the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in
which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it.
Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set
by fate, his own environment? Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the
attentions of the Polish countess who received him in a boudoir spread
ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four celebrated beauties who had
their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting his bust?[42] Was it
the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction, that swathed
him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a high platform
surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full view of
six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking
features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary
woman that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake
of "_un répas très appétissant_," and to read aloud to him afterwards
"_l'article biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencé hier_"?
If this same Janka Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering
friends from whom the proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to
Beethoven, or Schumann, or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others
play pieces beautifully, but you always play the soul, the thoughts,
and the sentiments of Liszt. You transport us into a world which will
die with you, and of which we shall have nothing left but the paradise
of recollection--a paradise out of which, as the poets say, we cannot
be driven"--would these great self-forgetful artists have given her
such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who are the poet,
dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"? No, if
the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy
by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a
clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that
there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur
and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that
posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio,
and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbé's
coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.
These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the
man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music,
and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners,
and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their
artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes;
for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much
he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment,
he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so
to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands
revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the
mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity
as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity
for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most
part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own
feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut
and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered,
tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air,
crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience.
They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their
magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment
is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann,
Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between
manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty
pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.
[Illustration: score]
Figure XXVIII.
In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible
imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his
piano sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in
octaves. This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its
strongly individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses,
its exciting use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer
acquaintance its theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely
rhetorical effectiveness, become only too apparent; like a sentence
printed all in italics, it is impotent through very excess of emphasis.
Or take the well-known opening motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto.
With its attention-seizing rhythm and its chromatic melody it seems at
first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an edict, a proclamation.
But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we go on, except
that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the hearer, at
first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a piece
of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So
with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too
anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills,
of his chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic
that the listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew
how to manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he
relieved the wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth
measure by setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the
opening.
If Liszt is unrestrained in his use of the italics and points of
exclamation of the musical language, so that his impressiveness
generally degenerates into ranting, when he tries the emotional he
fairly wallows. It is hard to find a parallel in any other composer
for those passages of his, fairly redolent with sentimentality, in
which he reiterates, over and over again, a single note, as the poet
rolls under his tongue his mistress's name, or the gourmand, under
his, a morsel of _paté de fois gras_. (See Figure XXIX, _a_ and _b_.)
It is hard, in any other composer who has had the advantage of German
traditions, to find bits of melody so feebly Italian, so sunk in an
amiable but insidious sensuality, as the themes of his "Sonnetto
del Petrarca" or his Album Leaf no. 2, in which he writes with the
pen dipped in violet water of a Donizetti or a Bellini. His harmonic
idiom, too, is degraded by a similar sensuality, however disguised.
How else than as proceeding from a love for thrills and swoons can we
explain his passion for those chords, such as diminished sevenths,
minor ninths, and all manner of chromatically altered chords, as the
theorists call them, which, for some reason never yet explained, exhale
mawkishness as some women exhale musk?[44]
[Illustration: score] (_a_) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.
[Illustration: score] (_b_) From the Liebestraum No. 3.
Figure XXIX.
It would be interesting, did it not involve a general discussion here
out of place, to inquire how far the exaggerated expression of Liszt
is due to the lack of spiritual, moral, and intellectual balance
already noted as characteristic of French romanticism. Surely there
is more than a striking analogy, there is an actual relation of cause
and effect, were we but learned and keen enough to trace it out,
between the unrestrained individualism of the romanticist, in politics,
religion, love--and the hysterical, unreal feeling of this music.
Both alike lose poise by taking an over-personal view of life. Liszt,
so singly set on being magnificent or heart-rending in passion that
he ignores the restraints of good taste, forgets artistic reserve,
and becomes in turn blustering and craven, reminds us of Rousseau,
so in love with his fixed idea of "freedom" that he undermines the
foundations of the social order on which true freedom depends.
If Liszt were quite sincere in his passionate extremes, we should
have to forgive them as on the whole we forgive the often crude
grandiloquence of the Gallic Berlioz. What makes the Hungarian artist
peculiarly exasperating is the impression of hypocrisy in his heroics
that we cannot escape or argue away. He does not really feel these
things, we discern; he is ogling us, he is posing for our benefit;
all the while that one of his eyes is so proudly flashing fire, or
so devoutly gazing heavenward, or so touchingly secreting a tear,
the other is winking at his _alter ego_, the ego that sits behind
the scenes and pulls the strings. What those ladies to whom he bowed
with such an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have
felt could they have read the cynical thoughts about women which
meanwhile filled his mind, that we feel when we realize that for all
his pompous utterance, for all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart
laughing at us for being so obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade.
