to every pianist. Joseffy told the present writer that the B minor
sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it “lies” so
beautifully for the hand. No work of Liszt, with the possible exception
of his études, is as interesting. Agreeing with those critics who declare
that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure, and also
with those who assert the work to be an organic amplification of the
old obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven’s last sonata
period as a starting-point for his plunge into futurity—agreeing with
these warring factions, we find fascinating music in this sonata. What a
dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex.
The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze from
which emerges that bold theme in octaves (Wotan’s theme), the leap from
C to the A sharp below—how Liszt has stamped this and the succeeding
intervals as his own! Power there is, sardonic power, like the first
phrase of the E flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively
the composer traps your consciousness in the theme of the sonata, with
its four knocking D’s! What follows might be a drama enacted in the
netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre,
with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz and Saint-Saëns and Raff
come to the mind as masters of the grisly and supernatural. But the thin,
sharp flames of hell hover about the brass, wood-wind, and shrieking
strings in the Liszt orchestra.
The chorale, usually the meat of the Lisztian composition, now appears
and in dogmatic affirmation proclaims the religious belief of the
composer; our convictions are swept along until after that outburst
in C major, when follows the insincerity of it all in the harmonic
sequences. Here, surely, it is not a whole-hearted belief, only theatric
attudinizing; after the faint return of the first motive is heard the
sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engenders the
suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling in prayer he was prostrate
before woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous
fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D begins some lovely music,
secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.
But the rustle of silken attire is behind every bar; sensuous imagery,
a delicate perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah!
naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy
credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a
melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tresses!
Wilt thou permit her to make away with thy spiritual resolutions? Vade
retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme, so
triumphantly proclaimed at the outset, is now solemnly sounded with
choric pomp and power. Then begins the hue and cry of diminished
sevenths, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colons
kaleidoscopically moves onward. Again the devil tempts our musical St.
Antony, this time in octaves and in the key of A major. He momentarily
succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its
orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Satan is routed
and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugato, which, like the
domestic ailment known as a bad conscience, is happily short-winded.
Another flank movement of the Eternal Feminine, this time in the
seductive key of B, made mock of by this musical Samson, who in stretta
quasi presto views his weakness with contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from
him, and in the bass triplets frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this finally leads to prestissimo finale of startling splendor.
In the literature of the piano there is nothing more exciting. It is
brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is painted on every
bar. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the musical anvil
tremble under the sledge-hammer blows of this tonal Attila. Then follow
a few bars of the Beethoven-andante, a moving return to the earlier
themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean abode,
whence it emerges, a Magyar Wotan, majestically vanishing not in the
mists of Valhalla but in the bowels of Gehenna; then a genuine Lisztian
chord-sequence followed by a profound stillness in the major. The B
minor sonata displays Liszt’s power, Liszt’s weakness. It is rhapsodic,
it is too long—infernal, not a “heavenly length”—it is noble, drastic,
cerebral, and it is blazing with exotic hues. It is also cynical and
insincere. Liszt, more than other composers, Meyerbeer and Berlioz
excepted, excelled in depicting a sneering, cynical sensuality. Also
insincerity. And when you come to think it over, it takes genius to
suggest in tones the insincere. This feat Liszt achieved. In his
symphony to Faust he succeeds better with the Mephisto picture than
in his characterization of Marguerite. But to deny the B minor sonata
a commanding position in the Pantheon of piano music would be folly.
And interpreted by an artist saturated in the Liszt tradition, such as
Arthur Friedheim—who has intellectual power and never resorts to mere
sentimentalism—the work almost compasses the sublime.
