(a) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.
(b) From the Liebestraum No. 3.
Figure XXIX.
It would be interesting, did it not involve a general discussion here out of place, to inquire how far the exaggerated expression of Liszt is due to the lack of spiritual, moral, and intellectual balance already noted as characteristic of French romanticism. Surely there is more than a striking analogy, there is an actual relation of cause and effect, were we but learned and keen enough to trace it out, between the unrestrained individualism of the romanticist, in politics, religion, love—and the hysterical, unreal feeling of this music. Both alike lose poise by taking an over-personal view of life. Liszt, so singly set on being magnificent or heart-rending in passion that he ignores the restraints of good taste, forgets artistic reserve, and becomes in turn blustering and craven, reminds us of Rousseau, so in love with his fixed idea of "freedom" that he undermines the foundations of the social order on which true freedom depends.
If Liszt were quite sincere in his passionate extremes, we should have to forgive them as on the whole we forgive the often crude grandiloquence of the Gallic Berlioz. What makes the Hungarian artist peculiarly exasperating is the impression of hypocrisy in his heroics that we cannot escape or argue away. He does not really feel these things, we discern; he is ogling us, he is posing for our benefit; all the while that one of his eyes is so proudly flashing fire, or so devoutly gazing heavenward, or so touchingly secreting a tear, the other is winking at his alter ego, the ego that sits behind the scenes and pulls the strings. What those ladies to whom he bowed with such an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have felt could they have read the cynical thoughts about women which meanwhile filled his mind, that we feel when we realize that for all his pompous utterance, for all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart laughing at us for being so obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade. We can forgive, we can even rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself in love with his pose, but not the charlatan who makes capital of our gullibility.
Liszt shows to far better advantage, however, in his manipulation of his ideas than in the ideas themselves; for whereas in the latter artificiality is a damning fault, in the former art, especially such skilful art as his, is a shining merit. His plan of combining the musical organization of the classicists with the dramatic organization of Berlioz was an interesting and in some ways a felicitous one. By the use of program and leading motives he secured the advantages of the realistic school: freedom from the shackles of the strict traditional sonata-form, and a "poetic" principle of coherence. By retaining thematic development, he reinforced this poetic coherence by musical logic, and avoided to some extent the fragmentary effects into which unmodified realism generally falls. To the thirteen orchestral pieces in which he most strikingly embodied this plan of interlinked dramatic and musical structure he gave the name of "Poèmes Symphoniques," generally translated as "Symphonic Poems" though more precisely as "Orchestral Poems." He owes his chief historical importance to his creation of this form, which he exemplified also on a larger scale in his "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies.