Part 14
The boast in his case, nevertheless, was far from an empty one; not the least strange element in his strangely mixed character was the real heroism, the splendid faith, with which he clung to an artistic ideal which was received with contempt or indifference on every side. In his devotion to an unpopular cause, through a lifetime of difficulties, he was a true martyr. His career, after his return from Rome to Paris in 1832, was one long uphill fight, not only for recognition, but for a bare livelihood. His accounts of his hated labors as a feuilletonist, up to the time when, by a generous gift from Paganini, he was freed from such servitude, are among the sincerest and most pathetic pages in his writings. He never won the appreciation from his countrymen that his vain, sensitive, and thoroughly Parisian nature most craved. Realizing, about 1840, that a man is never a prophet in his own country, he reluctantly sought abroad the support denied him at home, and in a series of tours in Germany, Austria, Russia, and England met with a large measure of success. Yet his first care, after each foreign triumph, was to know "what they thought of it in Paris"--and alas! they never thought about it at all. Tardily, in 1856, already over fifty years old, he obtained a _fauteuil_ in the Academy, and was appointed Librarian of the Conservatoire. But the cheering effect of this recognition was clouded by the fiasco, in 1863, of the opera on which he had been working for years, "Les Troyens à Carthage." This blow broke his heart. He wrote no more, and after six years of loneliness and ill-health, died on March 8, 1869. As so often happens, his funeral orations contained the enthusiastic praises his living ears had craved in vain, and he was shortly pronounced the greatest of French composers.
The faith in himself and his art, which kept him steadfast through all his discouragements and temptations, which enabled him to persist in a path of almost complete solitude, which armed him with the sword of conviction and the shield of a good conscience, was, as Mr. Apthorp says, "the one pure, sterling element in a character in which all else was more or less distorted." He was a man of overweening vanity and egotism, often blind to the needs of those nearest him; an uncertain friend, a spiteful enemy, an intolerable husband; he could descend to petty deceits and unworthy animosities, and was willing to sacrifice the most sacred relations on the altar of his dramatic sense. And yet he could say with truth, "The love of money has never allied itself in a single instance with my love of art; I have always been ready to make all sorts of sacrifices to go in search of the beautiful, and insure myself against contact with those paltry platitudes which are crowned by popularity." He had also many minor virtues which, if not like this precisely heroic, are nevertheless charming. He was a sprightly narrator, a witty and keen critic where his prejudices were not involved, and a taster of life in whom discrimination did not embitter good nature.
Concerning his achievement as a musician there will always be extreme oppositions of opinion, so uncompromising was his theory of art, and so relentless his execution of it. The ultimate problem of whether a realism so thoroughgoing as his is justified by the nature of music will perhaps always remain an open one. But the most recalcitrant critic must admit the greatness of his incidental services to the art which he practised with such headlong perversity. He was a good iconoclast. He helped to break the bonds of a narrow conservatism which was in danger of confining all music to the forms of the symphony and the sonata, and to the type of expression perfected by the classicists. By his daring imagination he abashed pedantry and opened up vistas of new possibilities. And he was, at least in one department, that of orchestration, a triumphant innovator. By using instruments, not in traditional, hackneyed ways, but with an intuition of their latent possibilities, he added permanently to the resources of all composers and to the sensitiveness of all listeners. Whether, therefore, the tendency of all music toward the realistic, which is so prominent to-day, and in relation to which he stands as one of the greatest of pioneers, shall continue indefinitely, or shall give place to some new movement in another direction, as certain signs seem to indicate--in any event Berlioz's place as a contributor to the unresting progress of art is secure.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] See "Selections from Berlioz's Writings," translated by W. F. Apthorp, New York, 1879, pp. 228-261.
[31] See the summary of the program of the "Symphonie Fantastique" at p. 24.
[32] Full score, Breitkopf and Härtel edition, p. 54.
[33] See Introduction, p. 43.
[34] E. Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," p. 264.
[35] W. H. Hadow, "Studies in Modern Music," p. 141.
[36] Francis Hueffer, "Half a Century of Music in England," pp. 231-232.
[37] Introduction, p. 53.
VII FRANZ LISZT
[Illustration: FRANZ LISZT]
VII FRANZ LISZT
A flood of light is thrown upon the opposing aspects of Franz Liszt's contradictory character by a story told of a certain occasion on which "The Master," as he loved to be called, sat for his portrait to the painter Schaffer. One of those key-stories it is, dear to biographers, which condense in single acts or speeches entire facets of personality. In Paris, in his youth, Liszt went to Schaffer to have his portrait painted. Instinctively he assumed one of those theatrical poses he was in the habit of taking when, at the end of one of his already famous recitals, he stood upon the stage receiving the plaudits of his audience. We can readily imagine it: the head thrown back, the eyes flashing fire, the right hand, perhaps, thrust between the second and third buttons of the coat, the left resting on some conveniently composed piece of furniture. But when Schaffer indicated that this histrionism did not impress him, Liszt, greatly embarrassed, cried out impulsively, "Forgive, dear master, but you do not know how it spoils one to have been an infant prodigy." Here are the two opposing sides of this curious character for once set in a clear antithesis: on the one hand, the affectation, the strut and posture, the cheap theatricality, of the prodigy playing to his audience; on the other, the frankness, the magnanimity, the humility even, of the true artist. Liszt's whole career is one long exhibition of these two attitudes in constant alternation; he is a mingling in one person of the charlatan and the idealist.
