III
We may conceive Herz and Thalberg each to be an infant Hercules, strangling serpents in his cradle, if we compare them with Franz Liszt, who, above all else, represents virtuosity grown to fully heroic proportions. He was the great and universal hero in the history of music. He cannot be dissociated from the public, the general world over which he established his supremacy by feats of sheer muscular or technical skill. Even the activity of his mind was essentially empirical. Especially in the realm of pianoforte music he won his unique place by colossal energy put to test or to experiment upon the public through the instrument. The majority of his compositions in this branch of music are tours de force.
His manifold activities in music all reveal the truly great virtuoso, whom we may here define as an agent of highest efficiency between a created art and the public to which it must be related. We will presently analyze some of his compositions for the pianoforte, but without presuming to draw from features of them so discovered any conclusions as to their musical vitality or their æsthetic value. These conclusions must be left to the wisdom and sense of posterity; whatever they may prove to be, one cannot at present but recognize in Liszt first and foremost the intermediary. He so conducted himself in all his musical activities, which, taken in the inverse order of their importance, show him as a writer upon subjects related to music, as a conductor, as a composer, and as a pianist. He worked in an indissoluble relation with the public, and by virtue of this relation appears to us a hero of human and comprehensible shape, though enormous, whose feet walked in the paths of men and women, and whose head was not above the clouds in a hidden and secret communion which we can neither define nor understand.
Many qualities in his character and in his person, which, of course, are of no importance in estimating the value of his compositions, made his peculiar relation with the public secure. His face was very handsome, brilliantly so; he had a social charm which won for him a host of friends in all the capitals of Europe; he was fascinating to men and women in private, and in public exercised a seemingly irresistible personal magnetism over his audiences. He was, moreover, exceedingly generous and charitable, quick to befriend all musicians, especially men younger than he, and to lend his aid in, movements of public benefaction. He was an accomplished linguist, and cosmopolitan, indeed international in his sympathies. As a teacher he inspired his many pupils with an almost passionate affection and feeling of loyal devotion. All these qualities set him quite apart from the wizard Paganini, with whom alone his technical mastery of his instrument was comparable. Paganini was wrapped in mystery, whether he wove the veil himself or not; Liszt was thoroughly a man of the world.
Liszt’s playing was stupendous. At least two influences fired him not only to develop a technique which was limited only by the physically impossible, but to establish himself as the unequalled player of the age. Already as a youth when he first came to Paris this technique was extraordinary, though probably not unmatched. It was the wizardry of Paganini, whom he heard in Paris, that determined him to seek an attainment hitherto undreamed of in skill with the keyboard. This he achieved before he left Paris to journey away from the world in Switzerland and Italy. During his absence Thalberg came to Paris and took it by storm. Back came Liszt post-haste to vanquish his rival and establish more firmly his threatened position. The struggle was long and hotly fought, but the victory remained with Liszt, who, though he had not that skill in a kind of melody playing which was peculiar to Thalberg, towered far above his rival in virility, in fire, and in variety.
We may thus imagine him established by force of arms as king of all pianists. He never relinquished his royal prerogatives nor could he tolerate a challenge of his power; but he proved himself most a hero in the use to which he put this enormous power. He chose the master’s highest privilege and made himself a public benefactor. It is true that he never wholly discarded the outward trappings of royal splendor. He played operatic fantasias like the rest; made, of his own, fabrics which were of a splendor that was blinding. But the true glory of his reign was the tribute he paid to men who had been greater than kings in music and the service he rendered to his own subjects in making known to them the masterpieces of these men, the fugues of Bach, the last sonatas of Beethoven, the works of Chopin. It was largely owing to Liszt that the general public was educated to an appreciation of these treasures, even that it became aware of its possession of them. It may be added that the pupils of this man, who was the most outstanding and overpowering of all the pianoforte virtuosi, made wholly familiar to the world a nobler practice of virtuosity in service to great music. Here, however, must be mentioned one great contemporary of Liszt’s, Clara Schumann, who, possessed of greatest skill, made her playing, in even greater degree than Liszt, the interpreter of great music. It is one of the richest tributes to Liszt as a pianist that he may in some respects be compared with that noble woman.
It seems to have been above all else the fire in Liszt’s playing which made it what it was, a fire which showed itself in great flames of sound, spreading with incredible rapidity up and down the keyboard, which, like lightning, was followed by a prodigious thunder. Yet it was a playing which might rival all the elements, furious winds, tumultuous waters, very phenomena of sounds. Caricatures show him in all sorts of amazing attitudes, and many draw him with more than two hands, or more than five fingers to a hand. At the piano he was like Jupiter with the thunder-bolts, Æolus with the winds of heaven, Neptune with the oceans of the earth in his control. And at the piano he made his way to the throne which perhaps no other will ever occupy again.
Just what was the effect of Liszt’s accomplishments upon pianoforte technique must be carefully considered, and such a consideration will bring us to problems which we may venture to assert are of profound interest to the pianist and to the musician. Broadly speaking he expanded the range of technique enormously, which is to say that he discovered many new effects and developed others which had previously been but partially understood. The Douze Études d’exécution transcendante may be taken to constitute a registry of his technical innovations.
First, in these, and in all his music, he makes a free and almost constant use of all the registers of the keyboard, the very low and the very high more than they had been used before, and the middle with somewhat more powerful scoring than was usual with any other composers excepting Schumann. Particularly his use of the low registers spread through the piano an orchestral thunder.
