Part 15

During the fourteen years that Liszt spent in Weimar as Music-Director to the Grand Duke, he accomplished an extraordinary amount of work, in musical and literary composition, in teaching, and in making propaganda for struggling composers by performing their works. His cordial interest in other artists, perhaps the finest trait of his character, was at this time most strikingly evinced. His baton, his pen, and his powerful personal influence were constantly employed in the service of young musicians of merit striving to make themselves known. His efforts in Wagner's behalf, especially, have become famous. By his performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar in 1850, by his articles on four of the music-dramas, and by his financial aid to the struggling composer during many years, he did more than any other one man to secure this uncompromising genius a foothold in the world. Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Raff, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and a host of less gifted men also owed much to Liszt; and his leaving Weimar was the indirect result of his zealous championship of an unpopular opera by his friend Peter Cornelius. It is true that even this benevolence was not quite unalloyed by his besetting egotism. In our mental image of Liszt dispensing his artistic charity there is always a trace of that bland smile of the professional philanthropist. Saint-Saëns suggests that Liszt contemplated, in his relations with Wagner, a sort of alliance of two men of genius, in which Wagner should represent the hero of music-drama, and himself the hero of instrumental music. His rupture with Brahms, who did not appreciate his piano sonata,[40] suggests an inability to forget the first person, excusable perhaps in one so long used to constant adulation, but still not to be neglected in a delineation of his character. Tschaïkowsky's testimony on the point is very blunt. "Liszt, the old Jesuit," he writes in a letter, "speaks in terms of exaggerated praise of every work which is submitted to his inspection. He is at heart a good man, one of the very few great artists who has never known envy; but he is too much of a Jesuit to be frank and sincere." And again: "Liszt was a good fellow, and ready to respond to every one who paid court to him. But as I never toadied to him, or any other celebrity, we never got into correspondence." But if the great man had thus his petty vanities, if he liked to take a toll of self-satisfaction, so to speak, out of the gifts he so lavished upon others, this human weakness did not, happily, destroy the efficacy of his many services to music.

We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "_le petit Litz_," electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the ladies. And then--the third phase--Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.

From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbé, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."

"All Weimar adores him,"--let us confess, for we can no longer blink the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment? Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the attentions of the Polish countess who received him in a boudoir spread ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four celebrated beauties who had their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting his bust?[42] Was it the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction, that swathed him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a high platform surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full view of six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary woman that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake of "_un répas très appétissant_," and to read aloud to him afterwards "_l'article biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencé hier_"? If this same Janka Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering friends from whom the proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to Beethoven, or Schumann, or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others play pieces beautifully, but you always play the soul, the thoughts, and the sentiments of Liszt. You transport us into a world which will die with you, and of which we shall have nothing left but the paradise of recollection--a paradise out of which, as the poets say, we cannot be driven"--would these great self-forgetful artists have given her such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who are the poet, dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"? No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbé's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.

These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most

## part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own

feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann, Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.

[Illustration: score] Figure XXVIII.

In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his piano sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in octaves. This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its strongly individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses, its exciting use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer acquaintance its theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely rhetorical effectiveness, become only too apparent; like a sentence printed all in italics, it is impotent through very excess of emphasis. Or take the well-known opening motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto. With its attention-seizing rhythm and its chromatic melody it seems at first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an edict, a proclamation. But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we go on, except that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the hearer, at first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a piece of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills, of his chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic that the listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew how to manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he relieved the wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth measure by setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the opening.

If Liszt is unrestrained in his use of the italics and points of exclamation of the musical language, so that his impressiveness generally degenerates into ranting, when he tries the emotional he fairly wallows. It is hard to find a parallel in any other composer for those passages of his, fairly redolent with sentimentality, in which he reiterates, over and over again, a single note, as the poet rolls under his tongue his mistress's name, or the gourmand, under his, a morsel of _paté de fois gras_. (See Figure XXIX, _a_ and _b_.) It is hard, in any other composer who has had the advantage of German traditions, to find bits of melody so feebly Italian, so sunk in an amiable but insidious sensuality, as the themes of his "Sonnetto del Petrarca" or his Album Leaf no. 2, in which he writes with the pen dipped in violet water of a Donizetti or a Bellini. His harmonic idiom, too, is degraded by a similar sensuality, however disguised. How else than as proceeding from a love for thrills and swoons can we explain his passion for those chords, such as diminished sevenths, minor ninths, and all manner of chromatically altered chords, as the theorists call them, which, for some reason never yet explained, exhale mawkishness as some women exhale musk?[44]

[Illustration: score] (_a_) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.

