Franz Liszt Part 1

Franz Liszt.

by James Huneker.

I

LISZT: THE REAL AND LEGENDARY

I

Franz Liszt remarked to a disciple of his: "Once Liszt helped Wagner, but who now will help Liszt?" This was said in 1874, when Liszt was well advanced in years, when his fame as piano virtuoso and his name as composer were wellnigh eclipsed by the growing glory of Wagner--truly a glory he had helped to create. In youth, an Orpheus pursued by the musical Maenads of Europe, in old age Liszt was a Merlin dealing in white magic, still followed by the Viviens. The story of his career is as romantic as any by Balzac. And the end of it all--after a half century and more of fire and flowers, of proud, brilliant music-making--was tragical. A gentle King Lear (without the consolation of a Cordelia), following with resignation the conquering chariot of a man, his daughter's husband, who owed him so much, and, despite criticism, bravely acknowledged his debt, thus faithful to the end (he once declared that by Wagner he would stand or fall), Franz Liszt died a quarter of a century ago at Bayreuth, not as Liszt the Conqueror, but a world-weary pilgrim, petted and flattered when young, neglected as the star of Wagner arose on the horizon. If only Liszt could have experienced the success of poverty as did Wagner. But the usual malevolent fairy of the fable endowed him with all the gifts but poverty, and that capricious old Pantaloon, the Time-Spirit, had his joke in the lonesome latter years. As regards his place in the musical pantheon, this erst-while comet is now a fixed star, and his feet set upon the white throne. There is no longer a Liszt case; his music has fallen into critical perspective; but there is still a Liszt case, psychologically speaking. Whether he was an archangel of light, a Bernini of tones, or, as Jean-Christophe describes him, "The n.o.ble priest, the circus-rider, neo-cla.s.sical and vagabond, a mixture in equal doses of real and false n.o.bility," is a question that will be answered according to one's temperament. That he was the captain of the new German music, a pianist without equal, a conductor of distinction, one who had helped to make the orchestra and its leaders what they are to-day; that he was a writer, a reformer of church music, a man of the n.o.blest impulses and ideals, generous, selfless, and an artist to his fingertips--these are the commonplaces of musical history. As a personality he was an apparition; only Paganini had so electrified Europe. A _charmeur_, his love adventures border on the legendary; indeed, are largely legend. As amorous as a guitar, if we are to believe the romancers, the real Liszt was a man of intellect, a deeply religious soul; in middle years contemplative, even ascetic. His youthful extravagances, inseparable from his gipsy-like genius, and without a father to guide him, were remembered in Germany long after he had left the concert-platform. His successes, artistic and social--especially the predilection for him of princesses and n.o.ble dames--raised about his ears a nest of pernicious scandal-hornets. Had he not run away with Countess D'Agoult, the wife of a n.o.bleman! Had he not openly lived with a married princess at Weimar, and under the patronage of the Grand Duke and d.u.c.h.ess and the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Maria Pawlowna, sister of the Czar of all the Russias! Besides, he was a Roman Catholic, and that didn't please such prim persons as Mendelssohn and Hiller, not to mention his own fellow-countryman, Joseph Joachim.

Germany set the fashion in abusing Liszt. He had too much success for one man, and as a composer he must be made an example of; the services he rendered in defending the music of the insurgent Wagner was but another black mark against his character. And when Wagner did at last succeed, Liszt's share in the triumph was speedily forgotten. The truth is, he paid the penalty for being a cosmopolitan. He was the first cosmopolitan in music. In Germany he was abused as a Magyar, in Hungary for his Teutonic tendencies--he never learned his mother tongue--in Paris for not being French born; here one recalls the Stendhal case.

But he introduced into the musty academic atmosphere of musical Europe a strong, fresh breeze from the Hungarian _puzta_; this wandering piano-player of Hungarian-Austrian blood, a genuine cosmopolite, taught music a new charm, the charm of the unexpected, the improvised. The freedom of Beethoven in his later works, and of Chopin in all his music, became the princ.i.p.al factor in the style of Liszt. Music must have the shape of an improvisation. In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern, are the extremes of his system. His orchestral and vocal works, the two symphonies, the ma.s.ses and oratorios and symphonic poems, are full of dignity, poetic feeling, religious spirit, and a largeness of accent and manner though too often lacking in architectonic; yet the gipsy glance and gipsy voice lurk behind many a pious or pompous bar. Apart from his invention of a new form--or, rather, the condensation and revisal of an old one, the symphonic poem--Liszt's greatest contribution to art is the wild, truant, rhapsodic, extempore element he infused into modern music; nature in her most reckless, untrammelled moods he interpreted with fidelity. But the drummers in the line of moral gasolene who controlled criticism in Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. Even the piquant triangle in his piano-concerto was suspected as possibly suggesting the usual situation of French comedy.

