"While remaining itself obscure," wrote George Moore of L'Education
Sentimentale, by Flaubert, "this novel has given birth to a numerous
literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L'Education
Sentimentale re-written into twenty volumes by a prodigious
journalist--twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes
getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless
walking-sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them
into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to
forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original
spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and
prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known."
This particular passage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his
obligations to Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz--as, indeed, Flaubert owed
something to Chateaubriand, Bossuet, and Balzac--he invented a new form,
the symphonic poem, invented a musical phrase, novel in shape and gait,
perfected the leading motive, employed poetic ideas instead of the
antique and academic cut and dried square-toed themes--and was
ruthlessly plundered almost before the ink was dry on his manuscript,
and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came
to pass that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel,
first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the
public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Saens,
Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers
and a half-hundred besides of the new men, beginning with the name of
Richard Strauss--that most extraordinary personality of latter-day
music. And Liszt sat in Weimar and smiled and waited and waited and
smiled; and if he has achieved paradise by this time he is still
smiling and waiting. He often boasted that storms were his _metier_,
meaning their tonal reproduction in orchestral form or on the
keyboard--but I suspect that patience was his cardinal virtue.
Henry James once wrote of the human soul and it made me think of Liszt:
"A romantic, moonlighted landscape, with woods and mountains and dim
distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs." Liszt's music often
evokes the golden opium-haunted prose of De Quincy; it is at once
sensual and rhetorical. It also has its sonorous platitudes, unheavenly
lengths, and barbaric yawps.
Despite his marked leaning toward the classic (Raphael, Correggio,
Mickelangelo, and those frigid, colourless Germans, Kaulbach, Cornelius,
Schadow, not to mention the sweetly romantic Ary Scheffer and the
sentimental Delaroche), by temperament Liszt was a lover of the
grotesque, the baroque, the eccentric, even the morbid. He often
declared that it was his pet ambition to give a piano recital in the
_Salon Carre_ of the Louvre, where, surrounded by the canvases of Da
Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Veronese, and
others of the immortal choir, he might make music never to be forgotten.
In reality, he would have played with more effect if the pictures had
been painted by Salvator Rosa, El Greco, Hell-Fire Breughel, Callot,
Orcagna (the Dance of Death at Pisa), Matthew Gruenwald; or among the
moderns, Gustave Dore, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch,
Matisse or Picasso. Ugliness mingled with voluptuousness, piety doubted
by devilry, the quaint and the horrible, the satanic and the angelic,
these states of soul (and body) appealed to Liszt quite as much as they
did to Berlioz. They are all the apex of delirious romanticism;--now as
dead as the classicism that preceded and produced it--of the seeking
after recondite sensations and expressing them by means of the eloquent,
versatile orchestral apparatus. Think what roles Death and Lust play in
the over-strained art of the Romantics (the "hairy romantic" as
Thackeray called Berlioz, and no doubt Liszt, for he met him in
London); what bombast, what sonorous pomp and pageantry, what sighing
sensuousness, what brilliant martial spirit--they are all to be found in
Liszt. In musical irony he never had but one match, Chopin--until
Richard Strauss; Berlioz was also an adept in this disquieting mood.
Liszt makes a direct appeal to the nerves, he has the trick of getting
atmosphere with a few bars; and even if his great solo sonata has been
called "The Invitation to Hissing and Stamping" (thus named by
Gumprecht, a blind critic of Berlin, about 1854) the work itself is a
mine of musical treasures, and a most dramatic sonata--that is if one
accepts Liszt's definition of the form. Here we recall Cabaner's
music--as reported by Mr. Moore--"the music that might be considered by
Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to
understand."
Liszt's music is virile and homophonic, despite its chromatic
complexities. Instead of lacking in thematic invention he was, perhaps,
a trifle too facile, too Italianate; he shook too many melodies from
his sleeve to be always fresh; in a word, he composed too much.
