by H.R. Haweis [Hugh Reginald Haweis].
Originally published in Longman's Magazine (Longman, Green, & Co.) vol.3 #14 (Dec 1883).
Who has not heard of Liszt? Who has heard Liszt? I suppose to most of us in England he is personally a great tradition and nothing more; his compositions, indeed, form the chief pièces de résistance of our annual crop of pianoforte recitals, but the man and his playing are alike unknown. He has already become historical during his lifetime. Only by a happy chance can I reckon myself amongst the few who have lately heard Liszt play.
I happened to be staying in Rome, and Liszt kindly invited me over to the Villa d'Este twice.
There at Tivoli alone with him he conversed with me of the times long gone by—of Mendelssohn, of Paganini, of Chopin.
There in the warm light of an Italian autumn, subdued by the dark-red curtains that hung in his study, with an old-world silence around us, he sat at his piano once more; and as he played to me the clock of time went back, and Chopin entered with his pale refined face, his slight aristocratic figure; Heine sat restlessly in a dark corner; Mme. Sand reclined in the deep window-niche overlooking the desolate Campagna, with Rome in the distance; De Lamennais stood at the foot of the piano—a delicate, yet sinewy and mobile frame—with his noble eager face all aglow, his eloquent tongue silent, listening to the inspiration of another believer in another evangelium—the evangelium of the emotions, the Gospel of Art.
Shadows all of you, yet to me for an hour, in the deep solitude of the great Cardinal's palace alone with Liszt, more real than the men and women of our lesser day.
Liszt is the embodiment of an epoch. In religion, politics, and philosophy he represents that creative ferment through which the genius of the nineteenth century has come to the understanding and possession of itself. The Romanticism of 1830-40, with all its deplorable aberrations, its reactionary and one-sided views, its hazardous experiments, its impatience of authority, its childlike and impulsive fancy, was nevertheless a great creative period.
Then were sown the seeds that have since germinated so gloriously in literature, and art, and politics throughout Europe. Then flourished, or at least were born, the men who impressed this century with its peculiar characteristics—its insatiable thirst for knowledge, boundless curiosity, noble upward endeavour, despairing scepticism, trembling hope, eager love of life and intense belief in itself, intuitive convictions which every decade has done something to deepen and perhaps to justify.
It was the age of Liszt, of Paganini, Thalberg; of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Spohr, Chopin, Wagner; of Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo; of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth—age of upheaval and revolution, ferment of new life, unsettlement of old opinions. The political heavens were full of portents; the firmament of Art flashing with meteors; the social world alive and palpitating with new theories of life, which mistook license for liberty—truly an age convulsed with the violence of the old aboriginal impulses suddenly let loose.
One thousand eight hundred and eleven was the year of the great comet—a year which, we are told, re-echoed with the sounds of the lyre and the sword, and announced so many pioneering spirits of the future.
In 1811 was Franz Liszt born. He had the hot Hungarian blood of his father, the fervid German spirit of his mother, and he inherited the lofty independence, with none of the class prejudices, of the old Hungarian nobility from which he sprang.
Liszt's father, Adam, earned a modest livelihood as agent and accountant in the house of Count Esterhazy. In that great musical family inseparably associated with the names of Haydn and Schubert,[1] Adam Liszt had frequent opportunities of meeting distinguished musicians. The Prince's private band had risen to public fame under the instruction of the venerable Haydn himself. The Liszts, father and son, often went to Eisenstadt, where the Count lived; there they rubbed elbows with Cherubini and Hummel, a pupil of Mozart.
Franz took to music from his earliest childhood. When about five years old he was asked what he would like to do. 'Learn the piano,' said the little fellow. Soon afterwards his father asked him what he would like to be; the child pointed to a print of Beethoven hanging on the wall, and said, 'Like him.' Long before his feet could reach the pedals or his fingers stretch an octave, the boy spent all his spare time strumming, making what he called 'clangs,' chords, and modulations. He mastered scales and exercises without difficulty.
But there was a certain intensity in all he did, which seemed to wear him-out. He was attacked with fever, but would hardly be persuaded to lie down until completely exhausted; then he lay and prayed aloud to God to make him well, and vowed that on his recovery he would only make hymns and play music which pleased God and his parents. The strong lines of his character early asserted themselves—religious ardour, open sincerity, a certain nobleness of mind that scorned a lie and generously confessed to a fault, quick affections, ready sympathies, a mind singularly without prejudices or antipathies, except in music. Liszt's musical antipathies are matters of world-wide notoriety; his hatred of 'Conservatorium' dogma, his contempt for the musical doctrinaire, his aversion to the shallow and frivolous, his abhorrence of mere sensationalism.
The boy's decided bent soon banished all thought of anything but a musical vocation, but the res angustæ domi stood in the way.
How was he to be taught? how was he to be heard? how to earn money? That personal fascination, from which no one who has ever come in contact with Liszt has quite escaped, helped him thus early. When eight years old, he played before Count Esterhazy in the presence of six noblemen, amongst them Counts Amadee, Apponyi, and Szapary—eternal honour to their names! They at once subscribed for him an annuity of six hundred gulden for six years. This was to help the little prodigy to a musical education.