The Liszt-Wagner question no longer presents any difficulties to the fair-minded. It is a simple one; men still living know that Wagner, to reach his musical apogee, to reach his public, had to lean heavily on the musical genius and individual inspiration of Liszt. The later Wagner would not have existed--as we now know him--without first traversing the garden of Liszt. This is not a theory but a fact. Beethoven, as Philip Hale has pointed out, is the last of the very great composers; there is nothing new since Beethoven, though plenty of persuasive personalities, much delving in mole-runs, many "new paths," leading nowhere, and much self-advertising. With its big drum and cymbals, its mouthing or melting phrases, its startling situations, its scarlet waistcoats, its hair-oil and harlots, its treacle and thunder, the Romantic movement swept over the map of Europe, irresistible, contemptuous to its adversaries, and boasting a wonderful array of names. Schumann and Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt, Wagner--in a cla.s.s by himself--are a few that may be cited; not to mention Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal.

Georg Brandes a.s.signs to Liszt a prominent place among the Romantics.

But Beethoven still stood, stands to-day, four square to the universe.

Wagner construed Beethoven to suit his own grammar. Why, for example, Berlioz should have been puzzled (or have pretended to) over the first page of the Tristan and Isolde prelude is itself puzzling; the Frenchman was a deeply versed Beethoven student. If he had looked at the first page of the piano sonata in C minor--the Pathetic, so-called--the enigma of the Wagnerian phraseology would have been solved; there, in a few lines, is the kernel of this music-drama. This only proves Wagner's Shakesperian faculty of a.s.similation and his extraordinary gift in developing an idea (consider what he made of the theme of Chopin's C minor study, the Revolutionary, which he boldly annexed for the opening measures of the prelude to Act II of Tristan and Isolde); he borrowed his ideas whenever and wherever he saw fit. His indebtedness to Liszt was great, but equally so to Weber, Marschner, and Beethoven; his indebtedness to Berlioz ended with the externals of orchestration. Both Liszt and Wagner learned from Berlioz in this respect. Nevertheless, how useless to compare Liszt to Berlioz or Berlioz to Wagner. As well compare a ruby to an opal, an emerald to a ruby. Each of these three composers has his individual excellences. The music of all three suffers from an excess of profile. We call Liszt and Wagner the leaders of the moderns, but their aims and methods were radically different. Wagner a.s.serted the supremacy of the drama over tone, and then, inconsistently, set himself down to write the most emotionally eloquent music that was ever conceived; Liszt always harped on the dramatic, on the poetic, and seldom employed words, believing that the function of instrumental music is to convey in an ideal manner a poetic impression. In this he was the most thorough-going of poetic composers, as much so in the orchestral domain as was Chopin in his pianoforte compositions. Since Wagner's music-plays are no longer a novelty "the long submerged trail of Liszt is making its appearance," as Ernest Newman happily states the case. But to be truthful, the music of both Liszt and Wagner is already a little old-fashioned. The music-drama is not precisely in a rosy condition to-day. Opera is the weakest of forms at best, the human voice inevitably limits the art, and we are beginning to wonder what all the Wagnerian menagerie, the birds, dragons, dogs, snakes, swans, toads, dwarfs, giants, horses, and monsters generally, have to do with music.

The music of the future is already the music of the past. The Wagner poems are uncouth, c.u.mbersome machines. We long for a breath of humanity, and it is difficult to find it outside of Tristan and Isolde or Die Meistersinger. Alas! for the enduring quality of operatic music.

Nothing stales like theatre music. The rainbow vision of a synthesis of the Seven Arts has faded forever. In the not far distant future Wagner will gain, rather than lose, by being played in the concert-room; that, at least, would dodge the ominously barren stretches of the Ring, and the early operas. The b.u.t.ton-Moulder awaits at the cross-roads of time all operatic music, even as he waited for Peer Gynt. And the New Zealander is already alive, though young, who will visit Europe to attend the last piano-recital: that species of entertainment invented by Liszt, and by him described in a letter to the Princess Belgiojoso as colloquies of music and ennui. He was the first pianist to show his profile on the concert stage, his famous _profil d'ivoire_; before Liszt pianists either faced the audience or sat with their back to the public.

