V
Liszt, the supreme virtuoso of the piano, is the Liszt who wrote about three-fourths of the compositions which bear his name. The other fourth, or perhaps a quarter share of the whole, comes from another Liszt, a great poet, who could feel the values of whole nations as Chopin could feel the values of individual souls. It is not a paradox to say that Liszt was so utterly master of the piano that he was a slave to it. With it he won a place for himself among counts and princesses, storming a national capital with twenty-four concerts at a single visit by way of variety between flirtations. Having so deeply in his being the pianistic formulas for conquering, it was inevitable that when he set out to do other tasks the pianistic formula conquered him. So it is, at least, in much of his music, which, with all its supreme pianistic skill, is sometimes pretty worthless music. Only, apart from this Liszt of the piano, there always stood that other Liszt—the one who, as he tells us in his book on gypsy music, slept in the open fields with the gypsies, studied and noted their tunes, and felt the great sweeps of nature as strongly as he felt the great sweeps of history. Both Liszts must be kept in mind if we would understand his piano works.
Liszt’s piano style was quite the opposite of Chopin’s. The Pole played for a few intimate friends; the Hungarian played for a vast auditorium. He had the sense of the crowd as few others have ever had it. His dazzling sweeps of arpeggios, of diatonic and chromatic runs, his thunderous chords, piling up on one another and repeated in violent succession, his unbelievable rapidity of finger movement, his way of having the whole seven octaves of the keyboard apparently under his fingers at once—in short, his way of making the pianoforte seem to be a whole orchestra—this was the Liszt who wrote the greater part of what we are about to summarize briefly.
Liszt’s piano style was not born ready made. Although he captured Paris as an infant prodigy when he first went there, he had an immense amount of maturing and developing to do. ‘It is due in great measure to the example of Paganini’s violin playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil, created modern piano playing,’ says Dr. Bie. ‘The world was struck dumb by the enchantment of the Genoese violinist; men did not trust their ears; something uncanny, inexplicable, ran with this demon of music through the halls. The wonder reached Liszt; he ventured on his instrument to give sound to the unheard of; leaps which none before him had ventured to make, “disjunctions” which no one had hitherto thought could be acoustically united; deep tremolos of fifths, like a dozen kettle-drums, which rushed forth into wild chords; a polyphony which almost employed as a rhythmical element the overtones which destroy harmony; the utmost possible use of the seven octaves in chords set sharply one over another; resolutions of tied notes in unceasing octave graces with harmonies hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fullness of tone-color; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application of the tone-colors of different octaves for the coloration of the tone-effect; the entirely naturalistic use of the tremolo and the glissando; and, above all, a perfect systematization of the method of interlacing the hands, partly for the management of runs, so as to bring out the color, partly to gain a doubled power by the division, and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in the figures, a fullness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process of individualization begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin.’
The earliest of Liszt’s published études, published in 1826, are now difficult to obtain. They were the public statement of his pianistic creed, the ultimatum, so to speak, of the most popular pianist of the day to all rivals. They seemed to represent the utmost of pianistic skill. Then, in 1832, came Paganini to Paris, and Liszt, with his customary justice toward others, recognized in him the supreme executant, and, what was more significant, the element of the true artist. Inevitably the experience reacted on his own art. He adapted six of Paganini’s violin caprices for piano, achieving a new ‘last word’ in pianoforte technique. These studies still hold their place in piano concerts, especially the picturesque ‘Campanella.’ In 1838 Liszt sought to mark the progress of his pianism to date by publishing a new arrangement of his earliest études, under the name of Études d’exécution transcendante. These, while primarily technical studies, are also the work of a creative artist. The Mazeppa was a symphonic poem in germ (later becoming one in actuality). The Harmonies du Soir, experimenting with ‘atmospheric’ tone qualities on the piano, is an ancestor of the modern ‘impressionistic’ school. The Étude Héroique foreshadows the Tasso and Les Préludes. The significant thing in this is the way in which Liszt’s creative impulse grew out of his mastery of the piano.
