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-SaËns. 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-SaËns 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-SaËns 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 cafÉ 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 AnnÉes de PÈlerinage, of the Valse OubliÉe, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the Nocturnes, of the F-sharp Impromptu of Ab-Irato—that Étude of which most pianists never heard; of the Apparitions, the Legends, the Ballades, the brilliant Mazurka, the Elegier, the Harmonies PÉstiques et Religieuses, or the Concerto Patetico À 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.]

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-SaËns; 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 AbbÉ 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 AnnÉes de PÈlerinage, 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 AbbÉ. 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 PrÉludes, 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.