His parents felt the whole importance of the crisis. If the boy was to prosper, the father's present retired life with a fixed income must be exchanged for an unsettled, wandering and precarious existence. 'When the six years are over, and your hopes prove vain, what will become of us?' said his mother, who heard, with tears in her eyes, that father was going to give up the agency and settle down wherever the boy might need instruction, protection, and a home. 'Mother,' said the impetuous child, 'what God wills!' and he added, prophetically enough, 'God will help me to repay you for all your anxieties and for what you do for me.' And with what results he laboured in this faith, years afterwards in Paris, we shall see.
The agency was thrown up; the humble family, mother, father, son, went out alone from the little Hungarian village into an unknown and untried world, simply trusting to the genius, the will, the word of an obscure child of eight: 'I will be a musician, and nothing else!'
As the child knelt at his farewell mass in the little village church of Raiding, many wept, others shook their heads, but some even then seemed to have a presentiment of his future greatness, and said, 'That boy will one day come back in a glass coach.' This modest symbol represented to them the idea of boundless wealth.
Hummel would only teach for a golden louis a lesson, and then picked his pupils; but at Vienna the father and son fell in with Czerny, Beethoven's pupil, and the famous Salieri, now seventy years old.
Czerny at once took to Liszt, but refused to take anything for his instruction. Salieri was also fascinated, and instructed him in harmony; and fortunate it was that Liszt began his course under two such strict mentors.
He soon began to resent Czerny's method—thought he knew better and needed not those dry studies of Clementi and that irksome fingering by rule—he could finger everything in half-a-dozen different ways. There was a moment when it seemed that master and pupil would have to part, but timely concessions to genius paved the way to dutiful submission, and years afterwards the great master dedicated to the rigid disciplinarian of his boyhood his 'Vingtquatre Grandes Etudes' in affectionate remembrance.
Young talent often splits upon the rock of self-sufficiency. Many a clever artist has failed because in the pride of youthful facility he has declined the method and drudgery of a correct technique.
Such a light as Liszt's could not be long hid; all Vienna in 1822 was talking of the wonderful boy. 'Est deus in nobis,' wrote the papers rather profanely. The 'little Hercules,' the 'young giant,' the boy 'virtuoso from the clouds,' were amongst the epithets coined to celebrate his marvellous rendering of Hummel's 'Concerto in A' and a free 'Fantasia' of his own.
The Vienna Concert Hall was crowded to hear him, and the other illustrious artists—then, as indeed they have been ever since forced to do wherever Liszt appeared—effaced themselves with as good a grace as they could.
It is a remarkable tribute to the generous nature as well as to the consummate ability of Liszt, that, whilst opposing partisans have fought bitterly over him—Thalbergites, Herzites, Mendelssohnites versus Lisztites—yet few of the great artists who have, one after another, had to yield to him in popularity have denied to him their admiration, while most of them have given him their friendship.
Liszt early wooed and early won Vienna. He spoke ever of his dear Viennese and their 'resounding city.'
When I saw Liszt at Tivoli in 1880, I remember his saying to me, 'J'ai reçu le célèbre baiser de Beethoven.' I find that Beethoven's secretary, Schindler, wrote in 1823 to Beethoven: 'You will be present at little Liszt's concert, will you not? It will encourage the boy. Promise me that you will go.' And Beethoven went. When the 'little Liszt' stepped on to the platform, he saw Beethoven in the front row; it nerved instead of staggering him—he played with an abandon and inspiration which defied criticism. Amidst the storm of applause which followed, Beethoven was observed to step up on the platform, take the young virtuoso in his arms, and embrace him, as Liszt assured me, 'on both cheeks.' This was an event not to be lightly forgotten, and hardly after fifty-seven years to be alluded to without a certain awe; indeed, Liszt's voice quite betrayed his sense of the seriousness of the occasion as he repeated, with a certain conscious pride and gravity, 'Oui, j'ai reçu le baiser de Beethoven.'
A concert tour on his way to Paris brought him before the critical-public of Stuttgard and Munich. Hummel, an old man, and Moscheles, then in his prime, heard him and declared that his playing was equal to theirs. But Liszt was bent upon completing his studies in the celebrated school of the French capital, and at the feet of the old musical dictator Cherubini.
The Erards, who were destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt throughout his career has owed so much, at once provided him with a magnificent piano; but Cherubini put in force a certain bylaw of the Conservatoire excluding foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt.
This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little he required such patronage. In a very short time 'le petit Liszt' was the great Paris sensation. The old noblesse tried to spoil him with flattery, the Duchess de Berri drugged him with bonbons, the Duke of Orleans called him the 'little Mozart.' He gave private concerts at which Herz, Moscheles, Lafont, and De Beriot, assisted. Rossini would sit by his side at the piano and applaud. He was a 'miracle.' The company never tired of extolling his 'verve, fougue et originalité,' whilst the ladies, who petted and caressed him after each performance, were delighted at his simple and graceful carriage, the elegance of his language, and the perfect breeding and propriety of his demeanour.
