II
“The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young.”
This sentence, charmingly phrased as it is charming in sentiment, could be uttered by no other than Camille Saint-Saëns. He wrote of Liszt and, as the natural son of the Hungarian composer, musically speaking, he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most critics; his adoration is perfectly excusable, for to him Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of classical form only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the romantic. They all came from Berlioz; Saint-Saëns’ violent protest to the contrary; only this much may be urged in the latter’s favor: a great movement like the romantic movement in music, painting and literature appeared simultaneously in a half dozen places. It was in the air, and catching. Goethe dismissed the whole movement in his usual Jovian fashion, saying to Eckermann: “They all come from Châteaubriand,” and this is a sound criticism for, in the writings of the author of The Genius of Christianity and Atala may be found the germ-plasm of all the artistic disorder; the fierce color, the bizarrerie, the morbid extravagance, the introspective analysis—which in Amiel’s case amounted almost to mania. Stendhal was the unwilling St. John of the movement that captivated the powerful imagination of Franz Liszt, as it later caused the orphic utterances of Richard Wagner.
Saint-Saëns sets great store on Liszt’s original compositions, and I am sure when all the brilliant, empty operatic paraphrases and Hungarian rhapsodies are forgotten, the true Liszt will shine more brightly. How cheap and tinkling are these piano rhapsodies, and how the old bones do rattle! We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz variations and Kalkbrenner’s fantasias but the next generation will laugh at us for tolerating Liszt’s rhapsodies when Brahms has written three such wonderful examples. Technically the Liszt arrangements are excellent finger pieces. You may “show off” with them and make much noise and a reputation for virtuosity that would be shattered if a Bach fugue were selected as a test. One Chopin mazourka contains more music than all of Liszt’s rhapsodies, which are but overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt’s pompous, affected introductions, spun-out scales and transcendental technical feats are all foreign to the wild, native simplicity of Hungarian folk-music.
I need not speak of Liszt’s admirable transcriptions of songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz, nor of his own original songs nor yet of his three concertos for piano. All these are witnesses to the man’s geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish to speak only of the compositions for piano solo composed by Liszt, Ferencz of Raiding, Hungaria. Many I salute with the Eljen of patriotic enthusiasm, and I particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his knowledge of the études—those wonderful continuations of the Chopin études—of his acquaintance with the Années de Pèlerinage, of the Valse Oubliée, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the nocturnes, of the F sharp impromptu, of Ab-Irato—that étude of which most pianists never heard—of the Apparitions, of the Legendes, of the Ballades, of the mazourka in A major, of the Elegies, of the Harmonies Poétiques, of the Concerto Patetico à la Burmeister, of many other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory—as Philip Hale would say—a half dozen piano composers at this fag-end of the century.
The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B minor sonata was one of those compositions that played itself, it lay so beautifully for the hand; and while I have not encountered many self-playing B minor sonatas nor even many pianists who can attack the work in a manner commensurate with its content, I am thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of the great pianist’s remark. To me no work of Liszt, with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie which masquerades in H moll as a sonata. Agreeing with Mr. Krehbiel and Mr. Henderson, who declare that they cannot find a trace of a sonata in the organic structure of this composition, and also with those who declare this work to be an amplification of the old obsolete form and that Liszt has simply taken Beethoven’s latest sonata period as a starting point and made a plunge for futurity—agreeing absolutely with these warring factions, and thus choking off the contingency of an interesting argument, I repeat that I find the B minor sonata of Liszt most fascinating music.
What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It certainly stirs the blood—it is intense and it is complex. The opening bars are so truly Lisztian.
The gloom, the harmonic haze out of which emerges that bold theme in octaves, the leap from the G to the A sharp—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 concerto which is mocking, cynical, but tremendous. How incisively the composer taps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking Ds! What follows is like a drama enacted in the nether-world. Is there really a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, better than Liszt? Berlioz had the gift, so had Raff, so has Saint-Saëns, but thin, sharp flames hover about the brass, wood and shrieking strings of Liszt’s orchestra. The chorale, which is usually the meat of a Liszt composition, soon appears and proclaims the composer’s religious belief in powerful accents, and we are swept away in conviction until after that burst in C, when comes the insincerity of it in the following harmonic sequences. Then it is not real heart-whole belief, and after the faint return of the opening motive, appears the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment which engenders the notion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix, he was before a woman. He dearly loves to blend piety and passion in the most mystically-amorous fashion, and in this sonata with the cantando espressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for pyx and reredos.
But the rustle of silken attire is in every bar; sensuous imagery, faint perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah, naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy chorales and tonsures, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody and in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress; wilt thou allow her to make away with thy resolutions? Vade retro, Sathanas! and it is done; the bold utterance so triumphantly proclaimed at the outset is sounded with chordal pomp and power. The hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and so this ruddy, moving picture with its swirl of intoxicating colors goes kaleidoscopically on. Again the devil tempts this musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major, and he momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is heard again and if its orthodoxy is in spots faulty, it serves its purpose, for the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic disease, is short-winded. 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 splendor. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the conqueror, Liszt the magnificent, is stamped on every octave. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the earth tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from this cyclopean fist! Then follow a few bars of that very Beethoven-like andante, a moving return of the early themes, and silently the first lento descends to the subterranean depths whence it emerged; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor contains all of Liszt’s strength and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long, it is full of nobility, a drastic intellectuality and sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a prominent place in the repertory of piano music, were folly.
It is not my intention to claim your consideration for the rest of Liszt’s original compositions. In the Années de Pèlerinage, redolent of Virgilian meadows, with soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious than the étude Au Bord d’une Source? It is exquisitely idyllic. Surely in those years of pilgrimage Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the French salon or Continental concert platform.
Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian patterned after the noblest things of nature. In the atmosphere of salons of the Papal Court and the public, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character.
Oh, I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord! Pooh! if he had not had to cut and run to sanctuary to escape two women we should never have heard of Liszt the Abbé!
One penalty of genius is its pursuit by glossaries and gibes. Liszt was no exception. Like Maeterlinck and Ibsen, he has had many things read into his music; mysticism not being forgotten. Perhaps the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the usual pleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any distinguished man, not in a book.
The Mephisto Valse from Lenau’s Faust, in addition to its biting, broad humor and Satanic suggestiveness, contains one of the most voluptuous episodes outside of a score by Wagner. That halting languorous syncopated, valse-like theme in D flat is marvellously expressive, and the poco allegretto seems to have struck the fancy of Wagner, who did not hesitate to appropriate from his esteemed father-in-law when the notion struck him.
He certainly considered Kundry Liszt-wise before fabricating her motif for Parsifal. In the hands of a capable pianist the Mephisto Valse can be made very effective. The twelve great études should be on the desk of every student of advanced technique. So should the Waldesrauschen and Gnomenreigen and I cannot sufficiently praise the three beautiful Études de Concert. The ballades and legendes are becoming favorites at recitals. The polonaise in E, when compared to the less familiar one in C minor, seems banal. Liszt’s life was a sequence of triumphs, his sympathies were boundless, he appreciated and even appropriated Chopin, he unearthed Schumann’s piano music, he materially aided Wagner and discovered Robert Franz; yet he had time for himself and his spiritual nature was never quite submerged. I wish however that he had not manufactured the rhapsodies and the Liszt pupil!