The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein--one naturally drops into the Almanac de Gotha when writing of the friends of Liszt--averred that Liszt had launched his musical spear further into the future than Wagner. She was a lady of firm opinions, who admired Berlioz as much as she loathed Wagner. But could she have foreseen that Richard Strauss, Parsifal-like, had caught the whizzing lance of the Klingsor of Weimar, what would she have said? Put the riddle to contemporary critics of Richard II--who has, at least, thrown off the influence of Liszt and Wagner, although he too frequently takes snap-shots at the sublime in his scores. Otherwise, you can no more keep Liszt's name out of the music of to-day than could good Mr. d.i.c.k the head of King Charles from the pages of his memorial.

His musical imagination was versatile, his impressionability so lively that he translated into tone his voyages, pictures, poems--Dante, Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Obermann, (Senancour), even Sainte-Beuve (Les Consolations,) legends, and the cypress-haunted fountains of the Villa d' Este (Tivoli); not to mention canvases by Raphael, Mickelangelo, and the uninspired frescoes of Kaulbach. All was grist that came to his musical mill.

In a moment of self-forgetfulness, Wagner praised the music of Liszt in superlative terms. No need of quotation; the correspondence, a cla.s.sic, is open to all. That the symphonic poem was secretly antipathetic to Wagner is the bald truth. After all his rhapsodic utterances concerning the symphonies and poems of Liszt--from which he borrowed many a sparkling jewel to adorn some corner in his giant frescoes--he said in 1877, "In instrumental music I am a _reactionnaire_, a conservative. I dislike everything that requires verbal explanations beyond the actual sounds." And he, the most copious of commentators concerning his own music, in which almost every other bar is labelled with a leading motive! To this Liszt wittily answered--in an unpublished letter (1878)--that leading motives are comfortable inventions, as a composer does not have to search for a new melody. But what boots leading motives--as old as the hills and Johann Sebastian Bach--or symphonic poems nowadays? There is no Wagner, there is no Liszt question. After the unbinding of the cla.s.sic forms the turbulent torrent is become the new danger. Who shall dam its speed! Brahms or Reger? The formal formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The symphonic poem is now a monster of appalling lengths, thereby, as Mr.

Krehbiel suggests, defeating its chiefest reason for existence, its brevity. The foam and fireworks of the impressionistic school, Debussy, Dukas, and Ravel, and the rest, are enjoyable; the piano music of Debussy has the iridescence of a spider's web touched by the fire of the setting sun; his orchestra is a jewelled conflagration. But he stems like the others, the Russians included, from Liszt. Charpentier and his followers are Wagner _a la coule_. Where it will all end no man dare predict. But Mr. Newman is right in the matter of programme-music. It has come to stay, modified as it may be in the future. Too many bricks and mortar, the l.u.s.t of the ear as well as of the eye, glutted by the materialistic machinery of the Wagner music-drama, have driven the lovers of music-for-music's-sake back to Beethoven; or, in extreme cases, to novel forms wherein vigourous affirmations are dreaded as much as an eight-bar melody; for those meticulous temperaments that recoil from clangourous chord, there are the misty tonalities of Debussy or the verse of Paul Verlaine. However, the aquarelles and pastels and landscapes of Debussy or Ravel were invented by _Urvater_ Liszt--caricatured by Wagner in the person of Wotan; all the impressionistic school may be traced to him as its fountain-head. Think of the little sceneries scattered through his piano music, particularly in his Years of Pilgrimage; or of the storm and stress of the Dante Sonata. The romanticism of Liszt was, like so many of his contemporaries, a state of soul, a condition of exalted or morbid sensibility. But it could not be said of him as it could of all the Men of Fine Shades--Chateaubriand, Heine, Stendhal, Benjamin Constant, Sainte-Beuve--that they were only men of feeling in their art, and decidedly the reverse in their conduct. Liszt was a pattern of chivalry, and if he seems at times as indulging too much in the Grand Manner set it down to his surroundings, to his temperament. The idols of his younger years were Bonaparte and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, while in the background hovered the prime corrupter of the nineteenth century and the father of Romanticism, J. J. Rousseau.

