In closing, we may say, to quote from “The Meistersaenger”: “The witnesses, I think, were well selected. Is your Hans Sachs on that account disturbed?” The best literary test of the matter is contained in Richard Wagner’s “Letters on Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems,” which appeared in 1857. Liszt himself demonstrated his clear understanding of the far-reaching progress he had made for his art in his analysis of Beethoven’s “Egmont” music, in 1854.
“In ‘Egmont’ we recognize one of the first illustrations of the modern period. A great musician derives his inspiration directly from the works of a great poet,” says he. “At this time Beethoven appears to us as bold and rich in meaning as he was uncertain and wavering in his first attempts. When he composed these fragments he began to open up a new path for art. With mighty hand he felled the first tree in this hitherto unknown forest. Even while he cleared away the first obstacles and laid his hand to his work he entered upon the path himself. The world regarded this first step without particular attention, but the time came when art advanced upon this path and found it illuminated and laid out by him.”
Liszt describes himself when he thus characterizes the present epoch of music: “Going back to antiquity and searching for material scarcely anywhere do we fail to find a period of poetical life. Imagery and color characterize the tone-work of the people of the Orient as well as of the Occident. A full flooded magnetic stream unites poetry and music, those two forms of human thought and feeling.” He above all others has in reality done for music what was prophesied by Joseph Haydn, the father of the symphony, who was the first to invest it with a distinctively poetical character. At the close of his days he declared that what was yet to happen in music would be far greater than what had happened in it.
CHAPTER VII.
CONSOLATION.
Liszt’s Great Resolve—Reply to a Scoffer—Religion and Music—Religion at the Foundation of Culture—George Sand’s Testimony—Relations of Religion and Music—Music in the Catholic and Protestant Churches—Peculiarities of the Musical Services—Influence of the Catholic Church on Music—A gradual Lowering of the Standards—Opera Music in the Church—Liszt’s Ambition to Reform it—His Early Piety—Views on Church Music—The Religious Element in his Compositions—The Hungarian Coronation Mass—The Choral Mass—Departure to Rome—Takes Orders—Why he did not Remain—Germany his Field for Work.
“Is that then a life object?” was the reply of a Prussian school-director on one occasion, when in answer to his question why Liszt had specially taken orders, he was informed that in pursuance of his life-mission it was indispensable for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope and Sistine chapel, in order to accomplish the reform of Catholic church music. If we were also to make the reply to that question, “Yes, perchance at this very time especially more important than the elevation of education,” which would certainly turn the school-man round and make him step aside, we should not encroach upon the domain of politics, but strikingly characterize with this one remark the sad indifference and ignorance of the entire, and for the time the predominating multitude of our educated people, who make and dominate our culture.
How can one, himself outside of the confession, after a little reflection, have any doubt that the only ties which bind and unite the immense mass of the people, besides the desperate occasions of overwhelming necessity, are the ideal conceptions which religion offers in a very crude and yet powerful and forcible shape? On that account the church remains, let her be what she may, so long as this is true, the only source for the great multitude of men which approaches them with such conceptions, and, while it elevates them above themselves and the ordinary necessities, makes them believe in a human community and in mutual duties. Where again is the substitute for such an indispensable institution, so long as we have no other, which in a common union unites the masses upon a sure foundation, and without which cement they would be dashed to atoms. Even granting that state and culture have reached high attainments, no one but a short-sighted person will say that they have reached their utmost possibilities. It was this very feeling which, following upon the mental intoxication of former centuries, and the fearful ones that came after with their outbreaking revolutions and wars, made all the stronger minds and more earnest spirits turn to the existing assurance which we possess in ideal things as permanent realities—Religion and the Church. “Religion is the true cement of the social edifice. The more numerous the stones and details, the stronger should be the cement that unites them,” writes George Sand, in 1830, in the “Lettres d’un Voyageur.” That the assaults of the Catholic church upon the State are as discreditable as the insolent self-elevation of Protestant orthodoxy over all intellectual work and culture, goes without saying. Now, as ever, the church, still more the service, in both confessions, is the sure foundation for all really educated people. Its loftiest purpose can only be to improve the mind religiously and thus secure for it a higher effectiveness. State and church must be regarded from the same point of view as Alberich and Mime, who struggled for the ring upon which depended the heritage and power of the world, while Siegfried possessed it. And as it is rightly claimed on behalf of the Protestant church that its purpose is to give to worship such a form and value that it shall unite and satisfy, in itself, the noblest aspirations and the essentially ideal wants of all mankind, so the Catholic church, as far as a stranger may judge, fails not by earnest consideration and inward endeavor, far removed from the clamor of the day and the warring of dominating factions and parties in the church, to restore again its world-conquering, because world-redeeming power, in that it seeks to give that spirit to its worship in which is the real safety of our time. And as it is not a matter of chance that art has been awakened by this characteristic spirit of the later times, to which it has given a new language, to give a fitting expression to the fullness and depth of feeling, like the infinity of the spirit which springs from the spirit itself, as it is not a matter of chance that music is pre-eminently the daughter of the church and of its service, so from the oldest to the most recent times, this daughter, who meanwhile has become so unspeakably affluent and above all so independent, has been loudly called upon to establish herself in the church and its service in all the perfection and richness of her nature.
If the great difficulty with the Protestant service lies in the fact that it does not easily assimilate music, and, so to speak, make it a part of divine worship, so that its employment makes religious service partake of the nature of a sacred concert, thereby destroying religion itself, if in this case also, peculiar but in no way insuperable difficulties stand in the way of such a result, on the other hand in the Catholic service, music is an indispensable part of it and in the real sense its central part, for transubstantiation, besides the elevation of the Host, which is only a symbol, is felt as a deep inward reality in the music, which at that instant is poured forth at the true Mass even in the most insignificant church like a sacred flood, deeply refreshing the hearts which turn to it. We may say that but for this recalling of the wandering heart to the harmony of the Eternal and the All, but for this return of the individual to the everlasting foundations of being, as they are revealed in transubstantiation, we should not securely hold that art which in its very essence reveals the fixity of the world, outwardly as well as inwardly. It should also be said that the Catholic service, that is, its highest attainment, the Mass, without its daughter, Music, which in an actual sense is in turn its mother, or can at any time become so, could not reach its ultimate possibilities and by its life prolong its own.
There has been endless complaint that with the progress of its dominion, which has immeasurably enhanced the outward pomp of the church, and which has not scorned to make use of the dramatic for its purposes, the music of its worship has become superficial and theatrical. There is also a Jesuitic style in the music, and he who perfects his artistic taste by the ever true and really classical, will find good proofs in Beethoven’s greater Masses as well as in Mozart’s “Requiem,” that since the seventeenth century the opera has invaded the church, and that the peculiar fineries of the Saints’ statues of that time denominated the fundamental character of its music. This is true of Germany as well as of the Roman countries, and any one who has been to Italy knows to his own satisfaction that the latest operatic melodies can be heard to-day upon the organ, even in sublime St. Peter’s at Rome. From Mozart to Mendelssohn, among musicians there is the same complaint of this impropriety, and since Goethe, almost every writer on Italy has spoken of this matter, which is a disgrace to the church and a calamity to the religious elevation of the poor.
Under these circumstances, how could a nature like that of Liszt’s hesitate? As we have seen over and over again, the modern way of regarding things had become, in fact, his second nature, an irresistible and yet spontaneous motive power in all his thoughts and actions. We have an additional test of this artist, which brings us to the very source of his life, even to the very basis of life itself. We have the facts for our information, and need not contemplate the phenomenon of Liszt as a reformer of art in his church in any sense as a wonder or a mere accident. It rests upon the very foundation of his life and it works accordingly.