liszt as song writer, as composer for the
pianoforte, as litterateur, the man, the wickedest of Don Juans, the
ecclesiastic--these and a dozen other studies of the most protean
musician of the last century have been appearing ever since the
publication of Lina Ramann's vast and sentimental biography. Instead of
there being a lack of material for a new book there is an embarrassment,
not always of riches, from industrious pens, though few are of value.
The Liszt pupils have had their say, and their pupils are beginning to
intone the psalmody of uncritical praise. Liszt the romantic,
magnificent, magnanimous, supernal, is set to the same old harmonies,
until the reader, tired of the gabble and gush, longs for a biographer
who will riddle the various legends and once and for all prove that
Liszt was not perfection, even if he was the fascinating Admirable
Crichton of his times.
Yet, and the fact sets us wondering over the mutability of fame, the
Liszt propaganda is not flourishing. Richard Burmeister, a well known
pupil and admirer of the master in Berlin has assured us that while
Liszt is heard in all the concerts in Germany, the public is lukewarm;
Richard Strauss is more eagerly heard. Liszt's familiar remark, "I can
wait," provoked from the authority above mentioned the answer, "Perhaps
he has waited too long." We are inclined to disagree with this dictum.
Liszt once had musical and unmusical Europe at his feet. His success was
called comet-like, probably because he was born in the comet year 1811,
also because his hair was long and his technique transcendentally
brilliant. His critical compositions were received with less approval.
That such an artist of the keyboard could be also a successor to
Beethoven was an idea mocked at by the conservative Leipsic school.
Besides, he came in such a questionable guise as a _Symphoniker_. A
piano concerto with a triangle in the score (the E flat), compositions
for full orchestra which were called symphonic poems, lyrics without a
tune, that pretended to follow the curve of the words; finally church
music, solemn masses through which stalked the apparition of the haughty
Magyar chieftain, accompanied by echoes of the gipsies on the putzta
(the Graner Mass); it was too much for ears attuned to the suave,
melodious Mendelssohn. Indeed the entire Neo-German school was too
exotic for Germany. Berlioz, a half mad Frenchman; Richard Wagner, a
crazy revolutionist, a fugitive from Saxony; and the Hungarian Liszt,
half French, wholly diabolic--of such were the uncanny ingredients of
the new music. And then were there not Liszt and his Princess
Wittgenstein at Weimar, and the crew of pupils, courtiers and bohemians
who collected at the Altenburg? Decidedly these people would never do,
even though patronised by royalty. George Eliot and her man Friday,
proper British persons, were rather shocked when they visited Weimar.
Liszt survived it all and enjoyed, notwithstanding the opposition of
Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Joachim, the Schumanns, later Brahms and
Hanslick, the pleasure of hearing his greater works played, understood,
and applauded.
Looking backward in an impartial manner it cannot be said that the Liszt
compositions have unduly suffered from the proverbial neglect of genius.
A Liszt orchestral number, if not imperative, is a matter of course at
most symphony concerts. The piano music is done to death, especially the
Hungarian Rhapsodies. Liszt has been ranged; the indebtedness of modern
music to his pioneer efforts has been duly credited. We know that the
Faust and Dante symphonies (which might have been called symphonic
poems) are forerunners not only of much of Wagner, but of the later
group from Saint-Saens to Richard Strauss. Why, then, the inevitable
wail from the Lisztians that the Liszt music is not heard? Christus and
the other oratorios and the masses might be heard oftener, and there are
many of the sacred compositions yet unsung that would make some critics
sit up. No, we are lovers of Liszt, but the martyrdom motive has been
sounded too often. In a double sense a reaction is bound to come. The
true Liszt is to emerge from the clouds of legend, and Liszt the
composer will be definitely placed. A little disappointment will result
in both camps; the camp of the ultra-Liszt worshippers, which sets
him in line with Beethoven and above Wagner, and the camp of the
anti-Lisztians, which refuses him even the credit of having written a
bar of original music. How Wagner would have rapped the knuckles of
these latter; how he would have told them what he wrote to Liszt: "Ich
bezeichne dich als Schoepfer meiner jetzigen Stellung. Wenn ich
komponiere und instrumentiere--denke ich immer nur an dich ... deine
drei letzten Partituren sollen mich wieder zum Musiker weihen fuer den
Beginn meines zweiten Aktes [Siegfried], denn dies Studium einleiten
soll."
Did Wagner mean it all? At least, he couldn't deny what is simply a
matter of dates. Liszt preceded Wagner. Otherwise how explain that
yawning chasm between Lohengrin and Tristan? Liszt, an original stylist
and a profounder musical nature than Berlioz, had intervened.
Nevertheless Liszt learned much from Berlioz, and it is quite beside the
mark to question the greater creative power of Wagner over both the
Frenchman and the Hungarian. Wagner, like the Roman conquerors, annexed
many provinces and made them his own. Let us drop these futile
comparisons. Liszt was as supreme in his domain as Wagner in his; only
the German had the more popular domain. His culture was intensive, that
of Liszt extensive. The tragedy was that Liszt lived to hear himself
denounced as an imitator of Wagner; butchered to make a Bayreuth
holiday. The day after his death in 1886 the news went abroad in
Bayreuth that the "father-in-law of Wagner" had died; that his funeral
might disturb the success of the current music festival! Liszt, who had
begun his career with a kiss from Beethoven; Liszt, whose name was a
flaring meteor in the sky of music when Wagner was starving in Paris;
Liszt the path-breaker, meeting the usual fate of such a Moses, who
never conquered the soil of the promised land, the initiator, at the
last buried in foreign soil (he loathed Bayreuth and the Wagnerians) and
known as the father-in-law of the man who eloped with his daughter and
had borrowed of him everything from money to musical ideas. The gods
must dearly love their sport.
The new books devoted to Liszt, his life and his music, are by Julius
Kapp, August Goellerich (in German), Jean Chantavoine and Calvocoressi
(in French), and A. W. Gottschalg's Franz Liszt in Weimar, a diary
full of reminiscences. These works, ponderous in the case of the
Germans, represent the vanguard of the literature that is due the
anniversary year. To M. Chantavoine may be awarded the merit of the most
symmetrically told tale; however, he need not have repeated Janka Wohl's
doubtful _mot_ attributed to Liszt apropos of priestly celibacy:
"Gregory VII was a great philanthropist." This reflects on the Princess
Wittgenstein, and Liszt, most chivalric of men, would never have said
anything that might present her in the light of pursuing him with
matrimonial designs. That she did is not to be denied. Dr. Kapp is often
severe on his hero. Is any man ever a hero to his biographer? He does
not glorify his subject, and for the amiable weakness displayed by Liszt
for princesses and other noble dames Dr. Kapp is sharp. The compositions
are fairly judged, neither in the superlative key, nor condescendingly,
as being of mere historic interest. There are over thirteen hundred, of
which about four hundred are original. Liszt wrote too much, although he
was a better self-critic than was Rubinstein. New details of the quarrel
with the Schumanns are given. The gifted pair do not emerge exactly in
an agreeable light. Liszt it was who first made known the piano music of
Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann, with the true Wieck provinciality, was
jealous of Liszt's influence over Robert. Then came the disturbing
spectre of Wagner, and Schumann could not forgive Liszt for helping the
music of the future to a hearing at Weimar. The rift widened. Liszt made
a joke of it, but he was hurt by Schumann's ingratitude. Alas! he was to
be later hurt by Wagner, by Joachim, by Brahms. He dedicated his B-minor
sonata to Schumann, and Schumann dedicated to him his noble Fantaisie in
C. After Schumann's death his widow brought out an edition of this
fantaisie with the dedication omitted. The old-fashioned lady neither
forgot nor forgave.
We consider the Kapp biography solid. The best portrait of Liszt may be
found in that clever and amusing novel by Von Wolzogen, Kraftmayr. The
Goellerich book chiefly consists of a chain of anecdotes in which the
author is a prominent figure. Herr Kapp in a footnote attacks Herr
Goellerich, denying that he was much with Liszt. How these Liszt pupils
love each other! Joseffy--who was with the master two summers at Weimar,
though he never relinquished his proud title of Tausig scholar--when the
younger brilliant stars Rosenthal, first a Joseffy pupil, Sauer,
and others cynically twitted him about his admiration of Liszt's
playing--over seventy, at the time Rosenthal was with him--Joseffy
answered: "He was the unique pianist." "But you were very young when you
heard him" (1869), they retorted. "Yes, and Liszt was ten years younger
too," replied the witty Joseffy.
Goellerich relates the story of the American girl who threw stones at the
window of the Hoffgartnerei, Liszt's residence in Weimar, and when the
master appeared above called out: "I've come all the way from America to
hear you play." "Come up," said the aged magician, "I'll play for you."
He did so, much to the scandal of the Liszt pupils assembled for daily
worship. The anecdotes of Tausig and the stolen score of the Faust
symphony (Liszt generously stated that the score was overlooked), are
also set forth in the Goellerich book.
But he, the darling of the gods, fortune fairly pursuing him from cradle
to grave, nevertheless the existence of this genius was far from happy.
His closing years were melancholy. The centre of the new musical life
and beloved by all, he was a lonely, homeless, disappointed man. His
daughter Cosima, a dweller among memories only, said that the music of
her father did not exist for her; Weimar had been swallowed by Bayreuth,
and the crowning sorrow for Liszt lovers is the tomb of Liszt at
Bayreuth. It should be in his beloved Weimar. He lies in the shadow of
his dear friend Wagner, he, the "father-in-law of Wagner." Pascal was
right; no matter the comedy, the end of life is always tragic. Perhaps
if the tragedy had come to Franz Liszt earlier he might have profited by
the uses of adversity, as did Richard Wagner, and thus have achieved the
very stars.
III
THE B-MINOR SONATA AND OTHER PIANO PIECES
I
When Franz Liszt nearly three quarters of a century ago made some
suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased
sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had
been foreshadowed in Clementi's Gradus, and its intellectual resultant,
the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had been hardly realised.
Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpassingly sweet tones,
was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the problem. The arpeggio
principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole, who used it in the
most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies.
But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a glow not then sicklied
by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school;
despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin's style he
was, in the main, manly and sincere. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits
scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end and not a means
of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic
blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal
verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, were his trinity of
gods.
Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling
Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at the doors of Leipsic and drove
back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old women professors--a
respectable crowd, which swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at
the spirit. Poverty, chastity, and obedience were the obligatory vows
insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic; to attain this triune
perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull,
musty precedent, and chaste in finger exercises. What wonder, when the
dashing young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears
plugged by prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end
seemed at hand. Thalberg went under. Chopin never competed, but stood, a
slightly astonished spectator, at the edge of the fray. He saw his own
gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence; his polonaises were so
many cleaving battle-axes, and perforce he had to confess that all this
carnage of tone unnerved him. Liszt was the warrior, not he.
Schumann did all he could by word and note, and to-day, thanks to Liszt
and his followers, any other style of piano playing would seem
old-fashioned. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann
astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a
once powerful school and not the representative of an existing method.
There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style, and modern
giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the
rococoisms of the idealists; but as a school pure and simple it is of
the past. We moderns are as eclectic as the Bolognese. We have a craze
for selection, for variety, for adaptation; hence a pianist of to-day
must include many styles in his performance, but the keynote, the
foundation, is realism, a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair
the apostles of the beautiful in music and often forces them to
lingering retrospection. To all is not given the power to summon spirits
from the vasty deep, and thus we have viewed many times the mortifying
spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his
master, a world too heavy for his attenuated artistic frame. With all
this the path was blazed by the Magyar and we may now explore with
impunity its once trackless region.
Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago
principally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand,
forearm and upper arm are important factors now in tone production where
formerly the fingertips were considered the prime utility. Triceps
muscles rule the big tonal effects in our times. Liszt discovered their
value. The Viennese pianos certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and
others in their styles; just as Clementi inaugurated his reforms by
writing a series of studies and then building himself a piano to make
them possible of performance. With variety of touch--tone-colour--the
old rapid pearly passage, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished; it
was absorbed by the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann,
forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Power,
sonority, dynamic variety and novel manipulation of the pedals, combined
with a technique that included Bach part playing and demanded the most
sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard--these were a few of
the signs of the new school. In the giddiness superinduced by indulging
in this heady new wine an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the
moment harmful to a pure interpretation of the classics, which were
mangled by the young vandals who had enlisted under Liszt's victorious
standard. Colour, only colour, all the rest is but music! was the motto
of those bold youths, who had never heard of Paul Verlaine.
But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its too dangerous
quality, and when the last of the Liszt pupils gives his--or her--last
recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Indeed,
tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of
Tausig's attempt to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has
been toned down into a more sober, grateful colouring. The scarlet
waistcoat of the Romantic school is outworn; the brutal brilliancies and
exaggerated orchestral effects of the realists are beginning to be
regarded with suspicion. We comprehend the possibilities of the
instrument and our own aural limitations. Wagner on the piano is absurd,
just as absurd as were Donizetti and Rossini. A Liszt operatic
transcription is as nearly obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. (Which
should you prefer hearing, the Norma of Thalberg or the Lucia of Liszt?