II

[Ill.u.s.tration: Liszt's Birthplace, Raiding]

The year 1811 was the year of the great comet. Its wine is said to have been of a richness; some well-known men were born, beginning with Thackeray and John Bright; Napoleon's son, the unhappy Duc de Reichstadt, first saw the light that year, as did Jules Dupre, Theophile Gautier, and Franz Liszt. There will be no disputes concerning the date of his birth, October 22d, as was the case with Chopin. His ancestors, according to a lengthy family register, were originally n.o.ble; but the father of Franz, Adam Liszt, was a manager of the Esterhazy estates in Hungary at the time his only son and child was born. He was very musical, knew Joseph Haydn, and was an admirer of Hummel, his music and playing. The mother's maiden name was Anna Lager (or Laager), a native of lower Austria, with German blood in her veins. The mixed blood of her son might prove a source of interest to Havelock Ellis in his studies of heredity and genius. If Liszt was French in the early years of his manhood, he was decidedly German the latter half of his life. The Magyar only came out on the keyboard, and in his compositions. She was of a happy and extremely vivacious nature, cheerful in her old age, and contented to educate her three grandchildren later in life. The name Liszt would be meal or flour in English; so that Frank Flour might have been his unromantic cognomen; a difference from Liszt Ferencz, with its accompanying battle-cry of _Eljen!_ In his son Adam Liszt hoped to realise his own frustrated musical dreams. A prodigy of a prodigious sort, the comet and the talent of Franz were mixed up by the superst.i.tious. Some gipsy predicted that the lad would return to his native village rich, honoured, and in a gla.s.s house (coach). This he did. In Oedenburg, during the summer of 1903, I visited at an hour or so distant, the town of Eisenstadt and the village of Raiding (or Reiding). In the latter is the house where Liszt was born. The place, which can hardly have changed much since the boyhood of Liszt, is called Dobrjan in Hungarian. I confess I was not impressed, and was glad to get back to Oedenburg and civilisation. In this latter spot there is a striking statue of the composer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Anna Liszt

Liszt's Mother]

It is a thrice-told tale that several estimable Hungarian magnates raised a purse for the boy, sent him with his father to Vienna, where he studied the piano with the pedagogue Carl Czerny, that indefatigable fabricator of finger-studies, and in theory with Salieri. He was kissed by the aged Beethoven on the forehead--Wotan saluting young Siegfried--though Schindler, _ami de_ Beethoven, as he dubbed himself, denied this significant historical fact. But later Schindler pitched into Liszt for his Beethoven interpretations, hotly swearing that they were the epitome of unmusical taste. The old order changeth, though not old prejudices. Liszt waxed in size, technique, wisdom. Soon he was given up as hopelessly in advance of his teachers. Wherever he appeared they hailed him as a second Hummel, a second Beethoven. And he improvised. That settled his fate. He would surely become a composer. He went to Paris, was known as _le pet.i.t Litz_, and received everywhere. He became the rage, though he was refused admission to the Conservatoire, probably because he displayed too much talent for a boy. He composed an opera, Don Sancho, the score of which has luckily disappeared. Then an event big with consequences was experienced by the youth--he lost his father in 1827. (His mother survived her husband until 1866.) He gave up concert performances as too precarious, and manfully began teaching in Paris. The revolution started his pulse to beating, and he composed a revolutionary symphony. He became a lover of humanity, a socialist, a follower of Saint-Simon, even of the impossible Pere Prosper Enfantin.

His friend and adviser was Lamenais, whose Paroles d'un Croyant had estranged him from Rome. A wonderful, unhappy man. Liszt read poetry and philosophy, absorbed all the fashionable frenzied formulas and a.s.sociated with the Romanticists. He met Chopin, and they became as twin brethren. Francois Mignet, author of A History of the French Revolution, said to the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Liszt: "In the brain of this young man reigns great confusion." No wonder. He was playing the piano, composing, teaching, studying the philosophers, and mingling with enthusiastic idealists who burnt their straw before they moulded their bricks. As Francis Hackett wrote of the late Lord Acton, Liszt suffered from "intellectual log-jam." But the current of events soon released him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Adam Liszt

Liszt's Father]

