Franz Liszt.

This little work, which is rather an essay upon the personal and musical characteristics of Liszt than a biography of him, as its title indicates, hardly needs more than an informal introduction to the public. It may safely be left to commend itself to readers upon its own merits. Unlike most of his other biographies, Dr. Nohl seems to have addressed himself to this with feelings of strong personal admiration and affection for his hero. It appears to be the universal testimony of those who have enjoyed Liszt’s acquaintance, not merely his friendship, that he has inspired in them the strongest and most intimate feelings of personal attachment to him by his own genial and generous nature. If at times, therefore, the biographer appears to rhapsodize, it is probably because his relations to Liszt make it difficult for him to avoid idealizing him. If this be so, fortunately there is compensation in the reflection that no other musician of the present day, in every admirable quality of head and heart, so nearly approaches the ideal.

In reproducing the selections from Miss Amy Fay’s “Music Study in Germany,” which appear[4] in the closing chapter of this volume, the translator, so far as has been practicable, for the German version does not follow the English very closely in its connection, or always literally, has made use of the original text. He has also prepared an appendix containing much interesting matter that serves to explain and sometimes to illustrate the contents of the work. The list of scholars of the great teacher to which Dr. Nohl also refers in the closing chapter, and which were furnished to the biographer by Liszt himself, will be found at the close of this appendix. It is of more than ordinary interest as it contains indirectly the testimony of Liszt himself as to the relative prominence of the vast number of pupils who have studied with him. Surely such a life as his, so rich in success, so bountiful in reward and triumph, so fruitful in results, its skill and love attested to by eminent scholars in every country, refutes his mournful remark to George Sand, in one case at least, “Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist.”

G. P. U.

        Chicago, Feb. 1, 1884.

In contrast with our practice in the previous biographies, let us, this time, as the master has also done in his greatest oratorio, disclose the life of the hero in his deeds, which display themselves before us in regular succession.

First of all appears his early youth with its incomprehensible virtuosity. It is the actual strangling of the serpents in the cradle, so utterly does this power defy every obstacle and difficulty in the revelation of its art. Then appears a new germ of the ever fruitful life of Nature, as specially manifested in the weird gypsy world. And now the great man rises resplendent in the great artist, in strong contrast with a kindred genius, we mean the great violinist, Paganini, in whom, so different from Liszt himself, the essential principle which lies at the very root of artistic creation, namely, the genius of humanity, was not apparent. It proved its power in the recognition of the one artist of equal rank whom he encountered and whom he unceasingly helped to realize that grand consummation which we possess to-day in Baireuth.

Still further, there appears in its wonderful versatility his active sympathy with all the momentous[6] intellectual questions of the time and of humanity. We recognize it with astonishment in his imposing series of “Collected Writings” which rises up before us. Then follows the new epoch in art-development, the creation of the Symphonic Poem, growing, as it were, spontaneously out of his association with all that is comprised in poetry and life. Then comes the crown of all, the latest and grandest work he has accomplished, the renovation of church music. We beseech the laymen at least to recognize the importance of this great accomplishment.

In a sketch of such a richly exuberant life it is essential that we fail not to recognize the personality of this genius in his creations as “Master.” How much of loving kindliness it manifests! It is not like Ludwig Richter’s genial and gentle “Beemaster.” It is like Michel Angelo’s majestic “Lord” to whom the newly created Eve meekly bows. It is like Prometheus among his loved creations which his breath will first inspire with life. And to what extent this reaches, the world knows by the great number of his master-scholars whose eminent names enframe the complete picture.

Thus we wander here, as it were amid a new creation, and discover that in the pure art of music our time is not inferior to any other; nay, more, that it has added to the great possessions of the past many an enduring and noble work.

“Behold a young virtuoso, seemingly dropped from the clouds, who arouses the greatest astonishment. The performances of this boy border on the miraculous, and one is tempted to doubt their physical possibility when he hears the young giant thunder forth Hummel’s difficult compositions,” says a Vienna account of this boy, scarce eleven years of age. Only a year afterward, we see Paris[12] wild with amazement over a phenomenon never beheld before. Like that of young Mozart at Naples, the piano was turned round so that they could see what they did not believe to be possible, thereby revealing the genial and manly characteristics of the young artist, which afterward became the delight of the world, like his playing. “His eyes gleam with animation, mischievousness and joy. He is not led to the piano, he rushes up to it. They applaud and he looks surprised. They applaud afresh and he rubs his hands,” it is said, and then are pointed out the national quality, the inspired fury, the unmistakable originality, and at another time the proud, manly expression, which gained for him the appellation of the “Hungarian Wonder-Child.” We shall further notice the indications of these peculiarities, particularly as they are given in a longer biographical notice, which, in its main features, seems to have been taken from his own communication that appeared about the year 1830, in one of the first of Parisian musical journals, the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” which collapsed a few years ago.

Franz Liszt was born October 22, 1811, at[13] Raiding, near Oedenburg. The comet year appeared to his parents a good omen of his future. The father, belonging to a not very wealthy family of the old nobility, was, in his prime, accountant at Eisenstadt with that Prince Nicholas Esterhazy for whom Joseph Haydn was Capellmeister. As he enjoyed the personal acquaintance of the honored master of the quartet, mostly at card-playing, which he practiced as a recreation in the midst of his always severe labor, he was brought into a sphere which was peculiarly musical in its character, and which furnished his own nature with the richest food, for father Liszt was on terms of personal friendship also with that best scholar of Mozart’s, the distinguished pianist, Hummel, born at Presburg in 1778, who officiated many years as the Prince’s Capellmeister at Eisenstadt and Esterhaz. No one esteemed him more highly as a pianist. His playing had made an indelible impression upon him. He was also musical himself in a high degree, playing nearly every instrument, particularly the piano and violoncello, and was only restrained by the displeasure of his family relatives from perfecting himself as a[14] thorough musician. So much the more his dreams and hopes of artistic power were transferred to his eldest son, whose rare talent had manifested itself early. “Thy destiny is fixed. Thou wilt realize that art ideal which fascinated my youth in vain. In thee will I grow young again and transmit myself,” he often said to him. He was so strongly impressed with all the signs of promise in the boy that he devoted a diary to him in which he entered his notes “with the most minute and solicitous punctiliousness of a tender father.” Here is a leaf from the recollections of that childhood:

“After his vaccination, a period commenced in which the boy had to struggle alternately with nervous pains and fever, which more than once imperiled his life. On one occasion, in his second or third year, we thought him dead and ordered his coffin made. This disquieted state continued until his sixth year. In that year he heard me playing Ries’ concerto in C sharp minor. He leaned upon the piano and was all ears. Towards evening he returned from the garden and sang the theme. We made him repeat it but he did not know what[15] he sang. That was the first indication of his genius. He incessantly begged that he might commence piano-playing. After three months’ instruction, the fever returned and compelled us to discontinue it. His delight in instruction did not take away his pleasure in playing with children of his own age, although from this time forth he sought to live more for himself alone. He was not regular in his practice but was always tractable up to his ninth year. It was at this period that he played in public for the first time in Oedenburg. He performed a concerto by Ries in E major and extemporized. The fever attacked him just before he seated himself at the piano and yet he was strengthened by the playing. He had long manifested a desire to play in public and exhibited much ease and courage.”

We interrupt the narrative at this point to inquire what was the active source of this inner consecration to art as well as of the passionate impulse to exhibit it in public. Neither Ferdinand Ries, who merely imitated the ornamentations of his great teacher, Beethoven, nor Mozart’s pupil, Hummel, who succeeded Haydn at Esterhaz, nor the great father of instrumental[16] music himself even felt remotely that genius for execution, the wonderful results of which were already filling the youthful soul like a creative impulse and with a passionate longing for expression urging him on to public performance. In a letter from Paris to Schumann’s musical paper in 1834, it is said: “He often plays tenderly and with gentle melancholy;” then again: “With overpowering passion and with such fire and even fury, that it seems as if the piano must give way beneath his fingers. It often creaks and rattles during his playing. You see head, eyes, hands, the whole upper part of the body moving impetuously in every direction.” On one occasion he fell back from the piano exhausted. Whence this unprecedented devotion to music? Whence, as one might say, this merging of his very identity in his playing?

