James Huneker

“ But he introduced into the musty academic atmosphere of musical Europe a strong, fresh breeze from the Hungarian puzta; this wandering piano-player of Hungarian-Austrian blood, a genuine cosmopolite, taught music a new charm, the charm of the unexpected, the improvised. The freedom of Beethoven in his later works, and of Chopin in all his music, became the principal factor in the style of Liszt. Music must have the shape of an improvisation. In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern, are the extremes of his system. ”

“ I ask if our old masters made great movements by the manifold variation of themes of a few bars, ought the like to be forbidden to a composer when a recognisably poetic thought is the moving spring? Does not invention belong to such characteristic variation? And just this movement reveals to us most clearly Liszt's profound knowledge of the real nature of music. When the hellish Devil's brood has grown to the most appalling power, then, hovering in the clouds of glory, the main theme of the Gretchen movement appears in its original, untouched beauty. ”

“ Rafael Joseffy stands to-day for all that is exquisite and poetic in the domain of the piano. His touch is original, his manipulation of the mechanism of the instrument unapproachable, a virtuoso among virtuosi, and the beauty of his tone, its velvety, aristocratic quality, so free from any suspicion of harshness or brutality, gives him a unique position in the music-loving world. There is magic in his attack, magic and moonlight in [375] his playing of a Chopin nocturne, and brilliancy—a meteor-like brilliancy—in his performance of a Liszt concerto. ”

“ The attention of the audience was entirely centred upon Liszt. When he came forward to play in Hummel's septet one was prepared to be staggered, but only heard the well-known piece which he plays with the most perfect execution, storming occasionally like a Titan, but still in the main free from extravagance; for the distinguishing mark of Liszt's mind and genius is that he knows perfectly the capability of the audience and the style of music he brings before them, and uses his powers, which are equal to everything, merely as a means of eliciting the most varied kinds of effects. ”

“ That he was the captain of the new German music, a pianist without equal, a conductor of distinction, one who had helped to make the orchestra and its leaders what they are to-day; that he was a writer, a reformer of church music, a man of the noblest impulses and ideals, generous, selfless, and an artist to his fingertips—these are the commonplaces of musical history. As a personality he was an apparition; only Paganini had so electrified Europe. A charmeur, his love adventures border on the legendary; indeed, are largely legend. ”

“ Arthur Friedheim is the most individual performer I have ever heard. A very few executants equal him in mere finger dexterity, but he surpasses them all in his gigantic strength at the instrument and in marvellous clearness and brilliancy. At times he plays with the unbridled impetuosity of a cyclone; and even while apparently dealing the piano mighty blows, which from other hands would sound forced and discordant, they never cease to be melodious. This musical, penetrating quality of touch is the chief charm of Friedheim's playing. He makes the piano sing, but its voice is full and sonorous. ”

“ What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist. Scudo wrote that Thalberg's scales were like pearls on velvet, the scales of Liszt the same, but the velvet was hot! Louis Ehlert, no mean observer, said he possessed a quality that neither Tausig nor any virtuoso before or succeeding him ever boasted—the nearest approach, perhaps, was Rubinstein—namely: a spontaneous control of passion that approximated in its power to nature ... ”

“ ROSENTHAL
"You, I presume, do not wish for biographical details—of my appearances as a boy in Vienna and later in St. Petersburg, of my early studies with Joseffy and later with Liszt," asked the great virtuoso. "You would like to hear something about Liszt? As a man or as an artist? You know I was with him ten years, and can flatter myself that I have known him intimately. As a man, I can well say I have never met any one so good and noble as he. Every one knows of his ever-ready helpfulness toward struggling artists, of his constant willingness to further the cause of charity. ”

“ To me the piano is one of the domestic lares, one of our household gods. It is, thanks to it, and it alone, that we have for ourselves and in our homes the most poetic and the most personal of all the arts—music. What is it that brings into our dwellings an echo of the Conservatory concerts? What is it that gives us the opera at our own firesides? What is it that unites four, five or six harmonious voices in the interpretation of a masterpiece of vocal music, as the trio of Don Juan, the quartet of Moses, or the finale of the Barber of Seville? The piano, and the piano alone. ”

“ Another flank movement of the "ewig Weibliche," this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the triolen of the bass frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendour. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is stamped on every bar. ”

“ I had the rare good fortune to hear these two great artists on the same day, in the same salon, at an interval of a quarter of an hour, at a concert given by the Princess Belgiojoso for the Poles. There was then revealed to me palpably, clearly, the characteristic difference in their talent. Liszt was incontestably the more artistic, the more vibrant, the more electric. He had tones of a delicacy that made one think of the almost inaudible tinkling of tiny spangles or the faint explosion of sparks of fire. Never have fingers bounded so lightly over the piano. ”

“ But the automatic piano has outpointed every virtuoso except Rosenthal in the matter of mere technic. So we enjoy our Brahms from Joseffy, and when he plays Liszt or Chopin, which he does in an ideal style, far removed from the tumultuous thumpings of the average virtuoso, we turn out in numbers to enjoy and applaud him. His music has that indefinable quality which vibrates from a Stradivarius violin. His touch is like no other in the world, and his readings of the classics are marked by reverence and authority. ”

“ Infinite shadings are to be heard where before were only piano, forte, and mezzo-forte. Chopin and Liszt and Tausig did much for the nuance; Joseffy taught America the nuance, as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of his golden tones. "Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance," sang Verlaine; and without nuance the piano is a box of wood, wire and steel, a coffin wherein is buried the soul of music. ”

“ All in all I see in Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt, the Virtuoso-Composer, and I would be glad to believe that their 'breaking all bounds' may be an advantage to the coming genius. In the sense, however, of specifically musical creation I can recognise neither one of them as a composer—and, in addition to this, I have noticed so far that all three of them are wanting in the chief charm of creation—the naïve—that stamp of geniality and, at the same time, that proof that genius after all is a child of humanity. ”

“ It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze, from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (the descending octaves Wagner recalled when he wrote his Wotan theme) ; the leap from the G to the A sharp below—how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own. Power there is, sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E-flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D's. ”

“ With Weber's sonata in A flat Liszt was perfectly delighted. I had studied it in much love with Wehrstaedt at Geneva, and gave it throughout in the spirit of the thing. This Liszt testified by the way in which he listened, by lively gestures and movements, by exclamations about the beauty of the composition, so that we worked at it with both our heads! This great romantic poem for the piano begins, as is well known, with a tremolo of the bass on A flat. Never had a sonata opened in such a manner! It is as sunshine over the enchanted grove in which the action takes place. ”

“ They were, anyhow, wide-awake Parisians: people familiar with the greatest celebrities of modern times, totally blasé and preoccupied men, who had 'done to death' all things in the world, art included; women equally 'done up' by having danced the polka the whole winter through. Truly it was no German sentimental, Berlin-emotional audience before which Liszt played—quite alone, or rather accompanied only by his genius. And yet, what an electrically powerful effect his mere appearance produced! What a storm of applause greeted him! How many bouquets were flung at his feet! ”

“ We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaptation; hence a pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the keynote, the foundation, is realism, a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and often forces them to lingering retrospection. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep, and thus we have viewed many times the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated artistic frame. ”

“ Saint-Saëns sets great store on Liszt's original compositions, and I am sure when the empty operatic paraphrases and rhapsodies are forgotten the true Liszt will shine the brighter. How tinkling are the Hungarian rhapsodies—now become café entertainment. And how the old bones do rattle. We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz Variations, the Kalkbrenner Fantasias, but the next generation will wonder at us for having so long tolerated this drunken gipsy, who dances to fiddle and cymbalom accompaniment. ”

“ As a pianist he has never had his equal. With Liszt's fire and Bülow's intellectuality he nevertheless transcended them both in the possession of a subtle something that defied analysis. We see it in his fugitive compositions that revel on technical heights hitherto unscaled. Tausig had a force, a virility combined [365] with a mental insight, that made him peer of all pianists. It is acknowledged by all who heard him that his technic outshone all others; he had the whispering and crystalline pianissimo of Joseffy, the liquidity of Thalberg's touch, with the resistless power of a Rubinstein. ”

“ Apart from his invention of a new form—or, rather, the condensation and revisal of an old one, the symphonic poem—Liszt's greatest contribution to art is the wild, truant, rhapsodic, extempore element he infused into modern music; nature in her most reckless, untrammelled moods he interpreted with fidelity. But the drummers in the line of moral gasolene who controlled criticism in Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. ”

“ Liszt's attitude at the piano, like that of a pythoness, has been remarked again and again. Constantly tossing back his long hair, his lips quivering, his nostrils palpitating, he swept the auditorium with the glance of a smiling master. He had some little trick of the comedian in his manner, but he was not that. He was a Hungarian; a Hungarian in two aspects, at once Magyar and Tzigane. True son of the race that dances to the clanking of its spurs. His countrymen understood him well when they sent him as a testimonial of honour an enormous sabre. ”

“ The bride, intellectual, sensitive, full of the Polish love of art, above all of music, could not long endure the raw dragoon, dissipated gambler and hard liver into whose arms she had been pushed by her ambitious father. She made a retreat to Woronice with her infant daughter and spent laborious days and nights in the study of philosophy, the arts, sciences, and religion. The collision of two such natures as Carolyne and Liszt led to some magnificent romantic and emotional fireworks. ”

“ But we both vowed to keep the anniversary of this day sacred for ever, and never, while life lasted, to forget a single incident of it. We were like men in love, or bewitched. What wonder? Never before had we come face to face with such a gifted, impassioned, almost demoniacal personality as that of Liszt, who seemed alternately to let loose the forces of the whirlwind, or to carry us away on a flood of tenderness, grace, and beauty.'
"Serov felt even more strongly the fascination of Liszt's genius. ”