BERLIN, October 8, 1873.
Voilà! as Liszt always says. Here I am back again in old Berlin, and if I ever felt "like a cat in a strange garret," I do now. I left dear little Weimar two days ago, and parted from our adored Liszt a week ago to-day. He has gone to Rome. Never did I feel leaving anybody or any place so much, and Berlin seems to me like a great roaring wilderness. The distances are so endless here. You either have to kill yourself walking, or else spend a fortune in droschkies. The houses all seem to me as if they had grown. There is an immense number of new ones going up on all sides, and the noise, and the crowd, and the confusion are enough to set one distracted, after the idyllic life I've been leading. Ah, well! Es war eben ZU schön! (It was too beautiful!)
Yesterday and to-day I've been looking about for a new boarding-place. I've had two invitations to dinner since my return, but everybody and everything seems so dull and stupid, prosaic and tedious to me, that I declined them both, and haven't given any of my friends my address until I have had a little time to let myself down gradually from the delights of Weimar.
Liszt was kindness itself when the time came to say good-bye, but I could scarcely get out a word, nor could I even thank him for all he had done for me. I did not wish to break down and make a scene, as I felt I should if I tried to say anything. So I fear he thought me rather ungrateful and matter-of-course, for he couldn't know that I was feeling an excess of emotion which kept me silent. I miss going to him inexpressibly, and although I heard my favourite Joachim last night, even he paled before Liszt. He is on the violin what Liszt is on the piano, and is the only artist worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with him.
Like Liszt, he so vitalizes everything that I have to take him in all over again every time I hear him. I am always astonished, amazed and delighted afresh, and even as I listen I can hardly believe that the man can play so! But Liszt, in addition to his marvellous playing, has this unique and imposing personality, whereas at first Joachim is not specially striking. Liszt's face is all a play of feature, a glow of fancy, a blaze of imagination, whereas Joachim is absorbed in his violin, and his face has only an expression of fine discrimination and of intense solicitude to produce his artistic effects. Liszt never looks at his instrument; Joachim never looks at anything else. Liszt is a complete actor who intends to carry away the public, who never forgets that he is before it, and who behaves accordingly. Joachim is totally oblivious of it. Liszt subdues the people to him by the very way he walks on to the stage. He gives his proud head a toss, throws an electric look out of his eagle eye, and seats himself with an air as much as to say, "Now I am going to do just what I please with you, and you are nothing but puppets subject to my will." He said to us in the class one day, "When you come out on the stage, look as if you didn't care a rap for the audience, and as if you knew more than any of them. That's the way I used to do.—Didn't that provoke the critics though!" he added, with an ineffable look of malicious mischief. So you see his principle, and that was precisely the way he did at the rehearsal in the theatre at Weimar that I wrote to you about. Joachim, on the contrary, is the quiet gentleman-artist. He advances in the most unpretentious way, but as he adjusts his violin he looks his audience over with the calm air of a musical monarch, as much as to say, "I repose wholly on my art, and I've no need of any 'ways or manners.'" In reality I admire Joachim's principle the most, but there is something indescribably fascinating and subduing about Liszt's willfulness. You feel at once that he is a great genius, and that you are nothing but his puppet, and somehow you take a base delight in the humiliation! The two men are intensely interesting, each in his own way, but they are extremes.
[Beside his playing and his compositions, what Liszt has done for music and for musicians, and why, therefore, he stands so pre-eminently the greatest and the best beloved master in the musical world, may appear to the general reader in the following extract taken from a translation in Dwight's Journal, Oct. 23, 1880, of "Franz Liszt, a Musical Character Portrait" by La Mara, in the Gartenlaube: "We must count it among the exceptional merits of Liszt, that he has paved the way to recognition for innumerable aspirants, as he always shows an open heart and open hands to all artistic strivings. He was the first and most active furtherer of the immense Bayreuth enterprise, and the chief founder of the Musical Societies or Unions that flourish throughout Germany. And for how many noble and philanthropic objects has he not exerted his artistic resources! If, during his earlier virtuoso career, he made his genius serve the advantage of others far more than his own—saving out of the millions that he earned only a modest sum for himself, while he alone contributed many thousands for the completion of Cologne Cathedral, for the Beethoven monument at Bonn, and for the victims of the Hamburg conflagration—so since the close of his career as a pianist his public artistic activity has been exclusively consecrated to the benefit of others, to artistic undertakings, or to charitable objects. Since the end of 1847, not a penny has come into his own pocket either through piano-playing and conducting, or through teaching. All this, which has yielded such rich capital and interest to others, has cost only sacrifice of time and money to himself.">[—ED.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Kullak as a Teacher. The Four Great Virtuosi, Clara Schumann,
Rubinstein, Von Bülow, and Tausig.
BERLIN, November 7, 1873.
I've been in a sort of mental apathy since I got back—the result, I suppose, of so much artistic excitement all summer. Of course I am practicing very hard, and I am taking private lessons of Kullak again. I played him my Rubinstein concerto two weeks ago and told him I wanted to play it in a concert. He says I need more power in it in many places, and by practicing it every day I hope I shall at last work up to it, as I've conquered the technical difficulties in it. There were two pages in it I thought I never could master. It is the same with all concertos. They are fearfully difficult things to play, and far more difficult, I think, than solos are, because the effort is so sustained. They are to me the most interesting things to listen to of all, and I can't imagine how you can think that piano and orchestra are "not made to go together." However, I never myself appreciated concertos until I came to Germany. Kullak is the most awfully discouraging teacher that can be imagined. When you play to him, it is like looking at your skin through a magnifying glass. All your faults seem to start out and glare at you. I don't think, though, that I ever fairly do myself justice when I play to him, because he has a sort of benumbing effect on me, and I feel to him something the way that Owen did to old Peter in Hawthorne's story of "The Artist of the Beautiful." I can't help acknowledging the truth of his observations even when I am wincing under them, and I yet feel at the same time that he does not wholly get at the soul of the thing. Kullak is so pedantic! He never overlooks a technical imperfection, and he ties you down to the technique so that you never can give rein to your imagination. He sits at the other piano, and just as you are rushing off he will strike in himself and say, "Don't hurry, Fräulein," or something like that, and then you begin to think about holding back your fingers and playing every note even, etc. Now I never expect to get that perfection of technique that all these artists have who have been training throughout their childhood while their hand was forming. Kullak's own technique is magnificent, but now that I've graduated, as it were, he ought to let me play my own way, and not expect me to play as he does, and then I could produce my own effects. That is just the difference between him and Liszt. Liszt's grand principle is, to leave you your freedom, and when you play to him, you feel like a Pegasus caracoling about in the air. When you play to Kullak, you feel as if your wings were suddenly clipped, and as if you were put into harness to draw an express wagon! However, I don't think it would be well to go to Liszt without having been through such a training first, for you want to know what you are about when you study with him. You must have a good solid basis upon which to raise his airy super-structures. Kullak I regard as the basis.