There are a peculiar people, scattered from the Himalayas even to the Ebro and the Scottish Highlands, possessing nothing, in this wide world of God, but themselves and nature. Neither house nor hearth, neither state nor social forms restrain them. They have no fixed pursuit, no calling which makes a firmly settled[17] existence, based on duty and inclination. They have no manners, no church, no God. And yet these people have lived for centuries, as we know, unchanged in kind and number, yet nowhere settled. They are the gypsies, who seemingly possess nothing which the earth offers men or which makes life valuable. And still more, wherever they appear they are completely ignored and even looked upon with utter contempt. Truly they have nothing and are, as it were, a miserable fragment of the human race, everlastingly forgotten by God. But they have one thing that vies with our culture and art—their music. As they feel the complete rapture of an existence in nature which is boundlessly free, free from everything which hinders the slightest movement or inclination, so in their habits, but particularly in their improvisations, they express the God-given freedom of the inner sensibility in all its emotions, from the proudest human consciousness to the inmost longing of the soul for sympathetic communion. This music is to them as it were their world and God, life and happiness, the sun and all that world-movement with which we feel ourselves closely associated.[18] In a paper, worthy of notice, Liszt has sought to clear up the mystery of the vitality remaining in these dissevered fragments of the old Indian race, and explain the greater mystery how a people so destitute of any social and intellectual basis of life, possess one art and one of such originality, depth and power. We must follow him still further to understand the wonderful effect of his own performances.

“Recollections of the gypsies are associated with memories of my childhood and some of its most vivid impressions,” the world-renowned “Magician of the Hungarian Land,” writes in his fiftieth year: “Afterwards I became a wandering virtuoso, as they are in our fatherland. They have pitched their tents in all the countries of Europe, and I have traversed the tangled maze of roads and paths over which they have wandered in the course of time, my experiences some years, in a certain sense, being very similar to their historical destiny. Like them I was a stranger to the people of every country. Like them I pursued my ideal in the continual revelations of art, if not of nature.” In recalling these early recollections, he confesses that few things[19] impressed him so strongly as these gypsies soliciting alms at the threshold of every palace and cottage for a few words softly whispered in the ear, a few loudly played dance-melodies, or a few songs, such as no minstrel sings, that throw lovers into rapture without their knowing why. How often he himself has sought the solution of this charm, which held all with unchallenged sway! As the weak pupil of a strong master, his father, he had as yet had no other insight into the world of phantasy than the architectural framework of notes in their artificial arrangement together, and when we think of the old-fashioned composers, like Hummel and Ries, we imagine that it must have doubly fascinated him to exercise that charm, which these calloused gypsy hands practiced before all eyes, when they drew the bow across the sighing instrument or made the metal ring with powerful defiance.

We now see how these children of nature, with their most mysterious and spontaneous power of sensibility, blossoming out in their art, absorbed him and filled a soul incapable of jealousy with a natural envy of the incredible effect they produced. His waking[20] dreams had been filled with these bronzed faces, prematurely old with the vicissitudes of centuries and dissolute habits of every sort, their defiant smiles, their dull, red eyes, in which laughs a sardonic unbelief and gleams flash out which glisten but do not glow. Their dances always floated through his visions with their languid, elastic, bounding and tempting movements. By degrees the conviction was borne in upon him that “in comparison with the continuously dull and sombre days imaged upon the background of our civilized world, upon which only here and there some moments beaming with joy or lurid with pain are conspicuous, these beings had fashioned a defter texture of joy and sorrow, alternating with love, song, wine and the dance, as they were excited and soothed by these four elements of passion and voluptuousness.”

Thus early his soul had discovered the supernatural, throned like a sphynx in the inmost recesses of nature. He had felt that mysterious creative power which shapes and maintains the world. He felt it as belonging to his own inner nature and power, and his heart, in the profound consciousness of this[21] magical possession, must have bounded more exultantly, since those other lofty human acquirements of culture and art-work, which first invest the deep outreachings of life with the nobility and loftiness of thought, were open to him also. Henceforth his genius illuminated him, but the activity of this genius, in other words, its creative power, he attributed to his always profound recognition of the mysterious operations of the creative power of nature. A Parisian description of his playing, and that of the similarly “demonish” Paganini, about the year 1834, says: “Music is to them the art which gives man the presentiment of his higher existence, and leads him from the occurrences of ordinary life into the Isis-temple, where nature speaks with him in sacred tones, unheard before and yet intelligible.”

Let us now observe how the success of his playing, which this boy had already evidently achieved by his vigorous expression of his own feelings, influenced his future fortunes. “The tones of his bewitching violin fell upon my ear like drops of some fiery, volatile essence,” he says of the gipsy virtuoso, Bihary, whom he[22] heard in Vienna in 1822. “Had my memory been of soft clay, and every one of his notes a diamond nail, they could not have clung to it more tenaciously. Had my soul been the ooze from which a river-god had returned to his bed, and every tone of the artist a fructifying seed-corn, it could not have taken deeper root in me.”

His father took him at this time to Prince Esterhazy, in whose family musical patronage was hereditary. “I believe that female influence alone succeeds with him,” wrote the great Beethoven two years later, when he proffered the “Missa Solemnis” to him, as he had to another prince, for a subscription. He did not anticipate much kindly feeling on his part towards himself. Of what use, then, for a mere young beginner in art to expect anything? The Prince made him a gift of a few hundred francs. That was little for the heir of Haydn’s patron. In contrast with this, the boy met with a merited reception in the larger and more cultivated city of Presburg. Six noblemen, among them Counts Amadee and Szapary, settled upon him for six years an annuity of six hundred gulden, which satisfied[23] the father’s desire to give the boy a fitting education.

Soon afterward, in the year 1821, he resolved to give up his position and settle in Vienna with his wife and child. He was met with the anxious misgivings of his wife (born in Upper Austria), who could not bear to see her darling exposed to the vicissitudes of an artistic career, and who tremblingly asked what would become of them, if, at the expiration of the time, their hopes were disappointed. “What God wills,” cried the boy of nine, who had listened to the conversation with a quiet timidity. The objections and solicitude of the mother were dispelled, all the more readily, as she was of a deeply and genuinely religious nature.

It was estimated that six hundred francs was a fair price for their household effects. On their arrival in Vienna the father selected the distinguished and unassuming Carl Czerny for the boy’s teacher, for Czerny had been Beethoven’s pupil a short time and played nearly all his compositions by heart. It was only the wonderful endowment of the boy that induced the overburdened teacher to accept him, and when he had finished playing to him he won[24] his complete affection, as he did Beethoven’s. How could a boy of such a fiery musical spirit, who had enjoyed such a free and overflowing life in this art of his youth, play the dry, pedantic Clementi, which Czerny at first selected as the pedagogical groundwork? “If he visited a music store he never found a piece difficult enough to suit him,” says our informant. Once a publisher showed him the B minor concerto of Hummel. The boy turned over the leaves and intimated that it was nothing, and that he could play it at sight, making the assertion in the presence of the first piano-players of the city. The gentleman, astonished at the self-confidence of the boy, took him at his word and led him into the hall where there was a piano. He performed the concerto with equal skill and ease. It was the same composition which he played before Beethoven a year afterwards. Nothing could now restrain him from giving himself entirely to the public. “There is no greater pleasure for me than to practice and display my art,” Beethoven also wrote in his earlier years, and should not a genius who had acquired to his own thorough satisfaction the utmost freedom and highest[25] success by such characteristic performances in public, seek its own free course, the open sea of the great public? “I still remember to have seen and heard this virtuoso whose manly, beautiful personnel displayed all the characteristics of his race,” writes Liszt at the time he first heard Bihary in Vienna. “I can still recall the absolute fascination which he exercised when with an absorbed and at the same time melancholy listlessness, in striking contrast with the apparent buoyancy of his temperament and the flashing glances which, as it were, fathomed the souls of his hearers, he took his violin in his hands and for hours, forgetful that time was also flying, unloosed cascades of tones which streamed on in their wild plunges, anon rippling away as over velvety moss.” On the 18th of December of the same year, 1822, the “Young Hercules” in that concert when he “thundered out” the Hummel composition, so united and as it were kneaded into one whole, the andante of Beethoven’s A major symphony with an aria of Rossini’s, who was at that time idolized in Vienna, that the relator excitedly cries out—“Est deus in nobis.” Verily a god directed[26] the creative and executive power of this little one, with his open brow, his haughty nose, and his countenance lit up by his large, deep eyes, which seemed set in the streaming hair, appearing as it were, like emanations of his power. All this it was that may have urged our serious Beethoven, who could so unerringly distinguish between the true and the false, the great and the little, to go up to the boy at the close of that concert of April 13, 1823, embrace and kiss him.

It was a difficult matter to get the old master out to such a concert. His ill health, deafness and many other troubles had kept him from the public many years. He was moreover restrained by his aversion to prodigies, who were all the rage at that time, and by his fixed displeasure with Czerny, some of whose works were certainly noble, and yet they had not kept him from the faults of a frivolous virtuosity. At last the persuasion of his friends, his own good-heartedness and interest in art prevailed, as they wrote to him the boy and himself were in the same situation which he and Mozart had occupied in their youth. “The presence of the renowned composer, far[27] from intimidating the boy, increased his imaginative power,” says the account. It also expressly mentions that Beethoven encouraged him, but in that reserved manner which was characteristic of him in his last years, and which was ascribed either to his personal circumstances or to his great sorrow about his deafness. Beethoven’s life is to-day fully revealed to us in the firm assurance of his spiritual condition in these last years, when the Ninth Symphony begins with its “Ode to Joy.” It may be found set forth in its historical connection in the book: “Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner.” Thus the young Liszt started upon his way in the great world, consecrated by the kiss of the freest poetical spirit in his art.

The next move was to Paris, which at that time, indeed, was the most important place in the world for artistic, and above all musical productivity. Besides, as the opportunity for full musical development was wanting in Vienna, since Beethoven himself was no longer active in such matters, it seemed best to apply to the Paris Conservatory, at that time under the world-renowned Cherubini. “The boy was pleased with the excellent receipts,” says our[28] last concert report, and their means for the journey were soon increased in Munich, where he succeeded in rivaling the very eminent Moscheles, and heard himself called “the second Mozart.” It was the same also at Stuttgart. Then they went to Paris.

“The two strangers made application to Cherubini, with letters of recommendation from Prince Metternich,” says a Parisian sketch. He met them with the reply: “A foreigner can not enter the Conservatory!” The Director forgot that he himself was an Italian. The disappointed father fell into despair. Had he then risked his very existence on the hope of the complete artistic development of his son?

Meanwhile his hope for the success and artistic perfection of the boy was at last gratified. The public and the friends of the noble art itself supplied the place of a narrow-minded and envious clique and became father and godfather alike to this true “wonder-child” of the nineteenth century, of whom one account aptly says: “We believe that no other contemporary has created so profusely or reflected so faithfully his varied acquirements as he.”[29] They were next summoned to the Palais Royal. It was on New Year’s, 1824. The boy charmed every one. The Duke of Orleans, afterwards King Louis Philippe, in his delight bade him ask for any gift he liked. “This harlequin,” cried the boy, and pointed to a beautiful automaton hanging on the wall.

This incident, as in the case of Mozart, illustrates the utter unselfishness of the real artist, who continually gave and desired nothing for himself. These frank, manly traits, like the incomparable genius of the boy, who was no longer a boy, powerfully affected every one within his circle. The biography of his youth tells us his sensibility was as perceptible as it was attractive to every one.

A year passed, and the young Liszt became in the mean time, so to speak, the plaything of all the ladies of Paris. Everywhere he was caressed and fondled. His roguish tricks and pranks, his whims and caprices were all observed and told over and over. Every one was delighted. Scarcely thirteen years of age, he had awakened love, aroused envy, kindled enmity. All were attracted to him and were completely infatuated with him.

[30]This sudden conquest of the leading society of the Europe of that day, which was noted in the public prints, may be found more amply detailed in the volume, “Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner.” Heaven must have remarkably endowed that extraordinary child, who at the age of twelve was without a rival, and that too in an art in which he accomplished and understood what no mortal could boast to have produced of himself. The “genius for performance,” whose sources we have sought to locate, without, however, the skill to disclose their lowest depths, since they lie in that combination of the freest and most individual power, as applied to universal individuality and to the artistic, which we call “genius”—this unsurpassed skill of performance was so irresistibly overwhelming at that time, for example upon an actor like Talma, that one evening in the Italian theatre, while they rushed around the boy from all the boxes, he threw his arms about him and embraced him so closely, that the poor little fellow had great difficulty in releasing himself so that he could see his enthusiastic friends. It was developed to its ultimate perfection by the continuous[31] and hearty recognition of his gifts by a great and sympathetic public in France and England. His face more and more assumed the likeness of an Apollo, with the types of the two royal animals, the lion and the eagle, as we observe in an excellent picture of him in his youth. In his playing he also resembled that Pythian deity, who in the glowing embrace of the proud Muse disclosed her hidden secret and threw the world into rapturous amazement.

It was Paganini who had the first and most decisive influence upon the unapproachable playing of the young artist. It was the language of unfathomable nature, the same which he had heard among the gypsies, but translated into the higher language of genius, without which the superhuman, which is so mysteriously throned in our deeper natures, would remain unexpressed. It was in the year 1831 that this hero of violinists appeared in Paris, and carried everything before him with his concerts. The most inconceivable difficulties were overcome in his consummate achievements and seemed to be the essential methods of expressing particular emotions, like those of the deepest sorrow or the most extravagant humor.[32] Liszt, at that time in his nineteenth year, was touched to his inmost soul by this playing. “He became convinced,” says a contemporary musical writer, “it was only through new and unusual means that a large audience could be roused into unexampled enthusiasm, and that the same methods could be applied to the piano, which had been used with the violin. He determined to become the Paganini of the piano. That he became even greater, we now know. We close these preludes of his life with some little known accounts of these first reproductive periods.”

In that excellent Parisian musical journal, to which Liszt himself contributed many years, the following appeared in 1834, when he was in his twenty-second year: “His playing is his language, his soul. It is the very poetical essence of all the impressions he has felt, of all that have captivated him. These impressions, which in all likelihood he could not render in language, and express in clear and precise ideas, he reproduced in their full meaning, with an accurate skill, a natural power, an energy of feeling and a charming grace, which have never been equaled. At one time his art[33] is passive, an instrument, an echo; it expresses and interprets. At another it is active again; it speaks. It is the organ which he uses for the development of his ideas. Hence it is that Liszt’s playing is not a mechanical, material exercise, but much more than this, in the genuine sense a composition, a successful creation of art.”

The details of his performances are then noted, as for instance, that in the Weber “Concert-Stueck” he drowned a tutti of the orchestra with his piano and its thunder overpowered the hundred voices of its instruments and the thousand-fold bravas which rang through the hall at that instant. “How is it that we feel a sudden and irresistible pressure in the breast and a stoppage of the breath as soon as Liszt sits down to the piano to play the simplest thing, a capriccio, a waltz, an etude of Cramer, Chopin or Moscheles,” wonderingly asks this admirer. Then he refers to his playing of Beethoven’s music. “Beethoven is a divinity to Liszt, before whom he bows his head. He regards him as a savior whose advent in the world through the freedom of poetical thought has been signalized by his annihilation of superannuated[34] practices. You must hear him while he plays one of those melodious poems which are distinguished by the commonly accepted name of sonata. You must see his eyes when he raises them as if to receive an inspiration from above, and when again he lowers them sadly to the earth. You must see him, hear him, and—be silent. For here you feel only too well how feeble is any expression of admiration.”

About the same time appeared a very considerate German account in Robert Schumann’s musical paper. “In Paris they did not have much faith in the young artist’s talent for composing or originating ideas, but on the other hand credited him with divining the thoughts of the great masters by his perceptions and study. So far as his playing was concerned, they could only use the expression, ‘marvelous.’ He plays with unrivaled facility and purity, elegantly, tenderly and with fire. He carries the listener along with him and often makes him fear that he will not hold out. It is related that at the close of one day, after a too continuous and lavish display of his vigor and power, he was exhausted by weariness.[35] He triumphs over all, only he can not conquer his nerves, which I fear, will conquer him,” says our countryman in conclusion. “In a word, you behold an immensely nervous man who plays the piano immensely.”

