Franz Liszt

“ Europe had been familiar with other great players, many of them consummate artists, like Hummel, Henri Herz, Czerny, Kalkbrenner, Field, Moscheles, and Thalberg, the most brilliant name of them all. But the feeling which these performers aroused was pale and passionless in comparison with that evoked by Franz Liszt. This was not merely the outcome of Liszt as a player and musician, but of Liszt as a man. The man always impressed people as immeasurably bigger than what he did, great as that was. ”

“ Franz Liszt was born Oct. 22, 1811, at Raiding, in Hungary, the son of Adam Liszt, an official in the imperial service, and a musical amateur of sufficient attainment to instruct his son in the rudiments of pianoforte-playing. At the age of 9 young Liszt made his first appearance in public at Oedenburg with such success that several Hungarian noblemen guaranteed him sufficient means to continue his studies for six years. For that purpose he went to Vienna, and took lessons from Czerny on the pianoforte and from Salieri and Randhartinger in composition. ”

“ That such a restless head, driven and perplexed by all the needs and doctrines of his time, feeling compelled to trouble himself about all the necessities of humanity, and eagerly sticking his nose into all the pots in which the good God brews the future—that Franz Liszt can be no quiet piano player for tranquil townfolks and good-natured night-caps is self-evident. ”

“ We gaze deep into the very abyss, and discover new, whirling forms. It did not seem to be the strings of a piano that were sounding. No, every tone was like an echoing drop of water. Any one who admires the technic of art must bow before Liszt; he that is charmed with the genial, the divine gift, bows still lower. The Orpheus of our day has made tones sound through the great capital of machinery and a Copenhagener has said that 'his fingers are simply railroads and steam engines.' His genius is more powerful to bring together the great minds of the world than all the railroads on earth. ”

“ Since that time, Abbé Franz Liszt did much composing. He also continued to teach the piano to great numbers of pupils, who flocked to him from all parts of the world. Many of the greatest artists now before the public were numbered among his students, and owe much of their success to his artistic guidance.
In 1871, the Hungarian Cabinet created him a noble, with a yearly pension of three thousand dollars. In 1875, he was made Director of the Academy at Budapest. In addition, Liszt was a member of nearly all the European Orders of Chivalry. ”

“ George Eliot and Lewes, Madame de Récamier and Chateaubriand, Goethe and his affinities, Chopin and George Sand, Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult, Wagner and Mathilde—a voluminous index might be made of the classic and romantic liaisons that have excited curiosity from the time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary down to yesteryear. Although Franz Liszt, great piano virtuoso, great composer, great man, has been dead since 1886, and the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein since 1887, volumes are still written about their friendship. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The boy Franz Liszt had now demonstrated that already at eleven years old, he was one of the leading virtuosi of the time; indeed his great reputation as a pianist dates from this third Vienna concert. The press praised him highly, and many compared him to the wonderful genius, Mozart. Adam Liszt wished him now to see more of the world, and make known his great talents, also to study further. He decided to take the boy to Paris, for there lived the celebrated composer, Cherubini, at that time Director of the Paris Conservatoire. ”

“ 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 new books devoted to Liszt, his life and his music, are by Julius Kapp, August Göllerich [56] (in German) , Jean Chantavoine and Calvocoressi (in French) , and A. W. Gottschalg's Franz Liszt in Weimar, a diary full of reminiscences. These works, ponderous in the case of the Germans, represent the vanguard of the literature that is due the anniversary year. To M. Chantavoine may be awarded the merit of the most symmetrically told tale; however, he need not have repeated Janka Wohl's doubtful mot attributed to Liszt apropos of priestly celibacy: "Gregory VII was a great philanthropist." ”

“ As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head "Tristan and Isolde," the simplest but most full-blooded musical conception; with the "black flag" which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die.
When you have had enough of "Rhinegold," send it to Chorusmaster Fischer at Dresden, instructing him in my name to give it to the copyist Wolfel, so that he may finish the copy which he has begun. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Since my first acquaintance with his compositions, I have played many of them in private circles in Milan, Vienna, etc., but without being able to win over my hearers to them. They lay, happily, much too far removed from the insipid taste, which at that time absolutely dominated, for it to be possible for any one to thrust them into the commonplace circle of approbation. The public did not care for them, and the majority of pianists did not understand them. In Leipzig even, where I played the "Carneval" at my second concert in the Gewandhaus, I did not succeed in obtaining my usual applause. ”