He was only twelve when he played for the first time at the Italian Opera, and one of those singular incidents which remind one of Paganini's triumphs occurred.
At the close of a bravura cadenza the band forgot to come in, so absorbed were the musicians in watching the young prodigy. Their failure was worth a dozen successes to Liszt. The ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling.
Gall, the inventor of phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the tragedian, embraced him publicly with effusion; and the misanthropic Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the art of painting.
In 1824 Liszt, then thirteen years old, came with his father to England; his mother returned to Austria.
He went down to Windsor to see George 1V., who was delighted with him, and Liszt, speaking of him to me, said: 'I was very young at the time, but I remember the King very well—a fine pompous-looking gentleman.'
In London he met Clementi, whose exercises he had so objected to, Cipriani Potter, Cramer, also of exercise celebrity, Kalkbrenner, Neate, then a fashionable pianist, once a great favourite of George III., and whom I remember about thirty years ago in extreme old age. He described to me the poor old king's delight at hearing him play some simple English melodies. 'I assure you, Mr. Neate,' said George III., 'I have had more pleasure in hearing you play those simple airs than in all the variations and tricks your fine players affect.'
George 1V. went to Drury Lane on purpose to hear the boy, and commanded an encore. Liszt was also heard in the theatre at Manchester, and in several private houses.
On his return to France people noticed a change in him. He was now fourteen, grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little tired of praise, and excessively tired of being called 'le petit Liszt.' His vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas à Kempis was his constant companion. 'Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;' 'Through labour to rest, through combat to victory;' 'The glory which men give and take is transitory'—these and like phrases were already deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amidst all his glowing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear in public; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.
In 1827 he now again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone.
Rousing himself from the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable energy and that high sense of honour which has always distinguished him, began to set his house in order.
He called in all his debts, sold his magnificent grand Erard, and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou.
He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral development.
Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing with intuitive intelligence into the 'clear-obscure' depths of religion and philosophy.
But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he laboured to put by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words, 'God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me.' Still, he laboured often wofully against the grain. 'Poverty,' he writes, 'that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and overstrained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion.'
Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got his twenty francs a lesson at the best houses; he was naturally a welcome guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high Parisian society.
His life was feverish, his activity irregular, his health far from strong; but the vulgar temptations of the gay capital seemed to have little attraction for his noble nature. His heart remained unspoiled. He was most generous to those who could not afford to pay for his lessons, most pitiful to the poor, most dutiful and affectionate to his mother. Coming home late from some grand entertainment, he would sit outside on the staircase till morning sooner than awaken, or perhaps alarm, her by letting himself in. But in losing his father he seemed to have lost a certain method and order. His meals were irregular, so were his lessons; more so were the hours devoted to sleep.
At this time he was hardly twenty; we are not surprised anon to hear in his own words of 'a female form chaste and pure as the alabaster of holy vessel;' but he adds: 'Such was the sacrifice which I offered with tears to the God of Christians!'
I will explain.
Mlle. Caroline St. Cricq was just seventeen, lithe, slender, and of 'angelic' beauty, with a complexion like a lily flushed with roses, open, 'impressionable to beauty, to the world, to religion, to God.' The Countess, her mother, appears to have been a charming woman, very partial to Liszt, whom she engaged to instruct Mademoiselle in music.
The lessons went not by time, but by inclination. The young man's eloquence, varied knowledge, ardent love of literature, and flashing genius won both the mother and daughter. Not one of them seemed to suspect the whirlpool of grief and death to which they were hurrying. The Countess fell ill and died, but not before she had recommended Liszt to the Count St. Cricq as a possible suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle.
The haughty diplomat St. Cricq at once put his foot down. The funeral over, Liszt's movements were watched. They were innocent enough. He was already an enfant de la maison, but one night he lingered reading aloud some favourite author to Mademoiselle a little too late. He was reported by the servants, and received his polite dismissal as music master.
In an interview with the Count his own pride was deeply wounded. 'Difference of rank!' said the Count. That was quite enough for Liszt. He rose, pale as death, with quivering lip, but uttered not a word.
As a man of honour he had but one course. He and Caroline parted for ever. She contracted later an uncongenial marriage; he seems to have turned with intense ardour to religion. His good mother used to complain to those who came to inquire for him that he was all day long in church, and had ceased to occupy himself, as he should, with music.
Love, grief, religion, all struggling together for victory in that young and fervid spirit, at last seemed to fairly exhaust him.
His old haunts knew him not; his pupils were neglected; he saw no friends; shut himself up in his room; and at last would only see his mother at meals.
He never appeared in the streets, and not unnaturally ended by falling dangerously ill. It was at this time that Paris was one morning startled with the following newspaper announcement:
DEATH OF YOUNG LISZT.
