REFLEXIONS.
Goethe’s Criticism on Winckelmann--The Poetical
Necessity--Winckelmann and the Plastic Art--Has Music a
Language?--Musicians and Musical Writers--Gluck’s Writings--His War
in Paris--A fierce Struggle with the Theorists--Luther’s
Indebtedness to Bach--Heinse and his Writings--His Italian
Visit--Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart--Their Literary
Characteristics--A criticism of Marx--Liszt’s Contributions to
Literature--His great Literary Ability--The Place of Artists--List
of his Works--Goethe and Beethoven--Bettina’s Phantasies--Jean
Paul--Schumann--Liszt’s Criticism of the “Swan Song”--Tribute from
the “Gazette Musicale”--Selections from his Writings.
Goethe writes in 1805, of Winckelmann, the author of the “History of
Modern Art”: “He sees ineffable works with the eye, he comprehends them
with the sense, yet he feels the unmistakable difficulty of describing
them in words and characters. The complete majesty, the idea whence
sprang the form, the feeling which aroused the sense of beauty in him,
he would communicate to the hearer or reader, and while he musters the
entire arsenal of his abilities, he realizes that it is demanded of him
to seize upon the strongest and worthiest he has at command. He must be
a poet, whether he realizes it or not.”
Thus Winckelmann became the originator of the reflective style of
statement in our language, which had not previously existed, and what
Goethe himself learned from it is shown very clearly in the poetical
description of the Greek myths, like Leda and the Swan, in the second
part of “Faust.”
Have we a similar language for the art of music, which reveals to us,
as it were, the nature, the soul-image of mankind as the plastic art
reveals its exterior? Have our language and literature acquired afresh
such far-reaching capabilities, such a fixed scope and self-enrichment
as the plastic art has, through Winckelmann? This question is all
the more worthy of attention since music, embodying the very essence
of things and not their appearance, reflecting the idea of the world
itself by its own hand and with its own power, is more essentially
poetical than the plastic art. We have in Liszt’s writings a
significant incentive to consider the question further.
It is certainly taking a narrow and one-sided view of musical talent,
to assert, like Riehl, that he who writes about music as a musician can
not be a correct musician. On the contrary, the truest tone-poets among
musicians have written the best about music, and in part about their
own, and at the same time by their clear comprehension of the poetical
idea in tone-poems have intensified the poetical force of the language.
The first who wrote with a definite purpose as an artist, about the
peculiar form and the poetico-dramatic development of his art--for
we do not refer here to the old and learned musical pundits, was
Gluck, and this is specially manifest in his writings about his own
works. Partly consisting of prefaces to scores, partly of letters to
newspapers, these writings were prompted by the necessities of art
itself. That is, the free poetical movement of the composer and his
sympathetic delineation of the salient circumstances and phases of life
were assailed, and they tried to confine him to established forms, to
fine melodies of a set style, to a fashion as it were. Then the German
drew his sword, for the quarrel had been restricted mainly to Paris
and Italy, and thrust it sharply into the confused mass of theoretical
ideas, which are most prized by people who know little or nothing of
music. Drastic in comparison, striking in characterization, mercilessly
ridiculing all lordly authority, upon the literary, or true throne, he
settles in defiance of the theoretical, every concrete, individual and
intellectual question. When one considers the peculiarly Italian or
French text, there is something of Bismarck’s style about it. How far
removed from the theorist or delving fancy-monger was this artist, who
was at the same time a man of facts, a practician! Although we notice
some extremely striking and poetical, though merely incidental images,
such as only the creative spirit would discover, there is little to
be found of the externals of music, that is of musical description,
so that these writings produced an admirable effect and furnished the
proof that musical problems might engage the attention of the highest
literary circles. For the language itself was of little account in this
controversy, not even the two foreign idioms, which Gluck, by the way,
handled with great ease.
Another illustration forces itself upon us, as viewed from the
standpoint of Luther’s translation of the Bible, which unquestionably
belongs to the poetical literature of our fatherland, namely, that
music, poetically considered, lay at the basis of early German as a
language. Luther’s German sprang from the texts of Sebastian Bach,
the sublimity of which reached the highest point of all art and which
is as thoroughly German as the ordinary plain recitative is Italian.