Away from the glitter of the concert-room this extraordinary Hungarian,
inspired after the loftiest in art, yet in the atmosphere of aristocratic
salons, or of the papal court, Liszt was not altogether admirable. We
have heard certain cries calling heaven to witness that he was anointed
of the Lord (which he was not); also that if he had not cut and run
to sanctuary to escape the petticoats—one was his egregious Polish
Princess—we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. This theory is
not far from the truth. Among the various penalties undergone by genius
is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck,
the composer Liszt has had many things read into his music which do
not belong there. He set great store by his sacred compositions, his
masses and his psalms, and he was bitterly disappointed because Rome did
not espouse his reforms in churchly music, notwithstanding his close
friendship with Pope Pius IX. But there is a vein of insincerity running
throughout this music, despite its ecclesiastic pomp and operatic
coloring. Perhaps the best estimate of Franz Liszt is the purely human
one. He was a virile musical genius, and was compact of the usual
pleasing and unpleasing faults and virtues as is any great man not born
of a book.
DREAMING OF LISZT
Philip Hale once wrote that they buried Richard Wagner in the back yard
like a cat; which is irreverent yet a bald statement of the fact. Liszt
is also buried at Baireuth, in a forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson,
Siegfried Wagner, who, at the time of his grandfather’s death, was a
student of architecture. After a pilgrimage to this tomb in the cemetery
in the Erlangerstrasse, for I count myself among the Lisztianer, and also
after hearing several operas of Siegfried I reached the conclusion that,
notwithstanding critical opinion to the contrary, the young man wisely
abandoned his architectural dreams. But it is another kind of dream that
I would describe this Sunday morning. When a young chap, I was crazy to
see, to hear, Liszt, and while I think that the old man with long white
hair and warts on his face was the real Liszt—I met him on the Rue de
Rivoli in 1878—still the possibility of a closer view haunted my sleeping
and waking hours, and, finally armed with letters of introduction from
a well-known French pianist, a pupil of the musical Merlin, and a Paris
music publisher, I found myself one evening at the Gare de l’Est, en
route for Strasburg, thence to Stuttgart, and Weimar. In those times,
forty years ago, we travelled slowly.
A lovely morning in May saw me walking through a sun-smitten lane on the
road to the garden-house where his Serene Highness was living. I had sent
my introductions to the royal household the previous evening. I had been
summoned. The hedges were white with spring blossoms, the air redolent of
bockbier. Ah! thronging memories of youth. Suddenly a man on horseback,
his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather, dashed by,
shouting, “Make way for the Master. He comes. He comes!” Presently a
venerable being with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose—appeared,
and walking. His hair streamed in the wind. He wore a monkish habit,
and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat of the pattern affected by
Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville. “It must be Liszt or the Devil,”
I cried, and the only Liszt smiled, his warts growing more purple,
his expression most benignant. He waved to me a friendly hand, that
formidable hand, which, like a steam-hammer, could crush steel or crack
the shell of an egg, so sensitive was it. “Both Liszt and the Devil,” he
grunted, and then I knew my man. I kissed his hand, made the sign of the
cross, for I was addressing an ecclesiastic, an Abbé, though one without
a tonsure, and created a deacon by Pope Pius IX, called Pio Nono in
Italy, but in Rome affectionately nicknamed “Pianino” because of his love
of piano music, Liszt’s in particular.
He invited me to refreshments at the Czerny Café, but as it was crowded
we went across the street to the garden of the Elephant Hotel, there to
be surrounded by a throng of little Liszts, pupils, male and female, who
mimicked the old, old gentleman in an absurd manner. They wore their hair
on their shoulders, they sprinkled this hair with flour, they even went
so far as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They
donned semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar style
of the Master; they, too, sported shovel-shaped hats, and from time to
time they indulged in patibulary gestures. But, good Lord, how they could
down the beer!