Architecturally his work recalls at times the fantastic Kremlin, or the
Taj Mahal, or--as in the Graner Mass--a strange perversion of the
gothic. Liszt was less the master-builder than the painter; color, not
form, was his stronger side. And like Chateaubriand his music is an
interminglement of religious with moods of sensuality. An authority has
written that his essays in counterpoint are perhaps more successful than
those of Berlioz, though his fugue subjects are equally artificial; and
he fails to make the most of them (but couldn't the same be said of
Beethoven, or of the contrapuntal Reger?). Both the French and Hungarian
masters seem to have concocted rather than have composed their fugues.
All of which is the eternal rule of thumb over again. The age of the
fugue, like the age of manufactured miracles, is forever past. If you
don't care for the fugal passages and part-writing in the Graner Mass or
in the organ music, then there is nothing more to be said. Charles Lamb
inveighed against concertos and instrumental music because, as he wrote,
"words are something; but to gaze on empty frames, and to be forced to
make the pictures for yourself ... to invent extempore tragedies is to
answer the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime." This
unimaginative condition is the precise one from which suffered so many
early and too many later critics of Liszt's original music. If you are
not in the mood poetical, whether lyric, heroic, or epic, then go to
some other composer. And I protest against the parenthetical position
allotted him by musical commentators, mostly of the Bayreuth brood. The
Wagner family saw to it that the mighty Richard should be furnished with
an appropriate artistic pedigree; Beethoven and Gluck were called his
precursors. Liszt is not a transitional composer, except that all great
composers are a link in the unending chain. But, though he helped Wagner
to his later ideas and style, he had nothing whatever to do with the
Wagnerian music-drama or the Wagnerian attitude toward art. Berlioz,
Liszt, and Wagner are all three as different in conception and texture
as Handel and Haydn and Mozart; yet many say Handel and Haydn, or, worse
still, Mozart and Beethoven. Absurd and unjust bracketings by the
fat-minded unmusical.
In musicianship Liszt had no contemporary who could pretend to tie his
shoe-strings, with the possible exception of Felix Mendelssohn. And in
one particular he ranks next to Bach and Beethoven--in rhythmic
invention; after Bach and Beethoven, Liszt stands nearest as regards the
variety of his rhythms. His Eastern blood--the Magyar came from
Asia--may account for this rhythmic versatility. It is a point not to be
overlooked in future estimates of the composer.
How then account for the rather indifferent fashion with which the Liszt
compositions are received by the musical public, not only here, but in
Europe? This year (1911) the festivals in honor of the Master's
Centenary may revive interest in his music and, perhaps, open the ears
of the present generation to the fact that Strauss, Debussy and others
are not as original as they sound. But I fear that Liszt, like any other
dead composer--save the few giants, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven--will be
played as a matter of course, sometimes from piety, sometimes because
certain dates bob up on the calendar. His piano music, the most grateful
ever written, will die hard, yet die it will.
Musicians should never forget Liszt, who, as was the case with Henry
Irving and the English speaking actors, was the first to give musicians
a social standing and prestige; before his time a pianist, violinist,
organist, singer, was hardly superior to a lackey. Liszt was the
aristocrat of his art; his essential nobility of soul, coupled with his
flaming genius, made him that. And he came from a cottage that seemed
like a peasant's. A point for your anarch in art.
Whatever the fluctuations of the chameleon of the Seven Arts, the best
music will be always beautiful; beautiful with the old or the new
beauty. Ugliness for the sheer sake of ugliness never endures; but one
must be able to define modern beauty, else find oneself in the
predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the
beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the
characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The
sting and glamour of the Liszt orchestral music has compelling quality.
Probably one of the most eloquent tributes paid to music is the
following, and by a critic of pictorial art, Mr. D. S. MacColl, now
keeper of the Wallace Collection in London. He wrote:
"An art that came out of the old world two centuries ago with a few
chants, love-songs, and dances, that a century ago was still tied to the
words of a mass or an opera, or threading little dance movements
together in a 'suite,' became, in the last century, this extraordinary
debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or
worshipped a god may not only ideally but through the response of his
nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of
struggle, rapture and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an
anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility unheard of. An amplified pattern
of action and emotion is given; each man fits to it the images he
will."