Life of Liszt

by Ludwig Nohl

“Is he not always a stranger among men,” he continues, in his letter to George Sand. “Whatever he may do, wherever he may go, he always feels himself an exile. To him it is as if he had known a purer heaven, a warmer sun, a better existence. What can he do to escape this boundless sorrow, this unvoiced pain? Singing, must the artist rush through the world and in hurrying by scatter his thoughts without inquiring on what soil they fall, whether calumnies stab them, whether laurels mockingly cover them. Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist. A sacred predestination affixes its seal upon him at birth. He does not elect his calling but his calling elects him and incessantly urges him forward. However unpropitious his relations, the hostility of family and the world and the pressure of his mournful wretchedness may be, however insuperable the obstacles may seem, his will stands firm and remains unalterably turned to the pole. This pole to him is his art; it is his devotion to the mysterious and the divine in man and nature.

“The artist stands alone. The circumstances of his life force him into society, and so his soul creates in the midst of inharmonious influences an impenetrable solitude in which no voice of man is heard. All the passions which agitate men—vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, even love itself, are outside the magic circle which incloses his inner world. Withdrawing into this, as into a sanctuary, he contemplates and worships that ideal which it is the object of his life to realize. Here appear to him divine and incomprehensible forms, and colors such as his eyes never beheld on the most beautiful flowers in the brightness of spring. Here he listens to the harmony of the eternal, whose cadence rules the worlds, and in which all the voices of creation join in a marvelous celestial concert. Then an ardent fever seizes him. His blood flows more quickly. A thousand consuming thoughts revolve in his brain from which only the sacred labor of art can release it. He feels as if he were the victim of an unutterable disease. An unknown power urges him to reveal by words, colors or tones, the ideal which dwells in him and fills him with a thirst of desire, with a torment for possession, such as no man has ever experienced for an object of actual passion. But when his work is ended and the whole world applauds, he is not wholly satisfied. In his discontent he would perhaps destroy it, did not some new phenomenon avert his glance from his creations, to throw him anew into those heavenly, painful ecstacies which make his life a constant struggle toward an unattainable goal, a continual effort of all the powers of the spirit to raise itself to the realization of that which he has conceived in those favored hours when the eternal beauty disclosed itself without a cloud.”

Again he describes, with more gloomy tints, the social reception of the artist to-day, in our enlightened century, and the necessity which has been laid upon him, the mighty and high-throned one, at all times, and now more than ever, to associate with the meanest existence, provided it truly longs for the marvels of art, to lavish upon them the water of life.

“The artist dwells these days outside of the social community,” he writes, “for the poetical element, especially the religious agitation of humanity, has disappeared from our modern public. What have they who attempt to solve the problem of human happiness by granting a few privileges, by an unlimited expansion of industry and of egoistic well being—what have they to do with a poet or an artist? Why should they trouble themselves with those who wander about, of no use to the State-machinery of the world, to kindle sacred flames, noble feelings and lofty inspirations, that by their achievements they may satisfy the restless longing for the beautiful and the great which rests more or less securely in the depths of every soul? Such beautiful times are no more as when the blooming verdure of art spread itself and exhaled its perfume over all Greece. Every citizen was then an artist, for law-givers, warriors, philosophers, all were imbued with the idea of moral, spiritual and physical beauty. The majestic astonished no one, and great achievements were as common as those creations which at the same time exhibited and prompted them.

“The strong and mighty art of the Middle Ages which built cathedrals and summoned the enraptured people to them with peal of bells and the sound of the organ, became extinct when faith was animated anew. There is to-day the inward interest which unites art and society, but that which brought power and glory to those other deep agitations, is destroyed. The social art has gone and has not yet returned. Whom do we principally meet in these days? Sculptors? No, the manufacturers of statues. Painters? No, the manufacturers of pictures. Musicians? No, the manufacturers of music. Everywhere artisans, nowhere artists. Hence, there can only be cruel pain to one who was born with the pride and the wild freedom of a genuine child of art. He is surrounded by a swarm of mechanical workers who obsequiously devote their services to the caprices of the populace and the fancies of the uncultivated wealthy, at whose nod they bow themselves down to the earth, as if they could not get close enough to it. The artist must accept them as his brothers and as the multitude confounds them together, must see himself and them rated at the same value and regarded with the same childish, stupid astonishment. It can not be said that these are the complaints of vanity and self-conceit. No, no—they who stand so high that no rivalry can reach them, they know this. The bitter tears which our eyes have shed belong to the worship of the true god, whose temple is defiled with idols for whose sake the silly people have forsaken the worship of the living god and bowed the knee before these degrading divinities of stone.”

Thus speaks this proud and truly noble soul whose best efforts and talents have been sacrificed to the silliness of idle caprice and to the obstinate humors of shallow minds. He knows that the only remedy is the old Grecian one, the personal contemplation of noble forms, of true skill.

“It is a fact that thorough musical culture is confined to a very few,” he says. “The majority are ignorant of the first rudiments of art and in the upper circles nothing is rarer than an earnest study of our masters. They are content with hearing a few good works from time to time, and without choice, amongst a mass of miserable stuff which spoils the taste and accustoms the ear to wretched poverty. In contrast with the poet who speaks all languages and besides only devotes himself to mankind, and whose mind has been cultivated by classical study, the musician reveals himself in a mysterious language, the comprehension of which, if it does not presuppose particular study, shows at least a long accustomed familiarity with it. Besides that, in contrast with the painter and sculptor, he has the disadvantage that they are devoted more to the expression of form, which is more universal than the inward conception of nature and the feeling for the infinite which are the essence of music.”

How firmly also his knowledge was founded upon personal experience is shown by the fact that like photography now-a-days, which represents all and every phase of the treasures of the plastic arts, so the piano for him could “gather the harvest, make use of the garnered treasures, and invest with life again those which conduce to ideas of happiness.”

In his twenty-fifth year, he writes to Adolf Pictet, asking why he was surprised that he devoted himself exclusively to the piano. He hardly realized that he had touched upon the most sensitive point of his very existence. “You do not know,” he says, “that if I should give up my piano, which speaks so much, it would be to me a day of gloom, robbing me of the light which illuminated all my early life and has grown to be inseparable from it. For, look you, my piano is to me what his vessel is to the seaman, his horse is to the Arab—nay, even more, till now it has been myself, my speech, my life. It is the repository of all that stirred my nature in the passionate days of my youth. I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys and sorrows. Its strings vibrated with my emotions and its flexible keys have obeyed my every caprice. Would you have me abandon it and strive for the more brilliant and sounding triumphs of the theater or orchestra? O, no! Even admitting that I were competent for music of that kind, even then my resolution would be firm not to abandon the study and development of piano-playing, until I had accomplished whatever is practicable, whatever it is possible to attain now-a-days.”

In this he discloses those deep aspirations which now have a more lively interest and higher significance for us, since we know that they have not disappointed him.