VII
FRANZ LISZT
A flood of light is thrown upon the opposing aspects of Franz Liszt's contradictory character by a story told of a certain occasion on which "The Master," as he loved to be called, sat for his portrait to the painter Schaffer. One of those key-stories it is, dear to biographers, which condense in single acts or speeches entire facets of personality. In Paris, in his youth, Liszt went to Schaffer to have his portrait painted. Instinctively he assumed one of those theatrical poses he was in the habit of taking when, at the end of one of his already famous recitals, he stood upon the stage receiving the plaudits of his audience. We can readily imagine it: the head thrown back, the eyes flashing fire, the right hand, perhaps, thrust between the second and third buttons of the coat, the left resting on some conveniently composed piece of furniture. But when Schaffer indicated that this histrionism did not impress him, Liszt, greatly embarrassed, cried out impulsively, "Forgive, dear master, but you do not know how it spoils one to have been an infant prodigy." Here are the two opposing sides of this curious character for once set in a clear antithesis: on the one hand, the affectation, the strut and posture, the cheap theatricality, of the prodigy playing to his audience; on the other, the frankness, the magnanimity, the humility even, of the true artist. Liszt's whole career is one long exhibition of these two attitudes in constant alternation; he is a mingling in one person of the charlatan and the idealist.
Born in Raiding, a small town in Hungary, October 22, 1811, an only child of Adam Liszt, a Hungarian, and Anna Lager, a German, Franz Liszt showed at once such extraordinary talent for music that in his tenth year his parents resolved to educate him in Vienna as a professional musician. After a year and a half in the Austrian capital, where the brilliancy of his piano playing and the cleverness of his improvisations attracted much attention, and where he studied with Czerny and Salieri, he was taken by his parents to Paris. Here, in the autumn of 1823, only twelve years old, he took his first plunge into the atmosphere of adulation which was to become to him in later years almost a necessary of life. It was now that he became the petted darling of the fashionable salons of the Boulevard St. Germain, and made the great ladies of Parisian society forget for a time their lap-dogs and their love-intrigues in order to caress this fascinating composite of the child and the virtuoso. After his first public concert in Paris, in March, 1824, he "made the round of the boxes," a sort of triumphal progress across the laps of great ladies, who wooed him, we must suppose, with a discreet mixture of compliments and bonbons. In the following spring he extended his dominion to England, and saw his name in large type on a hand-bill such as nowadays we associate with circuses rather than with concerts. "An Air," we read, "with Grand Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard's New Patent Grand Pianoforte, by
MASTER LISZT,
who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia, and respectfully request Two Written Themes from any of the Audience, upon which he will play his Variations."
There are not wanting signs, however, that the artist in Liszt was already, with approaching adolescence, beginning to disdain the spectacular triumphs of the virtuoso. He began to suspect that "the praise belongs to the child and not the artist"; the indignity of being advertised as a year or two younger than he really was, and being carried upon the stage in his manager's arms, like an infant, aroused his disgust; "I would rather be anything in the world," he cries, "than a musician in the pay of great folk, patronized and paid by them like a conjurer or the clever dog Munito."[38] He became more and more reluctant to appear in public, grew moody and melancholy, occupied himself with religious meditations, and even cherished a half-formed desire to withdraw from the brilliant world into monastic solitude.
This is the first appearance of a mystical tendency of mind which in later years gained great ascendancy over him, and finally led him to take orders in the Roman Catholic Church. The event, however, which decisively ended, for the time, his public piano playing, was the death, in August, 1827, of his father, whose assistance in all practical details was indispensable to his virtuoso tours.