We can forgive, we can even rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself
in love with his pose, but not the charlatan who makes capital of our
gullibility.
Liszt shows to far better advantage, however, in his manipulation of
his ideas than in the ideas themselves; for whereas in the latter
artificiality is a damning fault, in the former art, especially such
skilful art as his, is a shining merit. His plan of combining the
musical organization of the classicists with the dramatic organization
of Berlioz was an interesting and in some ways a felicitous one. By the
use of program and leading motives he secured the advantages of the
realistic school: freedom from the shackles of the strict traditional
sonata-form, and a "poetic" principle of coherence. By retaining
thematic development, he reinforced this poetic coherence by musical
logic, and avoided to some extent the fragmentary effects into which
unmodified realism generally falls. To the thirteen orchestral pieces
in which he most strikingly embodied this plan of interlinked dramatic
and musical structure he gave the name of "Poèmes Symphoniques,"
generally translated as "Symphonic Poems" though more precisely as
"Orchestral Poems." He owes his chief historical importance to his
creation of this form, which he exemplified also on a larger scale in
his "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies.
A brief analysis of his most popular symphonic poem, "Les Préludes,"
will make clear the peculiarities of the type. This work has a program,
taken from Lamartine's "Méditations poétiques," as follows:--
"What is our life but a series of Preludes to that unknown song of
which death strikes the first solemn note? Love is the enchanted dawn
of every life; but where is the destiny in which the first pleasures
of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, whose deadly breath
dissipates its fair illusions, whose fatal thunderbolt consumes its
altar? And where is the soul which, cruelly wounded, does not seek, at
the coming of one of these storms, to calm its memories in the tranquil
life of the country? Man, however, cannot long resign himself to the
kindly tedium which has at first charmed him in the companionship of
nature, and when 'the trumpet has sounded the signal of alarms,' he
hastens to the post of peril, whatever may be the strife which calls
him to its ranks, in order to regain in combat the full consciousness
of himself and the complete command of his powers."
This program, it will at once be seen, is far more favorable to musical
treatment than Berlioz's hotch-potches of petty details and wild,
incongruous fancies. It is but slightly narrative and descriptive,
presenting rather such abstract emotional states as music can best
depict. And it has a natural symmetry and completeness of its own which
the composer has only to reproduce in order to give his music the
same desirable qualities. This he does by dividing his piece into six
sections, which might be called Introduction, Love, Storm, Country
Life, War, and Coda or Conclusion.
[Illustration: score]
(_a_)
[Illustration: score]
(_b_)
[Illustration: score]
(_c_)
[Illustration: score]
(_d_)
[Illustration: score]
(_e_)
[Illustration: score]
(_f_)
Figure XXX.
To this natural poetic structure Liszt adds a most ingenious musical
form, by basing his entire work on two leading motives (_a_ and _b_ in
Figure XXX), which he subjects to all manner of variation, melodic,
harmonic, rhythmic, as opportunity suggests. Some of the more important
of these variants, set down in Figures XXX-XXXIII, deserve careful
attention. The work begins with a recitative for strings, andante
(_c_), derived from (_a_) by a modification of rhythm. At page 7 of
the full orchestral score, published by Breitkopf and Härtel, appears
another variant of the same theme, andante maestoso in bass strings and
brass (_d_). Motive (_a_) is sung by the 'cellos, in very nearly its
primitive form, at page 13 (_e_); in the last measure of this excerpt
the very clever echoing of the three characteristic notes of the theme,
in the bass, marked by asterisks, should be especially noted. Motive
(_b_), symbolizing love, first appears at page 21, sensuously set forth
by four horns, strings, and harp, is taken up by the wood wind, and
is developed in a powerful climax, at the end of which appears for a
moment the variant of it represented at (_f_). Thus in the first two
sections of the poem are the underlying motives expounded and somewhat
developed.
Section three, Storm, begins (allegro ma non troppo, page 30) with a
very theatrical variant of motive _a_, highly characteristic of Liszt,
in which he resorts to the chromatic scale beloved of all musical
storm-makers (_g_, Figure XXXI), and later to an endless series of
diminished sevenths, intended for nothing but to make our flesh creep
(_h_). It is unnecessary to follow out this section in detail; it is
the least interesting of all, and illustrates that element of claptrap
which Liszt could never entirely eliminate.
