The advantages of such a scheme of form as is exemplified in "Les Préludes" are many; and they are made the most of by Liszt, with his accustomed cleverness and long-headed sense for practical values. For both of the two classes of listeners that make up the average concert audience music made on this recipe has an appropriate appeal. That class, usually a majority, which has little ear for music, but likes to indulge itself in vague dreams, pictorial imaginings, and nervous thrills, finds its account in the program, follows out with interest the suggestions of the various moods, such as, in the present instance, the amorous, the stormy, the pastoral, the warlike, and gets its fill, all along the way, of brilliant and gorgeous tone-coloring, exciting rhythms, sombre, rich, or mysterious harmonies. At the same time the minority of true music-lovers have, as they have not in the works of Berlioz, a "logical and lucid play of definite motives" to enjoy; they trace with never failing interest the transformations of a few simple themes; they may entirely forget the program, and yet have plenty of opportunity for an agreeable activity of attention, perception, memory, and imagination. Thus each hearer may pick out from the mass of conglomerate impressions something that appeals to him.
There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it firmly in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned beforehand to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined mould; it can ramify, as it proceeds, in obedience to its own latent possibilities. A development here may be expanded to great length, an episode or repetition there may be abbreviated to the slightest possible compass; so long as each link securely engages the next, so long as there is no break in the coherence of the thread, the hearer will be satisfied. Through all the twists and turns the presence of the fundamental melodies will save him from that sense of mere drifting which was so painful to Wagner in listening to Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet." The symphonic poem bears, in fact, somewhat the same relation to the symphony that rhymed couplets bear to a sonnet, triolet, or other conventional verse-form. It exacts little of strict formalism; but by retaining, underneath all its free ramification, certain basic principles of balance and symmetry, it escapes the pitfall of amorphousness, and constantly satisfies, though in unexpected ways, the radical expectations of the intelligent listener.
Unfortunately, however, Liszt himself fell short of realizing the finer potentialities of his own device. Just as his primal melodies, as we have already seen, are usually of a stilted, rhetorical, and artificial character, his treatment of them, the second but scarcely less important of the processes of composition, is generally labored; it is apt to be a clever feat of intelligence, a sort of mental legerdemain, rather than a spontaneous germination of idea. What he said of Chopin's larger works, that they showed "plus de volonté que d'inspiration," is true of his own. His developments are as often distortions as fulfilments, and among his melodies there are many monsters. Plausible, and even winning, as are at first sight some of the thematic transformations (for we are apt to be won by any display of intelligence, no matter how specious its ends), on closer inspection they are seen to be mere juggling. The variants of motive (a), in "Les Préludes," shown at (c) and (d) in Figure XXX, at (g) in Figure XXXI, and at (l) in Figure XXXIII, have an unpleasant sub-flavor of artificiality; analysis reveals their derivation from the parent motive, but affection, so to speak, repudiates them. Even more is this the case with (f) in Figure XXX, and (m) in Figure XXXIII, which, though we see that they come from motive b, we feel to be parodies or caricatures of it, bearing only a superficial resemblance to it, and quite devoid of its essential character. Such observations make us wonder whether a theme is not truly as inconvertible into anything else as any other individual being, and whether the kind of thematic transformation, or deformation, adopted by Liszt, is not after all intrinsically mechanical and inartistic. If the reader will take the trouble to look at some typical example of thematic evolution as it is practised by a master like Beethoven, such as the first movement, for instance, of the "Eroica Symphony,"[45] he will see what a vast difference there is between such inevitable drawing forth of the very soul of a melody, by a process as august and beyond human whim as the processes of nature, and the laborious ingenuity of the composer of "Les Préludes."
As in this all-important matter of thematic development, so is it in other subordinate matters of technic: Liszt, allowing mere ostentation, immediate effect upon an audience, to have too large a part in his artistic ideal, falls thereby into a hundred artificialities. While he was alive the extraordinary magnetism of his personality carried it all off, by disguising the factitiousness of his methods, and reinforcing immensely their superficial appeal; but stripped from himself and scanned in the cold impersonal light of criticism, his gorgeous artistic accoutrements look thin and tawdry, and prove to be made, not of genuine gold, but of theatrical tinsel. His melody, when it neither struts nor fawns, is apt to stagnate. His "furiously chromatic" harmony gains its effectiveness at the expense of solidity; by too completely forgetting key-relationship, on which all genuine harmony must depend, it falls into chaos, as the harmony of a master such as Wagner never does. When it is based on the old ecclesiastical modes instead of on the chromatic scale, as in many passages of the later religious works, it is no less a fabrication, an artifice: the Palestrina-like ending of the Credo in the "Gran Mass," for example, is pseudo-mediævalism, such as no modern composer could write spontaneously. His orchestration, much praised, is indeed skilful, but radically vulgar; his amorous 'cellos and braying trombones are enemies fatal to artistic moderation and restraint. Even in his piano-writing, so large an element in his fame, his methods are those of barbarism. He ignores the lesson of fitness that Chopin might have taught him, and overstrains the resources of the poor instrument until, instead of achieving its own unique possibilities, it becomes a forlorn imitation of an orchestra, without an orchestra's variety, sonority, and grandeur.
Thus is the virtuoso spirit of Liszt, which had thriven on adulation only too well from the days when, as "le petit Litz," he made the tour of the boxes, to those later days when, as "The Master," he oscillated between Rome and Weimar in one prolonged triumph, responsible for errors of taste and judgment which seriously impair the value of all his work. Yet there was in him, besides the virtuoso who fed on applause and was not superior to charlatanisms when they served his purpose, quite another being, who aspired honestly to be a faithful servant of art, and who brought to the service rare intellectual powers. This was the Liszt who befriended all worthy composers, who gave freely of his time, his money, and his strength, whenever he saw merit unacknowledged or genius struggling for bread. This was the Liszt who kept Wagner alive until the world could learn to appreciate him, who sought out César Franck when he was the obscure organist of St. Clotilde, who risked his post as Kapellmeister in order to produce an opera by his friend Cornelius. And this was the Liszt whose keen wit discerned the principles of combined musical and dramatic form on which works intrinsically far superior to his own were later written by Dvořák, Smetana, Tschaïkowsky, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss. Whatever his purely musical powers, his indefatigable and highly cultivated mind and his generous heart enabled him to play an important rôle in the history of music.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Ramann, "Life of Liszt," Eng. trans., I, 218.
[39] "Letters of Liszt," ed. by La Mara, Eng. trans., I, 8.
[40] Brahms is said to have fallen asleep during Liszt's performance of it. See Dr. William Mason's "Memories of a Musical Life."
[41] Amy Fay, "Music Study in Germany."