Indeed, nothing is more princely, nothing better reveals the amplitude, the generosity of your spirit, than your relations with your fellow craftsmen. Artists are oftentimes so petty in their conduct toward each other that it is indeed refreshing to read with what infallible kindness you treated so many composers less fortunately situated than yourself. And not only Wagner and César Franck benefited by your good deeds. Many obscurer and younger men, poor Edward MacDowell, for instance, knew what it was to receive cordial and commendatory letters from you, to be assisted by you in their careers, to have their compositions brought to performance by the best German orchestras through your aid. And you had no conceit in you, smilingly referred to your symphonic poems as "Gartenmusik," and replied to Wagner, when he informed you that he had stolen such and such a theme from you, "Thank goodness, now it will at least be heard!" Had you, O Liszt, expressed the nobility of your nature as purely in your composition as you expressed it in your social relations, we could have complained of no mountainous rubble, no squalor marring the perfect splendor of your figure.
But, unhappily, the veritable grandeur of your endowment never begot itself a body of work really symbolic of itself. For if your music, as a whole, has any grandeur, it is the hollow grandeur of inflation, of ostentation, of externality. Your music is almost entirely a monstrous décor de théâtre. It is forever seeking to establish tragical and satanic and passional atmospheres, to suggest immense and regal and terrific things, to gain tremendous effects. It is full of loud, grandiloquent pronouncements, of whirlwinds, thunderstorms, coronations on the Capitoline, ideals, lamentations, cavalcades across half of Asia, draperies, massacres, frescoes, façades, magnificats, lurid sunsets, scimitars, miracles, triumphs of the cross, retreats from the world. It is full of all the romantic properties. Like vast pieces of stage scenery the various passages and movements are towed before our eyes, and we are bidden to feast our eyes on representations of titanic rocks and lowering skies and holy hermits' dwellings that remind us dangerously of the wonders displayed in the peepshows at gingerbread fairs. The atmosphere of the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious façades, these vast, pompous frescoes by Kaulbach, these Byronic instrumental soliloquies, these hollow, empty flourishes of the brass, these foolishly satanic chromatics, these inevitable triumphs of the cross and the Gregorian modes.
No doubt, much of your fustian and rhodomontade, your diabolic attitudes, your grandiose battles between the hosts of evil and the light of the Tree, your interminable fanfares, was due the age in which you grew. The externality, the pompousness of intention, the theatrical postures, was part of the romantic constitution. The desire to achieve sensational effects, the tendency to externalize, to assume theatrical postures and intend pompously, was inborn in every single one of the men among whom you passed your youth. For they had suddenly, painfully become aware that nature was supremely indifferent to their individual fates and sorrows. So wounded were they in their amour-propre that they sought to restore their diminished sense of self-worth by exaggerating the importance and intensity of their sufferings and seeking to convince themselves of their satanic sins and dreadful dooms. Manfred, posing darkly on an Alpine crag and summoning
"Nature to her feud
With bile & buskin attitude,"
was the type of you all. You had to ward off consciousness of your own insignificance by conceiving yourselves amid stupendous surroundings, lurid natural effects, flaming prairies, pinnacles, torrents, coliseums, subterranean palaces, moonlit ruins, bandit dens, and as laboring under frightful curses, dire punishments, ancestral sins, etc., etc.
But while we find the frenetic romanticism of a Delacroix, for instance, attractive, even, because of the virtue of his painting, and forgive that of a Berlioz and a Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation, the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der Geläufichkeit—nach Frauen."
So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.
We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience.
Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of rôle, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the fashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds of lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary. You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins. You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your "Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."