'Young Liszt died at Paris—the event is painful—at an age when most children are at school. He had conquered the public,' &c. So wrote the 'Etoile.' In fact, he was seriously ill. M. von Lenz, Beethoven's biographer, went to visit him. He was lying pale, haggard, and apathetic; could hardly be roused to converse, except occasionally when music cropped up. Then his eye brightened for a moment like the 'flashing of a dagger in the sun.'
In 1830 the Revolution burst on Paris. This, it seems, was needed to arouse Liszt. The inner life was suddenly to be exchanged for the outer. Self was to be merged in the larger interests, some of them delusions, which now began to pose again under the cunning watchwords of 'Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,'
Generous souls saw in the quarrel of Charles X. with his people the hope of a new national life. They proposed to exchange the old and effete 'Divine right' for the legitimate 'sovereignty of the people.' 'C'est le canon qui l'a guéri!' his mother used to say. Liszt was hardly restrained by her tears and entreaties from rushing to the barricades. The cure threatened to be worse than the disease. The heroic deeds of the 'great week' inflamed him, and he shouted with the rest for the silver-haired General Lafayette, 'genius of the liberties of two worlds.'
The republican enthusiasm, so happily restrained from action out of affection for his dependent mother, found a more wholesome vent in a vigorous return to his neglected art. Just as he was busy revolving great battle symphonies, his whole artistic nature received a decisive and startling impulse from the sudden apparition of Paganini in Paris. Preceded by revolution and cholera, this weird man had come upon the bright city that had sinned and suffered so much, and found her shaken and demoralised, but still seething with a strange ferment of new life in which Saint-Simonianism, communism, and scepticism, side by side with fanaticism, piety, and romance, struggled to make confusion worse confounded. Into the depths of what has been called the Romantic movement of 1830-40 it is not my purpose here to enter. There was war alike with the artificial humdrum of the old French world and the still more artificial revival of the classical world of Greece and Rome.
The human spirit was at length to be liberated; no one, it was held, need believe anything that did not happen to commend itself to his fancy or passion. As Heine put it: 'The great God, it appeared, was not at all the being in whom our grandmothers had trusted; he was, in fact, none other than you yourself.' No one need be bound by the morals of an effete civilisation. In Love the world of sentiment alone must decide our actions, Every one must be true to nature. All men were brothers, and women should have equal and independent rights. The social contract, most free and variable, must be substituted for marriage, community of goods for hereditary possessions, philosophy for law, and romance for religion. The beautiful and pregnant seeds of truth that lay embedded in the teeming soil of this great movement have since fully germinated; its extravagances have already, to a great extent, been outgrown.
In spite of theories disastrous to political and social order, the genius of Mme. Sand, Victor Hugo, and A. de Musset, sceptic and sensualist as he was, have rescued the movement from the despair of raw materialism and produced works of immortal beauty and spiritual significance.
They helped the European spirit to recover its independence, they reacted against the levelling tyranny of the first Napoleon, and were largely instrumental in undermining the third Napoleon's throne of gilded lead. Stained with license and full of waywardness, it was, nevertheless, an age of great and strong feelings—an age volcanic, vivid, electric. Such an age eagerly welcomed the magicians who set the language of emotion free, and gave to music its myriad wings and million voices.
Paganini appeared. The violin was no more the violin. A new transcendent technique made it the absolute minister of an emancipated and fantastic will. The extraordinary power exercised by the Italian violinist throughout Europe was quickened by the electric air which he breathed. The times were ripe. He stood before kings and people as the very emotional embodiment of the Zeitgeist. He was the emancipated demon of the epoch, with power to wield the sceptre of sound, and marshal in strange and frenzied legions the troubled spirits of the time.
When Liszt heard Paganini, it seemed to him to be the message for which he had been waiting. From him he doubtless received that passion for 'transcendent execution,' that absolute perfection of technique, which enabled him to create the modern pianoforte school, and do for Erard and Broadwood what Paganini did for Stradivarius and Joseph Guarnerius. His transcriptions of Paganini's studies, the arpeggio, the fioriture, the prodigious attaque and élan that took audiences by storm, the meetings of extremes which abolished the spaces on the pianoforte keyboard by making the hands ubiquitous—these and other 'developments' were doubtless inspired by the prodigious feats of Paganini.
Liszt now suddenly retired from the concert-room. He was no longer heard in public; he seemed disinclined, except in the presence of his intimates, to exhibit his wondrous talent; but he retired to perfect himself, to work up and work out the new impulses which he had received from Paganini.
He thus early laid deep the foundations of his unique virtuosity; and when he reappeared in public he seemed to mount at once to that solitary pinnacle of fame and surpassing excellence to which the greatest pianists then and ever since have looked up in admiring and despairing wonder. Tausig said: 'We are all blockheads by the side of Liszt.' Rubinstein has often declared Liszt's perfection of art and wealth of resource to be simply unrivalled.
