VII
FRANZ LISZT
A flood of light is thrown upon the opposing aspects of Franz Liszt's contradictory character by a story told of a certain occasion on which "The Master," as he loved to be called, sat for his portrait to the painter Schaffer. One of those key-stories it is, dear to biographers, which condense in single acts or speeches entire facets of personality. In Paris, in his youth, Liszt went to Schaffer to have his portrait painted. Instinctively he assumed one of those theatrical poses he was in the habit of taking when, at the end of one of his already famous recitals, he stood upon the stage receiving the plaudits of his audience. We can readily imagine it: the head thrown back, the eyes flashing fire, the right hand, perhaps, thrust between the second and third buttons of the coat, the left resting on some conveniently composed piece of furniture. But when Schaffer indicated that this histrionism did not impress him, Liszt, greatly embarrassed, cried out impulsively, "Forgive, dear master, but you do not know how it spoils one to have been an infant prodigy." Here are the two opposing sides of this curious character for once set in a clear antithesis: on the one hand, the affectation, the strut and posture, the cheap theatricality, of the prodigy playing to his audience; on the other, the frankness, the magnanimity, the humility even, of the true artist. Liszt's whole career is one long exhibition of these two attitudes in constant alternation; he is a mingling in one person of the charlatan and the idealist.
Born in Raiding, a small town in Hungary, October 22, 1811, an only child of Adam Liszt, a Hungarian, and Anna Lager, a German, Franz Liszt showed at once such extraordinary talent for music that in his tenth year his parents resolved to educate him in Vienna as a professional musician. After a year and a half in the Austrian capital, where the brilliancy of his piano playing and the cleverness of his improvisations attracted much attention, and where he studied with Czerny and Salieri, he was taken by his parents to Paris. Here, in the autumn of 1823, only twelve years old, he took his first plunge into the atmosphere of adulation which was to become to him in later years almost a necessary of life. It was now that he became the petted darling of the fashionable salons of the Boulevard St. Germain, and made the great ladies of Parisian society forget for a time their lap-dogs and their love-intrigues in order to caress this fascinating composite of the child and the virtuoso. After his first public concert in Paris, in March, 1824, he "made the round of the boxes," a sort of triumphal progress across the laps of great ladies, who wooed him, we must suppose, with a discreet mixture of compliments and bonbons. In the following spring he extended his dominion to England, and saw his name in large type on a hand-bill such as nowadays we associate with circuses rather than with concerts. "An Air," we read, "with Grand Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard's New Patent Grand Pianoforte, by
MASTER LISZT,
who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia, and respectfully request Two Written Themes from any of the Audience, upon which he will play his Variations."
There are not wanting signs, however, that the artist in Liszt was already, with approaching adolescence, beginning to disdain the spectacular triumphs of the virtuoso. He began to suspect that "the praise belongs to the child and not the artist"; the indignity of being advertised as a year or two younger than he really was, and being carried upon the stage in his manager's arms, like an infant, aroused his disgust; "I would rather be anything in the world," he cries, "than a musician in the pay of great folk, patronized and paid by them like a conjurer or the clever dog Munito."[38] He became more and more reluctant to appear in public, grew moody and melancholy, occupied himself with religious meditations, and even cherished a half-formed desire to withdraw from the brilliant world into monastic solitude.
This is the first appearance of a mystical tendency of mind which in later years gained great ascendancy over him, and finally led him to take orders in the Roman Catholic Church. The event, however, which decisively ended, for the time, his public piano playing, was the death, in August, 1827, of his father, whose assistance in all practical details was indispensable to his virtuoso tours.
The young pianist now settled with his mother in Paris, where eight quiet years of piano teaching succeeded the excitement of his adventurous boyhood. His conduct at this crisis illustrates that keen sense of honor which was so agreeable a trait in his character. Considering that the money he had accumulated by his many successful concerts was rightfully his mother's, because of all the sacrifices she had made to his career, he made it over to her in a lump sum, and took up teaching for his own livelihood. It was an act of delicate justice, freely and cheerfully performed. Outwardly Liszt's life now became quite simple and laborious, almost plodding; but inwardly it was developing apace, and ramifying in many directions, under the provocations of this brilliant and complex Paris.
