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Title: Life of Liszt

Author: Ludwig Nohl

Translator: George P. Upton

Release date: July 14, 2022 [eBook #68522]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: A. C. McClurg & Company

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE OF LISZT ***

BIOGRAPHIES OF MUSICIANS.


I.

  LIFE OF MOZART, From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
    Price $0.75.

II.

  LIFE OF BEETHOVEN, From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
    Price $0.75.

III.

  LIFE OF HAYDN, From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
    Price $0.75.

IV.

  LIFE OF WAGNER, From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
    Price $0.75.

V.

  LIFE OF LISZT, From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With Portrait.
    Price $0.75.

A. C. McCLURG & CO., PUBLISHERS.




[Illustration: FRANZ LISZT.]




  _BIOGRAPHIES OF MUSICIANS._

  LIFE OF LISZT

  BY
  LOUIS NOHL

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
  BY
  GEORGE P. UPTON

  “_Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist._”

  SIXTH EDITION

  CHICAGO
  A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY
  1902




  COPYRIGHT, 1880.




TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.


This little work, which is rather an essay upon the personal and
musical characteristics of Liszt than a biography of him, as its title
indicates, hardly needs more than an informal introduction to the
public. It may safely be left to commend itself to readers upon its own
merits. Unlike most of his other biographies, Dr. Nohl seems to have
addressed himself to this with feelings of strong personal admiration
and affection for his hero. It appears to be the universal testimony of
those who have enjoyed Liszt’s acquaintance, not merely his friendship,
that he has inspired in them the strongest and most intimate feelings
of personal attachment to him by his own genial and generous nature.
If at times, therefore, the biographer appears to rhapsodize, it is
probably because his relations to Liszt make it difficult for him to
avoid idealizing him. If this be so, fortunately there is compensation
in the reflection that no other musician of the present day, in every
admirable quality of head and heart, so nearly approaches the ideal.

In reproducing the selections from Miss Amy Fay’s “Music Study in
Germany,” which appear in the closing chapter of this volume, the
translator, so far as has been practicable, for the German version
does not follow the English very closely in its connection, or always
literally, has made use of the original text. He has also prepared an
appendix containing much interesting matter that serves to explain
and sometimes to illustrate the contents of the work. The list of
scholars of the great teacher to which Dr. Nohl also refers in the
closing chapter, and which were furnished to the biographer by Liszt
himself, will be found at the close of this appendix. It is of more
than ordinary interest as it contains indirectly the testimony of Liszt
himself as to the relative prominence of the vast number of pupils who
have studied with him. Surely such a life as his, so rich in success,
so bountiful in reward and triumph, so fruitful in results, its skill
and love attested to by eminent scholars in every country, refutes his
mournful remark to George Sand, in one case at least, “Sorrowful and
great is the destiny of the artist.”

                                                                G. P. U.
  Chicago, Feb. 1, 1884.




AUTHOR’S PREFACE.


In contrast with our practice in the previous biographies, let us, this
time, as the master has also done in his greatest oratorio, disclose
the life of the hero in his deeds, which display themselves before us
in regular succession.

First of all appears his early youth with its incomprehensible
virtuosity. It is the actual strangling of the serpents in the cradle,
so utterly does this power defy every obstacle and difficulty in the
revelation of its art. Then appears a new germ of the ever fruitful
life of Nature, as specially manifested in the weird gypsy world. And
now the great man rises resplendent in the great artist, in strong
contrast with a kindred genius, we mean the great violinist, Paganini,
in whom, so different from Liszt himself, the essential principle
which lies at the very root of artistic creation, namely, the genius
of humanity, was not apparent. It proved its power in the recognition
of the one artist of equal rank whom he encountered and whom he
unceasingly helped to realize that grand consummation which we possess
to-day in Baireuth.

Still further, there appears in its wonderful versatility his active
sympathy with all the momentous intellectual questions of the time and
of humanity. We recognize it with astonishment in his imposing series
of “Collected Writings” which rises up before us. Then follows the new
epoch in art-development, the creation of the Symphonic Poem, growing,
as it were, spontaneously out of his association with all that is
comprised in poetry and life. Then comes the crown of all, the latest
and grandest work he has accomplished, the renovation of church music.
We beseech the laymen at least to recognize the importance of this
great accomplishment.

In a sketch of such a richly exuberant life it is essential that we
fail not to recognize the personality of this genius in his creations
as “Master.” How much of loving kindliness it manifests! It is not
like Ludwig Richter’s genial and gentle “Beemaster.” It is like Michel
Angelo’s majestic “Lord” to whom the newly created Eve meekly bows.
It is like Prometheus among his loved creations which his breath will
first inspire with life. And to what extent this reaches, the world
knows by the great number of his master-scholars whose eminent names
enframe the complete picture.

Thus we wander here, as it were amid a new creation, and discover that
in the pure art of music our time is not inferior to any other; nay,
more, that it has added to the great possessions of the past many an
enduring and noble work.




CONTENTS.


  CHAPTER I.

  LES PRELUDES.

  Liszt’s Childish Characteristics--The Home at Raiding--The
    Father and his musical Abilities--His Ambition for his
    Son--Selections from his Diary--Young Liszt’s first
    Appearances--Peculiarities of his Playing--The Gypsies--The
    Influence of their Life and Music upon him--Paganini and
    Bihary--Generosity of Counts Amadee and Szapary--His studies
    with Czerny--Old artists’ astonished--Plays before
    Beethoven--The great Master kisses the Boy--The Journey to
    Paris--Cherubini’s Churlishness--Liszt’s immense
    Success--Ovations and Triumphs--A great Favorite among the
    Ladies--French and German tributes.                            11-35


  CHAPTER II.

  DIVERTISSEMENTS HONGROIS.

  The Power of Music--Its Origin and Influence--Relations to
    Nature--Bach, Mozart and Beethoven--Sources of their
    Inspiration--Autobiographical Sketch--Liszt as a Lad--His
    Voluntary Exile--Revival of the Home Feeling--His Love of
    Nature--Religious Feeling--The Gypsies--A Famous Visit to
    them--Picturesque Surroundings--Wild Dances--Talks with the
    Old Men--The Gypsy Hags--An Impromptu Orchestra and Wonderful
    Music--A Weird Night Scene--Salvator Rosa Effects--Grotesque
    Cavalcade--The Concert at the Inn--A Demoniac Symphony--Wild
    Revel in a Thunder Storm--Liszt’s Hungarian Music.             36-60


  CHAPTER III.

  CAPRICCIOSO.

  Untamable Animals and Men--An Interesting Test--Attempt to
    refine a Gypsy--The Boy Josy--Bought from the Gypsies--His
    Advent into Liszt’s Salon--Thalberg’s Astonishment--Adopted
    by the Master--Attempts to Educate him--A Hopeless Task--Josy
    becomes a Fop--His Insolence and Conceit--Liszt
    despondent--Josy goes to the Conservatory--Worse
    and Worse--Sent to the Black Forest--No Better--Liszt’s
    Encounter with a traveling Band--Josy’s Brother intercedes
    for his Return--Liszt consents--Great Joy--Josy settles at
    Debrezin--Violinist in a Gypsy Band--Letter to Liszt--His
    Love and Devotion.                                             61-75


  CHAPTER IV.

  IMPROMPTU.

  General Characteristics of Liszt--Earnestness of his Art--Its
    genial Character--His Interest In Life--His Loving
    Nature--Affection for his Parents--Remorse of a
    Capellmeister--Richard Wagner’s Testimony--A Helping Hand
    in time of Need--His Generosity to Wagner--Secures him a
    Hearing--The Letter to Herr B.--Plans to bring out Wagner’s
    Works in London--Wagner in Despair--Misunderstanding of
    Liszt--A Personal Appeal and prompt Reply--A Success made in
    Weimar--Urges Wagner to create a new Work--“The
    Nibelungen”--Wagner’s Tribute at Baireuth.                     76-90


  CHAPTER V.

  REFLEXIONS.

  Goethe’s Criticism on Winckelmann--The Poetical
    Necessity--Winckelmann and the Plastic Art--Has Music a
    Language?--Musicians and Musical Writers--Gluck’s
    Writings--His War in Paris--A fierce Struggle with the
    Theorists--Luther’s Indebtedness to Bach--Heinse and his
    Writings--His Italian Visit--Reichardt, Rochlitz and
    Schubart--Their literary Characteristics--A Criticism of
    Marx--Liszt’s Contributions to Literature--His great
    literary Ability--The Place of Artists--List of his
    Works--Goethe and Beethoven--Bettina’s Phantasies--Liszt’s
    Criticism of the “Swan Song”--Tribute from the “Gazette
    Musicale”--Selections from his Writings.                      91-112


  CHAPTER VI.

  HARMONIES POETIQUES.

  Liszt’s Tribute to Wagner--A new Form of Instrumental
    Music--Liszt’s new Departure--The Symphonic Poem--Its
    Essence and Characteristics--The Union of Poetry and
    Music--Programme Music--How Liszt developed his new
    Forms--Analysis of Individual Works--Liszt’s Tribute to
    Beethoven--His Notice of “Egmont”--Beethoven as a
    Pioneer--Fulfillment of Haydn’s Prophecy.                    113-120


  CHAPTER VII.

  CONSOLATION.

  Liszt’s Great Resolve--Reply to a Scoffer--Religion and
    Music--Religion at the Foundation of Culture--George
    Sand’s Testimony--Relations of Religion and Music--Music
    in the Catholic and Protestant Churches--Peculiarities of
    the Musical Services--Influence of the Catholic Church on
    Music--A Gradual Lowering of the Standard--Opera Music in
    the Church--Liszt’s Ambition to Reform it--His early
    Piety--Views on Church Music--The Religious Element in
    his Compositions--The Hungarian Coronation Mass--The
    Choral Mass--Departure to Rome--Takes Orders--Why he did
    not remain--Germany his Field for Work.                      121-135


  CHAPTER VIII.

  HARMONIES RELIGIEUSES.

  The Oratorio of “Christus”--Its Title--The Origin of
    Oratorios--Their Relation to Opera--Gradual Changes in
    Style--The Dramatic Element in them--Liszt’s Original
    Treatment--A Wide Departure from Old Forms--Events
    Pictured in Music--Groupings of Materials--What it did
    for the Church--General Divisions of the Oratorio--The
    Motto of “Christus”--The Christmas Music--Introduction
    of the Stabat Mater--The Shepherds at the Manger--The
    Kings’ March--The “Seligkeit”--Entrance to Jerusalem--The
    Scene at Gethsemane--The Inflammatus--Skillful treatment
    of Motifs.                                                   136-148


  CHAPTER IX.

  PROMETHEUS.

  Liszt’s letter to George Sand--Happiness of the
    Wanderer--Allusions to Wagner--The Artist as an
    Exile--Sorrowful Character of his Lot--His Solitude--His
    Creative Moments and Inspirations--No Sympathy between
    the Artist and Society--Degradation of Art--Artisans, not
    Artists--Letter to Adolph Pictet--Why he devoted himself
    to the Piano--His love for it--Estimate of its
    Capabilities--Miss Fay’s “Music Study in Germany”--A
    Critical Notice--The Author’s first Meeting with
    Liszt--Personal Description--Grace of his
    Manner--Peculiarities of his Playing--His Home--Pleasant
    Gatherings--Personal Incidents--Liszt and Tausig--The
    Loss of “Faust”--Happily Recovered--The Final Tribute.       149-177


  APPENDIX.

  A LETTER FROM LISZT’S FATHER.                                      179
  LISZT’S ONE OPERA.                                                 183
  BIHARY.                                                            187
  THE HUNGARIAN GYPSY MUSIC.                                         189
  HEINE ON LISZT.                                                    192
  A LETTER FROM BERLIOZ TO LISZT.                                    194
  HESSE’S CRITICISM OF LISZT.                                        196
  LIST OF LISZT’S PRINCIPAL SCHOLARS.                                198




THE LIFE OF LISZT.




CHAPTER I.

LES PRELUDES.

  Liszt’s Childish Characteristics--The Home at Raiding--The Father
    and his Musical Abilities--His Ambition for his Son--Selections
    from his Diary--Young Liszt’s First Appearances--Peculiarities of
    his Playing--The Gypsies--The Influence of their Life and Music
    upon him--Paganini and Bihary--Generosity of Counts Amadee and
    Szapary--His Studies with Czerny--Old Artists Astonished--Plays
    before Beethoven--The great Master kisses the Boy--The Journey to
    Paris--Cherubini’s Churlishness--Liszt’s immense Success--Ovations
    and Triumphs--A great Favorite among the Ladies--French and German
    Tributes.


“Behold a young virtuoso, seemingly dropped from the clouds, who
arouses the greatest astonishment. The performances of this boy
border on the miraculous, and one is tempted to doubt their physical
possibility when he hears the young giant thunder forth Hummel’s
difficult compositions,” says a Vienna account of this boy, scarce
eleven years of age. Only a year afterward, we see Paris wild with
amazement over a phenomenon never beheld before. Like that of young
Mozart at Naples, the piano was turned round so that they could see
what they did not believe to be possible, thereby revealing the genial
and manly characteristics of the young artist, which afterward became
the delight of the world, like his playing. “His eyes gleam with
animation, mischievousness and joy. He is not led to the piano, he
rushes up to it. They applaud and he looks surprised. They applaud
afresh and he rubs his hands,” it is said, and then are pointed out the
national quality, the inspired fury, the unmistakable originality, and
at another time the proud, manly expression, which gained for him the
appellation of the “Hungarian Wonder-Child.” We shall further notice
the indications of these peculiarities, particularly as they are given
in a longer biographical notice, which, in its main features, seems to
have been taken from his own communication that appeared about the year
1830, in one of the first of Parisian musical journals, the “Revue et
Gazette Musicale,” which collapsed a few years ago.

Franz Liszt was born October 22, 1811, at Raiding, near Oedenburg.
The comet year appeared to his parents a good omen of his future. The
father, belonging to a not very wealthy family of the old nobility,
was, in his prime, accountant at Eisenstadt with that Prince Nicholas
Esterhazy for whom Joseph Haydn was Capellmeister. As he enjoyed the
personal acquaintance of the honored master of the quartet, mostly at
card-playing, which he practiced as a recreation in the midst of his
always severe labor, he was brought into a sphere which was peculiarly
musical in its character, and which furnished his own nature with the
richest food, for father Liszt was on terms of personal friendship
also with that best scholar of Mozart’s, the distinguished pianist,
Hummel, born at Presburg in 1778, who officiated many years as the
Prince’s Capellmeister at Eisenstadt and Esterhaz. No one esteemed him
more highly as a pianist. His playing had made an indelible impression
upon him. He was also musical himself in a high degree, playing nearly
every instrument, particularly the piano and violoncello, and was only
restrained by the displeasure of his family relatives from perfecting
himself as a thorough musician. So much the more his dreams and hopes
of artistic power were transferred to his eldest son, whose rare talent
had manifested itself early. “Thy destiny is fixed. Thou wilt realize
that art ideal which fascinated my youth in vain. In thee will I grow
young again and transmit myself,” he often said to him. He was so
strongly impressed with all the signs of promise in the boy that he
devoted a diary to him in which he entered his notes “with the most
minute and solicitous punctiliousness of a tender father.” Here is a
leaf from the recollections of that childhood:

“After his vaccination, a period commenced in which the boy had to
struggle alternately with nervous pains and fever, which more than once
imperiled his life. On one occasion, in his second or third year, we
thought him dead and ordered his coffin made. This disquieted state
continued until his sixth year. In that year he heard me playing Ries’
concerto in C sharp minor. He leaned upon the piano and was all ears.
Towards evening he returned from the garden and sang the theme. We
made him repeat it but he did not know what he sang. That was the
first indication of his genius. He incessantly begged that he might
commence piano-playing. After three months’ instruction, the fever
returned and compelled us to discontinue it. His delight in instruction
did not take away his pleasure in playing with children of his own
age, although from this time forth he sought to live more for himself
alone. He was not regular in his practice but was always tractable
up to his ninth year. It was at this period that he played in public
for the first time in Oedenburg. He performed a concerto by Ries in E
major and extemporized. The fever attacked him just before he seated
himself at the piano and yet he was strengthened by the playing. He had
long manifested a desire to play in public and exhibited much ease and
courage.”

We interrupt the narrative at this point to inquire what was the active
source of this inner consecration to art as well as of the passionate
impulse to exhibit it in public. Neither Ferdinand Ries, who merely
imitated the ornamentations of his great teacher, Beethoven, nor
Mozart’s pupil, Hummel, who succeeded Haydn at Esterhaz, nor the great
father of instrumental music himself even felt remotely that genius
for execution, the wonderful results of which were already filling the
youthful soul like a creative impulse and with a passionate longing
for expression urging him on to public performance. In a letter from
Paris to Schumann’s musical paper in 1834, it is said: “He often plays
tenderly and with gentle melancholy;” then again: “With overpowering
passion and with such fire and even fury, that it seems as if the piano
must give way beneath his fingers. It often creaks and rattles during
his playing. You see head, eyes, hands, the whole upper part of the
body moving impetuously in every direction.” On one occasion he fell
back from the piano exhausted. Whence this unprecedented devotion to
music? Whence, as one might say, this merging of his very identity in
his playing?

There are a peculiar people, scattered from the Himalayas even to the
Ebro and the Scottish Highlands, possessing nothing, in this wide
world of God, but themselves and nature. Neither house nor hearth,
neither state nor social forms restrain them. They have no fixed
pursuit, no calling which makes a firmly settled existence, based
on duty and inclination. They have no manners, no church, no God.
And yet these people have lived for centuries, as we know, unchanged
in kind and number, yet nowhere settled. They are the gypsies, who
seemingly possess nothing which the earth offers men or which makes
life valuable. And still more, wherever they appear they are completely
ignored and even looked upon with utter contempt. Truly they have
nothing and are, as it were, a miserable fragment of the human race,
everlastingly forgotten by God. But they have one thing that vies
with our culture and art--their music. As they feel the complete
rapture of an existence in nature which is boundlessly free, free
from everything which hinders the slightest movement or inclination,
so in their habits, but particularly in their improvisations, they
express the God-given freedom of the inner sensibility in all its
emotions, from the proudest human consciousness to the inmost longing
of the soul for sympathetic communion. This music is to them as it
were their world and God, life and happiness, the sun and all that
world-movement with which we feel ourselves closely associated. In a
paper, worthy of notice, Liszt has sought to clear up the mystery of
the vitality remaining in these dissevered fragments of the old Indian
race, and explain the greater mystery how a people so destitute of
any social and intellectual basis of life, possess one art and one of
such originality, depth and power. We must follow him still further to
understand the wonderful effect of his own performances.

“Recollections of the gypsies are associated with memories of my
childhood and some of its most vivid impressions,” the world-renowned
“Magician of the Hungarian Land,” writes in his fiftieth year:
“Afterwards I became a wandering virtuoso, as they are in our
fatherland. They have pitched their tents in all the countries of
Europe, and I have traversed the tangled maze of roads and paths over
which they have wandered in the course of time, my experiences some
years, in a certain sense, being very similar to their historical
destiny. Like them I was a stranger to the people of every country.
Like them I pursued my ideal in the continual revelations of art, if
not of nature.” In recalling these early recollections, he confesses
that few things impressed him so strongly as these gypsies soliciting
alms at the threshold of every palace and cottage for a few words
softly whispered in the ear, a few loudly played dance-melodies, or a
few songs, such as no minstrel sings, that throw lovers into rapture
without their knowing why. How often he himself has sought the solution
of this charm, which held all with unchallenged sway! As the weak pupil
of a strong master, his father, he had as yet had no other insight
into the world of phantasy than the architectural framework of notes
in their artificial arrangement together, and when we think of the
old-fashioned composers, like Hummel and Ries, we imagine that it
must have doubly fascinated him to exercise that charm, which these
calloused gypsy hands practiced before all eyes, when they drew the
bow across the sighing instrument or made the metal ring with powerful
defiance.

We now see how these children of nature, with their most mysterious and
spontaneous power of sensibility, blossoming out in their art, absorbed
him and filled a soul incapable of jealousy with a natural envy of the
incredible effect they produced. His waking dreams had been filled
with these bronzed faces, prematurely old with the vicissitudes of
centuries and dissolute habits of every sort, their defiant smiles,
their dull, red eyes, in which laughs a sardonic unbelief and gleams
flash out which glisten but do not glow. Their dances always floated
through his visions with their languid, elastic, bounding and tempting
movements. By degrees the conviction was borne in upon him that “in
comparison with the continuously dull and sombre days imaged upon the
background of our civilized world, upon which only here and there some
moments beaming with joy or lurid with pain are conspicuous, these
beings had fashioned a defter texture of joy and sorrow, alternating
with love, song, wine and the dance, as they were excited and soothed
by these four elements of passion and voluptuousness.”

Thus early his soul had discovered the supernatural, throned like a
sphynx in the inmost recesses of nature. He had felt that mysterious
creative power which shapes and maintains the world. He felt it
as belonging to his own inner nature and power, and his heart, in
the profound consciousness of this magical possession, must have
bounded more exultantly, since those other lofty human acquirements
of culture and art-work, which first invest the deep outreachings of
life with the nobility and loftiness of thought, were open to him
also. Henceforth his genius illuminated him, but the activity of this
genius, in other words, its creative power, he attributed to his always
profound recognition of the mysterious operations of the creative
power of nature. A Parisian description of his playing, and that of
the similarly “demonish” Paganini, about the year 1834, says: “Music
is to them the art which gives man the presentiment of his higher
existence, and leads him from the occurrences of ordinary life into
the Isis-temple, where nature speaks with him in sacred tones, unheard
before and yet intelligible.”

Let us now observe how the success of his playing, which this boy
had already evidently achieved by his vigorous expression of his own
feelings, influenced his future fortunes. “The tones of his bewitching
violin fell upon my ear like drops of some fiery, volatile essence,” he
says of the gipsy virtuoso, Bihary, whom he heard in Vienna in 1822.
“Had my memory been of soft clay, and every one of his notes a diamond
nail, they could not have clung to it more tenaciously. Had my soul
been the ooze from which a river-god had returned to his bed, and every
tone of the artist a fructifying seed-corn, it could not have taken
deeper root in me.”

His father took him at this time to Prince Esterhazy, in whose family
musical patronage was hereditary. “I believe that female influence
alone succeeds with him,” wrote the great Beethoven two years later,
when he proffered the “Missa Solemnis” to him, as he had to another
prince, for a subscription. He did not anticipate much kindly feeling
on his part towards himself. Of what use, then, for a mere young
beginner in art to expect anything? The Prince made him a gift of a
few hundred francs. That was little for the heir of Haydn’s patron. In
contrast with this, the boy met with a merited reception in the larger
and more cultivated city of Presburg. Six noblemen, among them Counts
Amadee and Szapary, settled upon him for six years an annuity of six
hundred gulden, which satisfied the father’s desire to give the boy a
fitting education.

