I
Franz Liszt remarked to a disciple of his: "Once Liszt helped Wagner,
but who now will help Liszt?" This was said in 1874, when Liszt was well
advanced in years, when his fame as piano virtuoso and his name as
composer were wellnigh eclipsed by the growing glory of Wagner--truly a
glory he had helped to create. In youth, an Orpheus pursued by the
musical Maenads of Europe, in old age Liszt was a Merlin dealing in
white magic, still followed by the Viviens. The story of his career
is as romantic as any by Balzac. And the end of it all--after a
half century and more of fire and flowers, of proud, brilliant
music-making--was tragical. A gentle King Lear (without the consolation
of a Cordelia), following with resignation the conquering chariot of a
man, his daughter's husband, who owed him so much, and, despite
criticism, bravely acknowledged his debt, thus faithful to the end (he
once declared that by Wagner he would stand or fall), Franz Liszt died a
quarter of a century ago at Bayreuth, not as Liszt the Conqueror, but a
world-weary pilgrim, petted and flattered when young, neglected as the
star of Wagner arose on the horizon. If only Liszt could have
experienced the success of poverty as did Wagner. But the usual
malevolent fairy of the fable endowed him with all the gifts but
poverty, and that capricious old Pantaloon, the Time-Spirit, had his
joke in the lonesome latter years. As regards his place in the musical
pantheon, this erst-while comet is now a fixed star, and his feet set
upon the white throne. There is no longer a Liszt case; his music has
fallen into critical perspective; but there is still a Liszt case,
psychologically speaking. Whether he was an archangel of light, a
Bernini of tones, or, as Jean-Christophe describes him, "The noble
priest, the circus-rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in equal
doses of real and false nobility," is a question that will be answered
according to one's temperament. That he was the captain of the new
German music, a pianist without equal, a conductor of distinction, one
who had helped to make the orchestra and its leaders what they are
to-day; that he was a writer, a reformer of church music, a man of the
noblest impulses and ideals, generous, selfless, and an artist to his
fingertips--these are the commonplaces of musical history. As a
personality he was an apparition; only Paganini had so electrified
Europe. A _charmeur_, his love adventures border on the legendary;
indeed, are largely legend. As amorous as a guitar, if we are to
believe the romancers, the real Liszt was a man of intellect, a deeply
religious soul; in middle years contemplative, even ascetic. His
youthful extravagances, inseparable from his gipsy-like genius, and
without a father to guide him, were remembered in Germany long after
he had left the concert-platform. His successes, artistic and
social--especially the predilection for him of princesses and noble
dames--raised about his ears a nest of pernicious scandal-hornets. Had
he not run away with Countess D'Agoult, the wife of a nobleman! Had he
not openly lived with a married princess at Weimar, and under the
patronage of the Grand Duke and Duchess and the Grand Duchess Maria
Pawlowna, sister of the Czar of all the Russias! Besides, he was a Roman
Catholic, and that didn't please such prim persons as Mendelssohn and
Hiller, not to mention his own fellow-countryman, Joseph Joachim.
Germany set the fashion in abusing Liszt. He had too much success for
one man, and as a composer he must be made an example of; the services
he rendered in defending the music of the insurgent Wagner was but
another black mark against his character. And when Wagner did at last
succeed, Liszt's share in the triumph was speedily forgotten. The truth
is, he paid the penalty for being a cosmopolitan. He was the first
cosmopolitan in music. In Germany he was abused as a Magyar, in Hungary
for his Teutonic tendencies--he never learned his mother tongue--in
Paris for not being French born; here one recalls the Stendhal case.
But he introduced into the musty academic atmosphere of musical Europe a
strong, fresh breeze from the Hungarian _puzta_; this wandering
piano-player of Hungarian-Austrian blood, a genuine cosmopolite, taught
music a new charm, the charm of the unexpected, the improvised. The
freedom of Beethoven in his later works, and of Chopin in all his music,
became the principal factor in the style of Liszt. Music must have the
shape of an improvisation. In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of
which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern, are the extremes of his
system. His orchestral and vocal works, the two symphonies, the masses
and oratorios and symphonic poems, are full of dignity, poetic feeling,
religious spirit, and a largeness of accent and manner though too often
lacking in architectonic; yet the gipsy glance and gipsy voice lurk
behind many a pious or pompous bar. Apart from his invention of a new
form--or, rather, the condensation and revisal of an old one, the
symphonic poem--Liszt's greatest contribution to art is the wild,
truant, rhapsodic, extempore element he infused into modern music;
nature in her most reckless, untrammelled moods he interpreted with
fidelity. But the drummers in the line of moral gasolene who controlled
criticism in Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso
with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. Even the piquant
triangle in his piano-concerto was suspected as possibly suggesting the
usual situation of French comedy.
