V
The most typical musical form of to-day—the symphonic poem—is wholly the creation of Liszt. The dramatic symphony attained its highest development at the hands of its inventor; later works of the kind, such as Raff’s ‘Lenore Symphony,’ have been musically of the second or third rate. It is quite true that a large proportion of the symphonies of to-day have some sort of general program or ‘subject,’ and nearly all are sufficiently dramatic in feeling to invite fanciful ‘programs’ on the part of their hearers. But few composers have cared or dared to go to Berlioz’s lengths. The symphonic poem, on the other hand, has become the ambition of most of the able orchestral writers of our day. And, whereas Berlioz has never been equalled in his line, Liszt has often been surpassed, notably by Richard Strauss, in his.
Curiously enough, Berlioz, who was by temperament least fitted to work in the strict symphonic form, always kept to it in some degree. The most revolutionary of spirits never broke away wholly from the past. Liszt carried Berlioz’s program ideas to their logical conclusion, inventing a type of composition in which the form depended wholly and solely on the subject matter. This latter statement will almost serve as a definition of the symphonic poem. It is any sort of orchestral composition which sets itself to tell a story or depict the emotional content of a story. Its form will be—what the story dictates, and no other. The distinction sometimes drawn between the symphonic poem and the tone poem is largely fanciful. One may say that the former tends to the narrative and the latter to the emotional, but for practical purposes the two terms may be held synonymous.
In any kind of musical narration it is usually necessary to represent the principal characters or ideas in particular fashion, and the leit-motif is the natural means to this end. And, though theoretically not indispensable, the leit-motif has become a distinguishing feature of the symphonic poem and inseparable from it. Sometimes the themes are many (Strauss has scores of them in his Heldenleben), but Liszt took a particular pleasure in economy of means. Sometimes a single theme served him for the development of the whole work. He took the delight of a short-story writer in making his work as compact and unified as possible. In fact, the formal theory of the symphonic poem would read much like Poe’s well known theory of the short story. Let there be some predominant character or idea—‘a single unique effect,’ in Poe’s language—and let this be developed through the various incidents of the narration, changing according to the changing conditions, but always retaining an obvious relation to the central idea. Or, in musical terms, select a single theme (or at most two or three) representing the central character or idea, and repeat and develop this in various forms and moods. This principle brought to a high efficiency a device which Berlioz used only tentatively—that of transformation. To Liszt a theme should always be fluid, rarely repeating itself exactly, for a story never repeats itself. And his musicianship and invention show themselves at their best (and sometimes at their worst) in his constant variation of his themes through many styles and forms.
But such formal statement as this is vague and meaningless without the practical application which Liszt gave it. The second and in many respects the noblest of Liszt’s symphonic poems is the ‘Tasso, Lament and Triumph,’ composed in 1849 to accompany a festival performance of Goethe’s play at Weimar on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The subject caught hold of Liszt’s romantic imagination. He confesses, like the good romanticist that he is, that Byron’s treatment of the character appealed to him more than Goethe’s. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says in his preface to the work, ‘Byron, in his picture of Tasso in prison, was unable to add to the remembrance of his poignant grief, so nobly and eloquently uttered in his “Lament,” the thought of the “Triumph” that a tardy justice gave to the chivalrous author of “Jerusalem Delivered.” We have sought to mark this dual idea in the very title of our work, and we should be glad to have succeeded in pointing this great contrast—the genius who was misjudged during his life, surrounded, after death, with a halo that destroyed his enemies. Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara; he was avenged at Rome; his glory still lives in the folk-songs of Venice. These three elements are inseparable from his memory. To represent them in music, we first called up his august spirit as he still haunts the waters of Venice. Then we beheld his proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals of Ferrara where he had produced his master-works. Finally, we followed him to Rome, the eternal city, that offered him the crown and glorified in him the martyr and the poet.’ A few lines further Liszt says: ‘For the sake, not merely of authority, but the distinction of historical truth, we put our idea into realistic form in taking for the theme of our musical hero the melody to which we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing over the waters the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet.’ The theme is one of the finest in the whole Liszt catalogue. We need hardly go to the length of saying that its origin was a fiction on the part of the composer, but doubtless he changed it generously to suit his musical needs. Yet his evident delight in its pretended origin is typical of the man and the time; romanticism had a sentimental veneration for ‘the people,’ especially the people of the Middle Ages, and a Venetian gondolier would naturally be the object of a shower of quite undeserved sentimental poetry. The whole story, and the atmosphere which surrounded it, was meat for Liszt’s imagination.