The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage the most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive to influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as Liszt. There was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant of a public languid and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music that Liszt had to coat the pill of a Beethoven Concerto with sugary ornamentation to make it go down. Such a public was a good stolid quarry for the marksmanship of an enthusiastic artist. In general intellectual life there was, on the other hand, a brisk fermentation highly exciting to Liszt's active mind. Paris was a seething pot of ideas, theories, heresies, aspirations, scepticisms, individualities. "Here is a whole fortnight," he writes in 1832, "that my mind and fingers have been working like two lost spirits—Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, ChÂteaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this I practise four to five hours of exercises.... Ah, provided I don't go mad, you will find an artist in me!"[39] Above all, there was in the French romanticism of 1830 an emotional delirium, a fever of the sentiments, which profoundly affected the high-strung young musician.
French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking a political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a generation was required for these principles to propagate themselves from the realm of practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they appeared as crude instincts; romanticism refined and systematized them into self-conscious doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered the aristocrats who oppressed them; the romanticists proclaimed the effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all traditional ordinances, whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in effect, "Each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the romanticists asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The individual alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the welfare of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its own version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual," it also had its equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic sentiment which usually proved too vaporous to bear the stress of an actual human situation. Both movements, too, were passionate exaggerations; they overshot their mark, and have had to be limited, qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the sentiments, it is notable that while in England it applied its theories chiefly to political and religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical realms, in France it concentrated itself largely upon the relations of the sexes. In such typical romantic documents as ChÂteaubriand's "RenÉ" and George Sand's "Leone Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is marriage (especially the mariage de convenance, which indeed was a fair mark for reformers), the extolled individualism takes the form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the thrills of the amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application of these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave one uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary impulse, so sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which it opens the way. When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism quickly gives place to pity for the sophist. When we learn that her ideal of friendship between a man and a woman, or, as she called it, camaraderie, involved "unlimited confidential conversations," we know not which to doubt, her insight or her good faith. And in all this she is typical of her age and school, which made a fetich of the "demoniac power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor that can only be called religious.
The effect of such doctrines as these on a young man like Liszt may readily be imagined. Too keen-minded to be really deceived by the current fallacies, but at the same time not austere or independent enough to reject what was so universally accepted, he let himself go with the current, and half-blindly, half-ironically, played the game he saw others playing. Almost before he knew it he found that he had staked nothing less than his honor, and that this game, begun in a mood of dalliance, must be played through in sober earnest. The heroine of his love affair was the Countess d'Agoult, better known by her literary pseudonym of Daniel Stern, a woman of great beauty and fascination, but apparently consumed by vanity and a thirst for power. In 1834, when her connection with the idolized young musician began, she was twenty-eight years old, had been married for six years to the Count d'Agoult, and had had three children. In the following spring, Liszt tried in vain to bring the affair to an end; finding this impossible, he accepted the situation with the best grace he could summon, and entered upon a period of travel with the countess which lasted a decade. Three children resulted from this union, Daniel, Blandine, and Cosima, who became the wife of Von BÜlow, and later of Wagner.
It is difficult to arrive at a just conception of Liszt's behavior in this relation, so conflicting are the available accounts of it. The biography by Ramann, for example, states that he offered marriage, which the lady indignantly refused on the score of his inferiority in rank. Janka Wohl, in her "Reminiscences," on the contrary, quotes Liszt's emphatic denial that he ever offered marriage. Again, the very zeal with which his admirers depict the Countess as hurling herself upon him, tend to arouse the suspicion of a judicious reader. One thing is certain, the uncongeniality of the pair was fundamental and cumulative. Liszt himself testifies to this in no uncertain way, and, one may add, with more sarcastic animus than is quite to his credit. He reports a conversation in which she expressed a desire to be his inspirer in art, a desire which he attributes to her vanity. "She wished to be my Beatrice," he says; and continues: "But I told her: 'You are wrong. It is the Dantes who create the Beatrices, and the real Beatrices die at the age of eighteen—that is all.' Louis de Ronchaud was present at the time. 'There's the man,' said I, 'who would have pleased you.'" This was ungallant almost to the verge of brutality. That verge was overpassed when Liszt, to a request for suggestions as to the title of some souvenirs the countess had been writing, proposed "Swagger and Lies." He always spoke of the countess, says Janka Wohl, with irony.
This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness such as often lay just below the saccharine smile of this finished man of the world is one of the most familiar by-products of sentimental romanticism, one which has been made historically famous by the case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast disappointed in unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful dreams, the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially expanded, the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are made more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a good deal of satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord in conversation. The sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot make some of his principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait of his character which at first sight seems to have little connection with it, but on careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of reaction against the sentimental interpretation of life with its unsocial lawlessness and its self-defeating egotism. That strong leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases of Roman Catholicism, which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a devoted reader of Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers, which impelled him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively devotional works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to escape from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed? Monasticism is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned. Complete isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry an exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion, which has so often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the longing for repose of a soul too long overwrought by the religion of passion.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of temperament that this new mood of Liszt's, the mood of mystical passion, found its aspirations crystallizing, no less than those of the earlier worldly passion had done, in a woman. If paganism had for a time summed itself for him in the person of the Countess d'Agoult, the monastic Christianity to which he now reacted found its avatar and priestess in the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, a remarkable woman with whom he lived in intimate but what are called platonic relations from 1847 on. The daughter of a Polish nobleman, and the wife of a Russian field marshal of erratic character whom, after thrice refusing, she married without love at seventeen, she had suffered much, and like many other sufferers had found her consolation in religion. The story of her relation with Liszt is a pathetic one. She deserted her husband to follow him to Weimar, where he settled as a conductor and composer in 1847, after his many years of wandering as a virtuoso; for thirteen years she was his secretary, friend, and adviser; in 1860 she succeeded in getting a divorce from her husband, whose infidelities were notorious, only to have it retracted at the last moment by the Pope. Her spirit was so broken by this cruel freak of fate that, although Prince Wittgenstein died four years later, she never married Liszt. She died in Rome in 1887, only six weeks after Liszt, leaving in manuscript a treatise in twenty-four volumes entitled "Des Causes IntÉrieures de la Faiblesse ExtÉrieure de l'Église," with directions that it should not be printed for twenty-five years. The subject is one on which she may well have written with passion; but it is sad to think of this woman consoling herself, by twenty-four volumes of literary discussion, for a vital tragedy.
During the fourteen years that Liszt spent in Weimar as Music-Director to the Grand Duke, he accomplished an extraordinary amount of work, in musical and literary composition, in teaching, and in making propaganda for struggling composers by performing their works. His cordial interest in other artists, perhaps the finest trait of his character, was at this time most strikingly evinced. His baton, his pen, and his powerful personal influence were constantly employed in the service of young musicians of merit striving to make themselves known. His efforts in Wagner's behalf, especially, have become famous. By his performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar in 1850, by his articles on four of the music-dramas, and by his financial aid to the struggling composer during many years, he did more than any other one man to secure this uncompromising genius a foothold in the world. Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Raff, Franck, Saint-SaËns, and a host of less gifted men also owed much to Liszt; and his leaving Weimar was the indirect result of his zealous championship of an unpopular opera by his friend Peter Cornelius. It is true that even this benevolence was not quite unalloyed by his besetting egotism. In our mental image of Liszt dispensing his artistic charity there is always a trace of that bland smile of the professional philanthropist. Saint-SaËns suggests that Liszt contemplated, in his relations with Wagner, a sort of alliance of two men of genius, in which Wagner should represent the hero of music-drama, and himself the hero of instrumental music. His rupture with Brahms, who did not appreciate his piano sonata,[40] suggests an inability to forget the first person, excusable perhaps in one so long used to constant adulation, but still not to be neglected in a delineation of his character. TschaÏkowsky's testimony on the point is very blunt. "Liszt, the old Jesuit," he writes in a letter, "speaks in terms of exaggerated praise of every work which is submitted to his inspection. He is at heart a good man, one of the very few great artists who has never known envy; but he is too much of a Jesuit to be frank and sincere." And again: "Liszt was a good fellow, and ready to respond to every one who paid court to him. But as I never toadied to him, or any other celebrity, we never got into correspondence." But if the great man had thus his petty vanities, if he liked to take a toll of self-satisfaction, so to speak, out of the gifts he so lavished upon others, this human weakness did not, happily, destroy the efficacy of his many services to music.