[Illustration: score] (_b_) From the Liebestraum No. 3.

Figure XXIX.

It would be interesting, did it not involve a general discussion here out of place, to inquire how far the exaggerated expression of Liszt is due to the lack of spiritual, moral, and intellectual balance already noted as characteristic of French romanticism. Surely there is more than a striking analogy, there is an actual relation of cause and effect, were we but learned and keen enough to trace it out, between the unrestrained individualism of the romanticist, in politics, religion, love--and the hysterical, unreal feeling of this music. Both alike lose poise by taking an over-personal view of life. Liszt, so singly set on being magnificent or heart-rending in passion that he ignores the restraints of good taste, forgets artistic reserve, and becomes in turn blustering and craven, reminds us of Rousseau, so in love with his fixed idea of "freedom" that he undermines the foundations of the social order on which true freedom depends.

If Liszt were quite sincere in his passionate extremes, we should have to forgive them as on the whole we forgive the often crude grandiloquence of the Gallic Berlioz. What makes the Hungarian artist peculiarly exasperating is the impression of hypocrisy in his heroics that we cannot escape or argue away. He does not really feel these things, we discern; he is ogling us, he is posing for our benefit; all the while that one of his eyes is so proudly flashing fire, or so devoutly gazing heavenward, or so touchingly secreting a tear, the other is winking at his _alter ego_, the ego that sits behind the scenes and pulls the strings. What those ladies to whom he bowed with such an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have felt could they have read the cynical thoughts about women which meanwhile filled his mind, that we feel when we realize that for all his pompous utterance, for all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart laughing at us for being so obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade. We can forgive, we can even rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself in love with his pose, but not the charlatan who makes capital of our gullibility.

Liszt shows to far better advantage, however, in his manipulation of his ideas than in the ideas themselves; for whereas in the latter artificiality is a damning fault, in the former art, especially such skilful art as his, is a shining merit. His plan of combining the musical organization of the classicists with the dramatic organization of Berlioz was an interesting and in some ways a felicitous one. By the use of program and leading motives he secured the advantages of the realistic school: freedom from the shackles of the strict traditional sonata-form, and a "poetic" principle of coherence. By retaining thematic development, he reinforced this poetic coherence by musical logic, and avoided to some extent the fragmentary effects into which unmodified realism generally falls. To the thirteen orchestral pieces in which he most strikingly embodied this plan of interlinked dramatic and musical structure he gave the name of "Poèmes Symphoniques," generally translated as "Symphonic Poems" though more precisely as "Orchestral Poems." He owes his chief historical importance to his creation of this form, which he exemplified also on a larger scale in his "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies.

A brief analysis of his most popular symphonic poem, "Les Préludes," will make clear the peculiarities of the type. This work has a program, taken from Lamartine's "Méditations poétiques," as follows:--

"What is our life but a series of Preludes to that unknown song of which death strikes the first solemn note? Love is the enchanted dawn of every life; but where is the destiny in which the first pleasures of happiness are not interrupted by some storm, whose deadly breath dissipates its fair illusions, whose fatal thunderbolt consumes its altar? And where is the soul which, cruelly wounded, does not seek, at the coming of one of these storms, to calm its memories in the tranquil life of the country? Man, however, cannot long resign himself to the kindly tedium which has at first charmed him in the companionship of nature, and when 'the trumpet has sounded the signal of alarms,' he hastens to the post of peril, whatever may be the strife which calls him to its ranks, in order to regain in combat the full consciousness of himself and the complete command of his powers."

This program, it will at once be seen, is far more favorable to musical treatment than Berlioz's hotch-potches of petty details and wild, incongruous fancies. It is but slightly narrative and descriptive, presenting rather such abstract emotional states as music can best depict. And it has a natural symmetry and completeness of its own which the composer has only to reproduce in order to give his music the same desirable qualities. This he does by dividing his piece into six sections, which might be called Introduction, Love, Storm, Country Life, War, and Coda or Conclusion.

[Illustration: score] (_a_)

[Illustration: score] (_b_)

[Illustration: score] (_c_)

[Illustration: score] (_d_)

[Illustration: score] (_e_)

[Illustration: score] (_f_)

Figure XXX.