Both in their different ways are clever but--outmoded.) Bold is the man
to-day who plays either in public.
With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The nuance is ruler now. The
reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy are
present, but the nuance is inevitable, not alone tonal but expressive
nuance. Infinite shadings are to be heard where before were only piano,
forte, and mezzo-forte. Chopin and Liszt and Tausig did much for the
nuance; Joseffy taught America the nuance, as Rubinstein revealed to us
the potency of his golden tones. "Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,"
sang Verlaine; and without nuance the piano is a box of wood, wire and
steel, a coffin wherein is buried the soul of music.
II
"The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young."
This sentence, charmingly phrased, as it is charming in sentiment, could
have been written by no other than Camille Saint-Saens. He refers to
Liszt, and he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most
musicians or critics. His adoration is perfectly comprehensible; to him
Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of the
classical form (only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the
romantics). They all come from Berlioz, the violent protestation of
Saint-Saens to the contrary notwithstanding. However this much may be
urged in the favour of the Parisian composer; a great movement like the
romantic in music, painting, and literature simultaneously appeared in a
half dozen countries. It was in the air and evidently catching. Goethe
summed up the literary revolution in his accustomed Olympian manner,
saying to Eckermann: "They all come from Chateaubriand." This is sound
criticism; for in the writings of the author of Atala, and The Genius of
Christianity may be found the germ-plasm of all the later artistic
disorder; the fierce colour, bizarrerie, morbid extravagance,
introspective analysis--which in the case of Amiel touched a brooding
melancholy. Stendhal was the unwilling forerunner of the movement that
captivated the sensitive imagination of Franz Liszt, as it later
undoubtedly prompted the orphic impulses of Richard Wagner.
Saint-Saens sets great store on Liszt's original compositions, and I am
sure when the empty operatic paraphrases and rhapsodies are forgotten
the true Liszt will shine the brighter. How tinkling are the Hungarian
rhapsodies--now become cafe entertainment. And how the old bones do
rattle. We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of
Prague, the Herz Variations, the Kalkbrenner Fantasias, but the next
generation will wonder at us for having so long tolerated this drunken
gipsy, who dances to fiddle and cymbalom accompaniment. He is too loud
for polite nerves. Technically, the Liszt arrangements are brilliant and
effective for dinner music. One may show off with them, make much noise
and a reputation for virtuosity, that would be quickly shattered if a
Bach fugue were selected as a text. One Chopin Mazurka contains more
music than all of the rhapsodies, which I firmly contend are but
overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt's pompous introductions,
spun-out scales, and transcendental technical feats are not precisely in
key with the native wood-note wild of genuine Hungarian folk-music. A
visit to Hungary will prove this statement. Gustav Mahler was right in
affirming that too much gipsy has blurred the outlines of real Magyar
music.
I need not speak of Liszt's admirable transcriptions of songs by
Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Mendelssohn, and others; they served their
purpose in making publicly known these compositions and are witnesses to
the man's geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish only to speak of the
compositions for solo piano composed by Liszt Ferencz of Raiding,
Hungaria. Many I salute with the _eljen!_ of patriotic enthusiasm, and I
particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his
knowledge of the Etudes--those wonderful continuations of the Chopin
studies--of his acquaintance with the Annees de Pelerinage, of the Valse
Oubliee, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the
Nocturnes, of the F-sharp Impromptu of Ab-Irato--that etude of which
most pianists never heard; of the Apparitions, the Legends, the
Ballades, the brilliant Mazurka, the Elegier, the Harmonies Pestiques et
Religieuses, or the Concerto Patetico _a la_ Burmeister, and of numerous
other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory--as Philip
Hale would say--a dozen composers in this decade of the new century. [It
was Max Bendix who so wittily characterised the A-major concerto as
"Donizetti with Orchestra." Liszt was very often Italianate.]
[Illustration: _After a lithograph by Kriehuber in the N. Y. Public
Library_
Kriehuber Berlioz Czerny Liszt Ernst
A Matinee at Liszt's]
The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt's original music commends it to
every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B-minor sonata was one of
those compositions that plays itself, it lies so beautifully for the
hand. For me no work of Liszt with the possible exception of the
studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie that masquerades as a
sonata in H _moll_. Agreeing with those who declare that they find few
traces of the sonata form in the structure of this composition, and also
with those critics who assert the word to be an organic amplification of
the old, obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven's last sonata
period as a starting-point and made a plunge into futurity--agreeing
with these warring factions, thereby choking off the contingency of a
spirited argument, I repeat that I find the B minor of Liszt truly
fascinating music.
What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is
intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom,
the harmonic haze, from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (the
descending octaves Wagner recalled when he wrote his Wotan theme); the
leap from the G to the A sharp below--how Liszt has made this and the
succeeding intervals his own. Power there is, sardonic power, as in the
opening phrase of the E-flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How
incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the next theme of
the sonata, with its four knocking D's. What follows is like a drama
enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal,
the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz possessed
the gift above all, except Liszt; Raff can compass the grisly, and also
Saint-Saens; but thin sharp flames hover about the brass, wood and
shrieking strings in the Lisztian orchestra.
The chorale, usually the meat of a Liszt composition, now appears and
proclaims the religious belief of the composer in dogmatic accents, and
our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major,
when follows the insincerity of it in the harmonic sequences. Here it
surely is not a whole-heart belief but only a theatrical attitudinising;
after the faint return of the opening motive is heard the sigh of
sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engender the suspicion that
when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix he was to a woman. He
blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with
the cantando expressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in
spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.
But the rustle of silken attire is back of every bar; sensuous imagery,
a faint perfume of femininity lurks in each cadence and trill. Ah!
naughty Abbe have a care. After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy
credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a
melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress!
Wilt thou allow her to make away with spiritual resolutions! Vade, retro
me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme so eloquently
proclaimed at the outset is solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power.
Then the hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and this tonal
panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colours moves kaleidoscopically
onward. Again the devil tempts the musical St. Anthony, this time in
octaves and in A major; he momentarily succumbs, but that good old
family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots
it serves its purpose; the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks
forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic ailment, is happily
short-winded. Another flank movement of the "ewig Weibliche," this time
in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music
who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and
contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the triolen of the bass
frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendour.
Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is
brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is stamped on every
bar. What gorgeous swing, and how the very bases of the earth seem to
tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from the cyclopean fist of this
musical Attila. Then follow a few bars of that Beethoven-like andante,
a moving return to the early themes, and softly the first lento
descends to the subterranean caverns whence it emerged, a Magyar Wotan
majestically vanishing into the bowels of a Gehenna; then a true Liszt
chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor
displays all of Liszt's power and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is
too long--infernal, not "heavenly lengths"--it is full of nobility, a
drastic intellectuality, and a sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a
commanding position in the pantheon of piano music would be folly. And
interpreted by an artist versed in the Liszt traditions, such as
Arthur Friedheim, this work compasses at times the sublime.
It is not my intention to claim your attention for the remainder of the
original compositions; that were indeed a terrible strain on your
patience. In the Annees de Pelerinage, redolent of Vergilian meadows,
soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious
except Au Bord d'une Source? Is the latter not exquisitely idyllic?
Surely in those years of pilgrimage through Switzerland, Italy, France,
Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of
the salon or concert platform. The two Polonaises recapture the heroic
and sorrowing spirit of Sarmatia. The first in E is a perennial
favourite; I always hear its martial theme as a pattern reversed of the
first theme in the A-flat Polonaise of Chopin. But the second Liszt
Polonaise in C minor is the more poetic of the pair; possibly that is
the reason why it is so seldom played.
Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian aspired
after the noblest things. In the atmosphere of the salons, of the Papal
court, and concert room, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character. I
know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed
of the Lord (which he was not); that if he had cut and run to sanctuary
to escape two or more women we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbe.
One penalty undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries.
Liszt was no exception to this rule. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck he has
had many things read into his music, mysticism not forgotten. Perhaps
the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the
usual pleasing and unpleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any
great man, not born of a book.
The Mephisto Valse from Lenau's Faust, in addition to its biting broad
humour and satanic suggestiveness, contains one of the most voluptuous
episodes outside of the Tristan score. That halting, languourous,
syncopated, theme in D flat is marvellously expressive, and the poco
allegretto seems to have struck the fancy of Wagner, who did not
hesitate to appropriate motives from his esteemed father-in-law when the
desire overtook him. He certainly considered Kundry Liszt-wise before
fabricating her scream in Parsifal.
Liszt's life was a sequence of triumphs, his sympathies were almost
boundless, yet he found time to work unfalteringly and despite myriad
temptations his spiritual nature was never wholly submerged. I wish,
however, that he had not invented the piano recital and the Liszt
pupil.
III
I possess, and value as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt's Etudes, Opus 1.
The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written when
Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show decided
traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured to
modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not the Etudes
d'Execution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I
exclaimed at the composer's cleverness. The Hungarian has taken his opus
1 and dressed it up in the most bewildering technical fashion. He gave
these studies appropriate names, and even to-day they require a
tremendous technique to do them justice. The most remarkable of the
set--the one in F minor No. 10--Liszt left nameless, and like a peak it
rears its head skyward, while about it cluster its more graceful
fellows: Ricordanza, Feux-follets, Harmonies du Soir (Chasse-neige, and
Paysage). The Mazeppa is a symphonic poem in miniature. What a superb
contribution to piano literature is Liszt's. These twelve incomparable
studies, the three effective Etudes de Concert (several quite Chopinish
in style and technique), the murmuring Waldesrauschen, the sparkling
Gnomenreigen, the stormy Ab-Irato, the poetic Au Lac de Wallenstadt and
Au Bord d'une Source, have they not all tremendously developed the
technical resources of the instrument? And to play them one must have
fingers of steel, a brain on fire, a heart bubbling with chivalric
force; what a comet-like pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept European
skies, who transformed the still small voice of Chopin into a veritable
hurricane. Nevertheless, we cannot imagine a Liszt without a Chopin
preceding him.
But, Liszt lost, the piano would lose its most dashing cavalier; while
his freedom, fantasy, and fire are admirable correctives of the
platitudes of the Hummel-Czerny-Mendelssohn school. Liszt won from his
instrument an orchestral quality. He advanced by great wing-strokes
toward perfection, and deprived of his music we should miss colour,
sonority, richness of tinting, and dramatic and dynamic contrasts. He
has had a great following. Tausig was the first to feel his influence,
and if he had lived longer would have beaten out a personal style of his
own. Of the two we prefer Liszt's version of the Paganini studies to
Schumann's. The Campanella is a favourite of well equipped virtuosi.
In my study of Chopin reference is made to Chopin's obligations to
Liszt. I prefer now to quote a famous authority on the subject, no less
a critic than Professor Frederick Niecks, whose biography of Chopin is,
thus far, the superior of all. He writes: "As at one time all
ameliorations in the theory and practice of music were ascribed to Guido
of Arezzo, so it is nowadays the fashion to ascribe all improvements and
extensions of the pianoforte technique to Liszt, who, more than any
other pianist, drew upon himself the admiration of the world, and
through his pupils continued to make his presence felt even after the
close of his career as a virtuoso. But the cause of this false opinion
is to be sought not so much in the fact that the brilliancy of his
artistic personality threw all his contemporaries into the shade, as in
that other fact, that he gathered up into one web the many threads
new and old which he found floating about during the years of his
development. The difference between Liszt and Chopin lies in this, that
the basis of the former's art is universality, that of the latter's,
individuality. Of the fingering of the one we may say that it is a
system, of that of the other that it is a manner. Probably we have here
also touched on the cause of Liszt's success and Chopin's want of
success as a teacher."
Niecks does not deny that Liszt influenced Chopin. In volume 1 of his
Frederick Chopin, he declares that "The artist who contributed the
largest quotum of force to this impulse was probably Liszt, whose fiery
passions, indomitable energy, soaring enthusiasm, universal tastes and
capacity of assimilation, mark him out as the opposite of Chopin. But,
although the latter was undoubtedly stimulated by Liszt's style of
playing the piano and of writing for this instrument, it is not so
certain as Miss L. Ramann, Liszt's biographer, thinks, that this
master's influence can be discovered in many passages of Chopin's music
which are distinguished by a fiery and passionate expression, and
resemble rather a strong, swelling torrent than a gently gliding
rivulet. She instances Nos. 9 and 12 of Douze Etudes, Op. 10; Nos. 11
and 12 of Douze Etudes, Op. 25; No. 24 of Vingt Quatre Preludes, Op. 28;
Premier Scherzo, Op. 20; Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 32. All these
compositions, we are told, exhibit Liszt's style and mode of feeling.
