Have you read Thoreau's _Walden_ with its smell of the woods and its
ozone-permeated pages? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially
to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring
under the delusion that they are developing their individuality.
Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays among musicians! They
have been admonished so often in print and private that their ignorance
is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these ambitious ladies and
gentlemen rush off to the booksellers, to libraries, and literally gorge
themselves with the "ologies" and "isms" of the day. Lord, Lord, how I
enjoy meeting them at a musicale! There they sit, cocked and primed for
a verbal encounter, waiting to knock the literary chip off their
neighbor's shoulder.
"Have you read"--begins some one and the chattering begins, _furioso_.
"Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,"--"Tolstoi's _What is Art?_ certainly, he
ought to be electrocuted"--"Nordau! isn't he terrible?" And the
cacophonous conversational symphony rages, and when it is spent, the
man who asked the question finishes:
"Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in the _Kölnische
Zeitung?_" and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards
him whilst murmurs arise, "What an uncultured man! To talk 'shop' like a
regular musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but
was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The
newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame
for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a
second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and
dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory
and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly
something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program--I mean plots
for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one
once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England,
begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank
verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now
so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.
Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He had read everything before he
was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This
volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his
has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to
parse a sentence or play a Bach _Invention_. The Weimar crew all
imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a
sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of
bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through
a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with
excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room
for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man
with a purple nose--a Cyrano de Cognac nose--came towards me. He wore a
monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort
affected by Don Basilio in _The Barber of Seville_.
"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his
warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He
invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the
time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us.
I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an
outrageous manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they
sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint
purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore
semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and
affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats. When
Liszt left me--we studied together with Czerny--they trooped after him,
their garments ballooning in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was
the devotion of a pet ape.
I mention this because I have never met a Liszt pupil since without
recalling that day in Weimar. And when one plays I close my eyes and
hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding,
treacherous technic. Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch. The
old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, "Don't copy
my touch; it's spoiled." He had for so many years pounded and punched
the keyboard that his tactile sensibility--isn't that your new-fangled
expression?--had vanished. His "orchestral" playing was one of those
pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe,
and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons. I remember well
that Liszt, who was first and foremost a melodramatic actor, had a habit
of striding to the instrument, sitting down in a magnificent manner and
uplifting his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories. He was a master
hypnotist, and like John L. Sullivan he had his adversary--the
audience--conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific,
his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He
usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms
of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for a
barn-floor!
Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied.
In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris,
Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage. He wrote articles about
himself in the musical papers--a practice that his disciples have not
failed to emulate--and in an article on Thalberg displayed his bad taste
in abusing what he could not imitate. Oh yes, Liszt was a great thief.
His piano music--I mean his so-called original music--is nothing but
Chopin and brandy. His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed from Paganini,
and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped
himself to its hair. So in his piano music we find a conglomeration of
other men's ideas, other men's figures. When he wrote for orchestra the
hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz. I
never could quite see Liszt. He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious
Pole got rid of him and then he strung after Wagner. I do not mean that
Liszt was without merit, but I do assert that he should have left the
piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.
Let us consider some of his compositions.
Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not,
however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary
artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving
for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was
served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates,
the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through
the _Lucia_ fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff
before she mounts her bicycle.
And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to
flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the _Don Juan_
of Liszt and the _Don Juan_ of Thalberg! See which is the more musical,
the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic
extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies,
bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thing he could
lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the _Tannhäuser_
overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual
playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses
everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh
fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert,
Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you
that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form
like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of
one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had
evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the
raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors,
appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy.
The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most
commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes _à la_ Chopin; clever, I
admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up
into _Twelve Etudes Transcendentales_--listen to the big, boastful
title!--is better than the furbished up later collection. His three
concert studies are Chopinish; his _Waldesrauschen_ is pretty, but leads
nowhere; his _Années des Pèlerinage_ sickly with sentimentalism; his
_Dante Sonata_ a horror; his _B-minor Sonata_ a madman's tale signifying
froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of
the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious,
artificial and insincere. Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his
continual worship of God in his music is for me monotonously
blasphemous.
The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last. They are the nightmare curse of
the pianist, with their rattle-trap harmonies, their helter-skelter
melodies, their vulgarity and cheap bohemianism. They all begin in the
church and end in the tavern. There is a fad just now for eating
ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accompaniment of
a wretched gypsy circus called a Czardas. Liszt's rhapsodies
irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirty _table d'hôte_, where
evil-smelling dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced
by evil-tasting messes. If Liszt be your god, why then give me Czerny,
or, better still, a long walk in the woods, humming with nature's
rhythms. I think I'll read _Walden_ over again. Now do you think I am as
amiable as I look?
X