The ceaseless and rapid weaving together of the deepest and the highest notes made necessary a wide, free movement of both arms, and more remarkably of the left arm, because such rapid flights had hardly been demanded of it before. The fourth étude, a musical reproduction of the ride of Mazeppa, is almost entirely a study in the movement of the arms, demanding of them, especially in the playing of the inner accompaniment, an activity and control hardly less rapid or less accurate than what a great part of pianoforte music had demanded of the fingers.
It is in fact by recognizing the possibilities of movement in the arm that Liszt did most to expand pianoforte technique. One finds not only such an interplaying of the arms as that in ‘Mazeppa’ and other of his compositions, but a playing of the arms together in octave passages which leap over broadest distances at lightning speed. Sometimes these passages are centred, or rather based, so to speak, on a fixed point, from and to which the arms shoot out and back, touching a series of notes even more remote from the base, often being expected to cover the distance of nearly two octaves, as in the beginning of the first concerto. There are samples of this difficulty in ‘Mazeppa’; and also of other runs in octaves for both hands, which are full of irregular and wide skips.
In the long and extremely rapid tremolos with which his music is filled, it is again the arm which is exerted to new efforts. The last of the études is a study in tremolo for the arm, and so is the first of the Paganini transcriptions. The tremolo, it need hardly be said, is no invention of Liszt’s, but no composer before him demanded either such rapidity in executing it, or such a flexibility of the arm. The tremolo divided between the two hands, as here in this last study, and the rapid alternation of the two hands in the second study, depend still further on the freedom of the arm. It is the arm that is called upon almost ceaselessly in the tenth study; and the famous Campanella in the Paganini series is only a tour de force in a lateral movement of the arm, swinging on the wrist.
The series, usually chromatic, of free chords which one finds surging up and down the keyboard, often for both hands, may well paralyze the unpracticed arm; the somewhat bombastic climaxes, in which, à la Thalberg, he makes a huge noise by pounding chords, are a task for the arm. All of the last part of the eleventh étude, Harmonies du soir, is a study for the arm. Indeed even the wide arpeggios, running from top to bottom of the keyboard in bolder flight than Thalberg often ventured upon, the rushing scales, in double or single notes, the countless cadenzas and runs for both hands, all of these, which depend upon velocity for their effect, are possible only through the unmodified liberation of the arm.
All this movement of the arm over wide distances and at high speed makes possible the broad and sonorous effects which may be said to distinguish his music from that of his predecessors and his contemporaries. It makes possible his thunders and his winds, his lightnings and his rains. Thus he created a sort of grand style which every one must admit to be imposing.
Beyond these effects it is difficult to discover anything further so uniquely and so generally characteristic in his pianoforte style. He demands an absolutely equal skill in both hands, frequently throughout an entire piece. He calls for the most extreme velocity in runs of great length, sometimes in whole pages; and for as great speed in executing runs of double notes as in those of single. A study like the Feux-Follets deals with a complex mixture of single and double notes. All these things, however, can be found in the works of Schumann, or Chopin, or even Beethoven. Yet it must be said that no composer ever made such an extended use of them, nor exacted from the player quite so much physical endurance and sustained effort. Moreover, against the background of his effects of the arm, they take on a new light, no matter how often they had a share in the works of other composers.
It can hardly be denied, furthermore, that this new light which they seem to give his music, by which it appears so different from that of Schumann and even more from that of Chopin, is also due to the use to which he puts them. With Liszt these things are indisputably used wholly as effects. Liszt follows Thalberg, or represents a further development of the idea of pianoforte music which Thalberg represents. He deals with effects,—with, as we have said elsewhere of Thalberg, masses of sound. Very few of his compositions for the pianoforte offer a considerable exception, and with these we shall have to do presently. The great mass of études, concert or salon pieces, and transcriptions, those works in which he displays this technique, are virtuoso music. He shows himself in them a sensationalist composer. Therefore the music suffers by the necessary limitations mentioned in connection with Herz and Thalberg, with the difference that within these limitations Liszt has crowded the utmost possible to the human hand.
His great resources still remain speed and noise. He can do no more than electrify or stupefy. It must not be forgotten that in these limitations lies the glory of his music, its quality that is heroic because it wins its battles in the world of men and women. It is superb in its physical accomplishment. It shows the mighty Hercules in a struggle with no ordinary serpent, but with the hundred-headed Hydra. Yet if he will electrify he must do so with speed that is reckless, and if he will overpower with noise he must be brutal. Hence the great sameness in his material, trills, arpeggios, scales, and chromatic scales, which are no more than these trills, arpeggios, scales, etc., even if they be filled up with all the notes the hand can grasp. Hence also the passages of rapidly repeated chords in places where he wishes to be imposing to the uttermost.
It would be an interesting experiment to take from Liszt’s pianoforte music all these numerous effects and put them together in a volume; then to classify them, and, having mastered three or four of the formulas, to try to find any further difficulties. It is doubtful if, having so mastered the few types, one would need to make great effort to play the whole volume from cover to cover. And these effects constitute the great substance of Liszt’s music. He fills piece after piece with solid blocks of them. The page on which they are printed terrifies the eye, yet they demand of the player only speed and strength. Inasmuch as these may be presupposed in a theoretical technique, the music is, theoretically, not technically difficult. The higher difficulties of pianoforte playing are not to be met in music that conforms to technical types, but in music the notes of which appear in ever changing combinations and yet are of separate and individual importance. Such music presents a new difficulty almost in every measure. In playing it the mind must control each finger in its every move, and may not attend in general but must attend in particular. The player who can play the twelve études of Liszt will find the Well-tempered Clavichord and the Preludes of Chopin more difficult to play. In the tours de force of Liszt his technique is of itself effective; in the music of Bach or Chopin it must be effectual. Having a colossal technique he can play Liszt, but he must ever practise Bach and Chopin.