Franz Liszt

by James Huneker

TAUSIG

Over a quarter of a century has passed since the death of Karl Tausig, a time long enough to dim the glory of the mere virtuoso. Many are still living who have heard him play, and can recall the deep impressions which his performances made on his hearers. Whoever not only knew Karl Tausig at the piano, but had studied his genuinely artistic nature, still retains a living image of him. He stands before us in all his youth, for he died early, before he had reached the middle point of life; he counted thirty years at the time of his death, when his great heart, inspired with a love for all beauty, ceased to beat; when those hands, Tes mains de bronze et des diamants, as Liszt named them in a letter to his pupil and friend, grew stiff in death.

It was through many wanderings and perplexities that Karl Tausig rose to the height which he reached in the last years of his life. A friendless childhood was followed by a period of Sturm und Drang, till the dross had been purged away and the pure gold of his being displayed. The essence of his playing was warm objectivity; he let every masterpiece come before us in its own individuality; the most perfect virtuosity, his incomparable surmounting of all technical means of expression, was to him only the means, never the end. Paradoxical as it may appear, there never was, before or since, so great a virtuoso who was less a virtuoso. Hence the career of a virtuoso did not satisfy him; he strove for higher ends, and apart from his ceaseless culture of the intellect, his profound studies in all fields of science and the devotion which he gave to philosophy, mathematics, and the natural sciences, what he achieved in the field of music possesses a special interest, as he regarded it as merely a preparation for comprehensive creative activity. Some of these compositions are still found in the programmes of all celebrated pianists, while the arrangements that he made for pedagogic purposes occupy a prominent place in the courses of all conservatories.

Karl Tausig came to Berlin in the beginning of the sixties. Alois Tausig, his father, a distinguished piano teacher at Warsaw, who had directed the early education of the son, whom he survived by more than a decade, had already presented him to Liszt at Weimar. Liszt at once took the liveliest interest in the astonishing talents of the boy and made him a member of his household at Altenburg, at Weimar, where this prince in the realm of art kept his court with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, surrounded by a train of young artists, to which Hans von Bülow, Karl Klindworth, Peter Cornelius (to name only a few) belonged. With all these Karl Tausig formed intimate friendships, especially with Cornelius, who was nearest to him in age. An active correspondence was carried on between them, even when their paths of life separated them. Tausig next went to Wagner at Zürich, and the meeting confirmed him in his enthusiasm for the master's creations and developed that combativeness for the works and artistic struggles of Wagner which resulted in the arrangement of orchestral concerts in Vienna exclusively for Wagner's compositions, a very hazardous venture at that period. He directed them in person, and gave all his savings and all his youthful power to them without gaining the success that was hoped for. The master himself, when he came to Vienna for the rehearsals of the first performances of Tristan und Isolde, had sad experiences; his young friend stood gallantly by his side, but the performance did not take place. Vienna was then a sterile soil for Wagner's works and designs. Tausig returned in anger to Berlin, where he quickly became an important figure and a life-giving centre of a circle of interesting men. He founded a conservatory that was sought by pupils from all over the world, and where teachers like Louis Ehlert and Adolf Jensen gave instruction. When Richard Wagner came to Berlin in 1870 with a project for erecting a theatre of his own for the performance of the Nibelungen Ring it was Tausig who took it up with ardent zeal, to which the master bore honourable testimony in his account of the performance.

In July, 1871, Tausig visited Liszt at Weimar and accompanied him to Leipsic, where Liszt's grand mass was performed in St. Thomas' Church by the Riedle Society. After the performance he fell sick. A cold, it was said, prostrated him. In truth he had the seeds of death in him, which Wagner, in his inscription for the tomb of his young friend, expressed by the words, "Ripe for death!" The Countess Krockow and Frau von Moukanoff, who on the report of his being attacked by typhus hastened to discharge the duties of a Samaritan by his sick-bed in the hospital, did all that careful nursing and devoted love could do, but in vain, and on July 17 Karl Tausig breathed his last.

His remains were carried from Leipsic to Berlin, and were interred in the new cemetery in the Belle Alliance Strasse. During the funeral ceremony a great storm burst forth, and the roll of the thunder mingled with the strains of the Funeral March from the Eroica which the Symphony Orchestra performed at his grave. Friends erected a simple memorial. An obelisk of rough-hewn syenite bears his portrait, modelled in relief by Gustav Blaesar. Unfortunately wind and weather in the course of years injured the marble of the relief, so that its destruction at an early period was probable, and the same friends substituted a bronze casting for the marble, which on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death was adorned with flowers by loving hands.

Karl Tausig represents the very opposite pole in "pianism" to Thalberg; he was fire and flame incarnate, he united all the digital excellencies of the aristocratic Thalberg, including his supreme and classic calm to a temperament that, like a comet, traversed artistic Europe and fired it with enthusiastic ideals. If Karl Tausig had only possessed the creative gift in any proportion to his genius for reproduction he would have been a giant composer. 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 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.

He literally killed himself playing the piano; his vivid nature felt so keenly in reproducing the beautiful and glorious thoughts of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, and, like a sabre that was too keen for its own scabbard, he wore himself out from nervous exhaustion. Tausig was many-sided, and the philosophical bent of his mind may be seen in the few fragments of original music he has vouchsafed us. Take a Thalberg operatic fantaisie and a paraphrase of Tausig's, say of Tristan and Isolde, and compare them; then one can readily gauge the vast strides piano music has taken. Touch pure and singing was the Thalbergian ideal. Touch dramatic, full of variety, is the Tausig ideal. One is vocal, the other instrumental, and both seem to fulfill their ideals. Tausig had a hundred touches; from a feathery murmur to an explosive crash he commanded the entire orchestra of contrasts. Thalberg was the cultivated gentleman of the drawing-room, elegiac, but one who never felt profoundly (glance at his étude on repeated notes). Elegant always, jocose never. Tausig was a child of the nineteenth century, full of its ideals, its aimless strivings, its restlessness, its unfaith and desperately sceptical tone. If he had only lived he would have left an imprint on our modern musical life as deep as Franz Liszt, whose pupil he was. Richard Wagner was his god and he strove much for him and his mighty creations.