Now the works composed by Chopin before he came to Paris and got
acquainted with Liszt, comprise not only a sonata, a trio, two
concertos, variations, polonaises, waltzes, mazurkas, one or more
nocturnes, etc., but also--and this is for the question under
consideration of great importance--most of, if not all, the studies of
Op. 10 (Sowinski says that Chopin brought with him to Paris the MS. of
the first book of his studies) and some of Op. 25; and these works prove
decisively the inconclusiveness of the lady's argument. The twelfth
study of Opus 10 (composed in September, 1831) invalidates all she says
about fire, passion, and rushing torrents. In fact, no cogent reason can
be given why the works mentioned by her should not be the outcome of
unaided development. [That is to say, development not aided in the way
indicated by Miss Ramann.] The first Scherzo alone might make us pause
and ask whether the new features that present themselves in it ought not
to be fathered on Liszt. But seeing that Chopin evolved so much, why
should he not also have evolved this? Moreover, we must keep in mind
that Liszt had, up to 1831, composed almost nothing of what in after
years was considered either by him or others of much moment, and that
his pianoforte style had first to pass through the state of fermentation
into which Paganini's playing had precipitated it (in the spring of
1831) before it was formed; on the other hand, Chopin arrived in Paris
with his portfolios full of masterpieces, and in possession of a style
of his own as a player of his instrument as well as a writer for it.
That both learned from each other cannot be doubted; but the exact gain
of each is less easily determinable. Nevertheless, I think I may venture
to assert that whatever may be the extent of Chopin's indebtedness to
Liszt, the latter's indebtedness to the former is greater. The tracing
of an influence in the works of a man of genius, who, of course, neither
slavishly imitates nor flagrantly appropriates, is one of the most
difficult tasks. If Miss Ramann had first noted the works produced by
the two composers in question before their acquaintance began, and had
carefully examined Chopin's early productions with a view to ascertain
his capability of growth, she would have come to another conclusion, or,
at least have spoken less confidently."
To the above no exception may be taken except the reference to the
B-minor Scherzo as possibly having been suggested by Liszt. For me it is
most characteristic of Chopin in its perverse, even morbid, ironical
humour, its original figuration; who but Chopin could have conceived
that lyrical episode! Liszt, doubtless, was the first who introduced
interlocking octaves instead of the chromatic scale at the close; Tausig
followed his example. But there the matter ended. Once when Chopin heard
that Liszt intended to write an account of his concerts for the _Gazette
Musicale_, he said: "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire."
This remark casts much illumination on the relations of the two men.
Liszt was the broader minded of the two; Chopin, as Niecks points out,
forgave but never forgot.
IV
AT ROME, WEIMAR, BUDAPEST
I
ROME
The Roman candle has attracted many spiritual moths. Goethe, Humboldt,
Platen, Winckelmann, Thorwaldsen, Gregorovius and Liszt--to mention only
the first at hand--fluttered to Rome and ascribe to it much of their
finer productivity. For Franz Liszt it was a loadstone of double
power--the ideality of the place attracted him and its religion anchored
his spiritual restlessness.
Liszt liked a broad soul-margin to his life. Heine touched on this side
of Liszt's character when he wrote of him: "Speculation has the greatest
fascination for him; and still more than with the interests of his art
is he engrossed with all manner of rival philosophical investigations
which are occupied with the solution of all great questions of heaven
and earth. For long he was an ardent upholder of the beautiful
Saint-Simonian idea of the world. Later the spiritualistic or rather
vaporous thoughts of Ballanche enveloped him in their midst; now he is
enthusiastic over the Republican-Catholic dogmas of a Lamennais who has
hoisted his Jacobin cap on the cross.... Heaven knows in what mental
stall he will find his next hobby-horse!" This was written in 1837, and
only two years afterward Liszt paid his first visit to Rome.
Based on letters and diaries of Liszt, Gregorovius, Ad. Stahr, Fanny
Lewald, W. Allmers, Cardinal Wiseman, Jul. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and
Eugen Segnitz, a study of Franz Liszt in Rome may be made.
The time spent in the Eternal City was unquestionably an important one
in Liszt's life and worthy of the detailed attention given it. Rome in
1839 presented a contradictory picture. Contrasted to the pomp of the
Vatican were the unprincipled conditions of the city itself. Bands of
robbers infested it and the surroundings, making it as unsafe as an
English highway during the glorious but rather frisky times of Jonathan
Wild and his agile confreres. So, for instance, Massocia and his band
kidnapped the pupils of the seminary in Albano, and when the demanded
ransom was not forthcoming defiantly strung up these innocents on trees
flanking the gateways of Rome. So, too, the political freedom of the
city found a concession in the privilege of Cardinal Consalvi, who
permitted foreign papers of every political party to be read openly;
while the papal edict declared null and void all contracts closed
between Christian and Hebrew.
In matters of art things were not much better. The censor swung his axe
in a most irresponsible and, now to us, laughable manner. Overbeck's
Holy Family was condemned because the feet of the Madonna in it were too
bare; Thorwaldsen's Day and Night was offensive in its nudeness;
Raphael's art was an eyesore, and the same discriminating mind, Padre
Piazza, would have liked to consign to the flames all philosophical
books.
The musical taste and standard was not elevating at this time. Piccini,
Paisiello, Cimarosa, Sacchini, Anfossi, Sarti, Righini, Paer, and
Rossini wrote purely for the sensual enjoyment of the people.
Even the behaviour of the masses in theatres was defined by an edict
issued by Leo XII. Any poor devil caught wearing his hat in the theatre
was shown the door; if an actor interpolated either gesture or word not
provided for in the prompt-book he was sent to the galleys for five
years; the carrying of weapons in places of amusement was punishable
with life sentence in the galleys, and wounding another during a row
earned a death verdict for the unfortunate one; applause and hisses were
rewarded by a prison term from two months to half a year.
[Illustration: Countess Marie d'Agoult]
Liszt's first visit to Rome occurred in 1839, and in company with the
Countess d'Agoult. A strange mating this had been. Her salon was the
meeting-place where enthusiastic persons foregathered--aesthetes,
artists, and politicians. Liszt became a member of this circle, and
the impressionable young man of twenty-three was as so much wax in the
hands of this sensation-mongering woman six years his senior. Against
Liszt's wishes she had followed him to Berne, and there is plenty of
evidence at hand that he assumed the inevitable responsibilities with
good grace and treated her as his wife, but evidently not entirely to
her satisfaction. She fancied herself the muse of the young genius; but
the wings of the young eagle she had patronized soon out-stripped her.
Their years of wandering were noteworthy. From Paris to Berne and
Geneva; then two trips back to Paris, where Liszt fought his keyboard
duel with Thalberg. They rested awhile at Nohant, entertained by George
Sand, which they forsook for Lake Como, some flying trips to Milan
and eventually Venice. It happened to be the year of the Danube
flood--1837--and the call for help sent Liszt to Vienna where he gave
benefit concerts for the sufferers. This accomplished, the pair returned
to Venice and threaded their way to Rome by way of Lugano, Genoa, and
Florence.
Originally Liszt had no intention of concertising on this trip; but he
excused his appearances on the concert platforms in the Italian cities:
"I did not wish to forget my trade entirely."
The condition of music of the day in Italy held out no inducements or
illusions to him. He writes Berlioz that he wished to make the
acquaintance of the principal Italian cities and really could hope for
no benefiting influence from these flighty stops. But there was another
reason why he was so little influenced, and it was simply that Italy of
the day had nothing of great musical interest to offer Liszt.
His first public appearance in Rome was in January, 1839. Francilla
Pixis-Goehringer, adopted daughter of his friend Pixis and pupil of
Sonntag and Malibran, gave a concert at this time, and it was here that
Liszt assisted. After that the Romans did what ever so many had done
before them--threw wide their doors to the artist Liszt. Thus encouraged
he dared give serious recitals in face of all the Roman musical
flippancy. He defied public taste and craving and gave a series of what
he called in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso "soliloques musicaux";
in these he assumed the role of a musical Louis XIV, and politely said:
"le concert c'est moi!" He quotes one of his programmes:
1. Overture to William Tell, performed by Mr. Liszt.
2. Fantaisie on reminiscences of Puritani, composed and performed by the
above named.
3. Studies and Fragments, composed and performed by the same.
4. Improvisation on a given theme--still by the same. That is all.
This was really nothing more than a forerunner of the present
piano-recital. Liszt was the first one who ventured an evening of piano
compositions without fearing the disgust of an audience. From his
accounts they behaved very well indeed, and applauded and chatted only
at the proper time.
Liszt, realising that he had nothing to learn from the living Italians,
turned to their dead; and for such studies his first visit to Rome was
especially propitious. Gregory XIV, had opened the Etruscan Museum but
two years before and was stocking it with the treasures which were being
unearthed in the old cities of Etruria. The same pope also enlarged the
Vatican library and took active interest in the mural decorations of
these newly added ten rooms. The painters Overbeck, Cornelius, and Veit
were kept actively employed in this city, and the influence of their
work was not a trifling one on the painter colony. The diplomat Von
Bunsen and the Cardinals Mezzofanti and Mai exerted their influences to
spread general culture.
An interesting one of Liszt's friendships, dating from this time, is
that with Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French
Academie. Strolling under the oaks of the Villa Medici, Ingres would
disentangle for his younger friend the confusion of impressions gathered
in his wanderings among Rome's art treasures. Himself a music lover and
a musician--he played the violin in the theatre orchestra of his native
place, Montauban, at some performances of Gluck's operas--Ingres admired
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and above all Gluck, upon whom he looked as
the musical successor to AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Under such
sympathetic and intelligent guidance Liszt's admiration for the other
arts became ordered. After a day among the forest of statues he would
coax his friend to take up the violin, and Liszt writes almost
enthusiastically of his Beethoven interpretations.
It is entirely within reason to argue that we owe to this new viewpoint
such of Liszt's compositions as were inspired by works of the other
arts. Such, to name a few, were the Sposalizio and Il Penseroso--by
Raphael and Michelangelo--Die Hunnenschlacht--Kaulbach--and Danse
Macabre--after Andrea Orcagna. That Liszt was susceptible to such
impressions, even before, is proven by his essay Die Heilige Caecelia by
Raphael, written earlier than this Roman trip; but under Ingres' hints
his width of vision was extended, and he began to find alluring
parallels between the fine arts--his comprehension of Mozart and
Beethoven grew with his acquaintance of the works of Raphael and
Michelangelo. He compared Giovanni da Pisa, Fra Beato, and Francia with
Allegri, Marcello, and Palestrina; Titian with Rossini!
What attracted Liszt principally during his first stay at Rome was the
religion of art, as it had attracted Goethe before him. Segnitz quotes
against this attitude the one of Berlioz, whom the ruins of Rome touched
slightly, as did Palestrina's church music. He found the latter devoid
of religious sentiment, and in this verdict he was joined by none less
than Mendelssohn.
The surroundings, the atmosphere of Rome, appealed to Liszt, and under
them his individuality thrived and asserted itself. The scattered and
often hurried impressions of this first visit ordered themselves
gradually, but the composite whole deflected his life's currents into
the one steady and broad stream of art. Like Goethe, he might have
regarded his first day at Rome as the one of his second birth, as the
one on which his true self came to light. The Via Sacra by which he left
Rome led him into the forum of the art world.
In June, 1839, after a stay of five months, Liszt, accompanied by the
Countess d'Agoult, left Rome for the baths at Lucca. The elusive peace
he was tracking escaped him here, and he wandered to the little fishing
village San Rossore. In November of the same year he parted company with
Italy--and also with the countess. The D'Agoult had romantic ideas of
their union, in which the inevitable responsibilities of this sort of
thing played no part. Segnitz regards the entire affair as having been a
most unfortunate one for Liszt, and believes that the latter only saved
himself and his entire artistic future by separating from the countess.
The years of contact had formed no spiritual ties between them and the
rupture was inevitable.
With her three children d'Agoult started for Paris there to visit
Liszt's mother; later, through Liszt's intervention, a complete
reconciliation with her family was effected. Although after the death of
her mother the countess inherited a fortune, Liszt continued to support
the children.
Leaving San Rossore the artist began his public life in earnest. It was
the beginning of his virtuoso period and Vienna was the starting-point
of his triumphal tournee across Europe. This period was an important one
for development of piano playing, placing the latter on a much higher
artistic plane than it had been; in it Liszt also inaugurated a new
phase of the possibilities of concert giving. It was the time in which
he fought both friend and enemy, fought without quarter for the cause of
art.
As a composer Liszt, during his first stay in Italy, 1837-40, was far
from active. The Fantaisie quasi Sonata apres une lecture de Dante and
the twelve Etudes d'execution transcendante both came to life at Lake
Como. There were besides the Chromatic Galop and the pieces Sposalizio,
Il Penseroso and Tre Sonetti di Petrarca, which became part of the
Annees de Pelerinage (Italie). His first song, with piano accompaniment,
Angiolin dal biondo crin, dates from these days. The balance of this
time was devoted to making arrangements of melodies by Mercadante,
Donizetti, and Rossini, and to finishing the piano transcriptions of
the Beethoven symphonies. These and a few others about cover his list of
compositions and arrangements.
