In the meantime, Paganini, had set his brain seething. Chopin, Paganini
and Berlioz were the predominating artistic influences in his life; from
the first he appreciated the exotic, learned the resources of the
instrument, and the value of national folk-song flavour; from the second
he gained the inspiration for his transcendental technique; from the
third, orchestral colour and the "new paths" were indicated to his
ambitious spirit. He never tired, he always said there would be plenty
of time to loaf in eternity. His pictures were everywhere, he became a
kind of Flying Hungarian to the sentimental Sentas of those times. He
told Judith Gautier that the women loved themselves in him. Modest man!
What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine
called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an
advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl, and Doehler--a
pianist. Scudo wrote that Thalberg's scales were like pearls on velvet,
the scales of Liszt the same, but the velvet was hot! Louis Ehlert, no
mean observer, said he possessed a quality that neither Tausig nor any
virtuoso before or succeeding him ever boasted--the nearest approach,
perhaps, was Rubinstein--namely: a spontaneous control of passion that
approximated in its power to nature ... and an incommensurable nature
was his. He was one among a dozen artists who made Europe interesting
during the past century. Slim, handsome in youth, brown of hair and
blue-eyed, with the years he grew none the less picturesque; his mane
was white, his eyes became blue-gray, his pleasant baritone voice a
brumming bass. There is a portrait in the National Gallery by Lorenzo
Lotto, of Prothonotary Giuliano, that suggests him, and in the
Burne-Jones picture, Merlin and Vivien, there is certainly a transcript
of his features. A statue by Foyatier in the Louvre, of Spartacus,
is really the head of the pianist. As Abbe he was none the less
fascinating; for his admirers he wore his _soutane_ with a difference.
Useless to relate the Thousand-and-One Nights of music, triumphs, and
intrigues in his life. When the Countess d'Agoult returned to her family
a council, presided over by her husband's brother, exonerated the
pianist, and his behaviour was pronounced to be that of a gentleman!
Surely the Comic Muse must have chuckled at this. Like Wagner, Franz
Liszt was a Tragic Comedian of prime order. He knew to the full the
value of his electric personality. Sincere in art, he could play the
grand seignior, the actor, the priest, and diplomat at will. Pose he had
to, else abandon the profession of piano virtuoso. But he bitterly
objected to playing the role of a performing poodle, and once publicly
insulted the Czar, who dared to talk while the greatest pianist in the
world played. He finally grew tired of Paris, of public life. He had
been loved by such various types of women as George Sand--re-christened
by Baudelaire as the Prudhomme of immorality; delightful epigram!--by
Marie Du Plessis, the Lady of the Camellias, and by that astounding
adventuress, Lola Montez. How many others only a Leporello catalogue
would show.
His third artistic period began in 1847, his sojourn at Weimar. It was
the most attractive and fruitful of all. From 1848 to 1861 the musical
centre of Germany was this little town immortalised by Goethe. There the
world flocked to hear the first performance of Lohengrin, and other
Wagner operas. A circle consisting of Raff, Von Buelow, Tausig,
Cornelius, Joseph Joachim, Schumann, Robert Franz, Litolff, Dionys
Pruckner, William Mason, Lassen, with Berlioz and Rubinstein and Brahms
(in 1854) and Remenyi as occasional visitors, to mention a tithe of
famous names, surrounded Liszt. His elective affinity--in Goethe's
phrase--was the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who with her child had
deserted the usual brutal and indifferent husband--in fashionable
romances. Her influence upon Liszt's character has been disputed, but
unwarrantably. She occasionally forced him to do the wrong thing, as in
the case of the ending of the Dante symphony; _vide_, the new Wagner
Autobiography. Together they wrote his chief literary works, the study
of Chopin--the princess supplying the feverish local colour, and the
book on Hungarian gipsy music, which contains a veiled attack on the
Jews, for which Liszt was blamed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein was an intense,
narrow nature--she has been called a "slightly vulgar aristocrat," and
one of her peculiarities was seeing in almost every one of artistic or
intellectual prominence Hebraic traits or lineaments. Years before the
Geyer and the Leipsic _Judengasse_ story came out she unhesitatingly
pronounced Richard Wagner of Semitic origin; she also had her doubts
about Berlioz and others. The Lisztian theory of gipsy music consists,
as Dannreuther says, in the merit of a laboured attempt to prove the
existence of something like a gipsy epic in terms of music, the fact
being that Hungarian gipsies merely play Hungarian popular tunes in a
fantastic and exciting manner, but have no music that can properly be
called their own. Liszt was a facile, picturesque writer and did more
with his pen for Wagner than Wagner's own turbid writings. But a great
writer he was not--many-sided as he was. It was unkind, however, on the
part of Wagner to say to a friend that Cosima had more brains than her
father. If she has, Bayreuth since her husband's death hasn't proved it.
Wagner, when he uttered this, was probably in the ferment of a new
passion, having quite recovered from his supposedly eternal love for
Mathilde Wesendonck.
[Illustration: Cosima von Buelow