Part 2 (1/2)

The future bibliographer of Liszt literature has a heavy task in store for him, for books about the great Hungarian composer are multiplying apace. Liszt the dazzling virtuoso has long been a theme with variations, and is, we suspect, a theme nearly exhausted; but Liszt as tone poet, Liszt as song writer, as composer for the pianoforte, as litterateur, the man, the wickedest of Don Juans, the ecclesiastic--these and a dozen other studies of the most protean musician of the last century have been appearing ever since the publication of Lina Ramann's vast and sentimental biography. Instead of there being a lack of material for a new book there is an embarra.s.sment, not always of riches, from industrious pens, though few are of value.

The Liszt pupils have had their say, and their pupils are beginning to intone the psalmody of uncritical praise. Liszt the romantic, magnificent, magnanimous, supernal, is set to the same old harmonies, until the reader, tired of the gabble and gush, longs for a biographer who will riddle the various legends and once and for all prove that Liszt was not perfection, even if he was the fascinating Admirable Crichton of his times.

Yet, and the fact sets us wondering over the mutability of fame, the Liszt propaganda is not flouris.h.i.+ng. Richard Burmeister, a well known pupil and admirer of the master in Berlin has a.s.sured us that while Liszt is heard in all the concerts in Germany, the public is lukewarm; Richard Strauss is more eagerly heard. Liszt's familiar remark, ”I can wait,” provoked from the authority above mentioned the answer, ”Perhaps he has waited too long.” We are inclined to disagree with this dictum.

Liszt once had musical and unmusical Europe at his feet. His success was called comet-like, probably because he was born in the comet year 1811, also because his hair was long and his technique transcendentally brilliant. His critical compositions were received with less approval.

That such an artist of the keyboard could be also a successor to Beethoven was an idea mocked at by the conservative Leipsic school.

Besides, he came in such a questionable guise as a _Symphoniker_. A piano concerto with a triangle in the score (the E flat), compositions for full orchestra which were called symphonic poems, lyrics without a tune, that pretended to follow the curve of the words; finally church music, solemn ma.s.ses through which stalked the apparition of the haughty Magyar chieftain, accompanied by echoes of the gipsies on the putzta (the Graner Ma.s.s); it was too much for ears attuned to the suave, melodious Mendelssohn. Indeed the entire Neo-German school was too exotic for Germany. Berlioz, a half mad Frenchman; Richard Wagner, a crazy revolutionist, a fugitive from Saxony; and the Hungarian Liszt, half French, wholly diabolic--of such were the uncanny ingredients of the new music. And then were there not Liszt and his Princess Wittgenstein at Weimar, and the crew of pupils, courtiers and bohemians who collected at the Altenburg? Decidedly these people would never do, even though patronised by royalty. George Eliot and her man Friday, proper British persons, were rather shocked when they visited Weimar.

Liszt survived it all and enjoyed, notwithstanding the opposition of Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Joachim, the Schumanns, later Brahms and Hanslick, the pleasure of hearing his greater works played, understood, and applauded.

Looking backward in an impartial manner it cannot be said that the Liszt compositions have unduly suffered from the proverbial neglect of genius.

A Liszt orchestral number, if not imperative, is a matter of course at most symphony concerts. The piano music is done to death, especially the Hungarian Rhapsodies. Liszt has been ranged; the indebtedness of modern music to his pioneer efforts has been duly credited. We know that the Faust and Dante symphonies (which might have been called symphonic poems) are forerunners not only of much of Wagner, but of the later group from Saint-Saens to Richard Strauss. Why, then, the inevitable wail from the Lisztians that the Liszt music is not heard? Christus and the other oratorios and the ma.s.ses might be heard oftener, and there are many of the sacred compositions yet unsung that would make some critics sit up. No, we are lovers of Liszt, but the martyrdom motive has been sounded too often. In a double sense a reaction is bound to come. The true Liszt is to emerge from the clouds of legend, and Liszt the composer will be definitely placed. A little disappointment will result in both camps; the camp of the ultra-Liszt wors.h.i.+ppers, which sets him in line with Beethoven and above Wagner, and the camp of the anti-Lisztians, which refuses him even the credit of having written a bar of original music. How Wagner would have rapped the knuckles of these latter; how he would have told them what he wrote to Liszt: ”Ich bezeichne dich als Schopfer meiner jetzigen Stellung. Wenn ich komponiere und instrumentiere--denke ich immer nur an dich ... deine drei letzten Part.i.turen sollen mich wieder zum Musiker weihen fur den Beginn meines zweiten Aktes [Siegfried], denn dies Studium einleiten soll.”