The world knows to-day, by hundreds and hundreds of his victorious achievements, that by the “ideality of his personal presence” as well as by the fascinating and magical beauty of his playing, he has marched through the world like another Alexander the Great, and that it yielded not merely to the purest enjoyment of human nature but to the highest possible proofs of truth and beauty—brother and sister to each other as it were, yet in our inmost being they are one.

The work of artistic genius will always remain an enigma to be silently admired by us, like the incomprehensible and creative phenomena of nature, of which it is, by its very essence, a part and a speaking likeness. Transporting the whole nature and again rousing a secret awe in the presence of its mysterious power, which like nature itself, knows neither good nor evil, deliciously reveling in a flood of light, as when the first morning of creation revealed the boundless fullness of its form, and again filling one with fear and dread of the[37] overpowering immeasurability and the mysterious depths of the original creative power—with such varied emotions this creative force of genius fills us, especially in music, when it confronts us almost face to face with the sense of that secret incomprehensible world-force which, endlessly destroying, creates again and creates only to destroy.

Whence comes the power to a single individual which subdues millions of hearts, which for centuries has dictated the laws of thought and feeling, which seems even to broaden the limits of creation, while it produces pictures and images which were not pre-existent? Is it not the same with the images of tragic poetry? Does it not, like the antique, live an imperishable life by the side of and yet above humanity? Do not these melodies of Mozart and Beethoven give us a new and different view of our kind, and does not the mighty Leipsic cantor, Sebastian Bach, construct a dome of mere tones which is a part of the plan and order of the universe we call the cosmos, a tangible and perceptible mental structure, as apparent as the everlasting abode of Deity?

Whence comes, we repeat, this incomprehensible[38] power, this knowledge we are almost inclined to regard as something unprecedented and impossible? Is it an accident of natural endowment, a mysterious inner combination of powers, which have no connection with the customary mental processes but expand and work in a time and place which we must consciously recollect in order to comprehend the designated results of its immeasurable creative power?

The higher spiritual perceptions in their widest development must spread out before the poetical genius ere he can collect the beams which make a new sun-life for the world. Homer and Sophocles, like Shakespeare and Goethe, in their overpowering creations, represent a new world-period in the growth of humanity, and Beethoven well knew what he said when in a letter to Bettina he called the great, that is, the true poet, “the most precious treasure of a nation.” The highest flights of the plastic perceptions, combined with the objective results of technical skill through long generations, at last make possible the appearance of a Phidias and a Raphael. Who has fully comprehended that grand musical architect,[39] Sebastian Bach, who looks down from the true heights of humanity on a whole generation of spirits who lived and thought in that other world, in which the very creation seemed to repeat itself through mere ethereal tone-vibrations, nay more, a creation was fashioned having nothing to do with the other world, and, if one may credit the bold hypotheses of the philosophers, able to exist without it.

And Mozart! Can we fancy an existence in which the tenderest graces of life bloom like roses and violets without a development of those sources in the human breast in their endless breadth and ineffable depth and reaching their full maturity, from which melody flows and in which the eternal power of creation reveals itself like the reason in idea and word? And then, Beethoven! Deeply concealed, world-pervading and far-reaching influences must have preceded the supernatural power of volition and inspiration, before such a phenomenon could appear and like a new solar system enter the firmament which seems already opened for him. Had we not these remote and world-old proofs of this highest human inspiration preceding all culture—did we[40] not know the deeds, did we not possess the songs of our mighty ancestors which sing them, were it not for these known and observed influences, a phenomenon like Beethoven could not be comprehended. As he sprang from the old lower Germany, there was revealed in him the undaunted hero-spirit of the earlier ages, which in its struggle with foreign popular forms upheld its independence and fitted it to help prepare a new and higher culture for the world.

Let us now observe the source and career of a still further fragment of a similarly overwhelming artistic phenomenon which leads us nearer to the source of its wonderful success, and by the recognition of the intimate union of the mysteriously working forces of nature with the understanding, enables us to clearly comprehend what needs to be made clear to the senses when it is brought before them in the master’s playing and creation.

In the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” of the year 1838, there is a letter of his which gives us his impressions of his revisit to his Hungarian home. We learn from it that Hungary had been and continued to be a home to this[41] genius whose cosmopolitan art, as well as his rare international culture, seemed to render any distinctive national life unnecessary.

Nearly fifteen years ago, this letter says,—it dated in reality from 1821, and was thus more than seventeen—the father forsook his peaceful abode to go out into the world with him, and exchange the simple freedom of country life for the brilliant career of the artist. France at once appeared to him the most fitting sphere for the development of his genius, as he in his simple pride denominated his son’s musical talent. He thoughtfully describes that important period from his fifteenth to his twenty-fifth year, which he had passed in Paris, and which for the time had caused him to forget his home, and to regard France as his fatherland. People, things, events and places powerfully affect his ideas. He says that a flood of radiance streams from his heart. The absolute necessity of loving is so strong in his nature that a little part of himself goes out to everything that is near him. He is disquieted by the tumult of his own emotions. He does not actually live; he merely strives for life. He is full of curiosity,[42] longing and restless desire. A continuous ebb and flow of contending emotions surges through him. He exhausts himself in a labyrinth of confused longings and passions. He can only regard with pity everything simple, slight and natural. He oversteps all bounds, boldly searches after difficulties and the good things which he might do, the feelings which might be a blessing to him he considers scarcely of any value. In a word he is mercilessly tortured with these thorns of youth.

The soil of France, where he passed this time of feverish strife, of wasted powers, of energetic but perverted life-vigor, received the mortal remains of his father. There was his grave—the holy place of his first sorrow. “How could I help regarding myself as the child of a country in which I loved and suffered so much,” said he.

And yet there is a still more sacred home than the one where we have had our first personal experiences and appreciations. It is the place of our birth, where our earliest feelings and emotions impressed us. Speaking of this longing for home, he says: “On one occasion an accident aroused the feeling which had only[43] slumbered, while I thought it lost.” One morning in Venice he read a description of the calamity which an inundation had caused in the capital of his fatherland. “Their misfortune affected me deeply and I was impelled by an irresistible longing to help the unfortunate sufferers,” he says. “But how could I help, I, who possessed neither the means, the money nor the influence which power confers? ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘I will find no rest for the heart, no sleep for the eyes until I have contributed my little mite for the relief of so great a need. Heaven will bless the artist’s penny as much as the millionaire’s gold.’” In such a mood, the real import of the word, “Fatherland,” suddenly became clear to him. “My memory reverted to the past. I looked into myself and discovered with ineffable delight, pure and without blemish, all the treasures of childhood’s recollections.”

He then gives a description of Raiding, his birthplace, accompanied with the warmest and heartiest praise of Hungary and its people. To them, though of older stock, belong the gypsies, apparently the most scattered and wasted of all people on earth, and yet a homogeneous[44] race which more than all others has its own peculiar gift and has given it to the world as its contribution to the aggregate of human culture—the gypsy music.

Young Liszt, “Ferencz,”[A] like them, was also a musician in the sense that nothing in the world could transcend in his estimation such a soul-possession, while he, and perhaps he alone, could fully realize that blessing which is the holiest thing to men and which is born spontaneously in all its perfection and purity, of this art of tone—Religion. Liszt knew this unfortunately-fortunate wandering people. With their music they had first revealed to his soul that deep supernal world, as we above characterized their music. Out of the passionate stir of all the mental powers as well as of pleasure in their impetuous rhythms had come to him the irrepressible longing for a purer and higher mental expression which resounded in their gypsy melodies like the soul-lament of the world. He had experienced and realized that to him, as to the gypsies, music was an All, a hold upon life itself scarcely weaker than the natural bonds of the[45] closest human intimacy or of the love of children and parents. He knew, that to this miserable people, without home or place, without social affiliations or culture, even without religion, this spontaneous art of music was all that the world offers beyond mere nature and her gifts, culture and customs. It was to them those higher thoughts and deeper emotions of human life we call religion and God himself.

As a boy he had realized the expiation which must be made for the attainment of such a spiritual condition. He had heard these tones rising from the lowest depths of a mysterious being and pervading his earliest emotions with all the energy of a heart full of the inexhaustible power of youth, and he had felt himself alternating between rapture and sorrow, between tears and delight, between pride and desire, the plaything of those uncomprehended and eternal powers which nevertheless are the source and essence of life. For years he had acquired and exercised in the great world that immense skill which complete devotion to an external object secures. He was deeply absorbed as well as passionately delighted, as his hands rested upon the keys, as his spirit[46] floated in tones, as his eyes were full of a higher delight in the sight of a world transcending the senses, as his breast heaved with the unaccustomed fullness of the impressions of such feelings and of such a spectacle, and he fully shared the boundless and enthusiastic impressions which his art, his magical playing exercised. All this he had realized a hundred-fold. Why then should his heart not beat when he saw the gypsies again and when he heard again those tones which, so to speak, had summoned him to life? For his life was and is yet only music, and these gypsy melodies are, as it were, the soul of the country to which above all other countries of the world they peculiarly belong. It was this country which first appreciated this music, for Hungary or a Magyar festival without it, is no Hungary, no festival. The gypsies and their music are like another and ideal fatherland in that of Hungary, the most sadly longing as well as the most deliriously passionate expression of its national existence.

Liszt, unquestionably the greatest son which this Hungary has yet produced, has paid a tribute to that race, the gypsies, apparently the[47] weakest of all earth’s people, which with conscientious fidelity tells the story of what they really are and what he himself owes to them. The description of his Hungarian fatherland, of his beloved countrymen, and then of the manner of life and ideas of those restless wanderers, their mysterious origin and still more mysterious endurance as a people, the mystery of their moral duration, if one may so call it, in all their outward change and constant privation, the atmosphere of poetry, or of the actual world-spirit, as one might say, which surrounds them, as it does all the simple products of nature—all this one must read in the volume, “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary.” For tender love, delicate observation, faithful portraiture, deep intellectual perception, ethical criticism and genuine poetico-ideal clearness, one can find no parallel to the manner in which he has described for us this apparently God and world-forsaken people, maintaining their right to exist. It is a beautiful heart and soul-tribute which the great artist has paid them.

One part of this volume, his visit to the gypsies, confirms in every particular what we[48] have said above of the influence of their art upon him, and of the divine, free inspiration and untrammeled genius of music as the direct outcome of the primitive force of the world itself. We shall let our volume tell the story. It is a variegated picture, and as Salvator Rosa among the robbers is once said to have studied the absolute unrestraint and individuality of their natural life, and the consequent incomparable variety of character and characteristics of landscape, figures, groups, costumes, colors and forms, so we shall find in this highly colored picture at least one of the numerous germs and shoots which, in Liszt, developed into such a strong and vigorous tree. From these genuine children of nature he acquired at least the one indispensable element of all art-creation, a complete freedom and absolute consecration of the entire nature to it.

Liszt relates that on his first return to Hungary, in the summer of 1838, he wished to refresh his youthful recollections with some of their liveliest impressions, and to see again these gypsy bands in the woods and fields, in the picturesque promiscuity of their marches[49] and halting-places, with all the contrast of the union of ages, passions and varying moods, free from any conventional gloss or mask, rather than in the stifled city streets, whose dust they gladly shake off, preferring to wound their feet with the thorns and stubble of the heath than with the rough pavements. “I visited them in their outdoor kingdom, slept with them under the open heavens, played with the children, made presents to the maidens, gossiped with their rulers and chiefs, listened at concerts given to gratuitous audiences, by a hearth-fire whose place chance determined.” Salvator Rosa among the robbers! Thereupon follows a description which strikingly contrasts the extreme naturalness of these wandering hordes with the splendor of cities, particularly of the world-ruling Paris, and with the education and polish of the child of the salon, who was nevertheless an artist, and who could say of himself: “Afterwards I became myself a wandering virtuoso in my fatherland, like them. I was, like them, a stranger to the people. Like them, I pursued my ideal in a complete devotion to art if not to nature.”

[50]Stretched out upon the close, crisp fleeces of their lamb skin mantles, out of which they prepare a couch of honor resting upon freshly plucked and fragrant flowers, before it a row of lofty ash trees, whose wide-spread branches seemed to support the blue sky, stretched out like a broad pavilion and ornamented with curtains of vapory clouds, at his feet a mossy turf, sprinkled with the brightest meadow-flowers, like those tapestries of the Mexican Caciques, he spent hours listening to one of the best of the gypsy orchestras, whose playing was animated by the beauty of the summer day and the abundance of its favorite drink, and accompanied with indescribable ardor the dances of their women, who shook their tamborines with gentle cries and fascinating gestures. During the intervals of rest, so he says, he heard the creaking of the poorly greased axles of their wagons, which had been removed to one side to leave more room for the dancers and the huzzas of the boys in their own jargon, which the musicians politely translated into “Elyen Liszt Ferencz” or “hurrah for Franz Liszt.” Then came shouts of delight at sight of a meal, composed of meat and[51] honey, a noisy cracking of nuts by white-toothed children, and bright laughter, mad leaps, somersaults and a wild whirl and bustle—a genuine lyric of untamed nature and caprice. Actual battles were fought over favorite delicacies, such as some sacks of peas, around which tattered Megaras with disheveled hair, bleared eyes, toothless jaws, hands trembling like aspen leaves, danced incredible sarabands for these gifts which promised to satisfy their greediness. The men to whom he had given beautiful horses, laughingly showed their dazzling teeth and cracked their finger-joints like castanets, threw their caps high in air, strutted about like peacocks and then commenced the fiery rhythms of their dances with a vigor which soon became a frenzy and at last reached that delirious whirl which forms the culminating point of the ecstacy of the dervish dances. Truly a tempting bit for the brush of a genuine Netherlander, but can any one paint their music as well? We shall see, but we will first continue the narrative which leads us to the very verge of this singular, unrestrained and apparently purposeless nomadic existence.

[52]He conversed for a long time with the old men of the tribe and besought them to tell him some of their experiences from their own recalling. Their memory, however, did not extend beyond the limits of the living generation and he was obliged to help them in recalling the course of events so that they could keep them in regular order. Once they have secured the thread of a story, so this close observer informs us, they experience extraordinary pleasure and seem to regain, in all their original freshness, feelings which have been long concealed under later impressions. The less frequently this occurs, however, the greater is the delight with which they again sound the strains of the old time and with growing enthusiasm, often with a bizarre kind of poetry, and with imagery tinted with a constantly increasing oriental glow, they describe the scenes which they have drawn from their recollections.

The description itself was only the expression of momentary and accidental passion, not of a well considered purpose or regularly developed plan, hence these impetuous, unrestrained, unsubdued impulses make dissimulation[53] unnecessary. The originality of the occurrence consists chiefly in the more or less energetic or fanciful passion of the hero who accompanies it with impromptu accessories. The remarkable simplicity of these natural relations prevents that sequence of events, that change of circumstances, that development of the emotions like germinating seeds, which in their maturity are turning points in our destiny. Too quick, prompt and self-willed for patience or perseverance, they as quickly seize what they desire; they take swift revenge for any assault; sometimes, like a wounded animal, they bear away the shaft that has pierced them and to conceal their wounds forsake their tribe. Our narrator further mentions that they observe a haughty and timid silence, a feeling of manly shame, as it were, about their own feelings, and speaking of their companions they only allude to the dead or the faithless, and a word, a nod of the head or a gesture suffices for all they have to say. Thus Liszt could obtain only individual adventures in love-intrigues, strife and crafty tricks, and in these the most important thing, namely, the part played by the principal[54] himself and the controlling passion at work, were persistently and regularly concealed, and yet in spite of all the craftiness which the necessity of procuring alms has taught them they manifest a very poetical sense in picturing the scenes of which they were witnesses, so much so indeed, that the little narratives “can be strung upon the same thread, like pearls of the same color.”