The Liszt-Wagner question no longer presents any difficulties to the
fair-minded. It is a simple one; men still living know that Wagner, to
reach his musical apogee, to reach his public, had to lean heavily on
the musical genius and individual inspiration of Liszt. The later Wagner
would not have existed--as we now know him--without first traversing the
garden of Liszt. This is not a theory but a fact. Beethoven, as Philip
Hale has pointed out, is the last of the very great composers; there is
nothing new since Beethoven, though plenty of persuasive personalities,
much delving in mole-runs, many "new paths," leading nowhere, and much
self-advertising. With its big drum and cymbals, its mouthing or melting
phrases, its startling situations, its scarlet waistcoats, its hair-oil
and harlots, its treacle and thunder, the Romantic movement swept over
the map of Europe, irresistible, contemptuous to its adversaries, and
boasting a wonderful array of names. Schumann and Chopin, Berlioz and
Liszt, Wagner--in a class by himself--are a few that may be cited; not
to mention Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal.
Georg Brandes assigns to Liszt a prominent place among the Romantics.
But Beethoven still stood, stands to-day, four square to the universe.
Wagner construed Beethoven to suit his own grammar. Why, for example,
Berlioz should have been puzzled (or have pretended to) over the first
page of the Tristan and Isolde prelude is itself puzzling; the Frenchman
was a deeply versed Beethoven student. If he had looked at the first
page of the piano sonata in C minor--the Pathetic, so-called--the enigma
of the Wagnerian phraseology would have been solved; there, in a few
lines, is the kernel of this music-drama. This only proves Wagner's
Shakesperian faculty of assimilation and his extraordinary gift in
developing an idea (consider what he made of the theme of Chopin's C
minor study, the Revolutionary, which he boldly annexed for the opening
measures of the prelude to Act II of Tristan and Isolde); he borrowed
his ideas whenever and wherever he saw fit. His indebtedness to Liszt
was great, but equally so to Weber, Marschner, and Beethoven; his
indebtedness to Berlioz ended with the externals of orchestration. Both
Liszt and Wagner learned from Berlioz in this respect. Nevertheless, how
useless to compare Liszt to Berlioz or Berlioz to Wagner. As well
compare a ruby to an opal, an emerald to a ruby. Each of these three
composers has his individual excellences. The music of all three suffers
from an excess of profile. We call Liszt and Wagner the leaders of the
moderns, but their aims and methods were radically different. Wagner
asserted the supremacy of the drama over tone, and then, inconsistently,
set himself down to write the most emotionally eloquent music that was
ever conceived; Liszt always harped on the dramatic, on the poetic, and
seldom employed words, believing that the function of instrumental music
is to convey in an ideal manner a poetic impression. In this he was the
most thorough-going of poetic composers, as much so in the orchestral
domain as was Chopin in his pianoforte compositions. Since Wagner's
music-plays are no longer a novelty "the long submerged trail of Liszt
is making its appearance," as Ernest Newman happily states the case. But
to be truthful, the music of both Liszt and Wagner is already a little
old-fashioned. The music-drama is not precisely in a rosy condition
to-day. Opera is the weakest of forms at best, the human voice
inevitably limits the art, and we are beginning to wonder what all the
Wagnerian menagerie, the birds, dragons, dogs, snakes, swans, toads,
dwarfs, giants, horses, and monsters generally, have to do with music.
The music of the future is already the music of the past. The Wagner
poems are uncouth, cumbersome machines. We long for a breath of
humanity, and it is difficult to find it outside of Tristan and Isolde
or Die Meistersinger. Alas! for the enduring quality of operatic music.
Nothing stales like theatre music. The rainbow vision of a synthesis of
the Seven Arts has faded forever. In the not far distant future Wagner
will gain, rather than lose, by being played in the concert-room; that,
at least, would dodge the ominously barren stretches of the Ring, and
the early operas. The Button-Moulder awaits at the cross-roads of time
all operatic music, even as he waited for Peer Gynt. And the New
Zealander is already alive, though young, who will visit Europe to
attend the last piano-recital: that species of entertainment invented by
Liszt, and by him described in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso as
colloquies of music and ennui. He was the first pianist to show his
profile on the concert stage, his famous _profil d'ivoire_; before Liszt
pianists either faced the audience or sat with their back to the public.