Instrumental music was now closely allied to this language, and
as Gluck produced a poetical form upon the living basis of actual
language, which afterwards especially delighted Goethe and Schiller, as
it had Klopstock, and certainly must have had an influence upon their
poetry, so the later ones, by personal intercourse with Philip Emanuel
Bach in Hamburg, had the opportunity to perceive by actual observation,
that German instrumental music began to assume a peculiarly German
form. Mozart’s melodies, from the “Entfuehrung” to the “Zauberfloete,”
speedily proved that music in its “beloved German” was not inferior to
the highest beauties of the poetical classics.
Their leading features were also closely connected. As Winckelmann
gained his talent for the representation of the plastic art through
the idea of language, from the antique, so the later ones had to go to
the immediate sources of music to find the necessary “inspiration,”
as Gluck denominated the creative faculty of our natures, for the
expression of their conceptions. Thus things were in a bad way. The
musicians did not understand writing and the writers knew little or
nothing about music.
Let us trace in the history of events the most striking features of
both styles of writing. In a literary sense Heinse was the first to
treat of music. This Thuringian was musical in the fullest sense,
and since the poet as a writer can not know much in this direction
of his endowments, the Musical Lexicon is literally correct when it
particularly specifies Heinse’s talent and mentions Hildegarde of
Hohenthal as ever memorable to the musician. How the charms of the
Italian landscape and the fascinations of this land of music work upon
him and impart to his style the warmth and color of that very land
itself! Above all else the sentient, nay more, the material aspect of
things preponderates, for how often in the sweet voice of a soprano the
sad “_Benedetto il Coltello_” has fallen upon his ravished ear, and
“his soul felt as if carried away by a flood.” Here for the first time
the effect of our art is definitely connected with the very essence of
speech, and the current histories of literature have therefore taken
little notice of this circumstance, because our classic writers made it
so. The effect of these writings first appeared when it became known
through the great masters of poetry in music, Mozart and Beethoven,
even more clearly about the year 1830, when Heinrich Laube gave it new
expression and Jean Paul illustrated it with his lofty conceptions of
the tone-art.
Now appear distinctive musical writers whose works belong both to the
domain of literature and music--Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart,
the latter by far the most prominent of the three. His “Ideas of the
Esthetics of Music” first appeared in 1806, after his death. The
“Spitz von Giebichenstein,” as Goethe called Reichardt, had a strong
intellectual basis and development. He understood Bach and Handel in
their colossal works and Gluck in his dramatic achievements. He had
not a correct idea of Mozart’s poetry and Beethoven’s powerful blows
almost overwhelmed his brain and heart. Yet what he has said about
the old classics is not without influence upon men like Rochlitz, in
Leipsic, and Marx, in Berlin, who have also comprehended yet more
clearly the free action of poetry in music. “There spoke spirit to
spirit,” says the latter of Reichardt’s analysis of the Handel songs.
Frederick Rochlitz has done that work for Mozart, and Marx for
Beethoven, and in many circles of the reading public the first
knowledge and direct appreciation of this new world of music was
obtained from their writings. And yet the one always shows something
too much of authorship and but little of the free poetical flow,
while the other struggles and is too obscure in the expression of the
emotions which music awakens in him. He merely feels and does not grasp
the expression of it firmly and forcibly and thus neither of them are
far from the significance of an achievement like the narrative of
Winckelmann.
This is in the highest degree characteristic of Schubart, who was an
actual poet. With him begins that genuine musical authorship which has
gradually become a possession of our literature. This brings us to the
solid array of writers who were equally at home in both provinces and
thus could embody music in language as they had acquired the talent for
expression from literature. It includes, and very prominently, too,
Franz Liszt and his numerous musical writings.
