DIE IDEALE
Die Ideale was projected in the summer of 1856, but it was composed in 1857. The first performance was at Weimar, September 5, 1857, on the occasion of unveiling the Goethe-Schiller monument. The first performance in Boston was by Theodore Thomas's orchestra, October 6, 1870. The symphonic poem was played here at a Symphony Concert on January 26, 1889.
The argument of Schiller's poem, Die Ideale, first published in the Musenalmanach of 1796, has thus been presented: "The sweet belief in the dream-created beings of youth passes away; what once was divine and beautiful, after which we strove ardently, and which we embraced lovingly with heart and mind, becomes the prey of hard reality; already midway the boon companions—love, fortune, fame, and truth—leave us one after another, and only friendship and activity remain with us as loving comforters." Lord Lytton characterised the poem as an "elegy on departed youth."
Yet Liszt departed from the spirit of the elegy, for in a note to the concluding section of the work, the Apotheosis, he says: "The holding fast and at the same time the continual realising of the ideal is the highest aim of our life. In this sense I ventured to supplement Schiller's poem by a jubilantly emphasising resumption of the motives of the first section in the closing Apotheosis." Mr. Niecks, in his comments on this symphonic poem, adds: "To support his view and justify the alteration, Liszt might have referred to Jean Paul Richter's judgment, that the conclusion of the poem, pointing as it does for consolation to friendship and activity, comforts but scantily and unpoetically. Indeed, Schiller himself called the conclusion of the poem tame, but explained that it was a faithful picture of human life, adding: 'I wished to dismiss the reader with this feeling of tranquil contentment.' That, apart from poetical considerations, Liszt acted wisely as a musician in making the alteration will be easily understood and readily admitted. Among the verses quoted by the composer, there are eight which were omitted by Schiller in the ultimate amended form of Die Ideale. The order of succession, however, is not the same as in the poem; what is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with Liszt is 1, 4, 3, 2, 5 with Schiller. The musician seized the emotional possibilities of the original, but disregarded the logical sequence. And there are many things which the tone poet who works after the word poet not only may but must disregard. As the two arts differ in their nature, the one can be only an imperfect translator of the other; but they can be more than translators—namely, commentators. Liszt accordingly does not follow the poem word for word, but interprets the feelings which it suggests, 'feelings which almost all of us have felt in the progress of life.' Indeed, programme and music can never quite coincide; they are like two disks that partly cover each other, partly overlap and fall short. Liszt's Die Ideale is no exception. Therefore it may not be out of place to warn the hearer, although this is less necessary in the present case than in others, against forming 'a grossly material conception of the programme,' against 'an abstractly logical interpretation which allows itself to be deceived by the outside, by what presents itself to the first glance, disdains the mediation of the imagination.'"
Mr. Hale gives some interesting facts about the composition.
Liszt and Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein were both ill in the spring of 1857, and the letters written by Liszt to her during this period are of singular interest. Yet Liszt went about and conducted performances until he suffered from an abscess in a leg and was obliged to lie in bed. On the 30th of January Liszt had written to a woman, the anonymous "Friend": "For Easter I shall have finished Die Ideale (symphony in three movements)"; and in March he wrote the princess that he was dreaming of Die Ideale. In May he went to Aix-la-Chapelle to conduct at a music festival, and in July he returned to that town for medical treatment. He wrote the princess (July 23) that he had completed the indications, the "nuances," of the score that morning, and he wished her to see that the copyist should prepare the parts immediately—six first violins, six second violins, four violas, and five double basses.
The performance at Weimar excited neither fierce opposition nor warm appreciation. Liszt conducted the work at Prague, March 11, 1858, and it appears from a letter to the Princess that he made cuts and alterations in the score after the performance. Hans von Bülow produced Die Ideale at Berlin in 1859, and the performance stirred up strife. Bülow thought the work too long for the opening piece, and preferred to put it in the second part. Then he changed his mind; he remembered that Liszt's Festklänge was at the end of a concert the year before in Berlin, and that many of the audience found it convenient to leave the hall for the cloak-room during the performance. A few days later he wrote that he would put it at the end of the first part: "My first rehearsal lasted four hours. The parts of Die Ideale are very badly copied. It is a magnificent work, and the form is splendid. In this respect I prefer it to Tasso, to The Preludes, and to other symphonic poems. It has given me an enormous pleasure—I was happier than I have been for a long time. Apropos—a passage, where the basses and the trombones give the theme of the Allegro, a passage that is found several times in the parts is cut out in the printed score." Ramagn names 1859 as the date of publication, while others say the score was published in 1858. "I have left this passage as it is in the arts; for I find it excellent, and the additional length of time in performance will be hardly appreciable. It will go, I swear it!" The concert was on January 14, 1859, and when some hissed after the performance of Die Ideale, Bülow asked them to leave the hall. A sensation was made by this "maiden speech," as it was called. (See the pamphlet, Hans v. Bülow und die Berliner Kritik, Berlin, 1859, and Bülow's Briefe, vol. iii. pp. 202, 203, 205, 206, Leipsic, 1898.) Bülow was cool as a cucumber, and directed the next piece, Introduction to Lohengrin, as though nothing had happened. The Princess of Prussia left her box, for it was nine o'clock, the hour of tea; but there was no explosion till after the concert, when Bülow was abused roundly by newspaper article and word of mouth. He had promised to play two piano pieces at a Domchoir concert the 22d, and it was understood that he would then be hissed and hooted. The report sold all the seats and standing places. Never had he played so well, and instead of a scandalous exhibition of disapproval there was the heartiest applause. Liszt conducted Die Ideale at Bülow's concert in Berlin on February 27 of that year, and there was then not a suspicion of opposition to work or composer.