He met the Countess d'Agoult in the brilliant whirl of his artistic success. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her contemporaries declare she was not of a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, at Frankfort-on-Main in 1805. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a reformed Hebrew. She had literary ability, was proud of having once seen Goethe, and in 1827 she married Comte Charles d'Agoult. But social sedition was in the air. The misunderstood woman--no new thing--was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every new book she wrote, and Madame, the Countess d'Agoult--to whom Chopin dedicated his first group of Etudes--began to write, began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued. Anyhow, they eloped. In honour he couldn't desert the woman, and they made Geneva their temporary home. She had in her own right 20,000 francs a year income; it cost Liszt exactly 300,000 francs annually to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been accustomed to--he earned this, a tidy amount, for those days, by playing the piano all over Europe. Madame d'Agoult bore him three children: Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. The first named married Emile Ollivier, Napoleon's war minister--still living at the present writing--in 1857. She died in 1862. Cosima married Hans von Bulow, her father's favourite pupil, in 1857; later she went off with Richard Wagner, married him, to her father's despair--princ.i.p.ally because she had renounced her religion in so doing--and to-day is Wagner's widow. Daniel Liszt, his father's hope, died December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatised the birth of his children, had educated them, had dowered his daughters, and they proved all three a source of sorrow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Blandine Ollivier

Daughter of Liszt]

He quarrelled with the D'Agoult and they parted bad friends. Under the pen name of Daniel Stern she attacked Liszt in her souvenirs and novels.

He forgave her. They met in Paris once, in the year 1860. He gently told her that the t.i.tle of the souvenirs should have been "Poses et Mensonges." She wept. Tragic comedians, both. They were bored with one another; their union recalls the profound reflection of Flaubert, that Emma Bovary found in adultery all the plat.i.tudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladies had supervened. Like Byron, Liszt was the sentimental hero of the day, a Chateaubriand Rene of the keyboard. Balzac put him in a book, so did George Sand. All the painters and sculptors, Delaroche and Ary Scheffer among others made his portrait. Nevertheless, his head was not turned, and when, after an exile of a few years, Thalberg had conquered Paris in his absence, he returned and engaged in an ivory duel, at the end worsting his rival. Thalberg was the first pianist in Europe, contended every one. And the Belgiojoso calmly remarked that Liszt was the only one. After witnessing the Paderewski worship of yesterday nothing related of Liszt should surprise us.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Daniel Liszt

Son of Liszt]

In the meantime, Paganini, had set his brain seething. Chopin, Paganini and Berlioz were the predominating artistic influences in his life; from the first he appreciated the exotic, learned the resources of the instrument, and the value of national folk-song flavour; from the second he gained the inspiration for his transcendental technique; from the third, orchestral colour and the "new paths" were indicated to his ambitious spirit. He never tired, he always said there would be plenty of time to loaf in eternity. His pictures were everywhere, he became a kind of Flying Hungarian to the sentimental Sentas of those times. He told Judith Gautier that the women loved themselves in him. Modest man!

What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl, and Doehler--a pianist. Scudo wrote that Thalberg's scales were like pearls on velvet, the scales of Liszt the same, but the velvet was hot! Louis Ehlert, no mean observer, said he possessed a quality that neither Tausig nor any virtuoso before or succeeding him ever boasted--the nearest approach, perhaps, was Rubinstein--namely: a spontaneous control of pa.s.sion that approximated in its power to nature ... and an incommensurable nature was his. He was one among a dozen artists who made Europe interesting during the past century. Slim, handsome in youth, brown of hair and blue-eyed, with the years he grew none the less picturesque; his mane was white, his eyes became blue-gray, his pleasant baritone voice a brumming ba.s.s. There is a portrait in the National Gallery by Lorenzo Lotto, of Prothonotary Giuliano, that suggests him, and in the Burne-Jones picture, Merlin and Vivien, there is certainly a transcript of his features. A statue by Foyatier in the Louvre, of Spartacus, is really the head of the pianist. As Abbe he was none the less fascinating; for his admirers he wore his _soutane_ with a difference.

Useless to relate the Thousand-and-One Nights of music, triumphs, and intrigues in his life. When the Countess d'Agoult returned to her family a council, presided over by her husband's brother, exonerated the pianist, and his behaviour was p.r.o.nounced to be that of a gentleman!