We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean spirit, three rÔles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "le petit Litz," electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the ladies. And then—the third phase—Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the AbbÉ Liszt.
From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbÉ, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbÉ's coat, reaching nearly to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."
"All Weimar adores him,"—let us confess, for we can no longer blink the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment? Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the attentions of the Polish countess who received him in a boudoir spread ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four celebrated beauties who had their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting his bust?[42] Was it the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction, that swathed him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a high platform surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full view of six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary woman that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake of "un rÉpas trÈs appÉtissant," and to read aloud to him afterwards "l'article biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencÉ hier"? If this same Janka Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering friends from whom the proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to Beethoven, or Schumann, or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others play pieces beautifully, but you always play the soul, the thoughts, and the sentiments of Liszt. You transport us into a world which will die with you, and of which we shall have nothing left but the paradise of recollection—a paradise out of which, as the poets say, we cannot be driven"—would these great self-forgetful artists have given her such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who are the poet, dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"? No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbÉ's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.
These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann, TschaÏkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.
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Figure XXVIII.
In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his piano sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in octaves. This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its strongly individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses, its exciting use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer acquaintance its theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely rhetorical effectiveness, become only too apparent; like a sentence printed all in italics, it is impotent through very excess of emphasis. Or take the well-known opening motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto. With its attention-seizing rhythm and its chromatic melody it seems at first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an edict, a proclamation. But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we go on, except that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the hearer, at first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a piece of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills, of his chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic that the listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew how to manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he relieved the wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth measure by setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the opening.
If Liszt is unrestrained in his use of the italics and points of exclamation of the musical language, so that his impressiveness generally degenerates into ranting, when he tries the emotional he fairly wallows. It is hard to find a parallel in any other composer for those passages of his, fairly redolent with sentimentality, in which he reiterates, over and over again, a single note, as the poet rolls under his tongue his mistress's name, or the gourmand, under his, a morsel of patÉ de fois gras. (See Figure XXIX, a and b.) It is hard, in any other composer who has had the advantage of German traditions, to find bits of melody so feebly Italian, so sunk in an amiable but insidious sensuality, as the themes of his "Sonnetto del Petrarca" or his Album Leaf no. 2, in which he writes with the pen dipped in violet water of a Donizetti or a Bellini. His harmonic idiom, too, is degraded by a similar sensuality, however disguised. How else than as proceeding from a love for thrills and swoons can we explain his passion for those chords, such as diminished sevenths, minor ninths, and all manner of chromatically altered chords, as the theorists call them, which, for some reason never yet explained, exhale mawkishness as some women exhale musk?[44]
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(a) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.
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(b) From the Liebestraum No. 3.
Figure XXIX.
It would be interesting, did it not involve a general discussion here out of place, to inquire how far the exaggerated expression of Liszt is due to the lack of spiritual, moral, and intellectual balance already noted as characteristic of French romanticism. Surely there is more than a striking analogy, there is an actual relation of cause and effect, were we but learned and keen enough to trace it out, between the unrestrained individualism of the romanticist, in politics, religion, love—and the hysterical, unreal feeling of this music. Both alike lose poise by taking an over-personal view of life. Liszt, so singly set on being magnificent or heart-rending in passion that he ignores the restraints of good taste, forgets artistic reserve, and becomes in turn blustering and craven, reminds us of Rousseau, so in love with his fixed idea of "freedom" that he undermines the foundations of the social order on which true freedom depends.
If Liszt were quite sincere in his passionate extremes, we should have to forgive them as on the whole we forgive the often crude grandiloquence of the Gallic Berlioz. What makes the Hungarian artist peculiarly exasperating is the impression of hypocrisy in his heroics that we cannot escape or argue away. He does not really feel these things, we discern; he is ogling us, he is posing for our benefit; all the while that one of his eyes is so proudly flashing fire, or so devoutly gazing heavenward, or so touchingly secreting a tear, the other is winking at his alter ego, the ego that sits behind the scenes and pulls the strings. What those ladies to whom he bowed with such an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have felt could they have read the cynical thoughts about women which meanwhile filled his mind, that we feel when we realize that for all his pompous utterance, for all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart laughing at us for being so obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade. We can forgive, we can even rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself in love with his pose, but not the charlatan who makes capital of our gullibility.
Liszt shows to far better advantage, however, in his manipulation of his ideas than in the ideas themselves; for whereas in the latter artificiality is a damning fault, in the former art, especially such skilful art as his, is a shining merit. His plan of combining the musical organization of the classicists with the dramatic organization of Berlioz was an interesting and in some ways a felicitous one. By the use of program and leading motives he secured the advantages of the realistic school: freedom from the shackles of the strict traditional sonata-form, and a "poetic" principle of coherence. By retaining thematic development, he reinforced this poetic coherence by musical logic, and avoided to some extent the fragmentary effects into which unmodified realism generally falls. To the thirteen orchestral pieces in which he most strikingly embodied this plan of interlinked dramatic and musical structure he gave the name of "PoÈmes Symphoniques," generally translated as "Symphonic Poems" though more precisely as "Orchestral Poems." He owes his chief historical importance to his creation of this form, which he exemplified also on a larger scale in his "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies.
A brief analysis of his most popular symphonic poem, "Les PrÉludes," will make clear the peculiarities of the type. This work has a program, taken from Lamartine's "MÉditations poÉtiques," as follows:—
"What is our life but a series of Preludes to that unknown song of which death strikes the first solemn note? Love is the enchanted dawn of every life; but where is the destiny in which the first pleasures of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, whose deadly breath dissipates its fair illusions, whose fatal thunderbolt consumes its altar? And where is the soul which, cruelly wounded, does not seek, at the coming of one of these storms, to calm its memories in the tranquil life of the country? Man, however, cannot long resign himself to the kindly tedium which has at first charmed him in the companionship of nature, and when 'the trumpet has sounded the signal of alarms,' he hastens to the post of peril, whatever may be the strife which calls him to its ranks, in order to regain in combat the full consciousness of himself and the complete command of his powers."
This program, it will at once be seen, is far more favorable to musical treatment than Berlioz's hotch-potches of petty details and wild, incongruous fancies. It is but slightly narrative and descriptive, presenting rather such abstract emotional states as music can best depict. And it has a natural symmetry and completeness of its own which the composer has only to reproduce in order to give his music the same desirable qualities. This he does by dividing his piece into six sections, which might be called Introduction, Love, Storm, Country Life, War, and Coda or Conclusion.
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(a)
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(b)
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(c)
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(d)
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(e)
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(f)
Figure XXX.
To this natural poetic structure Liszt adds a most ingenious musical form, by basing his entire work on two leading motives (a and b in Figure XXX), which he subjects to all manner of variation, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, as opportunity suggests. Some of the more important of these variants, set down in Figures XXX-XXXIII, deserve careful attention. The work begins with a recitative for strings, andante (c), derived from (a) by a modification of rhythm. At page 7 of the full orchestral score, published by Breitkopf and HÄrtel, appears another variant of the same theme, andante maestoso in bass strings and brass (d). Motive (a) is sung by the 'cellos, in very nearly its primitive form, at page 13 (e); in the last measure of this excerpt the very clever echoing of the three characteristic notes of the theme, in the bass, marked by asterisks, should be especially noted. Motive (b), symbolizing love, first appears at page 21, sensuously set forth by four horns, strings, and harp, is taken up by the wood wind, and is developed in a powerful climax, at the end of which appears for a moment the variant of it represented at (f). Thus in the first two sections of the poem are the underlying motives expounded and somewhat developed.
