“From youth up, Franz’s spirit was naturally inclined to devotion, and his passionate feeling for art was blended with a piety which was characterized by all the frankness of his age,” reads an entry in the diary of his father, who died when the son was in his sixteenth year. In 1857, Liszt himself speaks of the poor little church in his Hungarian home, “in which, as a child, I had prayed with such ardent devotion.” Even in his youth he thought that he was called to the church, and it was only the earnest wish, at first, of his father, and afterwards of his mother, an extremely kind-hearted Upper-Austrian, that kept him in the path of art and its practice. The biographical sketch in the “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” of 1834, to which we are indebted for the first reliable accounts of Liszt, significantly says, however: “His piety was rational and imparted a certain freedom to his ideas and their execution. It did not exhibit the stiffness, roughness, dogmatism or brutality of the canting devotee. It was sincere and was the outcome of liberal reason from the Catholic standpoint.” Heine says in one of his Paris letters, 1830, that he has a great talent for speculation, and he dwells upon his “boundless thirst for light and the deity, which bear evidence to the holiness and religion in his nature.”
Enough has already been said to make further reference unnecessary, but the biographical sketch goes on to state that he had undertaken to compose religious music, and says in that connection: “The so-called music of our time did not seem to him to correspond to a manly conception of it, and thus the idea was forced upon him to create religious music.” “We talk of the reformation of church music,” Liszt writes in 1834. “Although this expression ordinarily implies only music like that performed during the ceremonies of divine service, I use it here in its most significant meaning. When the service expressed and satisfied the confessions, the necessities and the sympathies of the people, when men and women found an altar in the church where they could bow the knee, a pulpit where they could draw near to the divine, and it was a sight which refreshed their minds and uplifted their hearts in holy rapture, then church music only needed to retire to its own mysterious sphere and content itself with serving as an accompaniment to the splendor of the Catholic liturgy. In these days, when the altar shakes and totters; in these days, when the pulpit and religious ceremonies serve for the sport of the mocker and doubter, art must leave the inner temple and spreading out through the world seek a place to exhibit its magnificent accomplishments. As in former time—nay, even more than it did then—music must recognize the people and God as the sources of its life. It must speed from one to the other, ennobling, consoling and purifying man, blessing and glorifying God.”
Thus music was to him a service completely divine. More than one witness of that day testifies to the strong impression which the religious agitation of the time of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and the Abbe Lamennais made upon him, which had been already foreshadowed in his own fantasie, the “Berg symphony,” as well as the “Consolation.” In the same year, 1834, appeared the “Pensée des Morts” a fragment of the “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for piano, which he prefaced with some words of Lamartine’s. It also seems to be one of his first attempts to intimately associate poetry and music. This preface reads: “There are contemplative souls which in their solitary meditations are irresistibly elevated by the infinite ideas of religion. All their thoughts are turned to inspiration and prayer, all their being is a silent hymn to the divinity and the divine hope. In themselves and in the surrounding creation they seek the steps that ascend to God, the images and symbols with which to elevate themselves, with which to raise themselves to Him. O, that I could offer such to them! There are hearts broken by sorrow, crushed by the world, who fly to the world of their thoughts and to the solitude of their own souls to weep, to watch and to pray; O, that they might search for a muse as solitary as themselves, find sympathy in her tones, and listening, many a time declare: ‘We pray in thy language, we weep with thy tears, we are uplifted by thy songs.’”
As soon as Liszt, after his long, long wanderings, was in the right mood to actually compose—for the French account rightly calls Liszt’s work “no mechanical exercise but composition in the real sense, the actual artistic creation”—when he had so arranged these creations of his nature, for such we must call these reproductions, as to make sure of artistic results, from the thoughts of his early years, in reality out of a time almost a generation remote from us, sprang the larger part of his religious and church compositions, which we now possess.
The “lofty festival greetings” of the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the Fest Mass for the consecration of the Graner Cathedral (Graner Mass) which preceded that work of 1856, moving along with stately splendor, prove that it was not a mere reflection of the outward show but that it reached the very spirit of the occasion. Still grander was it, so to speak, to offer the daily bread when, alas, so often a stone had been tendered to the hungering multitude. The little Missa Choralis (Choral Mass) is enough to show that he had attained to the desire of his youth and that a truly religious music had been achieved for the church service of our time. It was practically performed for the first time in Vienna, in 1877, by the Cecilia Verein, at the court church. There is nothing of the conventional mass form of the last century in it, and although the arrangement for male voices is in the style of Palestrina, it does not at all remind one of him. It is original, new and modern throughout; in other words, it is in consonance with our own actual feelings. It must have deeply impressed the soul of the layman that this art not merely embellished and animated the service but that he freshly elevated its living spirit, just as Palestrina preserved and handed down to us the lofty religious spirit of the old church.
Liszt was not satisfied with this. He desired his work to be of a practical nature so that the music of the church should be purified, renovated and improved. He resolved to leave Weimar at once, and in 1861 left for Rome. It was necessary for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope, in order to accomplish what he wished. In accordance with ancient usage such an one must separate himself from the world by taking the first orders. Palestrina was the last Capellmeister at the Sistine who was not in orders. He was married and it was only the impossibility of filling his place that kept him in his position. Thus Liszt, who had always felt like a priest in his art, took orders and is to-day an Abbe.
And why did he not remain in Rome? “I was thwarted by the lack of culture among the cardinals,” he says, speaking in a musical sense, and besides most of the princes of the church are Italian. He felt it was only in Germany that the heart of music could be regenerated. So he came back to us in the North and devoted himself immediately to the encouragement of schools of a better and more original style of church music, such as those established in Regensburg, and Eichstaett and to the Scuola Gregoriana in Rome, in 1881. May they accomplish their purpose though it takes generations. They supply anew that elementary sustenance of the spirit which nothing else can, and which grows more pressing from decade to decade. We recognize anew that here as in every instance of creative activity the man and the artist are one. Securely settled and grounded inwardly he can outwardly rule like a king and as lavishly bestow.
CHAPTER VIII.
HARMONIES RELIGIEUSES.
The Oratorio of “Christus”—Its Title—The Origin of Oratorios—Their Relations to Opera—Gradual Changes in Style—The Dramatic Element in them—Liszt’s Original Treatment—A Wide Departure from old Forms—Events Pictured in Music—Groupings of Materials—What it did for the Church—General Divisions of the Oratorio—The Motto of “Christus”—The Christmas Music—Introduction of the Stabat Mater—The Shepherds at the Manger—The King’s March—The “Seligkeit”—Entrance to Jerusalem—The Scene at Gethsemane—The Inflammatus—Skilful treatment of Motifs.
“Christus, Oratorio, with texts from the Holy Scriptures and the Catholic Liturgy,” is the title of Liszt’s greatest church work, finished in 1866.