Franz Liszt Part 2

The future bibliographer of Liszt literature has a heavy task in store for him, for books about the great Hungarian composer are multiplying apace. Liszt the dazzling virtuoso has long been a theme with variations, and is, we suspect, a theme nearly exhausted; but Liszt as tone poet, Liszt as song writer, as composer for the pianoforte, as litterateur, the man, the wickedest of Don Juans, the ecclesiastic--these and a dozen other studies of the most protean musician of the last century have been appearing ever since the publication of Lina Ramann's vast and sentimental biography. Instead of there being a lack of material for a new book there is an embarra.s.sment, not always of riches, from industrious pens, though few are of value.

The Liszt pupils have had their say, and their pupils are beginning to intone the psalmody of uncritical praise. Liszt the romantic, magnificent, magnanimous, supernal, is set to the same old harmonies, until the reader, tired of the gabble and gush, longs for a biographer who will riddle the various legends and once and for all prove that Liszt was not perfection, even if he was the fascinating Admirable Crichton of his times.

Yet, and the fact sets us wondering over the mutability of fame, the Liszt propaganda is not flourishing. Richard Burmeister, a well known pupil and admirer of the master in Berlin has a.s.sured us that while Liszt is heard in all the concerts in Germany, the public is lukewarm; Richard Strauss is more eagerly heard. Liszt's familiar remark, "I can wait," provoked from the authority above mentioned the answer, "Perhaps he has waited too long." We are inclined to disagree with this dictum.

Liszt once had musical and unmusical Europe at his feet. His success was called comet-like, probably because he was born in the comet year 1811, also because his hair was long and his technique transcendentally brilliant. His critical compositions were received with less approval.

That such an artist of the keyboard could be also a successor to Beethoven was an idea mocked at by the conservative Leipsic school.

Besides, he came in such a questionable guise as a _Symphoniker_. A piano concerto with a triangle in the score (the E flat), compositions for full orchestra which were called symphonic poems, lyrics without a tune, that pretended to follow the curve of the words; finally church music, solemn ma.s.ses through which stalked the apparition of the haughty Magyar chieftain, accompanied by echoes of the gipsies on the putzta (the Graner Ma.s.s); it was too much for ears attuned to the suave, melodious Mendelssohn. Indeed the entire Neo-German school was too exotic for Germany. Berlioz, a half mad Frenchman; Richard Wagner, a crazy revolutionist, a fugitive from Saxony; and the Hungarian Liszt, half French, wholly diabolic--of such were the uncanny ingredients of the new music. And then were there not Liszt and his Princess Wittgenstein at Weimar, and the crew of pupils, courtiers and bohemians who collected at the Altenburg? Decidedly these people would never do, even though patronised by royalty. George Eliot and her man Friday, proper British persons, were rather shocked when they visited Weimar.

Liszt survived it all and enjoyed, notwithstanding the opposition of Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Joachim, the Schumanns, later Brahms and Hanslick, the pleasure of hearing his greater works played, understood, and applauded.

Looking backward in an impartial manner it cannot be said that the Liszt compositions have unduly suffered from the proverbial neglect of genius.

A Liszt orchestral number, if not imperative, is a matter of course at most symphony concerts. The piano music is done to death, especially the Hungarian Rhapsodies. Liszt has been ranged; the indebtedness of modern music to his pioneer efforts has been duly credited. We know that the Faust and Dante symphonies (which might have been called symphonic poems) are forerunners not only of much of Wagner, but of the later group from Saint-Saens to Richard Strauss. Why, then, the inevitable wail from the Lisztians that the Liszt music is not heard? Christus and the other oratorios and the ma.s.ses might be heard oftener, and there are many of the sacred compositions yet unsung that would make some critics sit up. No, we are lovers of Liszt, but the martyrdom motive has been sounded too often. In a double sense a reaction is bound to come. The true Liszt is to emerge from the clouds of legend, and Liszt the composer will be definitely placed. A little disappointment will result in both camps; the camp of the ultra-Liszt worshippers, which sets him in line with Beethoven and above Wagner, and the camp of the anti-Lisztians, which refuses him even the credit of having written a bar of original music. How Wagner would have rapped the knuckles of these latter; how he would have told them what he wrote to Liszt: "Ich bezeichne dich als Schopfer meiner jetzigen Stellung. Wenn ich komponiere und instrumentiere--denke ich immer nur an dich ... deine drei letzten Part.i.turen sollen mich wieder zum Musiker weihen fur den Beginn meines zweiten Aktes [Siegfried], denn dies Studium einleiten soll."