II
Immediately after Liszt's separation from the Countess d'Agoult began a
period of restless activity for him. The eight nomadic years during
which he wandered up and down Europe, playing constantly in public, are
the ones in which his virtuosity flourished. To-day we are inclined to
mock at the mere mention of Liszt the virtuoso--we have heard far too
much of his achievements, achievements behind which the real Liszt has
become a warped and unrecognizable personality. But it was a remarkable
tour nevertheless, and so wholesale a lesson in musical interpretation
as Europe had never had before. Whenever and wherever he smote the
keyboard the old-fashioned clay idols of piano playing were shattered,
and however much it was attempted to patch them the pieces would not
quite fit. Liszt struck the death-blow to unemotional playing, but he
destroyed only to create anew: he erected ideals of interpretation which
are still honored.
When he accepted the Weimar post of Hofkapellmeister in 1847--he had _en
passant_ in a term, lasting from December, 1843, to February of the
following year, conducted eight successful concerts in Weimar--it
looked as if his wild spirit of travel had dissipated itself:
_ausgetobt_, as the Germans say.
With scarcely any time modulation this versatile genius began his career
of Hofkapellmeister, in which he topsy-turvied traditions and roused
Weimar from the lethargy into which it had fallen with the fading of
that wonderful Goethe circle. At this point the influence of woman is
again made manifest.
Gregorovius, the great antiquarian, gives us a few glimpses of her in
his Roemischen Tagebuechern. He admits that her personality was repulsive
to him, but that she fairly sputtered spirituality. Also that she
wrote an article about the Sixtine Chapel for the _Revue du Monde
Catholique_--"a brilliant article: all fireworks, like her speech";
finally, that "she is writing an essay on friendship."
When the possibility of marriage with the Princess went up into thin air
Liszt began contemplating a permanent residence in Rome. Here he could
live more independently and privately than in Germany, and this was
desirable, since he still had some musical problems to solve. First of
all, he turned to his legend of the Holy Elizabeth, completing that;
then Der Sonnen-Hymnus des heiligen Franziskus von Assisi was written,
to say nothing of a composition for organ and trombone composed for one
of his Weimar adherents. Frequent excursions and work so consumed his
hours that soon we find him complaining as bitterly about the lack of
time in Rome as in Weimar.
Rome of this time was still "outside of Italy": the reverse side of the
Papal medallions showed Daniel in the lion's den and Pope Pio Nono
immersed in mysticism. The social features were important. Segnitz
mentions "die Koelnische Patrizierin Frau Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen,
Peter Cornelius, die Dame Schopenhauer," the Ottilie of Goethe. Besides
the artists Catel and Nerenz there was Frau von Schwarz, who attracted
Liszt. She boasted friendship with Garibaldi, and her salon was a
meeting-place of the intellectual multitude. Liszt seems to have
been king pin everywhere, and it is refreshing to read the curt,
unsentimental impression of him retailed by Gregorovius: "I have met
Liszt," wrote the latter; "remarkable, demoniac appearance; tall,
slender, long hair. Frau von Schwarz believes he is burned out, that
only the walls of him remain, wherein a small ghostly flame flits." To
add to the list of notables: the painter Lindemann-Frommel; the Prussian
representatives, Graf Arnim and Kurt von Schloezer; King Louis I, of
Bavaria, and the artists Riedel, Schweinfurt, Passini, and Feuerbach the
philosopher.
Naturally Liszt participated in the prominent church festivals and was
affected by their glamour; it even roused him to sentimental utterance.
Germany and the thoughts of it could not lure him away from Rome, nor
could the summer heat drive him out. The Holy Elizabeth was completed by
August 10, 1862, and with it he had finished the greater part of his
work as composer. Never did he lose interest in German art movements,
and was ever ready with advice and suggestions.
A severe shock, one which sent him to bed, came to him about the middle
of September of this year, when his youngest daughter, Blandine
Ollivier, the wife of Louis Napoleon's war minister, Emile Ollivier,
died. Liszt turned to religion and to his art for consolation; he slaved
away at the Christus oratorio and wrote two psalms and the instrumental
Evocatio in der Sixtinischen Kapelle. Invitations from London, Weimar,
and Budapest could not budge him from Rome; deeper and deeper he became
interested in the wonders and beauties of his religion.
The following year--1863--finds him hard at work as ever. His oratorio
is not achieving great progress, but he is revising his piano
arrangements of the Beethoven Symphonies. In the spring he changes his
quarters and moves into the Cloister Madonna del Rosario, in which he
had been offered several rooms. These new lodgings enchant him. Situated
on the Monte Mario, the site commanded a view of Rome and the Campagna,
the Albano Mountains and the River Tiber. So Signor Commendatore Liszt,
the friend of Padre Theiner, is living in a cloister and the religious
germs begin to sprout in this quiet surrounding. Liszt esteemed the
priest highly as an educated man and admired his personality.
Gregorovius, on the other hand, could pump up no liking at all for the
hermit-like Padre, discovered him dry and judged his writings and
philosophy as dry, archaic stuff.
In Italian politics and Italian music Liszt found nothing to attract
him. The latter was crude, as regards composition, and generally
resolved itself into Drehorgel-Lyrik. The piano was at that time not an
Italian object of furniture, and in the churches they still served up
operatic music with the thinnest religious varnish. In the salons one
seldom heard good music, so that Liszt, through his pupils Sgambati,
Berta, and others was able to work some reform in these matters.
On July 11, 1862, the tongue of all Rome was wagging: Pope Pius IX had
paid Liszt a visit at the Cloister Santa Maria del Rosario. Liszt
recounts that His Holiness had stayed with him about half an hour,
during which time the pianist had played for him on the harmonium and on
the little working piano. After that the Pope had spoken earnestly to
him and begged him to strive for the heavenly, even in earthly matters,
and to prepare himself for the eternal sounding harmonies by means of
the passing earthly ones.
Liszt was the first artist who had been honored thus. A few days later
the Pope granted him an audience in the Vatican, when he presented Liszt
with a cameo of the Madonna.
Segnitz quotes from two of Liszt's letters in which he voices his
religious sentiments, and hopes that eventually his bones may rest in
Roman earth.
Rather a remarkable phase of Liszt now was that he tried with might and
main to live down and forget his so-called "Glanzperiode," the one of
his virtuosity. An invitation from Cologne and also one from St.
Petersburg to play and display once more "that entrancing tone which he
could coax out of the keys" aroused his wrath. He asks, is he never to
be taken more seriously than as a pianist, is he not worthy of
recognition as a musician, a composer? On the other hand, nothing
flattered him as much as when an Amsterdam society performed his Graner
Messe and sent him a diploma of honorary membership. Furthermore, he
derived much encouragement from an article in the _Neue Zeitschrift fuer
Musik_, written by Heinrich Porges, in which Liszt's compositions were
seriously discussed.
Liszt found time to revise the four Psalms, 13--this was his favourite
one--18, 23, 137; and during this year he also composed for the piano
Alleluja, Ave Maria, Waldesrauschen, Gnomenreigen, the two legends, Die
Vogelpredigt and Der heilige Franz von Paula auf den Wogen schreitend;
then the organ variations on the Bach theme Weinen, klagen, sorgen,
zagen, and the Papsthymus. He again took up his former project of making
piano arrangements of the Beethoven quartets.
* * * * *
The year after this one was remarkable for the facts that Liszt was
coaxed to play in public on the occasion of a benefit for the Peter's
Pence, and that he participated in the Karlsruhe music festival. He left
Rome in August and journeyed first to St. Tropez to visit his daughter's
grave; then to Karlsruhe. After this he went to Munich and visited Hans
and Cosima von Buelow on the way to Weimar. Finally a trip to Paris to
see his aged mother, and he returned to Rome at the end of October.
Besides working on his oratorio and making some piano transcriptions, he
composed only two new numbers, a litany for organ and a chorus with
organ accompaniment.
Two public appearances in Rome as pianist occurred during the spring of
1865, and then, to the surprise of many, on April 25, Liszt took minor
orders of priesthood, forsook the Cloister and made his abode in the
Vatican next to the rooms of his priestly friend Monseigneur Hohenlohe.
Gregorovius writes of this appearance of Liszt as the virtuoso: "He
played Die Aufforderung zum Tanz and Erlkoenig--a queer adieu to the
world. No one suspected that already he carried his abbe's socks in his
pockets.... Now he wears the cloaklet of the abbe, lives in the Vatican,
and, as Schloezer tells me, is happy and healthy. This is the end of the
genial virtuoso, the personality of a sovereign. I am glad that I heard
Liszt play once more, he and his instrument seemed to be grown
together--a piano-centaur."
As we look back at the step now and are able to weigh the gradual
influence which asserted itself on Liszt the act seems to have been an
inevitable one. At the time, however, it was more or less unexpected.
He assures Breitkopf & Haertel that his old weakness for composition has
not deserted him, that he must commit to paper some of the wonderful
things which were spooking about in his head. And the public? Well, it
regretted that Liszt was wasting his time writing such dreadful
"Tonwirrwarr." Liszt smiled ironically--and continued to compose.
His patriotism sent him travelling once more--this year to Pesth, where
he conducted his arrangement of the Rakoczy March and the Divine Comedy.
He returned to Rome and learned that his friend Hohenlohe was about to
be made cardinal, an event which had its bearing on his stay in the
Vatican.
Liszt moved back to the Cloister after Hohenlohe had given up his
quarters in the Vatican for a cardinal's house. This year--1866--is also
a record of travel. After he had conducted his Dante Symphony in
Rome--and the natives found it "inspired but formless"--he went to
Paris to witness a performance of his Mass. Report had preceded him that
he was physically a wreck, and he delighted in showing himself to prove
the falsehood of the rumour. And partly to display his mental activity
he began theological studies, so that he might pass his examination and
take higher orders.
In addition to his Paris trip he also wandered to Amsterdam to hear his
Mass once more. Immediately after his return to Rome he completed the
Christus oratorio and began work on the arrangements of the Beethoven
quartets. He soon found that he had attacked an impossible task. "I
failed where Tausig succeeded," he lamented; and then explained that
Tausig had been wise enough to select only such movements as were
available for the piano.
* * * * *
His compositions this year were not very numerous--some piano extracts
out of his oratorio and sketches for the Hungarian Coronation Mass.
Politics were throwing up dense clouds of dust in Rome, the Papal
secular power was petering out, and in consequence Liszt, who hated
politics, was compelled to change his residence again, moving this time
to the old cloister Santa Francesca Romana. Here he met his friends
weekly on Friday mornings, and besides animated conversation there was
much chamber music to be heard.
The Hungarian Mass was finished early in 1867, and Liszt went to Pesth,
where he conducted it with much success when Francis Joseph was made
King of Hungary. Then he appeared at the Wartburg Festival, and on his
return trip stopped at Lucerne to greet Wagner. After a short stay at
Munich, with Cosima and Hans von Buelow, he found himself once more in
Rome and was allowed a few months of rest. Besides the Hungarian Mass he
composed this year a Funeral March on the occasion of Maximilian of
Mexico's death--it appeared later as the sixth of the third collection:
Annees de Pelerinage. His piano transcriptions were confined to works by
Verdi and Von Buelow, and as a souvenir of the days passed with Wagner at
Triebschen he transcribed Isolde's Liebestod.
The social features of his stay in Rome were becoming unbearable, and
Liszt could only command privacy by being rude to the persistent ones.
Several little excursions out of Rome during the spring were followed by
a long journey in the summer with his friend Abbe Solfanelli. First to a
place of pilgrimage; then to the city of Liszt's patron saint, Assisi,
and from there to Loreto. When Liszt re-entered Rome he found the social
life so exigent that he was driven to the stillness of the Campagna, and
lived for some time in the Villa d'Este. This--1868--was his last year
at Rome, for the middle of January of the following year found him
settled in Weimar again. Although he was still spared many years in
which to work, yet the eve of his life was upon him. If he had hoped to
find finally in Weimar homely rest and peace he was doomed to
disappointment. He remained a wanderer to the end of his days.
There remains to be made a mention of his compositions during his last
year at Rome. Principal among these was the Requiem dedicated to the
memory of his deceased mother and his two children, Daniel and Blandine;
then three church compositions and the epilogue to his Tasso, Le
Triomphe du Tasse, and the usual transcriptions for the piano.
Whether or not Liszt's interest in matters religious abated is not made
very clear. So much is certain that his plans for taking higher orders
came to nothing. Was the Church after all a disappointment to him? One
recalls his childish delight when first he was created Abbe. Then he
wrote Hohenlohe: "They tell me that I wear my _soutane_ as though I
always had worn one."
