Part 3 (2/2)
2. Fantaisie on reminiscences of Puritani, composed and performed by the above named.
3. Studies and Fragments, composed and performed by the same.
4. Improvisation on a given theme--still by the same. That is all.
This was really nothing more than a forerunner of the present piano-recital. Liszt was the first one who ventured an evening of piano compositions without fearing the disgust of an audience. From his accounts they behaved very well indeed, and applauded and chatted only at the proper time.
Liszt, realising that he had nothing to learn from the living Italians, turned to their dead; and for such studies his first visit to Rome was especially propitious. Gregory XIV, had opened the Etruscan Museum but two years before and was stocking it with the treasures which were being unearthed in the old cities of Etruria. The same pope also enlarged the Vatican library and took active interest in the mural decorations of these newly added ten rooms. The painters Overbeck, Cornelius, and Veit were kept actively employed in this city, and the influence of their work was not a trifling one on the painter colony. The diplomat Von Bunsen and the Cardinals Mezzofanti and Mai exerted their influences to spread general culture.
An interesting one of Liszt's friends.h.i.+ps, dating from this time, is that with Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Academie. Strolling under the oaks of the Villa Medici, Ingres would disentangle for his younger friend the confusion of impressions gathered in his wanderings among Rome's art treasures. Himself a music lover and a musician--he played the violin in the theatre orchestra of his native place, Montauban, at some performances of Gluck's operas--Ingres admired Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and above all Gluck, upon whom he looked as the musical successor to aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Under such sympathetic and intelligent guidance Liszt's admiration for the other arts became ordered. After a day among the forest of statues he would coax his friend to take up the violin, and Liszt writes almost enthusiastically of his Beethoven interpretations.
It is entirely within reason to argue that we owe to this new viewpoint such of Liszt's compositions as were inspired by works of the other arts. Such, to name a few, were the Sposalizio and Il Penseroso--by Raphael and Michelangelo--Die Hunnenschlacht--Kaulbach--and Danse Macabre--after Andrea Orcagna. That Liszt was susceptible to such impressions, even before, is proven by his essay Die Heilige Cacelia by Raphael, written earlier than this Roman trip; but under Ingres' hints his width of vision was extended, and he began to find alluring parallels between the fine arts--his comprehension of Mozart and Beethoven grew with his acquaintance of the works of Raphael and Michelangelo. He compared Giovanni da Pisa, Fra Beato, and Francia with Allegri, Marcello, and Palestrina; t.i.tian with Rossini!
What attracted Liszt princ.i.p.ally during his first stay at Rome was the religion of art, as it had attracted Goethe before him. Segnitz quotes against this att.i.tude the one of Berlioz, whom the ruins of Rome touched slightly, as did Palestrina's church music. He found the latter devoid of religious sentiment, and in this verdict he was joined by none less than Mendelssohn.
The surroundings, the atmosphere of Rome, appealed to Liszt, and under them his individuality thrived and a.s.serted itself. The scattered and often hurried impressions of this first visit ordered themselves gradually, but the composite whole deflected his life's currents into the one steady and broad stream of art. Like Goethe, he might have regarded his first day at Rome as the one of his second birth, as the one on which his true self came to light. The Via Sacra by which he left Rome led him into the forum of the art world.
In June, 1839, after a stay of five months, Liszt, accompanied by the Countess d'Agoult, left Rome for the baths at Lucca. The elusive peace he was tracking escaped him here, and he wandered to the little fis.h.i.+ng village San Rossore. In November of the same year he parted company with Italy--and also with the countess. The D'Agoult had romantic ideas of their union, in which the inevitable responsibilities of this sort of thing played no part. Segnitz regards the entire affair as having been a most unfortunate one for Liszt, and believes that the latter only saved himself and his entire artistic future by separating from the countess.
The years of contact had formed no spiritual ties between them and the rupture was inevitable.
With her three children d'Agoult started for Paris there to visit Liszt's mother; later, through Liszt's intervention, a complete reconciliation with her family was effected. Although after the death of her mother the countess inherited a fortune, Liszt continued to support the children.
Leaving San Rossore the artist began his public life in earnest. It was the beginning of his virtuoso period and Vienna was the starting-point of his triumphal tournee across Europe. This period was an important one for development of piano playing, placing the latter on a much higher artistic plane than it had been; in it Liszt also inaugurated a new phase of the possibilities of concert giving. It was the time in which he fought both friend and enemy, fought without quarter for the cause of art.