To this natural poetic structure Liszt adds a most ingenious musical form, by basing his entire work on two leading motives (_a_ and _b_ in Figure XXX), which he subjects to all manner of variation, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, as opportunity suggests. Some of the more important of these variants, set down in Figures XXX-XXXIII, deserve careful attention. The work begins with a recitative for strings, andante (_c_), derived from (_a_) by a modification of rhythm. At page 7 of the full orchestral score, published by Breitkopf and Härtel, appears another variant of the same theme, andante maestoso in bass strings and brass (_d_). Motive (_a_) is sung by the 'cellos, in very nearly its primitive form, at page 13 (_e_); in the last measure of this excerpt the very clever echoing of the three characteristic notes of the theme, in the bass, marked by asterisks, should be especially noted. Motive (_b_), symbolizing love, first appears at page 21, sensuously set forth by four horns, strings, and harp, is taken up by the wood wind, and is developed in a powerful climax, at the end of which appears for a moment the variant of it represented at (_f_). Thus in the first two sections of the poem are the underlying motives expounded and somewhat developed.

Section three, Storm, begins (allegro ma non troppo, page 30) with a very theatrical variant of motive _a_, highly characteristic of Liszt, in which he resorts to the chromatic scale beloved of all musical storm-makers (_g_, Figure XXXI), and later to an endless series of diminished sevenths, intended for nothing but to make our flesh creep (_h_). It is unnecessary to follow out this section in detail; it is the least interesting of all, and illustrates that element of claptrap which Liszt could never entirely eliminate.

[Illustration: score] (_g_)

[Illustration: score] (_h_)

Figure XXXI.

[Illustration: score] (_i_)

[Illustration: score] (_j_)

[Illustration: score] (_k_)

Figure XXXII.

The mood now changes again, and with (_i_) (Figure XXXII), a charmingly expanded version of motive _a_, intrusted to the oboe, an allegretto pastorale is ushered in, beginning the fourth section, Country Life. A new theme, of fascinating grace and freshness (_j_), now enters in the horn, and is presently combined with motive _b_ in what seems on the whole the most delightful moment, musically, of the entire composition (_k_). A somewhat lengthy working out of these combined motives follows, gradually growing more and more agitated, until, with an adaptation of the protean motive (_a_) for horns and trumpets, allegro marziale (_l_) (Figure XXXIII), the fifth section, War, is introduced. Piccolos and drums become prominent, and at page 82 of the score even the love motive (_b_) takes on a militant character (_m_, Figure XXXIII). Turmoil now increases steadily until a sort of apotheosis is reached with the reëntrance of the majestic passage (_d_), in Figure XXX, and the poem comes to an impressive close.

[Illustration: score] (_l_)

[Illustration: score] (_m_)

Figure XXXIII.

The advantages of such a scheme of form as is exemplified in "Les Préludes" are many; and they are made the most of by Liszt, with his accustomed cleverness and long-headed sense for practical values. For both of the two classes of listeners that make up the average concert audience music made on this recipe has an appropriate appeal. That class, usually a majority, which has little ear for music, but likes to indulge itself in vague dreams, pictorial imaginings, and nervous thrills, finds its account in the program, follows out with interest the suggestions of the various moods, such as, in the present instance, the amorous, the stormy, the pastoral, the warlike, and gets its fill, all along the way, of brilliant and gorgeous tone-coloring, exciting rhythms, sombre, rich, or mysterious harmonies. At the same time the minority of true music-lovers have, as they have not in the works of Berlioz, a "logical and lucid play of definite motives" to enjoy; they trace with never failing interest the transformations of a few simple themes; they may entirely forget the program, and yet have plenty of opportunity for an agreeable activity of attention, perception, memory, and imagination. Thus each hearer may pick out from the mass of conglomerate impressions something that appeals to him.

There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it firmly in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned beforehand to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined mould; it can ramify, as it proceeds, in obedience to its own latent possibilities. A development here may be expanded to great length, an episode or repetition there may be abbreviated to the slightest possible compass; so long as each link securely engages the next, so long as there is no break in the coherence of the thread, the hearer will be satisfied. Through all the twists and turns the presence of the fundamental melodies will save him from that sense of mere drifting which was so painful to Wagner in listening to Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet." The symphonic poem bears, in fact, somewhat the same relation to the symphony that rhymed couplets bear to a sonnet, triolet, or other conventional verse-form. It exacts little of strict formalism; but by retaining, underneath all its free ramification, certain basic principles of balance and symmetry, it escapes the pitfall of amorphousness, and constantly satisfies, though in unexpected ways, the radical expectations of the intelligent listener.