This is the theme—a typical one—which Liszt transforms, ‘according to the changing conditions,’ to delineate his hero’s struggles, the heroic character of the man; his determination to achieve greatness; his ‘proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals at Ferrara’—the theme of the dance itself is developed from the Tasso motif:
and then his boisterous acclamation by the crowd in Rome:
And here, for a moment, the listener hides his face. For Liszt has become as cheap as any bar-room fiddler. His theme will not stand this transformation. It happens again and again in Liszt, this forcing of a theme into a mold in which it sounds banal. No doubt the acclamations of the crowd were banal (if Liszt intended it that way), but this thought cannot compensate a listener who is having his ears pained. It is one of the regrettable things about Liszt, whose best is very nearly equal to the greatest in music, that he sometimes sails into a passage of banality without seeming to be at all conscious of it. Perhaps in this case he was conscious of it, but stuck to his plan for the sake of logical consistency. (The most frenzied radicals are sometimes the most rigid doctrinaires.) The matter is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it is one of the most characteristic faults of the great man. In the present case we are compensated for this vulgar episode by the grand ‘apotheosis’ which closes the work:
Such is the method, and it is in principle the same as that since employed by all composers of ‘symphonic poems’—of program music in fact.
Liszt’s symphonic poems number twelve (excluding one, ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ which was left unfinished at the time of his death). When they are at their best they are among the most inspiring things in modern music. But Liszt’s strange absence of self-criticism mingles with these things passages which an inferior composer might have been suspicious of. In consequence many of his symphonic poems have completely dropped from our concert programs. Such ones as the ‘Hamlet,’ the Festklänge, and ‘What is to Be Heard on the Mountain,’ are hardly worth the efforts of any orchestra. Les Préludes, on the other hand, remains one of the most popular of our concert pieces. Nowhere are themes more entrancing than in this work, or his structural form more convincing. ‘The Ideal,’ after Schiller’s poems, was one of Wagner’s favorites among the twelve, but is uneven in quality. ‘Orpheus,’ which is less ‘programmistic’ than any of the others, in that it attempts only an idealized picture of the mythical musician, is worked out on a consistently high plane of musicianship. ‘Mazeppa,’ narrating the ride of Byron’s hero tied on the back of a wild horse, is simply an elaboration and orchestral scoring of one of the piano études published as Liszt’s opus 1 in 1826. The étude was even entitled ‘Mazeppa,’ and was descriptive of the wild ride, so we may, if we choose, give Liszt the credit of having schemed the symphonic poem form in germ before he became acquainted with the works of Berlioz. ‘Hungaria,’ a heroic fantasy on Hungarian tunes, should have been, one would think, one of the best of Liszt’s works, but in point of fact it sounds strangely empty, and exhibits to an irritating degree the composer’s way of playing to the gallery. The Festklänge was written, tradition says, to celebrate his expected marriage with the Princess von Wittgenstein, and, in view of Huneker’s remark that Liszt accepted the Pope’s veto to this project ‘with his tongue in his cheek,’ we may assume that its emptiness was a true gauge of his feelings. In most of these works there is more than one chief theme, and sometimes a pronounced antithesis or contrast of two themes. In this classification falls ‘The Preludes,’ which, in attempting to trace man’s struggles preparatory to ‘that great symphony whose initial note is sounded by death,’ makes use of two themes, each of rare beauty, to depict the heroic and the gentle sides of the hero’s nature, respectively. The antithesis is more pronounced in ‘The Battle of the Huns,’ founded on Kalbeck’s picture, which is meant to symbolize the struggle between Christianity (or the Church) and Paganism. The Huns have a wild minor theme in triplets, and the Church is represented by the Gregorian hymn, Crux Fidelis.
Thus by works as well as by faith Liszt established the musical type which best expressed his fervent romantic nature. The symphonic poem form, coming to something like maturity at the hands of one man, was a proof of his intellectuality and his high musicianship. We may wish that he had written less and criticized his work more, but many of the pages are inescapable in their beauty. In them we are in the very heart of nineteenth-century romanticism.