Soon afterward, in the year 1821, he resolved to give up his position
and settle in Vienna with his wife and child. He was met with the
anxious misgivings of his wife (born in Upper Austria), who could not
bear to see her darling exposed to the vicissitudes of an artistic
career, and who tremblingly asked what would become of them, if, at
the expiration of the time, their hopes were disappointed. “What God
wills,” cried the boy of nine, who had listened to the conversation
with a quiet timidity. The objections and solicitude of the mother were
dispelled, all the more readily, as she was of a deeply and genuinely
religious nature.

It was estimated that six hundred francs was a fair price for their
household effects. On their arrival in Vienna the father selected the
distinguished and unassuming Carl Czerny for the boy’s teacher, for
Czerny had been Beethoven’s pupil a short time and played nearly all
his compositions by heart. It was only the wonderful endowment of the
boy that induced the overburdened teacher to accept him, and when he
had finished playing to him he won his complete affection, as he did
Beethoven’s. How could a boy of such a fiery musical spirit, who had
enjoyed such a free and overflowing life in this art of his youth,
play the dry, pedantic Clementi, which Czerny at first selected as
the pedagogical groundwork? “If he visited a music store he never
found a piece difficult enough to suit him,” says our informant.
Once a publisher showed him the B minor concerto of Hummel. The boy
turned over the leaves and intimated that it was nothing, and that
he could play it at sight, making the assertion in the presence of
the first piano-players of the city. The gentleman, astonished at the
self-confidence of the boy, took him at his word and led him into the
hall where there was a piano. He performed the concerto with equal
skill and ease. It was the same composition which he played before
Beethoven a year afterwards. Nothing could now restrain him from
giving himself entirely to the public. “There is no greater pleasure
for me than to practice and display my art,” Beethoven also wrote in
his earlier years, and should not a genius who had acquired to his own
thorough satisfaction the utmost freedom and highest success by such
characteristic performances in public, seek its own free course, the
open sea of the great public? “I still remember to have seen and heard
this virtuoso whose manly, beautiful _personnel_ displayed all the
characteristics of his race,” writes Liszt at the time he first heard
Bihary in Vienna. “I can still recall the absolute fascination which
he exercised when with an absorbed and at the same time melancholy
listlessness, in striking contrast with the apparent buoyancy of his
temperament and the flashing glances which, as it were, fathomed the
souls of his hearers, he took his violin in his hands and for hours,
forgetful that time was also flying, unloosed cascades of tones
which streamed on in their wild plunges, anon rippling away as over
velvety moss.” On the 18th of December of the same year, 1822, the
“Young Hercules” in that concert when he “thundered out” the Hummel
composition, so united and as it were kneaded into one whole, the
andante of Beethoven’s A major symphony with an aria of Rossini’s, who
was at that time idolized in Vienna, that the relator excitedly cries
out--“_Est deus in nobis._” Verily a god directed the creative and
executive power of this little one, with his open brow, his haughty
nose, and his countenance lit up by his large, deep eyes, which seemed
set in the streaming hair, appearing as it were, like emanations of his
power. All this it was that may have urged our serious Beethoven, who
could so unerringly distinguish between the true and the false, the
great and the little, to go up to the boy at the close of that concert
of April 13, 1823, embrace and kiss him.

It was a difficult matter to get the old master out to such a concert.
His ill health, deafness and many other troubles had kept him from
the public many years. He was moreover restrained by his aversion
to prodigies, who were all the rage at that time, and by his fixed
displeasure with Czerny, some of whose works were certainly noble, and
yet they had not kept him from the faults of a frivolous virtuosity.
At last the persuasion of his friends, his own good-heartedness and
interest in art prevailed, as they wrote to him the boy and himself
were in the same situation which he and Mozart had occupied in their
youth. “The presence of the renowned composer, far from intimidating
the boy, increased his imaginative power,” says the account. It also
expressly mentions that Beethoven encouraged him, but in that reserved
manner which was characteristic of him in his last years, and which was
ascribed either to his personal circumstances or to his great sorrow
about his deafness. Beethoven’s life is to-day fully revealed to us
in the firm assurance of his spiritual condition in these last years,
when the Ninth Symphony begins with its “Ode to Joy.” It may be found
set forth in its historical connection in the book: “Beethoven, Liszt,
Wagner.” Thus the young Liszt started upon his way in the great world,
consecrated by the kiss of the freest poetical spirit in his art.

The next move was to Paris, which at that time, indeed, was the most
important place in the world for artistic, and above all musical
productivity. Besides, as the opportunity for full musical development
was wanting in Vienna, since Beethoven himself was no longer active
in such matters, it seemed best to apply to the Paris Conservatory,
at that time under the world-renowned Cherubini. “The boy was pleased
with the excellent receipts,” says our last concert report, and their
means for the journey were soon increased in Munich, where he succeeded
in rivaling the very eminent Moscheles, and heard himself called “the
second Mozart.” It was the same also at Stuttgart. Then they went to
Paris.

“The two strangers made application to Cherubini, with letters of
recommendation from Prince Metternich,” says a Parisian sketch. He met
them with the reply: “A foreigner can not enter the Conservatory!” The
Director forgot that he himself was an Italian. The disappointed father
fell into despair. Had he then risked his very existence on the hope of
the complete artistic development of his son?

Meanwhile his hope for the success and artistic perfection of the boy
was at last gratified. The public and the friends of the noble art
itself supplied the place of a narrow-minded and envious clique and
became father and godfather alike to this true “wonder-child” of the
nineteenth century, of whom one account aptly says: “We believe that no
other contemporary has created so profusely or reflected so faithfully
his varied acquirements as he.” They were next summoned to the Palais
Royal. It was on New Year’s, 1824. The boy charmed every one. The Duke
of Orleans, afterwards King Louis Philippe, in his delight bade him ask
for any gift he liked. “This harlequin,” cried the boy, and pointed to
a beautiful automaton hanging on the wall.

This incident, as in the case of Mozart, illustrates the utter
unselfishness of the real artist, who continually gave and desired
nothing for himself. These frank, manly traits, like the incomparable
genius of the boy, who was no longer a boy, powerfully affected
every one within his circle. The biography of his youth tells us his
sensibility was as perceptible as it was attractive to every one.

A year passed, and the young Liszt became in the mean time, so to
speak, the plaything of all the ladies of Paris. Everywhere he was
caressed and fondled. His roguish tricks and pranks, his whims and
caprices were all observed and told over and over. Every one was
delighted. Scarcely thirteen years of age, he had awakened love,
aroused envy, kindled enmity. All were attracted to him and were
completely infatuated with him.

This sudden conquest of the leading society of the Europe of that
day, which was noted in the public prints, may be found more amply
detailed in the volume, “Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner.” Heaven must have
remarkably endowed that extraordinary child, who at the age of twelve
was without a rival, and that too in an art in which he accomplished
and understood what no mortal could boast to have produced of himself.
The “genius for performance,” whose sources we have sought to locate,
without, however, the skill to disclose their lowest depths, since they
lie in that combination of the freest and most individual power, as
applied to universal individuality and to the artistic, which we call
“genius”--this unsurpassed skill of performance was so irresistibly
overwhelming at that time, for example upon an actor like Talma, that
one evening in the Italian theatre, while they rushed around the boy
from all the boxes, he threw his arms about him and embraced him so
closely, that the poor little fellow had great difficulty in releasing
himself so that he could see his enthusiastic friends. It was developed
to its ultimate perfection by the continuous and hearty recognition
of his gifts by a great and sympathetic public in France and England.
His face more and more assumed the likeness of an Apollo, with the
types of the two royal animals, the lion and the eagle, as we observe
in an excellent picture of him in his youth. In his playing he also
resembled that Pythian deity, who in the glowing embrace of the proud
Muse disclosed her hidden secret and threw the world into rapturous
amazement.

It was Paganini who had the first and most decisive influence upon the
unapproachable playing of the young artist. It was the language of
unfathomable nature, the same which he had heard among the gypsies,
but translated into the higher language of genius, without which the
superhuman, which is so mysteriously throned in our deeper natures,
would remain unexpressed. It was in the year 1831 that this hero of
violinists appeared in Paris, and carried everything before him with
his concerts. The most inconceivable difficulties were overcome in
his consummate achievements and seemed to be the essential methods of
expressing particular emotions, like those of the deepest sorrow or the
most extravagant humor. Liszt, at that time in his nineteenth year,
was touched to his inmost soul by this playing. “He became convinced,”
says a contemporary musical writer, “it was only through new and
unusual means that a large audience could be roused into unexampled
enthusiasm, and that the same methods could be applied to the piano,
which had been used with the violin. He determined to become the
Paganini of the piano. That he became even greater, we now know. We
close these preludes of his life with some little known accounts of
these first reproductive periods.”

In that excellent Parisian musical journal, to which Liszt himself
contributed many years, the following appeared in 1834, when he was in
his twenty-second year: “His playing is his language, his soul. It is
the very poetical essence of all the impressions he has felt, of all
that have captivated him. These impressions, which in all likelihood he
could not render in language, and express in clear and precise ideas,
he reproduced in their full meaning, with an accurate skill, a natural
power, an energy of feeling and a charming grace, which have never been
equaled. At one time his art is passive, an instrument, an echo; it
expresses and interprets. At another it is active again; it speaks. It
is the organ which he uses for the development of his ideas. Hence it
is that Liszt’s playing is not a mechanical, material exercise, but
much more than this, in the genuine sense a composition, a successful
creation of art.”

The details of his performances are then noted, as for instance, that
in the Weber “Concert-Stueck” he drowned a tutti of the orchestra
with his piano and its thunder overpowered the hundred voices of its
instruments and the thousand-fold bravas which rang through the hall
at that instant. “How is it that we feel a sudden and irresistible
pressure in the breast and a stoppage of the breath as soon as Liszt
sits down to the piano to play the simplest thing, a capriccio, a
waltz, an etude of Cramer, Chopin or Moscheles,” wonderingly asks
this admirer. Then he refers to his playing of Beethoven’s music.
“Beethoven is a divinity to Liszt, before whom he bows his head.
He regards him as a savior whose advent in the world through the
freedom of poetical thought has been signalized by his annihilation of
superannuated practices. You must hear him while he plays one of those
melodious poems which are distinguished by the commonly accepted name
of sonata. You must see his eyes when he raises them as if to receive
an inspiration from above, and when again he lowers them sadly to the
earth. You must see him, hear him, and--be silent. For here you feel
only too well how feeble is any expression of admiration.”

About the same time appeared a very considerate German account in
Robert Schumann’s musical paper. “In Paris they did not have much
faith in the young artist’s talent for composing or originating ideas,
but on the other hand credited him with divining the thoughts of the
great masters by his perceptions and study. So far as his playing was
concerned, they could only use the expression, ‘marvelous.’ He plays
with unrivaled facility and purity, elegantly, tenderly and with fire.
He carries the listener along with him and often makes him fear that he
will not hold out. It is related that at the close of one day, after
a too continuous and lavish display of his vigor and power, he was
exhausted by weariness. He triumphs over all, only he can not conquer
his nerves, which I fear, will conquer him,” says our countryman in
conclusion. “In a word, you behold an immensely nervous man who plays
the piano immensely.”

The world knows to-day, by hundreds and hundreds of his victorious
achievements, that by the “ideality of his personal presence” as well
as by the fascinating and magical beauty of his playing, he has marched
through the world like another Alexander the Great, and that it yielded
not merely to the purest enjoyment of human nature but to the highest
possible proofs of truth and beauty--brother and sister to each other
as it were, yet in our inmost being they are one.




CHAPTER II.

DIVERTISSEMENTS HONGROIS.

  The Power of Music--Its Origin and Influence--Relation
    to Nature--Bach, Mozart and Beethoven--Sources of their
    Inspiration--Autobiographical Sketch--Liszt as a Lad--His Voluntary
    Exile--Revival of the Home Feeling--His Love of Nature--Religious
    Feeling--The Gypsies--A Famous Visit to them--Picturesque
    Surroundings--Wild Dances--Talks with the Old Men--The Gypsy
    Hags--An Impromptu Orchestra and Wonderful Music--A Weird Night
    Scene--Salvator Rosa Effects--Grotesque Cavalcade--The Concert at
    the Inn--A Demoniac Symphony--Wild Revel in a Thunder Storm--Liszt’s
    Hungarian Music.


The work of artistic genius will always remain an enigma to be silently
admired by us, like the incomprehensible and creative phenomena of
nature, of which it is, by its very essence, a part and a speaking
likeness. Transporting the whole nature and again rousing a secret awe
in the presence of its mysterious power, which like nature itself,
knows neither good nor evil, deliciously reveling in a flood of
light, as when the first morning of creation revealed the boundless
fullness of its form, and again filling one with fear and dread of the
overpowering immeasurability and the mysterious depths of the original
creative power--with such varied emotions this creative force of genius
fills us, especially in music, when it confronts us almost face to
face with the sense of that secret incomprehensible world-force which,
endlessly destroying, creates again and creates only to destroy.

Whence comes the power to a single individual which subdues millions
of hearts, which for centuries has dictated the laws of thought and
feeling, which seems even to broaden the limits of creation, while it
produces pictures and images which were not pre-existent? Is it not the
same with the images of tragic poetry? Does it not, like the antique,
live an imperishable life by the side of and yet above humanity? Do not
these melodies of Mozart and Beethoven give us a new and different view
of our kind, and does not the mighty Leipsic cantor, Sebastian Bach,
construct a dome of mere tones which is a part of the plan and order
of the universe we call the cosmos, a tangible and perceptible mental
structure, as apparent as the everlasting abode of Deity?

Whence comes, we repeat, this incomprehensible power, this knowledge
we are almost inclined to regard as something unprecedented and
impossible? Is it an accident of natural endowment, a mysterious inner
combination of powers, which have no connection with the customary
mental processes but expand and work in a time and place which we must
consciously recollect in order to comprehend the designated results of
its immeasurable creative power?

The higher spiritual perceptions in their widest development must
spread out before the poetical genius ere he can collect the beams
which make a new sun-life for the world. Homer and Sophocles, like
Shakespeare and Goethe, in their overpowering creations, represent a
new world-period in the growth of humanity, and Beethoven well knew
what he said when in a letter to Bettina he called the great, that is,
the true poet, “the most precious treasure of a nation.” The highest
flights of the plastic perceptions, combined with the objective results
of technical skill through long generations, at last make possible
the appearance of a Phidias and a Raphael. Who has fully comprehended
that grand musical architect, Sebastian Bach, who looks down from the
true heights of humanity on a whole generation of spirits who lived
and thought in that other world, in which the very creation seemed
to repeat itself through mere ethereal tone-vibrations, nay more, a
creation was fashioned having nothing to do with the other world, and,
if one may credit the bold hypotheses of the philosophers, able to
exist without it.

And Mozart! Can we fancy an existence in which the tenderest graces
of life bloom like roses and violets without a development of those
sources in the human breast in their endless breadth and ineffable
depth and reaching their full maturity, from which melody flows and in
which the eternal power of creation reveals itself like the reason in
idea and word? And then, Beethoven! Deeply concealed, world-pervading
and far-reaching influences must have preceded the supernatural power
of volition and inspiration, before such a phenomenon could appear and
like a new solar system enter the firmament which seems already opened
for him. Had we not these remote and world-old proofs of this highest
human inspiration preceding all culture--did we not know the deeds,
did we not possess the songs of our mighty ancestors which sing them,
were it not for these known and observed influences, a phenomenon like
Beethoven could not be comprehended. As he sprang from the old lower
Germany, there was revealed in him the undaunted hero-spirit of the
earlier ages, which in its struggle with foreign popular forms upheld
its independence and fitted it to help prepare a new and higher culture
for the world.

Let us now observe the source and career of a still further fragment
of a similarly overwhelming artistic phenomenon which leads us nearer
to the source of its wonderful success, and by the recognition of the
intimate union of the mysteriously working forces of nature with the
understanding, enables us to clearly comprehend what needs to be made
clear to the senses when it is brought before them in the master’s
playing and creation.

In the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” of the year 1838, there is a letter
of his which gives us his impressions of his revisit to his Hungarian
home. We learn from it that Hungary had been and continued to be a
home to this genius whose cosmopolitan art, as well as his rare
international culture, seemed to render any distinctive national life
unnecessary.

Nearly fifteen years ago, this letter says,--it dated in reality from
1821, and was thus more than seventeen--the father forsook his peaceful
abode to go out into the world with him, and exchange the simple
freedom of country life for the brilliant career of the artist. France
at once appeared to him the most fitting sphere for the development of
his genius, as he in his simple pride denominated his son’s musical
talent. He thoughtfully describes that important period from his
fifteenth to his twenty-fifth year, which he had passed in Paris, and
which for the time had caused him to forget his home, and to regard
France as his fatherland. People, things, events and places powerfully
affect his ideas. He says that a flood of radiance streams from his
heart. The absolute necessity of loving is so strong in his nature that
a little part of himself goes out to everything that is near him. He
is disquieted by the tumult of his own emotions. He does not actually
live; he merely strives for life. He is full of curiosity, longing
and restless desire. A continuous ebb and flow of contending emotions
surges through him. He exhausts himself in a labyrinth of confused
longings and passions. He can only regard with pity everything simple,
slight and natural. He oversteps all bounds, boldly searches after
difficulties and the good things which he might do, the feelings which
might be a blessing to him he considers scarcely of any value. In a
word he is mercilessly tortured with these thorns of youth.

The soil of France, where he passed this time of feverish strife, of
wasted powers, of energetic but perverted life-vigor, received the
mortal remains of his father. There was his grave--the holy place of
his first sorrow. “How could I help regarding myself as the child of a
country in which I loved and suffered so much,” said he.

And yet there is a still more sacred home than the one where we have
had our first personal experiences and appreciations. It is the place
of our birth, where our earliest feelings and emotions impressed
us. Speaking of this longing for home, he says: “On one occasion an
accident aroused the feeling which had only slumbered, while I thought
it lost.” One morning in Venice he read a description of the calamity
which an inundation had caused in the capital of his fatherland. “Their
misfortune affected me deeply and I was impelled by an irresistible
longing to help the unfortunate sufferers,” he says. “But how could I
help, I, who possessed neither the means, the money nor the influence
which power confers? ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘I will find no rest for the
heart, no sleep for the eyes until I have contributed my little mite
for the relief of so great a need. Heaven will bless the artist’s
penny as much as the millionaire’s gold.’” In such a mood, the real
import of the word, “Fatherland,” suddenly became clear to him. “My
memory reverted to the past. I looked into myself and discovered with
ineffable delight, pure and without blemish, all the treasures of
childhood’s recollections.”

He then gives a description of Raiding, his birthplace, accompanied
with the warmest and heartiest praise of Hungary and its people. To
them, though of older stock, belong the gypsies, apparently the most
scattered and wasted of all people on earth, and yet a homogeneous
race which more than all others has its own peculiar gift and has
given it to the world as its contribution to the aggregate of human
culture--the gypsy music.

Young Liszt, “Ferencz,”[A] like them, was also a musician in the
sense that nothing in the world could transcend in his estimation
such a soul-possession, while he, and perhaps he alone, could fully
realize that blessing which is the holiest thing to men and which is
born spontaneously in all its perfection and purity, of this art of
tone--Religion. Liszt knew this unfortunately-fortunate wandering
people. With their music they had first revealed to his soul that
deep supernal world, as we above characterized their music. Out of
the passionate stir of all the mental powers as well as of pleasure
in their impetuous rhythms had come to him the irrepressible longing
for a purer and higher mental expression which resounded in their
gypsy melodies like the soul-lament of the world. He had experienced
and realized that to him, as to the gypsies, music was an All, a
hold upon life itself scarcely weaker than the natural bonds of the
closest human intimacy or of the love of children and parents. He knew,
that to this miserable people, without home or place, without social
affiliations or culture, even without religion, this spontaneous art of
music was all that the world offers beyond mere nature and her gifts,
culture and customs. It was to them those higher thoughts and deeper
emotions of human life we call religion and God himself.

As a boy he had realized the expiation which must be made for the
attainment of such a spiritual condition. He had heard these tones
rising from the lowest depths of a mysterious being and pervading
his earliest emotions with all the energy of a heart full of the
inexhaustible power of youth, and he had felt himself alternating
between rapture and sorrow, between tears and delight, between pride
and desire, the plaything of those uncomprehended and eternal powers
which nevertheless are the source and essence of life. For years he
had acquired and exercised in the great world that immense skill
which complete devotion to an external object secures. He was deeply
absorbed as well as passionately delighted, as his hands rested upon
the keys, as his spirit floated in tones, as his eyes were full of a
higher delight in the sight of a world transcending the senses, as his
breast heaved with the unaccustomed fullness of the impressions of such
feelings and of such a spectacle, and he fully shared the boundless and
enthusiastic impressions which his art, his magical playing exercised.
All this he had realized a hundred-fold. Why then should his heart
not beat when he saw the gypsies again and when he heard again those
tones which, so to speak, had summoned him to life? For his life was
and is yet only music, and these gypsy melodies are, as it were, the
soul of the country to which above all other countries of the world
they peculiarly belong. It was this country which first appreciated
this music, for Hungary or a Magyar festival without it, is no Hungary,
no festival. The gypsies and their music are like another and ideal
fatherland in that of Hungary, the most sadly longing as well as the
most deliriously passionate expression of its national existence.

Liszt, unquestionably the greatest son which this Hungary has yet
produced, has paid a tribute to that race, the gypsies, apparently the
weakest of all earth’s people, which with conscientious fidelity tells
the story of what they really are and what he himself owes to them. The
description of his Hungarian fatherland, of his beloved countrymen, and
then of the manner of life and ideas of those restless wanderers, their
mysterious origin and still more mysterious endurance as a people, the
mystery of their moral duration, if one may so call it, in all their
outward change and constant privation, the atmosphere of poetry, or
of the actual world-spirit, as one might say, which surrounds them,
as it does all the simple products of nature--all this one must read
in the volume, “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary.” For tender
love, delicate observation, faithful portraiture, deep intellectual
perception, ethical criticism and genuine poetico-ideal clearness, one
can find no parallel to the manner in which he has described for us
this apparently God and world-forsaken people, maintaining their right
to exist. It is a beautiful heart and soul-tribute which the great
artist has paid them.