The picture becomes gayer and more animated when he returns to his friends the second time. It was on those same plains of the Oedenburg county where he was born. He had not forgotten his old hosts and they still thought well of him also, for when he left the plain old church, after the mass, where he had prayed so fervently as a child, in which all his neighbors had loudly sung in honor of this same boy, who, the good dames of the village prophesied, would come back in “a carriage of glass,” that is, in a glistening equipage, a great crowd of gypsies swarmed about him and received him with every manifestation of joy and delight, prepared to do him honor.

Their orchestra was soon ready in a neighboring oak-grove. Barrels placed on end and[55] covered with boards formed a table and around it “Roman couches” were made of stacks of hay, one of them a genuine throne of thyme, butterfly-shaped flowers, flax blooms in elegant half-mourning, anemones in white tunics, wild mallows, cornflowers, irises, and golden bells, a “flowery mound fit to offer to Titania.” Nightshades, with their broad, shield-shaped leaves spread a colossal fan about the rural festival. And then follows a description of nature, the counterpart of which may be found in music: “Bees, attracted by the fragrance of the fresh hay, forsook their hives in the neighboring tree-trunks by swarms. Crickets chirped in the rye and wheat fields. Hornets and wasps buzzed their contralto. The dragon-flies came in flights with a whirr like the rustling of taffeta robes. The quails and larks sang. The frightened sparrows called out. The little emerald frogs croaked among the rushes of the brook and a whole swarm of shelterless insects flew about us with the most confused sounds. What polyphony! What ethereal music! What smorzandos on organ points! All this must have floated before Berlioz when he composed the[56] ‘Dance of the Sylphs.’” But, say we, such a picture of the surprisingly varied activity of creative nature must have filled the daring and at all times active fancy of the same artist who quickly makes the living human heart, with all its foolish pride and restless longings, realize “the pain and pangs of almighty nature,” as he terms it, with an effect as wonderfully vivid as only a Salvator Rosa or a Ruysdael could paint it. Farther on we have a genuine Inferno in mere word-pictures.

“Night came before they were weary. To light up the darkness a dozen pitch torches blazed in a circle. The flames arose like cylinders of glowing iron, for not a breath stirred the atmosphere laden with heat and the fragrance of invisible aromatic herbs that had been mowed down in the morning. To our half-closed dreamy eyes the torches appeared like columns supporting the dark canopy of the heavens. The smoke wavered in the air, now concealing and anon revealing the golden stars. The darkness was like a solid wall around a fantastic wood palace, while the gnarled tree-trunks with their curiously twisted branches stood out like statuary. The[57] children leaped about like gnomes and stripped the bushes. The scene constantly grew more strange and fantastic. The women appeared like specters when they suddenly emerged from some dark corner with eyes gleaming like coals and with magical beckoning hands to tell us our ‘good fortune.’ That evening the phrase was not a meaningless one.” As a happy close, one of those humorous scenes occurred which are never wanting among the children of simple nature.

“On the next morning, the men would not hear of an immediate separation, and gave us their company as protectors, some on horseback, some running on foot, to the nearest village. The closeness of the day before was followed by a rain storm but they refreshed themselves with parting drinks and glowed with delight, rejoicing in the fitful rushes of the rain. In their turned lamb’s skins they looked like bears on raging steeds, for they spurred their horses so furiously that they leaped about like carps. The abandon of these people, could scarcely be kept within bounds any longer. They reached a tavern not far off, and here this extraordinary carnival[58] came to an end with a morning serenade under a huge shed, and pretending that it did not rain, the symphony began with an animated flourish, con estro poetico, but the circulating morning’s wine and the liquor of the day before infused them with fresh vigor and soon led to a rinforzado con rabbia. The thunder growled in the distance like a continuous bass. The high beams and the half-fallen walls of the shed gave back such an echo that every sound struck upon the ear with redoubled power. Passionate passages and feats of virtuosity followed each other and were confusedly mixed. This musical morning roar was rent into tatters of tones, and in the stormy finale it seemed as if all the sounds were piled upon each other like a mountain ridge. One could hardly tell whether the old building had not tumbled in, so deafening was the instrumentation of this concert, which certainly would not have received a favorable verdict from any conservatory, and which I myself must declare was somewhat daring.” With this spirited description, this vigorous picture of life closes.

But what is all this in comparison with the[59] effect when the artist takes his own pencil and depicts these scenes in music, the spirit of which re-echoes them all. When Salvator Rosa dashes off his passionately excited scenes from nature, his bold conceptions of bandit characteristics, and other weird pictures of outdoor life and its accessories, as if they were living figures passing before us, we can not help realizing that he must have actually lived among the robbers. The artist has given us his own account of this unpolluted nature and her children. Our musical picture-gallery has been remarkably enriched with his “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” in which he has successfully painted in tones all that life which he has sketched in words and thus has preserved it to the world of art. The “Hungarian Fantasy,” for piano and orchestra, and the stately symphonic poem, “Hungaria,” give us a memorial picture of this animated Hungarian life, so full of strange power and extreme contrasts, with which also, in this regard, the nature-world of the gypsies was fully identified. It was important to give a definite description of it, for it seems in this connection above all else necessary to furnish the details and essentials of a music, which, in[60] contrast with our European musical creations in their accepted forms, is a world in itself, in harmony, rhythm, melody and instrumentation, and one which we recognize as wonderfully fanciful and rich in color and yet full of the germs of life. Did we not possess the inimitable magic of that web of nature in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we should declare that in the artistic presentation of the wonderful poetry of absolute nature, these works of Liszt, based upon the gypsy music, were the most poetical of all. At all events, by the side of these picturesque, genre pictures, they suffer but little in power, delicacy and reality, and we may call them studies made directly from nature.

It is well known that there are animals who are never tamable for any length of time and it is none the less interesting to know that an untamableness of nature just as absolute is a human characteristic, and belongs to beings of our own kind, who inconsistently throw away all the benefactions and blessings of a fixed existence and culture, content to secure the inexhaustible bounty of nature and enjoy the simplest form of human existence. It is that people “which draws water from every stream of earth and eats bread from all its furrows.”[62] Liszt, who had found the way to them by his earnest desire to witness their actual life, has given us an illustration of this feature of their untamableness and contempt for all our blessings of culture, which, when closely considered, leads us to reflect upon the real nature of our culture. In parts it is very amusing and again it is almost pathetically humorous, revealing to us the nature of human existence in all its varying moods. We may observe this from a psychological standpoint and thus save ourselves the necessity of character-description.

Would not continual kindness of treatment at last overcome this innate wantonness of the gypsy nature? Might not one by carefully fostering their music, that exotic plant, that special gift of theirs, so brilliant in its first radiance, develop it to a fuller growth in the atmosphere of civilization and improve its beauty? These were the questions which for a long time had impressed themselves upon the manly feelings and the kindly spirit of the great artist, as well as upon his deep concern for and earnest sympathy with all true and genuine things and with the immortal nature[63] of all the spontaneous outgrowths of his art.

It was in Paris, about the beginning of 1840, and at a time also when Liszt’s attention was not much given to the gypsies, that one morning his dear friend, Count Sandor Teleky, came in, accompanied by a twelve-year-old lad, in a hussar jacket and broad laced trowsers, with dark brown complexion, wildly waving hair, a bold look, and a demeanor as haughty as if he were about to challenge all the kings of the world. He had a violin in his hands. “See,” said the Count, as he pushed the lad toward him by the shoulders, “I bring you a present.” Great was the astonishment of all the guests at a scene so strange for Frenchmen to witness. Among these guests was that great artist, who was at that time, notwithstanding Liszt’s abilities, called in Paris, “the greatest,” until one who had closely watched the rivalry between them settled it in a word: “Thalberg is the first but Liszt is the only one.” It was Thalberg who could not refrain from asking what he intended to do with this gift.

Liszt himself was surprised. He had not thought for a long time of the wish he had expressed, when in Hungary, of finding a[64] young gypsy with a talent for the violin which he might further develop, but he guessed as soon as he looked upon this slim, nervous and evidently quarrelsome little being that his desire for a young “Cygan” and countryman had been gratified. In fact, the Count on leaving Hungary had left instructions on his estates, since they had sought in vain while he was there, that in the event of finding such a young man he should be sent direct to Paris. The impetuous youngster, whom he now introduced to Liszt, had been discovered a short time before on his possessions, and had been purchased and forwarded to him as a token of friendly affection.

Liszt kept the boy continually near him and naturally took keen pleasure in watching the development of his emotions and humors amid his new surroundings. Insolence was the strongest characteristic of his nature, and it displayed itself in the most diverse ways, by a thousand naive and childish frivolities. To steal out of greediness, to continually hug the women, to break every object whose mechanism he did not understand, were very inconvenient but natural faults which might have[65] corrected themselves. It was not easy, however, to deal with them as they continually broke out in new directions. In these circles which included acute psychological observers, like Balzac and George Sand, “Josy” soon became a little lion and his private concerts kept his purse well filled. The money which came in so abundantly he flung away recklessly and with all the prodigality of a magnate. The first object of his attention was the adorning of his own little person. His coquetry was beyond belief and even went so far as affected vanity. He must always have plenty of beautiful little canes, breast-pins and watch-chains by him, and of various kinds. His cravats and vests could not be too showy in colors and no hair-dresser was too good to curl his locks. To become an Adonis was the great problem of his existence, but in his attempt to solve it, one pang gnawed at his heart and poisoned his peace. In contrast with those about him, his complexion was so brown and yellow! He thought that by the active application of soap and oil, such as he had seen employed with great success in acquiring that enviable possession, a beautiful color, he[66] could overcome his misfortunes, and he continually provided himself with them. He visited the best shops and bought everything he thought would answer for that purpose, always throwing down five franc pieces, for he was much too fine a gentleman to take any change.

It soon became impossible to do anything with him. In all the friendly circles of his adopted father, he swelled about, a full flown dandy. On the eve of taking his journey to Spain, Liszt gave him over to the violin professor of the Paris Conservatory. He promised to give the utmost attention to his astonishing musical talent, while the superintendent of a school, in which meanwhile the boy was placed, undertook to cultivate him mentally and morally. All accounts from him, however, more and more confirmed Liszt’s doubts of the success of these educational schemes. In music it was specially useless to try and keep him within any practical bounds. He had the utmost contempt for everything that he did not know, and without directly asserting it, in his own estimation he was convinced of his superiority to everything about him. Like a genuine “savage” he was interested[67] only in his own pleasures, his own violin and his own music, and had no desire for anything else.

When Count Teleky brought him in, in his Hungarian gypsy costume, he had still his own violin. Upon this little wooden shell, poorly glued together, covered with strings which seemed better adapted for hanging oneself than for playing, he played even then the liveliest dances with remarkable aplomb and unsurpassed vigor. His perceptions never failed him and he played very willingly. He could perform for hours partly by ear and partly improvising and was very reluctant to make use of the melodies which he had heard among his associates. For the most part they were dull and insipid to him, but he was very partial to the melodies which he had heard Liszt play many times, and he would often regale his own audience with them, ornamenting them, however, in such a droll fashion that they never failed to set every one in a cheerful mood. As soon, however, as he was obliged to undertake actual study, he became refractory and would have nothing to do with it. No one could convince him that his own methods[68] were not finer than any they could teach him and he lived in the fullest conviction that he was the victim of barbarous coercion whenever his teacher in the least complained that he was unwilling to be instructed by him.

As might have been expected, Liszt soon heard that Josy grew larger but did not change otherwise; that he made no progress, and that nothing could be done with him. With his personal weakness for these singular people, he looked upon the zig-zag letters of the boy which showed the type of oriental exaggeration, as a proof of his industry. He sent word to him to meet him in Strasburg. When he first arrived he did not think of the boy, but when he stepped from his carriage he suddenly felt a violent hand-shake and was almost suffocated in the embraces of a strange young man. It took some time before he could recognize in this elegant young gentleman, clad in Parisian fashion, his little untamed, harum-scarum gypsy of the moors. Only the curved nose, the Asiatic eyes and the dark skin, in spite of all the French cosmetics and soaps, were the same. The self-conceit also was left, for when Liszt suddenly exclaimed: “Why,[69] Josy, you look like a young gentleman,” not in the least disconcerted and with the mien of an hidalgo, he replied, “Yes, because I am one.” In his new costume he also preserved his lofty style and grandeur of demeanor, and after that it was difficult for the “father” to believe that the inflexible gypsy nature could be restrained within the limits of civilization and keep a designated course. Still he would not allow his convictions to defeat his hopes so soon. He thought that perhaps woods and fields would have a better influence upon the boy than the great city and he consigned him to an excellent musician in Germany, on the edge of the Black Forest. This retreat, which withdrew him from the atmosphere of the great city and the danger of continual fresh corruption, interfering with the growth of what little virtuous aptitude he had by nature, Liszt hoped would lead yet to the amelioration of the wild creature.

Not long after he was in Vienna and heard of a new gypsy band. He went one evening to the “Zeiferl,” where they played, to see whether it was worth the trouble to make their acquaintance. Not one of the company[70] expected to find a face they knew in the band and for that reason they were surprised at the commotion which Liszt’s entrance occasioned. A slim young fellow rushed out of the troupe, fell at his feet and embraced his knees with the most passionate gestures. At the same instant he was surrounded by the whole troupe, who without further ado, overwhelmed him by kissing his hand and expressions of gratitude, of which he did not understand a syllable. After much trouble he discovered that the one who had thrown himself at his feet with such an enthusiastic “Elyen Liszt,” was an older brother of Josy’s. He had been inquiring among Liszt’s friends and related, boasting and sobbing at the same time, all that had been done for the benefit of the poor sold boy, which did not prevent him, however, from timidly intimating how glad they would be to see him and have him again.

The news from his teacher was not satisfactory, so all hope must be given up of making a rational artist out of this gypsy musician. Liszt could no longer force an organization which was at utter variance with the temperament of our society and culture. Will any[71] one contend that the European world has anything better to offer to such a branch dissevered from its stem, than the joys of nature, to which our culture had perhaps gradually made him wholly insensible? So he allowed this “son of the wilderness” to come to Vienna in order that he might again join his companions, if he so wished. His rapture at seeing them was boundless. They feared he would go mad, but the elasticity of such nerves knows no limits. Although in his foolish moments he had wished for another complexion he now was conscious that he could no longer disown his race. No sooner were they reunited than the band disappeared from the city with the purpose of showing the lost child to his father again. From the very first moment, Josy had shown himself more intolerable than ever, and with many passionate expressions of gratitude begged to be allowed to return at once and forever to his people. So they parted, after his friends had filled his purse with a little contribution which the haughty little fellow squandered upon a colossal banquet given to his brethren in spite of all protestations and the farewell supper besides, which had been provided for him.

[72]Did he ever see him again, this most perverse of all his countless scholars, on the edge of the wood, with his violin, smoking, playing or only dreaming, as Lenau has pictured “the three gypsies?”

Some years later, in 1857, Liszt’s volume made its appearance. A German translation of it by P. Cornelius appeared in Pesth, in 1861. It contained a letter from Debrezin, in Hungary, signed: “Sarai Josef, or the Gypsy Josy in the principal orchestra of Boka Karoly.” A notice of the volume had appeared in the Debrezin Sonntagsblatt, and so Josy writes the following which shows that culture had had some influence upon him: “Since I have become the father of a family and acquired a restful spirit and clear understanding, I reflect with sadness that in my youth I might have had the good fortune, under Your Highness’ protection and patronage, of an introduction to the great world and of artistic cultivation, but for my incorrigible perversity and aversion to all that was noble, elevated and artistic. But it was impossible, and you are richly rewarded by my own and my brother’s request, since a worthless gypsy[73] fellow, whom it was impossible to develop into an artist, is sent home again. In a word, I realize that I have buried my future, but it could not have been otherwise. But as you openly desire, at the close of your narrative, to hear something of me, I take this opportunity to humbly inform you that here in Debrezin, my home, I am serving as an ordinary gypsy in the orchestra, among my companions, and am a favorite with the public since I still play the violin tolerably well.”

