Orphée, composed in 1854, was conceived by Liszt at a time when he was engaged in conducting rehearsals of Gluck's opera "Orpheus" for performance at Weimar, and the completed symphonic poem was first played there, as a prelude to the opera of Gluck, on February 16,1854. The score contains a preface by Liszt which forms an admirable commentary on the spirit and temper of the music:
"One day I had to conduct Gluck's 'Orpheus.' During the rehearsals it was well-nigh impossible for me to refrain from abstracting my imagination from the point of view—touching and sublime in its simplicity—from which the great master had considered his subject, to travel in thought back to that Orpheus whose name soars so majestically and harmoniously over the most poetic of Greek myths. I saw again, in my mind's eye, an Etruscan vase in the Louvre, representing the first poet-musician, draped in a starry robe, his brow encircled by a mystically royal fillet, his lips parted and breathing forth divine words and songs, and his fine, long, taper fingers energetically striking the strings of his lyre. I thought to see round about him, as if I had seen him in the flesh, wild beasts listening in ravishment; man's brutal instincts quelled to silence; stones softening; hearts harder still, perhaps, bedewed with a miserly and burning tear; warbling birds and babbling water-falls interrupting their own melodies; laughter and pleasures listening with reverence to those accents that revealed to Humanity the beneficent power of art, its glorious illumination, its civilizing harmony.
"With the purest of morals preached to it, taught by the most sublime dogmas, enlightened by the most shining beacons of science, informed by the philosophic reasonings of the intellect, surrounded by the most refined of civilizations, Humanity to-day, as formerly and always, preserves in its breast its instincts of ferocity, brutality, and sensuality, which it is the mission of art to soften, sweeten, and ennoble. To-day, as formerly and always, Orpheus, that is to say, Art, should spread his melodious waves, his chords vibrating, like a sweet and irresistible light, over those conflicting elements which rend each other and bleed in the soul of every one of us, as they do in the entrails of every society. Orpheus bewails Eurydice—Eurydice, that emblem of the Ideal engulfed by evil and suffering, whom he is allowed to snatch from the monsters of Erebus, to lead forth from the depths of Cimmerian darkness, but whom he cannot, alas! keep for his own on earth. May at least those barbarous times never return, when furious passions, like drunken and unbridled mænads, revenged themselves upon art's disdain of their coarse, sensual delights by felling it with their murderous thyrsi and their stupid fury.
"Had it been given me completely to formulate my thought, I could have wished to render the serenely civilizing character of the songs that radiate from every work of art; their gentle energy, their august empery, their sonority that fills the soul with noble ecstasy, their undulation, soft as breezes from Elysium, their gradual uprising like clouds of incense, their diaphanous and azure ether enveloping the world and the whole universe as with an atmosphere, as with a transparent garment of ineffable and mysterious Harmony."[73]
Mr. Philip Hale has thus described the music in which Liszt crystallized his fancies:
"... Harp arpeggios are thrown over soft horn tones for a prelude, and then Orpheus sings of the might of his art.... The song of Orpheus becomes more intimate in its appeal [Lento ... English horn, oboe.] The passage ends, ... and a short phrase is given to the first violin. Some hear, in this phrase, a call, 'Eurydice!' These themes are used alternately until there is a climax with the entrance of the first and solemn Orpheus theme, fortissimo. [Later] the Orpheus song is again intoned in all its majesty. There is a hush, and the Eurydice theme is heard. The 'mystical end' is brought by an alternate use of strings and wood-wind instruments in the Orpheus song."
"MAZEPPA," SYMPHONIC POEM (No. 6) [74]
This symphonic poem, composed, in the early thirties, as a piano piece (it was published as No. 4 of the famous Études d'exécution transcendante), was made over by Liszt for orchestra in 1850. Both originally and in its final shape the music is an illustration, not of the familiar poem of Byron, but of verses in Victor Hugo's Les Orientales. Hugo's lines, in French and German, preface the score. The following prose translation is by Mr. W. F. Apthorp:
I
"So, when Mazeppa, roaring and weeping, has seen his arms, feet, sabre-grazed sides, all his limbs bound upon a fiery horse, fed on sedge grass, reeking, darting forth fire from his nostrils and fire from his feet;
"when he has writhed in his knots like a reptile, has well gladdened his joyous executioners with his futile rage, and fallen back at last upon the wild croup, sweat on his brow, foam at his mouth, and blood in his eyes,
"a cry goes up; and suddenly horse and man fly with the winds over the plain, carried away across the moving sands, alone, filling with noise a whirlwind of dust, like a black cloud in which the lightning winds like a snake!