Surely the Comic Muse must have chuckled at this. Like Wagner, Franz Liszt was a Tragic Comedian of prime order. He knew to the full the value of his electric personality. Sincere in art, he could play the grand seignior, the actor, the priest, and diplomat at will. Pose he had to, else abandon the profession of piano virtuoso. But he bitterly objected to playing the role of a performing poodle, and once publicly insulted the Czar, who dared to talk while the greatest pianist in the world played. He finally grew tired of Paris, of public life. He had been loved by such various types of women as George Sand--re-christened by Baudelaire as the Prudhomme of immorality; delightful epigram!--by Marie Du Plessis, the Lady of the Camellias, and by that astounding adventuress, Lola Montez. How many others only a Leporello catalogue would show.

His third artistic period began in 1847, his sojourn at Weimar. It was the most attractive and fruitful of all. From 1848 to 1861 the musical centre of Germany was this little town immortalised by Goethe. There the world flocked to hear the first performance of Lohengrin, and other Wagner operas. A circle consisting of Raff, Von Bulow, Tausig, Cornelius, Joseph Joachim, Schumann, Robert Franz, Litolff, Dionys Pruckner, William Mason, La.s.sen, with Berlioz and Rubinstein and Brahms (in 1854) and Remenyi as occasional visitors, to mention a t.i.the of famous names, surrounded Liszt. His elective affinity--in Goethe's phrase--was the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who with her child had deserted the usual brutal and indifferent husband--in fashionable romances. Her influence upon Liszt's character has been disputed, but unwarrantably. She occasionally forced him to do the wrong thing, as in the case of the ending of the Dante symphony; _vide_, the new Wagner Autobiography. Together they wrote his chief literary works, the study of Chopin--the princess supplying the feverish local colour, and the book on Hungarian gipsy music, which contains a veiled attack on the Jews, for which Liszt was blamed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein was an intense, narrow nature--she has been called a "slightly vulgar aristocrat," and one of her peculiarities was seeing in almost every one of artistic or intellectual prominence Hebraic traits or lineaments. Years before the Geyer and the Leipsic _Judenga.s.se_ story came out she unhesitatingly p.r.o.nounced Richard Wagner of Semitic origin; she also had her doubts about Berlioz and others. The Lisztian theory of gipsy music consists, as Dannreuther says, in the merit of a laboured attempt to prove the existence of something like a gipsy epic in terms of music, the fact being that Hungarian gipsies merely play Hungarian popular tunes in a fantastic and exciting manner, but have no music that can properly be called their own. Liszt was a facile, picturesque writer and did more with his pen for Wagner than Wagner's own turbid writings. But a great writer he was not--many-sided as he was. It was unkind, however, on the part of Wagner to say to a friend that Cosima had more brains than her father. If she has, Bayreuth since her husband's death hasn't proved it.

Wagner, when he uttered this, was probably in the ferment of a new pa.s.sion, having quite recovered from his supposedly eternal love for Mathilde Wesendonck.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cosima von Bulow

Daughter of Liszt]

A masterful woman the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, though far from beautiful, she so controlled and ordered Liszt's life that he quite shed his bohemian skin, composed much, and as Kapellmeister produced many novelties of the new school. They lived on a hill in a house called the Altenburg, not a very princely abode, and there Liszt accomplished the major portion of his works for orchestra, his ma.s.ses and piano concertos. There, too, Richard Wagner, a revolutionist, wanted by the Dresden police, came in 1849--from May 19th to 24th--disguised, carrying a forged pa.s.sport, poor, miserable. Liszt secured him lodgings, and gave him a banquet at the Altenburg attended by Tausig, Von Bulow, Gille, Draeseke, Gottschalg, and others, nineteen in all. Wagner behaved badly, insulted his host and guests. He was left in solitude until Liszt insisted on his apologising for his rude manners--which he did with a bad grace. John F. Runciman has said that Liszt ought to have done even more for Wagner than he did--or words to that effect; just so, and there is no doubt that the n.o.ble man has put the world in his debt by piloting the music-dramatist into safe harbour; but while ingrat.i.tude is no crime according to Nietzsche (who, quite illogically, reproached Wagner for _his_ ingrat.i.tude) there seems a limit to amiability, and in Liszt's case his amiability amounted to weakness. He could never say "No" to Wagner (nor to a pretty woman). He understood and forgave the Mime nature in Wagner for the sake of his Siegfried side. There was no Mime in Liszt, nothing small nor hateful, although he could at times play the benevolent, ironic Mephisto. And in his art he mirrored the quality to perfection--the Mephistopheles of his Faust Symphony.