Born in Raiding, a small town in Hungary, October 22, 1811, an only child of Adam Liszt, a Hungarian, and Anna Lager, a German, Franz Liszt showed at once such extraordinary talent for music that in his tenth year his parents resolved to educate him in Vienna as a professional musician. After a year and a half in the Austrian capital, where the brilliancy of his piano playing and the cleverness of his improvisations attracted much attention, and where he studied with Czerny and Salieri, he was taken by his parents to Paris. Here, in the autumn of 1823, only twelve years old, he took his first plunge into the atmosphere of adulation which was to become to him in later years almost a necessary of life. It was now that he became the petted darling of the fashionable salons of the Boulevard St. Germain, and made the great ladies of Parisian society forget for a time their lap-dogs and their love-intrigues in order to caress this fascinating composite of the child and the virtuoso. After his first public concert in Paris, in March, 1824, he "made the round of the boxes," a sort of triumphal progress across the laps of great ladies, who wooed him, we must suppose, with a discreet mixture of compliments and bonbons. In the following spring he extended his dominion to England, and saw his name in large type on a hand-bill such as nowadays we associate with circuses rather than with concerts. "An Air," we read, "with Grand Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard's New Patent Grand Pianoforte, by
MASTER LISZT,
who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia, and respectfully request _Two Written Themes_ from any of the Audience, upon which he will play his Variations."
There are not wanting signs, however, that the artist in Liszt was already, with approaching adolescence, beginning to disdain the spectacular triumphs of the virtuoso. He began to suspect that "the praise belongs to the child and not the artist"; the indignity of being advertised as a year or two younger than he really was, and being carried upon the stage in his manager's arms, like an infant, aroused his disgust; "I would rather be anything in the world," he cries, "than a musician in the pay of great folk, patronized and paid by them like a conjurer or the clever dog Munito."[38] He became more and more reluctant to appear in public, grew moody and melancholy, occupied himself with religious meditations, and even cherished a half-formed desire to withdraw from the brilliant world into monastic solitude.
This is the first appearance of a mystical tendency of mind which in later years gained great ascendancy over him, and finally led him to take orders in the Roman Catholic Church. The event, however, which decisively ended, for the time, his public piano playing, was the death, in August, 1827, of his father, whose assistance in all practical details was indispensable to his virtuoso tours.
The young pianist now settled with his mother in Paris, where eight quiet years of piano teaching succeeded the excitement of his adventurous boyhood. His conduct at this crisis illustrates that keen sense of honor which was so agreeable a trait in his character. Considering that the money he had accumulated by his many successful concerts was rightfully his mother's, because of all the sacrifices she had made to his career, he made it over to her in a lump sum, and took up teaching for his own livelihood. It was an act of delicate justice, freely and cheerfully performed. Outwardly Liszt's life now became quite simple and laborious, almost plodding; but inwardly it was developing apace, and ramifying in many directions, under the provocations of this brilliant and complex Paris.
The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage the most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive to influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as Liszt. There was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant of a public languid and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music that Liszt had to coat the pill of a Beethoven Concerto with sugary ornamentation to make it go down. Such a public was a good stolid quarry for the marksmanship of an enthusiastic artist. In general intellectual life there was, on the other hand, a brisk fermentation highly exciting to Liszt's active mind. Paris was a seething pot of ideas, theories, heresies, aspirations, scepticisms, individualities. "Here is a whole fortnight," he writes in 1832, "that my mind and fingers have been working like two lost spirits--Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Châteaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; besides this I practise four to five hours of exercises.... Ah, provided I don't go mad, you will find an artist in me!"[39] Above all, there was in the French romanticism of 1830 an emotional delirium, a fever of the sentiments, which profoundly affected the high-strung young musician.
French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking a political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a generation was required for these principles to propagate themselves from the realm of practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they appeared as crude instincts; romanticism refined and systematized them into self-conscious doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered the aristocrats who oppressed them; the romanticists proclaimed the effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all traditional ordinances, whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in effect, "Each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the romanticists asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The individual alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the welfare of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its own version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual," it also had its equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic sentiment which usually proved too vaporous to bear the stress of an actual human situation. Both movements, too, were passionate exaggerations; they overshot their mark, and have had to be limited, qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the sentiments, it is notable that while in England it applied its theories chiefly to political and religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical realms, in France it concentrated itself largely upon the relations of the sexes. In such typical romantic documents as Châteaubriand's "René" and George Sand's "Leone Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is marriage (especially the _mariage de convenance_, which indeed was a fair mark for reformers), the extolled individualism takes the form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the thrills of the amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application of these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave one uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary impulse, so sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which it opens the way. When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism quickly gives place to pity for the sophist. When we learn that her ideal of friendship between a man and a woman, or, as she called it, _camaraderie_, involved "unlimited confidential conversations," we know not which to doubt, her insight or her good faith. And in all this she is typical of her age and school, which made a fetich of the "demoniac power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor that can only be called religious.
The effect of such doctrines as these on a young man like Liszt may readily be imagined. Too keen-minded to be really deceived by the current fallacies, but at the same time not austere or independent enough to reject what was so universally accepted, he let himself go with the current, and half-blindly, half-ironically, played the game he saw others playing. Almost before he knew it he found that he had staked nothing less than his honor, and that this game, begun in a mood of dalliance, must be played through in sober earnest. The heroine of his love affair was the Countess d'Agoult, better known by her literary pseudonym of Daniel Stern, a woman of great beauty and fascination, but apparently consumed by vanity and a thirst for power. In 1834, when her connection with the idolized young musician began, she was twenty-eight years old, had been married for six years to the Count d'Agoult, and had had three children. In the following spring, Liszt tried in vain to bring the affair to an end; finding this impossible, he accepted the situation with the best grace he could summon, and entered upon a period of travel with the countess which lasted a decade. Three children resulted from this union, Daniel, Blandine, and Cosima, who became the wife of Von Bülow, and later of Wagner.
It is difficult to arrive at a just conception of Liszt's behavior in this relation, so conflicting are the available accounts of it. The biography by Ramann, for example, states that he offered marriage, which the lady indignantly refused on the score of his inferiority in rank. Janka Wohl, in her "Reminiscences," on the contrary, quotes Liszt's emphatic denial that he ever offered marriage. Again, the very zeal with which his admirers depict the Countess as hurling herself upon him, tend to arouse the suspicion of a judicious reader. One thing is certain, the uncongeniality of the pair was fundamental and cumulative. Liszt himself testifies to this in no uncertain way, and, one may add, with more sarcastic animus than is quite to his credit. He reports a conversation in which she expressed a desire to be his inspirer in art, a desire which he attributes to her vanity. "She wished to be my Beatrice," he says; and continues: "But I told her: 'You are wrong. It is the Dantes who create the Beatrices, and the _real_ Beatrices die at the age of eighteen--that is all.' Louis de Ronchaud was present at the time. 'There's the man,' said I, 'who would have pleased you.'" This was ungallant almost to the verge of brutality. That verge was overpassed when Liszt, to a request for suggestions as to the title of some souvenirs the countess had been writing, proposed "Swagger and Lies." He always spoke of the countess, says Janka Wohl, with irony.
This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness such as often lay just below the saccharine smile of this finished man of the world is one of the most familiar by-products of sentimental romanticism, one which has been made historically famous by the case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast disappointed in unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful dreams, the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially expanded, the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are made more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a good deal of satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord in conversation. The sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot make some of his principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait of his character which at first sight seems to have little connection with it, but on careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of reaction against the sentimental interpretation of life with its unsocial lawlessness and its self-defeating egotism. That strong leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases of Roman Catholicism, which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a devoted reader of Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers, which impelled him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively devotional works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to escape from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed? Monasticism is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned. Complete isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry an exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion, which has so often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the longing for repose of a soul too long overwrought by the religion of passion.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of temperament that this new mood of Liszt's, the mood of mystical passion, found its aspirations crystallizing, no less than those of the earlier worldly passion had done, in a woman. If paganism had for a time summed itself for him in the person of the Countess d'Agoult, the monastic Christianity to which he now reacted found its avatar and priestess in the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, a remarkable woman with whom he lived in intimate but what are called platonic relations from 1847 on. The daughter of a Polish nobleman, and the wife of a Russian field marshal of erratic character whom, after thrice refusing, she married without love at seventeen, she had suffered much, and like many other sufferers had found her consolation in religion. The story of her relation with Liszt is a pathetic one. She deserted her husband to follow him to Weimar, where he settled as a conductor and composer in 1847, after his many years of wandering as a virtuoso; for thirteen years she was his secretary, friend, and adviser; in 1860 she succeeded in getting a divorce from her husband, whose infidelities were notorious, only to have it retracted at the last moment by the Pope. Her spirit was so broken by this cruel freak of fate that, although Prince Wittgenstein died four years later, she never married Liszt. She died in Rome in 1887, only six weeks after Liszt, leaving in manuscript a treatise in twenty-four volumes entitled "Des Causes Intérieures de la Faiblesse Extérieure de l'Église," with directions that it should not be printed for twenty-five years. The subject is one on which she may well have written with passion; but it is sad to think of this woman consoling herself, by twenty-four volumes of literary discussion, for a vital tragedy.