As a composer Liszt, during his first stay in Italy, 1837-40, was far from active. The Fantaisie quasi Sonata apres une lecture de Dante and the twelve Etudes d'execution transcendante both came to life at Lake Como. There were besides the Chromatic Galop and the pieces Sposalizio, Il Penseroso and Tre Sonetti di Petrarca, which became part of the Annees de Pelerinage (Italie). His first song, with piano accompaniment, Angiolin dal biondo crin, dates from these days. The balance of this time was devoted to making arrangements of melodies by Mercadante, Donizetti, and Rossini, and to finis.h.i.+ng the piano transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies. These and a few others about cover his list of compositions and arrangements.
II
Immediately after Liszt's separation from the Countess d'Agoult began a period of restless activity for him. The eight nomadic years during which he wandered up and down Europe, playing constantly in public, are the ones in which his virtuosity flourished. To-day we are inclined to mock at the mere mention of Liszt the virtuoso--we have heard far too much of his achievements, achievements behind which the real Liszt has become a warped and unrecognizable personality. But it was a remarkable tour nevertheless, and so wholesale a lesson in musical interpretation as Europe had never had before. Whenever and wherever he smote the keyboard the old-fas.h.i.+oned clay idols of piano playing were shattered, and however much it was attempted to patch them the pieces would not quite fit. Liszt struck the death-blow to unemotional playing, but he destroyed only to create anew: he erected ideals of interpretation which are still honored.
When he accepted the Weimar post of Hofkapellmeister in 1847--he had _en pa.s.sant_ in a term, lasting from December, 1843, to February of the following year, conducted eight successful concerts in Weimar--it looked as if his wild spirit of travel had dissipated itself: _ausgetobt_, as the Germans say.
With scarcely any time modulation this versatile genius began his career of Hofkapellmeister, in which he topsy-turvied traditions and roused Weimar from the lethargy into which it had fallen with the fading of that wonderful Goethe circle. At this point the influence of woman is again made manifest.
Gregorovius, the great antiquarian, gives us a few glimpses of her in his Romischen Tagebuchern. He admits that her personality was repulsive to him, but that she fairly sputtered spirituality. Also that she wrote an article about the Sixtine Chapel for the _Revue du Monde Catholique_--”a brilliant article: all fireworks, like her speech”; finally, that ”she is writing an essay on friends.h.i.+p.”
When the possibility of marriage with the Princess went up into thin air Liszt began contemplating a permanent residence in Rome. Here he could live more independently and privately than in Germany, and this was desirable, since he still had some musical problems to solve. First of all, he turned to his legend of the Holy Elizabeth, completing that; then Der Sonnen-Hymnus des heiligen Franziskus von a.s.sisi was written, to say nothing of a composition for organ and trombone composed for one of his Weimar adherents. Frequent excursions and work so consumed his hours that soon we find him complaining as bitterly about the lack of time in Rome as in Weimar.
Rome of this time was still ”outside of Italy”: the reverse side of the Papal medallions showed Daniel in the lion's den and Pope Pio Nono immersed in mysticism. The social features were important. Segnitz mentions ”die Kolnische Patrizierin Frau Sibylle Mertens-Schaaffhausen, Peter Cornelius, die Dame Schopenhauer,” the Ottilie of Goethe. Besides the artists Catel and Nerenz there was Frau von Schwarz, who attracted Liszt. She boasted friends.h.i.+p with Garibaldi, and her salon was a meeting-place of the intellectual mult.i.tude. Liszt seems to have been king pin everywhere, and it is refres.h.i.+ng to read the curt, unsentimental impression of him retailed by Gregorovius: ”I have met Liszt,” wrote the latter; ”remarkable, demoniac appearance; tall, slender, long hair. Frau von Schwarz believes he is burned out, that only the walls of him remain, wherein a small ghostly flame flits.” To add to the list of notables: the painter Lindemann-Frommel; the Prussian representatives, Graf Arnim and Kurt von Schlozer; King Louis I, of Bavaria, and the artists Riedel, Schweinfurt, Pa.s.sini, and Feuerbach the philosopher.
Naturally Liszt partic.i.p.ated in the prominent church festivals and was affected by their glamour; it even roused him to sentimental utterance.
Germany and the thoughts of it could not lure him away from Rome, nor could the summer heat drive him out. The Holy Elizabeth was completed by August 10, 1862, and with it he had finished the greater part of his work as composer. Never did he lose interest in German art movements, and was ever ready with advice and suggestions.
A severe shock, one which sent him to bed, came to him about the middle of September of this year, when his youngest daughter, Blandine Ollivier, the wife of Louis Napoleon's war minister, Emile Ollivier, died. Liszt turned to religion and to his art for consolation; he slaved away at the Christus oratorio and wrote two psalms and the instrumental Evocatio in der Sixtinischen Kapelle. Invitations from London, Weimar, and Budapest could not budge him from Rome; deeper and deeper he became interested in the wonders and beauties of his religion.
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