[Illustration: score]
(_g_)
[Illustration: score]
(_h_)
Figure XXXI.
[Illustration: score]
(_i_)
[Illustration: score]
(_j_)
[Illustration: score]
(_k_)
Figure XXXII.
The mood now changes again, and with (_i_) (Figure XXXII), a charmingly
expanded version of motive _a_, intrusted to the oboe, an allegretto
pastorale is ushered in, beginning the fourth section, Country Life. A
new theme, of fascinating grace and freshness (_j_), now enters in the
horn, and is presently combined with motive _b_ in what seems on the
whole the most delightful moment, musically, of the entire composition
(_k_). A somewhat lengthy working out of these combined motives
follows, gradually growing more and more agitated, until, with an
adaptation of the protean motive (_a_) for horns and trumpets, allegro
marziale (_l_) (Figure XXXIII), the fifth section, War, is introduced.
Piccolos and drums become prominent, and at page 82 of the score even
the love motive (_b_) takes on a militant character (_m_, Figure
XXXIII). Turmoil now increases steadily until a sort of apotheosis is
reached with the reëntrance of the majestic passage (_d_), in Figure
XXX, and the poem comes to an impressive close.
[Illustration: score]
(_l_)
[Illustration: score]
(_m_)
Figure XXXIII.
The advantages of such a scheme of form as is exemplified in "Les
Préludes" are many; and they are made the most of by Liszt, with his
accustomed cleverness and long-headed sense for practical values. For
both of the two classes of listeners that make up the average concert
audience music made on this recipe has an appropriate appeal. That
class, usually a majority, which has little ear for music, but likes
to indulge itself in vague dreams, pictorial imaginings, and nervous
thrills, finds its account in the program, follows out with interest
the suggestions of the various moods, such as, in the present instance,
the amorous, the stormy, the pastoral, the warlike, and gets its fill,
all along the way, of brilliant and gorgeous tone-coloring, exciting
rhythms, sombre, rich, or mysterious harmonies. At the same time the
minority of true music-lovers have, as they have not in the works of
Berlioz, a "logical and lucid play of definite motives" to enjoy; they
trace with never failing interest the transformations of a few simple
themes; they may entirely forget the program, and yet have plenty
of opportunity for an agreeable activity of attention, perception,
memory, and imagination. Thus each hearer may pick out from the mass of
conglomerate impressions something that appeals to him.
There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into
lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it
firmly in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned
beforehand to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined
mould; it can ramify, as it proceeds, in obedience to its own latent
possibilities. A development here may be expanded to great length,
an episode or repetition there may be abbreviated to the slightest
possible compass; so long as each link securely engages the next, so
long as there is no break in the coherence of the thread, the hearer
will be satisfied. Through all the twists and turns the presence of the
fundamental melodies will save him from that sense of mere drifting
which was so painful to Wagner in listening to Berlioz's "Romeo and
Juliet." The symphonic poem bears, in fact, somewhat the same relation
to the symphony that rhymed couplets bear to a sonnet, triolet, or
other conventional verse-form. It exacts little of strict formalism;
but by retaining, underneath all its free ramification, certain
basic principles of balance and symmetry, it escapes the pitfall of
amorphousness, and constantly satisfies, though in unexpected ways, the
radical expectations of the intelligent listener.
Unfortunately, however, Liszt himself fell short of realizing the
finer potentialities of his own device. Just as his primal melodies,
as we have already seen, are usually of a stilted, rhetorical, and
artificial character, his treatment of them, the second but scarcely
less important of the processes of composition, is generally labored;
it is apt to be a clever feat of intelligence, a sort of mental
legerdemain, rather than a spontaneous germination of idea. What he
said of Chopin's larger works, that they showed "_plus de volonté que
d'inspiration_," is true of his own. His developments are as often
distortions as fulfilments, and among his melodies there are many
monsters. Plausible, and even winning, as are at first sight some
of the thematic transformations (for we are apt to be won by any
display of intelligence, no matter how specious its ends), on closer
inspection they are seen to be mere juggling. The variants of motive
(_a_), in "Les Préludes," shown at (_c_) and (_d_) in Figure XXX, at
(_g_) in Figure XXXI, and at (_l_) in Figure XXXIII, have an unpleasant
sub-flavor of artificiality; analysis reveals their derivation from the
parent motive, but affection, so to speak, repudiates them. Even more
is this the case with (_f_) in Figure XXX, and (_m_) in Figure XXXIII,
which, though we see that they come from motive _b_, we feel to be
parodies or caricatures of it, bearing only a superficial resemblance
to it, and quite devoid of its essential character. Such observations
make us wonder whether a theme is not truly as inconvertible into
anything else as any other individual being, and whether the kind of
thematic transformation, or deformation, adopted by Liszt, is not after
all intrinsically mechanical and inartistic. If the reader will take
the trouble to look at some typical example of thematic evolution as it
is practised by a master like Beethoven, such as the first movement,
for instance, of the "Eroica Symphony,"[45] he will see what a vast
difference there is between such inevitable drawing forth of the very
soul of a melody, by a process as august and beyond human whim as the
processes of nature, and the laborious ingenuity of the composer of
"Les Préludes."