* * * * *
The Hungarian Government elected the Abbe honorary president of the
Landes Musikakademie in 1873. This gave Liszt's wanderings still a third
objective point, Budapest.
In Weimar his time was now devoted more to teaching than to composing,
and the Liszt pupils began to sprout by the gross. The absurd
sentimentality which clings about this period has never been condemned
sufficiently. Read this entry in the note-book of Gregorovius and draw
at least a few of your own conclusions: "Dined with Liszt at Weimar. He
was very lovable, made up to me and hoped at parting that I would give
him my confidence. This would be very difficult, as we have not one
point in common. He has grown very old; his face is all wrinkled; yet
his animation is very attractive. The Countess Tolstoy told me yesterday
that an American lady living here had stripped the covering off a chair
on which Liszt had sat, had had it framed and now it hung on her wall.
She related this to Liszt, who at first seemed indignant and then asked
if it were really true! If such a man does not despise mankind then one
must give him great credit for it."
Still Liszt fluttered to Rome from time to time. "If it had not been for
music I should have devoted myself entirely to the church and would have
become a Franciscan; It is in error that I am accused of becoming a
'frivolous Abbe' because of external reasons. On the contrary, it was my
most innermost wish which led me to join the church that I wished to
serve" he said.
During these later visits he took up his abode in the Hotel d'Alibert.
His rooms were furnished as plainly as possible--in the one a bed and a
writing-desk, and the second one, his reception and class-room, held a
grand piano. Some of his pupils lived at the same hotel--Stradal,
Ansorge, Goellerich, Burmeister, Stavenhagen, and Mademoiselle Cognetti.
Liszt's daily mode of life is rather intimately described. He arose at
four in the morning and began composing, which he continued until seven.
His pupils would drop in to greet him and be dismissed kindly with a
cigar. After a second breakfast he attended early mass in the San Carlo
Church, where he was accompanied by Stradal; then back to his rooms, and
after an hour's rest he would work or pay some visits.
His noon meal was taken regularly with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein,
who now lived a retired life and devoted herself to religious studies.
These visits brought to Liszt much peace and to the Princess happiness;
they were still devoted to each other. After this meal Liszt returned to
his quarters and rested. Only on every other day he taught. The pupil
played the composition of his own choice and Liszt's criticisms would
follow. Muddy playing drove him frantic, and he often told his pupils to
"wash their dirty linen at home"! He taught liberal use of the pedal,
but with utmost discretion. The one thing he could not abide was
pedantic performance: "Among artists there is not the division of
professors and non-professors. They are only artists--or they are not."
Occasionally he would play for a small assembly--once he favoured the
few with the D-flat Etude, and the crossing left hand struck false notes
repeatedly. He played the piece to the end, and then atoned for his
bulls by adding an improvisation on the theme which moved the assembly
to tears!
During these class hours a small circle of intimate ones was usually
invited. The Princess Wittgenstein was noticeably absent; but there were
the Princess Minghetti, the Countess Reviczy--to whom the Fifth Rhapsody
is dedicated--and several barons and artists--Alma Tadema among the
latter. Depend upon it, wherever Liszt pitched his tent there were some
titles in the neighbourhood. From two until six in the afternoon these
lessons lasted. Then the small audience withdrew and Liszt played cards
with his pupils for one hour.
About eight in the evening Liszt would take himself to the house of the
Princess Wittgenstein and sup with her. This meal consisted principally
of ham, says the biographer, and Hungarian red wine. By nine he had
usually retired.
Stradal seems to have been one of his favourites and accompanied Liszt
on some of his little excursions to the beloved cloisters, San Onofrio
and Monte Mario, then into the Valle dell' Inferno. Here under the Tasso
oak Liszt spoke of the life of the great poet and compared his own fate
to that of Tasso. "They will not carry me in triumph across the Capitol,
but the time will come when my works will be acknowledged. This will
happen too late for me--I shall not be among you any more," he said. Not
an untrue prophecy.
[Illustration: Liszt in His Atelier at Weimar]
During these trips he gave alms freely. His servant Mischka filled
Liszt's right vest pocket with _lire_ and the other one with _soldi_
every morning. And Liszt always strewed about the silver pieces,
returning to his astonished servant with the pocket full of copper coins
untouched.
Rudolf Louis, another Liszt biographer, tells an amusing story which
fits in the time when Pius the Ninth visited Liszt in the cloister.
While most of the living composers contented themselves with envying
Liszt, old Rossini tried to turn the incident to his own advantage. He
begged Liszt to use his influence in securing the admission of female
voices in service of the church because he--Rossini--did not care to
hear his churchly compositions sung by croaking boys' voices! Of course
nothing came of this request.
The incident itself--the Pope's visit to Liszt--caused much gossip at
the time. It was even reported that Pio Nono had called Liszt "his
Palestrina."
M. Louis also makes a point which most Wagner biographers seem to have
overlooked in their hurry to make Richard appear a very moral man,
namely, that the little Von Buelow-Cosima-Wagner affair did not please
Papa Liszt at all. Truce was patched up only in 1873, when Liszt's
"Christus" performance at Weimar was witnessed by Wagner. Bayreuth of
'76 cemented the friendship once more.
Read this paragraph from the pen of the cynical Gregorovius; it refers
to the Roman performance of the Dante Symphony in the Galleria Dantesca
when the Abbe reaped an aftermath of homage: "The Ladies of Paradise
(?!) poured flowers on him from above; Frau L. almost murdered him with
a big laurel wreath! But the Romans criticised the music severely as
being formless. There is inspiration in it, but it does not reach(?!).
Liszt left for Paris. The day before his departure I breakfasted with
him at Tolstoy's; he played for a solid hour and allowed himself to be
persuaded to do this by the young Princess Nadine Hellbig--Princess
Shahawskoy--a woman of remarkably colossal figure, but also of
remarkable intelligence."
V
AS COMPOSER
Richard Wagner wrote to Liszt July 20, 1856, concerning his symphonic
poems:
"With your symphonic poems I am now quite familiar. They are the only
music I have anything to do with at present, as I cannot think of doing
any work of my own while undergoing medical treatment. Every day I read
one or the other of your scores, just as I would read a poem, easily and
without hindrance. Then I feel every time as if I had dived into a
crystalline depth, there to be all alone by myself, having left all the
world behind, to live for an hour my own proper life. Refreshed and
invigorated, I then come to the surface again, full of longing for your
personal presence. Yes, my friend, _you have the power! You have the
power!_"
And later (December 6, 1856): "I feel thoroughly contemptible as a
musician, whereas you, as I have now convinced myself, are the greatest
musician of all times." Wagner, too, could be generous and flattering.
He had praised the piano sonata; Mazeppa and Orpheus were his favourites
among the symphonic poems.
Camille Saint-Saens was more discriminating in his admiration; he said:
"Persons interested in things musical may perhaps recall a concert given
many years ago in the hall of the Theatre Italien, Paris, under the
direction of the author of this article. The programme was composed
entirely of the orchestral work of Franz Liszt, whom the world persists
in calling a great pianist, in order to avoid acknowledging him as one
of the greatest composers of our time. This concert was considerably
discussed in the musical world, strictly speaking, and in a lesser
degree by the general public. Liszt as a composer seemed to many to be
the equal of Ingres as a violinist, or Thiers as an astronomer. However,
the public, who would have come in throngs to hear Liszt play ten bars
on the piano, as might be expected, manifested very little desire to
hear the Dante Symphony, the _Berges a la creche_ and _Les Mages_,
symphonic parts of _Christus_, and other compositions which, coming from
one less illustrious, but playing the piano fairly well, would have
surely aroused some curiosity. We must also state that the concert was
not well advertised. While the "Spanish Student" monopolized all the
advertising space and posters possible, the Liszt concert had to be
satisfied with a brief notice and could not, at any price, take its
place among the theatre notices.
"Several days later, a pianist giving a concert at the Italien, obtained
this favour. Theatres surely offer inexplicable mysteries to simple
mortals. The name of Liszt appeared here and there in large type on the
top row of certain posters, where the human eye could see it only by the
aid of the telescope. But, nevertheless, our concert was given, and not
to an empty hall. The musical press, at our appeal, kindly assisted;
but the importance of the works on which they were invited to express
an opinion seemed to escape them entirely. They considered, in
general, that the music of Liszt was well written, free from certain
peculiarities they expected to find in it, and that it did not lack a
certain charm. That was all.
"If such had been my opinion of the works of Liszt, I certainly should
not have taken the trouble to gather together a large orchestra and
rehearse two weeks for a concert. Moreover, I should like to say a few
words of these works, so little known, whose future seems so bright. It
is not long since orchestral music was confined to but two forms--the
symphony and the overture. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had never
written anything else; who would have dared to do other than they?
Neither Weber, Mendelssohn, Schubert, nor Schumann. Liszt did dare."
Liszt understood that to introduce new forms he must cause a necessity
to be felt, in a word, produce a motive for them. He resolutely entered
on the path which Beethoven, with the Pastoral and Choral Symphonies,
and Berlioz, with the Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy, had
suggested rather than opened, for they had enlarged the compass of the
symphony, but had not transformed it, and it was Liszt who created the
symphonic poem.
This brilliant and fecund creation will be to posterity one of Liszt's
greatest titles to glory, and when time shall have effaced the luminous
trace of this greatest pianist who has ever lived it will inscribe on
the roll of honour the name of the emancipator of instrumental music.
Liszt not only introduced into the musical world the symphonic poem, he
developed it himself; and in his own twelve poems he has shown the chief
forms in which it can be clothed.
Before taking up the works themselves, let us consider the form of which
it is the soul, the principle of programme music.
To many, programme music is a necessarily inferior _genre_. Much has
been written on this subject that cannot be understood. Is the music, in
itself, good or bad? That is the point. The fact of its being
"programme" or not makes it neither better not worse. It is exactly the
same in painting, where the subject of the picture, which is everything
to the vulgar mind, is nothing or little to the artist. The reproach
against music, of expressing nothing in itself without the aid of words,
applies equally to painting.
To the artist, programme music is only a pretext to enter upon new ways,
and new effects demand new means, which, by the way, is very little
desired by orchestra leaders and kapellmeisters who, above all, love
ease and tranquil existence. I should not be surprised to discover that
the resistance to works of which we speak comes not from the public, but
from orchestra leaders, little anxious to cope with the difficulties of
every nature which they contain. However, I will not affirm it.
The compositions to which Liszt gave the name symphonic poem are twelve
in number:
1. Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne, after Victor Hugo.
2. Tasso, Lamento and Trionfo.
3. Les Preludes, after Lamartine.
4. Orphee.
5. Promethee.
6. Mazeppa.
7. Fest-Klaenge.
8. Heroide funebre.
9. Hungaria.
10. Hamlet.
11. La bataille des Huns, after Kaulbach.
12. L'ideal, after Schiller.
The symphonic poem in the form in which Liszt has given it to us, is
ordinarily an ensemble of different movements depending on each other,
and flowing from a principal ideal, blending into each other, and
forming one composition. The plan of the musical poem thus understood
may vary infinitely. To obtain a great unity, and at the same time the
greatest variety possible, Liszt most often chooses a musical phrase,
which he transforms by means of artifices of rhythm, to give it the
most diverse aspects and cause it to serve as an expression of the most
varied sentiments. This is one of the usual methods of Richard Wagner,
and, in my opinion, it is the only one common to the two composers. In
style, in use of harmonic resources and instrumentation, they differ as
widely as two contemporary artists could differ, and yet really belong
to the same school.
THE BERG SYMPHONY
"Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne"--or, as it is more familiarly known,
"Die Bergsymphonie"--is ranked among the earliest of Liszt's symphonic
works. The first sketches of this symphonic poem were made as early as
1833-35, but they were not orchestrated until 1849, and the composition
had its first hearing in Weimar in 1853.
A German enthusiast says this work is the first towering peak of a
mountain chain, and that here already--in the first of the list of
Symphonic Poems--the mastery of the composer is indubitably revealed.
The subject is not a flippant one, by any means: it touches on the
relation of man to nature--das Weltraetsel. Inspiration came directly
from Victor Hugo's poem, "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne." The subject
is that of Nature's perfection contrasted to Man's misery:
Die Welt ist volkommen ueberall,
Wo der Mensch nicht hinkommt mit seiner Qual.
Only when one withdraws from the hurdy-gurdy trend of life, only from
the height of mountain does one see Truth in perspective. This is "What
one hears on the Mountain."
Zuerst vermorr'ner, unermess'ner Laerm,
Undeutlich wie der Wind in dichten Baeumen,
Voll klarer Tone, suessen Lispelns, sanft
Wie'n Abendlied, und stark wie Waffenklirren.
Es war ein Toenen, tief und unausprechlich,
Das flutend Kreise zog rings um die Welt
Und durch die Himmel ...
Die Welt, Gehuellt in diese Symphonie,
Schwamm wie in Luft, so in der Harmonie.