Intrigues pursued him in his capacity as court musical director. The Princess Maria-Pawlowna died June, 1859; the following October Princess Marie, daughter of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, married the Prince Hohenlohe, and Liszt, after the opera by Peter Cornelius was hissed, resigned his post. He remembered Goethe and his resignation, caused by a trained dog, at the same theatre. But he didn't leave Weimar until August 17, 1861, joining the princess at Rome. The scandal of the attempted marriage there is told in another chapter. Again the eyes of the world were riveted upon Liszt. His very warts became notorious. Some say that Cardinal Antonelli, instigated by Polish relatives of the princess, upset the affair when the pair were literally on the eve of approaching the altar; some believe that the wily Liszt had set in motion the machinery; but the truth is that at the advice of the Cardinal Prince Hohenlohe, his closest friend, the marriage scheme was dropped. When the husband of the princess died there was no further talk of matrimony. Instead, Liszt took minor orders, concentrated his attention on church music, and henceforth spent his year between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. He hoped for a position at the Papal court a.n.a.logous to the one he had held at Weimar; but the appointment of music-director at St. Peter's was never made. To Weimar he had returned (1869) at the cordial invitation of the archduke, who allotted to his use a little house in the park, the _Hofgartnerei_. There every summer he received pupils from all parts of the world, gratuitously advising them, helping them from his impoverished purse, and, incidentally, being admired by a new generation of musical enthusiasts, particularly those of the feminine gender. There were lots of scandals, and the worthy burghers of the town shook their heads at the goings-on of the _Lisztianer_. The old man fell under many influences, some of them sinister. He seldom saw Richard or Cosima Wagner, though he attended the opening of Bayreuth in 1876. On that occasion Wagner publicly paid a magnificent tribute to the genius and n.o.ble friendship of Liszt. It atoned for a wilderness of previous neglect and ingrat.i.tude.

With Wagner's death in 1883 his hold on mundane matters began to relax.

He taught, he travelled, he never failed to pay the princess an annual visit at Rome. She had immured herself, behind curtained windows and to the light of waxen tapers led the life of a mystic, also smoked the blackest of cigars. She became a theologian in petticoats and wrote numerous inutile books about pin-points in matters ecclesiastical. No doubt she still loved Liszt, for she set a spy on him at Weimar and thus kept herself informed as to how much cognac he daily consumed, how many pretty girls had asked for a lock of his silvery hair, also the name of the latest aspirant to his affections.

What a brilliant coterie of budding artists surrounded him: D'Albert, Urspruch, Geza Zichy, Friedheim, Joseffy, Rosenthal, Reisenauer, Grieg, Edward MacDowell, Burmeister, Stavenhagen, Sofie Menter, Toni Raab, Nikisch, Weingartner, Siloti, Laura Kahrer, Sauer, Adele Aus der Ohe, Moszkowski, Scharwenka, Pachmann, Saint-Saens, Rubinstein--the latter not as pupil--Borodin, Van der Stucken, and other distinguished names in the annals of compositions and piano playing. Liszt's health broke down, but he persisted in visiting London in the early summer of 1886, where he was received as a demi-G.o.d by Queen Victoria and the musical world; he had been earlier in Paris where a ma.s.s of his was sung with success.

His money affairs were in a tangle; once in receipt of an income that had enabled him to throw money away to any whining humbug, he complained at the last that he had no home of his own, no income--he had not been too shrewd in his dealings with music publishers--and very little cash for travelling expenses. The princess needed her own rents, and Liszt was never a charity pensioner. During the Altenburg years, the _Glanzzeit_ at Weimar, her income had sufficed for both, as Liszt was earning no money from concert-tours. But at the end, despite his devoted disciples, he was the very picture of a deserted, desolate old hero. And he had given away fortunes, had played fortunes at benefit-concerts into the coffers of cities overtaken by fire or flood. Surely, the seamy side of success. "_Wer aber wird nun Liszt helfen?_" This half humorous, half pathetic cry of his had its tragic significance.

