We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the boy virtuoso, "le petit Litz," electrifying vast audiences by his piano playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of 1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the ladies. And then—the third phase—Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination (especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.
From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired composer, the revered abbé, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."
"All Weimar adores him,"—let us confess, for we can no longer blink the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment? Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the attentions of the Polish countess who received him in a boudoir spread ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four celebrated beauties who had their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting his bust?[42] Was it the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction, that swathed him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a high platform surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full view of six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary woman that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake of "un répas très appétissant," and to read aloud to him afterwards "l'article biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencé hier"? If this same Janka Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering friends from whom the proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to Beethoven, or Schumann, or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others play pieces beautifully, but you always play the soul, the thoughts, and the sentiments of Liszt. You transport us into a world which will die with you, and of which we shall have nothing left but the paradise of recollection—a paradise out of which, as the poets say, we cannot be driven"—would these great self-forgetful artists have given her such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who are the poet, dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"? No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth, posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the left lapel of his abbé's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.
These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann, Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.
Figure XXVIII.
In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his piano sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in octaves. This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its strongly individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses, its exciting use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer acquaintance its theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely rhetorical effectiveness, become only too apparent; like a sentence printed all in italics, it is impotent through very excess of emphasis. Or take the well-known opening motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto. With its attention-seizing rhythm and its chromatic melody it seems at first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an edict, a proclamation. But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we go on, except that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the hearer, at first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a piece of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills, of his chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic that the listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew how to manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he relieved the wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth measure by setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the opening.
If Liszt is unrestrained in his use of the italics and points of exclamation of the musical language, so that his impressiveness generally degenerates into ranting, when he tries the emotional he fairly wallows. It is hard to find a parallel in any other composer for those passages of his, fairly redolent with sentimentality, in which he reiterates, over and over again, a single note, as the poet rolls under his tongue his mistress's name, or the gourmand, under his, a morsel of paté de fois gras. (See Figure XXIX, a and b.) It is hard, in any other composer who has had the advantage of German traditions, to find bits of melody so feebly Italian, so sunk in an amiable but insidious sensuality, as the themes of his "Sonnetto del Petrarca" or his Album Leaf no. 2, in which he writes with the pen dipped in violet water of a Donizetti or a Bellini. His harmonic idiom, too, is degraded by a similar sensuality, however disguised. How else than as proceeding from a love for thrills and swoons can we explain his passion for those chords, such as diminished sevenths, minor ninths, and all manner of chromatically altered chords, as the theorists call them, which, for some reason never yet explained, exhale mawkishness as some women exhale musk?[44]