Did Wagner mean it all? At least, he couldn't deny what is simply a matter of dates. Liszt preceded Wagner. Otherwise how explain that yawning chasm between Lohengrin and Tristan? Liszt, an original stylist and a profounder musical nature than Berlioz, had intervened.

Nevertheless Liszt learned much from Berlioz, and it is quite beside the mark to question the greater creative power of Wagner over both the Frenchman and the Hungarian. Wagner, like the Roman conquerors, annexed many provinces and made them his own. Let us drop these futile comparisons. Liszt was as supreme in his domain as Wagner in his; only the German had the more popular domain. His culture was intensive, that of Liszt extensive. The tragedy was that Liszt lived to hear himself denounced as an imitator of Wagner; butchered to make a Bayreuth holiday. The day after his death in 1886 the news went abroad in Bayreuth that the "father-in-law of Wagner" had died; that his funeral might disturb the success of the current music festival! Liszt, who had begun his career with a kiss from Beethoven; Liszt, whose name was a flaring meteor in the sky of music when Wagner was starving in Paris; Liszt the path-breaker, meeting the usual fate of such a Moses, who never conquered the soil of the promised land, the initiator, at the last buried in foreign soil (he loathed Bayreuth and the Wagnerians) and known as the father-in-law of the man who eloped with his daughter and had borrowed of him everything from money to musical ideas. The G.o.ds must dearly love their sport.

The new books devoted to Liszt, his life and his music, are by Julius Kapp, August Gollerich (in German), Jean Chantavoine and Calvocoressi (in French), and A. W. Gottschalg's Franz Liszt in Weimar, a diary full of reminiscences. These works, ponderous in the case of the Germans, represent the vanguard of the literature that is due the anniversary year. To M. Chantavoine may be awarded the merit of the most symmetrically told tale; however, he need not have repeated Janka Wohl's doubtful _mot_ attributed to Liszt apropos of priestly celibacy: "Gregory VII was a great philanthropist." This reflects on the Princess Wittgenstein, and Liszt, most chivalric of men, would never have said anything that might present her in the light of pursuing him with matrimonial designs. That she did is not to be denied. Dr. Kapp is often severe on his hero. Is any man ever a hero to his biographer? He does not glorify his subject, and for the amiable weakness displayed by Liszt for princesses and other n.o.ble dames Dr. Kapp is sharp. The compositions are fairly judged, neither in the superlative key, nor condescendingly, as being of mere historic interest. There are over thirteen hundred, of which about four hundred are original. Liszt wrote too much, although he was a better self-critic than was Rubinstein. New details of the quarrel with the Schumanns are given. The gifted pair do not emerge exactly in an agreeable light. Liszt it was who first made known the piano music of Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann, with the true Wieck provinciality, was jealous of Liszt's influence over Robert. Then came the disturbing spectre of Wagner, and Schumann could not forgive Liszt for helping the music of the future to a hearing at Weimar. The rift widened. Liszt made a joke of it, but he was hurt by Schumann's ingrat.i.tude. Alas! he was to be later hurt by Wagner, by Joachim, by Brahms. He dedicated his B-minor sonata to Schumann, and Schumann dedicated to him his n.o.ble Fantaisie in C. After Schumann's death his widow brought out an edition of this fantaisie with the dedication omitted. The old-fashioned lady neither forgot nor forgave.

We consider the Kapp biography solid. The best portrait of Liszt may be found in that clever and amusing novel by Von Wolzogen, Kraftmayr. The Gollerich book chiefly consists of a chain of anecdotes in which the author is a prominent figure. Herr Kapp in a footnote attacks Herr Gollerich, denying that he was much with Liszt. How these Liszt pupils love each other! Joseffy--who was with the master two summers at Weimar, though he never relinquished his proud t.i.tle of Tausig scholar--when the younger brilliant stars Rosenthal, first a Joseffy pupil, Sauer, and others cynically twitted him about his admiration of Liszt's playing--over seventy, at the time Rosenthal was with him--Joseffy answered: "He was the unique pianist." "But you were very young when you heard him" (1869), they retorted. "Yes, and Liszt was ten years younger too," replied the witty Joseffy.

Gollerich relates the story of the American girl who threw stones at the window of the Hoffgartnerei, Liszt's residence in Weimar, and when the master appeared above called out: "I've come all the way from America to hear you play." "Come up," said the aged magician, "I'll play for you."

