WEINGARTNER'S AND RUBINSTEIN'S CRITICISMS
In his The Symphony Since Beethoven, Felix Weingartner, renowned as a conductor and composer, has said some pertinent things of the Liszt symphonic works. It must not be forgotten that he was a pupil of the Hungarian composer. He has been discussing Beethoven's first Leonora overture and continues thus:
"The same defects that mark the Ideale mark Liszt's Bergsymphonie, and, in spite of some beauties, his Tasso. Some other of his orchestral works, as Hamlet, Prometheus, Héroïde Funèbre, are inferior through weakness of invention. An improvisatore style, often passing into dismemberment, is peculiar to most of Liszt's compositions. I might say that while Brahms is characterised by a musing reflective element, in Liszt a rhapsodical element has the upper hand, and can be felt as a disturbing element in his weaker works. Masterpieces, besides those already mentioned, are the Hungaria, Festklänge the Hunnenschlacht, a fanciful piece of elementary weird power; Les Préludes, and, above all, the two great symphonies to Faust and Dante's Divine Comedy. The Faust Symphony intends not at all to embody musically Goethe's poem, but gives, as its title indicates, three character figures, Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. The art and fancy with which Liszt here makes and develops psychologic, dramatic variation of a theme are shown in the third movement. Mephistopheles, the 'spirit that denies,' 'for all that does arise deserves to perish,' is the principle of the piece.
"Hence, Liszt could not give it a theme of its own, but built up the whole movement out of caricatures of previous themes referring specially to Faust; and it is only stupid lack of comprehension that brought against Liszt, in a still higher degree than against Berlioz, the reproach of poverty of invention. 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. Against it the might of the devil is shattered, and sinks back into nothing. The poet might let Gretchen sink, nay, become a criminal; the musician, in obedience to the ideal, noble character of his art, preserves for her a form of light. Powerful trombone calls resound through the dying hell-music, a male chorus begins softly Goethe's sublime words of the chorus mysticus, 'All that is transient is emblem alone,' and in the clearly recognised notes of the Gretchen theme a tenor voice continues, 'The ever-womanly draweth us up!' This tenor voice may be identified with Goethe's Doctor Marianus; we may imagine Gretchen glorified into the Mater Gloriosa, and recall Faust's words when he beholds Gretchen's image in the vanishing clouds:
'Like some fair soul, the lovely form ascends,
And, not dissolving, rises to the skies
And draws away the best within me with it.'
"So, in great compositions, golden threads spun from sunshine move between the music and the inspiring poetry, light and swaying, adorning both arts, fettering neither.
"Perhaps with still more unity and power than the Faust Symphony is the tone poem to Dante's Divine Comedy, with its thrilling representations of the torments of hell and the 'purgatorio,' gradually rising in higher and higher spheres of feeling. In these works Liszt gave us the best he could give. They mark the summit of his creative power, and the ripest fruit of that style of programme music that is artistically justified, since Berlioz.
"Outside of these two symphonies Liszt's orchestral works consist of only one movement and, as you know, are entitled Symphonic Poems. The title is extremely happy, and seems to lay down the law, perhaps the only law that a composition must follow if it has any raison d'être. Let it be a 'poem,' that is, let it grow out of a poetic idea, an inspiration of the soul, which remains either unspoken or communicated to the public by the title and programme; but let it also be 'symphonic,' which here is synonymous with 'musical.' Let it have a form, either one derived from the classic masters, or a new one that grows out of the contents and is adapted to them. Formlessness in art is always censurable and in music can never win pardon by a programme or by 'what the composer was thinking.' Liszt's symphonic works show a great first step on a new path. Whoever wishes to follow it must, before all things, be careful not to imitate Liszt's weakness, a frequently remarkable disjointed conception, nor to make it a law, but to write compositions which are more than musical illustrations to programmes."
Rubinstein, though he had been intimate with Liszt at Weimar, and profiting by his advice, made no concealment of his aversion to the compositions. In his "Conversation on Music" he said: "Liszt's career as a composer from 1853 is, according to my idea, a very disappointing one. In every one of his compositions 'one marks design and is displeased.' We find programme music carried to the extreme, also continual posing—in his church music before God, in his orchestral music works before the public, in his transcriptions of songs before the composers, in his Hungarian rhapsodies before the gipsies—in short, always and everywhere posing.
"'Dans les arts il faut faire grand' was his usual dictum, therefore the affectation in his work. His fashion for creating something new—à tout prix—caused him to form entire compositions out of a simple theme.... So: the sonata form—to set this aside means to extemporise a fantasia that is however not a symphony, not a sonata, not a concerto. Architecture is nearest allied to music in its fundamental principles—can a formless house or church or any other building be imagined? Or a structure, where the façade is a church, another part of the structure a railway station, another part a floral pavilion, and still another part a manufactory, and so on? Hence lack of form in music is improvisation, yes, borders almost on digression. Symphonic poems (so he calls his orchestral works) are supposed to be another new form of art—whether a necessity and vital enough to live, time, as in the case of Wagner's Music-Drama, must teach us. His orchestral instrumentation exhibits the same mastery as that of Berlioz and Wagner, even bears their stamp; with that, however, it is to be remembered that his pianoforte is the Orchestra-Pianoforte and his orchestra the Pianoforte-Orchestra, for the orchestral composition sounds like an instrumented pianoforte composition. 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. Their influence on the composers of the day is great, but as I believe unhealthy."