CONSOLATION.
Liszt’s Great Resolve--Reply to a Scoffer--Religion and
Music--Religion at the Foundation of Culture--George Sand’s
Testimony--Relations of Religion and Music--Music in the Catholic
and Protestant Churches--Peculiarities of the Musical
Services--Influence of the Catholic Church on Music--A gradual
Lowering of the Standards--Opera Music in the Church--Liszt’s
Ambition to Reform it--His Early Piety--Views on Church Music--The
Religious Element in his Compositions--The Hungarian Coronation
Mass--The Choral Mass--Departure to Rome--Takes Orders--Why he did
not Remain--Germany his Field for Work.
“Is that then a life object?” was the reply of a Prussian
school-director on one occasion, when in answer to his question why
Liszt had specially taken orders, he was informed that in pursuance of
his life-mission it was indispensable for him to become a Capellmeister
of the Pope and Sistine chapel, in order to accomplish the reform
of Catholic church music. If we were also to make the reply to that
question, “Yes, perchance at this very time especially more important
than the elevation of education,” which would certainly turn the
school-man round and make him step aside, we should not encroach upon
the domain of politics, but strikingly characterize with this one
remark the sad indifference and ignorance of the entire, and for the
time the predominating multitude of our educated people, who make and
dominate our culture.
How can one, himself outside of the confession, after a little
reflection, have any doubt that the only ties which bind and unite
the immense mass of the people, besides the desperate occasions of
overwhelming necessity, are the ideal conceptions which religion offers
in a very crude and yet powerful and forcible shape? On that account
the church remains, let her be what she may, so long as this is true,
the only source for the great multitude of men which approaches them
with such conceptions, and, while it elevates them above themselves
and the ordinary necessities, makes them believe in a human community
and in mutual duties. Where again is the substitute for such an
indispensable institution, so long as we have no other, which in a
common union unites the masses upon a sure foundation, and without
which cement they would be dashed to atoms. Even granting that state
and culture have reached high attainments, no one but a short-sighted
person will say that they have reached their utmost possibilities. It
was this very feeling which, following upon the mental intoxication
of former centuries, and the fearful ones that came after with their
outbreaking revolutions and wars, made all the stronger minds and
more earnest spirits turn to the existing assurance which we possess
in ideal things as permanent realities--Religion and the Church.
“Religion is the true cement of the social edifice. The more numerous
the stones and details, the stronger should be the cement that unites
them,” writes George Sand, in 1830, in the “Lettres d’un Voyageur.”
That the assaults of the Catholic church upon the State are as
discreditable as the insolent self-elevation of Protestant orthodoxy
over all intellectual work and culture, goes without saying. Now, as
ever, the church, still more the service, in both confessions, is the
sure foundation for all really educated people. Its loftiest purpose
can only be to improve the mind religiously and thus secure for it a
higher effectiveness. State and church must be regarded from the same
point of view as Alberich and Mime, who struggled for the ring upon
which depended the heritage and power of the world, while Siegfried
possessed it. And as it is rightly claimed on behalf of the Protestant
church that its purpose is to give to worship such a form and value
that it shall unite and satisfy, in itself, the noblest aspirations and
the essentially ideal wants of all mankind, so the Catholic church, as
far as a stranger may judge, fails not by earnest consideration and
inward endeavor, far removed from the clamor of the day and the warring
of dominating factions and parties in the church, to restore again
its world-conquering, because world-redeeming power, in that it seeks
to give that spirit to its worship in which is the real safety of our
time. And as it is not a matter of chance that art has been awakened by
this characteristic spirit of the later times, to which it has given a
new language, to give a fitting expression to the fullness and depth of
feeling, like the infinity of the spirit which springs from the spirit
itself, as it is not a matter of chance that music is pre-eminently
the daughter of the church and of its service, so from the oldest to
the most recent times, this daughter, who meanwhile has become so
unspeakably affluent and above all so independent, has been loudly
called upon to establish herself in the church and its service in all
the perfection and richness of her nature.
