Over a quarter of a century has passed since the death of Karl Tausig, a
time long enough to dim the glory of the mere virtuoso. Many are still
living who have heard him play, and can recall the deep impressions
which his performances made on his hearers. Whoever not only knew Karl
Tausig at the piano, but had studied his genuinely artistic nature,
still retains a living image of him. He stands before us in all his
youth, for he died early, before he had reached the middle point of
life; he counted thirty years at the time of his death, when his great
heart, inspired with a love for all beauty, ceased to beat; when those
hands, _Tes mains de bronze et des diamants_, as Liszt named them in a
letter to his pupil and friend, grew stiff in death.
It was through many wanderings and perplexities that Karl Tausig rose to
the height which he reached in the last years of his life. A friendless
childhood was followed by a period of _Sturm und Drang_, till the dross
had been purged away and the pure gold of his being displayed. The
essence of his playing was warm objectivity; he let every masterpiece
come before us in its own individuality; the most perfect virtuosity,
his incomparable surmounting of all technical means of expression, was
to him only the means, never the end. Paradoxical as it may appear,
there never was, before or since, so great a virtuoso who was less a
virtuoso. Hence the career of a virtuoso did not satisfy him; he strove
for higher ends, and apart from his ceaseless culture of the intellect,
his profound studies in all fields of science and the devotion which he
gave to philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences, what he
achieved in the field of music possesses a special interest, as he
regarded it as merely a preparation for comprehensive creative activity.
Some of these compositions are still found in the programmes of all
celebrated pianists, while the arrangements that he made for pedagogic
purposes occupy a prominent place in the courses of all conservatories.
Karl Tausig came to Berlin in the beginning of the sixties. Alois
Tausig, his father, a distinguished piano teacher at Warsaw, who had
directed the early education of the son, whom he survived by more than a
decade, had already presented him to Liszt at Weimar. Liszt at once took
the liveliest interest in the astonishing talents of the boy and made
him a member of his household at Altenburg, at Weimar, where this prince
in the realm of art kept his court with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein,
surrounded by a train of young artists, to which Hans von Buelow, Karl
Klindworth, Peter Cornelius (to name only a few) belonged. With all
these Karl Tausig formed intimate friendships, especially with
Cornelius, who was nearest to him in age. An active correspondence was
carried on between them, even when their paths of life separated them.
Tausig next went to Wagner at Zuerich, and the meeting confirmed
him in his enthusiasm for the master's creations and developed that
combativeness for the works and artistic struggles of Wagner which
resulted in the arrangement of orchestral concerts in Vienna exclusively
for Wagner's compositions, a very hazardous venture at that period. He
directed them in person, and gave all his savings and all his youthful
power to them without gaining the success that was hoped for. The master
himself, when he came to Vienna for the rehearsals of the first
performances of Tristan und Isolde, had sad experiences; his young
friend stood gallantly by his side, but the performance did not take
place. Vienna was then a sterile soil for Wagner's works and designs.
Tausig returned in anger to Berlin, where he quickly became an important
figure and a life-giving centre of a circle of interesting men. He
founded a conservatory that was sought by pupils from all over the
world, and where teachers like Louis Ehlert and Adolf Jensen gave
instruction. When Richard Wagner came to Berlin in 1870 with a project
for erecting a theatre of his own for the performance of the Nibelungen
Ring it was Tausig who took it up with ardent zeal, to which the master
bore honourable testimony in his account of the performance.
In July, 1871, Tausig visited Liszt at Weimar and accompanied him to
Leipsic, where Liszt's grand mass was performed in St. Thomas' Church by
the Riedle Society. After the performance he fell sick. A cold, it was
said, prostrated him. In truth he had the seeds of death in him, which
Wagner, in his inscription for the tomb of his young friend, expressed
by the words, "Ripe for death!" The Countess Krockow and Frau von
Moukanoff, who on the report of his being attacked by typhus hastened to
discharge the duties of a Samaritan by his sick-bed in the hospital, did
all that careful nursing and devoted love could do, but in vain, and on
July 17 Karl Tausig breathed his last.
His remains were carried from Leipsic to Berlin, and were interred in
the new cemetery in the Belle Alliance Strasse. During the funeral
ceremony a great storm burst forth, and the roll of the thunder mingled
with the strains of the Funeral March from the Eroica which the Symphony
Orchestra performed at his grave. Friends erected a simple memorial. An
obelisk of rough-hewn syenite bears his portrait, modelled in relief by
Gustav Blaesar. Unfortunately wind and weather in the course of years
injured the marble of the relief, so that its destruction at an early
period was probable, and the same friends substituted a bronze casting
for the marble, which on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death was
adorned with flowers by loving hands.
Karl Tausig represents the very opposite pole in "pianism" to Thalberg;
he was fire and flame incarnate, he united all the digital excellencies
of the aristocratic Thalberg, including his supreme and classic calm to
a temperament that, like a comet, traversed artistic Europe and fired it
with enthusiastic ideals. If Karl Tausig had only possessed the creative
gift in any proportion to his genius for reproduction he would have been
a giant composer. As a pianist he has never had his equal. With Liszt's
fire and Buelow's intellectuality he nevertheless transcended them both
in the possession of a subtle something that defied analysis. We see it
in his fugitive compositions that revel on technical heights hitherto
unscaled. Tausig had a force, a virility combined with a mental
insight, that made him peer of all pianists. It is acknowledged by all
who heard him that his technic outshone all others; he had the
whispering and crystalline pianissimo of Joseffy, the liquidity of
Thalberg's touch, with the resistless power of a Rubinstein.
He literally killed himself playing the piano; his vivid nature felt so
keenly in reproducing the beautiful and glorious thoughts of Bach,
Beethoven and Chopin, and, like a sabre that was too keen for its own
scabbard, he wore himself out from nervous exhaustion. Tausig was
many-sided, and the philosophical bent of his mind may be seen in the
few fragments of original music he has vouchsafed us. Take a Thalberg
operatic fantaisie and a paraphrase of Tausig's, say of Tristan and
Isolde, and compare them; then one can readily gauge the vast strides
piano music has taken. Touch pure and singing was the Thalbergian ideal.
Touch dramatic, full of variety, is the Tausig ideal. One is vocal, the
other instrumental, and both seem to fulfill their ideals. Tausig had a
hundred touches; from a feathery murmur to an explosive crash he
commanded the entire orchestra of contrasts. Thalberg was the cultivated
gentleman of the drawing-room, elegiac, but one who never felt
profoundly (glance at his etude on repeated notes). Elegant always,
jocose never. Tausig was a child of the nineteenth century, full of its
ideals, its aimless strivings, its restlessness, its unfaith and
desperately sceptical tone. If he had only lived he would have left an
imprint on our modern musical life as deep as Franz Liszt, whose pupil
he was. Richard Wagner was his god and he strove much for him and his
mighty creations.