Liszt in his youth. Engraved on steel by Carl Mayer.
In the same year, 1837, Liszt made a confession, in an essay written for the Gazette Musicale, which was the greatest flattery that ever the piano received from one of its masters. Liszt refuses to go nearer to the orchestra or to the opera. “My piano is to me what his boat is to the seaman, what his horse is to the Arab: nay, more, it has been till now my eye, my speech, my life. Its strings have vibrated under my passions, and its yielding keys have obeyed my every caprice. Perhaps the secret tie which holds me so closely to it is a delusion; but I hold the piano very high. In my view it takes the first place in the hierarchy of instruments; it is the oftenest used and the widest spread.... In the circumference of its seven octaves it embraces the whole circumference of an orchestra; and a man’s ten fingers are enough to render the harmonies which in an orchestra are only brought out by the combination of hundreds of musicians.... We can give broken chords like the harp, long sustained notes like the wind, staccati and a thousand passages which before it seemed only possible to produce on this or that instrument.... The piano has on the one side the capacity of assimilation; the capacity of taking into itself the life of all (instruments); on the other it has its own life, its own growth, its individual development.... It is a microcosm, a micro-theus.... My highest ambition is to leave to piano players after me some useful instructions, the footprints of attained advance, in fact a work which may some day provide a worthy witness of the labour and study of my youth. I remember the greedy dog in La Fontaine, which let the juicy bone fall from its mouth in order to grasp a shadow. Let me gnaw in peace at my bone. The hour will come, perhaps all too soon, in which I shall lose myself and hunt after a monstrous intangible shadow.”
Cartoon representing Liszt and his Works. 1842.
It is due in very great measure to the example of Paganini’s violin-playing that Liszt at this time, with slow, deliberate toil, created modern piano-playing. The world was struck dumb by the enchantment of the Genoese violinist; men did not trust their ears; something uncanny, inexplicable, ran with this demon of music through the halls. The wonder reached Liszt; he ventured on his instrument to give sound to the unheard of: leaps which none before him had ventured to make, “disjunctions” which no one had hitherto thought could be acoustically united: deep tremolos of fifths, like a dozen kettle-drums, which rushed forth into wild chords; a polyphony which almost employed as a rhythmical element the overtones which destroy harmony; the utmost possible use of the seven octaves in chords set sharply one over another; resolutions of tied notes in unceasing octave graces with harmonies thrown in the midst; an employment hitherto unknown of the interval of the tenth to increase the fulness of tone-colour; a regardless interweaving of highest and lowest notes for purposes of light and shade; the most manifold application of the tone-colours of different octaves for the coloration of the tone-effect; the entirely naturalistic use of the tremolo and the glissando; and above all a perfect systematization of the method of interlacing the hands, partly for the management of runs so as to bring out the colour, partly to gain a doubled power by the division, and partly to attain, by the use of contractions and extensions in the figures, a fulness of orchestral chord-power never hitherto practised. This is the last step possible for the piano in the process of individualisation begun by Hummel and continued by Chopin. The three systems of notes, instead of two, appear more frequently; in fact the two hands appear for the most part to play a group of notes which seem to be conceived for three. And precisely by this means the two hands run inside and through one another, as if they were only a single tool of ten fingers. The music appears again to become a corporate unity of tone, as it had already once been in its first beginnings. But, it has now become, out of a universal music, a music for the piano. An historic mission is fulfilled.
Der General Bass wird durch List in seinen festen Linien überrumpelt u überwunden.
“General” Bass surprised and overcome in his fortress by Liszt. (List means craft, or stratagem. Observe Liszt’s wings, flügel, which word also means grand piano. General or “thorough” Bass is a personification of the “classical” school.)