Richard Wagner, as Heinrich Laube says, in that peculiarly able sketch
of his life, which appeared in the “Zeitung fuer die elegante Welt,”
in 1843, from an opera composer became a writer, by the “Parisian
stress.” An entirely different reason actuated Liszt. It was the
longing to secure for his art the name and master which it required.
“Errors and misunderstandings thwarted the desired success,” says
Wagner, speaking of that Weimar performance of “Tannhauser,” by Liszt,
in 1849. “What was to be done to meet the requirements necessary to a
good understanding on all sides? Liszt comprehended it quickly and did
it. He gave the public his own judgment and impression of the work in
a manner, the persuasive eloquence and overwhelming efficacy of which
have had no parallel.”
There is a notice in the “Journal des Debats,” of 1849, which appeared
in Leipsic in 1851, together with a second under the title of
“Lohengrin et Tannhauser de Richard Wagner,” with which publication,
translated into German, at Cologne, in 1852, Liszt also makes his
appearance as a writer.
And yet, not so; for when had he not expressed, pen in hand, the
extraordinary activity of his feelings and thoughts? Since 1836,
numerous outspoken and generous tributes of his had appeared, as
for instance that concerning the position of artists in the “Revue
et Gazette Musicale de Paris,” and it may be said not one of the
artists mentioned, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Paganini, Berlioz,
Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Thalberg, Auber, Schubert, Schumann, Field
and Mendelssohn, are left without description. These sketches an
delineations made such a great and immediate sensation that Lamartine,
who was so renowned at that time, declared he would consider it a crime
if Liszt did not exclusively devote himself to this branch of his
art. In addition to the writings, “De la Fondation-Goethe a Weimar”
(1849), “F. Chopin,” “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary,” and
the numerous essays in the “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” like the
more important ones about “The Flying Dutchman” (1854), and “Robert
Franz” (1855), Liszt’s literary works, like Wagner’s, form an imposing
array of volumes, which are not second in importance to those of any
other art-writer and contribute an essential addition to our general
literature.
And how is it to-day with this musical authorship? The poet Schubart
in his “Esthetics of Music,” had only sounded the first notes of that
tone-language which, with the beginning of the opera was incorporated
with our art. The Italian language, which was its basis, had reached
the highest degree of perfection and the French of the Gluck operas
had scarcely increased the “speaking” which melody had acquired by
these idioms. All instrumental music speedily assumed this character
of personal language. It was as in the simple lyric, the personal
world-Ego that spoke in it. But when the German language reached the
height of its perfection and pervaded music, entirely new beauties
were revealed in our art. In one of his many notes of travel, written
at Vienna, in 1838, Liszt says that he has listened to the songs of
Franz Schubert with great pleasure and has been often moved to tears
by them, and he adds: “Schubert is the most poetical of all musicians
who have ever lived. The German language impresses the mind wonderfully
and the childlike purity and melancholy shading with which Schubert’s
music is permeated can only be fully understood by a German.” This
was true. The language of Goethe and Schiller had come to music and
bedewed it as with heavenly blessings. It returned a hundred-fold what
it had received in the old-time choral. We know the almost extravagant
reverence of Gluck for Klopstock’s Odes and particularly for the
“Hermannschlacht.” Mozart had written “The Violet” and the spirit of
its language pervaded the “Zauberfloete,” notwithstanding the rough
verses of the librettist destroyed all its beauty of shading. At
first Beethoven averred there was nothing loftier than Klopstock. He
preferred the soaring flights of fancy of this ideal, poetical soul,
but when he came to know Goethe it was all over. “He has finished
Klopstock for me,” he said. Goethe’s friend Bettina heard him declare:
“Goethe’s poems exercise a great power over me, not alone by the
subject-matter, but also by the rhythm. I should be induced and urged
on to composition by these verses, which are constructed upon a higher
plane, as if with spiritual help, and bear in themselves the secret of
harmony.” So said Beethoven, the purport of his judgment always being:
“a musician is also a poet.” In fact, through language, music has
completely associated itself with personal speech and what wonder is it
that it now, again enkindled with poetry, affected the world? From that
time on there have been masters of music who give us information about
it and although they are only instructors in the history and dogmas
of music, the professors of composition must state the essentially
artistic and poetical in words. In the perfection of language as
applied to the expression of musical things, these tone-masters have
been creatively constructive.