He did so, much to the scandal of the Liszt pupils a.s.sembled for daily worship. The anecdotes of Tausig and the stolen score of the Faust symphony (Liszt generously stated that the score was overlooked), are also set forth in the Gollerich book.

But he, the darling of the G.o.ds, fortune fairly pursuing him from cradle to grave, nevertheless the existence of this genius was far from happy.

His closing years were melancholy. The centre of the new musical life and beloved by all, he was a lonely, homeless, disappointed man. His daughter Cosima, a dweller among memories only, said that the music of her father did not exist for her; Weimar had been swallowed by Bayreuth, and the crowning sorrow for Liszt lovers is the tomb of Liszt at Bayreuth. It should be in his beloved Weimar. He lies in the shadow of his dear friend Wagner, he, the "father-in-law of Wagner." Pascal was right; no matter the comedy, the end of life is always tragic. Perhaps if the tragedy had come to Franz Liszt earlier he might have profited by the uses of adversity, as did Richard Wagner, and thus have achieved the very stars.

III

THE B-MINOR SONATA AND OTHER PIANO PIECES

I

When Franz Liszt nearly three quarters of a century ago made some suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had been foreshadowed in Clementi's Gradus, and its intellectual resultant, the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had been hardly realised.

Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpa.s.singly sweet tones, was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the problem. The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole, who used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies.

But the rich glow of idealism was over it all--a glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin's style he was, in the main, manly and sincere. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end and not a means of piano playing--Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, were his trinity of G.o.ds.

Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at the doors of Leipsic and drove back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old women professors--a respectable crowd, which swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at the spirit. Poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience were the obligatory vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic; to attain this triune perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull, musty precedent, and chaste in finger exercises. What wonder, when the dashing young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged by prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under. Chopin never competed, but stood, a slightly astonished spectator, at the edge of the fray. He saw his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence; his polonaises were so many cleaving battle-axes, and perforce he had to confess that all this carnage of tone unnerved him. Liszt was the warrior, not he.

Schumann did all he could by word and note, and to-day, thanks to Liszt and his followers, any other style of piano playing would seem old-fashioned. Occasionally an idealist like the unique De Pachmann astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a once powerful school and not the representative of an existing method.

There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style, and modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the rococoisms of the idealists; but as a school pure and simple it is of the past. We moderns are as eclectic as the Bolognese. We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaptation; hence a pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the keynote, the foundation, is realism, a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and often forces them to lingering retrospection. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep, and thus we have viewed many times the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated artistic frame. With all this the path was blazed by the Magyar and we may now explore with impunity its once trackless region.

Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago princ.i.p.ally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand, forearm and upper arm are important factors now in tone production where formerly the fingertips were considered the prime utility. Triceps muscles rule the big tonal effects in our times. Liszt discovered their value. The Viennese pianos certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and others in their styles; just as Clementi inaugurated his reforms by writing a series of studies and then building himself a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety of touch--tone-colour--the old rapid pearly pa.s.sage, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished; it was absorbed by the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Power, sonority, dynamic variety and novel manipulation of the pedals, combined with a technique that included Bach part playing and demanded the most sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard--these were a few of the signs of the new school. In the giddiness superinduced by indulging in this heady new wine an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the moment harmful to a pure interpretation of the cla.s.sics, which were mangled by the young vandals who had enlisted under Liszt's victorious standard. Colour, only colour, all the rest is but music! was the motto of those bold youths, who had never heard of Paul Verlaine.

But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its too dangerous quality, and when the last of the Liszt pupils gives his--or her--last recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Indeed, tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig's attempt to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has been toned down into a more sober, grateful colouring. The scarlet waistcoat of the Romantic school is outworn; the brutal brilliancies and exaggerated orchestral effects of the realists are beginning to be regarded with suspicion. We comprehend the possibilities of the instrument and our own aural limitations. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as were Donizetti and Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is as nearly obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. (Which should you prefer hearing, the Norma of Thalberg or the Lucia of Liszt?

Both in their different ways are clever but--outmoded.) Bold is the man to-day who plays either in public.

With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The nuance is ruler now. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy are present, but the nuance is inevitable, not alone tonal but expressive nuance. Infinite shadings are to be heard where before were only piano, forte, and mezzo-forte. Chopin and Liszt and Tausig did much for the nuance; Joseffy taught America the nuance, as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of his golden tones. "Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,"

sang Verlaine; and without nuance the piano is a box of wood, wire and steel, a coffin wherein is buried the soul of music.

II

"The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young."

This sentence, charmingly phrased, as it is charming in sentiment, could have been written by no other than Camille Saint-Saens. He refers to Liszt, and he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most musicians or critics. His adoration is perfectly comprehensible; to him Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of the cla.s.sical form (only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the romantics). They all come from Berlioz, the violent protestation of Saint-Saens to the contrary notwithstanding. However this much may be urged in the favour of the Parisian composer; a great movement like the romantic in music, painting, and literature simultaneously appeared in a half dozen countries. It was in the air and evidently catching. Goethe summed up the literary revolution in his accustomed Olympian manner, saying to Eckermann: "They all come from Chateaubriand." This is sound criticism; for in the writings of the author of Atala, and The Genius of Christianity may be found the germ-plasm of all the later artistic disorder; the fierce colour, bizarrerie, morbid extravagance, introspective a.n.a.lysis--which in the case of Amiel touched a brooding melancholy. Stendhal was the unwilling forerunner of the movement that captivated the sensitive imagination of Franz Liszt, as it later undoubtedly prompted the orphic impulses of Richard Wagner.

Saint-Saens sets great store on Liszt's original compositions, and I am sure when the empty operatic paraphrases and rhapsodies are forgotten the true Liszt will shine the brighter. How tinkling are the Hungarian rhapsodies--now become cafe entertainment. And how the old bones do rattle. We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz Variations, the Kalkbrenner Fantasias, but the next generation will wonder at us for having so long tolerated this drunken gipsy, who dances to fiddle and cymbalom accompaniment. He is too loud for polite nerves. Technically, the Liszt arrangements are brilliant and effective for dinner music. One may show off with them, make much noise and a reputation for virtuosity, that would be quickly shattered if a Bach fugue were selected as a text. One Chopin Mazurka contains more music than all of the rhapsodies, which I firmly contend are but overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt's pompous introductions, spun-out scales, and transcendental technical feats are not precisely in key with the native wood-note wild of genuine Hungarian folk-music. A visit to Hungary will prove this statement. Gustav Mahler was right in affirming that too much gipsy has blurred the outlines of real Magyar music.

I need not speak of Liszt's admirable transcriptions of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Mendelssohn, and others; they served their purpose in making publicly known these compositions and are witnesses to the man's geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish only to speak of the compositions for solo piano composed by Liszt Ferencz of Raiding, Hungaria. Many I salute with the _eljen!_ of patriotic enthusiasm, and I particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his knowledge of the Etudes--those wonderful continuations of the Chopin studies--of his acquaintance with the Annees de Pelerinage, of the Valse Oubliee, of the Valse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the Nocturnes, of the F-sharp Impromptu of Ab-Irato--that etude of which most pianists never heard; of the Apparitions, the Legends, the Ballades, the brilliant Mazurka, the Elegier, the Harmonies Pestiques et Religieuses, or the Concerto Patetico _a la_ Burmeister, and of numerous other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory--as Philip Hale would say--a dozen composers in this decade of the new century. [It was Max Bendix who so wittily characterised the A-major concerto as "Donizetti with Orchestra." Liszt was very often Italianate.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _After a lithograph by Kriehuber in the N. Y. Public Library_

Kriehuber Berlioz Czerny Liszt Ernst

A Matinee at Liszt's]

The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt's original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B-minor sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it lies so beautifully for the hand. For me no work of Liszt with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie that masquerades as a sonata in H _moll_. Agreeing with those who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure of this composition, and also with those critics who a.s.sert the word to be an organic amplification of the old, obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven's last sonata period as a starting-point and made a plunge into futurity--agreeing with these warring factions, thereby choking off the contingency of a spirited argument, I repeat that I find the B minor of Liszt truly fascinating music.

What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze, from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (the descending octaves Wagner recalled when he wrote his Wotan theme); the leap from the G to the A sharp below--how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own. Power there is, sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E-flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D's. What follows is like a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz possessed the gift above all, except Liszt; Raff can compa.s.s the grisly, and also Saint-Saens; but thin sharp flames hover about the bra.s.s, wood and shrieking strings in the Lisztian orchestra.

The chorale, usually the meat of a Liszt composition, now appears and proclaims the religious belief of the composer in dogmatic accents, and our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it in the harmonic sequences. Here it surely is not a whole-heart belief but only a theatrical att.i.tudinising; after the faint return of the opening motive is heard the sigh of sentiment, of pa.s.sion, of abandonment, which engender the suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix he was to a woman. He blends piety and pa.s.sion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.