If the great difficulty with the Protestant service lies in the fact
that it does not easily assimilate music, and, so to speak, make it a
part of divine worship, so that its employment makes religious service
partake of the nature of a sacred concert, thereby destroying religion
itself, if in this case also, peculiar but in no way insuperable
difficulties stand in the way of such a result, on the other hand in
the Catholic service, music is an indispensable part of it and in
the real sense its central part, for transubstantiation, besides the
elevation of the Host, which is only a symbol, is felt as a deep inward
reality in the music, which at that instant is poured forth at the
true Mass even in the most insignificant church like a sacred flood,
deeply refreshing the hearts which turn to it. We may say that but for
this recalling of the wandering heart to the harmony of the Eternal
and the All, but for this return of the individual to the everlasting
foundations of being, as they are revealed in transubstantiation, we
should not securely hold that art which in its very essence reveals the
fixity of the world, outwardly as well as inwardly. It should also be
said that the Catholic service, that is, its highest attainment, the
Mass, without its daughter, Music, which in an actual sense is in turn
its mother, or can at any time become so, could not reach its ultimate
possibilities and by its life prolong its own.
There has been endless complaint that with the progress of its
dominion, which has immeasurably enhanced the outward pomp of the
church, and which has not scorned to make use of the dramatic for
its purposes, the music of its worship has become superficial and
theatrical. There is also a Jesuitic style in the music, and he who
perfects his artistic taste by the ever true and really classical, will
find good proofs in Beethoven’s greater Masses as well as in Mozart’s
“Requiem,” that since the seventeenth century the opera has invaded
the church, and that the peculiar fineries of the Saints’ statues of
that time denominated the fundamental character of its music. This is
true of Germany as well as of the Roman countries, and any one who has
been to Italy knows to his own satisfaction that the latest operatic
melodies can be heard to-day upon the organ, even in sublime St.
Peter’s at Rome. From Mozart to Mendelssohn, among musicians there is
the same complaint of this impropriety, and since Goethe, almost every
writer on Italy has spoken of this matter, which is a disgrace to the
church and a calamity to the religious elevation of the poor.
Under these circumstances, how could a nature like that of Liszt’s
hesitate? As we have seen over and over again, the modern way
of regarding things had become, in fact, his second nature, an
irresistible and yet spontaneous motive power in all his thoughts and
actions. We have an additional test of this artist, which brings us to
the very source of his life, even to the very basis of life itself.
We have the facts for our information, and need not contemplate the
phenomenon of Liszt as a reformer of art in his church in any sense as
a wonder or a mere accident. It rests upon the very foundation of his
life and it works accordingly.
“From youth up, Franz’s spirit was naturally inclined to devotion,
and his passionate feeling for art was blended with a piety which was
characterized by all the frankness of his age,” reads an entry in
the diary of his father, who died when the son was in his sixteenth
year. In 1857, Liszt himself speaks of the poor little church in his
Hungarian home, “in which, as a child, I had prayed with such ardent
devotion.” Even in his youth he thought that he was called to the
church, and it was only the earnest wish, at first, of his father, and
afterwards of his mother, an extremely kind-hearted Upper-Austrian,
that kept him in the path of art and its practice. The biographical
sketch in the “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” of 1834, to which we are
indebted for the first reliable accounts of Liszt, significantly says,
however: “His piety was rational and imparted a certain freedom to his
ideas and their execution. It did not exhibit the stiffness, roughness,
dogmatism or brutality of the canting devotee. It was sincere and was
the outcome of liberal reason from the Catholic standpoint.” Heine
says in one of his Paris letters, 1830, that he has a great talent for
speculation, and he dwells upon his “boundless thirst for light and the
deity, which bear evidence to the holiness and religion in his nature.”
Enough has already been said to make further reference unnecessary,
but the biographical sketch goes on to state that he had undertaken to
compose religious music, and says in that connection: “The so-called
music of our time did not seem to him to correspond to a manly
conception of it, and thus the idea was forced upon him to create
religious music.” “We talk of the reformation of church music,” Liszt
writes in 1834. “Although this expression ordinarily implies only music
like that performed during the ceremonies of divine service, I use
it here in its most significant meaning. When the service expressed
and satisfied the confessions, the necessities and the sympathies of
the people, when men and women found an altar in the church where
they could bow the knee, a pulpit where they could draw near to the
divine, and it was a sight which refreshed their minds and uplifted
their hearts in holy rapture, then church music only needed to retire
to its own mysterious sphere and content itself with serving as an
accompaniment to the splendor of the Catholic liturgy. In these days,
when the altar shakes and totters; in these days, when the pulpit and
religious ceremonies serve for the sport of the mocker and doubter,
art must leave the inner temple and spreading out through the world
seek a place to exhibit its magnificent accomplishments. As in former
time--nay, even more than it did then--music must recognize the people
and God as the sources of its life. It must speed from one to the
other, ennobling, consoling and purifying man, blessing and glorifying
God.”