One part of this volume, his visit to the gypsies, confirms in every
particular what we have said above of the influence of their art upon
him, and of the divine, free inspiration and untrammeled genius of
music as the direct outcome of the primitive force of the world itself.
We shall let our volume tell the story. It is a variegated picture,
and as Salvator Rosa among the robbers is once said to have studied
the absolute unrestraint and individuality of their natural life, and
the consequent incomparable variety of character and characteristics
of landscape, figures, groups, costumes, colors and forms, so we shall
find in this highly colored picture at least one of the numerous germs
and shoots which, in Liszt, developed into such a strong and vigorous
tree. From these genuine children of nature he acquired at least the
one indispensable element of all art-creation, a complete freedom and
absolute consecration of the entire nature to it.

Liszt relates that on his first return to Hungary, in the summer of
1838, he wished to refresh his youthful recollections with some of
their liveliest impressions, and to see again these gypsy bands in the
woods and fields, in the picturesque promiscuity of their marches and
halting-places, with all the contrast of the union of ages, passions
and varying moods, free from any conventional gloss or mask, rather
than in the stifled city streets, whose dust they gladly shake off,
preferring to wound their feet with the thorns and stubble of the
heath than with the rough pavements. “I visited them in their outdoor
kingdom, slept with them under the open heavens, played with the
children, made presents to the maidens, gossiped with their rulers
and chiefs, listened at concerts given to gratuitous audiences, by a
hearth-fire whose place chance determined.” Salvator Rosa among the
robbers! Thereupon follows a description which strikingly contrasts
the extreme naturalness of these wandering hordes with the splendor of
cities, particularly of the world-ruling Paris, and with the education
and polish of the child of the salon, who was nevertheless an artist,
and who could say of himself: “Afterwards I became myself a wandering
virtuoso in my fatherland, like them. I was, like them, a stranger to
the people. Like them, I pursued my ideal in a complete devotion to art
if not to nature.”

Stretched out upon the close, crisp fleeces of their lamb skin mantles,
out of which they prepare a couch of honor resting upon freshly plucked
and fragrant flowers, before it a row of lofty ash trees, whose
wide-spread branches seemed to support the blue sky, stretched out like
a broad pavilion and ornamented with curtains of vapory clouds, at his
feet a mossy turf, sprinkled with the brightest meadow-flowers, like
those tapestries of the Mexican Caciques, he spent hours listening to
one of the best of the gypsy orchestras, whose playing was animated by
the beauty of the summer day and the abundance of its favorite drink,
and accompanied with indescribable ardor the dances of their women,
who shook their tamborines with gentle cries and fascinating gestures.
During the intervals of rest, so he says, he heard the creaking of the
poorly greased axles of their wagons, which had been removed to one
side to leave more room for the dancers and the huzzas of the boys
in their own jargon, which the musicians politely translated into
“Elyen Liszt Ferencz” or “hurrah for Franz Liszt.” Then came shouts
of delight at sight of a meal, composed of meat and honey, a noisy
cracking of nuts by white-toothed children, and bright laughter, mad
leaps, somersaults and a wild whirl and bustle--a genuine lyric of
untamed nature and caprice. Actual battles were fought over favorite
delicacies, such as some sacks of peas, around which tattered Megaras
with disheveled hair, bleared eyes, toothless jaws, hands trembling
like aspen leaves, danced incredible sarabands for these gifts which
promised to satisfy their greediness. The men to whom he had given
beautiful horses, laughingly showed their dazzling teeth and cracked
their finger-joints like castanets, threw their caps high in air,
strutted about like peacocks and then commenced the fiery rhythms
of their dances with a vigor which soon became a frenzy and at last
reached that delirious whirl which forms the culminating point of the
ecstacy of the dervish dances. Truly a tempting bit for the brush of
a genuine Netherlander, but can any one paint their music as well?
We shall see, but we will first continue the narrative which leads
us to the very verge of this singular, unrestrained and apparently
purposeless nomadic existence.

He conversed for a long time with the old men of the tribe and besought
them to tell him some of their experiences from their own recalling.
Their memory, however, did not extend beyond the limits of the living
generation and he was obliged to help them in recalling the course of
events so that they could keep them in regular order. Once they have
secured the thread of a story, so this close observer informs us, they
experience extraordinary pleasure and seem to regain, in all their
original freshness, feelings which have been long concealed under later
impressions. The less frequently this occurs, however, the greater is
the delight with which they again sound the strains of the old time
and with growing enthusiasm, often with a bizarre kind of poetry, and
with imagery tinted with a constantly increasing oriental glow, they
describe the scenes which they have drawn from their recollections.

The description itself was only the expression of momentary and
accidental passion, not of a well considered purpose or regularly
developed plan, hence these impetuous, unrestrained, unsubdued
impulses make dissimulation unnecessary. The originality of the
occurrence consists chiefly in the more or less energetic or fanciful
passion of the hero who accompanies it with impromptu accessories.
The remarkable simplicity of these natural relations prevents that
sequence of events, that change of circumstances, that development
of the emotions like germinating seeds, which in their maturity are
turning points in our destiny. Too quick, prompt and self-willed for
patience or perseverance, they as quickly seize what they desire; they
take swift revenge for any assault; sometimes, like a wounded animal,
they bear away the shaft that has pierced them and to conceal their
wounds forsake their tribe. Our narrator further mentions that they
observe a haughty and timid silence, a feeling of manly shame, as
it were, about their own feelings, and speaking of their companions
they only allude to the dead or the faithless, and a word, a nod of
the head or a gesture suffices for all they have to say. Thus Liszt
could obtain only individual adventures in love-intrigues, strife and
crafty tricks, and in these the most important thing, namely, the part
played by the principal himself and the controlling passion at work,
were persistently and regularly concealed, and yet in spite of all the
craftiness which the necessity of procuring alms has taught them they
manifest a very poetical sense in picturing the scenes of which they
were witnesses, so much so indeed, that the little narratives “can be
strung upon the same thread, like pearls of the same color.”

The picture becomes gayer and more animated when he returns to his
friends the second time. It was on those same plains of the Oedenburg
county where he was born. He had not forgotten his old hosts and they
still thought well of him also, for when he left the plain old church,
after the mass, where he had prayed so fervently as a child, in which
all his neighbors had loudly sung in honor of this same boy, who, the
good dames of the village prophesied, would come back in “a carriage
of glass,” that is, in a glistening equipage, a great crowd of gypsies
swarmed about him and received him with every manifestation of joy and
delight, prepared to do him honor.

Their orchestra was soon ready in a neighboring oak-grove. Barrels
placed on end and covered with boards formed a table and around it
“Roman couches” were made of stacks of hay, one of them a genuine
throne of thyme, butterfly-shaped flowers, flax blooms in elegant
half-mourning, anemones in white tunics, wild mallows, cornflowers,
irises, and golden bells, a “flowery mound fit to offer to Titania.”
Nightshades, with their broad, shield-shaped leaves spread a colossal
fan about the rural festival. And then follows a description of nature,
the counterpart of which may be found in music: “Bees, attracted by
the fragrance of the fresh hay, forsook their hives in the neighboring
tree-trunks by swarms. Crickets chirped in the rye and wheat fields.
Hornets and wasps buzzed their contralto. The dragon-flies came in
flights with a whirr like the rustling of taffeta robes. The quails
and larks sang. The frightened sparrows called out. The little emerald
frogs croaked among the rushes of the brook and a whole swarm of
shelterless insects flew about us with the most confused sounds. What
polyphony! What ethereal music! What smorzandos on organ points! All
this must have floated before Berlioz when he composed the ‘Dance of
the Sylphs.’” But, say we, such a picture of the surprisingly varied
activity of creative nature must have filled the daring and at all
times active fancy of the same artist who quickly makes the living
human heart, with all its foolish pride and restless longings, realize
“the pain and pangs of almighty nature,” as he terms it, with an effect
as wonderfully vivid as only a Salvator Rosa or a Ruysdael could paint
it. Farther on we have a genuine Inferno in mere word-pictures.

“Night came before they were weary. To light up the darkness a dozen
pitch torches blazed in a circle. The flames arose like cylinders of
glowing iron, for not a breath stirred the atmosphere laden with heat
and the fragrance of invisible aromatic herbs that had been mowed down
in the morning. To our half-closed dreamy eyes the torches appeared
like columns supporting the dark canopy of the heavens. The smoke
wavered in the air, now concealing and anon revealing the golden stars.
The darkness was like a solid wall around a fantastic wood palace,
while the gnarled tree-trunks with their curiously twisted branches
stood out like statuary. The children leaped about like gnomes and
stripped the bushes. The scene constantly grew more strange and
fantastic. The women appeared like specters when they suddenly emerged
from some dark corner with eyes gleaming like coals and with magical
beckoning hands to tell us our ‘good fortune.’ That evening the phrase
was not a meaningless one.” As a happy close, one of those humorous
scenes occurred which are never wanting among the children of simple
nature.

“On the next morning, the men would not hear of an immediate
separation, and gave us their company as protectors, some on horseback,
some running on foot, to the nearest village. The closeness of the day
before was followed by a rain storm but they refreshed themselves with
parting drinks and glowed with delight, rejoicing in the fitful rushes
of the rain. In their turned lamb’s skins they looked like bears on
raging steeds, for they spurred their horses so furiously that they
leaped about like carps. The abandon of these people, could scarcely
be kept within bounds any longer. They reached a tavern not far off,
and here this extraordinary carnival came to an end with a morning
serenade under a huge shed, and pretending that it did not rain, the
symphony began with an animated flourish, _con estro poetico_, but the
circulating morning’s wine and the liquor of the day before infused
them with fresh vigor and soon led to a _rinforzado con rabbia_. The
thunder growled in the distance like a continuous bass. The high beams
and the half-fallen walls of the shed gave back such an echo that every
sound struck upon the ear with redoubled power. Passionate passages and
feats of virtuosity followed each other and were confusedly mixed. This
musical morning roar was rent into tatters of tones, and in the stormy
finale it seemed as if all the sounds were piled upon each other like
a mountain ridge. One could hardly tell whether the old building had
not tumbled in, so deafening was the instrumentation of this concert,
which certainly would not have received a favorable verdict from any
conservatory, and which I myself must declare was somewhat daring.”
With this spirited description, this vigorous picture of life closes.

But what is all this in comparison with the effect when the artist
takes his own pencil and depicts these scenes in music, the spirit
of which re-echoes them all. When Salvator Rosa dashes off his
passionately excited scenes from nature, his bold conceptions of bandit
characteristics, and other weird pictures of outdoor life and its
accessories, as if they were living figures passing before us, we can
not help realizing that he must have actually lived among the robbers.
The artist has given us his own account of this unpolluted nature and
her children. Our musical picture-gallery has been remarkably enriched
with his “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” in which he has successfully painted
in tones all that life which he has sketched in words and thus has
preserved it to the world of art. The “Hungarian Fantasy,” for piano
and orchestra, and the stately symphonic poem, “Hungaria,” give us a
memorial picture of this animated Hungarian life, so full of strange
power and extreme contrasts, with which also, in this regard, the
nature-world of the gypsies was fully identified. It was important to
give a definite description of it, for it seems in this connection
above all else necessary to furnish the details and essentials of a
music, which, in contrast with our European musical creations in their
accepted forms, is a world in itself, in harmony, rhythm, melody and
instrumentation, and one which we recognize as wonderfully fanciful and
rich in color and yet full of the germs of life. Did we not possess
the inimitable magic of that web of nature in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer
Night’s Dream,” we should declare that in the artistic presentation of
the wonderful poetry of absolute nature, these works of Liszt, based
upon the gypsy music, were the most poetical of all. At all events, by
the side of these picturesque, genre pictures, they suffer but little
in power, delicacy and reality, and we may call them studies made
directly from nature.




CHAPTER III.

CAPRICCIOSO.

  Untamable Animals and Men--An Interesting Test--Attempt to Refine a
    Gypsy--The Boy Josy--Bought from the Gypsies--His Advent in Liszt’s
    Salon--Thalberg’s Astonishment--Adopted by the Master--Attempts to
    Educate him--A Hopeless Task--Josy becomes a Fop--His Insolence and
    Conceit--Liszt Despondent--Josy goes to the Conservatory--Worse and
    Worse--Sent to the Black Forest--No better--Liszt’s Encounter with
    a Traveling Band--Josy’s Brother Intercedes for his Return--Liszt
    Consents--Great Joy--Josy Settles at Debrezin--Violinist in a Gypsy
    Band--Letter to Liszt--His Love and Devotion.


It is well known that there are animals who are never tamable for any
length of time and it is none the less interesting to know that an
untamableness of nature just as absolute is a human characteristic,
and belongs to beings of our own kind, who inconsistently throw
away all the benefactions and blessings of a fixed existence and
culture, content to secure the inexhaustible bounty of nature and
enjoy the simplest form of human existence. It is that people “which
draws water from every stream of earth and eats bread from all its
furrows.” Liszt, who had found the way to them by his earnest desire
to witness their actual life, has given us an illustration of this
feature of their untamableness and contempt for all our blessings of
culture, which, when closely considered, leads us to reflect upon the
real nature of _our_ culture. In parts it is very amusing and again
it is almost pathetically humorous, revealing to us the nature of
human existence in all its varying moods. We may observe this from
a psychological standpoint and thus save ourselves the necessity of
character-description.

Would not continual kindness of treatment at last overcome this innate
wantonness of the gypsy nature? Might not one by carefully fostering
their music, that exotic plant, that special gift of theirs, so
brilliant in its first radiance, develop it to a fuller growth in the
atmosphere of civilization and improve its beauty? These were the
questions which for a long time had impressed themselves upon the manly
feelings and the kindly spirit of the great artist, as well as upon his
deep concern for and earnest sympathy with all true and genuine things
and with the immortal nature of all the spontaneous outgrowths of his
art.

It was in Paris, about the beginning of 1840, and at a time also
when Liszt’s attention was not much given to the gypsies, that one
morning his dear friend, Count Sandor Teleky, came in, accompanied by
a twelve-year-old lad, in a hussar jacket and broad laced trowsers,
with dark brown complexion, wildly waving hair, a bold look, and a
demeanor as haughty as if he were about to challenge all the kings of
the world. He had a violin in his hands. “See,” said the Count, as he
pushed the lad toward him by the shoulders, “I bring you a present.”
Great was the astonishment of all the guests at a scene so strange for
Frenchmen to witness. Among these guests was that great artist, who
was at that time, notwithstanding Liszt’s abilities, called in Paris,
“the greatest,” until one who had closely watched the rivalry between
them settled it in a word: “Thalberg is the first but Liszt is the
only one.” It was Thalberg who could not refrain from asking what he
intended to do with this gift.

Liszt himself was surprised. He had not thought for a long time of the
wish he had expressed, when in Hungary, of finding a young gypsy with
a talent for the violin which he might further develop, but he guessed
as soon as he looked upon this slim, nervous and evidently quarrelsome
little being that his desire for a young “Cygan” and countryman
had been gratified. In fact, the Count on leaving Hungary had left
instructions on his estates, since they had sought in vain while he
was there, that in the event of finding such a young man he should be
sent direct to Paris. The impetuous youngster, whom he now introduced
to Liszt, had been discovered a short time before on his possessions,
and had been purchased and forwarded to him as a token of friendly
affection.

Liszt kept the boy continually near him and naturally took keen
pleasure in watching the development of his emotions and humors amid
his new surroundings. Insolence was the strongest characteristic of
his nature, and it displayed itself in the most diverse ways, by a
thousand naive and childish frivolities. To steal out of greediness, to
continually hug the women, to break every object whose mechanism he did
not understand, were very inconvenient but natural faults which might
have corrected themselves. It was not easy, however, to deal with
them as they continually broke out in new directions. In these circles
which included acute psychological observers, like Balzac and George
Sand, “Josy” soon became a little lion and his private concerts kept
his purse well filled. The money which came in so abundantly he flung
away recklessly and with all the prodigality of a magnate. The first
object of his attention was the adorning of his own little person. His
coquetry was beyond belief and even went so far as affected vanity.
He must always have plenty of beautiful little canes, breast-pins and
watch-chains by him, and of various kinds. His cravats and vests could
not be too showy in colors and no hair-dresser was too good to curl his
locks. To become an Adonis was the great problem of his existence, but
in his attempt to solve it, one pang gnawed at his heart and poisoned
his peace. In contrast with those about him, his complexion was so
brown and yellow! He thought that by the active application of soap
and oil, such as he had seen employed with great success in acquiring
that enviable possession, a beautiful color, he could overcome his
misfortunes, and he continually provided himself with them. He visited
the best shops and bought everything he thought would answer for that
purpose, always throwing down five franc pieces, for he was much too
fine a gentleman to take any change.

It soon became impossible to do anything with him. In all the friendly
circles of his adopted father, he swelled about, a full flown dandy.
On the eve of taking his journey to Spain, Liszt gave him over to
the violin professor of the Paris Conservatory. He promised to give
the utmost attention to his astonishing musical talent, while the
superintendent of a school, in which meanwhile the boy was placed,
undertook to cultivate him mentally and morally. All accounts from
him, however, more and more confirmed Liszt’s doubts of the success of
these educational schemes. In music it was specially useless to try and
keep him within any practical bounds. He had the utmost contempt for
everything that he did not know, and without directly asserting it, in
his own estimation he was convinced of his superiority to everything
about him. Like a genuine “savage” he was interested only in _his own_
pleasures, _his own_ violin and _his own_ music, and had no desire for
anything else.

When Count Teleky brought him in, in his Hungarian gypsy costume, he
had still his own violin. Upon this little wooden shell, poorly glued
together, covered with strings which seemed better adapted for hanging
oneself than for _playing_, he played even then the liveliest dances
with remarkable aplomb and unsurpassed vigor. His perceptions never
failed him and he played very willingly. He could perform for hours
partly by ear and partly improvising and was very reluctant to make use
of the melodies which he had heard among his associates. For the most
part they were dull and insipid to him, but he was very partial to the
melodies which he had heard Liszt play many times, and he would often
regale his own audience with them, ornamenting them, however, in such
a droll fashion that they never failed to set every one in a cheerful
mood. As soon, however, as he was obliged to undertake actual study, he
became refractory and would have nothing to do with it. No one could
convince him that his own methods were not finer than any they could
teach him and he lived in the fullest conviction that he was the victim
of barbarous coercion whenever his teacher in the least complained that
he was unwilling to be instructed by him.

As might have been expected, Liszt soon heard that Josy grew larger but
did not change otherwise; that he made no progress, and that nothing
could be done with him. With his personal weakness for these singular
people, he looked upon the zig-zag letters of the boy which showed the
type of oriental exaggeration, as a proof of his industry. He sent word
to him to meet him in Strasburg. When he first arrived he did not think
of the boy, but when he stepped from his carriage he suddenly felt
a violent hand-shake and was almost suffocated in the embraces of a
strange young man. It took some time before he could recognize in this
elegant young gentleman, clad in Parisian fashion, his little untamed,
harum-scarum gypsy of the moors. Only the curved nose, the Asiatic eyes
and the dark skin, in spite of all the French cosmetics and soaps,
were the same. The self-conceit also was left, for when Liszt suddenly
exclaimed: “Why, Josy, you look like a young gentleman,” not in the
least disconcerted and with the mien of an hidalgo, he replied, “Yes,
because I am one.” In his new costume he also preserved his lofty
style and grandeur of demeanor, and after that it was difficult for
the “father” to believe that the inflexible gypsy nature could be
restrained within the limits of civilization and keep a designated
course. Still he would not allow his convictions to defeat his hopes
so soon. He thought that perhaps woods and fields would have a better
influence upon the boy than the great city and he consigned him to an
excellent musician in Germany, on the edge of the Black Forest. This
retreat, which withdrew him from the atmosphere of the great city and
the danger of continual fresh corruption, interfering with the growth
of what little virtuous aptitude he had by nature, Liszt hoped would
lead yet to the amelioration of the wild creature.

Not long after he was in Vienna and heard of a new gypsy band. He
went one evening to the “Zeiferl,” where they played, to see whether
it was worth the trouble to make their acquaintance. Not one of the
company expected to find a face they knew in the band and for that
reason they were surprised at the commotion which Liszt’s entrance
occasioned. A slim young fellow rushed out of the troupe, fell at his
feet and embraced his knees with the most passionate gestures. At the
same instant he was surrounded by the whole troupe, who without further
ado, overwhelmed him by kissing his hand and expressions of gratitude,
of which he did not understand a syllable. After much trouble he
discovered that the one who had thrown himself at his feet with such an
enthusiastic “Elyen Liszt,” was an older brother of Josy’s. He had been
inquiring among Liszt’s friends and related, boasting and sobbing at
the same time, all that had been done for the benefit of the poor sold
boy, which did not prevent him, however, from timidly intimating how
glad they would be to see him and have him again.

The news from his teacher was not satisfactory, so all hope must be
given up of making a rational artist out of this gypsy musician. Liszt
could no longer force an organization which was at utter variance with
the temperament of our society and culture. Will any one contend
that the European world has anything better to offer to such a branch
dissevered from its stem, than the joys of nature, to which our culture
had perhaps gradually made him wholly insensible? So he allowed this
“son of the wilderness” to come to Vienna in order that he might
again join his companions, if he so wished. His rapture at seeing
them was boundless. They feared he would go mad, but the elasticity
of such nerves knows no limits. Although in his foolish moments he
had wished for another complexion he now was conscious that he could
no longer disown his race. No sooner were they reunited than the band
disappeared from the city with the purpose of showing the lost child to
his father again. From the very first moment, Josy had shown himself
more intolerable than ever, and with many passionate expressions of
gratitude begged to be allowed to return at once and forever to his
people. So they parted, after his friends had filled his purse with a
little contribution which the haughty little fellow squandered upon a
colossal banquet given to his brethren in spite of all protestations
and the farewell supper besides, which had been provided for him.

Did he ever see him again, this most perverse of all his countless
scholars, on the edge of the wood, with his violin, smoking, playing or
only dreaming, as Lenau has pictured “the three gypsies?”

Some years later, in 1857, Liszt’s volume made its appearance. A German
translation of it by P. Cornelius appeared in Pesth, in 1861. It
contained a letter from Debrezin, in Hungary, signed: “Sarai Josef, or
the Gypsy Josy in the principal orchestra of Boka Karoly.” A notice of
the volume had appeared in the Debrezin _Sonntagsblatt_, and so Josy
writes the following which shows that culture had had some influence
upon him: “Since I have become the father of a family and acquired a
restful spirit and clear understanding, I reflect with sadness that
in my youth I might have had the good fortune, under Your Highness’
protection and patronage, of an introduction to the great world and of
artistic cultivation, but for my incorrigible perversity and aversion
to all that was noble, elevated and artistic. But it was impossible,
and you are richly rewarded by my own and my brother’s request, since
a worthless gypsy fellow, whom it was impossible to develop into an
artist, is sent home again. In a word, I realize that I have buried my
future, but it could not have been otherwise. But as you openly desire,
at the close of your narrative, to hear something of me, I take this
opportunity to humbly inform you that here in Debrezin, my home, I am
serving as an ordinary gypsy in the orchestra, among my companions, and
am a favorite with the public since I still play the violin tolerably
well.”