The first of these is C. M. Von Weber, whose famous and almost
world-wide critique on the “Eroica” appeared in 1809. In spite of his
jealous misunderstanding, he shows a closer conception of Beethoven
and particularly of music than any of the purely literary critics of
that time and we know that afterwards the composer of “Der Freischuetz”
wrote much and very well and commenced to compose an artistic romance.
A year later, Bettina wrote that “soulful fantasy about music,” which
in Goethe’s “Correspondence with a Child,” made a powerful impression
upon musical authors and inspired their better natures. Rochlitz’s
“Musikzeitung,” from 1809 to 1812, contains Hoffmann’s analyses of the
Beethoven symphonies, which to-day would have secured him the title
of “Wagnerian.” He not only gave a wonderful flight and new character
to language but he even extended its limits, for he describes in the
“Kreisleriana,” with nothing but mere verbal expression, the mysteries
of the art, its subject-matter, the keys and their character. He
enhanced the possibilities of language, enriched its treasury of words
and gave it a new significance. He was enabled to do this as he was
both musician and author and in a different style from that Prussian
Capellmeister, Reichardt. He also declared that after he had once
spoken of music, thenceforth he could only discourse of it as a poet.
And yet there is in this still more of brilliancy than fire, more of
the extravagant and even fantastic than the striking power of poetry
and soaring fancy which Bettina’s simple poetical nature showed, the
manifestations of which gave Goethe such presages of the power of
musical genius. It was not merely the poetical nature, it was the
actual poet, as in Winckelmann’s revelation of the plastic art, that
was needed to hit the mark.
Let us be brief. Jean Paul’s deeply musical, poetical nature fired
Robert Schumann with the might of his spirit and with the heavenly fire
of true poetical perception, and inspiration. For the first time in
Germany, in his “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” he collected about him
the spirits who lived thoughtfully and contemplatively in their art. In
comparison with these poetical writers where are now those theorists,
Wendt, in whose writings Beethoven found thoughts full of wisdom, and
Thibaut with his “Parity of Music,” a little book certainly expressing
with fervor the beauty of music, which even to-day reveals to many a
spirit its better self? Added to these the expressions of Mozart, in
his letters about music, have come to light, and Beethoven reveals his
lofty regard for it in Bettina’s letters to Goethe. The writings of the
poet Heine about music are revived again and from France an earnest
spirit of art was wafted over to us in the literary productions of
that phenomenon, Hector Berlioz. We recognize in this that music is
not confined within the bounds of any language and we almost imagine
that its spirit and being must actually dwell in the general modern
idioms and thus impart to them the distinctive characteristics of the
old languages. For Liszt also--and now we come to our subject--wrote
in French and only in French, and yet we can say that he has enriched,
beautified and extended the German language, for he wrote our modern
speech from the inner spirit, because he wrote from the spirit of
music, which above all belongs to us.
He thus begins his communication to the “Gazette Musicale” in 1838:
“Nearly fifteen years ago my father forsook his peaceful roof to go
with me into the world. He settled down in France, for he thought
that here was the fittest sphere for the development and perfection
of my genius, as he, in his simple pride, called my musical talents.
Thus early I forgot my home and learned to recognize France as my
fatherland.” He recompensed his new fatherland with his perfect use of
its language, which no native Frenchman to-day employs more correctly,
accurately or with better constructive ability than he, so that the
charge of “neologism and Germanism” which has been laid to him is based
for the most part only on a noticeable jealousy of his extraordinary
style. It is characterized by a vigor, power, delicacy and richness
which are at once surprising and fascinating. “A single glance of his
flashing eye” in the incorrect and beggarly translations of him that
have thus far appeared, tell us we have to do with a Siegfried. One
of his translators rightly asserts: “Liszt is as unprecedented and
unapproachable in his playing as he is unparalleled and original in his
style. They are his own possessions. In both we feel the same genial
inclinations, but even in the highest flights of his inspirations he
never mars their beauty. If one were to find any fault it would only
be with the exuberance of thought and the riotous luxuriance of his
fancy which is inexhaustible in pictures and blending of color. This is
only the natural result of the abundant richness of his surroundings.
