Liszt

Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbé Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion

of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which

was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in

your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is

the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who

struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in

all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust

reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant

of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us

with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin

robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them

of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the façades of the palaces of

Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are

executed in stucco and other cheap materials.

And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artist

reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which

you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies,

the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your

bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant

perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare

that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they

reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of the

imitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty

of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamond

cutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went a

temperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that

many better artists have not possessed.

You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some

cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in

your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born

musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign of

vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No

composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand.

Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the

"Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with

original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold

ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power

supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your

son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly

put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy,

and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your

"Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walküre";

Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he

introduced them into his "Bühnenweihfestspiel."

You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time.

For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it

was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to

listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its

proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without

preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its

actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort. For few

works better exhibit the various ranges of the instrument, better

contrast different volumes of piano-sound. The sonata actually lies on

different planes, proceeds from various directions, delimits a solid

form, makes even Beethoven's seem flat and two-dimensional by contrast.

Here, almost for the first time, is a sonata that is distinctly music

_of_ the pianoforte. And the modern achievements in pianoforte

composition do not by any means lessen the wonder of your comprehension

of the instrument's dynamics. The new men, Scriabine and the composers

of the modern French school, may have penetrated more deeply than it

was in your power to do, may have achieved where you failed.

Nevertheless, they could not have progressed had it not been for your

way-finding. They are immeasurably indebted to you.

Not even Wagner had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more

largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good

friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax

and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague

regions, the _terra incognita_ of tone. For you are their ancestor. If,

in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the

romantic period, your conviction that the content conditions the form of

every piece makes you the link between classic and modern musical art.

The symphonic poem, whether or not it originates in the overtures of

Beethoven, is mainly your handiwork, since although you yourself were

not sufficiently free of the classic formulas to create a symphonic form

entirely programmatic, as Strauss has subsequently done, you

nevertheless gave him the hint whereby he has profited most. The

impressionists, too, seem to stem from you. The little piece called "Les

jeux d'eau de La Villa d'Este" seems not a little to anticipate their

style. And although you were not responsible for the music of the

nationalistic Russian school, the robust, colorful barbarian in you

nevertheless made you welcome and encourage their work. It made you

write to Borodin and Moussorgsky those cordial letters which pleased

them so much. For at that time they were but obscure workmen, while you

were the very prince of musicians.

Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude,

the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow

craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each

other that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindness

you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself.

And not only Wagner and César Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many

obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what

it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be

assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to

performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had

no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as

"Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had

stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at

least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature

as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social

relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor

marring the perfect splendor of your figure.

But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot

itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a

whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of

ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous

_décor de théâtre_. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and

satanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and

terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud,

grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations

on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia,

draperies, massacres, frescoes, façades, magnificats, lurid sunsets,

scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. It

is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage

scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes,

and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks

and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us

dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread

fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational,

the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly

impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all

substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains

of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these

loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost

insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these

pretentious façades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these

Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the

brass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of

the cross and the Gregorian modes.

No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic

attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the

light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which

you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical

postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve

sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical

postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men

among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully

become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual

fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their _amour-propre_ that

they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by

exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and

seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms.

Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning

"Nature to her feud

With bile & buskin attitude,"

was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own

insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings,

lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums,

subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under

frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.

But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance,

attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive

that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the

veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love

yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another

powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your

art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was

pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on

the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who

finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his

performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All

your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very

tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a

virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of

that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the

contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the

exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the

clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems

but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation,

the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in

your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless

sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and

incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual

climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called

into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first

hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining

you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your

music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der

Geläufichkeit--nach Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly

set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently

with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its

liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing

that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented

you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent,

completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine

hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style.

It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic

material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and

give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so

wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom

he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One

must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions,

the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you

cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the

"virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps

the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to

us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.

We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us,

immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion,

your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as

complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you

have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies

of the audience.

Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein

of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape

marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many

years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not

entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with

its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of

those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a

hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of rôle, and how real a one,

religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the

most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the

fashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you

bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds

of lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most

beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins.

You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your

"Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."

No doubt, you loved your native land. But your patriotism recalls

dangerously the restaurant Magyar, the fiddler in the frogged coat. You

draw from your violin passionate laments. In a sort of ecstasy you

celebrate Hungaria. Then, smiling brilliantly, you pass the hat.

Once, only, your eye did not wander liquidly to the gallery. Once, only,

your workmanship was not marred by schemes for titillating effects, for

sensational contrasts, for grandiose and bombastic expression. Once,

only, you were completely the artist, impregnating your work with a

fine glow of life, making it deeply dignified and impassioned, sincere

and firm, profoundly moving. For you, too, there was the cardinal

exception. For you there was the "Faust Symphony." The work is romantic

music, the music of the Byronic school _par excellence_. Here, too, is

the brooding and revolt, the satanic cynicism, the expert's language.

But here the miracle has taken place, and your music, generally so loose

and shallow and theatrical, has the point, the intensity, the

significance that it seems everywhere else to lack. Here, for once, is a

work of yours that moves by its own initiative, that has an independent

and marvelous life, that is brilliant and yet substantial. Here you have

materialized yourself. We believe in your Faust as we believe neither in

your Tasso nor in your Mazeppa nor in your Orpheus. For he utters your

own romantic brooding in touching and impressive terms. In the theme

that conjures up before us "Faust in ritterlicher Hofkleidung des

Mittelalters," you have expressed your own seigneurial pride and

daintiness. Goethe must have tapped with his tragedy, his characters,

some vein long choked in you. In each of the three movements, the Faust,

the Marguerite and the Mephisto, you make your best music. There is real

drama in the first. There is a warm, fragrant hush in the second.

Perhaps Gretchen plucks her daisy a little too thoroughly. But there is

a rare sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling in her music. It is all in

pastels. There is something very youthful and warm in it that perhaps no

other composition of yours displays, as though in composing it you had

recaptured pristine emotions long since spoiled.

But it is the third movement, the _Allegro ironico_, that opened your

sluices and produced your genius. For in the conception of Mephisto you

found in Goethe, you found your own spiritual equation. You, too, were

victim of a disillusioned intellect that played havoc with all you found

pure and lovely and poured its sulphuric mockery over all your

aspiration. For all your mariolatry, you were full of "der Geist der

stets verneint." And so you were able to create a musical Mephisto that

will outlive your other work, sonata and all, and express you to other

times. For here, all that one senses dimly behind your sugared and

pretentious compositions speaks out frankly. Listening to this mighty

scherzo, we know the cynicism that corroded your spirit. We hear it

surge and fill the sky. We hear it pour its mocking laughter over grief

and longing and pride, over purity and tenderness in those outrageous

orchestral arabesques that descend on the themes of the "Faust" and

"Marguerite" movements, and whip them into grinning distortions. We hear

it deny and stamp and curse, topple the whole world over in ribald

scorn. The concluding chorus may seek to call in another emotion. You

may turn with all apparent fervor and pray "das Ewig-Weibliche" to save

you. The other expression remains the telling one. It is one of the

supreme pieces of musical irony. It ranks with "Till Eulenspiegel" and

"Petrouchka."

It is also the saddest of your works. For it makes us know, once for

all, how infinitely much greater a musician you might have been, O

miserable and magnificent Abbé Liszt!