The whole work is in Liszt’s most exalted vein. The ‘character pictures’ are suggestive in the extreme, and are contrasted in the most vivid manner. Liszt has rarely surpassed in sheer beauty the Gretchen episode, the theme of which later becomes the setting for Goethe’s famous line, ‘The eternal feminine leads us upward and on.’ These two works—the ‘Dante’ and the ‘Faust’—are doubtless not so supremely creative as Liszt imagined, but they remain among the noblest things in modern music. Their great difficulty of execution, even to orchestras in our day, stands in the way of their more frequent performance, but to those who hear them they prove unforgettable. In them, more than in any other of his works, Liszt has lavished his musical learning and invention, has put all that was best and noblest in himself.
V
The most typical musical form of to-day—the symphonic poem—is wholly the creation of Liszt. The dramatic symphony attained its highest development at the hands of its inventor; later works of the kind, such as Raff’s ‘Lenore Symphony,’ have been musically of the second or third rate. It is quite true that a large proportion of the symphonies of to-day have some sort of general program or ‘subject,’ and nearly all are sufficiently dramatic in feeling to invite fanciful ‘programs’ on the part of their hearers. But few composers have cared or dared to go to Berlioz’s lengths. The symphonic poem, on the other hand, has become the ambition of most of the able orchestral writers of our day. And, whereas Berlioz has never been equalled in his line, Liszt has often been surpassed, notably by Richard Strauss, in his.
Curiously enough, Berlioz, who was by temperament least fitted to work in the strict symphonic form, always kept to it in some degree. The most revolutionary of spirits never broke away wholly from the past. Liszt carried Berlioz’s program ideas to their logical conclusion, inventing a type of composition in which the form depended wholly and solely on the subject matter. This latter statement will almost serve as a definition of the symphonic poem. It is any sort of orchestral composition which sets itself to tell a story or depict the emotional content of a story. Its form will be—what the story dictates, and no other. The distinction sometimes drawn between the symphonic poem and the tone poem is largely fanciful. One may say that the former tends to the narrative and the latter to the emotional, but for practical purposes the two terms may be held synonymous.
In any kind of musical narration it is usually necessary to represent the principal characters or ideas in particular fashion, and the leit-motif is the natural means to this end. And, though theoretically not indispensable, the leit-motif has become a distinguishing feature of the symphonic poem and inseparable from it. Sometimes the themes are many (Strauss has scores of them in his Heldenleben), but Liszt took a particular pleasure in economy of means. Sometimes a single theme served him for the development of the whole work. He took the delight of a short-story writer in making his work as compact and unified as possible. In fact, the formal theory of the symphonic poem would read much like Poe’s well known theory of the short story. Let there be some predominant character or idea—‘a single unique effect,’ in Poe’s language—and let this be developed through the various incidents of the narration, changing according to the changing conditions, but always retaining an obvious relation to the central idea. Or, in musical terms, select a single theme (or at most two or three) representing the central character or idea, and repeat and develop this in various forms and moods. This principle brought to a high efficiency a device which Berlioz used only tentatively—that of transformation. To Liszt a theme should always be fluid, rarely repeating itself exactly, for a story never repeats itself. And his musicianship and invention show themselves at their best (and sometimes at their worst) in his constant variation of his themes through many styles and forms.
But such formal statement as this is vague and meaningless without the practical application which Liszt gave it. The second and in many respects the noblest of Liszt’s symphonic poems is the ‘Tasso, Lament and Triumph,’ composed in 1849 to accompany a festival performance of Goethe’s play at Weimar on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth. The subject caught hold of Liszt’s romantic imagination. He confesses, like the good romanticist that he is, that Byron’s treatment of the character appealed to him more than Goethe’s. ‘Nevertheless,’ he says in his preface to the work, ‘Byron, in his picture of Tasso in prison, was unable to add to the remembrance of his poignant grief, so nobly and eloquently uttered in his “Lament,” the thought of the “Triumph” that a tardy justice gave to the chivalrous author of “Jerusalem Delivered.” We have sought to mark this dual idea in the very title of our work, and we should be glad to have succeeded in pointing this great contrast—the genius who was misjudged during his life, surrounded, after death, with a halo that destroyed his enemies. Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara; he was avenged at Rome; his glory still lives in the folk-songs of Venice. These three elements are inseparable from his memory. To represent them in music, we first called up his august spirit as he still haunts the waters of Venice. Then we beheld his proud and melancholy figure as he passed through the festivals of Ferrara where he had produced his master-works. Finally, we followed him to Rome, the eternal city, that offered him the crown and glorified in him the martyr and the poet.’ A few lines further Liszt says: ‘For the sake, not merely of authority, but the distinction of historical truth, we put our idea into realistic form in taking for the theme of our musical hero the melody to which we have heard the gondoliers of Venice sing over the waters the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet.’ The theme is one of the finest in the whole Liszt catalogue. We need hardly go to the length of saying that its origin was a fiction on the part of the composer, but doubtless he changed it generously to suit his musical needs. Yet his evident delight in its pretended origin is typical of the man and the time; romanticism had a sentimental veneration for ‘the people,’ especially the people of the Middle Ages, and a Venetian gondolier would naturally be the object of a shower of quite undeserved sentimental poetry. The whole story, and the atmosphere which surrounded it, was meat for Liszt’s imagination.