Enfin, after some diplomatic skirmishing I was invited to the afternoon
musicale and went with the gang to the pretty little home of Liszt in
the ducal park. Liszt was amiable. He knew that I was nervous, so he
asked a few promising young beginners, such as Arthur Friedheim, Alfred
Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil Sauer, Richard Burmeister, to open the
ball. After I heard them I wished myself in Buxtehude. I had proclaimed
myself as an ardent upholder of the Thalberg school, which champions a
singing touch and pearly scales. I had studied all the Thalberg fantasies
on operatic airs with Charles H. Jarvis of Philadelphia, who could read
prima vista any music composed by man, god, or devil. You will estimate
my musical and intellectual equipment of those days when I tell you that
my battle-horse was the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, arranged by Thalberg,
and my favorite reading the prose of Chateaubriand; in few words, lush,
luxuriant, and overblown romanticism. The step to Ouida’s novels and the
Henselt études was not far. All that I detest now in music and literature
was then my passion. Like Ephraim I was sealed to my idols, and the
chiefest was Thalberg, natural son of Prince Lichtenstein, a handsome
piano virtuoso with aristocratic side-whiskers, a smooth pianistic style,
and a euphonious touch.
Liszt called to me. “Tiens! let us hear some music by an admirer of
my old friend Sigismund Thalberg.” I did not miss the veiled irony
of the speech, the slight underlining of “friend,” for I had read of
the historical Liszt-Thalberg duel in Paris during the third decade
of the last century. But memories soon annulled my agony. What a via
dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano—by the way, a Steinway
concert-grand. I shall not forget to my dying hour that chamber wherein
I stood the most fateful afternoon of my life. Liszt, with his powerful
profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the
light streaking his hair, silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting
chin. He was the illuminated focus of a picture that is burnt into my
memory cells. The pupils were wraiths floating in a misty dream, with
malicious points of light for eyes. I, too, felt like a disembodied
being in this spectral atmosphere of which Liszt was the living reality.
Urged by a hypnotic will I went to the piano, sat before it, and in my
nervous misery lifted the fall-board and paused to decipher the name
of its maker; that’s how I discovered Steinway. My act did not pass
unperceived. Whispering ensued, followed chuckling, and some one said:
“He must have begun as a piano salesman.” It was the voice of the witty
Rosenthal, and it utterly disconcerted me. Facing me on the wall was Ary
Scheffer’s portrait of Chopin, and doubtless prompted by the subject, my
fingers groped among the keys and I began, without rhyme or reason, the
weaving prelude in D of the immortal Pole. My insides were shaking like
a bowl of disturbed jelly, though outwardly I was as calm as growing
grass. Oddly enough my hands did not falter, the music seemed to ooze
from my wrists. I had not studied in vain Thalberg’s Art of Singing
on the Pianoforte. I finished. Not a murmur was heard. Then Liszt’s
voice cut the sultry air: “I had expected Thalberg’s tremolo study,” he
casually remarked, avenging himself with an epigram on his old rival a
half century after their battles. But Thalberg didn’t hear it. I did. I
took the hint and bowed myself out of the royal presence, permitted by
the boss to kiss his technique-laden fingers, and without stopping for my
hat and walking-stick in the ante-chamber I went away. Then tempted by
the cool of the woods I strayed across to Goethe’s Garden House. At the
moment I preferred poetry to music. Nevertheless, I had played for Liszt.
Rotten playing, of course, yet a historical fact. But when I compiled a
life of the Grand Old Man of Hungary I hadn’t the courage to put my name
in that long list of reputed pupils, though I dare say I didn’t play any
worse than some of them. Ask Arthur Friedheim.
My hat and stick I sent for. I was not precisely in a jubilant mood,
though I joined the Liszt lobby that night at the Hotel “Zum Elefanten.”
It was a goodly crowd, the majority of whom achieved musical fame later.
In the Weimar of those days Liszt walked and talked, smoked big black
cigars, drank his share of brandy, played, composed, and prayed—he
seldom missed early mass. Despite his Hungarian origin, his early French
training, there emerged through the palimpsest of his brilliant and
complex personality the characteristics of his mother, an Austrian born.