Bülow after the first performance at Berlin advised Liszt to cut out the very last measures. "I love especially the thirds in the kettle-drums, as a new and bold invention—but I find them a little too ear-boxing for cowardly ears.... I know positively that these eight last drumbeats have especially determined or rather emboldened the opposition to manifestation. And so, if you do not find positive cowardice in my request—put these two measures on my back—do as though I had had the impertinence to add them as my own. I almost implore this of you!"
In 1863 Bülow sent Louis Köhler his latest photograph, "Souvenir du 14 janvier, 1859." It represents him standing, baton in hand; on a conductor's desk is the score of Die Ideale, and there is this inscription to Liszt: "'Sub hoc signo vici, nec vincere desistam.' to his Master, his artistic Ideal, with thanks and veneration out of a full heart. Hans v. Bülow, Berlin, October 22, 1863." Liszt wrote Bülow from Budapest (January 3, 1873): "You know I profess not to collect photographs, and in my house portraits do not serve as ornaments. At Rome I had only two in my chamber; yours—that of Die Ideale, 'Sub hoc signo vici, nec vincere desistam'—was one of them."
It appears that others wished to tinker the score of this symphonic poem. Bülow wrote the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (February 10, 1859) that he had anticipated the permission of Liszt, and had sent Die Ideale to Leopold Damrosch, who would have the parts copied and produce the work in the course of the month at Breslau. Carl Tausig produced Die Ideale at Vienna for the first time, February 24, 1861, and in a letter written before the performance to Liszt he said: "I shall conduct Die Ideale wholly according to your wish, yet I am not at all pleased with Damrosch's variante; my own are more plausible, ... and Cornelius has strengthened me in my belief." When Die Ideale was performed again at Vienna, in 1880, at a concert of the Society of Music Friends, led by the composer, Eduard Hanslick based his criticism on the "witty answer" made by Berthold Auerbach to a noble dame who asked him what he thought of Liszt's compositions. He answered by putting another question: "What would you think if Ludwig Devrient, after he had played Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe with the complete mastery of genius, had said to himself in his fiftieth year: 'Why should I not be able also to write what I play so admirably? I'll be no longer a play actor; henceforth I'll be a tragic poet'?"
Die Ideale was performed for the first time in England at a concert at the Crystal Palace, April 16, 1881, with August Manns conductor.
This is C. A. Barry's answer to the question, Why was Liszt obliged to invent the term symphonic poem?
It may be explained that finding the symphonic form, as by rule established, inadequate for the purposes of poetic music, which has for its aim the reproduction and re-enforcement of the emotional essence of dramatic scenes, as they are embodied in poems or pictures, he felt himself constrained to adopt certain divergences from the prescribed symphonic form, and, for the new art-form thus created, was consequently obliged to invent a more appropriate title than that of "symphony," the formal conditions of which this would not fulfil. The inadequateness of the old symphonic form for translating into music imaginative conceptions arising from poems or pictures, and which necessarily must be presented in a fixed order, lies in its "recapitulation" section. This Liszt has dropped; and the necessity of so doing is apparent. Hence he has been charged with formlessness. In justification, therefore, of his mode of procedure, it may be pointed out to those of his critics who regard every divergence from the established form as tending to formlessness, that the form which he has devised for his symphonic poems in the main differs less from the established form than at first sight appears. A comparison of the established form of the so-called classical period with that devised by Liszt will make this apparent.
The former may be described as consisting of (1) the exposition of the principal subjects; (2) their development; and (3) their recapitulation. For this Liszt has substituted (1) exposition, (2) development, and (3) further development; or, as Wagner has tersely expressed it, "nothing else but that which is demanded by the subject and its expressible development." Thus, though from sheer necessity, rigid formality has been sacrificed to truthfulness, unity and consistency are as fully maintained as upon the old system, but by a different method, the reasonableness of which cannot be disputed.