As in this all-important matter of thematic development, so is it in
other subordinate matters of technic: Liszt, allowing mere ostentation,
immediate effect upon an audience, to have too large a part in his
artistic ideal, falls thereby into a hundred artificialities. While
he was alive the extraordinary magnetism of his personality carried
it all off, by disguising the factitiousness of his methods, and
reinforcing immensely their superficial appeal; but stripped from
himself and scanned in the cold impersonal light of criticism, his
gorgeous artistic accoutrements look thin and tawdry, and prove to
be made, not of genuine gold, but of theatrical tinsel. His melody,
when it neither struts nor fawns, is apt to stagnate. His "furiously
chromatic" harmony gains its effectiveness at the expense of solidity;
by too completely forgetting key-relationship, on which all genuine
harmony must depend, it falls into chaos, as the harmony of a master
such as Wagner never does. When it is based on the old ecclesiastical
modes instead of on the chromatic scale, as in many passages of the
later religious works, it is no less a fabrication, an artifice:
the Palestrina-like ending of the _Credo_ in the "Gran Mass," for
example, is pseudo-mediævalism, such as no modern composer could write
spontaneously. His orchestration, much praised, is indeed skilful, but
radically vulgar; his amorous 'cellos and braying trombones are enemies
fatal to artistic moderation and restraint. Even in his piano-writing,
so large an element in his fame, his methods are those of barbarism.
He ignores the lesson of fitness that Chopin might have taught him,
and overstrains the resources of the poor instrument until, instead of
achieving its own unique possibilities, it becomes a forlorn imitation
of an orchestra, without an orchestra's variety, sonority, and grandeur.
Thus is the virtuoso spirit of Liszt, which had thriven on adulation
only too well from the days when, as "_le petit Litz_," he made
the tour of the boxes, to those later days when, as "The Master,"
he oscillated between Rome and Weimar in one prolonged triumph,
responsible for errors of taste and judgment which seriously impair the
value of all his work. Yet there was in him, besides the virtuoso who
fed on applause and was not superior to charlatanisms when they served
his purpose, quite another being, who aspired honestly to be a faithful
servant of art, and who brought to the service rare intellectual
powers. This was the Liszt who befriended all worthy composers, who
gave freely of his time, his money, and his strength, whenever he saw
merit unacknowledged or genius struggling for bread. This was the
Liszt who kept Wagner alive until the world could learn to appreciate
him, who sought out César Franck when he was the obscure organist of
St. Clotilde, who risked his post as Kapellmeister in order to produce
an opera by his friend Cornelius. And this was the Liszt whose keen
wit discerned the principles of combined musical and dramatic form on
which works intrinsically far superior to his own were later written
by Dvořák, Smetana, Tschaïkowsky, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss.
Whatever his purely musical powers, his indefatigable and highly
cultivated mind and his generous heart enabled him to play an important
rôle in the history of music.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Ramann, "Life of Liszt," Eng. trans., I, 218.
[39] "Letters of Liszt," ed. by La Mara, Eng. trans., I, 8.
[40] Brahms is said to have fallen asleep during Liszt's performance of
it. See Dr. William Mason's "Memories of a Musical Life."
[41] Amy Fay, "Music Study in Germany."
[42] Janka Wohl, "Recollections of Liszt," Eng. trans., p. 9.
[43] _Ibid._, p. 187.
[44] See, as examples of this cloying harmonization, both excerpts in
Figure XXIX, or almost any of the "Consolations" and "Liebesträume."
An especially flagrant instance may be found in the Piano Sonata in
B-minor, edition of Breitkopf and Härtel, p. 29, the last measure.
[45] See the present author's "Beethoven and his Forerunners," pp.
316-321.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Romantic Composers, by Daniel Gregory Mason