He loved German music, German ways. He liked to speak that tongue in
preference to French. Of the Magyar language he knew little. But his
music is Hungarian enough; Hungarian in the sense that Tchaikovsky’s is
Russian—_i. e._, cosmopolitan. However, there’s a lot of nonsense written
about that fetish of a certain critical school, the fetish of nationalism
in music. Liszt would have been invincibly Liszt even if he had been
born in Boston. And that tropically passionate town does not in the least
resemble Budapest.
At the Liszt museum his old housekeeper Paulina Apel—I must ask Albert
Morris Bagby if she still lives—showed me its numerous memorials. What a
collection of trophies, jewels, manuscripts, orders, pictures, letters,
and testimonials from all over the globe. I read a letter from Charles
Baudelaire to Liszt, which is not to be found in the volume dedicated
to his correspondence. Gifts from royalty abound. In glass cases are
the scores of Christus, the Faust Symphony, Orpheus, Hungaria, the
Berg Symphony, Totentanz, and Festklaenge. Besides the Steinway in the
music-room there was an old instrument dating back to the forties;
for the little piano upon which he studied as a child you must go to
the Budapest museum. At Weimar may be seen marble hands of Liszt’s,
Beethoven’s, and Chopin’s; also the long, nervous, spider-like fingers
of Liszt clasping the slender hand of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein.
Like Chopin, Liszt attracted princesses and other exalted personages in
petticoats as does sugar buzzing flies.
And then I woke up. I had been dreaming in my Parisian attic in 1878.
When I went for the first time to Weimar in 1896 Liszt had been dead ten
years.
A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD
In a half-forgotten study of Flaubert’s masterpiece, L’Education
Sentimentale, which he rightly calls A Tragic Novel, George Moore
compares the great Frenchman to Brahma “creating the passing spectacle
of life to relieve his eternal ennui.”... Now, Leopold Godowsky is
not Brahma, and he has never suffered from ennui, thanks to his
tremendous capacity for work; yet I can’t help picturing him as a sort
of impassive Asiatic deity seated before the keyboard of his instrument
calmly surveying the eternal spectacle of music and its many masques.
All schools, all styles, he knows, but upon this vast knowledge he
has no desire to make any personal comment. Passionless, passionate,
objective and subjective, his crystal-clear comprehension of the musical
universe has made him apparently assume the attitude of an omniscient
spectator, though he is neither one nor the other. Louis Ehlert asked
Karl Tausig—probably the greatest of all piano virtuosi—why he did not
offer up a small sacrifice to the human needs of the masses. The Pole
replied: “I am not sentimental; neither my life nor my education intended
me to be so.” Ehlert persisted. “How would it be if you were to give us
an historical representation of the sentimental?” he suggested. Tausig
shook his head and shrewdly smiled. He never made concessions to public
taste, and he was called inhuman, cold, objective. His master, Liszt,
was the reverse, overflowing with the milk of human music, spontaneous
and prodigal in his play. Tausig the obverse of the medal; yet I believe
that Liszt and Tausig were the piano Dioscuri, and not Liszt and Chopin.
Chopin as a pianist has a niche all his own.
In an article several years ago and in the magazine section of _The
Times_, I wrote that Leopold Godowsky is a pianist for pianists, as
Shelley is a poet for poets. But everybody reads Shelley nowadays, and
no doubt compares him unfavorably with the ear-splitting verse of the
cacophonous young poets of the hour. Leopold Liebling took exception to
my ascription, and I fancy he is right; every musical person listens to
the alluring playing of Godowsky quite impervious to the fact that there
are aspects of his art which will always escape them. In his playing he
is transcendental. This doesn’t mean that he is frostily objective; he is
human, emotional, and has at his finger ends all styles. It is the fine
equilibrium of intellect and emotion that compels our admiration. No one
plays Chopin like Godowsky, no, not even that tricky kobold, Vladimir de
Pachmann. Paderewski is more emotional, Josef Hofmann extorts a richer, a
more sonorous tone from the wires; nevertheless, Godowsky is a Chopinist
in a class apart. He doesn’t drip honey in the nocturnes as does Ignace
Jan, Premier of Poland; he can’t thunder the polonaises like his friend
Jozio from Cracow; but these qualities he gives us in his own scale of
tonal values. He is a powerful man with muscles that are both velvet
and steel. When he wishes he, too, can sound the orchestral note; but,
then, he seldom wishes this. His feeling for the limitations of the piano
recalls the words of Rafael Joseffy: “I’m not a brass band”; Joseffy,
who, in his abhorrence of a smeary touch produced his legato with the
aid of the pedals, and what an aristocratic floating touch was his! What
poetry! What atmosphere!