The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein--one naturally drops into the Almanac de
Gotha when writing of the friends of Liszt--averred that Liszt had
launched his musical spear further into the future than Wagner. She was
a lady of firm opinions, who admired Berlioz as much as she loathed
Wagner. But could she have foreseen that Richard Strauss, Parsifal-like,
had caught the whizzing lance of the Klingsor of Weimar, what would she
have said? Put the riddle to contemporary critics of Richard II--who
has, at least, thrown off the influence of Liszt and Wagner, although he
too frequently takes snap-shots at the sublime in his scores. Otherwise,
you can no more keep Liszt's name out of the music of to-day than could
good Mr. Dick the head of King Charles from the pages of his memorial.
His musical imagination was versatile, his impressionability so lively
that he translated into tone his voyages, pictures, poems--Dante,
Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Obermann, (Senancour), even Sainte-Beuve (Les
Consolations,) legends, and the cypress-haunted fountains of the Villa
d' Este (Tivoli); not to mention canvases by Raphael, Mickelangelo, and
the uninspired frescoes of Kaulbach. All was grist that came to his
musical mill.
In a moment of self-forgetfulness, Wagner praised the music of Liszt in
superlative terms. No need of quotation; the correspondence, a classic,
is open to all. That the symphonic poem was secretly antipathetic to
Wagner is the bald truth. After all his rhapsodic utterances concerning
the symphonies and poems of Liszt--from which he borrowed many a
sparkling jewel to adorn some corner in his giant frescoes--he said in
1877, "In instrumental music I am a _reactionnaire_, a conservative. I
dislike everything that requires verbal explanations beyond the actual
sounds." And he, the most copious of commentators concerning his own
music, in which almost every other bar is labelled with a leading
motive! To this Liszt wittily answered--in an unpublished letter
(1878)--that leading motives are comfortable inventions, as a composer
does not have to search for a new melody. But what boots leading
motives--as old as the hills and Johann Sebastian Bach--or symphonic
poems nowadays? There is no Wagner, there is no Liszt question. After
the unbinding of the classic forms the turbulent torrent is become the
new danger. Who shall dam its speed! Brahms or Reger? The formal
formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on
the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The
symphonic poem is now a monster of appalling lengths, thereby, as Mr.
Krehbiel suggests, defeating its chiefest reason for existence, its
brevity. The foam and fireworks of the impressionistic school, Debussy,
Dukas, and Ravel, and the rest, are enjoyable; the piano music of
Debussy has the iridescence of a spider's web touched by the fire of the
setting sun; his orchestra is a jewelled conflagration. But he stems
like the others, the Russians included, from Liszt. Charpentier and his
followers are Wagner _a la coule_. Where it will all end no man dare
predict. But Mr. Newman is right in the matter of programme-music. It
has come to stay, modified as it may be in the future. Too many bricks
and mortar, the lust of the ear as well as of the eye, glutted by the
materialistic machinery of the Wagner music-drama, have driven the
lovers of music-for-music's-sake back to Beethoven; or, in extreme
cases, to novel forms wherein vigourous affirmations are dreaded as
much as an eight-bar melody; for those meticulous temperaments that
recoil from clangourous chord, there are the misty tonalities of
Debussy or the verse of Paul Verlaine. However, the aquarelles
and pastels and landscapes of Debussy or Ravel were invented by
_Urvater_ Liszt--caricatured by Wagner in the person of Wotan; all the
impressionistic school may be traced to him as its fountain-head. Think
of the little sceneries scattered through his piano music, particularly
in his Years of Pilgrimage; or of the storm and stress of the
Dante Sonata. The romanticism of Liszt was, like so many of his
contemporaries, a state of soul, a condition of exalted or morbid
sensibility. But it could not be said of him as it could of all the Men
of Fine Shades--Chateaubriand, Heine, Stendhal, Benjamin Constant,
Sainte-Beuve--that they were only men of feeling in their art, and
decidedly the reverse in their conduct. Liszt was a pattern of chivalry,
and if he seems at times as indulging too much in the Grand Manner set
it down to his surroundings, to his temperament. The idols of his
younger years were Bonaparte and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, while
in the background hovered the prime corrupter of the nineteenth century
and the father of Romanticism, J. J. Rousseau.