"WHEN I PLAYED FOR LISZT"
To write from Bayreuth in the spring-time as Wagner sleeps calmly in the backyard of Wahnfried, without a hint of his music in the air, is giving me one of the deepest satisfactions of my existence. How came you in Bayreuth, and, of all seasons in the year, the spring? The answer may astonish you; indeed, I am astonished myself when I think of it. Liszt, Franz Liszt, greatest of pianists—after Thalberg—greatest of modern composers—after no one—Liszt lies out here in the cemetery on the Erlangerstrasse, and to visit that forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson Siegfried Wagner, I left my comfortable lodgings in Munich and traveled an entire day.
Now let me whisper something in your ear—I once studied with Liszt at Weimar! Does this seem incredible to you? An adorer of Thalberg, nevertheless, once upon a time I pulled up stakes at Paris and went to the abode of Liszt and played for him exactly once. This was a half-century ago. I carried letters from a well-known Parisian music publisher, Liszt's own, and was therefore accorded a hearing. Well do I recall the day, a bright one in April. His Serene Highness was at that time living on the Altenberg, and to see him I was forced to as much patience and diplomacy as would have gained me admittance to a royal household.
Endlich, the fatal moment arrived. Surrounded by a band of disciples, crazy fellows all—I discovered among the rest the little figure of Karl Tausig—the great man entered the saal where I tremblingly sat. He was very amiable. He read the letters I timidly presented him, and then, slapping me on the back with an expression of bonhomie, he cried aloud in French: "Tiens! let us hear what this admirer of my old friend Thalberg has to say for himself on the keyboard!" I did not miss the veiled irony of the speech, the word friend being ever so lightly underlined; I knew of the famous Liszt-Thalberg duello, during which so much music and ink had been spilt.
But my agony! The via dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano! Since then the modern school of painter-impressionists has come into fashion. I understand perfectly the mental, may I say the optical, attitude of these artists to landscape subjects. They must gaze upon a tree, a house, a cow, with their nerves at highest tension until everything quivers; the sky is bathed in magnetic rays, the background trembles as it does in life. So to me was the lofty chamber wherein I stood on that fateful afternoon. Liszt, with his powerful profile, the profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere.
Yet urged by an hypnotic will I went to the piano, lifted the fall-board, and in my misery I actually paused to read the maker's name. A whisper, a smothered chuckle, and a voice uttering these words: "He must have begun as a piano-salesman," further disconcerted me. I fell on to the seat and dropped my fingers upon the keys. Facing me was the Ary Scheffer portrait of Chopin, and without knowing why I began the weaving Prelude in D-major. My insides shook like a bowl of jelly; yet I was outwardly as calm as the growing grass. My hands did not falter and the music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vain Thalberg's Art of Singing on the Piano. I finished. There was a murmur; nothing more.
Then Liszt's voice cut the air:
"I expected Thalberg's tremolo study," he said. I took the hint and arose.
He permitted me to kiss his hand, and, without stopping for my hat and walking-stick in the antechamber, I went away to my lodgings. Later I sent a servant for the forgotten articles, and the evening saw me in a diligence miles from Weimar. But I had played for Liszt!
Now, the moral of all this is that my testimony furthermore adds to the growing mystery of Franz Liszt. He heard hundreds of such pianists of my caliber, and, while he never committed himself—for he was usually too kind-hearted to wound mediocrity with cruel criticism, yet he seldom spoke the unique word except to such men as Rubinstein, Tausig, Joseffy, d'Albert, Rosenthal, or von Bülow. A miraculous sort of a man, Liszt was ever pouring himself out upon the world, body, soul, brains, art, purse—all were at the service of his fellow-beings. That he was imposed upon is a matter of course; that he never did an unkind act in his life proves him to have been Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman: "One who never inflicts pain." And only now is the real significance of the man as a composer beginning to be revealed. Like a comet he swept the heavens of his early youth. He was a marvelous virtuoso who mistook the piano for an orchestra and often confounded the orchestra with the piano. As a pianist pure and simple I prefer Sigismund Thalberg; but, as a composer, as a man, an extraordinary personality, Liszt quite filled my firmament.
Setting aside those operatic arrangements and those clever, noisy Hungarian Rhapsodies, what a wealth of piano-music has not this man disclosed to us. Calmly read the thematic catalog of Breitkopf and Härtel and you will be amazed at its variety. Liszt has paraphrased inimitably songs by Schubert, Schumann, and Robert Franz, in which the perfumed flower of the composer's thoughts is never smothered by passage-work. Consider the delicious etude Au bord d'une Source, or the Sonnets After Petrarch, or those beautiful concert-studies in D-flat, F-minor, and A-flat; are they not models of genuine piano-music! The settings of Schubert marches Hanslick declared are marvels; and the Transcendental Studies! Are not keyboard limitations compassed? Chopin, a sick man physically, never dared as did Liszt. One was an æolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these studies in their revised form; I content myself with the first sketches published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen. Later Liszt expanded the croquis into elaborate frescoes. And yet they say that he had no thematic invention!
Take up his B-minor sonata. Despite its length, an unheavenly length, it is one of the great works of piano-literature fit to rank with Beethoven's most sublime sonatas. It is epical. Have you heard Friedheim or Burmeister play it? I had hoped that Liszt would vouchsafe me a performance, but you have seen that I had not the courage to return to him. Besides, I wasn't invited. Once in Paris a Liszt pupil, George Leitert, played for me the Dante Sonata, a composition I heard thirty years later from the fingers of Arthur Friedheim. It is the Divine Comedy compressed within the limits of a piano-piece. What folly, I hear some one say! Not at all. In several of Chopin's Preludes—his supreme music—I have caught reflections of the sun, the moon, and the starry beams that one glimpses in lonely midnight pools. If Chopin could mirror the cosmos in twenty bars, why should not a greater tone-poet imprison behind the bars of his music the subtle soul of Dante?
To view the range, the universality of Liszt's genius, it is only necessary to play such a tiny piano-composition, Eclogue, from Les Années de Pèlerinage and then hear his Faust Symphony, his Dante Symphony, his Symphonic Poems. There's a man for you! as Abraham Lincoln once said of Walt Whitman. After carefully listening to the Faust Symphony it dawns on you that you have heard all this music elsewhere, filed out, triturated, cut into handy, digestible fragments; in a word, dressed up for operatic consumption, popularized. Yes, Richard Wagner dipped his greedy fingers into Liszt's scores as well as into his purse. He borrowed from the pure Rhinegold hoard of the Hungarian's genius, and forgot to credit the original. In music there are no quotation marks. That is the reason borrowing has been in vogue from Handel down.
The Ring of the Nibelungs would not be heard today if Liszt had not written its theme in his Faust Symphony. Parsifal is altogether Lisztian, and a German writer on musical esthetics has pointed out recently, theme for theme, resemblance for resemblance, in this Liszt-Wagner Verhältniss. Wagner owed everything to Liszt—from money to his wife, success, and art. A wonderful white soul was Franz Liszt. And he is only coming into his kingdom as a composer. Poor, petty, narrow-minded humanity could not realize that because a man was a pianist among pianists, he might be a composer among composers. I made the error myself. I, too, thought that the velvet touch of Thalberg was more admirable than the mailed warrior fist of Liszt. It is a mistake. And now, plumped on my knees in Liszt's Bayreuth tomb, I acknowledge my faults. Yes, he was a greater pianist than Thalberg. Can an old-fashioned fellow say more?