For a short time in his absence at Paris, it was thought that Thalberg would prove a formidable opponent; but Liszt had only to reappear, and Thalberg himself was forced to join in the general applause. When between the various schools there was war, it was carried on by the partisans of the great men. Although they freely criticised one another, nothing is more remarkable than the kindly personal feeling which obtained between Liszt and his natural enemies, the great pianists of the age, Moscheles, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Thalberg.
There were no doubt cabals, and at one time in Paris he met with much detraction, but he seemed to move in a region of lofty courtesy in which squabbling for precedence was out of place; and his generosity of heart and genial recognition of others' talent disarmed criticism and silenced malice.
With the outburst of the Revolution, with the appearance of Paganini, came also to Liszt a violent reaction against the current religious ideas and the whole of the Catholic teaching.
Reading had opened his eyes; the Catholic system seemed to him not only inadequate, but false. He required a freer atmosphere, one rather more interpretative of human facts and human nature; he thought he found it in the doctrines of the Saint-Simonians. The 'Nouveau Christianisme,' by far the best of St. Simon's lucubrations, seemed to show that the Church had misrepresented and outraged the religion of Christ. It failed to take due account of art and science, had no sympathy with progress, refused altogether to assimilate the Zeitgeist, and had evidently ceased to lead the thinkers or purify the masses.
About this time Liszt came across the eloquent and gifted Abbé de Lamennais.
This man it was who more than any other saved Liszt from drifting into the prevailing whirlpool of atheism. The heterodox Abbé, who himself had broken with the retrograde religion of Rome, re-formulated his system, and discovered for him what at that time he most craved for—a link between his religion and his art.
'Art,' said De Lamennais, 'is in man what creative power is in God.' Art is the embodiment of eternal types. Nature suggests a beauty she never completely realises. Only in the soul of man is the supernal beauty mirrored as it exists in the mind of God. Art is the soul's formula for the expression of its inner life. 'Art, therefore, is an expression of God; her works are an infinite manifold reflection of Him.'
The mission of art to reveal the secrets of the inner life, to lift the souls of others into high communion with itself, to express its joy in possession, its hope of attainment, its insatiable and divine longings, its dreams of the infinite—these seemed to Liszt high functions, enriching, fertilising, and consoling all life, and leading the spirit forth into that weird borderland of the emotions, where voices come to it from the Unseen, and radiant flashes from behind the Veil.
It was towards the close of 1831 that Liszt met Chopin in Paris. From the first, these two men, so different, became fast friends. Chopin's delicate, retiring soul found a singular delight in Liszt's strong and imposing personality. Liszt's exquisite perception enabled him perfectly to live in the strange dreamland of Chopin's fancies, whilst his own vigour inspired Chopin with nerve to conceive those mighty Polonaises that he could never properly play himself, and which he so gladly committed to the keeping of his prodigious friend. Liszt undertook the task of interpreting Chopin to the mixed crowds which he revelled in subduing, but from which his fastidious and delicately-strung friend shrank with something like aversion.
From Chopin, Liszt and all the world after him got that tempo rubato, that playing with the duration of notes without breaking the time, and those arabesque ornaments which are woven like fine embroidery all about the pages of Chopin's nocturnes, and lift what in others are mere casual flourishes into the dignity of interpretative phrases and poetic commentaries on the text.
People were fond of comparing the two young men who so often appeared in the same salons together—Liszt with his finely-shaped, long, oval head and profile d'ivoire, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff hair of dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting, and cut in a straight line, his aplomb, his magnificent and courtly bearing, his ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial bonhomie and irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also with dark blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own words, 'an angel of fair countenance with brown eyes, from which intellect beamed rather than burned, a gentle, refined smile, slightly aquiline nose, a delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all bearing witness to the harmony of a soul which required no commentary beyond itself,'
Nothing can be more generous or more true than Liszt's recognition of Chopin's independent support. 'To our endeavours,' he says, 'to our struggles, just then so much needing certainty, he lent us the support of a calm, unshakeable conviction, equally armed against apathy and cajolery.' There was only one picture on the walls of Chopin's room; it hung just above his piano. It was a head of Liszt.
The over-intensity of Liszt's powerful nature may have occasionally led him into extravagances of virtuosity, which laid him open to some just criticism. Robert Schumann observed acutely: 'It appears as if the sight of Chopin brought him again to his senses.'
It is no part of my present scheme to describe the battle which romanticism in music waged against the prevalent conventionalities. We know the general outcome of the struggle culminating, after the most prodigious artistic convulsions, in the musical supremacy of Richard Wagner, who certainly marks firmly and broadly enough the greatest stride in musical development made since Beethoven.
