Life of Liszt

by Ludwig Nohl

Have we a similar language for the art of music, which reveals to us, as it were, the nature, the soul-image of mankind as the plastic art reveals its exterior? Have our language and literature acquired afresh such far-reaching capabilities, such a fixed scope and self-enrichment as the plastic art has, through Winckelmann? This question is all the more worthy of attention since music, embodying the very essence of things and not their appearance, reflecting the idea of the world itself by its own hand and with its own power, is more essentially poetical than the plastic art. We have in Liszt’s writings a significant incentive to consider the question further.

It is certainly taking a narrow and one-sided view of musical talent, to assert, like Riehl, that he who writes about music as a musician can not be a correct musician. On the contrary, the truest tone-poets among musicians have written the best about music, and in part about their own, and at the same time by their clear comprehension of the poetical idea in tone-poems have intensified the poetical force of the language.

The first who wrote with a definite purpose as an artist, about the peculiar form and the poetico-dramatic development of his art—for we do not refer here to the old and learned musical pundits, was Gluck, and this is specially manifest in his writings about his own works. Partly consisting of prefaces to scores, partly of letters to newspapers, these writings were prompted by the necessities of art itself. That is, the free poetical movement of the composer and his sympathetic delineation of the salient circumstances and phases of life were assailed, and they tried to confine him to established forms, to fine melodies of a set style, to a fashion as it were. Then the German drew his sword, for the quarrel had been restricted mainly to Paris and Italy, and thrust it sharply into the confused mass of theoretical ideas, which are most prized by people who know little or nothing of music. Drastic in comparison, striking in characterization, mercilessly ridiculing all lordly authority, upon the literary, or true throne, he settles in defiance of the theoretical, every concrete, individual and intellectual question. When one considers the peculiarly Italian or French text, there is something of Bismarck’s style about it. How far removed from the theorist or delving fancy-monger was this artist, who was at the same time a man of facts, a practician! Although we notice some extremely striking and poetical, though merely incidental images, such as only the creative spirit would discover, there is little to be found of the externals of music, that is of musical description, so that these writings produced an admirable effect and furnished the proof that musical problems might engage the attention of the highest literary circles. For the language itself was of little account in this controversy, not even the two foreign idioms, which Gluck, by the way, handled with great ease.

Another illustration forces itself upon us, as viewed from the standpoint of Luther’s translation of the Bible, which unquestionably belongs to the poetical literature of our fatherland, namely, that music, poetically considered, lay at the basis of early German as a language. Luther’s German sprang from the texts of Sebastian Bach, the sublimity of which reached the highest point of all art and which is as thoroughly German as the ordinary plain recitative is Italian. Instrumental music was now closely allied to this language, and as Gluck produced a poetical form upon the living basis of actual language, which afterwards especially delighted Goethe and Schiller, as it had Klopstock, and certainly must have had an influence upon their poetry, so the later ones, by personal intercourse with Philip Emanuel Bach in Hamburg, had the opportunity to perceive by actual observation, that German instrumental music began to assume a peculiarly German form. Mozart’s melodies, from the “Entfuehrung” to the “Zauberfloete,” speedily proved that music in its “beloved German” was not inferior to the highest beauties of the poetical classics.

Their leading features were also closely connected. As Winckelmann gained his talent for the representation of the plastic art through the idea of language, from the antique, so the later ones had to go to the immediate sources of music to find the necessary “inspiration,” as Gluck denominated the creative faculty of our natures, for the expression of their conceptions. Thus things were in a bad way. The musicians did not understand writing and the writers knew little or nothing about music.

Let us trace in the history of events the most striking features of both styles of writing. In a literary sense Heinse was the first to treat of music. This Thuringian was musical in the fullest sense, and since the poet as a writer can not know much in this direction of his endowments, the Musical Lexicon is literally correct when it particularly specifies Heinse’s talent and mentions Hildegarde of Hohenthal as ever memorable to the musician. How the charms of the Italian landscape and the fascinations of this land of music work upon him and impart to his style the warmth and color of that very land itself! Above all else the sentient, nay more, the material aspect of things preponderates, for how often in the sweet voice of a soprano the sad “Benedetto il Coltello” has fallen upon his ravished ear, and “his soul felt as if carried away by a flood.” Here for the first time the effect of our art is definitely connected with the very essence of speech, and the current histories of literature have therefore taken little notice of this circumstance, because our classic writers made it so. The effect of these writings first appeared when it became known through the great masters of poetry in music, Mozart and Beethoven, even more clearly about the year 1830, when Heinrich Laube gave it new expression and Jean Paul illustrated it with his lofty conceptions of the tone-art.

Now appear distinctive musical writers whose works belong both to the domain of literature and music—Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart, the latter by far the most prominent of the three. His “Ideas of the Esthetics of Music” first appeared in 1806, after his death. The “Spitz von Giebichenstein,” as Goethe called Reichardt, had a strong intellectual basis and development. He understood Bach and Handel in their colossal works and Gluck in his dramatic achievements. He had not a correct idea of Mozart’s poetry and Beethoven’s powerful blows almost overwhelmed his brain and heart. Yet what he has said about the old classics is not without influence upon men like Rochlitz, in Leipsic, and Marx, in Berlin, who have also comprehended yet more clearly the free action of poetry in music. “There spoke spirit to spirit,” says the latter of Reichardt’s analysis of the Handel songs.

Frederick Rochlitz has done that work for Mozart, and Marx for Beethoven, and in many circles of the reading public the first knowledge and direct appreciation of this new world of music was obtained from their writings. And yet the one always shows something too much of authorship and but little of the free poetical flow, while the other struggles and is too obscure in the expression of the emotions which music awakens in him. He merely feels and does not grasp the expression of it firmly and forcibly and thus neither of them are far from the significance of an achievement like the narrative of Winckelmann.

This is in the highest degree characteristic of Schubart, who was an actual poet. With him begins that genuine musical authorship which has gradually become a possession of our literature. This brings us to the solid array of writers who were equally at home in both provinces and thus could embody music in language as they had acquired the talent for expression from literature. It includes, and very prominently, too, Franz Liszt and his numerous musical writings.

Richard Wagner, as Heinrich Laube says, in that peculiarly able sketch of his life, which appeared in the “Zeitung fuer die elegante Welt,” in 1843, from an opera composer became a writer, by the “Parisian stress.” An entirely different reason actuated Liszt. It was the longing to secure for his art the name and master which it required. “Errors and misunderstandings thwarted the desired success,” says Wagner, speaking of that Weimar performance of “Tannhauser,” by Liszt, in 1849. “What was to be done to meet the requirements necessary to a good understanding on all sides? Liszt comprehended it quickly and did it. He gave the public his own judgment and impression of the work in a manner, the persuasive eloquence and overwhelming efficacy of which have had no parallel.”