LISZT AS A PIANOFORTE WRITER
"Nothing is easier than to estimate Liszt the pianist, nothing more difficult than to estimate Liszt the composer. As to Liszt the pianist, old and young, conservatives and progressives, not excepting the keyboard specialists, are perfectly agreed that he was unique, unsurpassed, and unsurpassable," says Professor Niecks. "As to Liszt the composer, on the other hand, opinions differ widely and multifariously—from the attribution of superlative genius to the denial of the least talent. This diversity arises from partisanship, individuality of taste, and the various conceptions formed of the nature of creative power. Those, however, who call Liszt a composer without talent confess themselves either ignorant of his achievements, or incapable of distinguishing good from bad and of duly apportioning praise and blame. Those, on the other hand, who call Liszt a creative genius should not omit to observe and state that his genius was qualitatively unlike the genius of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. With him the creative impulse was, in the main, and, as a rule, an intellectual impulse. With the great masters mentioned, the impulse was of a general origin, all the faculties co-operating. While with them the composition was always spontaneous, being, however great the travail, a birth, not a making; with Liszt it was often reflective, the solution of a problem, an experiment, a caprice, a defiance of conventional respectability, or a device for the dumfounding and electrification of the gaping multitude. In short, Liszt was to a larger extent inventive than creative. The foregoing remarks do not pretend to be more than a suggestive attempt at explaining the inexplicable differences of creative power. That Liszt could be spontaneous and in the best sense creative, he has proved by whole compositions, and more frequently by parts of compositions. That has to be noted; as well as that his love of experimenting and scorn for the familiar, not to mention the commonplace, led him often to turn his back on the beautiful and to embrace the ugly.
"As a composer of pianoforte music, Liszt's merits are more generally acknowledged than as a composer of any other kind. Here indeed his position is a commanding one. We should be obliged to regard him with respect, admiration, and gratitude, even if his compositions were æsthetically altogether a failure. For they incorporate an original pianoforte style, a style that won new resources from the instrument, and opened new possibilities to the composer for it, and the player on it. The French Revolution of 1830 aroused Liszt from a state of lethargy. A year after this political revolution, there occurred an event that brought about in him an artistic revolution. This event was the appearance of Paganini in Paris. The wonderful performances of the unique violin virtuoso revealed to him new ideas. He now began to form that pianoforte style which combined, as it were, the excellences of all the other instruments, individually and collectively. Liszt himself called the process "the orchestration of the pianoforte." But before the transformation could be consummated, other influences had to be brought to bear on the architect. The influence of Chopin, who appeared in Paris soon after Paganini, must have been great, but was too subtle and partial to be easily gauged. It is different with Berlioz, whose influence on Liszt was palpable and general, affecting every branch of his art-practice. Thalberg has at least the merit of having by his enormous success in 1836 stimulated Liszt to put forth his whole strength.
"The vast mass of Liszt's pianoforte compositions is divisible first into two classes—the entirely original compositions, and the compositions based to a more or less extent on foreign matter. The latter class consist of transcriptions of songs (Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Franz, etc.), symphonies and overtures (Berlioz, Beethoven, Rossini, Wagner, etc.), and operatic themes (from Rossini and Bellini to Wagner and Verdi), and of fifteen Hungarian rhapsodies; the former consists of studies, brilliant virtuosic pieces, musical poems, secular and sacred, picturesque, lyrical, etc. (such as Années de Pélerinage, Harmonies, poétiques et religieuses, Consolations, the legends, St. François d'Assise: La Prédication aux oiseaux, and St. François de Paule marchant sur les flots, etc.), and one work in sonata form, but not the conventional sonata form. Although not unfrequently leaving something to be desired in the matter of discretion, his transcriptions of songs are justly famous masterpieces. Marvellous in the reproduction of orchestral effects are the transcriptions of symphonies and overtures. The operatic transcriptions (Illustrations, Fantasies), into which the geistreiche Liszt put a great deal of his own, do not now enjoy the popularity they once enjoyed; the present age has lost some of its love for musical fireworks and the tricking-out and transmogrification by an artist of other artists' ideas. The Hungarian Rhapsodies, on the other hand, which are still more fantasias on the adopted matter than the operatic transcriptions, continue to be favourites of the virtuosi and the public.
"As to the original compositions, they are very unequal in artistic value. Many of them, however, are undoubtedly of the greatest beauty, and stand whatever test may be applied to them. No one would think of numbering with these exquisite perfect things the imposing sonata. It cannot be placed by the side of the sonatas of Beethoven, whose ideal and formative power Liszt lacked. Nevertheless it is impossible for the unprejudiced not to recognise in it a noble effort of a highly-gifted and ardently-striving mind. Technically, instead of three or four self-contained separate movements, we have there a long uninterrupted series of continuous movements, in which, however, we can distinguish three complexes corresponding to the three movements of the orthodox sonata. The Andante Sostenuto and Quasi Adagio form the simpler middle complex. Although some of the features of the orthodox sonata structure are discernible in Liszt's works, most of them are absent from it or irrecognisably veiled. The most novel and characteristic features are the unity and the evolution by metamorphosis of the thematic material—that is to say, the motives of the first complex reappear in the following ones, and are metamorphosed not only in the later but also in the first. Nothing could characterise the inequality of Liszt's compositions better than the fact that it is possible to draw up a programme of them wholly irreproachable, admirable, and delightful, and equally possible to draw up one wholly objectionable, abhorrent, and distressful. All in all, Liszt is a most remarkable and interesting and, at the same time, an epoch-making personality, one that will remain for long yet a living force in music, and for ever a striking figure in the history of the art."
SMETANA
Frederick Smetana, the greatest of Bohemian composers, founded in the year 1848 the institute which he conducted for the teaching of the piano in Prague. In this year it was that the composition for piano named Morceaux Caractéristiques, he dedicated to Liszt (which dedication Liszt accepted with the greatest cordiality, writing him a most complimentary letter), was the means of his becoming personally acquainted with Liszt, whom he until this time only knew by report. He obtained for the young composer an introduction to the publisher Kistner, in Leipsic, who brought out his six piano pieces called Stammbuchblaetter.
RIMSKY-KORSAKOFF
"Of all the Slav composers Rimsky-Korsakoff is perhaps the most charming, and as a musician the most remarkable," writes the music-critic of the Mercure de France. "He has not been equalled by any of his compatriots in the art of handling timbres, and in this art the Russian school has been long distinguished. In this respect he is descended directly from Liszt, whose orchestra he adopted and from whom he borrowed many an old effect. His inspiration is sometimes exquisite; the inexhaustible transformation of his themes is always most intelligent or interesting. As all the other Russians, he sins in the development of ideas through the lack of cohesion, of sustained enchainment, and especially through the lack of true polyphony. The influence of Berlioz and of Liszt is not less striking in his manner of composition. Sadko comes from Liszt's Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne, Antar and Scheherazade at the same time from Harold and the Faust symphony. The Oriental monody seems to throw a spell over Rimsky-Korsakoff which spreads over all his works a sort of 'local colour,' underlined here by the chosen subjects. In Scheherazade, it must be said, the benzoin of Arabia sends forth here and there the sickening empyreuma of the pastilles of the harem. In the second and the third movements of Antar the composer has approached nearest true musical superiority. The descriptive, almost dramatic, intention is realised there with an unusual sureness, and, if the brand of Liszt remains ineffaceable, the ease of construction, the breadth and the co-ordinated progressions of combinations mark a mastery and an originality that are rarely found among the composers of the far North, and that no one has ever possessed among the 'five.'