He had also married a gypsy of the same place, and the year before had
a son, who was christened with Liszt’s most precious name of Franz.
He says: “I am so bold as to select Your Highness as godfather. We
prolonged the christening with a lively entertainment, pledging the
godfather in a far away foreign land with high swinging cups.” He added
that the most precious recollections of him were impressed upon his
heart and that a portrait of “His Highness,” which he once took away
from Paris with him, should be preserved in his humble abode as long as
he lived and should be consigned to his posterity as a sacred relic.

“Poverty often hangs the soul with rags and leaves it bare of
everything that graces and warms,” says Goethe, but in this case we
see that where nature has no other needs than those which can be
satisfied without trouble, the saying is not true and the appreciation
of a benefit conferred is, so to speak, a higher moral attribute, a
culture in itself. If a want of gratitude be the first sign of liberty
and self-dependence, then this “ordinary gypsy,” Sarai Josy, might
quietly say: “We barbarians are still better men.” Gratitude was the
distinction of his person as that haughtiness which has clung to them
through centuries of misery and privation in all countries of the
world is the distinction of his race. Could culture have given such
a distinction to this Josy? We doubt it and offer as an illustration
the beautiful saying of our great Fichte, in the address to the German
people, that delight in the good is rooted in man. In fact we have
observed it in this Josy. The loss of all the beautiful gifts of
culture did not give him a moment’s concern. That he had “buried his
future” was to him simply a thing that could not have been avoided,
but the spirit of goodness and love which alone can add happiness and
blessing to culture, once experienced by him, was never forgotten.
As long as he lived and even after he was gone, the picture of his
benefactor would be preserved as a “holy relic.” This one incident
reveals to us the real character of our master, who in this respect
inherited the traits of Mozart.




CHAPTER IV.

IMPROMPTU.

  General Characteristics of Liszt--Earnestness of his Art--Its Genial
    Character--His Interest in Life--His Loving Nature--Affection for
    his Parents--Remorse of a Capellmeister--Richard Wagner’s
    Testimony--A Helping Hand in time of Need--His Generosity to
    Wagner--Secures him a Hearing--The Letter to Herr B.--Plans to
    Bring out Wagner’s Works in London--Wagner in
    Despair--Misunderstanding of Liszt--A Personal Appeal and Prompt
    Reply--A Success made in Weimar--Urges Wagner to create a New
    Work--“The Nibelungen”--Wagner’s Tribute at Baireuth.


Better known personally than most of his contemporaries, not so much
by the principles of his artistic movement as by his own personality,
for fifty years all over Europe, admired and courted on account of the
wonderful miracle of his genius, a hundred-fold more on account of
his manners and individuality studied partly for the laudable purpose
of discovering the secret of his overwhelming mastery, partly to
detect the failings of human weakness, the shadow in so much light,
“the dark ray”--what can be said of such a man as Liszt in a general
characterization?

And yet, however well known he may be, in reality, we, his
contemporaries, can know little of such a man, for the reason that we
are now in a position to define the limits of his artistic power. How
long is it since we shrugged our shoulders at the so-called earnest
manner of Mozart when we spoke of him as a man? That he was a genius
no one doubted, but with it was immediately associated the idea of
a light-minded person who was only too glad to drink champagne, or
of a child who did not know how to deal with life, still less with
money, and consequently differed from ordinary people. And yet how his
letters, already in their second edition, have revealed him to us!
That this divinely inspired artist, even in his youthful years, was so
imbued with the seriousness of his art, will surprise that person who
only recognizes the grace of his melodies apart from any idea of human
toil and does not know that they are results achieved by the hardest
labor. That life was so thoroughly beautiful to him, especially in the
pure and manly features of piety and friendship, was due to a lovely
union of the beauty and purity of feeling which alone can disclose to
us the soulfulness of his music. This could only be predicated of one,
who, like Mozart, had actually taken into his soul the very essence of
art. It is manifest in the great variety of his creations as well as in
his correspondence, and particularly in the latter, as in his various
biographies it is only disclosed piecemeal.

And yet that quality of his music which is showered down upon our
spirits like heavenly peace and blessing is a something which far
transcends the beautiful earnestness of a life measured by duty and
brings us to a close perception of the infinite, of those conditions
of life with which marvelous natural endowments and the highest
perfection of intellectual and artistic skill have little to do, and
in which we are forced to recognize the peculiar essence out of which
genius springs and creates. This deep heavenly joy of the spirit which
only seeks the good, and in such wise only as to maintain and cherish
it, how and when it can, not merely to conform his habit and life to
it--this genuine spirit of love which is the essence of industry, of
power, and of the highest and most productive qualities, this strongest
characteristic of Mozart’s nature is due to that spirit of human love
which was characteristic of his South-German home. It is as good a
product of his own peculiarly moral labor as his boundless knowledge
is the result of his industry as an artist. The loving earnestness of
a spirit which embraces all human things alone produces such creations
as Pamina and Sarastro. Every tone of his tells us this, be it in his
joyous songs, in the serene purpose of his life, or in the gracious
promptings of his heart.

Is not Franz Liszt also a child of this Austria, and particularly so
as he still possessed this natural good-heartedness in all its inner
abundance, and had not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge that would
drive him from the Paradise of unconscious, beautiful harmony without
securing in return for it the peace of the conscious and wished-for
reconciliation? His strong attachment to his parents in his youth is
known to us. It is a marked characteristic of his life. The loss of
his father threatened his mental condition. Friendships! How many
letters have been made public which disclose his personal relations in
every stage of development from pleasant acquaintanceship to the most
self-sacrificing friendship of the heart, mostly with artists, that is,
colleagues, even with rivals, to whom he was almost without exception
superior and whom he made happy with his love. Yes, most happy! We once
heard a Hofcapellmeister, who had been induced by a prominent director
of an art institute, now deceased, to practice an imposition on our
master, which drove him away from Weimar, the scene of his activity,
declare with tears in his eyes: “How could I have acted so toward such
a man? I feel it was a crime against myself rather than against him.”
There was no delay between the expectation and the reception of Liszt’s
benefactions. Who, especially among artists, can say that when they
appealed to him he did not speedily help them? And who has not appealed
to him? It has been truthfully said that no sovereign lives who has
lavished his generosity upon his dominions as widely and continuously
as Liszt. Vienna experienced it as well as the city where he lived. The
Beethoven memorial will bear witness to it for posterity, as well as
the one erected in Bonn, in 1845, and the Schiller-Goethe memorial of
1849, at Weimar, which would not have been completed but for Liszt’s
generosity.

One manifestation shows us the greatness and genuineness of the artist,
and its parallel can only be found in the relations of Goethe and
Schiller. What does Richard Wagner, the incomparable, who stands equal
in rank with Liszt in the world of art, say of the days when he had to
leave his fatherland as a fugitive, the victim of infamous persecution?

It was in May, 1849. “On the day when every indication convinced me,
beyond all question, that my personal situation was endangered, I saw
Liszt directing a performance of my ‘Tannhauser,’ and was astonished
at recognizing my second self in his rendering. What I felt when I
invented this music, he felt when he conducted it. What I wanted to
say when I wrote it down, he said when he clothed it in tones,” writes
Wagner, speaking of his short stay in Weimar. One realizes in this
event the climax of his artistic sympathy. Wagner assures us that
with Liszt it sprang from that deepest fountain of life, his true
manly habit and goodness; from his sympathy with actual life and its
influences. He tells us how strange it was that he had in truth found
his “wonderful friend.”

He had made Liszt’s acquaintance in Paris, about the year 1840, at
the very time when, after repeated disappointments, “disheartened and
disgusted,” he had renounced all hope of success and was in a constant
state of internal revolt against the artistic conditions which he found
there and which led him to a completely new career. “When we met, he
struck me as an utter contrast to my own being and circumstances,”
says he. “In this world, in which I had longed to appear and shine,
wherein the midst of my insignificant surroundings I had yearned for
the great, Liszt had grown up from his younger years to become the
general delight and wonder, at a time when I had become so disgusted
with it and with the coldness and lack of sympathy with which it
regarded me, that I could only realize its hollowness and emptiness
with all the bitterness of one repeatedly deceived.” Thus Liszt was
to him at that time “scarcely more than a suspicious phenomenon,” and
he had as yet no opportunity of acquainting the inspired virtuoso with
his own being and working. Thus the first contact of the two artists
was superficial, as might have been expected of a man like Liszt,
to whom every day brought its changeable impressions, while on his
own part, in his half desperate circumstances and condition, Wagner
had not sufficient calmness and fairness to seek for the natural and
simple causes of Liszt’s behavior toward him. He did not go to see him
again, and manifested his aversion by declining to make any closer
acquaintance with him. Liszt was to him as he says, “one of those
beings who are strange and hostile to one’s nature.” Unprecedented and
particularly impossible in a man like Liszt, it was only possible in
the case of a nature like Wagner’s, which had become hard and almost
repulsive through the force of circumstances. But we discover that the
situation cleared itself, and it reveals to us the actual nature of
Liszt himself, in all its greatness.

Wagner, in his openly vehement style, made no concealment of his
feelings toward Liszt, and so it could not fail to happen that
one day he heard what Wagner thought about him. It was at the time
when “Rienzi” was attracting general attention at Dresden and Liszt
had already settled down at Weimar as Hofcapellmeister. Liszt was
astonished to find that he was so violently misunderstood by a man
with whom he was scarcely acquainted, and in 1851, Wagner writes in
his “Communications to my Friends” that when he looks back he is still
greatly moved at the solicitude and actual persistence which Liszt
displayed, and the trouble which he took to change the opinions which
he entertained toward him. He had not even known anything of his works.
He was urged on by the simple wish to remove this accidental want of
harmony between himself and another person, and perhaps also he felt
a delicate misgiving whether he himself might not have unconsciously
injured him. “He who knows,” continues Wagner, “all the disputatious
hardness of human life and the boundless selfishness in all our social
relations, and particularly in the relations of artists to each other,
must be more than astonished when he realizes how I was treated by
that extraordinary man.”

But, he continues, notwithstanding all that had been done, he was yet
to experience the peculiar beauty of Liszt’s gracious and loving nature
in a stronger manifestation. He at last observed these approaches with
actual wonder, and had been inclined to give them still less credit,
now that Liszt’s circumstances had changed and he had come to be a
famous man and the Royal Saxon Hofcapellmeister. Now the actual basis,
the essence, so to speak, of Liszt’s manner of action and demeanor
shows itself for the first time. He had seen “Rienzi,” “and,” says
Wagner, “from every corner of the world, where, in the course of his
artistic career he had communicated with others, I received, now
through this person and now through that, evidences of the restless
ardor of Liszt and of the satisfaction he had experienced in hearing
my music.” This happened at the time when Wagner himself was more
and more losing ground with his dramatic creations. As Liszt had now
settled down quite permanently in Weimar, he made it a matter of prime
importance to establish a new and fixed abode for the creations of
this mistaken and proscribed artist. “Everywhere and always caring for
me, always quickly and decisively helping, when help was necessary,
with an open heart for my every wish, with a self-sacrificing love
for my very self, Liszt was something to me which I had never found
before and in a measure the fullness of which we only comprehend when
it actually embraces us to its full extent.” With this most beautiful
tribute, Wagner describes the circumstance which was so decisive for
him--and who can recall one more beautiful?

In the following year, 1841, in contrast with his own and Wagner’s
self-sacrificing natures, Liszt had publicly accused Paganini, his
greatest rival, of being a “narrow egotist,” and referred to the
“artistic royalty” and even to “the divine service of devotion,” which
elevates genius to a priestly power--that reveals the very souls of men
to their God. He closes with the significant words: “May the artist of
the future with joyful heart renounce a frivolous, egotistical role,
which we hope has found its last brilliant representative in Paganini!
May he fix his goal in and not outside of himself and virtuosity be to
him a means, not an end! May he never forget that, although it is a
customary saying, ‘Noblesse oblige,’ it is a far more honorable saying,
‘Genie oblige.’”

“It must be frankly conceded that Liszt has devoted himself with the
greatest enthusiasm to the laudable task of securing the appreciation
of new works which are unknown or misunderstood and old works which
have been forgotten, as well as of the latest works belonging to the
opposition school,” says a notice of him, written in 1876. “Thus we owe
to Liszt our nearer acquaintance with Berlioz, the introduction of many
unknown works of Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Raff,
Baerwald, Frank in Paris, and other masters, which secured their first
public performance through him.”

There is still further evidence of this in the following letter which
has only recently come to light. It was written in the year 1849,
when Wagner had been compelled to be a fugitive, and was bargaining
for “Lohengrin,” and is addressed to one Herr B., in Paris, but
not Berlioz. “Dear B.,” it says, “Richard Wagner, Capellmeister of
Dresden, has been here since yesterday. He is a man of astonishing
genius, of a _genie si trepantique_, as befits this country, a new and
brilliant appearance in art. Recent events in Dresden have forced him
to a plan in the execution of which I am determined to help him with
all my power. Meanwhile I have had a long interview with him. Listen
to what we have planned and what must be realized from it. First, we
will create a success for some grand, heroic and fascinating music,
the score of which was finished a year ago. Perhaps it will be in
London. Chorley, for instance, can be of great service to him in this
undertaking. Then if Wagner comes, with his success in his pocket, to
Paris in the winter, the doors of the opera, at which he has always
been knocking, will open to him. It is unnecessary to trouble you with
any further explanations. You understand and must learn whether there
is at this moment an English theatre in London--for the Italian opera
would be of no service to our friend, and whether there is any prospect
that a great and beautiful work by a master-hand could make a success.
Reply as soon as possible. Later, that is, toward the end of the month,
Wagner will pass through Paris. You will see him, and he will speak
with you personally about the direction and extent of his plan, and
will be royally thankful for every favor. Write soon and help me as
ever. It is a noble purpose for the accomplishment of which all this
must be done.”

Richard Wagner himself, in confirmation of what we have said, relates
the most beautiful thing of all. At the close of his brief Paris visit,
in 1849, when, sick, miserable and despairing, he sat brooding over
his situation, he happened to espy the score of his almost forgotten
“Lohengrin.” It suddenly struck him with a sense of pity, that the
music on this death-pale paper would never be heard: “I wrote two words
to Liszt and he replied that extensive preparations were being made
for the performance of the work. Whatever men and circumstances could
accomplish there (in Weimar,) should be done. Success rewarded him and
after this success he approached me and said: ‘See, thus far have we
come. Now create us a new work, that we may go still further.’”

Wagner created it. It was the “Nibelungen.”

And what occurred, when in the summer of 1876, this colossal work, the
glory of modern art as well as of modern culture, one might say of all
the culture of the world, for every nation was represented there, was
at last produced in an artistic manner worthy of it?

“Here is one who first gave me faith in my work, when no one knew
anything of me,” said the artist, in the midst of a joyful company, at
the close of the first performance. “But for him perhaps you would not
have had a note from me to-day. It is my dear friend, Franz Liszt.”

All this shows that what he did was only the fulfillment of duty. With
him, as with one of the greatest spirits of all the centuries, it was
his pride to be of service in his art. The proud words apply to him who
truly feels the greatness which he himself helps to create, beyond and
above all else in universal service, “genie oblige.”




CHAPTER V.

REFLEXIONS.

  Goethe’s Criticism on Winckelmann--The Poetical
    Necessity--Winckelmann and the Plastic Art--Has Music a
    Language?--Musicians and Musical Writers--Gluck’s Writings--His War
    in Paris--A fierce Struggle with the Theorists--Luther’s
    Indebtedness to Bach--Heinse and his Writings--His Italian
    Visit--Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart--Their Literary
    Characteristics--A criticism of Marx--Liszt’s Contributions to
    Literature--His great Literary Ability--The Place of Artists--List
    of his Works--Goethe and Beethoven--Bettina’s Phantasies--Jean
    Paul--Schumann--Liszt’s Criticism of the “Swan Song”--Tribute from
    the “Gazette Musicale”--Selections from his Writings.


Goethe writes in 1805, of Winckelmann, the author of the “History of
Modern Art”: “He sees ineffable works with the eye, he comprehends them
with the sense, yet he feels the unmistakable difficulty of describing
them in words and characters. The complete majesty, the idea whence
sprang the form, the feeling which aroused the sense of beauty in him,
he would communicate to the hearer or reader, and while he musters the
entire arsenal of his abilities, he realizes that it is demanded of him
to seize upon the strongest and worthiest he has at command. He must be
a poet, whether he realizes it or not.”

Thus Winckelmann became the originator of the reflective style of
statement in our language, which had not previously existed, and what
Goethe himself learned from it is shown very clearly in the poetical
description of the Greek myths, like Leda and the Swan, in the second
part of “Faust.”

Have we a similar language for the art of music, which reveals to us,
as it were, the nature, the soul-image of mankind as the plastic art
reveals its exterior? Have our language and literature acquired afresh
such far-reaching capabilities, such a fixed scope and self-enrichment
as the plastic art has, through Winckelmann? This question is all
the more worthy of attention since music, embodying the very essence
of things and not their appearance, reflecting the idea of the world
itself by its own hand and with its own power, is more essentially
poetical than the plastic art. We have in Liszt’s writings a
significant incentive to consider the question further.

It is certainly taking a narrow and one-sided view of musical talent,
to assert, like Riehl, that he who writes about music as a musician can
not be a correct musician. On the contrary, the truest tone-poets among
musicians have written the best about music, and in part about their
own, and at the same time by their clear comprehension of the poetical
idea in tone-poems have intensified the poetical force of the language.

The first who wrote with a definite purpose as an artist, about the
peculiar form and the poetico-dramatic development of his art--for
we do not refer here to the old and learned musical pundits, was
Gluck, and this is specially manifest in his writings about his own
works. Partly consisting of prefaces to scores, partly of letters to
newspapers, these writings were prompted by the necessities of art
itself. That is, the free poetical movement of the composer and his
sympathetic delineation of the salient circumstances and phases of life
were assailed, and they tried to confine him to established forms, to
fine melodies of a set style, to a fashion as it were. Then the German
drew his sword, for the quarrel had been restricted mainly to Paris
and Italy, and thrust it sharply into the confused mass of theoretical
ideas, which are most prized by people who know little or nothing of
music. Drastic in comparison, striking in characterization, mercilessly
ridiculing all lordly authority, upon the literary, or true throne, he
settles in defiance of the theoretical, every concrete, individual and
intellectual question. When one considers the peculiarly Italian or
French text, there is something of Bismarck’s style about it. How far
removed from the theorist or delving fancy-monger was this artist, who
was at the same time a man of facts, a practician! Although we notice
some extremely striking and poetical, though merely incidental images,
such as only the creative spirit would discover, there is little to
be found of the externals of music, that is of musical description,
so that these writings produced an admirable effect and furnished the
proof that musical problems might engage the attention of the highest
literary circles. For the language itself was of little account in this
controversy, not even the two foreign idioms, which Gluck, by the way,
handled with great ease.

Another illustration forces itself upon us, as viewed from the
standpoint of Luther’s translation of the Bible, which unquestionably
belongs to the poetical literature of our fatherland, namely, that
music, poetically considered, lay at the basis of early German as a
language. Luther’s German sprang from the texts of Sebastian Bach,
the sublimity of which reached the highest point of all art and which
is as thoroughly German as the ordinary plain recitative is Italian.
Instrumental music was now closely allied to this language, and
as Gluck produced a poetical form upon the living basis of actual
language, which afterwards especially delighted Goethe and Schiller, as
it had Klopstock, and certainly must have had an influence upon their
poetry, so the later ones, by personal intercourse with Philip Emanuel
Bach in Hamburg, had the opportunity to perceive by actual observation,
that German instrumental music began to assume a peculiarly German
form. Mozart’s melodies, from the “Entfuehrung” to the “Zauberfloete,”
speedily proved that music in its “beloved German” was not inferior to
the highest beauties of the poetical classics.

Their leading features were also closely connected. As Winckelmann
gained his talent for the representation of the plastic art through
the idea of language, from the antique, so the later ones had to go to
the immediate sources of music to find the necessary “inspiration,”
as Gluck denominated the creative faculty of our natures, for the
expression of their conceptions. Thus things were in a bad way. The
musicians did not understand writing and the writers knew little or
nothing about music.

Let us trace in the history of events the most striking features of
both styles of writing. In a literary sense Heinse was the first to
treat of music. This Thuringian was musical in the fullest sense,
and since the poet as a writer can not know much in this direction
of his endowments, the Musical Lexicon is literally correct when it
particularly specifies Heinse’s talent and mentions Hildegarde of
Hohenthal as ever memorable to the musician. How the charms of the
Italian landscape and the fascinations of this land of music work upon
him and impart to his style the warmth and color of that very land
itself! Above all else the sentient, nay more, the material aspect of
things preponderates, for how often in the sweet voice of a soprano the
sad “_Benedetto il Coltello_” has fallen upon his ravished ear, and
“his soul felt as if carried away by a flood.” Here for the first time
the effect of our art is definitely connected with the very essence of
speech, and the current histories of literature have therefore taken
little notice of this circumstance, because our classic writers made it
so. The effect of these writings first appeared when it became known
through the great masters of poetry in music, Mozart and Beethoven,
even more clearly about the year 1830, when Heinrich Laube gave it new
expression and Jean Paul illustrated it with his lofty conceptions of
the tone-art.

Now appear distinctive musical writers whose works belong both to the
domain of literature and music--Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart,
the latter by far the most prominent of the three. His “Ideas of the
Esthetics of Music” first appeared in 1806, after his death. The
“Spitz von Giebichenstein,” as Goethe called Reichardt, had a strong
intellectual basis and development. He understood Bach and Handel in
their colossal works and Gluck in his dramatic achievements. He had
not a correct idea of Mozart’s poetry and Beethoven’s powerful blows
almost overwhelmed his brain and heart. Yet what he has said about
the old classics is not without influence upon men like Rochlitz, in
Leipsic, and Marx, in Berlin, who have also comprehended yet more
clearly the free action of poetry in music. “There spoke spirit to
spirit,” says the latter of Reichardt’s analysis of the Handel songs.