Did Wagner mean it all? At least, he couldn't deny what is simply a matter of dates. Liszt preceded Wagner. Otherwise how explain that yawning chasm between Lohengrin and Tristan? Liszt, an original stylist and a profounder musical nature than Berlioz, had intervened.

Nevertheless Liszt learned much from Berlioz, and it is quite beside the mark to question the greater creative power of Wagner over both the Frenchman and the Hungarian. Wagner, like the Roman conquerors, annexed many provinces and made them his own. Let us drop these futile comparisons. Liszt was as supreme in his domain as Wagner in his; only the German had the more popular domain. His culture was intensive, that of Liszt extensive. The tragedy was that Liszt lived to hear himself denounced as an imitator of Wagner; butchered to make a Bayreuth holiday. The day after his death in 1886 the news went abroad in Bayreuth that the ”father-in-law of Wagner” had died; that his funeral might disturb the success of the current music festival! Liszt, who had begun his career with a kiss from Beethoven; Liszt, whose name was a flaring meteor in the sky of music when Wagner was starving in Paris; Liszt the path-breaker, meeting the usual fate of such a Moses, who never conquered the soil of the promised land, the initiator, at the last buried in foreign soil (he loathed Bayreuth and the Wagnerians) and known as the father-in-law of the man who eloped with his daughter and had borrowed of him everything from money to musical ideas. The G.o.ds must dearly love their sport.

The new books devoted to Liszt, his life and his music, are by Julius Kapp, August Gollerich (in German), Jean Chantavoine and Calvocoressi (in French), and A. W. Gottschalg's Franz Liszt in Weimar, a diary full of reminiscences. These works, ponderous in the case of the Germans, represent the vanguard of the literature that is due the anniversary year. To M. Chantavoine may be awarded the merit of the most symmetrically told tale; however, he need not have repeated Janka Wohl's doubtful _mot_ attributed to Liszt apropos of priestly celibacy: ”Gregory VII was a great philanthropist.” This reflects on the Princess Wittgenstein, and Liszt, most chivalric of men, would never have said anything that might present her in the light of pursuing him with matrimonial designs. That she did is not to be denied. Dr. Kapp is often severe on his hero. Is any man ever a hero to his biographer? He does not glorify his subject, and for the amiable weakness displayed by Liszt for princesses and other n.o.ble dames Dr. Kapp is sharp. The compositions are fairly judged, neither in the superlative key, nor condescendingly, as being of mere historic interest. There are over thirteen hundred, of which about four hundred are original. Liszt wrote too much, although he was a better self-critic than was Rubinstein. New details of the quarrel with the Schumanns are given. The gifted pair do not emerge exactly in an agreeable light. Liszt it was who first made known the piano music of Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann, with the true Wieck provinciality, was jealous of Liszt's influence over Robert. Then came the disturbing spectre of Wagner, and Schumann could not forgive Liszt for helping the music of the future to a hearing at Weimar. The rift widened. Liszt made a joke of it, but he was hurt by Schumann's ingrat.i.tude. Alas! he was to be later hurt by Wagner, by Joachim, by Brahms. He dedicated his B-minor sonata to Schumann, and Schumann dedicated to him his n.o.ble Fantaisie in C. After Schumann's death his widow brought out an edition of this fantaisie with the dedication omitted. The old-fas.h.i.+oned lady neither forgot nor forgave.

We consider the Kapp biography solid. The best portrait of Liszt may be found in that clever and amusing novel by Von Wolzogen, Kraftmayr. The Gollerich book chiefly consists of a chain of anecdotes in which the author is a prominent figure. Herr Kapp in a footnote attacks Herr Gollerich, denying that he was much with Liszt. How these Liszt pupils love each other! Joseffy--who was with the master two summers at Weimar, though he never relinquished his proud t.i.tle of Tausig scholar--when the younger brilliant stars Rosenthal, first a Joseffy pupil, Sauer, and others cynically twitted him about his admiration of Liszt's playing--over seventy, at the time Rosenthal was with him--Joseffy answered: ”He was the unique pianist.” ”But you were very young when you heard him” (1869), they retorted. ”Yes, and Liszt was ten years younger too,” replied the witty Joseffy.

Gollerich relates the story of the American girl who threw stones at the window of the Hoffgartnerei, Liszt's residence in Weimar, and when the master appeared above called out: ”I've come all the way from America to hear you play.” ”Come up,” said the aged magician, ”I'll play for you.”

