It was Paganini who had the first and most decisive influence upon the unapproachable playing of the young artist. It was the language of unfathomable nature, the same which he had heard among the gypsies, but translated into the higher language of genius, without which the superhuman, which is so mysteriously throned in our deeper natures, would remain unexpressed. It was in the year 1831 that this hero of violinists appeared in Paris, and carried everything before him with his concerts. The most inconceivable difficulties were overcome in his consummate achievements and seemed to be the essential methods of expressing particular emotions, like those of the deepest sorrow or the most extravagant humor. Liszt, at that time in his nineteenth year, was touched to his inmost soul by this playing. “He became convinced,” says a contemporary musical writer, “it was only through new and unusual means that a large audience could be roused into unexampled enthusiasm, and that the same methods could be applied to the piano, which had been used with the violin. He determined to become the Paganini of the piano. That he became even greater, we now know. We close these preludes of his life with some little known accounts of these first reproductive periods.”
In that excellent Parisian musical journal, to which Liszt himself contributed many years, the following appeared in 1834, when he was in his twenty-second year: “His playing is his language, his soul. It is the very poetical essence of all the impressions he has felt, of all that have captivated him. These impressions, which in all likelihood he could not render in language, and express in clear and precise ideas, he reproduced in their full meaning, with an accurate skill, a natural power, an energy of feeling and a charming grace, which have never been equaled. At one time his art is passive, an instrument, an echo; it expresses and interprets. At another it is active again; it speaks. It is the organ which he uses for the development of his ideas. Hence it is that Liszt’s playing is not a mechanical, material exercise, but much more than this, in the genuine sense a composition, a successful creation of art.”
The details of his performances are then noted, as for instance, that in the Weber “Concert-Stueck” he drowned a tutti of the orchestra with his piano and its thunder overpowered the hundred voices of its instruments and the thousand-fold bravas which rang through the hall at that instant. “How is it that we feel a sudden and irresistible pressure in the breast and a stoppage of the breath as soon as Liszt sits down to the piano to play the simplest thing, a capriccio, a waltz, an etude of Cramer, Chopin or Moscheles,” wonderingly asks this admirer. Then he refers to his playing of Beethoven’s music. “Beethoven is a divinity to Liszt, before whom he bows his head. He regards him as a savior whose advent in the world through the freedom of poetical thought has been signalized by his annihilation of superannuated practices. You must hear him while he plays one of those melodious poems which are distinguished by the commonly accepted name of sonata. You must see his eyes when he raises them as if to receive an inspiration from above, and when again he lowers them sadly to the earth. You must see him, hear him, and—be silent. For here you feel only too well how feeble is any expression of admiration.”
About the same time appeared a very considerate German account in Robert Schumann’s musical paper. “In Paris they did not have much faith in the young artist’s talent for composing or originating ideas, but on the other hand credited him with divining the thoughts of the great masters by his perceptions and study. So far as his playing was concerned, they could only use the expression, ‘marvelous.’ He plays with unrivaled facility and purity, elegantly, tenderly and with fire. He carries the listener along with him and often makes him fear that he will not hold out. It is related that at the close of one day, after a too continuous and lavish display of his vigor and power, he was exhausted by weariness. He triumphs over all, only he can not conquer his nerves, which I fear, will conquer him,” says our countryman in conclusion. “In a word, you behold an immensely nervous man who plays the piano immensely.”
The world knows to-day, by hundreds and hundreds of his victorious achievements, that by the “ideality of his personal presence” as well as by the fascinating and magical beauty of his playing, he has marched through the world like another Alexander the Great, and that it yielded not merely to the purest enjoyment of human nature but to the highest possible proofs of truth and beauty—brother and sister to each other as it were, yet in our inmost being they are one.
CHAPTER II.
DIVERTISSEMENTS HONGROIS.
The Power of Music—Its Origin and Influence—Relation to Nature—Bach, Mozart and Beethoven—Sources of their Inspiration—Autobiographical Sketch—Liszt as a Lad—His Voluntary Exile—Revival of the Home Feeling—His Love of Nature—Religious Feeling—The Gypsies—A Famous Visit to them—Picturesque Surroundings—Wild Dances—Talks with the Old Men—The Gypsy Hags—An Impromptu Orchestra and Wonderful Music—A Weird Night Scene—Salvator Rosa Effects—Grotesque Cavalcade—The Concert at the Inn—A Demoniac Symphony—Wild Revel in a Thunder Storm—Liszt’s Hungarian Music.
The work of artistic genius will always remain an enigma to be silently admired by us, like the incomprehensible and creative phenomena of nature, of which it is, by its very essence, a part and a speaking likeness. Transporting the whole nature and again rousing a secret awe in the presence of its mysterious power, which like nature itself, knows neither good nor evil, deliciously reveling in a flood of light, as when the first morning of creation revealed the boundless fullness of its form, and again filling one with fear and dread of the overpowering immeasurability and the mysterious depths of the original creative power—with such varied emotions this creative force of genius fills us, especially in music, when it confronts us almost face to face with the sense of that secret incomprehensible world-force which, endlessly destroying, creates again and creates only to destroy.
Whence comes the power to a single individual which subdues millions of hearts, which for centuries has dictated the laws of thought and feeling, which seems even to broaden the limits of creation, while it produces pictures and images which were not pre-existent? Is it not the same with the images of tragic poetry? Does it not, like the antique, live an imperishable life by the side of and yet above humanity? Do not these melodies of Mozart and Beethoven give us a new and different view of our kind, and does not the mighty Leipsic cantor, Sebastian Bach, construct a dome of mere tones which is a part of the plan and order of the universe we call the cosmos, a tangible and perceptible mental structure, as apparent as the everlasting abode of Deity?
Whence comes, we repeat, this incomprehensible power, this knowledge we are almost inclined to regard as something unprecedented and impossible? Is it an accident of natural endowment, a mysterious inner combination of powers, which have no connection with the customary mental processes but expand and work in a time and place which we must consciously recollect in order to comprehend the designated results of its immeasurable creative power?