Section three, Storm, begins (allegro ma non troppo, page 30) with a very theatrical variant of motive a, highly characteristic of Liszt, in which he resorts to the chromatic scale beloved of all musical storm-makers (g, Figure XXXI), and later to an endless series of diminished sevenths, intended for nothing but to make our flesh creep (h). It is unnecessary to follow out this section in detail; it is the least interesting of all, and illustrates that element of claptrap which Liszt could never entirely eliminate.
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(g)
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(h)
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(i)
Figure XXXI.
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(j)
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(k)
Figure XXXII.
The mood now changes again, and with (i) (Figure XXXII), a charmingly expanded version of motive a, intrusted to the oboe, an allegretto pastorale is ushered in, beginning the fourth section, Country Life. A new theme, of fascinating grace and freshness (j), now enters in the horn, and is presently combined with motive b in what seems on the whole the most delightful moment, musically, of the entire composition (k). A somewhat lengthy working out of these combined motives follows, gradually growing more and more agitated, until, with an adaptation of the protean motive (a) for horns and trumpets, allegro marziale (l) (Figure XXXIII), the fifth section, War, is introduced. Piccolos and drums become prominent, and at page 82 of the score even the love motive (b) takes on a militant character (m, Figure XXXIII). Turmoil now increases steadily until a sort of apotheosis is reached with the reËntrance of the majestic passage (d), in Figure XXX, and the poem comes to an impressive close.
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(l)
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(m)
Figure XXXIII.
The advantages of such a scheme of form as is exemplified in "Les PrÉludes" are many; and they are made the most of by Liszt, with his accustomed cleverness and long-headed sense for practical values. For both of the two classes of listeners that make up the average concert audience music made on this recipe has an appropriate appeal. That class, usually a majority, which has little ear for music, but likes to indulge itself in vague dreams, pictorial imaginings, and nervous thrills, finds its account in the program, follows out with interest the suggestions of the various moods, such as, in the present instance, the amorous, the stormy, the pastoral, the warlike, and gets its fill, all along the way, of brilliant and gorgeous tone-coloring, exciting rhythms, sombre, rich, or mysterious harmonies. At the same time the minority of true music-lovers have, as they have not in the works of Berlioz, a "logical and lucid play of definite motives" to enjoy; they trace with never failing interest the transformations of a few simple themes; they may entirely forget the program, and yet have plenty of opportunity for an agreeable activity of attention, perception, memory, and imagination. Thus each hearer may pick out from the mass of conglomerate impressions something that appeals to him.
There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it firmly in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned beforehand to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined mould; it can ramify, as it proceeds, in obedience to its own latent possibilities. A development here may be expanded to great length, an episode or repetition there may be abbreviated to the slightest possible compass; so long as each link securely engages the next, so long as there is no break in the coherence of the thread, the hearer will be satisfied. Through all the twists and turns the presence of the fundamental melodies will save him from that sense of mere drifting which was so painful to Wagner in listening to Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet." The symphonic poem bears, in fact, somewhat the same relation to the symphony that rhymed couplets bear to a sonnet, triolet, or other conventional verse-form. It exacts little of strict formalism; but by retaining, underneath all its free ramification, certain basic principles of balance and symmetry, it escapes the pitfall of amorphousness, and constantly satisfies, though in unexpected ways, the radical expectations of the intelligent listener.