That Hector Berlioz emancipated the orchestra from all previous trammels, and dealt with sound at first hand as the elemental and expressional breath of the soul, that he was thus the immediate precursor of Wagner, who said with more modesty than truth, 'I have invented nothing'—this is now admitted. That Schumann was afraid of the excesses into which the romantic musicians threatened to plunge, and, having started well and cheered them on, showed some tendency to relapse into old form at the moment when his ingenious and passionate soul sank into final and premature gloom—that has been whispered. That Mendelssohn was over-wedded to classical tradition and a certain passion for neatness and precision which prevented him from sounding the heights and depths of the revolutionary epoch in the midst of which he moved, and by which his sunny spirit was so little affected—this I am now able to see. That Spohr was too doctrinaire and mannered, Meyerbeer a great deal too fond of melodrama and sensation for its own sake, that Rossini and Auber, exclusively bent on amusing the public, were scarcely enough hommes sérieux to influence the deeper development of harmony, or effect any revolution in musical form, most musicians will allow, and that Liszt by his unique virtuosity has made it difficult for the world to accept him in any other capacity, is the constant grievance paraded by his admirers. From all which reflections it may be inferred that many workers have contributed to the wealth, resource and emancipation of modern music from those trammels which sought to confine its spirit or limit its freedom. Through past form, it has at length learned to use instead of being used by form. The modern orchestra has won the unity and spontaneity of an independent living organism. Like the body, it is a complex mechanism, but it is to the mind of the composer as the human body is to the soul. It has grown so perfect an instrument, and deals with so perfectly mastered an art, that a prelude like 'Lohengrin' or the opening of 'Parsifal' sounds like the actual expression of the inner moods of the spirit rendered outwardly with automatic unconscious fidelity. The rule, the technique are lost, hidden, forgotten, because completely efficacious, and subordinated to the free movements of the composer's spirit.
To this latest triumph of the musical art three men since Beethoven have mainly contributed; their names are certainly Hector Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt.
The darling of the aristocracy, accustomed from his earliest youth to mix freely with the haute noblesse of Germany and France, Liszt was a republican at heart. He felt acutely for the miseries of the people, and he was always a great player for the masses. 'When I play,' he once said, 'I always play for the people in the top gallery, so that those who can pay but five groschen for their seats may also get something for their money.' He was ever foremost in alleviating the sufferings of the poor, the sick, and the helpless. He seems, indeed, to have been unable to pass a beggar, and the beggars soon find that out; they will even intrude upon his privacy and waylay him in his garden.
Once, when at the height of his popularity in Paris, a friend found him holding a crossing-sweeper's broom at the corner of the street. 'The fact is,' said Liszt simply, 'I had no small change for the boy, so I told him to change me five francs, and he asked me to hold his broom for him till he returned.' I forgot to ask Liszt whether the lad ever came back.
I was walking with him one day in the private gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli when some little ruffians, who had clambered over the wall, rushed up to him with a few trumpery weeds, which they termed 'bouquets.' The benevolent Maestro took the gift good-humouredly, and fumbling in his pocket produced several
small coins, which he gave to the urchins, turning to me apologetically: 'They expect it, you know. In fact,' he added, with a little shrug, 'whenever I appear they do expect it.' His gifts were not always small. He could command large sums of money at a moment's notice. The proceeds of many a splendid concert went to manufacturing committees, widows, orphans, sick and blind. He founded pensions and provided funds for poor musicians; he set up monuments to great artists. A pecuniary difficulty arising about Beethoven's statue at Bonn, Liszt immediately guaranteed the whole sum. In the great commercial crisis of 1834 at Lyons Liszt gave concerts for the artisans out of work, and in Hungary, not long after, when the overflow of the Danube rendered hundreds homeless, Liszt was again to the fore with his brilliant performances for charity.
All through his life he was an ardent pamphleteer, and he fought not only for the poor, but in the highest interests of his art, and above all for the dignity of his own class.
In this he was supported by such musical royalties as Mendelssohn, Rossini, Paganini, and Lablache. Ella has told us how in past days the musicians were not expected to mix with the company, a rope being laid down on the carpet, showing the boundary line between the sacred and profane in social rank.
On one occasion Lablache, entering the music saloon at Apsley House, observed the usual rope laid down in front of him when he came on to sing in a duet. He quietly stooped down and tossed it aside. It was never replaced, and the offensive practice dropped out of London society from that day.
He refused to play at the court of Queen Isabella in Spain because the court etiquette forbade the introduction of musicians to royalty. In his opinion even crowned heads owed a certain deference and homage to the sovereignties of art, and he determined it should be paid.
He met Czar Nicholas I., who had very little notion of the respect due to any one but himself, with an angry look and a defiant word; he tossed Frederick William IV.'s diamonds into the side scenes; and broke a lance with Louis-Philippe, which cost him a decoration.
He never forgave that stingy King for abolishing certain musical pensions and otherwise snubbing art. He refused on every occasion to play at the Tuileries. One day the King and his suite paid a 'private view' visit to a pianoforte exhibition of Erard's. Liszt happened to be in the room, and was trying a piano just as his Majesty entered. The King advanced genially towards him and began a conversation; but Liszt merely bowed with a polished but icy reserve.
'Do you still remember,' said the King, 'that you played at my house when you were but a boy and I Duke of Orleans? Much has changed since then.'
'Yes, sire,' replied Liszt dryly, 'but not for the better.'
The King showed his royal appreciation of the repartee by striking the great musician's name off the list of those who were about to receive the cross of the Legion of Honour.
The idol of Parisian drawing-rooms at a most susceptible age, with his convictions profoundly shaken in Catholicism and church discipline, surrounded by wits and philosophers who were equally sceptical about marriage and the very foundations of society as then constituted, Liszt's views of life not unnaturally underwent a considerable change.
He had no doubt frankly and sincerely imbibed Mme. Sand's early philosophy, and his witty saying, which I think I have also read in 'Rasselas,' that 'whether a man marries or not, he will sooner or later be sure to repent it,' belongs to this period. His relations with Mme. Sand have been much misrepresented. He was far more attracted by her genius than by her person, and although for long years he entertained for her feelings of admiration and esteem, she never exercised over him the despotic influence which drove poor Chopin to despair.
Of the misguided Countess who threw herself upon his protection, and whom he treated with the utmost consideration and forbearance for several years, I shall not have much to say; but it must be remembered that he was considerably her junior, that he did his best to prevent her from taking the rash course which separated her from her family and made her his travelling companion, and that years afterwards her own husband, as well as her brother, when affairs came to be arranged and the whole facts of the case were canvassed in a conseil de famille at Paris, confessed of their own accord that throughout Liszt had acted 'like a man of honour.'
It was during his years of travel with the Countess in Italy and Germany that Liszt composed the great: bulk of his celebrated transcriptions of songs and operatic pieces, as well as the renowned 'Etudes d'Exécution Transcendante.'
Liszt's attempt to preserve his incognito in Italy conspicuously failed. He entered Ricordi's music-shop at Milan, and, sitting down at a grand piano, began to improvise.
''Tis Liszt or the devil!' he heard Ricordi whisper to a clerk, and in another moment the great Italian entrepreneur had welcomed the Hungarian virtwoso and placed his villa, his box at the opera, his carriage and horses at his disposal. Of course Ricordi very soon organised a concert, in which the Milanese were invited to judge the 'pianist of the future,' as he was then styled. The Milanese were better pleased with Liszt than was Liszt with the Milanese. He could not make them take to Beethoven. They even kicked at certain favourite studies of his own; but he won them by his marvellous improvisations on fragments of their darling Rossini, and afterwards wrote a smart article in the Paris 'Gazette Musicale,' expressing his dissatisfaction with the frivolity of Italian musical culture, quoting in scorn a voice from the pit which greeted one of his own 'Preludes Etudes'—it was the word 'étude' at which the pit stuck—'Vengo al teatro per divertirmi e non per studiare,' a sentiment which I think I have heard repeated in more northern latitudes.
Of course Liszt's free criticism got back to Milan. Milan was furious, Liszt was at Venice. The papers denounced him. Everybody proposed to fight duels with him. He was told that he could not play the piano, and they handed him over to the devil. Liszt wrote pacifying letters in the Milanese papers, but the uproar only increased. What would happen if he ever dared to show himself in Milan again, no one dared to speculate. He was a monstrous ingrate; he had insulted everyone down to the decorators and chorographers of La Scala, and he must be chastised summarily for his insolent presumption.
When the disturbance was at its height, Liszt wrote to the Milanese journals to say that he declined a paper war; that he had never intended to insult the Milanese; that he would arrive shortly in Milan and hold himself in readiness to receive all aggrieved persons, and give them every explanation and satisfaction they might require.
On a hot summer's day he drove quietly through Milan in an open carriage, and, taking up his abode at a fashionable hotel, awaited the arrival of the belligerents. But as not one of them turned up or made the least sign, Liszt went back to Venice.
When, however, in fulfilment of a promise, he returned in September, he met with a characteristic snub, for his concert was poorly attended, and then only by the upper classes. He had mortally wounded the people. He did not consider Mercadante and Bellini so great as Beethoven, and he said so. This was indeed a crime, and proved clearly that he could not play the piano!
Towards the year 1840 the relations between Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult had become rather strained. The inevitable dissolution which awaits such alliances was evidently at hand. For a brief period on the shores of the Lake of Como the cup of his happiness had indeed seemed full; but es war ein Traum. 'When the ideal form of a woman,' so he wrote to a friend, 'floats before your entranced soul—a woman whose heaven-born charms bear no allurements for the senses, but only wing the soul to devotion—if you see at her side a youth sincere and faithful in heart, weave these forms into a moving story of love, and give it the title "On the Shores of the Lake of Como."'
He wrote, we may be sure, as he then felt. He was sometimes mistaken, but he was always perfectly open, upright, and sincere.
A little daughter was born to him at Bellaggio, on the shores of that enchanted lake. He called her Cosima in memory of Como. She became afterwards the wife of Von Bülow, then the wife and widow of Richard Wagner.
But in 1840 the change came. The Countess and her children went off to Paris, and the roving spirit of the great musician, after being absorbed for some time in composition, found its restless rest in a new series of triumphs. After passing through Florence, Bologna, and Rome, he went to Bonn, then to Vienna, and entered upon the last great phase of his career as a virtuoso, which lasted from 1840 to between 1850-60.
In 1842 Liszt visited Weimar, Berlin, and then went to Paris. He was meditating a tour in Russia. Pressing invitations reached him from St. Petersburg and Moscow. The most fabulous accounts of his virtuosity had raised expectation to its highest pitch. He was as legendary even amongst the common people as Paganini.
His first concert at St. Petersburg realised the then unheard of sum of 2,000l. The roads were crowded to see him pass, and the corridors and approaches to the Grand Opera blocked to catch a glimpse of him.
The same scenes were repeated at Moscow, where he gave six concerts without exhausting the popular excitement.
On his return to Weimar he accepted the post of Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke. It provided him with that settled abode, and above all with an orchestra, which he now felt so indispensable to meet his growing passion for orchestral composition. But the time of rest had not yet come.
In 1844 and 1845 he was received in Spain and Portugal with incredible enthusiasm, after which he returned to Bonn to assist at the inauguration of Beethoven's statue. With boundless liberality he had subscribed more money than all the princes and people of Germany put together to make the statue worthy of the occasion and the occasion worthy of the statue.
The golden river which poured into him from all the capitals of Europe now freely found a new vent in boundless generosity. Hospitals, poor and needy, patriotic celebrations, the dignity and interests of art, were all subsidised from his private purse.
His transcendent virtuosity was only equalled by his splendid munificence; but he found what others have so often experienced—that great personal gifts and prodigious éclat cannot possibly escape the poison of envy and detraction. He was attacked by calumny; his very gifts denied and ridiculed; his munificence ascribed to vainglory, and his charity to pride and ostentation; yet none will ever know the extent of his private charities, and no one who knows anything of Liszt can be ignorant of the simple, unaffected goodness of heart which prompts them.
Still he was wounded by ingratitude and abuse. It seemed to check and paralyse for the moment his generous nature.
Fétis saw him at Coblenz soon after the Bonn festival, at which he had expended such vast sums. He was sitting alone, dejected and out of health. He said he was sick of everything, tired of life, and nearly ruined.
But that mood never lasted long with Liszt; he soon arose and shook himself like a lion. His detractors slunk away into their holes, and he walked forth victorious to refill his empty purse and reap new laurels.
His career was interrupted by the stormy events of 1848. He settled down for a time at Weimar, and it was then that he began to take that warm interest in Richard Wagner which ended in the closest and most enduring of friendships.
He laboured incessantly to get a hearing for the 'Lohengrin' and 'Tannhäuser.' He forced Wagner's compositions on the band, on the Grand Duke; he breasted public opposition and fought nobly for the eccentric and obscure person who was chiefly known as a political outlaw and an inventor of extravagant compositions which it was impossible to play or sing, and odiously unpleasant to listen to.
But years of faithful service, mainly the service and immense prestige and authority of Liszt, procured Wagner a hearing, and paved the way for his glorious triumphs at Bayreuth in 1876, 1882, and 1883.
At the age of seventy-two Liszt retains the wit and vivacity of forty. He passes from Weimar to Rome, to Pesth, to Berlin, to Vienna, but objects to cross the sea, and told me that he would never again visit England. He seldom touches the piano, but loves still to be surrounded by young aspirants to fame. To them he is prodigal of hints, and ever ready to-lavish all sorts of kindness upon people who are sympathique to him.
At unexpected moments, in the presence of some timid young girl overpowered with the honour of an introduction, or alone with a friend when old days are spoken of, will Liszt sit down for a few minutes and recall a phrase of Chopin or a quaint passage from Scarlatti, and then, forgetting himself, will wander on until a flash of the old fire comes back to his eyes as he strikes a few grand octaves, and then, just as you are lost in contemplation of that noble head with its grand profile and its cascade of white hair, and those hands that still seem to be the absolutely unconscious and effortless ministers of his fitful and despotic will, the master will turn away—break off, like one suddenly blasé, in the middle of a bar, with 'Come, let us take a little turn; it will be cool under the trees;' and he would be a bold man who ventured in that moment to allude to the piano or music.
I have preferred to confine myself in this article to the personality of Liszt, and have made no allusion to his orchestral works and oratorio compositions. The Symphonic Poems speak for themselves—magnificent renderings of the inner life of spontaneous emotion—but subject-matter which calls for a special article can find no place at the fag-end of this, and at all times it is better to hear music than to describe it. As it would be impossible to describe Liszt's orchestration intelligibly to those who have not heard it, and unnecessary to those who have, I will simply leave it alone.
I have seen Liszt but six times, and then only between the years 1876 and 1881. I have heard him play upon two occasions only, and then he played certain pieces of Chopin at my request and a new composition by himself. I have heard Mme. Schumann, Bülow, Rubinstein, Menter, and Esipoff, but I can understand that saying of Tausig, himself one of the greatest masters of technique whom Germany has ever produced: 'No mortal can measure himself with Liszt. He dwells alone upon a solitary height.'
1. See my Music and Morals, sections 96, 106.