A predominant part of Liszt’s earlier activity has in recent times passed into comparative insignificance. We are nowadays inclined to sneer at his pompous arrangements of everything from Beethoven symphonies and Bach preludes to the popular operas of the day. But these arrangements, by which his pianistic method chiefly became known, were equally important in their effect on pianism and on musical taste. The name and fame of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique went out among the nations chiefly through Liszt’s playing of his arrangement of it. Schubert’s songs, likewise, which one would suppose were possible only for the voice, were paraphrased by Liszt with such keen understanding of the melodic resources of the piano, and such pious regard for the intentions of Schubert, that Liszt’s piano was actually the chief apostle of Schubert’s vocal music through a great part of Europe. Liszt was similarly an apostle of Beethoven’s symphonies. It is eternally to his credit that Liszt, though in many ways an aristocrat in spirit, was never a musical snob; his paraphrases of Auber’s and Bellini’s operas showed as catholic a sense of beauty as his arrangements of Beethoven. He could bow to the popular demand for opera potpourris without ever quite descending to the vulgar level of most pianists of his day, though coming perilously near it. His arrangements were always in some degree the work of a creative artist, who could select his themes and develop them into an artistic whole. They were equally the work of an interpretive artist, for they frequently revealed the true beauties and meanings of an opera better than the conductors and singers of the day did.
As Liszt travelled about the world on his triumphal tours, or sojourned in the company of the Countess d’Agoult in Switzerland, he sought to confide his impressions to his piano. These impressions were published in the two volumes of the ‘Years of Pilgrimage,’ poetic musical pictures in the idiom of pianistic virtuosity. The first of these pieces was written to picture the uprising of the workmen in Lyons, following the Paris revolution of 1830. Thereafter came impressions of every sort. The chapel of William Tell, the Lake of Wallenstein, the dances of Venice or Naples, the reading of Dante or of Petrarch’s sonnets—all gave him some musical emotion or picture which he sought to translate into terms of the piano. The musical value of these works is highly variable, but at their best, as in certain of the grandiose Petrarch sonnets, they equal the best of his symphonic poems. In these works, too, his experiments in radical harmony are frequent, and at times he completely anticipates the novel progressions of Debussy—whole-toned scale and all. Along with the ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ may be grouped certain other large compositions for the piano, such as the two ‘Legends’ of St. Francis, the six ‘Consolations,’ the brilliant polonaises, the fascinating ‘Spanish Rhapsody,’ and the grandiose Funerailles. All of these works are still frequently played by concert pianists.
The two grand concertos with orchestra—in E flat major and A major—are of dazzling technical brilliancy. In the second in particular the pianistic resource seems inexhaustible. The thematic material is in Liszt’s finest vein and the orchestral accompaniment is executed in the highest of colors. In the second, too, Liszt not only connects the movements, as was the fashion of the day, but completely fuses them, somewhat in the manner that a Futurist painter fuses the various parts of his picture. Scherzo, andante, and allegro enter when fancy ordains, lasting sometimes but a moment, and returning as they please. In the same way is constructed the superb pianoforte sonata in B minor, a glorious fantasy in Liszt’s most heroic style. It is commonly said that as a sonata this work is structurally weak; it would be truer to say that as a sonata it has no existence. It is the nobility of the work, in its contrapuntal and pianistic mastership, that carries conviction.
The Hungarian Rhapsodies, perhaps Liszt’s most typical achievement, are universally known. They were the outcome of his visit to his native land in 1840, and of the notes he made at the time from the singing of the gypsies. His book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ is well worth reading for any who wish to know the real impulse behind the Rhapsodies. Liszt, beyond any of his time, understood the æsthetic and ethical import of folk-music, and knew how to place it at the foundation of all other music whatsoever. Without such an appreciation he could not have caught so accurately the distinctive features of Hungarian music and developed them through his fifteen rhapsodies without ever once losing the true flavor. In them the gypsy ‘snap,’ the dotted notes, the instrumental character, the extreme emphasis on rhythm, and the peculiar oriental scales become supremely expressive. Liszt is here, as he aspired to be, truly a national poet. The Lassan or slow movement of the second, and every note of the twelfth, the national hymn and funeral march which open the fourteenth, are a permanent part of our musical heritage. On the other hand, their real musical value is unhappily obscured by virtuoso display. They are, first and foremost, pieces for display, however much genuine life and virility the folk melodies and rhythms on which they are based may give them. As such they find their usual place at the end of concert programs, to suit the listener who is tired of really listening and desires only to be taken off his feet by pyrotechnics; as well as to furnish the player his final opportunity to dazzle and overpower.