Setting aside his Chopin interpretations, which we take for granted,
as he is Slavic, have you heard Godowsky play Mozart, or the neglected
Haydn; or Schubert, Schumann? Of his Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms I shall
not write. I can only repeat—all schools are at his beck, and if they
are “perfect pictures, perfectly framed and hung,” as Joseffy said of
his beloved master, Tausig, there is also the personal equation, for
me, full of magic. Sensationalism, the pianistic fracas, posing for the
gallery, all the bag of cheap tricks this great pianist eschews. He is
master of the art of playing the piano beautifully. His exquisitely
plastic phrasing, artistic massing of colors, above all the nobility
of his conception—little wonder I call him a Brahma of the keyboard,
far-fetched as the simile may sound. To Godowsky all other pianists
could go to school, if for nothing else but the purity of his style,
his kaleidoscopic tintings, his polyphony. And it must be admitted that
pianists I have spoken to about him admit his power. He does not boast
the grand manner of Josef Hofmann, yet Hofmann is reported to have told
his manager that he enjoyed listening in a room to Godowsky more than
playing to crowded and enthusiastic multitudes at his own concerts. Truly
a fraternal and noble sentiment! If it comes to sheer sensationalism,
then Godowsky easily leads them all, Rosenthal not excepted. I refer you
to his paraphrases of Chopin, Weber, and Johann Strauss, and the supreme
ease with which he conquers them. Brahma, indeed. Although as he plays
he looks more like Buddha under his Bodh tree conjuring beautiful sounds
from sky and air and the murmuring of crystalline waters.
It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhow eighteen, that I entertained
Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream Barn on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth
Street. The tenth floor, a room as big and as lofty as a cathedral.
Alas! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day? After eating a
duck, a kotchka, cooked Polish fashion, and borsch, beet soup, with
numerous Slavic side-dishes, preceded by the inevitable zakuska—those
appetite-slaying bonnes bouches—De Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. I
was embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had inconsiderately forgotten
the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a
naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host! He said this
in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, English,
and wound up with a hearty Hebrew “Raca!” which may mean hatred, or
revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come.
There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about
the instrument as if it were a dangerous monster. Finally he sniffed and
snapped: “My contract does not permit me to play a Steinway.” I hadn’t
thought of asking him, fearing Chopin’s classic retort after a dinner
party at Paris: “Madame, j’ai mangé si peu!” Finally I saw the hole
in the millstone and excused myself. When I returned with a bottle of
abominable cognac the little man’s malicious smile changed to a look of
ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever; but he was accustomed to his
“petit verre” after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it.
Such is human nature, something that Puritans, prohibitionists, and other
pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted
the fall-board of my piano and, quite forgetful of that “contract,” began
playing. And how he did play! Ye gods! Bacchus, Apollo, and Venus and
all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when
De Pachmann played! In the more intimate atmosphere of my apartment his
music was of a gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an æolian harp doubled
by a diabolic subtlety. Albert Ross Parsons, one of the few living pupils
of Tausig, in reply to my query, How did Joseffy compare with Tausig?
answered: “Joseffy was like the multicolored mist that encircles a mighty
mountain; but beautiful.” So Pachmann’s weaving enchantments seemed in
comparison to Godowsky’s profounder playing.