Pius IX, a lover of music, had on July 11, 1863, visited Liszt at the Dominican cloister of Monte Mario, and to the Hungarian's accompaniment had sung in his sweet-toned musical voice. Liszt was called his Palestrina, but alas! in the churchly music of Liszt Rome has never betrayed more than a passing interest; and to-day Pius X is ultra-Gregorian. Liszt, like a musical Moses, saw the promised land but did not enter it.
The friendship of the princess and Liszt never abated. He divided his days between Weimar, Rome, and Budapest (from 1876 in the latter city), and she wrote tirelessly in Rome books on theology, mysticism, and Church history. She was a great and generally good force in the life of Liszt, who was, she said, a lazy, careless man, though he left over thirteen hundred compositions. Women are insatiable.
The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein
III
LATER BIOGRAPHERS
The future bibliographer of Liszt literature has a heavy task in store for him, for books about the great Hungarian composer are multiplying apace. Liszt the dazzling virtuoso has long been a theme with variations, and is, we suspect, a theme nearly exhausted; but Liszt as tone poet, Liszt as song writer, as composer for the pianoforte, as littérateur, the man, the wickedest of Don Juans, the ecclesiastic—these and a dozen other studies of the most protean musician of the last century have been appearing ever since the publication of Lina Ramann's vast and sentimental biography. Instead of there being a lack of material for a new book there is an embarrassment, not always of riches, from industrious pens, though few are of value. The Liszt pupils have had their say, and their pupils are beginning to intone the psalmody of uncritical praise. Liszt the romantic, magnificent, magnanimous, supernal, is set to the same old harmonies, until the reader, tired of the gabble and gush, longs for a biographer who will riddle the various legends and once and for all prove that Liszt was not perfection, even if he was the fascinating Admirable Crichton of his times.
Yet, and the fact sets us wondering over the mutability of fame, the Liszt propaganda is not flourishing. Richard Burmeister, a well known pupil and admirer of the master in Berlin has assured us that while Liszt is heard in all the concerts in Germany, the public is lukewarm; Richard Strauss is more eagerly heard. Liszt's familiar remark, "I can wait," provoked from the authority above mentioned the answer, "Perhaps he has waited too long." We are inclined to disagree with this dictum. Liszt once had musical and unmusical Europe at his feet. His success was called comet-like, probably because he was born in the comet year 1811, also because his hair was long and his technique transcendentally brilliant. His critical compositions were received with less approval. That such an artist of the keyboard could be also a successor to Beethoven was an idea mocked at by the conservative Leipsic school. Besides, he came in such a questionable guise as a Symphoniker. A piano concerto with a triangle in the score (the E flat), compositions for full orchestra which were called symphonic poems, lyrics without a tune, that pretended to follow the curve of the words; finally church music, solemn masses through which stalked the apparition of the haughty Magyar chieftain, accompanied by echoes of the gipsies on the putzta (the Graner Mass); it was too much for ears attuned to the suave, melodious Mendelssohn. Indeed the entire Neo-German school was too exotic for Germany. Berlioz, a half mad Frenchman; Richard Wagner, a crazy revolutionist, a fugitive from Saxony; and the Hungarian Liszt, half French, wholly diabolic—of such were the uncanny ingredients of the new music. And then were there not Liszt and his Princess Wittgenstein at Weimar, and the crew of pupils, courtiers and bohemians who collected at the Altenburg? Decidedly these people would never do, even though patronised by royalty. George Eliot and her man Friday, proper British persons, were rather shocked when they visited Weimar.
Liszt survived it all and enjoyed, notwithstanding the opposition of Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Joachim, the Schumanns, later Brahms and Hanslick, the pleasure of hearing his greater works played, understood, and applauded.
Looking backward in an impartial manner it cannot be said that the Liszt compositions have unduly suffered from the proverbial neglect of genius. A Liszt orchestral number, if not imperative, is a matter of course at most symphony concerts. The piano music is done to death, especially the Hungarian Rhapsodies. Liszt has been ranged; the indebtedness of modern music to his pioneer efforts has been duly credited. We know that the Faust and Dante symphonies (which might have been called symphonic poems) are forerunners not only of much of Wagner, but of the later group from Saint-Saëns to Richard Strauss. Why, then, the inevitable wail from the Lisztians that the Liszt music is not heard? Christus and the other oratorios and the masses might be heard oftener, and there are many of the sacred compositions yet unsung that would make some critics sit up. No, we are lovers of Liszt, but the martyrdom motive has been sounded too often. In a double sense a reaction is bound to come. The true Liszt is to emerge from the clouds of legend, and Liszt the composer will be definitely placed. A little disappointment will result in both camps; the camp of the ultra-Liszt worshippers, which sets him in line with Beethoven and above Wagner, and the camp of the anti-Lisztians, which refuses him even the credit of having written a bar of original music. How Wagner would have rapped the knuckles of these latter; how he would have told them what he wrote to Liszt: "Ich bezeichne dich als Schöpfer meiner jetzigen Stellung. Wenn ich komponiere und instrumentiere—denke ich immer nur an dich ... deine drei letzten Partituren sollen mich wieder zum Musiker weihen für den Beginn meines zweiten Aktes [Siegfried], denn dies Studium einleiten soll."