Unfortunately, however, Liszt himself fell short of realizing the finer potentialities of his own device. Just as his primal melodies, as we have already seen, are usually of a stilted, rhetorical, and artificial character, his treatment of them, the second but scarcely less important of the processes of composition, is generally labored; it is apt to be a clever feat of intelligence, a sort of mental legerdemain, rather than a spontaneous germination of idea. What he said of Chopin's larger works, that they showed "plus de volontÉ que d'inspiration," is true of his own. His developments are as often distortions as fulfilments, and among his melodies there are many monsters. Plausible, and even winning, as are at first sight some of the thematic transformations (for we are apt to be won by any display of intelligence, no matter how specious its ends), on closer inspection they are seen to be mere juggling. The variants of motive (a), in "Les PrÉludes," shown at (c) and (d) in Figure XXX, at (g) in Figure XXXI, and at (l) in Figure XXXIII, have an unpleasant sub-flavor of artificiality; analysis reveals their derivation from the parent motive, but affection, so to speak, repudiates them. Even more is this the case with (f) in Figure XXX, and (m) in Figure XXXIII, which, though we see that they come from motive b, we feel to be parodies or caricatures of it, bearing only a superficial resemblance to it, and quite devoid of its essential character. Such observations make us wonder whether a theme is not truly as inconvertible into anything else as any other individual being, and whether the kind of thematic transformation, or deformation, adopted by Liszt, is not after all intrinsically mechanical and inartistic. If the reader will take the trouble to look at some typical example of thematic evolution as it is practised by a master like Beethoven, such as the first movement, for instance, of the "Eroica Symphony,"[45] he will see what a vast difference there is between such inevitable drawing forth of the very soul of a melody, by a process as august and beyond human whim as the processes of nature, and the laborious ingenuity of the composer of "Les PrÉludes."
As in this all-important matter of thematic development, so is it in other subordinate matters of technic: Liszt, allowing mere ostentation, immediate effect upon an audience, to have too large a part in his artistic ideal, falls thereby into a hundred artificialities. While he was alive the extraordinary magnetism of his personality carried it all off, by disguising the factitiousness of his methods, and reinforcing immensely their superficial appeal; but stripped from himself and scanned in the cold impersonal light of criticism, his gorgeous artistic accoutrements look thin and tawdry, and prove to be made, not of genuine gold, but of theatrical tinsel. His melody, when it neither struts nor fawns, is apt to stagnate. His "furiously chromatic" harmony gains its effectiveness at the expense of solidity; by too completely forgetting key-relationship, on which all genuine harmony must depend, it falls into chaos, as the harmony of a master such as Wagner never does. When it is based on the old ecclesiastical modes instead of on the chromatic scale, as in many passages of the later religious works, it is no less a fabrication, an artifice: the Palestrina-like ending of the Credo in the "Gran Mass," for example, is pseudo-mediÆvalism, such as no modern composer could write spontaneously. His orchestration, much praised, is indeed skilful, but radically vulgar; his amorous 'cellos and braying trombones are enemies fatal to artistic moderation and restraint. Even in his piano-writing, so large an element in his fame, his methods are those of barbarism. He ignores the lesson of fitness that Chopin might have taught him, and overstrains the resources of the poor instrument until, instead of achieving its own unique possibilities, it becomes a forlorn imitation of an orchestra, without an orchestra's variety, sonority, and grandeur.
Thus is the virtuoso spirit of Liszt, which had thriven on adulation only too well from the days when, as "le petit Litz," he made the tour of the boxes, to those later days when, as "The Master," he oscillated between Rome and Weimar in one prolonged triumph, responsible for errors of taste and judgment which seriously impair the value of all his work. Yet there was in him, besides the virtuoso who fed on applause and was not superior to charlatanisms when they served his purpose, quite another being, who aspired honestly to be a faithful servant of art, and who brought to the service rare intellectual powers. This was the Liszt who befriended all worthy composers, who gave freely of his time, his money, and his strength, whenever he saw merit unacknowledged or genius struggling for bread. This was the Liszt who kept Wagner alive until the world could learn to appreciate him, who sought out CÉsar Franck when he was the obscure organist of St. Clotilde, who risked his post as Kapellmeister in order to produce an opera by his friend Cornelius. And this was the Liszt whose keen wit discerned the principles of combined musical and dramatic form on which works intrinsically far superior to his own were later written by DvorÁk, Smetana, TschaÏkowsky, Saint-SaËns, and Richard Strauss. Whatever his purely musical powers, his indefatigable and highly cultivated mind and his generous heart enabled him to play an important rÔle in the history of music.
FOOTNOTES:
