Like many of Liszt’s contributions to piano literature, this dainty and most pleasing little work is not exclusively his own; that is, it is not an original melodic creation, but the admirably clever arrangement or setting of an old Venetian boat-song. The melody has been in existence for many decades, perhaps centuries, and may be heard by any one who visits Venice, as sung by the gondolier in time to the swing of his dextrously handled single oar. It is called “La Biondina in Gondoletta” (“the blond maid in a gondola”), and was originally composed by Pistrucci, to words by Peruchini, and harmonized later by Beethoven, in his folk-songs, entitled “ZwÖlf verschiedene Volkslieder.”

It is a distinctly Italian melody, with no pretensions to great depth or dramatic intensity, but simple, tender, and sweet, winning rather than commanding—a lyric of the sensuously beautiful type, but not to be despised, as it is a spontaneous product of the sunny-tempered, warm-hearted children of the South. It contains no hint of the Venice of mystery, of secret cruelty, of world-wide powers, of the Council of the Ten, that masked midnight tribunal of former days; but breathes only of Venice the fair, in her moonlit beauty—of Venice, “the Bride of the Sea.”

Liszt’s setting gives us not only the melody enhanced by effective harmonic coloring and delicate embellishment, but a characteristic and picturesque background of accompaniment suggesting the scene, the mood, and the environment; the low murmur of the Adriatic, at the distant water-gate, pleading to be admitted to the presence of his Queen; the soft ripples stealing up the long winding canals, whispering their love secrets under the palaces of Juliette and Desdemona, and creeping fearfully beneath the Bridge of Sighs, and past the dreaded dungeons of the doges; the silvery moonlight gleaming upon marble frieze and column, and touching to soft brilliancy the fadeless tints of glass mosaic; the dip and sway of the graceful gondola as it glides on its silent way along those water streets between rows of stately buildings, every carved stone of which is alive with history or with some romantic legend.

All these are delicately yet graphically depicted, while the boatman’s song rises and falls, seeming now near, now distant, as it is borne to us on the varying breath of the light sea-breeze. The whole picture is one of subdued evening tints, of half-disclosed, half-hinted outlines, with a pervading mood of dreamy fancy, of wistful tenderness. It seems to me one of Liszt’s most perfect and ably sustained efforts in the purely lyric, yet suggestively descriptive vein.

At the close, the great, sonorous bell of St. Mark’s Cathedral strikes midnight, its grave, deep-toned voice majestically commanding the attention. The F sharp here used to produce the bell effect, and at the same time serving as bass in a prolonged organ-point throughout the coda, is the actual keynote of the St. Mark’s bell, ingeniously utilized for this double purpose. Meanwhile, the last notes of the song die away in the distance, and slumber, like a veil of mist floating in from the summer sea, envelops the city.

Liszt, in his able and unique but somewhat prolix work, entitled “The Bohemians and Their Music in Hungary,” which, so far as I can learn, has never been translated into English, gives some most interesting information concerning these much-played and much-discussed Rhapsodies, their origin, character, and artistic importance, their relation to the national music of the gipsies and the racial peculiarities of this strange people, which I believe will be new to most readers.

I present here what seem to me the most valuable facts and ideas in Liszt’s book in connection with these Rhapsodies, using, so far as possible, his own words translated from the French. I have used the word “gipsies” for “Bohemians” in the translation; this being the usual English name for the race, as “Bohemian” is the French.

It should be distinctly borne in mind that, contrary to the generally prevailing impression, these so-called Hungarian Rhapsodies are not in any sense derived from or founded upon national Hungarian music, or the national life and racial traits of the Hungarians. The floating fragments of wild, fantastic melody and strange, weird harmony which Liszt has gathered and utilized in this form, came neither from the Huns nor from the Magyars, whose blended tribes compose the present Hungarian race; but they are of purely gipsy origin. It is distinctly and characteristically gipsy music which Liszt has merely adapted to the piano. His reasons for calling these works Hungarian Rhapsodies he states as follows:

“In publishing a part of the material which we had the opportunity to collect during our long connection with the gipsies of Hungary, in transcribing it for the piano, as the instrument which could best render, in its entirety, the sentiment and the form of the gipsy art, it was necessary to select a generic name which should indicate the doubly national character which we attach to it.

“We have called the collection of these fragments ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies.’ By the word ‘Rhapsody’ we have wished to designate the fantastically epic element which we believe we recognize therein. Each of these productions has always seemed to us to form a part of a poetic series. These fragments narrate no facts, it is true; but ‘those who have ears to hear’ will recognize in them certain states of mind, in which are condensed the ideals of a nation. It may be a nation of Pariahs; but what difference does that make to art? Since they have experienced sentiments capable of being idealized, and have clothed them in a form of undisputed beauty, they have acquired the right to recognition in art. “Furthermore, we have called these Rhapsodies ‘Hungarian’ because it would not be just to separate in the future what has been united in the past. The Hungarians have adopted the gipsies as their national musicians. They have identified themselves with their proud and warlike enthusiasms, as with their poignant griefs, which they know so well how to depict. They have not only associated themselves in their ‘Frischka’ with their joys and feasts, but have wept with them while listening to their ‘Lassans.’

“The nomadic people of the gipsies, though scattered in many countries, and cultivating elsewhere their music, have nowhere given it a value equivalent to that which it has acquired on Hungarian soil; because in no other place has it met, as there, the popular sympathy which was necessary to its development. The liberal hospitality of the Hungarians toward the gipsies was so necessary to its existence that it belongs as much to the one as to the other. Hungary, then, can with good right claim as its own this art nourished by its cornfields and its vineyards, developed by its sun and its shade, encouraged by its admiration, embellished and ennobled, thanks to its favor and protection.”

These compositions, then, according to Liszt’s own statement, are called “Hungarian” only by courtesy and a sort of national adoption. They are called “Rhapsodies” because of their resemblance, in form, character, and content, to those detached, fragmentary poems sung or recited by the wandering bards, troubadours, and rhapsodists of the olden time—poems embodying the collective sentiments, the heroic deeds, the touching or stirring experiences of a people, which were later collected and welded together, with more or less coherency, by some master mind, to form the national epic of that people. This music, of an authentically gipsy parentage, of which Liszt speaks as “the songs without words” of the gipsies, and to which he has merely stood sponsor at its rechristening and its introduction, in new civilized dress, to the musical world, is the only art form in which this enigmatical race has ever expressed itself—the only channel through which its ill-comprehended but intense inner life of emotion, imagination, and vague idealism has found vent. It is the inarticulate, but none the less expressive, cry of the soul of a race struggling with that universal human longing for self-utterance.

Liszt’s aim, pursued for many years, at great pains and with masterly ability, was to collect and preserve for the world at least certain representative portions of this music, and construct from them a tone epic of the gipsies, possessing, not only from the artistic, but from the historical and anthropological standpoint, an interest and value similar to that of other epics in verse, as, for instance, those of the Greeks, the Persians, the Germans, the Finns, Scandinavians, etc.

Of the actual history of the gipsies little is known, save that they are the strangest and most anomalous people of the globe. Numerous theories as to their origin have been advanced, only to be abandoned. But the best belief of to-day is that they originated in India, being of the lowest Soodra caste or Pariahs there, driven out by the terrible Mongol invasions between the tenth and thirteenth centuries A. D. They first appear to the historical world in Egypt, and their name, “gipsies,” given them in this country and Great Britain, is but a corruption of the word “Egyptian”; and hence they were long erroneously supposed to have originated there. In other countries they have received various names, as Bohemians in France, Gitanos in Spain, Zigeuner in Germany, Zingari in Italy. But they always and everywhere designate themselves as Romani, or Roma Sinte, meaning, “Roma” (men) and “Sinte,” probably from Scind, or the Indus River. They did not appear in Western Europe till the early part of the fifteenth century, first in Bohemia, then in France and Germany, and thence they spread, in wandering bands, from natural increase, and, perhaps, from further immigration, over most of Europe and other large portions of the world, everywhere abused and hated, and by most governments cruelly persecuted. The Austrian government, under Maria Theresa, was the main, modified exception to this harshness. She encouraged and protected them in some localities in Hungary, and, under this more humane care, they have there lived, in very considerable numbers, a more stable and localized life than elsewhere on earth, affording some modifications and improvement of their general habits and character, as nomad, oriental vagabonds.

Liszt, in the book referred to, has eloquently and strikingly characterized this strange people, as follows: “Among the nations of Europe there suddenly appeared one day a people, whence no one could definitely say. It cast itself upon the Continent without showing any desire of conquest, but also without asking any right to a domicile. It did not desire to appropriate to itself an inch of ground, but it declined to give up an hour of time. It had no wish to conquer, but it refused to submit. It avowed neither from what Asiatic or African plateaus it had descended, nor from what necessity it had sought other skies. It brought no memories; it betrayed no hope. Too vain of its sad race to condescend to merge itself in any other, it was content to live repulsing all foreign elements.... This is a strange people, so strange as to resemble no other in any respect. It possesses neither country, nor religion, nor history, nor any law whatever.... It permits no influence, no will, no persecution, no instruction either to modify, dissolve, or extirpate it. It is divided into tribes, hordes, and bands which wander here and there, following each the route dictated by chance, without communication with each other, largely ignoring their collective existence, but each preserving, under the most distant meridian, with a solidarity which is sacred to them, infallible rallying signs, the same physiognomy, the same language, the same manners.... The ages pass. The world progresses. The countries where they sojourn make war or peace, change masters and manners, while they remain impassive and indifferent, living from day to day, profiting by the preoccupations caused by events which decide the fate of nations, to secure their own existence with less difficulty.... This people that shares the joys, the sorrows, the prosperities, and misfortunes of no other; that, like an incarnate sarcasm, laughs at the ambitions, the tears, the combats, and festivals of all others; that knows neither whence it came nor whither it goes; ... that preserves no traditions and registers no annals; that has no faith and no law, no belief and no rule of conduct; that is held together only by gross superstitions, vague customs, constant misery, and deep humiliation; this people, that nevertheless is obstinate, at the price of all degradation and destitution, to preserve its tents and its tatters, its hunger and its liberty; this people, that exercises upon civilized nations an indescribable and indestructible fascination, passing as a mysterious legacy from one age to the next, all defamed as it is, offers nevertheless some striking and charming types to our grandest poets; this people, so heterogeneous, of a character so indomitable, so intractable, so inexplicable, must conceal, in some corner of its heart, some lofty qualities, since, susceptible of idealization, it has idealized itself; for it has poems and songs which, if united, might perhaps form the national epic of the gipsies.”

It is from such a people, so understood and described by him, that Liszt has taken the musical fragments inwrought into his Hungarian Rhapsodies; and he reasons at length and ingeniously as to his right to call these musical cycles parts of what could be enlarged and made to cohere into a national tone epic. This people, being unfitted to express itself nationally in any other mode save through its wonderful, though rude and uncultivated, instinct for music, “as it drew the bow upon the strings of the violin, inspiration taught it, without its seeking, rhythms, cadences, modulations, songs, speech, and discourse. Hegel was not wrong,” says Liszt, “when he gives to the word ‘epic’ more of the signification of the verb ‘to speak,’ or utter, than of the substantive, ‘recital’; and these tone pictures are fragments of an epic, because they speak sentiments which are common to all the race, which form their inner nature, the physiognomy of their soul, the expression of their whole sentient being.” And therefore, in summary conclusion, Liszt says: “Believing that the scattered fragments of the instrumental music of the gipsies, properly arranged, with some understanding of the succession necessary to make them reciprocally valuable, would afford the expression of those collective sentiments which inhere in the entire people, determining their character and customs, one feels himself authorized to give to such a collection the name of National Epic.”

Regarded from a purely musical standpoint, the Rhapsodies have occasioned much controversy and considerable adverse criticism on the part of certain musicians who pride themselves on their loyalty to conservative traditions. They have been decried as trivial, superficial, and sensational; as lacking in depth and dignity, in symmetry of form and nobility of sentiment. These critics seem to forget that the object of all art is primarily, not instruction or elevation, or even abstract beauty, but expression. Its mission is to portray, not exclusively the highest and grandest emotions of humanity, but every experience, every shade of feeling, every psychological possibility of the race, with equally sympathetic fidelity. Humanity is the broad theme; and the various forms of art, on which the specialist is apt to lay undue stress, are only the means of expression, not the supreme end. That form is best, in any given case, which best serves the artist’s purpose.

It should be remembered that the music under discussion does not purport to embody the loftiest or profoundest sentiment which Liszt was personally capable of feeling or portraying, but the life, scenes, and moods of the gipsy camp, presented in the primitive, but spontaneous and vividly graphic, tone imagery of the gipsies themselves. Who shall say that, as a representative racial art, it is not precisely as legitimate, as worthy, and as genuinely artistic as the characteristic national art of the Germans, the Italians, or any other people? Who shall presume to dictate to the artist what subject, or class of subjects, he may or may not select for treatment? I repeat, all art has for its mission the expression of life, all life; not the establishment or maintenance of standards either of morals or emotions; still less of mere forms of expression. Is not the gipsy maid, with her ungoverned caprices, her moments of exuberant gaiety, or passionate grief, just as much alive, hence as legitimate a theme for the artist, and certainly as interesting and romantic a subject for art treatment, as the staid German Hausfrau, or the frivolous American society girl? The beggar boy has been as ably painted, and is considered as artistic a figure as the king. Poets have sung the loves of shepherds and shepherdesses as fondly as those of lords and ladies. Is not, then, a good portrayal of a gipsy camp, whether in words, colors, or tones, just as legitimate a work of art as an equally able picture of an imperial palace, or an imposing cathedral? Will not “Carmen” live as long on the operatic stage as even that paragon of all feminine virtues, “Fidelio”? Is not Don Juan as immortal a personage in art as Lohengrin? Goethe says: “We have only the right to ask three questions of any art work: First, what did the artist intend? Second, was it worth doing? Third, has he succeeded?” Judged from this, the only true standpoint of esthetic criticism, I venture to maintain that the Hungarian Rhapsodies are just as good and just as legitimate music, in their own peculiar way,—that is to say, they fulfil the essential conditions of their special artistic purpose, as well and as completely,—as the Bach fugues, or the Beethoven sonatas.

