It was in 1834 that Liszt's first marriage took place, or as soon after as circumstances warranted. The young and brilliant Countess D'Agoult, wearied with a tyrannic and unsympathetic husband, left him and placed herself under the care of Liszt. They lived during the next three years in Geneva, in a semi-private manner, and here also Liszt continued his studies and experiments. Then, in 1836, he entered upon his great career as performing artist, when he astonished Europe from one end to the other by playing the piano in a manner previously unheard of. His art had everything in it. He had enormous facility, his very long hand giving him the same kind of mastery over technical difficulties that Paganini had upon the finger-board of the violin; and, while indulging in long stretches of pianissimo, he diversified his performances by climaxes of prodigious power, under which for a long time piano hammers gave way, so that often there were three or four grand pianos upon the stage, and as soon as one was knocked out in the melée another was rolled forward to be sacrificed in turn. After a few years the piano-makers found ways of strengthening the actions, so that nowadays such a thing as a hammer breaking in a concert never occurs.
In 1839 Liszt did one of those daring things which hardly any other musician has ever done. Hearing that the committee in charge of raising funds for a Beethoven monument at Bonn had found themselves making little or no headway, Liszt wrote them offering to raise the entire missing sum himself. This he did, and in 1847, I think it was, he himself conducted the musical festival with which the monument was dedicated, himself playing the Fifth Concerto of Beethoven in a manner which Berlioz characterized gloriously in his letters from Bonn to the Paris "Journal des Débats."
In this same year Liszt entered upon the restful period of his life in accepting the position of musical director at Weimar, where he lived and kept up a sort of musical court until 1861, and at intervals afterward. In the exercise of his duties here he was able to accept the manuscript of Wagner's "Lohengrin" when that hot-headed young musician had gotten himself mixed up in the revolution of 1848 at Dresden, and Liszt produced the work at Weimar in 1850. From that time forward Liszt was the mouthpiece of the new school, or rather he was a sort of godfather to it, ministering to Wagner's impecuniousness often and again out of resources which were absurdly small when we consider the rank of genius which the salary covered. Liszt's salary at Weimar was about $1100 a year.
In order to appreciate Liszt's standpoint as pianoforte writer more particularly, it is necessary for a moment to glance at his celebrated contemporary, Thalberg. This artist, born one year later than Liszt, was taught by Hummel and Sechter at Vienna, and in 1827 he made his debut as pianist, exciting admiration by the beauty of his tone, his unexampled equality of running work, and perhaps a little later through an effect of which he was the inventor (at least for the pianoforte)—that, namely, in which the melody is carried by the thumbs in the middle range of the instrument, the long tones being sustained by the pedal while the hands carry long and light running passages across the full range of the instrument. The real inventor of this effect was Parish-Alvars, a great virtuoso of the harp, who was born in 1808. Availing himself of the beautiful melodies of his native Wales, and later of suitable operatic melodies of the Donizetti and Bellini school, he created beautiful effects upon the harp, previously unheard, by means of melodies and surrounding variations or accompanying arabesques of runs, both arpeggios and scales. When Thalberg began to be praised for discovering this device in piano playing there ensued a long and acrimonious correspondence between him and Parish-Alvars, the latter claiming the prior invention—and rightfully so.
Thalberg arrived in Paris in 1836, and for some time there was quite a contest between him and Liszt for superiority of art. Thalberg sang a melody beautifully, and his running work was of the most delightfully clear and even description. He was entirely reposeful in his work, never manifesting any uneasiness of bodily position, no matter what the difficulty of his playing might be. Liszt, on the other hand, being of an impassioned and nervous temperament, had a great deal more motion, and in his brilliant climaxes he developed a strength which seemed excessive to the aristocratic hearers constituting the main portion of his audiences. Presently, however, the honors of the competition went to Liszt, where they have ever since remained.