But the rustle of silken attire is back of every bar; sensuous imagery, a faint perfume of femininity lurks in each cadence and trill. Ah!

naughty Abbe have a care. After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress!

Wilt thou allow her to make away with spiritual resolutions! Vade, retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme so eloquently proclaimed at the outset is solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power.

Then the hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colours moves kaleidoscopically onward. Again the devil tempts the musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major; he momentarily succ.u.mbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic ailment, is happily short-winded. Another flank movement of the "ewig Weibliche," this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the triolen of the ba.s.s frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.

All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendour.

Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is stamped on every bar. What gorgeous swing, and how the very bases of the earth seem to tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from the cyclopean fist of this musical Attila. Then follow a few bars of that Beethoven-like andante, a moving return to the early themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean caverns whence it emerged, a Magyar Wotan majestically vanishing into the bowels of a Gehenna; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor displays all of Liszt's power and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long--infernal, not "heavenly lengths"--it is full of n.o.bility, a drastic intellectuality, and a sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a commanding position in the pantheon of piano music would be folly. And interpreted by an artist versed in the Liszt traditions, such as Arthur Friedheim, this work compa.s.ses at times the sublime.

It is not my intention to claim your attention for the remainder of the original compositions; that were indeed a terrible strain on your patience. In the Annees de Pelerinage, redolent of Vergilian meadows, soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious except Au Bord d'une Source? Is the latter not exquisitely idyllic?

Surely in those years of pilgrimage through Switzerland, Italy, France, Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the salon or concert platform. The two Polonaises recapture the heroic and sorrowing spirit of Sarmatia. The first in E is a perennial favourite; I always hear its martial theme as a pattern reversed of the first theme in the A-flat Polonaise of Chopin. But the second Liszt Polonaise in C minor is the more poetic of the pair; possibly that is the reason why it is so seldom played.

Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian aspired after the n.o.blest things. In the atmosphere of the salons, of the Papal court, and concert room, Liszt was hardly so admirable a character. I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord (which he was not); that if he had cut and run to sanctuary to escape two or more women we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbe.

One penalty undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries.

Liszt was no exception to this rule. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck he has had many things read into his music, mysticism not forgotten. Perhaps the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the usual pleasing and unpleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any great man, not born of a book.

The Mephisto Valse from Lenau's Faust, in addition to its biting broad humour and satanic suggestiveness, contains one of the most voluptuous episodes outside of the Tristan score. That halting, languourous, syncopated, theme in D flat is marvellously expressive, and the poco allegretto seems to have struck the fancy of Wagner, who did not hesitate to appropriate motives from his esteemed father-in-law when the desire overtook him. He certainly considered Kundry Liszt-wise before fabricating her scream in Parsifal.

Liszt's life was a sequence of triumphs, his sympathies were almost boundless, yet he found time to work unfalteringly and despite myriad temptations his spiritual nature was never wholly submerged. I wish, however, that he had not invented the piano recital and the Liszt pupil.

III

I possess, and value as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt's Etudes, Opus 1.

The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written when Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show decided traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured to modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not the Etudes d'Execution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I exclaimed at the composer's cleverness. The Hungarian has taken his opus 1 and dressed it up in the most bewildering technical fashion. He gave these studies appropriate names, and even to-day they require a tremendous technique to do them justice. The most remarkable of the set--the one in F minor No. 10--Liszt left nameless, and like a peak it rears its head skyward, while about it cl.u.s.ter its more graceful fellows: Ricordanza, Feux-follets, Harmonies du Soir (Cha.s.se-neige, and Paysage). The Mazeppa is a symphonic poem in miniature. What a superb contribution to piano literature is Liszt's. These twelve incomparable studies, the three effective Etudes de Concert (several quite Chopinish in style and technique), the murmuring Waldesrauschen, the sparkling Gnomenreigen, the stormy Ab-Irato, the poetic Au Lac de Wallenstadt and Au Bord d'une Source, have they not all tremendously developed the technical resources of the instrument? And to play them one must have fingers of steel, a brain on fire, a heart bubbling with chivalric force; what a comet-like pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept European skies, who transformed the still small voice of Chopin into a veritable hurricane. Nevertheless, we cannot imagine a Liszt without a Chopin preceding him.