“ Dear Liszt, let us leave the TRADESMEN alone once for all. They are human and even love art, but only as far as BUSINESS will allow.
Tell me; advise me! Hitherto my wife and I have kept ourselves alive by the help of a friend here. By the end of this month of October our last florins will be gone, and a wide, beautiful world lies before me, in which I have nothing to eat, nothing to warm myself with. Think of what you can do for me, dear, princely man! Let some one buy my "Lohengrin," skin and bones; let some one commission my "Siegfried." ”

“ Liszt was less the master-builder than the painter; color, not form, was his stronger side. And like Chateaubriand his [30] music is an interminglement of religious with moods of sensuality. An authority has written that his essays in counterpoint are perhaps more successful than those of Berlioz, though his fugue subjects are equally artificial; and he fails to make the most of them (but couldn't the same be said of Beethoven, or of the contrapuntal Reger?) . Both the French and Hungarian masters seem to have concocted rather than have composed their fugues. ”

“ But I fear that Liszt, like any other dead [32] composer—save the few giants, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven—will be played as a matter of course, sometimes from piety, sometimes because certain dates bob up on the calendar. His piano music, the most grateful ever written, will die hard, yet die it will.
Musicians should never forget Liszt, who, as was the case with Henry Irving and the English speaking actors, was the first to give musicians a social standing and prestige; before his time a pianist, violinist, organist, singer, was hardly superior to a lackey. Liszt was the aristocrat of his art ”

“ I have met many, many great men, rulers, jurists, authors, scientists, teachers, merchants and warriors, but never have I met a man in any position whom I have not thought would have proved the inferior of Franz Liszt, had Liszt chosen to follow the career of the man in question. ”

“ She was the veritable muse of the Hungarian, [44] and when her influence upon him as a composer is considered it will not do to say, as many critics have said, that she was a stumbling-block in his career. The reverse is the truth.
The most recent contributions to Liszt literature are the letters between Franz Liszt and Carl Alexander, Archduke of Weimar; Aus der Glanzzeit der Weimarer Altenburg, by the fecund La Mara; and Franz Liszt, by August Göllerich, a former pupil of the master. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Liszt, who had begun his career with a kiss from Beethoven; Liszt, whose name was a flaring meteor in the sky of music when Wagner was starving in Paris; Liszt the path-breaker, meeting the usual fate of such a Moses, who never conquered the soil of the promised land, the initiator, at the last buried in foreign soil (he loathed Bayreuth and the Wagnerians) and known as the father-in-law of the man who eloped with his daughter and had borrowed of him everything from money to musical ideas. The gods must dearly love their sport. ”

“ In short, Liszt is not only the creator of the art of piano playing as we have it to-day, but his is the strongest musical influence in modern musical culture. But granting this, those thinkers who declare this influence not unmixed with harm are not altogether wrong. It is not the fault of genius, however, that undesirable consequences follow in its wake. It is also my opinion that it will do no harm to retrace our steps and revive the more simple times when there was less piano playing and more music. ”

“ Indeed, dear, good Liszt, I owe it to you that soon I shall be able once more to be entirely an artist. I look upon this final resumption of my artistic plans to which I now shall turn as one of the most decisive moments in my life. Between the musical execution of my "Lohengrin" and that of my "Siegfried" there lies for me a stormy, but, I feel convinced, a fruitful, world. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Those, however, who call Liszt a composer without talent confess themselves either ignorant of his achievements, or incapable of distinguishing good from bad and of duly apportioning praise and blame. Those, on the other hand, who call Liszt a creative genius should not omit to observe and state that his genius was qualitatively unlike the genius of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. ”

“ You received a letter from me at Leipzig; has it annoyed you? From Berne I wrote to you about the vise of my passport for France, and you were to send your answer to Turin. If that has been done, the letter will be forwarded to me. But why is it that I hear nothing else of you? Has the Carlsruhe festival been postponed, and will it be too late for you to come to Paris? I must be content; I want to see you, wherever it may be; if Zurich is too far for you, I will come to Basle. Paris begins almost to be unpleasant to me in my imagination; I am afraid of Berlioz. ”

“ He gave up concert performances as too precarious, and manfully began teaching in Paris. The revolution started his pulse to beating, and he composed a revolutionary symphony. He became a lover of humanity, a socialist, a follower of Saint-Simon, even of the impossible Père Prosper Enfantin. His friend and adviser was Lamenais, whose Paroles d'un Croyant had estranged him from Rome. A wonderful, unhappy man. Liszt read poetry and philosophy, absorbed all the fashionable frenzied formulas and associated with the Romanticists. He met Chopin, and they became as twin brethren. ”