Thus music was to him a service completely divine. More than one
witness of that day testifies to the strong impression which the
religious agitation of the time of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and the
Abbe Lamennais made upon him, which had been already foreshadowed in
his own fantasie, the “Berg symphony,” as well as the “Consolation.”
In the same year, 1834, appeared the “Pensée des Morts” a fragment of
the “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for piano, which he prefaced
with some words of Lamartine’s. It also seems to be one of his first
attempts to intimately associate poetry and music. This preface reads:
“There are contemplative souls which in their solitary meditations are
irresistibly elevated by the infinite ideas of religion. All their
thoughts are turned to inspiration and prayer, all their being is a
silent hymn to the divinity and the divine hope. In themselves and in
the surrounding creation they seek the steps that ascend to God, the
images and symbols with which to elevate themselves, with which to
raise themselves to Him. O, that I could offer such to them! There are
hearts broken by sorrow, crushed by the world, who fly to the world
of their thoughts and to the solitude of their own souls to weep, to
watch and to pray; O, that they might search for a muse as solitary
as themselves, find sympathy in her tones, and listening, many a time
declare: ‘We pray in thy language, we weep with thy tears, we are
uplifted by thy songs.’”
As soon as Liszt, after his long, long wanderings, was in the right
mood to actually compose--for the French account rightly calls Liszt’s
work “no mechanical exercise but composition in the real sense, the
actual artistic creation”--when he had so arranged these creations of
his nature, for such we must call these reproductions, as to make sure
of artistic results, from the thoughts of his early years, in reality
out of a time almost a generation remote from us, sprang the larger
part of his religious and church compositions, which we now possess.
The “lofty festival greetings” of the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the
Fest Mass for the consecration of the Graner Cathedral (Graner Mass)
which preceded that work of 1856, moving along with stately splendor,
prove that it was not a mere reflection of the outward show but that
it reached the very spirit of the occasion. Still grander was it, so
to speak, to offer the daily bread when, alas, so often a stone had
been tendered to the hungering multitude. The little Missa Choralis
(Choral Mass) is enough to show that he had attained to the desire of
his youth and that a truly religious music had been achieved for the
church service of our time. It was practically performed for the first
time in Vienna, in 1877, by the Cecilia Verein, at the court church.
There is nothing of the conventional mass form of the last century in
it, and although the arrangement for male voices is in the style of
Palestrina, it does not at all remind one of him. It is original, new
and modern throughout; in other words, it is in consonance with our own
actual feelings. It must have deeply impressed the soul of the layman
that this art not merely embellished and animated the service but that
he freshly elevated its living spirit, just as Palestrina preserved and
handed down to us the lofty religious spirit of the old church.
Liszt was not satisfied with this. He desired his work to be of a
practical nature so that the music of the church should be purified,
renovated and improved. He resolved to leave Weimar at once, and in
1861 left for Rome. It was necessary for him to become a Capellmeister
of the Pope, in order to accomplish what he wished. In accordance
with ancient usage such an one must separate himself from the world
by taking the first orders. Palestrina was the last Capellmeister at
the Sistine who was not in orders. He was married and it was only the
impossibility of filling his place that kept him in his position. Thus
Liszt, who had always felt like a priest in his art, took orders and is
to-day an Abbe.
And why did he not remain in Rome? “I was thwarted by the lack of
culture among the cardinals,” he says, speaking in a musical sense,
and besides most of the princes of the church are Italian. He felt it
was only in Germany that the heart of music could be regenerated. So
he came back to us in the North and devoted himself immediately to the
encouragement of schools of a better and more original style of church
music, such as those established in Regensburg, and Eichstaett and
to the Scuola Gregoriana in Rome, in 1881. May they accomplish their
purpose though it takes generations. They supply anew that elementary
sustenance of the spirit which nothing else can, and which grows more
pressing from decade to decade. We recognize anew that here as in every
instance of creative activity the man and the artist are one. Securely
settled and grounded inwardly he can outwardly rule like a king and as
lavishly bestow.