After a lithograph by Kriehuber in the N. Y. Public Library
Kriehuber Berlioz Czerny Liszt Ernst
A Matinée at Liszt's
The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt's original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B-minor sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it lies so beautifully for the hand. For me no work of Liszt with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie that masquerades as a sonata in H moll. Agreeing with those who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure of this composition, and also with those critics who assert the word to be an organic amplification of the old, obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven's last sonata period as a starting-point and made a plunge into futurity—agreeing with these warring factions, thereby choking off the contingency of a spirited argument, I repeat that I find the B minor of Liszt truly fascinating music.
What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze, from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (the descending octaves Wagner recalled when he wrote his Wotan theme); the leap from the G to the A sharp below—how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own. Power there is, sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E-flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D's. What follows is like a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz possessed the gift above all, except Liszt; Raff can compass the grisly, and also Saint-Saëns; but thin sharp flames hover about the brass, wood and shrieking strings in the Lisztian orchestra.
The chorale, usually the meat of a Liszt composition, now appears and proclaims the religious belief of the composer in dogmatic accents, and our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it in the harmonic sequences. Here it surely is not a whole-heart belief but only a theatrical attitudinising; after the faint return of the opening motive is heard the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engender the suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix he was to a woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.
But the rustle of silken attire is back of every bar; sensuous imagery, a faint perfume of femininity lurks in each cadence and trill. Ah! naughty Abbé have a care. After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress! Wilt thou allow her to make away with spiritual resolutions! Vade, retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme so eloquently proclaimed at the outset is solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power. Then the hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colours moves kaleidoscopically onward. Again the devil tempts the musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major; he momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic ailment, is happily short-winded. Another flank movement of the "ewig Weibliche," this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the triolen of the bass frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.
All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendour. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is stamped on every bar. What gorgeous swing, and how the very bases of the earth seem to tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from the cyclopean fist of this musical Attila. Then follow a few bars of that Beethoven-like andante, a moving return to the early themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean caverns whence it emerged, a Magyar Wotan majestically vanishing into the bowels of a Gehenna; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor displays all of Liszt's power and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long—infernal, not "heavenly lengths"—it is full of nobility, a drastic intellectuality, and a sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a commanding position in the pantheon of piano music would be folly. And interpreted by an artist versed in the Liszt traditions, such as Arthur Friedheim, this work compasses at times the sublime.
It is not my intention to claim your attention for the remainder of the original compositions; that were indeed a terrible strain on your patience. In the Années de Pèlerinage, redolent of Vergilian meadows, soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious except Au Bord d'une Source? Is the latter not exquisitely idyllic? Surely in those years of pilgrimage through Switzerland, Italy, France, Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the salon or concert platform. The two Polonaises recapture the heroic and sorrowing spirit of Sarmatia. The first in E is a perennial favourite; I always hear its martial theme as a pattern reversed of the first theme in the A-flat Polonaise of Chopin. But the second Liszt Polonaise in C minor is the more poetic of the pair; possibly that is the reason why it is so seldom played.
Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian aspired after the noblest things. In the atmosphere of the salons, of the Papal court, and concert room, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character. I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord (which he was not); that if he had cut and run to sanctuary to escape two or more women we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. One penalty undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Liszt was no exception to this rule. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck he has had many things read into his music, mysticism not forgotten. Perhaps the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the usual pleasing and unpleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any great man, not born of a book.