Frederick Rochlitz has done that work for Mozart, and Marx for
Beethoven, and in many circles of the reading public the first
knowledge and direct appreciation of this new world of music was
obtained from their writings. And yet the one always shows something
too much of authorship and but little of the free poetical flow,
while the other struggles and is too obscure in the expression of the
emotions which music awakens in him. He merely feels and does not grasp
the expression of it firmly and forcibly and thus neither of them are
far from the significance of an achievement like the narrative of
Winckelmann.

This is in the highest degree characteristic of Schubart, who was an
actual poet. With him begins that genuine musical authorship which has
gradually become a possession of our literature. This brings us to the
solid array of writers who were equally at home in both provinces and
thus could embody music in language as they had acquired the talent for
expression from literature. It includes, and very prominently, too,
Franz Liszt and his numerous musical writings.

Richard Wagner, as Heinrich Laube says, in that peculiarly able sketch
of his life, which appeared in the “Zeitung fuer die elegante Welt,”
in 1843, from an opera composer became a writer, by the “Parisian
stress.” An entirely different reason actuated Liszt. It was the
longing to secure for his art the name and master which it required.
“Errors and misunderstandings thwarted the desired success,” says
Wagner, speaking of that Weimar performance of “Tannhauser,” by Liszt,
in 1849. “What was to be done to meet the requirements necessary to a
good understanding on all sides? Liszt comprehended it quickly and did
it. He gave the public his own judgment and impression of the work in
a manner, the persuasive eloquence and overwhelming efficacy of which
have had no parallel.”

There is a notice in the “Journal des Debats,” of 1849, which appeared
in Leipsic in 1851, together with a second under the title of
“Lohengrin et Tannhauser de Richard Wagner,” with which publication,
translated into German, at Cologne, in 1852, Liszt also makes his
appearance as a writer.

And yet, not so; for when had he not expressed, pen in hand, the
extraordinary activity of his feelings and thoughts? Since 1836,
numerous outspoken and generous tributes of his had appeared, as
for instance that concerning the position of artists in the “Revue
et Gazette Musicale de Paris,” and it may be said not one of the
artists mentioned, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Paganini, Berlioz,
Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Thalberg, Auber, Schubert, Schumann, Field
and Mendelssohn, are left without description. These sketches an
delineations made such a great and immediate sensation that Lamartine,
who was so renowned at that time, declared he would consider it a crime
if Liszt did not exclusively devote himself to this branch of his
art. In addition to the writings, “De la Fondation-Goethe a Weimar”
(1849), “F. Chopin,” “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary,” and
the numerous essays in the “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” like the
more important ones about “The Flying Dutchman” (1854), and “Robert
Franz” (1855), Liszt’s literary works, like Wagner’s, form an imposing
array of volumes, which are not second in importance to those of any
other art-writer and contribute an essential addition to our general
literature.

And how is it to-day with this musical authorship? The poet Schubart
in his “Esthetics of Music,” had only sounded the first notes of that
tone-language which, with the beginning of the opera was incorporated
with our art. The Italian language, which was its basis, had reached
the highest degree of perfection and the French of the Gluck operas
had scarcely increased the “speaking” which melody had acquired by
these idioms. All instrumental music speedily assumed this character
of personal language. It was as in the simple lyric, the personal
world-Ego that spoke in it. But when the German language reached the
height of its perfection and pervaded music, entirely new beauties
were revealed in our art. In one of his many notes of travel, written
at Vienna, in 1838, Liszt says that he has listened to the songs of
Franz Schubert with great pleasure and has been often moved to tears
by them, and he adds: “Schubert is the most poetical of all musicians
who have ever lived. The German language impresses the mind wonderfully
and the childlike purity and melancholy shading with which Schubert’s
music is permeated can only be fully understood by a German.” This
was true. The language of Goethe and Schiller had come to music and
bedewed it as with heavenly blessings. It returned a hundred-fold what
it had received in the old-time choral. We know the almost extravagant
reverence of Gluck for Klopstock’s Odes and particularly for the
“Hermannschlacht.” Mozart had written “The Violet” and the spirit of
its language pervaded the “Zauberfloete,” notwithstanding the rough
verses of the librettist destroyed all its beauty of shading. At
first Beethoven averred there was nothing loftier than Klopstock. He
preferred the soaring flights of fancy of this ideal, poetical soul,
but when he came to know Goethe it was all over. “He has finished
Klopstock for me,” he said. Goethe’s friend Bettina heard him declare:
“Goethe’s poems exercise a great power over me, not alone by the
subject-matter, but also by the rhythm. I should be induced and urged
on to composition by these verses, which are constructed upon a higher
plane, as if with spiritual help, and bear in themselves the secret of
harmony.” So said Beethoven, the purport of his judgment always being:
“a musician is also a poet.” In fact, through language, music has
completely associated itself with personal speech and what wonder is it
that it now, again enkindled with poetry, affected the world? From that
time on there have been masters of music who give us information about
it and although they are only instructors in the history and dogmas
of music, the professors of composition must state the essentially
artistic and poetical in words. In the perfection of language as
applied to the expression of musical things, these tone-masters have
been creatively constructive.

The first of these is C. M. Von Weber, whose famous and almost
world-wide critique on the “Eroica” appeared in 1809. In spite of his
jealous misunderstanding, he shows a closer conception of Beethoven
and particularly of music than any of the purely literary critics of
that time and we know that afterwards the composer of “Der Freischuetz”
wrote much and very well and commenced to compose an artistic romance.
A year later, Bettina wrote that “soulful fantasy about music,” which
in Goethe’s “Correspondence with a Child,” made a powerful impression
upon musical authors and inspired their better natures. Rochlitz’s
“Musikzeitung,” from 1809 to 1812, contains Hoffmann’s analyses of the
Beethoven symphonies, which to-day would have secured him the title
of “Wagnerian.” He not only gave a wonderful flight and new character
to language but he even extended its limits, for he describes in the
“Kreisleriana,” with nothing but mere verbal expression, the mysteries
of the art, its subject-matter, the keys and their character. He
enhanced the possibilities of language, enriched its treasury of words
and gave it a new significance. He was enabled to do this as he was
both musician and author and in a different style from that Prussian
Capellmeister, Reichardt. He also declared that after he had once
spoken of music, thenceforth he could only discourse of it as a poet.
And yet there is in this still more of brilliancy than fire, more of
the extravagant and even fantastic than the striking power of poetry
and soaring fancy which Bettina’s simple poetical nature showed, the
manifestations of which gave Goethe such presages of the power of
musical genius. It was not merely the poetical nature, it was the
actual poet, as in Winckelmann’s revelation of the plastic art, that
was needed to hit the mark.

Let us be brief. Jean Paul’s deeply musical, poetical nature fired
Robert Schumann with the might of his spirit and with the heavenly fire
of true poetical perception, and inspiration. For the first time in
Germany, in his “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” he collected about him
the spirits who lived thoughtfully and contemplatively in their art. In
comparison with these poetical writers where are now those theorists,
Wendt, in whose writings Beethoven found thoughts full of wisdom, and
Thibaut with his “Parity of Music,” a little book certainly expressing
with fervor the beauty of music, which even to-day reveals to many a
spirit its better self? Added to these the expressions of Mozart, in
his letters about music, have come to light, and Beethoven reveals his
lofty regard for it in Bettina’s letters to Goethe. The writings of the
poet Heine about music are revived again and from France an earnest
spirit of art was wafted over to us in the literary productions of
that phenomenon, Hector Berlioz. We recognize in this that music is
not confined within the bounds of any language and we almost imagine
that its spirit and being must actually dwell in the general modern
idioms and thus impart to them the distinctive characteristics of the
old languages. For Liszt also--and now we come to our subject--wrote
in French and only in French, and yet we can say that he has enriched,
beautified and extended the German language, for he wrote our modern
speech from the inner spirit, because he wrote from the spirit of
music, which above all belongs to us.

He thus begins his communication to the “Gazette Musicale” in 1838:
“Nearly fifteen years ago my father forsook his peaceful roof to go
with me into the world. He settled down in France, for he thought
that here was the fittest sphere for the development and perfection
of my genius, as he, in his simple pride, called my musical talents.
Thus early I forgot my home and learned to recognize France as my
fatherland.” He recompensed his new fatherland with his perfect use of
its language, which no native Frenchman to-day employs more correctly,
accurately or with better constructive ability than he, so that the
charge of “neologism and Germanism” which has been laid to him is based
for the most part only on a noticeable jealousy of his extraordinary
style. It is characterized by a vigor, power, delicacy and richness
which are at once surprising and fascinating. “A single glance of his
flashing eye” in the incorrect and beggarly translations of him that
have thus far appeared, tell us we have to do with a Siegfried. One
of his translators rightly asserts: “Liszt is as unprecedented and
unapproachable in his playing as he is unparalleled and original in his
style. They are his own possessions. In both we feel the same genial
inclinations, but even in the highest flights of his inspirations he
never mars their beauty. If one were to find any fault it would only
be with the exuberance of thought and the riotous luxuriance of his
fancy which is inexhaustible in pictures and blending of color. This is
only the natural result of the abundant richness of his surroundings.
When Englishmen and Germans in their statements about music, especially
where Beethoven is concerned, complain of the obscurity and mystery of
his meaning, it is because music in its real form is still ‘a book with
seven seals’ to them.”

To specify his writings in detail would take too much space. It is
enough to state that Liszt was so familiar with the substance of all
the modern languages that he was enabled, by merely skimming over them,
to catch their general spirit and thus express the corresponding sense
and form of music, so that in reality, according to the historical
statement that we have given above, whenever these writings have
been translated into good German they have broadened and perfected
our language. One such translation appeared long since. It is the
volume, “Robert Franz.” The historical and technical are certainly the
weaker qualities of these writings, for they belong to science and
investigation, not to the art and the creative faculty as a special
province. And yet, in these respects, the last named volume is very
conspicuous. It contains an analysis of what we call the “Lied,”
which is more thorough in a historical and theoretical sense than any
that have ever been made. The entire volume is characterized by calm
consideration rather than by the flight of inspiration.

To show how accurately and delicately Liszt could sketch a subject
which up to that time had not been treated, and how fruitful,
therefore, the statements are for the history of the art, we give a
brief illustration from his sketch of “Lohengrin,” with which, as a
further illustration of the style of all his writings, we close. He is
speaking of the melody with which the Knight of the Grail takes leave
of his marvelous guide, the swan: “Music had not, as yet, acquired
those types which the painter and poet have so often endeavored to
portray. It had not, as yet, expressed the purity of feeling and the
sacred sorrow which the angels and the beings above us, who are better
than we, feel, when they are exiled from heaven and sent into our abode
of trouble on errands of beneficence. We believe that music, in this
respect, need no longer envy the other arts, for we are convinced that
no one has yet expressed this feeling with such lofty and even heavenly
perfection.”

We may say here, as Goethe said of Winckelmann’s prose: “He must be
a poet, whether he realizes it or not.” As this description of the
forms of plastic art has enriched our language for a century with
illustrations which are familiar to every one, so the description of
the creation of these new spiritual forms which music has produced,
will give a deeper soul and new wings to language. Liszt’s writings for
that reason have done a special work for the German language, for they
display the all-pervading spirit of modern culture, and thus help to
build up the essential and ultimate form of language. The introduction
to his pathetically enthusiastic essay on “The Place of the Artist,”
which forms the close of this chapter, shows us that Liszt was as
real as he was ideal when he took up his pen in 1835, impelled by his
literary activity.

“Truly it were a beautiful and noble duty to establish the definite
place of musicians in our social life--to group together their
political, individual and religious ideas--to describe their sorrows,
their sufferings, their difficulties and their errors--to tear away
the coverings from their bleeding wounds, and to raise an energetic
protest against the pressing injustice and the shameless prejudice
which injures and torments them, and condescends to use them as
playthings--to examine their past, to disclose their future, to bring
all their titles of honor to light, to teach the public and the
thankless materialistic society of men and women whom we entertain
and who support us, whence we come, whither we go, the nature of our
mission, in a word, who we are--to teach them who those chosen ones
are who were ordained of God Himself to bear witness to the highest
feelings of humanity and cherish them with noble trust, these divinely
anointed ones who strike off the fetters which enshackle men, who have
stolen the holy fire from heaven, who invest life with its material and
thought with its form, and while they achieve for us the realization
of our ideals, draw us up with irresistible power to their spiritual
heights, to the heavenly revelations--who they are, these human
creators, these evangelists and priests of an irredeemable religion,
constantly increasing in mystery and incessantly penetrating every
heart--to preach and to prophesy all this, which of itself is so loudly
proclaimed, with still louder voice even to the deafest ears, certainly
were a beautiful and noble duty.” Who has more nobly fulfilled this
duty by the deeds and words of a life-time than he!




CHAPTER VI.

HARMONIES POETIQUES.

  Liszt’s Tribute to Wagner--A New Form of Instrumental
    Music--Liszt’s new Departure--The Symphonic Poem--Its Essence and
    Characteristics--The Union of Poetry and Music--Programme Music--How
    Liszt Developed his new Forms--Analysis of Individual Works--Liszt’s
    Tribute to Beethoven--His notice of “Egmont”--Beethoven as a
    Pioneer--Fulfillment of Haydn’s Prophecy.


After the orchestral composition of Beethoven how many thought they
would be obliged to acknowledge that his great “Ninth” was also to be
the last symphony!

“There rose a towering genius, a sparkling, flaming spirit, summoned
to wear a double crown of fire and gold. He boldly dreamed, as poets
dream, to fix his aim so high that if it could ever be attained by
art, it would certainly happen at a time when the public was no longer
made up of that vacillating, heterogeneous, unprogressive, ignorant
and conceited crowd, which in our time sits in judgment and dictates
decrees, which the boldest scarcely venture to question.” Thus Liszt
once said of Wagner, and to whom does it apply with more force than to
himself?

Let us listen to an account of the new Siegfried-achievement which has
been famous for almost a quarter of a century. It is the flower of the
grand journalistic labor of a distinguished, theoretical musician of
the future, now dead, and only retouched and amplified in some places
to suit our more accurate estimate of things. It is in the “Neue
Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” of the year 1858, and thus reads: “Goethe has
already compared the progress of the physical sciences, as it appeared
to him, to a wanderer, who approaches the rising luminary, and when it
suddenly bursts upon him with blinding effulgence, is forced to turn
away, because he can not endure it. The achievements in the musical
world surpass this, for music pictures the grandest phenomena of modern
culture.

“Just as every one must see the grand future which Richard Wagner
has assured to the musical drama, so Liszt, by the freshness of his
individuality has animated instrumental music, in that he has utilized
its form for his purposes. The perception of the programme, the union
of the known and unknown, these are what instrumental music have
acquired for our time and for the future. Originally, music alone was
sufficient, now we have the totality of culture.

“In marked contrast with the earlier style is the Symphonic Poem, which
is extraordinarily striking in character. Such a title is the egg of
Columbus, and it expresses the thoroughly accurate knowledge of the
author. The poetical method was the only one left for progress, or the
combination of the instrumental work with a general texture of poetical
ideas, and thus complete mastery of the programme was achieved. We
see in Beethoven how one with perfect knowledge seizes upon the fresh
material of the intellectual life about him. It is (as Liszt’s favorite
scholar, Hans Von Buelow expresses it,) the lamentation of the eagle
whose flight is checked by the ardor of the sunbeams, the mournful roar
of the lion whom the impenetrable darkness has overtaken. A newer,
grander horizon looms up--a spiritual world full of poetry.

“Liszt grasped this manifold material with the strength of his
imagination, and introduced it in the world of music. Having gradually
arrived at complete maturity he gave his attention to a great variety
of themes and taking them from the outer world he adapted them to
the inner. With Germans that feeling is uppermost and it arouses
the activity of the fancy. Reversing the process, the fancy seizes
the object and arouses activity of feeling. There are spirit-tones,
corresponding to the emotions of the soul, which form the substance of
the early music. One has the feeling that here humanity approaches the
highest questions, reflectively, not merely feeling them intuitively.
It is consequently a new form above the bounds of music and musical
knowledge, a spiritual form, yet coupled with a corresponding artistic
natural skill, a form of higher intelligence and grander structure as
time advanced and the relations of life were increased, for the most of
the earlier musicians only foreshadowed it. We recognize, at a glance,
the individuality of Liszt, and the requirements demanded by our times
as well as the absence of that continual obtruding exclusiveness, that
obstinate conservatism of the earlier times of music. At the very
foundation of this lies a strong and solid individuality. Only the
branches and twigs come in contact with the outer world, thus leaving
space for development and drawing nourishment from it, while the trunk
defies every storm. A brilliant, sentient basis, a grand and powerful
array of passion, a depth of expression and spiritual value, a great,
broad horizon, are the results.

“In the single works we do not find the variety of tone, the exuberance
of emotion, nor the multitude of situations to be found in the works
of the earlier masters, but when we consider them as a whole, their
immense richness is disclosed. A great multitude of new ideas appear
as revealed in the music, taking the place of what had been already
settled and what was lost and gone. There was a joyous astonishment
when this new world arose and when one realized its richness and
diversity. There are the ‘Preludes,’ with their naivete and simple but
strong texture. With what sad and tender, yet grand emotions the poet
appears in ‘Tasso!’ A poetical glory illuminates ‘Orpheus.’ Antique
austerity, boldness and ruggedness are the predominating peculiarities
of ‘Prometheus.’ An enticing fascination carries us to the height
of the ideal in the ‘Berg Symphony.’ Brilliancy, festal revelry,
chivalrous elegance and knightliness are the traits which characterize
the ‘Festklaenge.’ German tenderness and intensity, German dignity
and intellectual power confront us in ‘Faust.’ The Adagio, called
‘Gretchen,’ fills our very souls with the sad ecstatic words of Faust:
‘Can it be that woman is so fair?’ A mystical meaning lies hidden
in ‘Dante,’ fantastic weirdness in the ‘Hungaria,’ the sublimity of
sorrow in the ‘Héroide funébre.’ Every work is a unit in itself, and as
different works represent different moods, they can be worked out with
greater sharpness and precision.”

Thus originated that richness of inward variety, that full scale of
human possibilities manifested in the complete development and mastery
of situations, which we call Liszt’s “Symphonic Poems.”

In closing, we may say, to quote from “The Meistersaenger”: “The
witnesses, I think, were well selected. Is your Hans Sachs on that
account disturbed?” The best literary test of the matter is contained
in Richard Wagner’s “Letters on Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems,” which
appeared in 1857. Liszt himself demonstrated his clear understanding of
the far-reaching progress he had made for his art in his analysis of
Beethoven’s “Egmont” music, in 1854.

“In ‘Egmont’ we recognize one of the first illustrations of the modern
period. A great musician derives his inspiration directly from the
works of a great poet,” says he. “At this time Beethoven appears to us
as bold and rich in meaning as he was uncertain and wavering in his
first attempts. When he composed these fragments he began to open up
a new path for art. With mighty hand he felled the first tree in this
hitherto unknown forest. Even while he cleared away the first obstacles
and laid his hand to his work he entered upon the path himself. The
world regarded this first step without particular attention, but the
time came when art advanced upon this path and found it illuminated and
laid out by him.”

Liszt describes himself when he thus characterizes the present epoch of
music: “Going back to antiquity and searching for material scarcely
anywhere do we fail to find a period of poetical life. Imagery and
color characterize the tone-work of the people of the Orient as well
as of the Occident. A full flooded magnetic stream unites poetry and
music, those two forms of human thought and feeling.” He above all
others has in reality done for music what was prophesied by Joseph
Haydn, the father of the symphony, who was the first to invest it
with a distinctively poetical character. At the close of his days he
declared that what was yet to happen in music would be far greater than
what _had_ happened in it.




CHAPTER VII.

CONSOLATION.

  Liszt’s Great Resolve--Reply to a Scoffer--Religion and
    Music--Religion at the Foundation of Culture--George Sand’s
    Testimony--Relations of Religion and Music--Music in the Catholic
    and Protestant Churches--Peculiarities of the Musical
    Services--Influence of the Catholic Church on Music--A gradual
    Lowering of the Standards--Opera Music in the Church--Liszt’s
    Ambition to Reform it--His Early Piety--Views on Church Music--The
    Religious Element in his Compositions--The Hungarian Coronation
    Mass--The Choral Mass--Departure to Rome--Takes Orders--Why he did
    not Remain--Germany his Field for Work.


“Is that then a life object?” was the reply of a Prussian
school-director on one occasion, when in answer to his question why
Liszt had specially taken orders, he was informed that in pursuance of
his life-mission it was indispensable for him to become a Capellmeister
of the Pope and Sistine chapel, in order to accomplish the reform
of Catholic church music. If we were also to make the reply to that
question, “Yes, perchance at this very time especially more important
than the elevation of education,” which would certainly turn the
school-man round and make him step aside, we should not encroach upon
the domain of politics, but strikingly characterize with this one
remark the sad indifference and ignorance of the entire, and for the
time the predominating multitude of our educated people, who make and
dominate our culture.

How can one, himself outside of the confession, after a little
reflection, have any doubt that the only ties which bind and unite
the immense mass of the people, besides the desperate occasions of
overwhelming necessity, are the ideal conceptions which religion offers
in a very crude and yet powerful and forcible shape? On that account
the church remains, let her be what she may, so long as this is true,
the only source for the great multitude of men which approaches them
with such conceptions, and, while it elevates them above themselves
and the ordinary necessities, makes them believe in a human community
and in mutual duties. Where again is the substitute for such an
indispensable institution, so long as we have no other, which in a
common union unites the masses upon a sure foundation, and without
which cement they would be dashed to atoms. Even granting that state
and culture have reached high attainments, no one but a short-sighted
person will say that they have reached their utmost possibilities. It
was this very feeling which, following upon the mental intoxication
of former centuries, and the fearful ones that came after with their
outbreaking revolutions and wars, made all the stronger minds and
more earnest spirits turn to the existing assurance which we possess
in ideal things as permanent realities--Religion and the Church.
“Religion is the true cement of the social edifice. The more numerous
the stones and details, the stronger should be the cement that unites
them,” writes George Sand, in 1830, in the “Lettres d’un Voyageur.”
That the assaults of the Catholic church upon the State are as
discreditable as the insolent self-elevation of Protestant orthodoxy
over all intellectual work and culture, goes without saying. Now, as
ever, the church, still more the service, in both confessions, is the
sure foundation for all really educated people. Its loftiest purpose
can only be to improve the mind religiously and thus secure for it a
higher effectiveness. State and church must be regarded from the same
point of view as Alberich and Mime, who struggled for the ring upon
which depended the heritage and power of the world, while Siegfried
possessed it. And as it is rightly claimed on behalf of the Protestant
church that its purpose is to give to worship such a form and value
that it shall unite and satisfy, in itself, the noblest aspirations and
the essentially ideal wants of all mankind, so the Catholic church, as
far as a stranger may judge, fails not by earnest consideration and
inward endeavor, far removed from the clamor of the day and the warring
of dominating factions and parties in the church, to restore again
its world-conquering, because world-redeeming power, in that it seeks
to give that spirit to its worship in which is the real safety of our
time. And as it is not a matter of chance that art has been awakened by
this characteristic spirit of the later times, to which it has given a
new language, to give a fitting expression to the fullness and depth of
feeling, like the infinity of the spirit which springs from the spirit
itself, as it is not a matter of chance that music is pre-eminently
the daughter of the church and of its service, so from the oldest to
the most recent times, this daughter, who meanwhile has become so
unspeakably affluent and above all so independent, has been loudly
called upon to establish herself in the church and its service in all
the perfection and richness of her nature.

If the great difficulty with the Protestant service lies in the fact
that it does not easily assimilate music, and, so to speak, make it a
part of divine worship, so that its employment makes religious service
partake of the nature of a sacred concert, thereby destroying religion
itself, if in this case also, peculiar but in no way insuperable
difficulties stand in the way of such a result, on the other hand in
the Catholic service, music is an indispensable part of it and in
the real sense its central part, for transubstantiation, besides the
elevation of the Host, which is only a symbol, is felt as a deep inward
reality in the music, which at that instant is poured forth at the
true Mass even in the most insignificant church like a sacred flood,
deeply refreshing the hearts which turn to it. We may say that but for
this recalling of the wandering heart to the harmony of the Eternal
and the All, but for this return of the individual to the everlasting
foundations of being, as they are revealed in transubstantiation, we
should not securely hold that art which in its very essence reveals the
fixity of the world, outwardly as well as inwardly. It should also be
said that the Catholic service, that is, its highest attainment, the
Mass, without its daughter, Music, which in an actual sense is in turn
its mother, or can at any time become so, could not reach its ultimate
possibilities and by its life prolong its own.

There has been endless complaint that with the progress of its
dominion, which has immeasurably enhanced the outward pomp of the
church, and which has not scorned to make use of the dramatic for
its purposes, the music of its worship has become superficial and
theatrical. There is also a Jesuitic style in the music, and he who
perfects his artistic taste by the ever true and really classical, will
find good proofs in Beethoven’s greater Masses as well as in Mozart’s
“Requiem,” that since the seventeenth century the opera has invaded
the church, and that the peculiar fineries of the Saints’ statues of
that time denominated the fundamental character of its music. This is
true of Germany as well as of the Roman countries, and any one who has
been to Italy knows to his own satisfaction that the latest operatic
melodies can be heard to-day upon the organ, even in sublime St.
Peter’s at Rome. From Mozart to Mendelssohn, among musicians there is
the same complaint of this impropriety, and since Goethe, almost every
writer on Italy has spoken of this matter, which is a disgrace to the
church and a calamity to the religious elevation of the poor.

Under these circumstances, how could a nature like that of Liszt’s
hesitate? As we have seen over and over again, the modern way
of regarding things had become, in fact, his second nature, an
irresistible and yet spontaneous motive power in all his thoughts and
actions. We have an additional test of this artist, which brings us to
the very source of his life, even to the very basis of life itself.
We have the facts for our information, and need not contemplate the
phenomenon of Liszt as a reformer of art in his church in any sense as
a wonder or a mere accident. It rests upon the very foundation of his
life and it works accordingly.

“From youth up, Franz’s spirit was naturally inclined to devotion,
and his passionate feeling for art was blended with a piety which was
characterized by all the frankness of his age,” reads an entry in
the diary of his father, who died when the son was in his sixteenth
year. In 1857, Liszt himself speaks of the poor little church in his
Hungarian home, “in which, as a child, I had prayed with such ardent
devotion.” Even in his youth he thought that he was called to the
church, and it was only the earnest wish, at first, of his father, and
afterwards of his mother, an extremely kind-hearted Upper-Austrian,
that kept him in the path of art and its practice. The biographical
sketch in the “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” of 1834, to which we are
indebted for the first reliable accounts of Liszt, significantly says,
however: “His piety was rational and imparted a certain freedom to his
ideas and their execution. It did not exhibit the stiffness, roughness,
dogmatism or brutality of the canting devotee. It was sincere and was
the outcome of liberal reason from the Catholic standpoint.” Heine
says in one of his Paris letters, 1830, that he has a great talent for
speculation, and he dwells upon his “boundless thirst for light and the
deity, which bear evidence to the holiness and religion in his nature.”

Enough has already been said to make further reference unnecessary,
but the biographical sketch goes on to state that he had undertaken to
compose religious music, and says in that connection: “The so-called
music of our time did not seem to him to correspond to a manly
conception of it, and thus the idea was forced upon him to create
religious music.” “We talk of the reformation of church music,” Liszt
writes in 1834. “Although this expression ordinarily implies only music
like that performed during the ceremonies of divine service, I use
it here in its most significant meaning. When the service expressed
and satisfied the confessions, the necessities and the sympathies of
the people, when men and women found an altar in the church where
they could bow the knee, a pulpit where they could draw near to the
divine, and it was a sight which refreshed their minds and uplifted
their hearts in holy rapture, then church music only needed to retire
to its own mysterious sphere and content itself with serving as an
accompaniment to the splendor of the Catholic liturgy. In these days,
when the altar shakes and totters; in these days, when the pulpit and
religious ceremonies serve for the sport of the mocker and doubter,
art must leave the inner temple and spreading out through the world
seek a place to exhibit its magnificent accomplishments. As in former
time--nay, even more than it did then--music must recognize the people
and God as the sources of its life. It must speed from one to the
other, ennobling, consoling and purifying man, blessing and glorifying
God.”

Thus music was to him a service completely divine. More than one
witness of that day testifies to the strong impression which the
religious agitation of the time of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and the
Abbe Lamennais made upon him, which had been already foreshadowed in
his own fantasie, the “Berg symphony,” as well as the “Consolation.”
In the same year, 1834, appeared the “Pensée des Morts” a fragment of
the “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for piano, which he prefaced
with some words of Lamartine’s. It also seems to be one of his first
attempts to intimately associate poetry and music. This preface reads:
“There are contemplative souls which in their solitary meditations are
irresistibly elevated by the infinite ideas of religion. All their
thoughts are turned to inspiration and prayer, all their being is a
silent hymn to the divinity and the divine hope. In themselves and in
the surrounding creation they seek the steps that ascend to God, the
images and symbols with which to elevate themselves, with which to
raise themselves to Him. O, that I could offer such to them! There are
hearts broken by sorrow, crushed by the world, who fly to the world
of their thoughts and to the solitude of their own souls to weep, to
watch and to pray; O, that they might search for a muse as solitary
as themselves, find sympathy in her tones, and listening, many a time
declare: ‘We pray in thy language, we weep with thy tears, we are
uplifted by thy songs.’”

As soon as Liszt, after his long, long wanderings, was in the right
mood to actually compose--for the French account rightly calls Liszt’s
work “no mechanical exercise but composition in the real sense, the
actual artistic creation”--when he had so arranged these creations of
his nature, for such we must call these reproductions, as to make sure
of artistic results, from the thoughts of his early years, in reality
out of a time almost a generation remote from us, sprang the larger
part of his religious and church compositions, which we now possess.

The “lofty festival greetings” of the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the
Fest Mass for the consecration of the Graner Cathedral (Graner Mass)
which preceded that work of 1856, moving along with stately splendor,
prove that it was not a mere reflection of the outward show but that
it reached the very spirit of the occasion. Still grander was it, so
to speak, to offer the daily bread when, alas, so often a stone had
been tendered to the hungering multitude. The little Missa Choralis
(Choral Mass) is enough to show that he had attained to the desire of
his youth and that a truly religious music had been achieved for the
church service of our time. It was practically performed for the first
time in Vienna, in 1877, by the Cecilia Verein, at the court church.
There is nothing of the conventional mass form of the last century in
it, and although the arrangement for male voices is in the style of
Palestrina, it does not at all remind one of him. It is original, new
and modern throughout; in other words, it is in consonance with our own
actual feelings. It must have deeply impressed the soul of the layman
that this art not merely embellished and animated the service but that
he freshly elevated its living spirit, just as Palestrina preserved and
handed down to us the lofty religious spirit of the old church.

Liszt was not satisfied with this. He desired his work to be of a
practical nature so that the music of the church should be purified,
renovated and improved. He resolved to leave Weimar at once, and in
1861 left for Rome. It was necessary for him to become a Capellmeister
of the Pope, in order to accomplish what he wished. In accordance
with ancient usage such an one must separate himself from the world
by taking the first orders. Palestrina was the last Capellmeister at
the Sistine who was not in orders. He was married and it was only the
impossibility of filling his place that kept him in his position. Thus
Liszt, who had always felt like a priest in his art, took orders and is
to-day an Abbe.

And why did he not remain in Rome? “I was thwarted by the lack of
culture among the cardinals,” he says, speaking in a musical sense,
and besides most of the princes of the church are Italian. He felt it
was only in Germany that the heart of music could be regenerated. So
he came back to us in the North and devoted himself immediately to the
encouragement of schools of a better and more original style of church
music, such as those established in Regensburg, and Eichstaett and
to the Scuola Gregoriana in Rome, in 1881. May they accomplish their
purpose though it takes generations. They supply anew that elementary
sustenance of the spirit which nothing else can, and which grows more
pressing from decade to decade. We recognize anew that here as in every
instance of creative activity the man and the artist are one. Securely
settled and grounded inwardly he can outwardly rule like a king and as
lavishly bestow.




CHAPTER VIII.

HARMONIES RELIGIEUSES.

  The Oratorio of “Christus”--Its Title--The Origin of Oratorios--Their
    Relations to Opera--Gradual Changes in Style--The Dramatic Element
    in them--Liszt’s Original Treatment--A Wide Departure from old
    Forms--Events Pictured in Music--Groupings of Materials--What
    it did for the Church--General Divisions of the Oratorio--The
    Motto of “Christus”--The Christmas Music--Introduction of the
    Stabat Mater--The Shepherds at the Manger--The King’s March--The
    “Seligkeit”--Entrance to Jerusalem--The Scene at Gethsemane--The
    Inflammatus--Skilful treatment of Motifs.


“Christus, Oratorio, with texts from the Holy Scriptures and the
Catholic Liturgy,” is the title of Liszt’s greatest church work,
finished in 1866.

“Oratorio” is derived from the oratory, or prayer-apartment, in which,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries upon sacred occasions in
Rome and at the “Azione Sagra” elsewhere, sacred plays were performed,
partly recited in costume in the so-called Collect style, and partly
sung. With the contemporary appearance of the opera, the oratorio,
through the influence of the Italian cantata, gradually assumed its
very form, and was only distinguished from it that it was not acted but
was merely sung, and had a well sustained harmony throughout. Thus with
a change of the recitative, aria, duets, terzets and chorus, Handel’s
oratorios as well as Haydn’s “Creation” are given to us. Mendelssohn
also does not essentially differ from them, but he has added to it the
chorale from the ordinary Protestant church music, while his recitative
in its increased proportion is operatic in style. From the scenic point
of view Liszt’s “Holy Elisabeth,” brought out in 1864, is very similar,
but even in this the “only one” has a high purpose and reveals the
loftiest mission. In these respects Liszt has treated the “Christus” in
a style different from all the other masters. He has not even adopted
the basis of the oratorio, or the arrangement of the materials in a
definite order dependent on the narrative and made conspicuous in its
salient points by the power of the music. On the contrary, the oratorio
gives no trace of its origin or its affiliation with the opera but is
simply a revelation of the sacred events. It is not for that reason a
mere narrative, but like Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” it describes events
by the grand colossal imagery such as music can display when allied
to religion. Not only is the recitative completely detached, and the
little that is told in narrative form restored to the Collect, which
the Catholic church employed for its old liturgy, but the aria as such
is confined to a single instance that could not be avoided, the lament
of Christ in Gethsemane. Wherever, indeed, solo or ensemble appear,
there is no trace of the personal nature of the dramatic. It is a calm
self-manifestation of the subject itself.

In its entirety it consists of a series of choral scenes which connect
and embody the details of the subject. A grand colossal world-history
is revealed to us. At the outset the composer turned to Friedrich
Rueckert’s “Evangelic Harmony” and selected therefrom detached and
lofty numbers like the “Seeligpreisungen” and “Vater Unser,” which
appeared in 1850, and upon this groundwork, he grouped together with
an accurate perception of details that must ever serve as an artistic
model, the salient features of the life of religion and the workings
of the church, according to the Vulgate and the Catholic liturgy.

In the ordinary sense also “Christus” is not an oratorio. The composer
indeed retained the name because it truly denominates a general style
of music. But it goes further than this. It is a very powerful and
clearly realistic expression of the actual spirit of the subject in
contradistinction to the operatic style. It is, in fact, a pure epic
poem, which an oratorio must be as distinguished from dramatic music,
besides being a calm and thoughtful principal features. We behold a
great world-moving event arising and passing before us. The particular
acts and salient phases come and go, like the heroes of the epic,
in quiet, simple grandeur. All the gloss of action is avoided. We
recognize that in this work we have an artistic invention and a model
which directs the world of music into a new course. This we may observe
in the arrangement of the subject.

The series is laid out, not only in three distinct divisions, but
also in separate numbers. There is deep and bold thoughtfulness in
the church portions, which breaks with all traditions, and builds
up the subject in an original style. We believe, therefore, that the
general character of the work, as may be gathered from its array of
texts, indicates the abiding in an invisible church, which, by the
pure agencies of an art which it created itself for the expression of
its deepest mysteries, has acquired a beauty of imagery revealing the
holy faith it serves in all its purity and unity. At the very outset
we realize that we have to do with an artist who is thoroughly at home
in the faith in which he was brought up, who regards it with clear
perception, who lays his foundations and builds thereon with a steady
hand. This, in and by itself, is a new treatment of the subject. In
this respect the master inwardly sympathizes with the spirit of the
church, as Sebastian Bach did with his. The difference does not consist
so much in the creative powers of the artists as in the peculiar
character of the subjects. Let us now attempt to describe more closely
some of the details of the scenes.

The work is divided into three principal sections: I. The Christmas
oratorio. II. After Epiphany. III. The Passion and Resurrection.
The nature of the work is declared in the motto, Paul’s words to the
Ephesians: “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all
things, which is the head, even Christ.” The instrumental introduction
built upon the theme, “Resound ye heavens above,” many times repeated
and closely bound together in musical unity, as its strong esthetic
character frees the mind from the manifold distractions of the world
and by a deeply impressive harmony prepares it for entrance into a
new and loftier sphere, which is revealed at the close by the soaring
tremolos of the violins, leads directly to a longer “Pastoral,” which,
the old theme disappearing, introduces the announcement of the angels
to the shepherds. At the commencement this is the simple Collect music,
replied to by the chorus, at first accompanied by the string quartette
and then by the full orchestra. The chorus of the heavenly hosts
shouts the “Gloria in Excelsis” with majestic breadth and in mighty
accords, until at the close the life of the simple shepherds is again
pictured, to whom for the first time the announcement of the long
expected salvation has come. The third scene is the old hymn, “Stabat
Mater speciosa,” the Holy Virgin at the cradle of her Son, _lento
misterioso_, a six part _a capella_ chorus, supported by the organ in
simple accords, and varied here and there by five or six voices in
solo. Poetically it is an almost ecstatic rapture of devotion, such as
the rude and violent Middle Ages developed. It is the mystery of the
mother-love, which gives us the first clue to the living self-devotion
of all time, and in which the world-forming power of all human actions
was first foreshadowed. As childlike simplicity and purity of heart
characterize the shepherd scenes, so innocence and fervent feeling are
the predominating traits of this. The full expression of this feeling
reaches its height in the “Inflammatus.” The scene closes with a deeply
inspired and loftily-soaring “Amen.” The fourth and fifth scenes are
purely instrumental in character. The “Pastoral Scene at the Manger,”
in which the Italian oboes are used with fine effect, and the march
of “The three holy Kings,” significant of the worldly splendor of the
church, impress themselves upon the senses by their mere sound and
rhythm, so that the music itself appeals to deeply seated longings.
Both scenes are the _al fresco_ style of modern orchestral music and
are very broadly treated.

The second part is introduced with the “Seligkeit,” expressing the
return of the world to its general ethical consciousness, a baritone
song in melodious declamatory style, continuously answered by a six
part chorus, as if the acceptance of such a truth by the world should
become a fact. The groundwork here is the objective organ sound nor is
the congregation itself overlooked. The “Paternoster” is characterized
by a quiet, fervent utterance of prayer between the precentors and the
congregation to which the peculiarly majestic closing “Amen” forms a
pedestal of granite. Repose and dignity are the features of both these
phases of the fundamental tone. The music is not specially considered,
but one may imagine the images of the saints standing there and with
clear utterance declaring the truth which helps all.

Very powerful in character is the “Founding of the Church,” noble in
its import, “Tu es Petrus,” and of tender softness the “Simon, son
of Jonas, lovest thou Me?” The perishable, sinful world in its every
form is here contrasted with an undoubting faith in an everlastingly
constant higher ideal, to give it this name. That it is the spirit of
the subject, not its mere perishable husk, is shown by the nature of
the melody which rises to the most powerful expression of the final
victory of this spirit of love. Now again the full orchestra joins
the double choir, for the world, the whole world is meant. The ninth
scene is a marvel. “The storms rage in contention”--not the storms
of the sea, but the storm of desires to which the weak of faith are
exposed. It is not the outward marvel or superstition, that is to be
strengthened, but the faith of human nature in itself and its higher
power and destiny. Hence the actual inner tranquillity, when after the
raging orchestral tumult, “a great stillness” succeeds Christ’s words,
which is ingeniously introduced with the motif of the “Seligkeit,”
because such inner purity alone bestows upon mankind effective power
over the savage forces of the world.

The “Entrance into Jerusalem” is a graphic picture of animated human
life, a prelude to the entrance of religious truth into the great wide
world painted perceptively as Paul Veronese paints. In the “Benedictus”
for mezzo-soprano there is an expression of inward contentment and
happiness such as only the individual heart feels and utters. This
chorus is very similar to the finale of the first part but it carries
the glory and power of religion yet further into the realms of the
ideal.

The third part has four scenes. In it we reach the powerful climax
of the whole. The spiritual events of the world’s history and the
sorrowful struggles of passion, which have given another aspect to
humanity, pass before our eyes. It is manifest here, as it is with
Sebastian Bach, that only these powerful choral scenes can give the
complete and exhaustive sense and the intrinsic importance of the
subject in the music in which this art is enabled to disclose alike
its cosmic as well as its spiritual being. The first of the scenes
is the walk to Gethsemane, where the most sorrowful of necessities
grows into open resolution, and it is only in consonance with this
condition of the soul that here and here alone solo singing proves
effective. This solo represents to us the all-grasping, superhuman
resolution of mankind. Its sympathy with this soul-suffering is shown
in the orchestral accompaniment. The Spaniard, Ribera, painted in these
deep, dark colors. The “Quod Tu” breathes in its deep content all the
blessing which this highest of all human sacrifices the world has ever
seen, can confer.

A truly sublime reality is it then that the history of sorrow is
reflected in us as in a mirror. It is the deeply impressive Middle Age
sequence, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” which here relates the unprecedented
events afresh with its self-created old melody. The skill to construct
upon the basis of the countless inner moods and aspects, and out of
them a four-lined, rhythmical choral melody, and architectonic work
of such strength and fullness can not be found in any single church
work of our time. It has the dimensions of the “Last Judgment” in the
Sistine. It is not like Bach’s gigantic chorales, Gothic-polyphonic
in character, but it is written in pure harmonic-melodic style and in
its thematic treatment, like the style of the Renaissance art, only
freely develops the motif of the subject in the text, and is built up
symmetrically to an astonishing climax, reminding one of the colors and
striking characteristics of Rubens.

This number alone would doubtless establish the permanence of the
work. It proves that the value of church composition is not confined
to either church style, that of Palestrina or Bach, but that the
most modern and progressive of the arts is enabled to clearly
express whatever is required of it, and that the increased methods
of expression of our day can furnish even yet entirely new means of
expressing a subject. As a conspicuous instance of this, the twice
recurring “Inflammatus,” with chorus, solo, quartette, orchestra and
organ is well nigh overpowering in its simple grandeur and impressive
strength, and all the more so as it only turns upon the tones of the
principal motif of the piece.

In this most solemn of the world tragedies, the blissful old Easter
Song, “O Filii et Filiae,” sung by boys with harmonium, sounds
pathetic. At the close of the “Stabat Mater,” a succession of expanding
chords had already announced the salvation of the world, almost
unheard, as if from distant worlds, but here it sounds forth as if
the blessing were actually gained by the ransomed human heart. That
children possess it is a double proof of its certainty. Like a sunbeam
in a church this chorus penetrates the gloom of the Passion.

The last scene consecrates the surety of this possession and expresses
with firm and massive power the final victory of christianity,
whereupon a short “Amen” upon the original connecting motif, “Rorati
Coeli,” closes the series. It is a cycle of scenes such as only the
victorious mastery of the subject by inward perception can give, and
such as only the artist can draw who dominates all the conditions of
art like a king and has directed his soul to the absolute truth and
power of the Eternal.




CHAPTER IX.

PROMETHEUS.

  Liszt’s Letter to George Sand--Happiness of the Wanderer--Allusions
    to Wagner--The Artist as an Exile--Sorrowful Character of his
    lot--His Solitude--His Creative Moments and Inspirations--No
    Sympathy Between the Artist and Society--Degradation of
    Art--Artisans not Artists--Letter to Adolf Pictet--Why he Devoted
    Himself to the Piano--His love for it--Estimate of its
    Capabilities--Miss Fay’s “Music Study in Germany”--A Critical
    Notice--The Author’s First Meeting with Liszt--Personal
    Description--Grace of his Manner--Peculiarities of his Playing--His
    Home--Pleasant Gatherings--Personal Incidents--Liszt and Tausig--The
    Loss of “Faust”--Happily Recovered--The final Tribute.


On the 30th of April, 1837, Liszt writes to George Sand:

“Happy, a hundred times happy, the wanderer! Happy he who does not have
to traverse the beaten paths and to walk in the old tracks! Restlessly
rushing on, he sees things only as they seem, and men only as they show
themselves. Happy he who gives up the warm, friendly hand before its
pressure grows icily chill; who does not wait for the day on which the
affectionate glances of the loved one change to blank indifference! In
fine, happy he who breaks with relations before he is broken by them!
Of the artist it is specially true that he only pitches his tent for
the hour and never settles down in any permanent place.”