This is the key-note to the introductory measures of Liszt's work. Out
of the sombre roll of the drum--which continues as a ground tone--the
different instruments assert themselves. Muted strings imitate the rush
of the sea; horns and woodwind hint at the battling of elements in
chaos, while the violins and harp swerve peacefully aloft in arpeggios.
The oboe chants sanft wie'n Abendlied, the beautiful melody of peaceful
idyllic nature. After this impression becomes a mood Liszt resumes the
poetic narrative and individualises the two voices:
Vom Meer die eine; wie ein Sang von Ruhm und Glueck,
Die and're hob von uns'rer Erde sich,
Sie war voll Trauer: das Geraeusch der Menschen.
The voice of Man is the first to be heard. It obtrudes itself even while
the violins are preaching earthly peace, and eventually embroils them in
its cry of discontent. All this over the pedal point of worldly noises.
There is a sudden pause, and in the succeeding maestoso episode the
second voice is heard--Nature's Hymn:
Der praecht'ge Ocean ...
Liess eine friedliche frohe Stimme hoeren,
Sang, wie die Harfe singt in Sion's Tempeln,
Und pries der Schoepfung Schoenheit.
Here there is composure and serenity, which diminishes to a tender piano
in string harmonics. But in the woodwind a dissenting theme appears from
time to time: Man and his torments invade this sanctity of peace. His
cry grows louder, and one hears in it the anguish of the pursued one.
The strings forsake their tranquil harmonics and resolve themselves into
a troublous tremolo, while the clarinettes, in a new theme, question
this intrusion. Meanwhile the misery of Man gains the upper hand, and in
the following Allegro con moto there sounds all the fury of a wild
chase:
Ein Weinen, Kreischen, Schmaehen and Verfluchen
Und Hohn und Laesterung und wuest' Geschrei
Taucht aus des Menschenlaermes Wirbelwogen.
The orchestra is in tumult, relieved only by a cry of agony coming from
Man; even the sea theme is tossed about, and the Motif of Nature
appears in mangled form. This fury lashes itself out by its own
violence, and after the strings once more echo the cry of despair all is
silent. Two light blows of the tam-tam suggest the fear which follows
upon such a display of tempestuous terror.
... warum man hier ist, was
Der Zweck von allem diesen endlich,
Und warum Gott ...
Bestandig einet zu des Liedes Masston
Sang der Natur mit seiner Menschen Schreinen.
This Warum is asked dismally, and as an answer the theme of Nature
reappears in its brightest garb. Question and answer succeed each other,
and are stilled by the recurring cry of Man until a final Why is
followed by a full stop.
The poet, weary of this restlessness, is searching for the consolation
of quietude; and here--as might be expected of Liszt--comes the thought
of religion shown by the Andante religioso. It is here, too, in the
realm of religious peace that the two antagonistic voices are
reconciled; they interweave, cross and are melted, one in the other.
This, the most intricate and longest part of the score, was employed by
Liszt to show his instrumental mastery. The two principal themes--the
two voices--are made to adjust with great skill, and are then sounded
simultaneously to prove their striving after unity.
The poet is almost convinced of this equalisation, when, without warning
and with the force of the full orchestra, brilliantly employed, a new
theme appears. This is repeated with even greater frenzy of utterance,
and usurps the theme of Man and that of Nature. The whole is the idea of
Faith, at which the poet now has arrived. A deep satisfaction silences
every sound--the clashing of the elements ceases and the last sigh
breathes itself out. Once more the plaintive "Why" is heard, and
resolves itself in a reminiscence of Man's fury. The trumpets quiet all
by intoning that sacrosanct Andante religioso, which concludes in a
mysterious chord through which the notes of the harp thread themselves.
The theme of Nature's Hymn returns pizzicato in the basses, and is
answered by harp arpeggios and chords in the brass. A few taps of the
tympani, with which the composition ends, give the ring of finality.
Arthur Hahn believes that this symphonic poem offers a solution to the
discord of the universe; that the ending with the two tympani taps and
the hollow preceding chords suggest a possible return of the storm.
Liszt made numerous sketches for this work two decades before its
composition.
TASSO
For the Weimar centennial anniversary of Goethe's birth, August 28,
1849, Liszt composed his Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo. And this stands
second in order of his symphonic poems. At the Weimar festival the work
preceded Goethe's Tasso, being played as an overture.
When the first part of this Tasso symphonic poem was written--there are
two parts, as you will see later--Liszt was not yet bold as a symphonic
poet, for he thought it necessary to define the meaning of his work in
words and thus explain his music.
Liszt's preface to Tasso is as follows: "I wished to define the contrast
expressed in the title of the work, and it was my object to describe the
grand antithesis of the genius, ill-used and misunderstood in life, but
in death surrounded with a halo of glory whose rays were to penetrate
the hearts of his persecutors. Tasso loved and suffered in Ferrara, was
avenged in Rome, and lives to this day in the popular songs of Venice.
These three viewpoints are inseparably connected with his career. To
render them musically I invoke his mighty shadow, as he wanders by the
lagoons of Venice, proud and sad in countenance, or watching the feasts
at Ferrara, where his master-works were created. I followed him to Rome,
the Eternal City, which bestowed upon him the crown of glory, and in him
canonised the martyr and the poet.
"Lamento e Trionfo--these are the contrasts in the fate of the poet, of
whom it was said that, although the curse might rest upon his life, a
blessing could not be wanting from his grave. In order to give to my
idea the authority of living fact, I borrowed the form of my tone
picture from reality, and chose for its theme a melody to which, three
centuries after the poet's death, I have heard Venetian gondoliers sing
the first strophes of his Jerusalem:
Canto l'armi pietose e'l Capitano,
Che'l gran Sepolcro libero di Cristo.
"The motif itself has a slow, plaintive cadence of monotonous mourning;
the gondoliers, however, by drawling certain notes, give it a peculiar
colouring, and the mournfully drawn out tones, heard at a distance,
produce an effect not dissimilar to the reflection of long stripes of
fading light upon a mirror of water. This song once made a profound
impression on me, and when I attempted to illustrate Tasso musically, it
recurred to me with such imperative force that I made it the chief motif
for my composition.
"The Venetian melody is so replete with inconsolable mourning, with
bitter sorrow, that it suffices to portray Tasso's soul, and again it
yields to the brilliant deceits of the world, to the illusive, smooth
coquetry of those smiles whose slow poison brought on the fearful
catastrophe, for which there seemed to be no earthly recompense, but
which was eventually, clothed in a mantle of brighter purple than that
of Alfonso."
Following this came--in later years, it is true--a strange denial from
Liszt himself. He admitted that when finally his Tasso composition began
to take form Byron's Tasso was nearer his heart and thoughts than
Goethe's. "I cannot deny," he writes, "that when I received the order
for an overture to Goethe's drama the chief and commanding influence on
the form of my work was the respectful sympathy with which Byron treated
the manes of the great poet."
Naturally this influence could not have extended beyond the Lamento
since Byron's poem is only the Lament of Tasso, and has no share in the
Trionfo. Now the anti-programmites could make a very strong case out of
this incident, and probably would have done so long before this if they
had known or thought about it. But then this question of the fallibility
of programme music is an eternal one. Was it not the late Thayer,
constantly haunting detail and in turn haunted by it, who could not
abide Beethoven's Coriolanus in his youth because he only knew the
Shakespeare drama and could not fit the Beethoven overture to it simply
because it would not be fitted? And now some commentators declare that
Beethoven must have known the Shakespeare work, that he could not have
found his inspiration in the forgotten play of Von Collin.
Liszt's Tasso opens with a descending octaved theme in C minor, meant to
depict the depressed mood and oppressed station of the poet. Wagner has
made mention of Liszt's particular aptitude for making such musical
moments pregnant with meaning. Here it expresses the tragedy of the
poet's life, and a second theme is his agonised cry. Gradually this
impatience is fanned to fury, and culminates in a wild outbreak of pain.
The tragic first theme, now given fortissimo by the full orchestra and
long sustained, spreads its shadow over all. The characteristic
rehearsal of the themes concludes the introduction to the work.
With an adagio the principal motif is heard in full for the first time;
it is the boat song of the Venetian gondoliers, and embraces in part the
first tragic theme with which the composition opened. You recall what
Liszt said about the expressiveness of this sombre song. He has
heightened its gloom by the moody orchestration in which he has embedded
it.
As a contrast comes the belief in self which forces its way to the soul
of the poet, and this comes to our ears in the form of the noble main
theme--the Tasso motif--which now sounds brilliantly in major. These two
moods relieve one another, as they might in the mind of any brooding
mortal, especially a poet.
The next picture is Tasso at the court of Ferrara. The courtly life is
sketched in a minuet-like allegro and a courteous subsidiary. How aptly
Tasso is carried away by the surrounding splendour we hear when the
Tasso theme sounds in the character of the gay minuet. This theme
becomes more and more impassioned, the poet has raised his eyes to
Leonore, and the inevitable calamity precipitates itself with the
recurrence of the wild and frantic burst of rage and fury.
Alles ist dahin! Nur eines bleibt:
Die Thraene hat uns die Natur verliehen,
Den Schrei des Schmerzes, wenn der Mann zuletzt
Es nicht mehr traegt.
With this, the first half of the first part of the work closes.
The second half concerns itself with the poet's transfiguration. His
physical self has been sacrificed, but the world has taken up his cause
and celebrates his works.
A short pause separates the two divisions. Now the glorious allegro has
an upward swing, the former dragging rhythms are spurned along
impetuously. The Tasso theme is glorified, the public enthusiasm grows
apace, and runs to a tremendous climax in the presto. Then there sounds
a sudden silence--the public pulse has ceased for a moment--followed by
a hymn, built on the Tasso theme. The entire orchestra intones this,
every figure is one of jubilation, save the four double basses which
recall the rhythm of the former theme of misery; but--notice the logic
of the composer--its resemblance is only a distant one, and it is heard
only in the lowest of the strings. So this composition concludes.
The Epilogue to the Tasso symphonic poem was written many years
afterward. Liszt called it Le Triomphe funebre du Tasse, and its first
performance was under Leopold Damrosch in New York in 1877. The subject
must have pursued Liszt through most of his life, and he seems to have
felt a certain affinity with the dead poet. We all know that the public
denied him credit for his compositions.
Goellerich in his Liszt biography mentions that once during his stay in
Italy the composer, in a covered wagon, had himself driven slowly over
the course along which the corpse of Tasso had been taken. And of this
incident he is supposed to have said: "I suffered the sad poetry of this
journey in the hopes that one day the bloody irony of vain apotheosis
may be spared every poet and artist who has been ill-treated during
life. Rest to the dead!"
The analysis of this work is short and precise. The musical programme is
simple. It opens with a cry of distressful mourning, while from the
distance the cortege approaches. A reminiscence of the Tasso theme is
recognisable in this pompous approach and the mood changes to one of
triumph. In the midst of all this the public adoration is mingled with
its tears, and the two climax in the Tasso motive.
LES PRELUDES
The third of Liszt's symphonic poems, Les Preludes, was sketched as
early as 1845, but not produced until 1854, and then in Weimar.
Lamartine's Meditations Poetiques set the bells tolling in Liszt's mind,
and he wrote Les Preludes. "What is life but a series of preludes to
that unknown song whose initial solemn note is tolled by Death? The
enchanted dawn of every life is love; but where is the destiny on whose
first delicious joys some storm does not break?--a storm whose deadly
blast disperses youth's illusions, whose fatal bolt consumes its altar.
And what soul thus cruelly bruised, when the tempest rolls away, seeks
not to rest its memories in the calm of rural life? Yet man allows
himself not long to taste the kindly quiet which first attracted him to
Nature's lap; but when the trumpet gives the signal he hastens to
danger's post, whatever be the fight which draws him to its lists, that
in the strife he may once more regain full knowledge of himself and all
his strength."
Corresponding to the first line of the programme the composition opens
promisingly with an ascending figure in the strings, followed by some
mysterious chords. Liszt had that wonderful knack--which he shared with
Beethoven and Wagner--of getting atmosphere immediately at the first
announcement. Gradually he achieves a climax with this device, and now
he has pictured the character--his hero--in defiant possession of full
manhood.
"The enchanted dawn of every life is love" reads the line, and the music
grows sentimental. That well-known horn melody occurs here, a theme
almost the character of a folk-song; then the mood becomes even more
tranquil until--
"But where is the destiny on whose first delicious joys some storm does
not break?--a storm whose deadly blast disperses youth's illusions,
whose fatal bolt consumes its altar." Here was one of those episodes on
which Liszt doted, a place where he could unloose all his orchestral
technique, piling his climaxes furiously high.
"And what soul thus cruelly bruised, when the tempest rolls away, seeks
not to rest its memories in the pleasant calm of rural life?" There was
nothing else for Liszt to do but to write the usual pastoral peace
dignified by Handel and Watteau.
