contradictory character by a story told of a certain occasion on which
"The Master," as he loved to be called, sat for his portrait to the
painter Schaffer. One of those key-stories it is, dear to biographers,
which condense in single acts or speeches entire facets of personality.
In Paris, in his youth, Liszt went to Schaffer to have his portrait
painted. Instinctively he assumed one of those theatrical poses he
was in the habit of taking when, at the end of one of his already
famous recitals, he stood upon the stage receiving the plaudits of
his audience. We can readily imagine it: the head thrown back, the
eyes flashing fire, the right hand, perhaps, thrust between the second
and third buttons of the coat, the left resting on some conveniently
composed piece of furniture. But when Schaffer indicated that this
histrionism did not impress him, Liszt, greatly embarrassed, cried out
impulsively, "Forgive, dear master, but you do not know how it spoils
one to have been an infant prodigy." Here are the two opposing sides of
this curious character for once set in a clear antithesis: on the one
hand, the affectation, the strut and posture, the cheap theatricality,
of the prodigy playing to his audience; on the other, the frankness,
the magnanimity, the humility even, of the true artist. Liszt's whole
career is one long exhibition of these two attitudes in constant
alternation; he is a mingling in one person of the charlatan and the
idealist.
Born in Raiding, a small town in Hungary, October 22, 1811, an only
child of Adam Liszt, a Hungarian, and Anna Lager, a German, Franz
Liszt showed at once such extraordinary talent for music that in
his tenth year his parents resolved to educate him in Vienna as a
professional musician. After a year and a half in the Austrian capital,
where the brilliancy of his piano playing and the cleverness of his
improvisations attracted much attention, and where he studied with
Czerny and Salieri, he was taken by his parents to Paris. Here, in
the autumn of 1823, only twelve years old, he took his first plunge
into the atmosphere of adulation which was to become to him in later
years almost a necessary of life. It was now that he became the petted
darling of the fashionable salons of the Boulevard St. Germain, and
made the great ladies of Parisian society forget for a time their
lap-dogs and their love-intrigues in order to caress this fascinating
composite of the child and the virtuoso. After his first public concert
in Paris, in March, 1824, he "made the round of the boxes," a sort of
triumphal progress across the laps of great ladies, who wooed him, we
must suppose, with a discreet mixture of compliments and bonbons. In
the following spring he extended his dominion to England, and saw his
name in large type on a hand-bill such as nowadays we associate with
circuses rather than with concerts. "An Air," we read, "with Grand
Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard's New Patent Grand
Pianoforte, by
MASTER LISZT,
who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia, and respectfully
request _Two Written Themes_ from any of the Audience, upon which he
will play his Variations."
There are not wanting signs, however, that the artist in Liszt was
already, with approaching adolescence, beginning to disdain the
spectacular triumphs of the virtuoso. He began to suspect that "the
praise belongs to the child and not the artist"; the indignity of being
advertised as a year or two younger than he really was, and being
carried upon the stage in his manager's arms, like an infant, aroused
his disgust; "I would rather be anything in the world," he cries,
"than a musician in the pay of great folk, patronized and paid by them
like a conjurer or the clever dog Munito."[38] He became more and more
reluctant to appear in public, grew moody and melancholy, occupied
himself with religious meditations, and even cherished a half-formed
desire to withdraw from the brilliant world into monastic solitude.
This is the first appearance of a mystical tendency of mind which in
later years gained great ascendancy over him, and finally led him
to take orders in the Roman Catholic Church. The event, however,
which decisively ended, for the time, his public piano playing, was
the death, in August, 1827, of his father, whose assistance in all
practical details was indispensable to his virtuoso tours.
The young pianist now settled with his mother in Paris, where eight
quiet years of piano teaching succeeded the excitement of his
adventurous boyhood. His conduct at this crisis illustrates that
keen sense of honor which was so agreeable a trait in his character.
Considering that the money he had accumulated by his many successful
concerts was rightfully his mother's, because of all the sacrifices
she had made to his career, he made it over to her in a lump sum, and
took up teaching for his own livelihood. It was an act of delicate
justice, freely and cheerfully performed. Outwardly Liszt's life now
became quite simple and laborious, almost plodding; but inwardly it
was developing apace, and ramifying in many directions, under the
provocations of this brilliant and complex Paris.
The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage
the most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive
to influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as
Liszt. There was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant
of a public languid and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of
Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music
that Liszt had to coat the pill of a Beethoven Concerto with sugary
ornamentation to make it go down. Such a public was a good stolid
quarry for the marksmanship of an enthusiastic artist. In general
intellectual life there was, on the other hand, a brisk fermentation
highly exciting to Liszt's active mind. Paris was a seething pot of
ideas, theories, heresies, aspirations, scepticisms, individualities.