Thus declares the youthful storming Apollo and many a Marsyas he flayed
on these journeys of investigation, personal as well as social, over
all Europe; on many a Midas grew asses’ ears in sight of the world.
Read the “Letters of Travel of a Baccalaureate in Music.” There is
nothing more spiritedly humorous, more serene in its earnestness.

Scarce ten years later, what was the experience of Richard Wagner, to
whom a second supplementing genius was even more indispensable than
the tenor Nourrit to Rossini, with “the masterwork which sprang from
the brain of the Olympian god,” and still appeals to the multitude to
combine art with art, the spirit with spirit, light with light?

During his abode as an exile in Weimar, in May, 1849, he writes:
“Wonderful! through the love of this rarest of all friends, I gained
at a time when I was homeless, the real home for my art, long looked
for, always sought in the wrong places and never found. At the close
of my exile, my wandering about led me to a little place which was to
make a home for me.” This he did for him and for many another musician,
after his change in 1842, for he knew that the artist’s only home is
his art.

“Is he not always a stranger among men,” he continues, in his letter to
George Sand. “Whatever he may do, wherever he may go, he always feels
himself an exile. To him it is as if he had known a purer heaven, a
warmer sun, a better existence. What can he do to escape this boundless
sorrow, this unvoiced pain? Singing, must the artist rush through
the world and in hurrying by scatter his thoughts without inquiring
on what soil they fall, whether calumnies stab them, whether laurels
mockingly cover them. Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist.
A sacred predestination affixes its seal upon him at birth. He does not
elect his calling but his calling elects him and incessantly urges him
forward. However unpropitious his relations, the hostility of family
and the world and the pressure of his mournful wretchedness may be,
however insuperable the obstacles may seem, his will stands firm and
remains unalterably turned to the pole. This pole to him is his art; it
is his devotion to the mysterious and the divine in man and nature.

“The artist stands alone. The circumstances of his life force him
into society, and so his soul creates in the midst of inharmonious
influences an impenetrable solitude in which no voice of man is heard.
All the passions which agitate men--vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy,
even love itself, are outside the magic circle which incloses his inner
world. Withdrawing into this, as into a sanctuary, he contemplates and
worships that ideal which it is the object of his life to realize. Here
appear to him divine and incomprehensible forms, and colors such as his
eyes never beheld on the most beautiful flowers in the brightness of
spring. Here he listens to the harmony of the eternal, whose cadence
rules the worlds, and in which all the voices of creation join in a
marvelous celestial concert. Then an ardent fever seizes him. His
blood flows more quickly. A thousand consuming thoughts revolve in
his brain from which only the sacred labor of art can release it. He
feels as if he were the victim of an unutterable disease. An unknown
power urges him to reveal by words, colors or tones, the ideal which
dwells in him and fills him with a thirst of desire, with a torment
for possession, such as no man has ever experienced for an object
of actual passion. But when his work is ended and the whole world
applauds, he is not wholly satisfied. In his discontent he would
perhaps destroy it, did not some new phenomenon avert his glance from
his creations, to throw him anew into those heavenly, painful ecstacies
which make his life a constant struggle toward an unattainable goal, a
continual effort of all the powers of the spirit to raise itself to the
realization of that which he has conceived in those favored hours when
the eternal beauty disclosed itself without a cloud.”

Again he describes, with more gloomy tints, the social reception of the
artist to-day, in our enlightened century, and the necessity which has
been laid upon him, the mighty and high-throned one, at all times, and
now more than ever, to associate with the meanest existence, provided
it truly longs for the marvels of art, to lavish upon them the water of
life.

“The artist dwells these days outside of the social community,” he
writes, “for the poetical element, especially the religious agitation
of humanity, has disappeared from our modern public. What have they
who attempt to solve the problem of human happiness by granting a few
privileges, by an unlimited expansion of industry and of egoistic
well being--what have they to do with a poet or an artist? Why should
they trouble themselves with those who wander about, of no use to the
State-machinery of the world, to kindle sacred flames, noble feelings
and lofty inspirations, that by their achievements they may satisfy
the restless longing for the beautiful and the great which rests more
or less securely in the depths of every soul? Such beautiful times are
no more as when the blooming verdure of art spread itself and exhaled
its perfume over all Greece. Every citizen was then an artist, for
law-givers, warriors, philosophers, all were imbued with the idea of
moral, spiritual and physical beauty. The majestic astonished no one,
and great achievements were as common as those creations which at the
same time exhibited and prompted them.

“The strong and mighty art of the Middle Ages which built cathedrals
and summoned the enraptured people to them with peal of bells and
the sound of the organ, became extinct when faith was animated anew.
There is to-day the inward interest which unites art and society, but
that which brought power and glory to those other deep agitations, is
destroyed. The social art has gone and has not yet returned. Whom do
we principally meet in these days? Sculptors? No, the manufacturers
of statues. Painters? No, the manufacturers of pictures. Musicians?
No, the manufacturers of music. Everywhere artisans, nowhere artists.
Hence, there can only be cruel pain to one who was born with the pride
and the wild freedom of a genuine child of art. He is surrounded by
a swarm of mechanical workers who obsequiously devote their services
to the caprices of the populace and the fancies of the uncultivated
wealthy, at whose nod they bow themselves down to the earth, as if
they could not get close enough to it. The artist must accept them as
his brothers and as the multitude confounds them together, must see
himself and them rated at the same value and regarded with the same
childish, stupid astonishment. It can not be said that these are the
complaints of vanity and self-conceit. No, no--they who stand so high
that no rivalry can reach them, they know this. The bitter tears which
our eyes have shed belong to the worship of the true god, whose temple
is defiled with idols for whose sake the silly people have forsaken the
worship of the living god and bowed the knee before these degrading
divinities of stone.”

Thus speaks this proud and truly noble soul whose best efforts and
talents have been sacrificed to the silliness of idle caprice and to
the obstinate humors of shallow minds. He knows that the only remedy is
the old Grecian one, the personal contemplation of noble forms, of true
skill.

“It is a fact that thorough musical culture is confined to a very
few,” he says. “The majority are ignorant of the first rudiments of
art and in the upper circles nothing is rarer than an earnest study of
our masters. They are content with hearing a few good works from time
to time, and without choice, amongst a mass of miserable stuff which
spoils the taste and accustoms the ear to wretched poverty. In contrast
with the poet who speaks all languages and besides only devotes himself
to mankind, and whose mind has been cultivated by classical study, the
musician reveals himself in a mysterious language, the comprehension
of which, if it does not presuppose particular study, shows at least
a long accustomed familiarity with it. Besides that, in contrast with
the painter and sculptor, he has the disadvantage that they are devoted
more to the expression of form, which is more universal than the inward
conception of nature and the feeling for the infinite which are the
essence of music.”

How firmly also his knowledge was founded upon personal experience is
shown by the fact that like photography now-a-days, which represents
all and every phase of the treasures of the plastic arts, so the piano
for him could “gather the harvest, make use of the garnered treasures,
and invest with life again those which conduce to ideas of happiness.”

In his twenty-fifth year, he writes to Adolf Pictet, asking why he
was surprised that he devoted himself exclusively to the piano. He
hardly realized that he had touched upon the most sensitive point of
his very existence. “You do not know,” he says, “that if I should give
up my piano, which speaks so much, it would be to me a day of gloom,
robbing me of the light which illuminated all my early life and has
grown to be inseparable from it. For, look you, my piano is to me what
his vessel is to the seaman, his horse is to the Arab--nay, even more,
till now it has been myself, my speech, my life. It is the repository
of all that stirred my nature in the passionate days of my youth. I
confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys and sorrows. Its
strings vibrated with my emotions and its flexible keys have obeyed my
every caprice. Would you have me abandon it and strive for the more
brilliant and sounding triumphs of the theater or orchestra? O, no!
Even admitting that I were competent for music of that kind, even then
my resolution would be firm not to abandon the study and development
of piano-playing, until I had accomplished whatever is practicable,
whatever it is possible to attain now-a-days.”

In this he discloses those deep aspirations which now have a more
lively interest and higher significance for us, since we know that they
have not disappointed him.

“Perhaps the mysterious influence which binds me to it so strongly,
prejudices me,” he writes, “but I consider the piano as of great
consequence. In my estimation it holds the first place in the hierarchy
of instruments. It is the most enjoyable and the most common of all.
Its importance and popularity are due to the harmonious power which
it almost exclusively possesses, in consequence of which it is also
capable of compressing the whole art of music in itself. In the compass
of its seven octaves it includes the entire scope of the orchestra
and the ten fingers suffice for the harmony which is produced by a
band of a hundred performers. By its agency it is possible to diffuse
works which, owing to the difficulty of collecting an orchestra,
would remain unknown to the great majority. Consequently it is to the
orchestral composition what the steel engraving is to painting, which
it repeats over and over, and though it lacks color yet it can exhibit
light and shade.”

In order to reach the goal of an art which has been rightly designated
as the idea of the world and the soul of humanity, and to behold it
spreading over our age and extending to posterity, he settled down to
rest after his career as a virtuoso, and founded “Weimar.” It must
be in that Germany of which he wrote to his friend Berlioz, in 1838,
“the study of art is universally less superficial here, the feeling
is truer, the usages are better. The traditions of Mozart, Beethoven
and Weber are not lost. These three geniuses have taken deep root in
Germany.” Without this Weimar we should certainly have had no artistic
execution to-day which would be worthy of the modern or classic
productions. Indeed Munich and Baireuth themselves, how could they
have been possible without the master-scholars who by Liszt’s piano
instruction displayed in every form the expressive, soaring, flaming
revelation of minute details as well as of the whole.

In bringing to a close the review of Liszt’s moral and artistic
influence, alike fruitful and far-reaching, we give first of all an
animated descriptive sketch by a pupil of this Weimar school and then
the list of master-scholars, whom Liszt has educated, and who have
continuously assisted in the realization of his ideal wishes and hopes.

“Music Study in Germany,” says the “Allgemeine Deutsche Musikzeitung,”
of 1881, “is the name of a very comprehensive, elegant and spiritedly
written little American book. It is in the form of letters which the
American author, Miss Amy Fay, sent from Germany to her home, during
her studies with Tausig, Kullak and Deppe. She manifests not only great
musical and artistic intelligence in general, but also an unusual
knowledge of human nature. Miss Fay has a feeling for the finest
emotions of the soul. With genuine stereoscopic fidelity she points
out the grand characteristics and the little peculiarities of the
important personages with whom she has had the good fortune to come in
contact. Of the many beauties and charms contained in these letters,
those which relate to Liszt must naturally awaken the greatest, most
universal and lasting interest. We select from them a few brief
extracts, because we know that the feelings of reverence, love and
intense admiration, which the author cherishes for Liszt, are shared to
the full by thousands and thousands of hearts.”

Miss Fay saw the master first at the theater in Weimar, with three
ladies, one of whom was very handsome. “He sat,” so she says, “with
his back to the stage, not paying the least attention, apparently, to
the play, for he kept talking all the while himself, and yet no point
of it escaped him, as I could tell by his expression and gestures.
Liszt is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and
slight, with deep set eyes, shaggy eyebrows and iron-gray hair. His
mouth turns up at the corners, which gives him, when he smiles, a most
crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with
long and 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, not with affectation or in mere gallantry, but with a
quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to
a lady was right or proper. It was most characteristic. But the most
extraordinary thing about Liszt is his wonderful variety of expression
and play of feature. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy,
tragic, the next, insinuating, amiable, ironical, sarcastic, but always
the same captivating grace of manners. He is a perfect study. He is all
spirit, but half the time at least, I should say, a mocking spirit. All
Weimar adores him, and people say that women still go perfectly crazy
over him. When he goes out every one greets him as if he were a king.
Liszt looks as if he had been through everything, and has a face seamed
with experience. He wears a long Abbe’s coat, reaching nearly down to
his feet. He made me think of an old-time magician and I felt with a
touch of his wand he could transform us all.”

The recommendations of the Countess von Schleinitz secured the author’s
introduction to Liszt. She continues: “To-morrow I shall present
myself, though I don’t know how the lion will act when I beard him
in his den. I brought the B minor sonata of Chopin and intended to
play only the first movement, for it is extremely difficult and it
cost me all the labor I could give to prepare that. But playing to
Liszt reminds me of trying to feed the elephant in the Zoological
Gardens with lumps of sugar. He disposes of whole movements as if they
were nothing and stretches out gravely for more. One of my fingers
fortunately began to bleed and that gave me a good excuse for stopping.
Liszt sat down and played the whole last three movements himself. It
was the first time I had heard him and I don’t know which was the most
extraordinary, the Scherzo, with its wonderful lightness and swiftness,
the Adagio, with its depth and pathos, or the last movement where
the whole key-board seemed to thunder and lighten. There is such a
vividness about everything he plays that it does not seem as if it were
mere music you were listening to, but it is as if he had called up a
real living form and you saw it breathing before your face and eyes.
It gives me almost a ghostly feeling to hear him, and it seems as if
the air were peopled with spirits. Oh! he is a perfect wizard! It is as
interesting to see him as it is to hear him, for his face changes with
every modulation of the piece and he looks exactly as he is playing. He
has one element that is most captivating and that is a sort of delicate
and fitful mirth that keeps peering out at you here and there! It is
most peculiar, and when he plays that way the most bewitching little
expression comes over his face. It seems as if a little spirit of joy
were playing hide and go seek with you.

“On Friday Liszt came and paid me a visit and even played a little
on my piano. Only think what an honor! At the same time he invited
me to a matinee he was going to give on Sunday for some countess of
distinction. * * * He played five times, the last three times duets
with Capellmeister Lassen, and made me come and turn the leaves.
Gracious! how he does read! It is very difficult to turn for him, for
he reads ever so far ahead of what he is playing, and takes in fully
five bars at a glance, so you have to guess about where you think he
would like to have the page over. Once I turned it too late, and once
too early, and he snatched it out of my hand and whirled it back. Not
quite the situation for timorous me, was it? At home Liszt doesn’t
wear his long Abbe’s coat, but a short one in which he looks much more
artistic. It is so delicious in that room of his. It was furnished and
put in order for him by the Grand Duchess of Weimar herself. The walls
are pale gray with gilded border running round the room, or rather
two rooms which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains.
The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable--such a
contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand
piano stands in one window. The other window is always wide open and
looks out on the park. There is a dove cote just opposite the window,
and the doves promenade up and down on the roof of it and fly about
and sometimes whirr down on the sill itself. That pleases Liszt. His
writing-table is beautifully fitted up with things that all match.
Everything is in bronze--ink-stand, paper-weight, match-box, etc., and
there is always a lighted candle standing on it by which the gentlemen
can light their cigars.

“There is a carpet on the floor, a rarity in Germany, and Liszt
generally walks about, and smokes, talks and calls upon one or other
of us to play. From time to time he will sit down and play himself
where a passage does not suit him and when he is in good spirits he
makes little jests all the time. His playing was a complete revelation
to me and has given me an entirely new insight into music. You can
not conceive, without hearing him, how poetic he is, or the thousand
nuances which he can throw into the simplest thing. He is equally great
on all sides. From the zephyr to the tempest the whole scale is equally
at his command.

“But Liszt is not at all like a master and can not be treated as one.
He is a monarch, and when he extends his royal scepter you can sit
down and play to him. You never can ask him to play anything for you
no matter how much you are dying to hear it. You can not even offer to
play yourself. You lay your notes on the table so he can see that you
want to play, and sit down. He takes a turn up and down the room, looks
at the music, and if the piece interests him, he will call upon you.

“Yesterday I had prepared for him his ‘Au Bord d’une Source.’ I was
nervous and played badly. He was not to be put out, however, but acted
as if he thought I had played charmingly, and then he sat down and
played the whole piece himself, oh, so exquisitely! It made me feel
like a wood-chopper. The notes just seemed to ripple off his fingers’
ends with scarce any perceptible motion. As he neared the close I
remarked that the funny little expression came over his face which
he always has when he means to surprise you, and he suddenly took
an unexpected chord and extemporized a poetical little end, quite
different from the written one. Do you wonder that people go distracted
over him?”

A talented pupil of Henselt’s arrived and played for Liszt with great
success. Miss Fay says: “She played with the greatest aplomb, although
her touch had a certain roughness about it to my ear. But all playing
sounds barren by the side of Liszt, for his is the living, breathing
impersonation of poetry, passion, grace, wit, coquetry, daring,
tenderness and every other fascinating attribute that you can think of.

“I’m ready to hang myself half the time when I’ve been to him. Oh! he
is the most phenomenal being in every respect! All that you’ve heard of
him would never give you an idea of him. In short, he represents the
whole scale of human emotions. He is a many-sided person and reflects
back the light in all colors, no matter how you look at him. His pupils
adore him, as in fact every one else does, but it is impossible to do
otherwise with a person whose genius flashes out of him all the time
so, and whose character is so winning.

“One day this week, when we were with Liszt, he was in such high
spirits that it was as if he had suddenly become twenty years younger.
A student from the Stuttgart Conservatory, played a Liszt concerto. His
name is V. Liszt kept up a little running fire of satire all the time
he was playing, but in a good-natured way. Everything that he says is
so striking. In one place where V. was playing the melody rather feebly
Liszt suddenly took his place at the piano, and said: ‘When I play, I
always play for the people in the gallery so that those persons who pay
only five groschen for their seats may also hear something.’ Then he
began and I wish you could have heard him. The sound didn’t seem very
loud, but it was penetrating and far-reaching. When he had finished he
raised one hand in the air, and you seemed to see all the people in
the gallery drinking in the sound. That is the way Liszt teaches you.
He presents an idea to you and it takes fast hold of your mind, and it
sticks there. Music is such a real, visible thing to him that he always
has a symbol, instantly, in the material world to express his idea.

“How he can bear to hear us play, I can not imagine. I assure you, no
matter how beautifully we play any piece, the minute Liszt plays it,
you would scarcely recognize it. His touch and his peculiar use of the
pedals are the secrets of his playing, and then he seems to dive down
into the most hidden thoughts of the composer, and fetch them to the
surface, so they gleam out at you, one by one, like stars.

“The more I see and hear Liszt the more I am lost in amazement. I can
neither eat nor sleep on those days that I go to him. I often think of
what Tausig said once: ‘Oh! compared with Liszt, we other artists are
all blockheads!’ I did not believe it at the time, but I’ve seen the
truth of it.

“Liszt does such bewitching little things. The other day, for instance,
Fraulein Gaul was playing something to him, and in it were two runs,
and after each run two staccato chords. She did them most beautifully
and struck the chords immediately after.

“‘No, no,’ said Liszt, ‘after you make a run you must wait a minute
before you strike the chords as if in admiration of your own
performance. You must pause, as if to say, ‘now nicely I did that.’
Then he sat down and made a run himself, waited a second, and then
struck the two chords in the treble, saying as he did so, ‘Bra-_vo_,’
and then he played again, struck the other chord, and said again,
‘Bra-_vo_,’ and positively, it was as if the piano had softly
applauded! That is the way he plays everything. It seems as if the
piano were speaking with a human tongue.

“You can not conceive anything like Liszt’s playing of Beethoven.
When he plays a sonata it is as if the composition rose from the dead
and stood transfigured before you. You ask yourself, ‘did I ever play
that?’”

Once Miss Fay asked the master to tell her how he produced a certain
effect in one of his great passages. He smiled and then immediately
played the whole passage. “‘Oh! I’ve invented a great many things,’
he said, indifferently, ‘this for instance,’ and he began playing a
double roll of octaves in chromatics in the bass of the piano. It was
very grand and made the room reverberate. ‘Magnificent,’ said I. ‘Did
you ever hear me do a storm?’ said he. ‘No.’ ‘Ah! you ought to hear me
do a storm, storms are my forte.’ Then to himself between his teeth,
while a weird look came into his eyes as if he could indeed rule the
blast--‘Then crash the trees.’ How ardently I wished he would play a
storm, but he did not. Alas, that we poor mortals here below should
share so often the fate of Moses and have only a glimpse of the
Promised Land, and that without the consolation of being Moses!

“Liszt sometimes strikes wrong notes when he plays, but it does not
trouble him in the least, on the contrary he rather enjoys it when
he comes down squarely wrong, as it affords him an opportunity of
displaying his genius and giving things such a turn that the false
note will appear simply a key leading to new and unexpected beauties.
An accident of this kind happened to him in one of the Sunday matinees
when the room was full of distinguished people and of his pupils. He
was rolling up the piano in arpeggios in a very grand manner indeed,
when he struck a semi-tone short of the high note upon which he had
intended to end. I caught my breath and wondered whether he was
going to leave us like that, in mid air, as it were, and the harmony
unresolved or whether he would be reduced to the humiliation of
correcting himself like ordinary mortals and taking the right chord.
A half smile came over his face, as much as to say, ‘don’t fancy that
this little thing disturbs me,’ and he instantly went meandering down
the piano in harmony with the false note he had struck, and then
rolled deliberately up in a second grand sweep, this time striking
true. I never saw a more delicious piece of cleverness. It was so
quick-witted and so exactly characteristic of Liszt. Instead of giving
you a chance to say ‘He has made a mistake,’ he forces you to say, ‘He
has shown how to get out of a mistake.’

“Another day I heard him pass from one piece into another by making
the finale of the first one play the part of prelude to the second.
So exquisitely were the two woven together that you could hardly tell
where the one left off and the other began. Ah, me! such a facile
grace! Nobody will ever equal him with those rolling basses and those
flowing trebles. And then his Adagios! When you hear him in one of
those you feel that his playing has got to that point where it is
purified from all earthly dross and is an exhalation of the soul that
mounts straight to heaven.”