Liszt last touched the keyboard July 19, 1886, at Colpach, Luxemburg, the castle of Munkaczy, the Hungarian painter. Feeble as he must have been there was a supernatural aureole about his music that caused his hearers to weep. (Fancy the pianoforte inciting to tears!) He played his favourite Liebestraum, the Chant Polonais from the "Glanes de Woronice"

(the Polish estate of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein) and the sixteenth of his Soirees de Vienne. He went on to Bayreuth, in company with a persistent young Parisian lady--the paramount pa.s.sion not quite extinguished--attended a performance of Tristan and Isolde, through which he slept from absolute exhaustion; though he did not fail to acknowledge in company with Cosima Wagner the applause at the end. He went at once to bed never to leave it alive. He died of lung trouble on the night of July 31st or the early hour of August 1, 1886, and his last word is said to have been "Tristan." He was buried, in haste--that he might not interfere with the current Wagner festival--and, no doubt, is mourned at leisure. His princess survived him a year; this sounds more romantic than it is. [Madame d'Agoult had died in 1876.] A new terror was added to death by the ugly tomb of the dead man, designed by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner; said to be a composer as well as an amateur architect. Victories usually resemble each other; it is defeat alone that wears an individual physiognomy. Liszt, with all his optimism, did not hesitate to speak of his career as a failure. But what a magnificent failure! "To die and to die young--what happiness," was a favourite phrase of his.

III

"While remaining itself obscure," wrote George Moore of L'Education Sentimentale, by Flaubert, "this novel has given birth to a numerous literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L'Education Sentimentale re-written into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist--twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupa.s.sant cut it into numberless walking-sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive pa.s.sages and turned them into Pa.s.sy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame. The original spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known."

This particular pa.s.sage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his obligations to Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz--as, indeed, Flaubert owed something to Chateaubriand, Bossuet, and Balzac--he invented a new form, the symphonic poem, invented a musical phrase, novel in shape and gait, perfected the leading motive, employed poetic ideas instead of the antique and academic cut and dried square-toed themes--and was ruthlessly plundered almost before the ink was dry on his ma.n.u.script, and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came to pa.s.s that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel, first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Saens, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers and a half-hundred besides of the new men, beginning with the name of Richard Strauss--that most extraordinary personality of latter-day music. And Liszt sat in Weimar and smiled and waited and waited and smiled; and if he has achieved paradise by this time he is still smiling and waiting. He often boasted that storms were his _metier_, meaning their tonal reproduction in orchestral form or on the keyboard--but I suspect that patience was his cardinal virtue.

Henry James once wrote of the human soul and it made me think of Liszt: "A romantic, moonlighted landscape, with woods and mountains and dim distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs." Liszt's music often evokes the golden opium-haunted prose of De Quincy; it is at once sensual and rhetorical. It also has its sonorous plat.i.tudes, unheavenly lengths, and barbaric yawps.

Despite his marked leaning toward the cla.s.sic (Raphael, Correggio, Mickelangelo, and those frigid, colourless Germans, Kaulbach, Cornelius, Schadow, not to mention the sweetly romantic Ary Scheffer and the sentimental Delaroche), by temperament Liszt was a lover of the grotesque, the baroque, the eccentric, even the morbid. He often declared that it was his pet ambition to give a piano recital in the _Salon Carre_ of the Louvre, where, surrounded by the canvases of Da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, t.i.tian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Veronese, and others of the immortal choir, he might make music never to be forgotten.

In reality, he would have played with more effect if the pictures had been painted by Salvator Rosa, El Greco, h.e.l.l-Fire Breughel, Callot, Orcagna (the Dance of Death at Pisa), Matthew Grunwald; or among the moderns, Gustave Dore, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch, Matisse or Pica.s.so. Ugliness mingled with voluptuousness, piety doubted by devilry, the quaint and the horrible, the satanic and the angelic, these states of soul (and body) appealed to Liszt quite as much as they did to Berlioz. They are all the apex of delirious romanticism;--now as dead as the cla.s.sicism that preceded and produced it--of the seeking after recondite sensations and expressing them by means of the eloquent, versatile orchestral apparatus. Think what roles Death and l.u.s.t play in the over-strained art of the Romantics (the "hairy romantic" as Thackeray called Berlioz, and no doubt Liszt, for he met him in London); what bombast, what sonorous pomp and pageantry, what sighing sensuousness, what brilliant martial spirit--they are all to be found in Liszt. In musical irony he never had but one match, Chopin--until Richard Strauss; Berlioz was also an adept in this disquieting mood.