"WHEN I PLAYED FOR LISZT"
To write from Bayreuth in the spring-time as Wagner sleeps calmly in the
backyard of _Wahnfried_, without a hint of his music in the air, is
giving me one of the deepest satisfactions of my existence. How came you
in Bayreuth, and, of all seasons in the year, the spring? The answer may
astonish you; indeed, I am astonished myself when I think of it. Liszt,
Franz Liszt, greatest of pianists--after Thalberg--greatest of modern
composers--after no one--Liszt lies out here in the cemetery on the
Erlangerstrasse, and to visit that forlorn pagoda designed by his
grandson Siegfried Wagner, I left my comfortable lodgings in Munich and
traveled an entire day.
Now let me whisper something in your ear--I once studied with Liszt at
Weimar! Does this seem incredible to you? An adorer of Thalberg,
nevertheless, once upon a time I pulled up stakes at Paris and went to
the abode of Liszt and played for him exactly once. This was a
half-century ago. I carried letters from a well-known Parisian music
publisher, Liszt's own, and was therefore accorded a hearing. Well do I
recall the day, a bright one in April. His Serene Highness was at that
time living on the Altenberg, and to see him I was forced to as much
patience and diplomacy as would have gained me admittance to a royal
household.
_Endlich_, the fatal moment arrived. Surrounded by a band of disciples,
crazy fellows all--I discovered among the rest the little figure of Karl
Tausig--the great man entered the _saal_ where I tremblingly sat. He was
very amiable. He read the letters I timidly presented him, and then,
slapping me on the back with an expression of _bonhomie_, he cried aloud
in French: "_Tiens!_ let us hear what this admirer of my old friend
Thalberg has to say for himself on the keyboard!" I did not miss the
veiled irony of the speech, the word _friend_ being ever so lightly
underlined; I knew of the famous Liszt-Thalberg _duello_, during which
so much music and ink had been spilt.
But my agony! The _via dolorosa_ I traversed from my chair to the piano!
Since then the modern school of painter-impressionists has come into
fashion. I understand perfectly the mental, may I say the optical,
attitude of these artists to landscape subjects. They must gaze upon a
tree, a house, a cow, with their nerves at highest tension until
everything quivers; the sky is bathed in magnetic rays, the background
trembles as it does in life. So to me was the lofty chamber wherein I
stood on that fateful afternoon. Liszt, with his powerful profile, the
profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the
light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow,
nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this
picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my
memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with
malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied
being in this spectral atmosphere.
Yet urged by an hypnotic will I went to the piano, lifted the
fall-board, and in my misery I actually paused to read the maker's name.
A whisper, a smothered chuckle, and a voice uttering these words: "He
must have begun as a piano-salesman," further disconcerted me. I fell on
to the seat and dropped my fingers upon the keys. Facing me was the Ary
Scheffer portrait of Chopin, and without knowing why I began the weaving
Prelude in D-major. My insides shook like a bowl of jelly; yet I was
outwardly as calm as the growing grass. My hands did not falter and the
music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vain
Thalberg's _Art of Singing on the Piano_. I finished. There was a
murmur; nothing more.
Then Liszt's voice cut the air:
"I expected Thalberg's tremolo study," he said. I took the hint and
arose.
He permitted me to kiss his hand, and, without stopping for my hat and
walking-stick in the antechamber, I went away to my lodgings. Later I
sent a servant for the forgotten articles, and the evening saw me in a
diligence miles from Weimar. But I had played for Liszt!
Now, the moral of all this is that my testimony furthermore adds to the
growing mystery of Franz Liszt. He heard hundreds of such pianists of my
caliber, and, while he never committed himself--for he was usually too
kind-hearted to wound mediocrity with cruel criticism, yet he seldom
spoke the unique word except to such men as Rubinstein, Tausig, Joseffy,
d'Albert, Rosenthal, or von Bülow. A miraculous sort of a man, Liszt was
ever pouring himself out upon the world, body, soul, brains, art,
purse--all were at the service of his fellow-beings. That he was imposed
upon is a matter of course; that he never did an unkind act in his life
proves him to have been Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman:
"One who never inflicts pain." And only now is the real significance of
the man as a composer beginning to be revealed. Like a comet he swept
the heavens of his early youth. He was a marvelous virtuoso who mistook
the piano for an orchestra and often confounded the orchestra with the
piano. As a pianist pure and simple I prefer Sigismund Thalberg; but, as
a composer, as a man, an extraordinary personality, Liszt quite filled
my firmament.