This little book contains many more beautiful passages but we are
reluctantly forced to desist. One charming trait of Liszt is related,
however, which we can not pass over in closing. Miss Fay says:

“Gottschal, organist in Weimar, told me that one time when Tausig
was ‘hard up’ for money, he sold the score of Liszt’s ‘Faust’ for
five thalers, to a servant, along with a great pile of his own notes.
Gottschal, hearing of it, went to the man and purchased them. Then he
went to Liszt and told him that he had the score. As it happened, the
publisher had written for it that very day and Liszt was turning the
house upside down, looking for it everywhere. He was in an awful state
of mind because his score was nowhere to be found. ‘A whole year’s
labor lost,’ he cried, and he was in such a rage that when Gottschal
asked him for the third time what he was looking for, he turned and
stamped his foot at him and said: ‘You confounded fellow, can’t you
leave me in peace and not torment me with your stupid questions?’
Gottschal knew perfectly well what was wanting but he wished to have
a little fun out of the matter. At last he took pity on Liszt and
said: ‘Herr Doctor, I know what you have lost! It is the score to your
Faust.’ ‘O,’ said Liszt, changing his tone immediately, ‘do you know
anything of it?’ ‘Of course, I do,’ said Gottschal, and proceeded to
unfold Master Tausig’s performance and how he had rescued the precious
music. Liszt was transported with joy that it was found and cried out:
‘We are saved, Gottschal has rescued us,’ and then Gottschal said that
Liszt embraced him in his transport, and could not say or do enough
to make up for his having been so rude to him. Well, you would have
supposed that it was now all up with Master Tausig, but not at all.
A few days after was Tausig’s birth-day. Madame C. took Gottschal
aside and begged him to drop the subject of the note-stealing, for
Liszt doted so on his Carl that he wished to forget it. Sure enough,
Liszt kissed Carl and congratulated him on his birth-day and consoled
himself with his same old observation: ‘You’ll either turn out a great
blockhead, my little Carl, or a great master.’”

“O, thou amiable grand master Liszt!”

Thus closes our notice of this genial book. Since the “soulful
fantasies” of Bettina about Beethoven, nothing comparable with it from
a lady’s hand has appeared.

In closing, we append, with the master’s own approval, as the
fac-simile in our own little work shows, a list of his principal
scholars. We preface it with a sentiment of the master, which shows how
much that remark of Beethoven’s to Bettina about music was to him--“The
elevated types of the moral sense also constitute its foundations,” or
truth and the will combined. It reads:

“It belongs to the higher mission of art, not only to exhibit and
celebrate in song the heroic spirit but to inspire it. Hence the artist
should feel it, preserve it and diffuse it like a sacred flame.”




APPENDIX.


A LETTER FROM LISZT’S FATHER.

The _Harmonicon_, an English musical journal, of June, 1824, contains
the following interesting letter, addressed to its editor by Liszt’s
father:

                                                            PARIS, 1824.

  SIR:--The expressions which you frequently employed in speaking of
  my son have been so flattering, that I can not but be sensible of
  your kindness, and therefore take this opportunity of testifying
  my gratitude. I must say, that I by no means anticipated the high
  degree of success with which he was honored by the public of Paris,
  and above all, was not prepared for the comparison, by no means
  advantageous, which they were pleased to draw between the rising
  talents of my son, and those of our great Mozart. I recognize in this
  amiable exaggeration that spirit of French politeness, the boast of
  which I have all my life been accustomed to hear, and my son will
  think himself most happy, if hereafter he shall have the good fortune
  to share some degree of celebrity with the masters of the German
  school, though he must remain at a very humble distance from him
  whom it glories in placing at its head.

  You must however allow me, Sir, to make a few observations upon the
  following expression that occurred in one of your journals: “The
  parents of young Liszt are poor, and he supports them by the product
  of his talents.”

  Fortune, it is true, has not loaded me with her favors, yet I have
  no reason to complain of her neglect. For the space of twenty-three
  years I have been in the service of Prince Esterhazy, where I filled
  the situation of steward of part of his sheep-farms. The immense
  income of this prince, and the noble and generous manner in which he
  acts toward those who have the good fortune to belong to any of his
  establishments, have long since placed me in that _aurea mediocritas_
  so happily described by the Latin poet.

  Having observed in my only son, from a very early age, a decided
  predilection for music, and having from my youth cultivated
  the art as an amateur, I myself, for the space of three years,
  superintended his first musical education with that constancy
  and perseverance which form one of the characteristic traits of
  our nation. I afterward placed him for eighteen months under the
  instruction of Messrs. Salieri and Czerny, from the first of whom he
  received lessons in harmony and counter-point, and from the second,
  instruction on the piano-forte, and to both of whom he is indebted
  for their kind care and attention. I am happy to be thus able
  publicly to render them the homage of my grateful acknowledgments.

  I came to Paris with the permission of the prince, and by the advice
  of my friends, in order to perfect my son’s talents, by affording
  him an opportunity of hearing the numerous artists whom this capital
  contains, and of cultivating the French language, of which he has
  already some general idea; a language which justly lays claim to the
  title of being that of Europe. At the same time, I have not neglected
  to take advantage of the eagerness testified by the Parisians to
  hear his performance, in order to indemnify myself for the expenses
  necessarily attendant upon a long journey, and the removal of my
  whole family.

  Accept my best acknowledgments, and believe me, etc.,

                                                             ADAM LISZT.

Accompanying this letter is the following editorial comment:

  “The young Francis Liszt, with his father, arrived in London last
  month, and has exhibited his talents to many people of rank, and to
  some of the most distinguished professors of this metropolis, who all
  agree in considering him as a performer that would be ranked very
  high, even were he arrived at full manhood, and therefore a most
  surprising instance of precocious talent at so early an age as twelve.
  He executes the most difficult of the modern piano-forte music without
  the smallest apparent effort, and plays at sight things that very few
  masters would venture upon, until they had given to them a little
  private study. But his extemporaneous performances are the most
  remarkable. Upon any subject that is proposed to him he improvises
  with the fancy and method of a deliberating composer, and with the
  correctness of an experienced contrapuntist. His hand is not unusually
  large, but is amazingly strong, and his touch has all the vigor of
  maturity. He has reached the usual growth of boys of his age, and
  possesses an open, intelligent and agreeable countenance, with a
  frankness, but at the same time a propriety of manner, that indicates
  a good temper and a correct understanding.”


LISZT’S ONE OPERA.

A German correspondent of the _Harmonicon_ sent that paper the
following account of the performance of Liszt’s Opera, “Don Sancho,” on
Oct. 18, 1825, at the Academie Royale de Musique, Paris:

  “The extraordinary youth, the composer of this opera, has but just
  entered his thirteenth year. He has been acknowledged by some of
  the first connoisseurs of Germany and France to merit a place among
  the principal pianists of Europe; nay, some have gone so far as to
  say that he yields the palm to Hummel only, whose immense talent as
  an improvisatore undoubtedly stands as yet alone and unrivaled. But
  the youthful Liszt is also a composer and gifted with the talent of
  improvisation in a high degree. Aware of this, and wishing early--we
  trust not too soon--to develop his talents, the admirers of the
  youthful compatriot of Mozart desired him to try his strength on a
  wider field; they procured a poem adapted, as they supposed, to his
  powers. He has for some time been diligently engaged upon it, and the
  present is the result of his labors. * * * *

  “The subject of the opera is taken from a tale of Florian, entitled
  ‘_Don Sancho_,’ one of the feeblest of all this author’s works. It
  is a kind of allegory, in which Love appears in person, armed with
  his bow and arrows. The little god is the lord and master of an
  almost inaccessible castle, the gate of which can be entered only by
  two and two at a time. The drawbridge is never let down, save to a
  knight accompanied by his lady. Elvira, persecuted by one whom she
  detests, and who is attempted to be forced upon her as a husband,
  disguises herself as a knight, and finding a favorable moment for
  escape, sallies forth alone from the castle of the King, her father.
  In the midst of a forest she meets with Don Sancho, who, being in
  quest of adventures, is desirous of entering into conversation with
  the unknown. Piqued at being answered only in monosyllables, he finds
  means to excite a quarrel. A combat ensues. Elvira, as every child
  could have foreseen, is vanquished. She sinks to the earth and her
  helmet falling off discovers the features of a beauteous female. The
  victor is on his knees before his lovely foe; Elvira no longer merits
  that title. She also is in love with Don Sancho at first sight. But
  a fearful storm comes on, and they hasten to the Castle of Love (_Le
  Chateau d’ Amour_) which is seen in the distance. On the way they
  are encountered by Rostubalde--for such is the name of the odious
  rival--who wishes to prevent their entrance into the castle. Don
  Sancho rushes upon him but is wounded; Elvira avenges the wound of
  her lover by the death of Rostubalde. At length the two lovers are
  at the gates of the castle. The winged god appears upon one of the
  towers. ‘Open to us,’ cries Elvira, ‘we are two faithful ones who
  love, and will love forever.’ At this magic word ‘_ever_,’ the gates
  fly open. Cupid with a single touch heals the wound of Don Sancho.
  Elvira returns with him to the court of the good-natured King, her
  father, who asks not a word of explanation relative to the absence
  of his blooming daughter from her home, but hastens to unite the two
  lovers.

  “In the outline here given of this dull and insipid pastoral, will,
  with a very few exceptions, be found the general story of the opera
  in question. The principal change is that of the person of Rostubalde
  into an enchanter, of the name of Alidor; but even this resource,
  such as it is, the authors have turned but to little account. In a
  word, we consider our young artist as dragged to the earth by the
  dead weight of this mass, which he has attempted in vain to leaven by
  his genius.

  “But we must now speak of the music. The overture contains many happy
  motives, and passages of great beauty and effect. If it fails in
  being strongly characteristic, we should impute the fault in a great
  measure to the subject. An overture should be the preface to the
  work, but what must be the preface to a work without interest! Among
  the airs, the most admired was that of the Magician, and above all,
  two romances, one sung by Don Sancho and the other by the Page. Many
  of the orchestral parts are treated with a vigor and intelligence
  which would do honor to composers long disciplined in their art.

  “Upon a cool and dispassionate view of the whole composition, we
  must remark, that the young Liszt ought to view this, his first
  dramatic work, only in the light of an experiment on the extent of
  his powers. Mozart was only twelve years of age when he composed his
  ‘Finta Semplice’ for the theater of Vienna. The distance is immense
  indeed between that essay and his ‘Don Giovanni’; but the question is
  whether he would ever have created the latter wondrous opera, if his
  first steps in the career of excellence had been inhumanly arrested.”


BIHARY.

A review of Liszt’s “Bohemiens” which appeared in the London _Athenæum_
of 1859 gives the following interesting sketch of Bihary, the gypsy
virtuoso:

  “Next we come to John Bihary, who seems to have been ‘the highest
  expression’ of the gypsy virtuoso,--a brilliant player, courted at
  all the courts and royally repaid for his playing:--a man as impudent
  as an Italian _tenore_ of the worst class. Bihary lived in our own
  time, for he gave a performance before Maria Louisa in 1814, and
  there made himself so remarkable by his undisguised admiration of
  one of the Imperial Princesses present, that his hostess found it
  necessary to rebuke his audacious eyes. The violinist was called up
  and was asked if he was a married man. His answer was ‘Yes;’ and that
  his wife was with him in Vienna. On this he was bidden to present her
  forthwith. Bihary’s wife was sent for on the spot. A striking looking
  and still young woman, magnificently attired in the gypsy dress, was
  brought. On receiving her, the Empress said to Bihary, that since
  heaven had given him so beautiful and faithful a helpmate, he was
  inexcusable in being so sensitive to the beauty of any princess,
  recommended to him more propriety for the future, and after paying
  marked compliments to Eve (Bihary’s wife), caused fifty ducats to be
  given to her, and sent the pair home in one of the court carriages.
  A second anecdote concerning Bihary is little less characteristic
  of manners. About the year 1824 a carriage accident disabled him
  for life. With true gypsy improvidence he had laid by nothing for a
  rainy day, and could hardly toil through the least important part
  in the band of which he had been the king. In this fallen estate it
  chanced that he fell in at a tavern with some Hungarian noblemen,
  who had known him in his days of court splendor and insolence. He
  was prevailed on to play slowly one or two of the very easy pieces
  of national music which he had yet power to master. His arm was soon
  tired. On his stopping, one of his princely auditors bound it up in
  bank-notes. Bihary died in 1827.”


THE HUNGARIAN GYPSY MUSIC.

  “The Hungarian gypsy merely _plays_ Hungarian; he sings little or
  not at all; and what is his principal instrument, and at the same
  time the principal instrument of the Hungarian popular music? It is
  the dulcimer or cimbalo. This instrument, consisting of a triangular
  wooden frame, with a bottom and sounding board, over which wires by
  twos or threes are stretched upon bridges, which are struck with two
  wooden hammers, covered on the upper part with cloth or leather, is
  peculiarly fitted to infuse into the little gypsy orchestra that
  palpitating, feverish, tremulous essence, by which the performance of
  a _Magyar nota_ gains so much. With this are associated the string
  quartet, together with the contra-basso and also quite willingly
  the clarinet. On the contrary all other instruments, as oböes,
  flutes, fagotti, horns, trumpets, etc., are entirely excluded from a
  Hungarian gypsy orchestra.

  “What does the gypsy produce with these instruments? Is his music,
  is the popular instrumental music any mere dance music? Essentially,
  perhaps; but ere the dancing mood begins, ere joy and appetite for
  pleasure hurry the _Magyar ember_ into dance and play, and make
  him forget himself, he must first, in the slow, sustained tones of
  a _Lassu_ (Adagio) in the minor, pour out his complainings, roll
  away the sighs which hold his soul imprisoned in a melancholy gloom.
  Not suddenly can his soul plunge into the fresh major tones of his
  national dances; nay, he often clings to the dear minor mood after
  his sadness is supposed to have given place to idle joy and pleasure.
  The kind of music which we would here indicate is called in general
  _Csardas_. This signifies both the dance itself and the dance music;
  and as every Hungarian dance is preceded by an introductory _Lassu_,
  this also is included in the term. The _Lassu_, soaring beyond the
  possibility of being represented as a dance, is usually followed by
  a _Frisded_, or Allegretto, of a quicker movement, but usually kept
  also in the minor, yet shaped already to the dance, but only for
  the _solo_ dance of men. If the _Magyar ember_ allows himself to be
  drawn away from his sombre mood into a dance, it is at first only a
  _solo_ dance; self-satisfied, he spins round in a circle and as yet
  covets not an object for his love; only when the third part in this
  psychological economy of the dance, with its quick, strong strokes,
  has hurried him completely out of himself, does he begin to know no
  moderation and no goal. His eye sparkles, his feet stamp, like those
  of an untamed horse. To think, it is good that a man do not remain
  alone, and to grasp at a maiden, are one act, and he begins with
  her that wild, unbridled dance, which is called _Csardas_ in the
  narrower sense of the word, or by way of distinction, _Friss_ (i. e.,
  Allegro, Presto). Already in the _Lassu_, the dull brooding in which
  the soul of the _Magyar ember_ swims, is crossed by some occasional
  gleams of enthusiasm; but in the _Frisded_ the dark clouds of sadness
  begin first to break away, and the _Friss_ tears away entirely the
  thin veil which yet lay on his soul and left him in a self-contented
  solitude. Now no repose is longer to be thought of; from melancholy
  it becomes impetuous passion; from pain unbounded pleasure; in short,
  his Me, delivered from itself, riots and storms away until his feet
  refuse their service.”--_Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik._


HEINE ON LISZT.

  “That such a restless head, driven and perplexed by all the needs and
  doctrines of his time, feeling the necessity of troubling himself
  about all the necessities of humanity, and eagerly sticking his nose
  into all the pots in which the good God brews the future, that Franz
  Liszt can be no still piano-forte player for tranquil townsfolks
  and good-natured nightcaps is self-evident. When he sits down at
  the piano, and has stroked his hair back over his forehead several
  times, and begins to improvise, he often storms away right madly
  over the ivory keys, and there rings out a wilderness of heaven-high
  thoughts, amid which, here and there, the sweetest flowers diffuse
  their fragrance, so that one is at once troubled and beatified, but
  troubled most.

  “I confess to you, much as I love Liszt, his music does not operate
  agreeably upon my mind; the more so that I am a Sunday child and
  also _see_ the specters which others only hear; since, as you
  know, at every tone which the hand strikes upon the key-board the
  corresponding tone-figure rises in my mind; in short, since music
  becomes visible to my inward eye. My brain still reels at the
  recollection of the concert in which I last heard Liszt play. It
  was in a concert for the unfortunate Italians, in the hotel of
  that beautiful, noble and suffering princess who so beautifully
  represents her material and her spiritual fatherland, to wit,
  Italy and Heaven. * * * * (You surely have seen her in Paris, that
  ideal form which yet is but the prison in which the holiest angel
  soul has been imprisoned. * * But this prison is so beautiful that
  every one lingers before it as if enchanted, and gazes at it with
  astonishment.) * * It was in a concert for the benefit of the unhappy
  Italians when I last heard Liszt, last winter, play, I know not
  what, but I could swear he varied upon themes from the Apocalypse.
  At first I could not quite distinctly see them, the four mystical
  beasts; I only heard their voices, especially the roaring of the lion
  and the screaming of the eagle. The ox with the book in his hand I
  saw clearly enough. Best of all he played the Valley of Jehosaphat.
  There were lists as at a tournament, and for spectators, the risen
  people, pale as the grave and trembling, crowded round the immense
  space. First galloped Satan into the lists, in black harness, on a
  milk-white steed. Slowly rode behind him, Death on his pale horse. At
  last Christ appeared, in golden armor, on a black horse, and with His
  holy lance He first thrust Satan to the ground, and then Death, and
  the spectators shouted.”

                                                         HEINRICH HEINE.


A LETTER FROM BERLIOZ TO LISZT.

The following is an extract from a letter written by Berlioz to Liszt
in 1843, as it appears in the former’s “Musical Wandering through
Germany:”

  “Proudly you can exclaim, like Louis XIV, ‘I am the orchestra! I am
  the chorus! At my grand piano I sing, dream, rejoice, and it excels
  in its rapidity the nimblest bows. Like the orchestra, it has its
  whispering flutes and pealing horns, and without any preparation
  can, like that, breathe the evening breeze from its silvery clouds
  of magic chords and tender melodies. It requires no scenes, no
  decorations, no spacious stage; I need not weary myself with
  tedious rehearsals; I want neither a hundred, nor fifty, nor twenty
  assistants; I need not one, and can even do without music. A large
  hall, a grand piano, and I am master of a whole audience. Applause
  resounds through the room.’ When his memory awakens brilliant
  fantasies under his fingers, shouts of enthusiasm welcome them. Then
  he sings Schubert’s _Ave Maria_, or Beethoven’s _Adelaide_, and
  every heart bounds to meet him, every breath is hushed in agitated
  silence, in suppressed amazement. Then, high in air ascend the
  thundering strife and glittering finale of these mighty fireworks
  and the acclamations of the admiring public. Now, amid a shower
  of wreaths and blossoms, the priest of harmony ascends his golden
  tripod, beautiful maidens approach, to kiss with tears the hem of
  his garment; to him belongs the sincere admiration of earnest minds,
  as well as the involuntary homage of the envious; to him bend noble
  forms, to him bow hearts who do not comprehend their own emotions.

  “And the next day, having poured forth the inexhaustible treasure of
  his inspiration, he hastens away, leaving behind him a glittering
  train of glory and enthusiasm. It is a dream! One of those golden
  dreams which one has when he is named Liszt or Paganini.”


HESSE’S CRITICISM OF LISZT.

Hesse, the famous German organist, after hearing Liszt play at Breslau,
in 1859, recalls his playing sixteen years previously in the same
place. He writes to the Breslauer _Zeitung_:

  “On the 9th of May, a grand concert was arranged in the Schiesswerder
  Hall, by Herr Doctor Leopold Damrosch, in honor of, and with the
  cooperation of, the Court-Capellmeister Herr Doctor FRANZ LISZT.
  Liszt, the great, genial master of the piano-forte, who with his
  achievements on this instrument alarmed the world, gave eleven
  concerts here in Breslau in the year 1843, with ever increasing
  success. He electrified his hearers by such playing as _no one_ had
  shown before. Whoever thought to give himself up to his playing with
  the calm and comfortable feeling that he would to the performances
  of Hummel and other masters, was greatly mistaken. Liszt transferred
  his moods to the piano. He screwed up the feelings of the hearer to
  a pitch of feverish excitement, but he allowed them also to subside
  occasionally. We were at that time so fortunate as to be daily
  in his presence and admire his magical play. His repertoire was
  multifarious; he played all masters.

  “We will not waste words about his gigantic _technique_, his art
  of singing on the instrument, etc.; these are well-known things;
  thousands have heard him. But we can not forbear alluding to one
  composition; we mean his ‘Reminiscences from Don Juan,’ one of the
  most genial of piano pieces. We lament for any one who has not heard
  him play these reminiscences. The marble guest on horseback, the
  insinuating Don Juan with his _La ci darem_, the struggling and at
  last consenting Zerlina, the Champagne song, etc., all this did
  Liszt pass before our minds in such a way that we forgot Liszt,
  concert-hall and all; one awoke from the performance as from a
  blissful dream. Four times we heard this piece by him, and always
  with the same emotions.”


LISZT’S PRINCIPAL SCHOLARS.

  HANS VON BUELOW, Meiningen.
  [B]CARL TAUSIG.
  [B]FRANZ BENDEL.
  HANS VON BRONSART, Hanover.
  CARL KLINDWORTH, Moscow.
  ALEXANDER WINTERBERGER, St. Petersburg.
  JULIUS REUBKE.
  [B]THEODORE RATZENBERGER.
  [B]ROBERT PFLUGHAUPT.
  FREDERICK ALTSCHUL.
  [B]NICHOLAS NEILISSOFF.
  CARL BAERMANN, Munich.
  DIONYS PRUCKNER, Stuttgart.
  FERDINAND SCHREIBER.
  LOUIS ROTHFELD.
  J. SIPASS, Budapest.
  GEORGE LEITERT.
  JULIUS RICHTER.
  LOUIS JUNGMANN, Weimar.
  WILLIAM MASON, New York.
  MAX PINNER, New York.
  JULES ZAREMBSKY, Brussels.
  G. SGAMBATI, Rome.
  CARLO LIPPI, Rome.
  SIEGFRIED LANGAARD, Denmark.
  CARL POHLIG.
  ARTHUR FRIEDHEIM.
  L. MAREK, Limberg.
  F. REUSS, Baden-Baden.
  BERTHRAND ROTH, Frankfort.
  ---- KOLLERMAN.
  CARL STASNY.
  JOSEPH WIENIAWSKY.
  INGEBORG STARK-BRONSART.
  SOPHIE MENTER-POPPER.
  [B]SOPHIE PFLUGHAUPT.
  [B]ALINE HUNDT.
  PAULINE FICHTNER-ERDMANNSDOERFER.
  AHRENDA BLUME.
  ANNA MEHLIG.
  VERA TIMANOFF, Russia.
  MARTHA REMMERT.
  SARA MAGNUS-HEINZE.
  DORA PETERSON.
  ILONKA RAVACZ, Hungary.
  CECILIA GAUL, America.
  MARIE BREIDENSTEIN, Erfurt.
  AMY FAY, America.




FOOTNOTES:

[A] Hungarian for “Franz.”

[B] Deceased.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

  The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is
    entered into the public domain.



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