As far as pianoforte music is concerned Liszt revealed a new power of sound in the instrument by means of the free movement of the arms, and created and exhausted effects due to the utmost possible speed. These are the chief contributions of his many compositions to the literature of the piano. His music is more distinguished by them than by any other qualities. In melody he is inventive rather than inspired. His rhythms lack subtlety and variety. Of this there can be no better proof than the endless short-windedness already observed in the sonata in B minor, which is to be observed, moreover, in the Symphonic Poems for orchestra. As a harmonist he lacks not so much originality as spontaneity. He is oftener bold than convincing. One finds on nearly every page signs of the experimentalist of heroic calibre. He is the inventor rather than the prophet, the man of action rather than the inspired rhapsodist. He is a converter into music oftener than a creator of music.
Hence we find him translating caprices of Paganini into caprices for the pianoforte; and when by so doing he has, so to speak, enlarged his vocabulary enormously, he gives us, in the Douze Études, a sort of translation of the pianoforte itself into a cycle of actions. Again he translates a great part of the literature of his day into terms of music: Consolations, Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses, Légendes, Eclogues and other things. Even Dante and Petrarch are so converted, not to mention Sénancourt, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Byron, and Lenau, with other contemporaries. The Chapel of William Tell, the Lake of Wallenstadt, the cypresses and fountains at the Villa d’Este, even the very Alps themselves pass through his mind and out his fingers. In this process details are necessarily obscured if not obliterated, and the result is a sort of general reproduction in sound that is not characterized by the detailed specialities of the art of music, that is, of the art of Bach, Mozart, and Chopin. And even of Schumann, it may be added, for Schumann’s music runs independently beside poetry, not with it, so closely associated, as Liszt’s runs.
The question arises as to how this generalization of music will appear to the world fifty years hence. Is Liszt a radical or a reactionary, after all? Did he open a new life to music, a further development of the pianoforte, or did he, having mastered utterly all the technical difficulties of the pianoforte, throw music back a stage? Internally his music has far less independent and highly organized life than Chopin’s. But by being less delicate is it perhaps more robust, more procreative? At present such hardly seems to be the case. A great part of the pianoforte music of Liszt is sinking out of sight in company with that of Herz and Thalberg—evidently for the same reason; namely, that it is sensationalist music. Its relations to poetry, romanticism, nature or landscape will not preserve it in the favor of a public whose ear little by little prefers rather to listen than to be overpowered. Yet, be his music what it may, he himself will always remain one of the great, outstanding figures in the history of music, the revealer of great treasures long ignored. Whatever the value of his compositions, he himself, the greatest of all pianoforte virtuosi, set the standard of the new virtuosity which, thanks to his abiding example, becomes less and less a skill of display, more and more an art of revelation.
FOOTNOTES:
[37] W. von Lenz: ‘The Great Piano Virtuosos of Our Time.’ Translated from the German by Madeline R. Baker, New York, 1899.
CHAPTER IX
IMITATORS AND NATIONALISTS
Inevitable results of Schumann, Chopin and Liszt—Heller, Raff, Jensen, Scharwenka, Moszkowski, and other German composers—The influence of national characteristics: Grieg, his style and his compositions; Christian Sinding—The Russians: Balakireff, Rubinstein, Tschaikowsky, Arensky, Glazounoff, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and others—Spanish traits; I. Albéniz; pianoforte composers in England and the United States.
It is scarcely to be wondered at that the work of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt has eclipsed that of most of their contemporaries, nor that three such remarkable composers should have left a standard for pianoforte music by which little else for the piano since that day can afford to be measured. One feels that the German Romantic spirit could find no expression more complete than that which Schumann gave it; that the beauties of sound in the pianoforte could not be again put into such emotional form as Chopin put them; that the instrument itself could not be made to do more than Liszt had made it do. These things are nearly true. One cannot therefore expect to find in the music of their obscure contemporaries such superlative greatness as has made theirs known to the whole world. One expects to find, and does find, in the music of their successors imitations of their method, style, or technique. The literature for the piano has been stuffed to overflowing with music of this kind. Only now and then may a little of it be distinguished by a touch of originality, either of personal, or, more frequently, of national or local idiom.
STEPHEN HELLER AND JOACHIM RAFF