Granting, if need be, that the Rhapsodies are sensational, heaven protect us from music that produces no sensation! And, in this case, it is the sensation, or startling effect, not of mere brilliancy, but of the unfamiliar contact with the spirit of a race radically differing from our own; not sensuous and superficial, but profoundly temperamental, possessing all the fresh charm of new thought expressed in a novel idiom. Granting again that their melodies are capricious and fantastic, their harmonies strange and half-barbaric, their form incoherent and wholly at variance with our established notions of musical structure, all this but renders them the more characteristic. The picturesque gipsy could not appear to advantage, nor as a typical figure in conventional evening dress, with punctilious drawing-room manners; and the sentiments imputed to him, to be true to life, must not be those of the cultivated modern gentleman, expressed with the stately precision affected by the scholastic world; but primitive, elementary, to some degree chaotic, uttered with the rude force and directness of the undeveloped nature. In brief, he must be represented against the background and amid the surroundings which are his natural environment.

These Rhapsodies are to be taken as rough but faithful self-portraitures of the gipsies, strictly on their own standards of merit, as art works in a department by themselves, with a pronounced individuality and a definite purpose. They are sixteen in number, and all constructed on the same general plan, made up, like mosaics, of widely varying fragments of melody, each expressing some particular mood or phase of life, but combined so as to give a comprehensive impression of the scenes and conditions of gipsy camps, familiar to Liszt for many years, through frequent and lengthy visits, as vividly described by him in the book from which we have so largely quoted.

Roughly speaking, the melodies so interwoven in the Rhapsodies may be divided into three classes, all of which appear in about equal proportions, and with their ever startling sharpness of contrast, in each and all of these works: the “lassan,” a slow, mournfully lugubrious song, expressing the uttermost depths of depression; the “frischka,” a bright, playful, capricious dance movement, full of grace, humor, and witching coquetry, and the “czardas,” a furious, almost demoniac dance portraying the dance delirium at its most intoxicating extreme, resembling somewhat the Tarantelle of Spain and the Dervish dance of the Orient. These three, with an occasional brief strain from a fugitive love-song, shy and elusive as the notes of some timid night bird, or a march-like movement of wild but distinctly martial character, formed the crude material from which Liszt has wrought these always effective and thoroughly pianistic compositions. A brief, special reference to two or three of the best known among them will be sufficient to indicate an intelligent interpretation of them all.

The No. 6, for instance, begins with one of the march movements referred to. It is rhythmic and pompous, with a bold, half-barbaric splendor. Next comes one of the slower forms of the “frischka,” which is often sung in Hungary to the words of a half-tipsy drinking-song. Then follows one of the most doleful of the “lassans,” the words to which, in free translation, run as follows: “My father is dead, my mother is dead, I have no brothers or sisters, and all the money that I have left will just buy a rope to hang myself with.”

The work closes with one of the wildest, most impetuous of the “czardas” dances, which Liszt has wrought up to an irresistible, overwhelming climax.

The No. 12 begins with a slow, gloomy recitative delivered with an impressive dignity so exaggerated as to border on the bombastic; a tale of strange adventures, it may be, narrated by the chief of the tribe at the evening camp-fire, while the flickering firelight plays upon the picturesque figures grouped about against the somber background of the pines, and the thunder mutters sullenly in the distance. Then a quiet bit of lyric, evidently a love-song, gives a touch of softness to the scene, and hints at a covert courtship among the shadows. Later, the crisp, piquant music of the “frischka” calls the young people to the dance, which gradually increases in speed and brilliancy, till it finally merges in the “czardas,” in which all join, and which is given with the greatest possible dash and abandon.

No. 15 is founded upon, and mainly consists of the Rakoczy March, composed by a gipsy musician in honor of Rakoczy, that Hungarian patriot, popular general, and hero, whose daring exploits as leader, in the Hungarian struggle for independence, made him a prominent historical figure of his time, and the idol of his countrymen. This march has been adopted as the national march of Hungary, and Liszt’s setting of it for piano is among his most stupendous works.

These few illustrations may serve as guides in forming a correct conception of all the Rhapsodies. I have given to the foregoing article more space than seems, at first thought, to be warranted; partly, because it gives a somewhat unusual point of view in considering Liszt, not only as a composer, but as a thoughtful and philosophic student of esthetics, and as an eloquent, forceful writer; partly, because I hope it may produce in the minds of some readers a more favorable, because more justly discriminating, attitude of mind toward these Hungarian Rhapsodies as musical art works; but mainly, because it emphasizes, with the powerful support of Liszt’s authority, certain general principles of art which seem to me all-important, but which are too often ignored in considering the special art of music.