"They go on. They pass through the valleys like a thunder-storm, like those hurricanes that pile themselves up in the mountains, like a globe of fire; then, next minute, are nothing more than a black dot in the dusk, and vanish into the air like a flake of foam on the vast blue ocean.
"They go on. The space is large. Both plunge together into the boundless desert, into the endless horizon which ever begins over again. Their course carries them onward like a flight, and great oaks, towns and towers, black mountains bound together in long chains, everything totters around them.
"And, if the hapless man struggles, with cracking head, the horse, flying faster than the breeze, rushes with still more affrighted bound into the vast, arid, impassable desert, stretching out before them, with its ridges of sand, like a striped cloak.
"Everything reels and takes on unknown colors; he sees the woods run, sees the broad clouds run, the old ruined donjon-keep, the mountains with a ray bathing the spaces between them; he sees; and herds of reeking mares follow with a great noise!
"And the sky, where the steps of night are already lengthening, with its oceans of clouds into which still other clouds are plunging, and the sun, ploughing through their waves with his prow, turns upon his dazzled forehead like a wheel of golden-veined marble.
"His eye wanders and glistens, his hair trails behind, his head hangs down; his blood reddens the yellow sand, the thorny brambles: the cord winds round his swollen limbs and, like a long serpent, tightens and multiplies its bite and its folds.
"The horse, feeling neither bit nor saddle, flies onward, and still his blood flows and trickles, his flesh falls in shreds; alas! the hot mares that were following just now, bristling their pendent manes, have been succeeded by the crows!
"The crows; the great horned owl with his round, frightened eye; the wild eagle of battle-fields, and the osprey, monster unknown to the daylight; the slanting owls, and the great fawn-colored vulture who ransacks the flanks of dead men, where his bare red neck plunges in like a naked arm!
"All come to augment the funereal flight: all leave both the solitary holm-oak and the nests in the manor to follow him. He, bloody, distracted, deaf to their cries of joy, wonders, when he sees them, who can be unfurling that big black fan on high there.
"The night falls dismal, without its starred robe, the swarm grows more eager and follows the reeking voyager like a winged pack. He sees them between the sky and himself, like a dark smoke-cloud, then loses them and hears them fly confusedly in the dark.
"At last, after three days of mad running, after crossing rivers of icy water, steppes, forests, deserts, the horse falls, to the shrieks of the thousand birds of prey, and his iron hoof, on the stone it grinds, quenches its four lightnings.
"There lies the hapless man, prostrate, naked, wretched, all spotted with blood, redder than the maple in the season of blossoms. The cloud of birds turns round him and stops; many an eager beak longs to gnaw the eyes in his head, all burned with tears.
"Well, this convict who howls and drags himself along the ground, this living carcass, shall be made a prince one day by the tribes of the Ukraine. One day, sowing the fields with unburied dead, he will make it up to the osprey and the vulture in the broad pasture-lands.
"His savage greatness shall spring from his punishment. One day, he shall gird around him the furred robe of the old Hetmans, great to the dazzled eye; and, when he passes by, those tented peoples, prone upon their faces, shall send a resounding bugle-call bounding about him!
II
"So, when a mortal, upon whom his god descends, has seen himself bound alive upon thy fatal croup, O Genius, thou fiery steed, he struggles in vain, alas! thou boundest, thou carriest him away out from the real world, whose doors thou breakest with thy feet of steel!
"With him thou crossest deserts, hoary summits of the old mountains, and the seas, and dark regions beyond the clouds; and a thousand impure spirits, awakened by thy course, O impudent marvel! press in legions round the voyager.
"He crosses at one flight, on thy wings of flame, every field of the Possible and the worlds of the soul; drinks at the eternal river; in the stormy or starry night, his hair mingled with the mane of comets, flames on heaven's brow.
"Herschel's six moons, old Saturn's ring, the pole, rounding a nocturnal aurora over its boreal brow, he sees them all; and for him thy never-tiring flight moves, every moment, the ideal horizon of this boundless world.
"Who, save demons and angels, can know what he suffers in following thee, and what strange lightnings shall flash from his eyes, how he shall be burned with hot sparks, alas! and what cold wings shall come at night to beat against his brow?
"He cries out in terror; thou, implacable, pursuest. Pale, exhausted, gaping, he bends in affright beneath thy overmastering flight; every step thou advancest seems to dig his grave. At last the end is come ... he runs, he flies, he falls, and arises King!"