"Here is a whole fortnight," he writes in 1832, "that my mind and
fingers have been working like two lost spirits--Homer, the Bible,
Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Châteaubriand, Beethoven, Bach,
Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on
them, devour them with fury; besides this I practise four to five hours
of exercises.... Ah, provided I don't go mad, you will find an artist
in me!"[39] Above all, there was in the French romanticism of 1830
an emotional delirium, a fever of the sentiments, which profoundly
affected the high-strung young musician.
French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the
intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking
a political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a
generation was required for these principles to propagate themselves
from the realm of practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they
appeared as crude instincts; romanticism refined and systematized
them into self-conscious doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered
the aristocrats who oppressed them; the romanticists proclaimed the
effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all traditional ordinances,
whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in effect, "Each
man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the romanticists
asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The individual
alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the welfare
of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of
the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its
own version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual,"
it also had its equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic
sentiment which usually proved too vaporous to bear the stress of
an actual human situation. Both movements, too, were passionate
exaggerations; they overshot their mark, and have had to be limited,
qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against
authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the
sentiments, it is notable that while in England it applied its theories
chiefly to political and religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical
realms, in France it concentrated itself largely upon the relations
of the sexes. In such typical romantic documents as Châteaubriand's
"René" and George Sand's "Leone Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is
marriage (especially the _mariage de convenance_, which indeed was
a fair mark for reformers), the extolled individualism takes the
form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the thrills of the
amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application of
these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are
sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George
Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave
one uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary
impulse, so sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which
it opens the way. When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much
the more genuine the love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism
quickly gives place to pity for the sophist. When we learn that her
ideal of friendship between a man and a woman, or, as she called it,
_camaraderie_, involved "unlimited confidential conversations," we know
not which to doubt, her insight or her good faith. And in all this she
is typical of her age and school, which made a fetich of the "demoniac
power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor that can only be
called religious.
The effect of such doctrines as these on a young man like Liszt may
readily be imagined. Too keen-minded to be really deceived by the
current fallacies, but at the same time not austere or independent
enough to reject what was so universally accepted, he let himself go
with the current, and half-blindly, half-ironically, played the game
he saw others playing. Almost before he knew it he found that he had
staked nothing less than his honor, and that this game, begun in a mood
of dalliance, must be played through in sober earnest. The heroine of
his love affair was the Countess d'Agoult, better known by her literary
pseudonym of Daniel Stern, a woman of great beauty and fascination, but
apparently consumed by vanity and a thirst for power. In 1834, when her
connection with the idolized young musician began, she was twenty-eight
years old, had been married for six years to the Count d'Agoult, and
had had three children. In the following spring, Liszt tried in vain
to bring the affair to an end; finding this impossible, he accepted
the situation with the best grace he could summon, and entered upon
a period of travel with the countess which lasted a decade. Three
children resulted from this union, Daniel, Blandine, and Cosima, who
became the wife of Von Bülow, and later of Wagner.
It is difficult to arrive at a just conception of Liszt's behavior in
this relation, so conflicting are the available accounts of it. The
biography by Ramann, for example, states that he offered marriage,
which the lady indignantly refused on the score of his inferiority
in rank. Janka Wohl, in her "Reminiscences," on the contrary, quotes
Liszt's emphatic denial that he ever offered marriage. Again, the very
zeal with which his admirers depict the Countess as hurling herself
upon him, tend to arouse the suspicion of a judicious reader. One
thing is certain, the uncongeniality of the pair was fundamental and
cumulative. Liszt himself testifies to this in no uncertain way, and,
one may add, with more sarcastic animus than is quite to his credit.
He reports a conversation in which she expressed a desire to be his
inspirer in art, a desire which he attributes to her vanity. "She
wished to be my Beatrice," he says; and continues: "But I told her:
'You are wrong. It is the Dantes who create the Beatrices, and the
_real_ Beatrices die at the age of eighteen--that is all.' Louis de
Ronchaud was present at the time. 'There's the man,' said I, 'who
would have pleased you.'" This was ungallant almost to the verge of
brutality. That verge was overpassed when Liszt, to a request for
suggestions as to the title of some souvenirs the countess had been
writing, proposed "Swagger and Lies." He always spoke of the countess,
says Janka Wohl, with irony.