He did so, much to the scandal of the Liszt pupils a.s.sembled for daily wors.h.i.+p. The anecdotes of Tausig and the stolen score of the Faust symphony (Liszt generously stated that the score was overlooked), are also set forth in the Gollerich book.

But he, the darling of the G.o.ds, fortune fairly pursuing him from cradle to grave, nevertheless the existence of this genius was far from happy.

His closing years were melancholy. The centre of the new musical life and beloved by all, he was a lonely, homeless, disappointed man. His daughter Cosima, a dweller among memories only, said that the music of her father did not exist for her; Weimar had been swallowed by Bayreuth, and the crowning sorrow for Liszt lovers is the tomb of Liszt at Bayreuth. It should be in his beloved Weimar. He lies in the shadow of his dear friend Wagner, he, the ”father-in-law of Wagner.” Pascal was right; no matter the comedy, the end of life is always tragic. Perhaps if the tragedy had come to Franz Liszt earlier he might have profited by the uses of adversity, as did Richard Wagner, and thus have achieved the very stars.

III

THE B-MINOR SONATA AND OTHER PIANO PIECES

I

When Franz Liszt nearly three quarters of a century ago made some suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had been foreshadowed in Clementi's Gradus, and its intellectual resultant, the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had been hardly realised.

Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpa.s.singly sweet tones, was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the problem. The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole, who used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies.

But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin's style he was, in the main, manly and sincere. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end and not a means of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, were his trinity of G.o.ds.

Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at the doors of Leipsic and drove back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old women professors--a respectable crowd, which swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at the spirit. Poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience were the obligatory vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic; to attain this triune perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull, musty precedent, and chaste in finger exercises. What wonder, when the das.h.i.+ng young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged by prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under. Chopin never competed, but stood, a slightly astonished spectator, at the edge of the fray. He saw his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence; his polonaises were so many cleaving battle-axes, and perforce he had to confess that all this carnage of tone unnerved him. Liszt was the warrior, not he.

Schumann did all he could by word and note, and to-day, thanks to Liszt and his followers, any other style of piano playing would seem old-fas.h.i.+oned. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a once powerful school and not the representative of an existing method.

There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style, and modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the rococoisms of the idealists; but as a school pure and simple it is of the past. We moderns are as eclectic as the Bolognese. We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaptation; hence a pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the keynote, the foundation, is realism, a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and often forces them to lingering retrospection. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep, and thus we have viewed many times the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated artistic frame. With all this the path was blazed by the Magyar and we may now explore with impunity its once trackless region.

Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago princ.i.p.ally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand, forearm and upper arm are important factors now in tone production where formerly the fingertips were considered the prime utility. Triceps muscles rule the big tonal effects in our times. Liszt discovered their value. The Viennese pianos certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and others in their styles; just as Clementi inaugurated his reforms by writing a series of studies and then building himself a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety of touch--tone-colour--the old rapid pearly pa.s.sage, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished; it was absorbed by the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Power, sonority, dynamic variety and novel manipulation of the pedals, combined with a technique that included Bach part playing and demanded the most sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard--these were a few of the signs of the new school. In the giddiness superinduced by indulging in this heady new wine an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the moment harmful to a pure interpretation of the cla.s.sics, which were mangled by the young vandals who had enlisted under Liszt's victorious standard. Colour, only colour, all the rest is but music! was the motto of those bold youths, who had never heard of Paul Verlaine.

But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its too dangerous quality, and when the last of the Liszt pupils gives his--or her--last recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Indeed, tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig's attempt to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has been toned down into a more sober, grateful colouring. The scarlet waistcoat of the Romantic school is outworn; the brutal brilliancies and exaggerated orchestral effects of the realists are beginning to be regarded with suspicion. We comprehend the possibilities of the instrument and our own aural limitations. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as were Donizetti and Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is as nearly obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. (Which should you prefer hearing, the Norma of Thalberg or the Lucia of Liszt?

Both in their different ways are clever but--outmoded.) Bold is the man to-day who plays either in public.

With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The nuance is ruler now. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy are present, but the nuance is inevitable, not alone tonal but expressive nuance. Infinite shadings are to be heard where before were only piano, forte, and mezzo-forte. Chopin and Liszt and Tausig did much for the nuance; Joseffy taught America the nuance, as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of his golden tones. ”Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,”