Liszt had the good fortune to divine the future course of piano development, as also did Schumann. Both took for the strategic center of the piano the principle of what has been called the "differential touch," or discrimination in touch, by means of which not only long passages of different kinds were discriminated from one another, as in the Thalbergian melodies and their surrounding arabesques, but the infinitely finer discriminations which take place within the phrase, and especially in chord playing, where at least one tone of the chord belongs to the melodic thread, and as such receives an emphasis, or at least a distinctness of delivery, to which the remainder of the chord has no claim whatever. Moreover, while Thalberg employed the pedal,—and it was, in fact, an indispensable condition of the effect of his pieces,—he did not rightly consider what would be the effect when the piano should be developed to a sonority and continuance of vibration which in his time it did not have. Schumann and Liszt recognized the inner significance of the pedal, and wrote their works with reference to what we might call perhaps a sort of pianoforte chiaro-oscuro (luminous-indistinctness), which inevitably follows when the pedal is rapidly employed in quickly moving chords. In many of the Schumann pieces this is one of the most notable elements of the tonal beauty, and it is the underlying condition of the successful performance of nearly or quite all of the great Liszt transcriptions.
Thus, in the course of the thirty years or more over which his activity as composer extended, Liszt not only inaugurated new principles of playing, but brought them to perfection himself, and illustrated them in a thousand ways in his voluminous works; and, through the charm of his personality and his pleasure in contact with young and promising genius, became the master and the forming influence of all the concert pianists who came upon the stage previous to his death.
No periods can be safely marked in the creative career of Liszt, at least not in so far as relates to the pianoforte. In his "Studies for Transcendent Execution," which appear to have been first written about 1836, advanced principles of playing are illustrated as fully as any that meet us later; and in the first of his serious transcriptions of orchestral works for piano,—the "Fantastic Symphony" of Berlioz,—he set himself as carefully to reproduce upon the piano the orchestral work as he did in his famous transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies and the later things of Wagner. But, while creative periods can not be affirmed with certainty, there are differences of style. In some of his works he indulges in a variety of piano-playing additions having no essential, or indeed suitable, relation to the musical matter which he purports to be illustrating. In others, on the contrary, he is essentially simple, loyal, and scrupulous to the last degree. The latter is true of his transcriptions of some of the Schubert songs, especially such as "My Sweet Repose," "The Wanderer," "Hark! Hark! the Lark," "The Erl King," "The Ave Maria," "Greeting to Spring," etc. In many of his operatic fantasies, on the contrary, he puts in running work, effect-cadenzas, and interpolations of various sorts. This is illustrated, perhaps better than elsewhere, in his enormously difficult fantasia upon melodies from Bellini's "Sonnambula," which for several years was one of his own concert pieces. In this there is a very difficult part where two melodies are going together, and a long and difficult trill. Other examples of this kind of writing are found in his "Trovatore" fantasias, his "Rigoletto," and the like.
After the production of "Lohengrin," Liszt seems to have entered upon a more serious view of his art than he had previously held, and his works later are generally more confined to musical considerations, and free from display as such. Nevertheless, the "Rigoletto" fantasia can not have been written prior to 1851, for it was in this year that the opera was first produced.
In cataloguing the Liszt works according to the difficulty they present to the piano player, it must first be noted that such has been the advance during the fifty years since the early ones were produced, that compositions which at their first appearance seemed stupendous to ordinary pianists have now, thanks to education and the general advance of art, become practicable to players of little beyond ordinary capacity. In fact, there is a whole world of pieces by Liszt which are more practicable to young players than most of the serious compositions of Chopin. The latter composer demands, above everything else, refinement and delicate finish; Liszt demands musical idea and effect, and, while refinement adds greatly to the charm of the works, it is not absolutely a sine quâ non. In other words, Liszt always wrote with an eye to the stage, and with a certain largeness and ample scope of treatment, in which breadth and genuine musical intention, combined with a certain freedom upon the keyboard, are the main conditions of success. From a modern standpoint, the most difficult of all the Liszt works are, probably, his arrangement of the overture to Wagner's "Tannhäuser,"—which he himself considered by far the most difficult piece ever written,—the "Don Juan" fantasia, and perhaps also the "Sonnambula."