When Englishmen and Germans in their statements about music, especially
where Beethoven is concerned, complain of the obscurity and mystery of
his meaning, it is because music in its real form is still ‘a book with
seven seals’ to them.”
To specify his writings in detail would take too much space. It is
enough to state that Liszt was so familiar with the substance of all
the modern languages that he was enabled, by merely skimming over them,
to catch their general spirit and thus express the corresponding sense
and form of music, so that in reality, according to the historical
statement that we have given above, whenever these writings have
been translated into good German they have broadened and perfected
our language. One such translation appeared long since. It is the
volume, “Robert Franz.” The historical and technical are certainly the
weaker qualities of these writings, for they belong to science and
investigation, not to the art and the creative faculty as a special
province. And yet, in these respects, the last named volume is very
conspicuous. It contains an analysis of what we call the “Lied,”
which is more thorough in a historical and theoretical sense than any
that have ever been made. The entire volume is characterized by calm
consideration rather than by the flight of inspiration.
To show how accurately and delicately Liszt could sketch a subject
which up to that time had not been treated, and how fruitful,
therefore, the statements are for the history of the art, we give a
brief illustration from his sketch of “Lohengrin,” with which, as a
further illustration of the style of all his writings, we close. He is
speaking of the melody with which the Knight of the Grail takes leave
of his marvelous guide, the swan: “Music had not, as yet, acquired
those types which the painter and poet have so often endeavored to
portray. It had not, as yet, expressed the purity of feeling and the
sacred sorrow which the angels and the beings above us, who are better
than we, feel, when they are exiled from heaven and sent into our abode
of trouble on errands of beneficence. We believe that music, in this
respect, need no longer envy the other arts, for we are convinced that
no one has yet expressed this feeling with such lofty and even heavenly
perfection.”
We may say here, as Goethe said of Winckelmann’s prose: “He must be
a poet, whether he realizes it or not.” As this description of the
forms of plastic art has enriched our language for a century with
illustrations which are familiar to every one, so the description of
the creation of these new spiritual forms which music has produced,
will give a deeper soul and new wings to language. Liszt’s writings for
that reason have done a special work for the German language, for they
display the all-pervading spirit of modern culture, and thus help to
build up the essential and ultimate form of language. The introduction
to his pathetically enthusiastic essay on “The Place of the Artist,”
which forms the close of this chapter, shows us that Liszt was as
real as he was ideal when he took up his pen in 1835, impelled by his
literary activity.
“Truly it were a beautiful and noble duty to establish the definite
place of musicians in our social life--to group together their
political, individual and religious ideas--to describe their sorrows,
their sufferings, their difficulties and their errors--to tear away
the coverings from their bleeding wounds, and to raise an energetic
protest against the pressing injustice and the shameless prejudice
which injures and torments them, and condescends to use them as
playthings--to examine their past, to disclose their future, to bring
all their titles of honor to light, to teach the public and the
thankless materialistic society of men and women whom we entertain
and who support us, whence we come, whither we go, the nature of our
mission, in a word, who we are--to teach them who those chosen ones
are who were ordained of God Himself to bear witness to the highest
feelings of humanity and cherish them with noble trust, these divinely
anointed ones who strike off the fetters which enshackle men, who have
stolen the holy fire from heaven, who invest life with its material and
thought with its form, and while they achieve for us the realization
of our ideals, draw us up with irresistible power to their spiritual
heights, to the heavenly revelations--who they are, these human
creators, these evangelists and priests of an irredeemable religion,
constantly increasing in mystery and incessantly penetrating every
heart--to preach and to prophesy all this, which of itself is so loudly
proclaimed, with still louder voice even to the deafest ears, certainly
were a beautiful and noble duty.” Who has more nobly fulfilled this
duty by the deeds and words of a life-time than he!