This number alone would doubtless establish the permanence of the work. It proves that the value of church composition is not confined to either church style, that of Palestrina or Bach, but that the most modern and progressive of the arts is enabled to clearly express whatever is required of it, and that the increased methods of expression of our day can furnish even yet entirely new means of expressing a subject. As a conspicuous instance of this, the twice recurring “Inflammatus,” with chorus, solo, quartette, orchestra and organ is well nigh overpowering in its simple grandeur and impressive strength, and all the more so as it only turns upon the tones of the principal motif of the piece.
In this most solemn of the world tragedies, the blissful old Easter Song, “O Filii et Filiae,” sung by boys with harmonium, sounds pathetic. At the close of the “Stabat Mater,” a succession of expanding chords had already announced the salvation of the world, almost unheard, as if from distant worlds, but here it sounds forth as if the blessing were actually gained by the ransomed human heart. That children possess it is a double proof of its certainty. Like a sunbeam in a church this chorus penetrates the gloom of the Passion.
The last scene consecrates the surety of this possession and expresses with firm and massive power the final victory of christianity, whereupon a short “Amen” upon the original connecting motif, “Rorati Coeli,” closes the series. It is a cycle of scenes such as only the victorious mastery of the subject by inward perception can give, and such as only the artist can draw who dominates all the conditions of art like a king and has directed his soul to the absolute truth and power of the Eternal.
CHAPTER IX.
PROMETHEUS.
Liszt’s Letter to George Sand—Happiness of the Wanderer—Allusions to Wagner—The Artist as an Exile—Sorrowful Character of his lot—His Solitude—His Creative Moments and Inspirations—No Sympathy Between the Artist and Society—Degradation of Art—Artisans not Artists—Letter to Adolf Pictet—Why he Devoted Himself to the Piano—His love for it—Estimate of its Capabilities—Miss Fay’s “Music Study in Germany”—A Critical Notice—The Author’s First Meeting with Liszt—Personal Description—Grace of his Manner—Peculiarities of his Playing—His Home—Pleasant Gatherings—Personal Incidents—Liszt and Tausig—The Loss of “Faust”—Happily Recovered—The final Tribute.
On the 30th of April, 1837, Liszt writes to George Sand:
“Happy, a hundred times happy, the wanderer! Happy he who does not have to traverse the beaten paths and to walk in the old tracks! Restlessly rushing on, he sees things only as they seem, and men only as they show themselves. Happy he who gives up the warm, friendly hand before its pressure grows icily chill; who does not wait for the day on which the affectionate glances of the loved one change to blank indifference! In fine, happy he who breaks with relations before he is broken by them! Of the artist it is specially true that he only pitches his tent for the hour and never settles down in any permanent place.”
Thus declares the youthful storming Apollo and many a Marsyas he flayed on these journeys of investigation, personal as well as social, over all Europe; on many a Midas grew asses’ ears in sight of the world. Read the “Letters of Travel of a Baccalaureate in Music.” There is nothing more spiritedly humorous, more serene in its earnestness.
Scarce ten years later, what was the experience of Richard Wagner, to whom a second supplementing genius was even more indispensable than the tenor Nourrit to Rossini, with “the masterwork which sprang from the brain of the Olympian god,” and still appeals to the multitude to combine art with art, the spirit with spirit, light with light?
During his abode as an exile in Weimar, in May, 1849, he writes: “Wonderful! through the love of this rarest of all friends, I gained at a time when I was homeless, the real home for my art, long looked for, always sought in the wrong places and never found. At the close of my exile, my wandering about led me to a little place which was to make a home for me.” This he did for him and for many another musician, after his change in 1842, for he knew that the artist’s only home is his art.