Setting aside those operatic arrangements and those clever, noisy
Hungarian Rhapsodies, what a wealth of piano-music has not this man
disclosed to us. Calmly read the thematic catalog of Breitkopf and
Härtel and you will be amazed at its variety. Liszt has paraphrased
inimitably songs by Schubert, Schumann, and Robert Franz, in which the
perfumed flower of the composer's thoughts is never smothered by
passage-work. Consider the delicious etude _Au bord d'une Source_, or
the _Sonnets After Petrarch_, or those beautiful concert-studies in
D-flat, F-minor, and A-flat; are they not models of genuine piano-music!
The settings of Schubert marches Hanslick declared are marvels; and the
_Transcendental Studies!_ Are not keyboard limitations compassed?
Chopin, a sick man physically, never dared as did Liszt. One was an
æolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these
studies in their revised form; I content myself with the first sketches
published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen.
Later Liszt expanded the _croquis_ into elaborate frescoes. And yet they
say that he had no thematic invention!
Take up his B-minor sonata. Despite its length, an unheavenly length, it
is one of the great works of piano-literature fit to rank with
Beethoven's most sublime sonatas. It is epical. Have you heard Friedheim
or Burmeister play it? I had hoped that Liszt would vouchsafe me a
performance, but you have seen that I had not the courage to return to
him. Besides, I wasn't invited. Once in Paris a Liszt pupil, George
Leitert, played for me the _Dante Sonata_, a composition I heard thirty
years later from the fingers of Arthur Friedheim. It is the _Divine
Comedy_ compressed within the limits of a piano-piece. What folly, I
hear some one say! Not at all. In several of Chopin's Preludes--his
supreme music--I have caught reflections of the sun, the moon, and the
starry beams that one glimpses in lonely midnight pools. If Chopin could
mirror the cosmos in twenty bars, why should not a greater tone-poet
imprison behind the bars of his music the subtle soul of Dante?
To view the range, the universality of Liszt's genius, it is only
necessary to play such a tiny piano-composition, _Eclogue_, from _Les
Années de Pèlerinage_ and then hear his _Faust Symphony_, his _Dante
Symphony_, his Symphonic Poems. There's a man for you! as Abraham
Lincoln once said of Walt Whitman. After carefully listening to the
_Faust Symphony_ it dawns on you that you have heard all this music
elsewhere, filed out, triturated, cut into handy, digestible fragments;
in a word, dressed up for operatic consumption, popularized. Yes,
Richard Wagner dipped his greedy fingers into Liszt's scores as well as
into his purse. He borrowed from the pure Rhinegold hoard of the
Hungarian's genius, and forgot to credit the original. In music there
are no quotation marks. That is the reason borrowing has been in vogue
from Handel down.
The _Ring of the Nibelungs_ would not be heard today if Liszt had not
written its theme in his _Faust Symphony_. _Parsifal_ is altogether
Lisztian, and a German writer on musical esthetics has pointed out
recently, theme for theme, resemblance for resemblance, in this
Liszt-Wagner _Verhältniss_. Wagner owed everything to Liszt--from money
to his wife, success, and art. A wonderful white soul was Franz Liszt.
And he is only coming into his kingdom as a composer. Poor, petty,
narrow-minded humanity could not realize that because a man was a
pianist among pianists, he might be a composer among composers. I made
the error myself. I, too, thought that the velvet touch of Thalberg was
more admirable than the mailed warrior fist of Liszt. It is a mistake.
And now, plumped on my knees in Liszt's Bayreuth tomb, I acknowledge my
faults. Yes, he was a greater pianist than Thalberg. Can an
old-fashioned fellow say more?