"Yet man allowed himself not long to taste the kindly quiet which first
attracted him to Nature's lap; but when the trumpet gives the signal he
hastens to danger's post, whatever be the fight which draws him to its
lists, that in the strife he may once more regain full knowledge of
himself and all his strength." The martial call of the trumpets and the
majestic strife is made much of. Liszt tortures his peaceful motives
into expressing war, and welds the entire incident into a stirring one.
Logically, he concludes the work by recalling the theme of his hero upon
whose life he has preluded so tunefully.
ORPHEUS
Of the origin of his Orpheus Liszt writes: "Some years ago, when
preparing Gluck's Orpheus for production, I could not restrain my
imagination from straying away from the simple version that the great
master had made of the subject, but turned to that Orpheus whose name
hovers majestically and full of harmony about the Greek myths. It
recalled that Etruscan vase in the Louvre which represents the
poet-musician crowned with the mystic kingly wreath; draped in a
star-studded mantle, his fine slender fingers are plucking the lyre
strings, while his lips are liberating godly words and song. The very
stones seem moved to hearing, and from adamant hearts stinging, burning
tears are loosing themselves. The beasts of the forests stand enchanted,
and the coarse noise of man is besieged into silence. The song of birds
is hushed; the melodious coursing of the brook halts; the rude laughter
of joy gives way to a trembling awe before these sounds, which reveal to
man universal harmonies, the gentle power of art and the brilliancy of
their glory."
The "dull and prosaic formula"--so some English critic put it--differs
in this work from that of most of the others of Liszt's symphonic
poems. The short cutting themes are absent and sharp contrasts are
generally avoided; the music flows rather in a broad melodic stream,
serene but magnificent. It is rather difficult to fit a detailed
programme to the composition, and the general outline is not so sharply
dented with incidents as some of the others.
Again atmosphere is evoked and the mood achieved by the lyre preluding
of the poet. Then the voice of Orpheus rises with majestic calm, and
swells to a climax which is typical of the majestic splendour of art.
This sweeps all sounds of opposition before it and leaves in its trail
awe-stricken man. It is with this mood that the work closes in a
marvellous progression of chords, harmonies daring for their day.
PROMETHEUS
The same general plan of conception and interpretation, but of course
much more heroic, has Liszt employed in the next symphonic poem,
Prometheus. It is a noble figure that Liszt has translated into music,
the Titan. The ideas he meant to convey may be summed up in "Ein tiefer
Schmerz, der durch trotzbietendes Ausharren triumphiert." Immediately at
the opening the swirl of the struggle is upon us, and the first theme is
the defiance of the Titan--a noble yet obstinate melody. The god is
chained to the rock to great orchestral tumult. His efforts to break
the manacles incite further musical riot, and then comes the wail of
helpless misery:
O Mutter, du Heil'ge! O Aether,
Lichtquell des All's!
Seh, welch Unrecht ich erdulde!
This recitative leads into a furious burst when the shackled one
clenches his fists and threatens all Godhead. Even Zeus is defied:
Und mag er schleudern seines feurigen Blitzes Loh'n,
In weissen Schneesturms Ungewittern, in Donnerhall
Der unterirdischen Tiefe werwirren mischen das All:
Nichts dessen wird mir beugen!
Then arises the belief in a deliverer, a faith motif which is one of
those heartfelt inventions of the melodic Liszt. After this the struggle
continues. Magnificently, the god, believing in his own obstinate will
for freedom, the composition concludes on this supreme note.
MAZEPPA
The sixth of Liszt's symphonic poems, Mazeppa, has done more than any
other to earn for its composer the disparaging comment that his piano
music was orchestral and his orchestral music Klaviermaessig. This
Solomon judgment usually proceeds from the wise ones, who are aware that
the first form of Liszt's Mazeppa was a piano etude which appeared
somewhere toward the end of 1830.
Liszt's orchestral version of Mazeppa was completed the middle of last
century and had its first hearing at Weimar in 1854. Naturally this is a
work of much greater proportion than the original piano etude; it is, as
some one has said, in the same ratio as is a panoramic picture to a
preliminary sketch.
The story of the Cossack hetman has inspired poets and at least one
painter. Horace Vernet--who, as Heine said, painted everything hastily,
almost after the manner of a maker of pamphlets--put the subject on
canvas twice; the Russian, Bulgarin, made a novel of it; Voltaire
mentioned the incident in his History of Charles the Twelfth; Byron
moulded the tale into rhyme, as did Victor Hugo--and the latter poem was
used by Liszt for the outline for his composition.
The amorous Mazeppa was of noble birth--so runs the tale. But while he
was page to Jan Casimir, King of Poland, he intrigued with Theresia the
young wife of a Podolian count. Their love was discovered and the count
had the page lashed to a wild horse--_un cheval farouche_, as Voltaire
has it--which was turned loose.
From all accounts the beast did not allow grass to grow under its hoofs,
but lashed out with the envious speed of the wind. It so happened that
the horse was "a noble steed, a Tartar of the Ukraine breed." Therefore
it headed for the Ukraine, which woolly country it reached with its
burden; then it promptly dropped dead.
Mazeppa was unhanded or unhorsed by a friendly Cossack and nursed back
to happiness. Soon he grew in stature and in power, becoming an Ukraine
prince; as the latter he fought against Russia at Pultowa.
That is the skeleton of the legend. Liszt has begun his musical tale at
the point when Mazeppa is corded to the furious steed, and with a cry it
is off. This opens the composition; there follow the galloping triplets
to mark the flight of the beast, irregular and wild. Trees and mountains
seem to whirl by them--this is represented by a vertiginous tremolo
figure, against which a descending theme sounds and seems to give
perspective to the swirling landscape.
When the prisoner stirs convulsively in the agony of his plight, the
horse bounds forward even more recklessly. The fury of the ride
continues, increases, until Mazeppa loses consciousness and mists
becloud his senses. Now and again pictures appear before his eyes an
instant as in a dream fantastic.
Gradually, as an accompaniment to the thundering hoof falls, the passing
earth sounds as a mighty melody to the delirious one. The entire plain
seems to ring with song, pitying Mazeppa in his suffering.
The horse continues to plunge and blood pours from the wounds of the
prisoner. Before his eyes the lights dance and the themes return
distorted. The goal is reached when the steed breaks down, overcome with
the killing fatigue of its three days' ride. It pants its last, and a
plaintive andante pictures the groaning of the bound Mazeppa; this dies
away in the basses.
Now the musician soars away in the ether. When he returns to us it is
with an allegro of trumpet calls. Mazeppa has been made a prince in the
interim and is now leading the warriors of the steppe who freed him.
These fanfares lead to a triumphal march, which is the last division
of the composition. Local colour is logically brought in by the
introduction of a Cossack march; the Mazeppa theme is jubilantly shared
by trumpet calls, and the motif of his sufferings appears transformed as
a melody of victory--all this in barbaric rhythms.
In form the work is free; two general divisions are about as much as it
yields to the formal dissector. It follows the poem, and, having been
written to the poem, that is really all the sequence demanded by logic.
Liszt was decidedly at a disadvantage as a composer when he lacked a
programme. Usually in composing his purpose was so distinct, the music
measuring itself so neatly against the logic of the programme, that his
symphonic compositions should be most easily comprehended by an
audience.
FESTKLAeNGE
There is no definite programme to Liszt's Festklaenge. Several probing
ones have been hot on the trail of such a thing. Pohl knew but would
not tell. He wrote: "This work is the most intimate of the entire group.
It stands in close relation with some personal experiences of the
composer--something which we will not define more clearly here. For this
reason Liszt himself has offered no elucidation to the work, and we must
respect his silence. The mood of the work is 'Festlich'--it is the
rejoicing after a victory of--the heart."
This is mysterious and sentimental enough to satisfy any conservatory
maiden. But Liszt died eventually, and then Pohl intimates that the
incident which this composition was meant to glorify was the marriage of
Liszt with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein--a marriage which never came
off.
Philip Hale has taken up the question in his interesting Boston Symphony
Programme Notes, and summons several witnesses: "Brendel said that this
symphonic poem is a sphinx that no one can understand. Mr. Barry, who
takes a peculiarly serious view of all things musical, claims that
Festival Sounds, Sounds of Festivity or Echoes of a Festival is the
portrayal in music of scenes that illustrate some great national
festival; that the introduction, with its fanfares, gives rise to strong
feelings of expectation. There is a proclamation, 'The festival has
begun,' and he sees the reception of guests in procession. The event is
great and national--a coronation--something surely of a royal character;
and there is holiday making until the 'tender, recitative-like period'
hints at a love scene; guests, somewhat stiff and formal, move in the
dance; in the finale the first subject takes the form of a national
anthem.
"Some have thought that Liszt composed the piece in honour of the
fiftieth anniversary of the entrance into Weimar of his friend and
patroness Maria Paulowna, sister of the Czar Nicholas I, Grand Duchess
of Weimar. The anniversary was celebrated with pomp November 9, 1854, as
half a century before the noble dame was greeted with Schiller's lyric
festival play Die Huldigung der Kuenste.
"This explanation is plausible; but Lina Ramann assures us that
Festklaenge was intended by Liszt as the wedding music for himself and
the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein; that in 1851 it seemed as
though the obstacles to the union would disappear; that this music was
composed as 'a song of triumph over hostile machinations'; 'bitterness
and anguish are forgotten in proud rejoicing'; the introduced
'Polonaise' pictures the brilliant mind of the Polish princess."
When this symphonic poem was first played in Vienna there were
distributed handbills written by "Herr K.," that the hearers might find
reasonable pleasure in the music. One of the sentences goes bounding
through the universe as follows: "A great universal and popular festival
calls within its magic circle an agitated crowd, joy on the brow, heaven
in the breast."
In whichever class you choose to place the Festklaenge--whether in that
of a higher grade of wedding music or as music incidental to some
national event--you are apt to find contradictions in the music itself.
So it is most reasonable to waive the entire question of a programme
here, and take the music at its word. It must be admitted that this
composition is not among Liszt's great ones; the big swing is missing
and honesty compels the acknowledgment that much of it is blank bombast,
some of it tawdry.
The introductory allegro is devoted to some tympani thumps--a la
Meyerbeer--and some blaring fanfares which terminate in a loud, blatant
theme.
Then comes the andante with the principal subject of the work, meant to
be impressive, but failing in its purpose. The mood changes and grows
humourous, which again is contrasted by the following rather melancholy
allegretto. This latter spot would serve to knock some of the festival
programme ideas into a cocked hat.
The work eventually launches into a polonaise, and until the close Liszt
busies himself with varying the character and rhythms of the foregoing
themes. Finally the martial prevails again, decorated with fanfares, and
thus the composition closes.
Festklaenge had its first performance at Weimar in 1854; but the composer
made some changes in the later edition that appeared in 1861, and this
version is the one usually played to-day.
A Liszt work which we seldom hear is "Choere zu Herder's 'Entfesselte
Prometheus,'" which was composed and performed in Weimar in 1850.
On August 25 of that year there was a monument unveiled to Johann
Gottfried Herder in Weimar, and the memory of the "apostle of humanity"
was also celebrated in the theatre. This accounts for the composition of
the symphonic poem Prometheus, which served as an overture to these
choruses, written for voices and orchestra. Richard Pohl has put the
latter into shape for solitary performance in the concert room.
Prometheus sits manacled on the rock, but the fury of his rebellion is
over. Resolutely he awaits the decree of fate. At this point the Liszt
work takes up the narrative. The Titan is soliloquising, while man,
aided by the gift of fire, is calmly possessing the world. The elemental
spirits look enviously at the power of man and turn to Prometheus with
plaints; the Daughters of the Sea lament that the holy peace of the sea
is disturbed by man, who sails the water imperiously. Prometheus answers
Okeanus philosophically that everything belongs to every one.
Then the chorus of the Tritons glorifies the socialistic Titan with
"Heil Prometheus." This dies away to make room for the grumbling of
All-Mother Erda and her dryads, who bring charge against the fire giver.
An answer comes from the bucolic chorus of reapers and their brothers
the vintagers, who chant the praise of "Monsieur" Bacchus.
From the under world comes the sound of strife, and Hercules arises as
victor. Prometheus recognises him as the liberator, and the Sandow of
mythology breaks the Titan's fetters and slays the hovering eagle of
Zeus. The freed Prometheus turns to the rocks on which he has sat
prisoner so long and asks that in gratitude for his liberty a paradise
arise there. Pallas Athene respects the wish, and out of the naked rock
sprouts an olive tree.
A chorus of the Invisible Ones invites Prometheus to attend before the
throne of Themis. She intercedes in his behalf against his accusers, and
the Chorus of Humanity celebrates her judgment in the hymn which closes
"Heil Prometheus! Der Menschheit Heil!" Some of the thematic material
for these choruses and orchestral interludes is borrowed from the
symphonic poem Prometheus.