This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande
passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a
realization of one side of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness
such as often lay just below the saccharine smile of this finished man
of the world is one of the most familiar by-products of sentimental
romanticism, one which has been made historically famous by the
case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast disappointed in
unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful dreams,
the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially expanded,
the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly
enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not
believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are
generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles
writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are
made more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a
good deal of satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord
in conversation. The sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot
make some of his principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait
of his character which at first sight seems to have little connection
with it, but on careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of
reaction against the sentimental interpretation of life with its
unsocial lawlessness and its self-defeating egotism. That strong
leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases of Roman Catholicism,
which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a devoted reader of
Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers, which impelled
him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively devotional
works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to escape
from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed? Monasticism
is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned. Complete
isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as
antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry
an exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion,
which has so often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the
longing for repose of a soul too long overwrought by the religion of
passion.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of temperament that
this new mood of Liszt's, the mood of mystical passion, found its
aspirations crystallizing, no less than those of the earlier worldly
passion had done, in a woman. If paganism had for a time summed
itself for him in the person of the Countess d'Agoult, the monastic
Christianity to which he now reacted found its avatar and priestess
in the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, a remarkable woman with whom he
lived in intimate but what are called platonic relations from 1847 on.
The daughter of a Polish nobleman, and the wife of a Russian field
marshal of erratic character whom, after thrice refusing, she married
without love at seventeen, she had suffered much, and like many other
sufferers had found her consolation in religion. The story of her
relation with Liszt is a pathetic one. She deserted her husband to
follow him to Weimar, where he settled as a conductor and composer in
1847, after his many years of wandering as a virtuoso; for thirteen
years she was his secretary, friend, and adviser; in 1860 she succeeded
in getting a divorce from her husband, whose infidelities were
notorious, only to have it retracted at the last moment by the Pope.
Her spirit was so broken by this cruel freak of fate that, although
Prince Wittgenstein died four years later, she never married Liszt. She
died in Rome in 1887, only six weeks after Liszt, leaving in manuscript
a treatise in twenty-four volumes entitled "Des Causes Intérieures de
la Faiblesse Extérieure de l'Église," with directions that it should
not be printed for twenty-five years. The subject is one on which she
may well have written with passion; but it is sad to think of this
woman consoling herself, by twenty-four volumes of literary discussion,
for a vital tragedy.
During the fourteen years that Liszt spent in Weimar as Music-Director
to the Grand Duke, he accomplished an extraordinary amount of work,
in musical and literary composition, in teaching, and in making
propaganda for struggling composers by performing their works. His
cordial interest in other artists, perhaps the finest trait of his
character, was at this time most strikingly evinced. His baton, his
pen, and his powerful personal influence were constantly employed in
the service of young musicians of merit striving to make themselves
known. His efforts in Wagner's behalf, especially, have become famous.
By his performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar in 1850, by his articles on
four of the music-dramas, and by his financial aid to the struggling
composer during many years, he did more than any other one man to
secure this uncompromising genius a foothold in the world. Schumann,
Chopin, Berlioz, Raff, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and a host of less gifted
men also owed much to Liszt; and his leaving Weimar was the indirect
result of his zealous championship of an unpopular opera by his friend
Peter Cornelius. It is true that even this benevolence was not quite
unalloyed by his besetting egotism. In our mental image of Liszt
dispensing his artistic charity there is always a trace of that bland
smile of the professional philanthropist. Saint-Saëns suggests that
Liszt contemplated, in his relations with Wagner, a sort of alliance
of two men of genius, in which Wagner should represent the hero of
music-drama, and himself the hero of instrumental music. His rupture
with Brahms, who did not appreciate his piano sonata,[40] suggests
an inability to forget the first person, excusable perhaps in one so
long used to constant adulation, but still not to be neglected in a
delineation of his character. Tschaïkowsky's testimony on the point
is very blunt. "Liszt, the old Jesuit," he writes in a letter, "speaks
in terms of exaggerated praise of every work which is submitted to
his inspection. He is at heart a good man, one of the very few great
artists who has never known envy; but he is too much of a Jesuit to be
frank and sincere." And again: "Liszt was a good fellow, and ready to
respond to every one who paid court to him. But as I never toadied to
him, or any other celebrity, we never got into correspondence." But if
the great man had thus his petty vanities, if he liked to take a toll
of self-satisfaction, so to speak, out of the gifts he so lavished upon
others, this human weakness did not, happily, destroy the efficacy of
his many services to music.
We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this
protean spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his
triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First
there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "_le petit Litz_,"
electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his
concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender,
romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830,
with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his
mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting
to the ladies. And then--the third phase--Liszt without the Monsieur,
Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of
symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron
and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over
the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing
to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of
the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious
solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable
figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his
ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts
transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion,
for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only
masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.
From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of
his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in
1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not
have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal
progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth,
the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbé, the
distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The
Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the
other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his
appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking
man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows,
and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly to his
feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a
most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow,
with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many
joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it
makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his
manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance,
after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and
made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that
no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of
expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy,
tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar
adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a
king."