We may thus imagine him established by force of arms as king of all pianists. He never relinquished his royal prerogatives nor could he tolerate a challenge of his power; but he proved himself most a hero in the use to which he put this enormous power. He chose the master’s highest privilege and made himself a public benefactor. It is true that he never wholly discarded the outward trappings of royal splendor. He played operatic fantasias like the rest; made, of his own, fabrics which were of a splendor that was blinding. But the true glory of his reign was the tribute he paid to men who had been greater than kings in music and the service he rendered to his own subjects in making known to them the masterpieces of these men, the fugues of Bach, the last sonatas of Beethoven, the works of Chopin. It was largely owing to Liszt that the general public was educated to an appreciation of these treasures, even that it became aware of its possession of them. It may be added that the pupils of this man, who was the most outstanding and overpowering of all the pianoforte virtuosi, made wholly familiar to the world a nobler practice of virtuosity in service to great music. Here, however, must be mentioned one great contemporary of Liszt’s, Clara Schumann, who, possessed of greatest skill, made her playing, in even greater degree than Liszt, the interpreter of great music. It is one of the richest tributes to Liszt as a pianist that he may in some respects be compared with that noble woman.
It seems to have been above all else the fire in Liszt’s playing which made it what it was, a fire which showed itself in great flames of sound, spreading with incredible rapidity up and down the keyboard, which, like lightning, was followed by a prodigious thunder. Yet it was a playing which might rival all the elements, furious winds, tumultuous waters, very phenomena of sounds. Caricatures show him in all sorts of amazing attitudes, and many draw him with more than two hands, or more than five fingers to a hand. At the piano he was like Jupiter with the thunder-bolts, Æolus with the winds of heaven, Neptune with the oceans of the earth in his control. And at the piano he made his way to the throne which perhaps no other will ever occupy again.
Just what was the effect of Liszt’s accomplishments upon pianoforte technique must be carefully considered, and such a consideration will bring us to problems which we may venture to assert are of profound interest to the pianist and to the musician. Broadly speaking he expanded the range of technique enormously, which is to say that he discovered many new effects and developed others which had previously been but partially understood. The Douze Études d’exécution transcendante may be taken to constitute a registry of his technical innovations.
First, in these, and in all his music, he makes a free and almost constant use of all the registers of the keyboard, the very low and the very high more than they had been used before, and the middle with somewhat more powerful scoring than was usual with any other composers excepting Schumann. Particularly his use of the low registers spread through the piano an orchestral thunder.
The ceaseless and rapid weaving together of the deepest and the highest notes made necessary a wide, free movement of both arms, and more remarkably of the left arm, because such rapid flights had hardly been demanded of it before. The fourth étude, a musical reproduction of the ride of Mazeppa, is almost entirely a study in the movement of the arms, demanding of them, especially in the playing of the inner accompaniment, an activity and control hardly less rapid or less accurate than what a great part of pianoforte music had demanded of the fingers.
It is in fact by recognizing the possibilities of movement in the arm that Liszt did most to expand pianoforte technique. One finds not only such an interplaying of the arms as that in ‘Mazeppa’ and other of his compositions, but a playing of the arms together in octave passages which leap over broadest distances at lightning speed. Sometimes these passages are centred, or rather based, so to speak, on a fixed point, from and to which the arms shoot out and back, touching a series of notes even more remote from the base, often being expected to cover the distance of nearly two octaves, as in the beginning of the first concerto. There are samples of this difficulty in ‘Mazeppa’; and also of other runs in octaves for both hands, which are full of irregular and wide skips.
In the long and extremely rapid tremolos with which his music is filled, it is again the arm which is exerted to new efforts. The last of the études is a study in tremolo for the arm, and so is the first of the Paganini transcriptions. The tremolo, it need hardly be said, is no invention of Liszt’s, but no composer before him demanded either such rapidity in executing it, or such a flexibility of the arm. The tremolo divided between the two hands, as here in this last study, and the rapid alternation of the two hands in the second study, depend still further on the freedom of the arm. It is the arm that is called upon almost ceaselessly in the tenth study; and the famous Campanella in the Paganini series is only a tour de force in a lateral movement of the arm, swinging on the wrist.
The series, usually chromatic, of free chords which one finds surging up and down the keyboard, often for both hands, may well paralyze the unpracticed arm; the somewhat bombastic climaxes, in which, à la Thalberg, he makes a huge noise by pounding chords, are a task for the arm. All of the last part of the eleventh étude, Harmonies du soir, is a study for the arm. Indeed even the wide arpeggios, running from top to bottom of the keyboard in bolder flight than Thalberg often ventured upon, the rushing scales, in double or single notes, the countless cadenzas and runs for both hands, all of these, which depend upon velocity for their effect, are possible only through the unmodified liberation of the arm.
All this movement of the arm over wide distances and at high speed makes possible the broad and sonorous effects which may be said to distinguish his music from that of his predecessors and his contemporaries. It makes possible his thunders and his winds, his lightnings and his rains. Thus he created a sort of grand style which every one must admit to be imposing.
Beyond these effects it is difficult to discover anything further so uniquely and so generally characteristic in his pianoforte style. He demands an absolutely equal skill in both hands, frequently throughout an entire piece. He calls for the most extreme velocity in runs of great length, sometimes in whole pages; and for as great speed in executing runs of double notes as in those of single. A study like the Feux-Follets deals with a complex mixture of single and double notes. All these things, however, can be found in the works of Schumann, or Chopin, or even Beethoven. Yet it must be said that no composer ever made such an extended use of them, nor exacted from the player quite so much physical endurance and sustained effort. Moreover, against the background of his effects of the arm, they take on a new light, no matter how often they had a share in the works of other composers.