Liszt wrote a preface to Heroide Funebre, his eighth poem (1849-1850;
1856.) Among other things he declares that "Everything may change in
human societies--manners and cult, laws and ideas; sorrow remains always
one and the same, it remains what it has been from the beginning of
time. It is for art to throw its transfiguring veil over the tomb of the
brave--to encircle with its golden halo the dead and the dying, in order
that they may be envied by the living." Liszt incorporated with this
poem a fragment from his Revolutionary Symphony outlined in 1830.
Hungaria (1854; 1857) and Hamlet (1858; 1861) the ninth and tenth poems
are not of marked interest or novel character--that is when compared to
their predecessors. There is a so-called poem, From the Cradle to the
Grave, the thirteenth in the series, one which did not take seriously.
It is quite brief. But let us consider the eleventh and twelfth of the
series.
THE BATTLE OF THE HUNS
Liszt's Hunnenschlacht was suggested by Wilhelm von Kaulbach's mural
painting in the staircase-hall of the New Museum in Berlin. It was
conceived in Munich in November, 1856, and written in 1857. When
completed, it was put into rehearsal at Weimar in October, 1857, and
performed in April, 1858. Its first performance in Boston, was under Mr.
Theodore Thomas in 1872.
The picture which suggested this composition to Liszt shows the city of
Rome in the background; before it is a battle-field, strewn with corpses
which are seen to be gradually reviving, rising up, and rallying, while
among them wander wailing and lamenting women. At the heads of two
ghostly armies are respectively Attila--borne aloft on a shield by Huns,
and wielding a scourge--and Theodoric with his two sons, behind whom is
raised the banner of the cross.
The composition is perfectly free in form; one noteworthy feature being
the interweaving of the choral Crux Fidelis with themes of the
composer's own invention. The score bears no dedication.
DIE IDEALE
Die Ideale was projected in the summer of 1856, but it was composed in
1857. The first performance was at Weimar, September 5, 1857, on the
occasion of unveiling the Goethe-Schiller monument. The first
performance in Boston was by Theodore Thomas's orchestra, October 6,
1870. The symphonic poem was played here at a Symphony Concert on
January 26, 1889.
The argument of Schiller's poem, Die Ideale, first published in the
_Musenalmanach_ of 1796, has thus been presented: "The sweet belief in
the dream-created beings of youth passes away; what once was divine and
beautiful, after which we strove ardently, and which we embraced
lovingly with heart and mind, becomes the prey of hard reality; already
midway the boon companions--love, fortune, fame, and truth--leave us one
after another, and only friendship and activity remain with us as loving
comforters." Lord Lytton characterised the poem as an "elegy on departed
youth."
Yet Liszt departed from the spirit of the elegy, for in a note to the
concluding section of the work, the Apotheosis, he says: "The holding
fast and at the same time the continual realising of the ideal is the
highest aim of our life. In this sense I ventured to supplement
Schiller's poem by a jubilantly emphasising resumption of the motives of
the first section in the closing Apotheosis." Mr. Niecks, in his
comments on this symphonic poem, adds: "To support his view and justify
the alteration, Liszt might have referred to Jean Paul Richter's
judgment, that the conclusion of the poem, pointing as it does for
consolation to friendship and activity, comforts but scantily and
unpoetically. Indeed, Schiller himself called the conclusion of the poem
tame, but explained that it was a faithful picture of human life,
adding: 'I wished to dismiss the reader with this feeling of tranquil
contentment.' That, apart from poetical considerations, Liszt acted
wisely as a musician in making the alteration will be easily understood
and readily admitted. Among the verses quoted by the composer, there are
eight which were omitted by Schiller in the ultimate amended form of Die
Ideale. The order of succession, however, is not the same as in the
poem; what is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with Liszt is 1, 4, 3, 2, 5 with Schiller.
The musician seized the emotional possibilities of the original, but
disregarded the logical sequence. And there are many things which the
tone poet who works after the word poet not only may but must disregard.
As the two arts differ in their nature, the one can be only an imperfect
translator of the other; but they can be more than translators--namely,
commentators. Liszt accordingly does not follow the poem word for word,
but interprets the feelings which it suggests, 'feelings which almost
all of us have felt in the progress of life.' Indeed, programme and
music can never quite coincide; they are like two disks that partly
cover each other, partly overlap and fall short. Liszt's Die Ideale is
no exception. Therefore it may not be out of place to warn the hearer,
although this is less necessary in the present case than in others,
against forming 'a grossly material conception of the programme,'
against 'an abstractly logical interpretation which allows itself to be
deceived by the outside, by what presents itself to the first glance,
disdains the mediation of the imagination.'"
Mr. Hale gives some interesting facts about the composition.
Liszt and Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein were both ill in the
spring of 1857, and the letters written by Liszt to her during this
period are of singular interest. Yet Liszt went about and conducted
performances until he suffered from an abscess in a leg and was obliged
to lie in bed. On the 30th of January Liszt had written to a woman, the
anonymous "Friend": "For Easter I shall have finished Die Ideale
(symphony in three movements)"; and in March he wrote the princess that
he was dreaming of Die Ideale. In May he went to Aix-la-Chapelle to
conduct at a music festival, and in July he returned to that town for
medical treatment. He wrote the princess (July 23) that he had completed
the indications, the "nuances," of the score that morning, and
he wished her to see that the copyist should prepare the parts
immediately--six first violins, six second violins, four violas, and
five double basses.
The performance at Weimar excited neither fierce opposition nor warm
appreciation. Liszt conducted the work at Prague, March 11, 1858, and it
appears from a letter to the Princess that he made cuts and alterations
in the score after the performance. Hans von Buelow produced Die Ideale
at Berlin in 1859, and the performance stirred up strife. Buelow thought
the work too long for the opening piece, and preferred to put it in the
second part. Then he changed his mind; he remembered that Liszt's
Festklaenge was at the end of a concert the year before in Berlin, and
that many of the audience found it convenient to leave the hall for the
cloak-room during the performance. A few days later he wrote that he
would put it at the end of the first part: "My first rehearsal lasted
four hours. The parts of Die Ideale are very badly copied. It is a
magnificent work, and the form is splendid. In this respect I prefer it
to Tasso, to The Preludes, and to other symphonic poems. It has given me
an enormous pleasure--I was happier than I have been for a long time.
Apropos--a passage, where the basses and the trombones give the theme of
the Allegro, a passage that is found several times in the parts
is cut out in the printed score." Ramagn names 1859 as the date of
publication, while others say the score was published in 1858. "I have
left this passage as it is in the arts; for I find it excellent, and the
additional length of time in performance will be hardly appreciable. It
will go, I swear it!" The concert was on January 14, 1859, and when some
hissed after the performance of Die Ideale, Buelow asked them to leave
the hall. A sensation was made by this "maiden speech," as it was
called. (See the pamphlet, Hans v. Buelow und die Berliner Kritik,
Berlin, 1859, and Buelow's Briefe, vol. iii. pp. 202, 203, 205, 206,
Leipsic, 1898.) Buelow was cool as a cucumber, and directed the next
piece, Introduction to Lohengrin, as though nothing had happened. The
Princess of Prussia left her box, for it was nine o'clock, the hour of
tea; but there was no explosion till after the concert, when Buelow was
abused roundly by newspaper article and word of mouth. He had promised
to play two piano pieces at a Domchoir concert the 22d, and it was
understood that he would then be hissed and hooted. The report sold all
the seats and standing places. Never had he played so well, and instead
of a scandalous exhibition of disapproval there was the heartiest
applause. Liszt conducted Die Ideale at Buelow's concert in Berlin on
February 27 of that year, and there was then not a suspicion of
opposition to work or composer.
Buelow after the first performance at Berlin advised Liszt to cut out the
very last measures. "I love especially the thirds in the kettle-drums,
as a new and bold invention--but I find them a little too ear-boxing
for cowardly ears.... I know positively that these eight last drumbeats
have especially determined or rather emboldened the opposition to
manifestation. And so, if you do not find positive cowardice in my
request--put these two measures on my back--do as though I had had the
impertinence to add them as my own. I almost implore this of you!"
In 1863 Buelow sent Louis Koehler his latest photograph, "Souvenir du 14
janvier, 1859." It represents him standing, baton in hand; on a
conductor's desk is the score of Die Ideale, and there is this
inscription to Liszt: "'_Sub hoc signo vici, nec vincere desistam._' to
his Master, his artistic Ideal, with thanks and veneration out of a full
heart. Hans v. Buelow, Berlin, October 22, 1863." Liszt wrote Buelow from
Budapest (January 3, 1873): "You know I profess not to collect
photographs, and in my house portraits do not serve as ornaments. At
Rome I had only two in my chamber; yours--that of Die Ideale, '_Sub hoc
signo vici, nec vincere desistam_'--was one of them."
It appears that others wished to tinker the score of this symphonic
poem. Buelow wrote the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (February 10,
1859) that he had anticipated the permission of Liszt, and had sent Die
Ideale to Leopold Damrosch, who would have the parts copied and produce
the work in the course of the month at Breslau. Carl Tausig produced Die
Ideale at Vienna for the first time, February 24, 1861, and in a letter
written before the performance to Liszt he said: "I shall conduct Die
Ideale wholly according to your wish, yet I am not at all pleased with
Damrosch's variante; my own are more plausible, ... and Cornelius has
strengthened me in my belief." When Die Ideale was performed again at
Vienna, in 1880, at a concert of the Society of Music Friends, led by
the composer, Eduard Hanslick based his criticism on the "witty answer"
made by Berthold Auerbach to a noble dame who asked him what he thought
of Liszt's compositions. He answered by putting another question: "What
would you think if Ludwig Devrient, after he had played Shakespeare,
Schiller, and Goethe with the complete mastery of genius, had said to
himself in his fiftieth year: 'Why should I not be able also to write
what I play so admirably? I'll be no longer a play actor; henceforth
I'll be a tragic poet'?"
Die Ideale was performed for the first time in England at a concert at
the Crystal Palace, April 16, 1881, with August Manns conductor.
This is C. A. Barry's answer to the question, Why was Liszt obliged to
invent the term symphonic poem?
It may be explained that finding the symphonic form, as by rule
established, inadequate for the purposes of _poetic_ music, which has
for its aim the reproduction and re-enforcement of the emotional essence
of dramatic scenes, as they are embodied in poems or pictures, he felt
himself constrained to adopt certain divergences from the prescribed
symphonic form, and, for the new art-form thus created, was consequently
obliged to invent a more appropriate title than that of "symphony," the
formal conditions of which this would not fulfil. The inadequateness of
the old symphonic form for translating into music imaginative
conceptions arising from poems or pictures, and which necessarily must
be presented in a fixed order, lies in its "recapitulation" section.
This Liszt has dropped; and the necessity of so doing is apparent. Hence
he has been charged with formlessness. In justification, therefore, of
his mode of procedure, it may be pointed out to those of his critics who
regard every divergence from the established form as tending to
formlessness, that the form which he has devised for his symphonic poems
in the main differs less from the established form than at first sight
appears. A comparison of the established form of the so-called classical
period with that devised by Liszt will make this apparent.
The former may be described as consisting of (1) the exposition of the
principal subjects; (2) their development; and (3) their recapitulation.
For this Liszt has substituted (1) exposition, (2) development, and (3)
further development; or, as Wagner has tersely expressed it, "nothing
else but that which is demanded by the subject and its expressible
development." Thus, though from sheer necessity, rigid formality has
been sacrificed to truthfulness, unity and consistency are as fully
maintained as upon the old system, but by a different method, the
reasonableness of which cannot be disputed.
A FAUST SYMPHONY
Franz Liszt as a composer was born too soon. Others plucked from his
amiable grasp the fruits of his originality. When Stendhal declared in
1830 that it would take the world fifty years to comprehend his analytic
genius he was a prophet, indeed, for about 1880, his work was felt by
writers of that period, Paul Bourget and the rest, and lived again in
their pages. But poor, wonderful Liszt, Liszt whose piano playing set
his contemporaries to dancing the same mad measure we recognise in these
days, Liszt the composer had to knock unanswered at many critical doors
for a bare recognition of his extraordinary merits.
One man, a poor, struggling devil, a genius of the footlights, wrote
him encouraging words, not failing to ask for a dollar by way of
compensating postscript. Richard Wagner discerned the great musician
behind the virtuoso in Liszt, discerned it so well that, fearing others
would not, he appropriated in a purely fraternal manner any of Liszt's
harmonic, melodic, and orchestral ideas that happened to suit him. So
heavily indebted was he to the big-hearted Hungarian that he married his
daughter Cosima, thus keeping in the family a "Sacred Fount"--as Henry
James would say--of inspiration. Wagner not only borrowed Liszt's
purse, but also his themes.
Nothing interests the world less than artistic plagiarism. If the
filching be but cleverly done, the setting of the stolen gems
individual, who cares for the real creator! He may go hang, or else
visit Bayreuth and enjoy the large dramatic style in which his themes
are
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