He had also married a gypsy of the same place, and the year before had a son, who was christened with Liszt’s most precious name of Franz. He says: “I am so bold as to select Your Highness as godfather. We prolonged the christening with a lively entertainment, pledging the godfather in a far away foreign land with high swinging cups.” He added that the most precious recollections of him were impressed upon his heart and that a portrait of “His Highness,” which he once took away from Paris with him, should be preserved in his humble abode as long as he lived and should be consigned to his posterity as a sacred relic.

[74]“Poverty often hangs the soul with rags and leaves it bare of everything that graces and warms,” says Goethe, but in this case we see that where nature has no other needs than those which can be satisfied without trouble, the saying is not true and the appreciation of a benefit conferred is, so to speak, a higher moral attribute, a culture in itself. If a want of gratitude be the first sign of liberty and self-dependence, then this “ordinary gypsy,” Sarai Josy, might quietly say: “We barbarians are still better men.” Gratitude was the distinction of his person as that haughtiness which has clung to them through centuries of misery and privation in all countries of the world is the distinction of his race. Could culture have given such a distinction to this Josy? We doubt it and offer as an illustration the beautiful saying of our great Fichte, in the address to the German people, that delight in the good is rooted in man. In fact we have observed it in this Josy. The loss of all the beautiful gifts of culture did not give him a moment’s concern. That he had “buried his future” was to him simply a thing that could not have been avoided, but the[75] spirit of goodness and love which alone can add happiness and blessing to culture, once experienced by him, was never forgotten. As long as he lived and even after he was gone, the picture of his benefactor would be preserved as a “holy relic.” This one incident reveals to us the real character of our master, who in this respect inherited the traits of Mozart.

Better known personally than most of his contemporaries, not so much by the principles of his artistic movement as by his own personality, for fifty years all over Europe, admired and courted on account of the wonderful miracle of his genius, a hundred-fold more on account of his manners and individuality studied partly for the laudable purpose of discovering the secret of his overwhelming mastery, partly to detect the failings of human weakness, the shadow in so much light, “the[77] dark ray”—what can be said of such a man as Liszt in a general characterization?

And yet, however well known he may be, in reality, we, his contemporaries, can know little of such a man, for the reason that we are now in a position to define the limits of his artistic power. How long is it since we shrugged our shoulders at the so-called earnest manner of Mozart when we spoke of him as a man? That he was a genius no one doubted, but with it was immediately associated the idea of a light-minded person who was only too glad to drink champagne, or of a child who did not know how to deal with life, still less with money, and consequently differed from ordinary people. And yet how his letters, already in their second edition, have revealed him to us! That this divinely inspired artist, even in his youthful years, was so imbued with the seriousness of his art, will surprise that person who only recognizes the grace of his melodies apart from any idea of human toil and does not know that they are results achieved by the hardest labor. That life was so thoroughly beautiful to him, especially in the pure and manly features of[78] piety and friendship, was due to a lovely union of the beauty and purity of feeling which alone can disclose to us the soulfulness of his music. This could only be predicated of one, who, like Mozart, had actually taken into his soul the very essence of art. It is manifest in the great variety of his creations as well as in his correspondence, and particularly in the latter, as in his various biographies it is only disclosed piecemeal.

And yet that quality of his music which is showered down upon our spirits like heavenly peace and blessing is a something which far transcends the beautiful earnestness of a life measured by duty and brings us to a close perception of the infinite, of those conditions of life with which marvelous natural endowments and the highest perfection of intellectual and artistic skill have little to do, and in which we are forced to recognize the peculiar essence out of which genius springs and creates. This deep heavenly joy of the spirit which only seeks the good, and in such wise only as to maintain and cherish it, how and when it can, not merely to conform his habit and life to it—this genuine spirit of love which is the essence[79] of industry, of power, and of the highest and most productive qualities, this strongest characteristic of Mozart’s nature is due to that spirit of human love which was characteristic of his South-German home. It is as good a product of his own peculiarly moral labor as his boundless knowledge is the result of his industry as an artist. The loving earnestness of a spirit which embraces all human things alone produces such creations as Pamina and Sarastro. Every tone of his tells us this, be it in his joyous songs, in the serene purpose of his life, or in the gracious promptings of his heart.

Is not Franz Liszt also a child of this Austria, and particularly so as he still possessed this natural good-heartedness in all its inner abundance, and had not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge that would drive him from the Paradise of unconscious, beautiful harmony without securing in return for it the peace of the conscious and wished-for reconciliation? His strong attachment to his parents in his youth is known to us. It is a marked characteristic of his life. The loss of his father threatened his mental condition. Friendships![80] How many letters have been made public which disclose his personal relations in every stage of development from pleasant acquaintanceship to the most self-sacrificing friendship of the heart, mostly with artists, that is, colleagues, even with rivals, to whom he was almost without exception superior and whom he made happy with his love. Yes, most happy! We once heard a Hofcapellmeister, who had been induced by a prominent director of an art institute, now deceased, to practice an imposition on our master, which drove him away from Weimar, the scene of his activity, declare with tears in his eyes: “How could I have acted so toward such a man? I feel it was a crime against myself rather than against him.” There was no delay between the expectation and the reception of Liszt’s benefactions. Who, especially among artists, can say that when they appealed to him he did not speedily help them? And who has not appealed to him? It has been truthfully said that no sovereign lives who has lavished his generosity upon his dominions as widely and continuously as Liszt. Vienna experienced it as well as the city where he lived. The Beethoven[81] memorial will bear witness to it for posterity, as well as the one erected in Bonn, in 1845, and the Schiller-Goethe memorial of 1849, at Weimar, which would not have been completed but for Liszt’s generosity.

One manifestation shows us the greatness and genuineness of the artist, and its parallel can only be found in the relations of Goethe and Schiller. What does Richard Wagner, the incomparable, who stands equal in rank with Liszt in the world of art, say of the days when he had to leave his fatherland as a fugitive, the victim of infamous persecution?

It was in May, 1849. “On the day when every indication convinced me, beyond all question, that my personal situation was endangered, I saw Liszt directing a performance of my ‘Tannhauser,’ and was astonished at recognizing my second self in his rendering. What I felt when I invented this music, he felt when he conducted it. What I wanted to say when I wrote it down, he said when he clothed it in tones,” writes Wagner, speaking of his short stay in Weimar. One realizes in this event the climax of his artistic sympathy.[82] Wagner assures us that with Liszt it sprang from that deepest fountain of life, his true manly habit and goodness; from his sympathy with actual life and its influences. He tells us how strange it was that he had in truth found his “wonderful friend.”

He had made Liszt’s acquaintance in Paris, about the year 1840, at the very time when, after repeated disappointments, “disheartened and disgusted,” he had renounced all hope of success and was in a constant state of internal revolt against the artistic conditions which he found there and which led him to a completely new career. “When we met, he struck me as an utter contrast to my own being and circumstances,” says he. “In this world, in which I had longed to appear and shine, wherein the midst of my insignificant surroundings I had yearned for the great, Liszt had grown up from his younger years to become the general delight and wonder, at a time when I had become so disgusted with it and with the coldness and lack of sympathy with which it regarded me, that I could only realize its hollowness and emptiness with all the bitterness of one repeatedly deceived.” Thus Liszt[83] was to him at that time “scarcely more than a suspicious phenomenon,” and he had as yet no opportunity of acquainting the inspired virtuoso with his own being and working. Thus the first contact of the two artists was superficial, as might have been expected of a man like Liszt, to whom every day brought its changeable impressions, while on his own part, in his half desperate circumstances and condition, Wagner had not sufficient calmness and fairness to seek for the natural and simple causes of Liszt’s behavior toward him. He did not go to see him again, and manifested his aversion by declining to make any closer acquaintance with him. Liszt was to him as he says, “one of those beings who are strange and hostile to one’s nature.” Unprecedented and particularly impossible in a man like Liszt, it was only possible in the case of a nature like Wagner’s, which had become hard and almost repulsive through the force of circumstances. But we discover that the situation cleared itself, and it reveals to us the actual nature of Liszt himself, in all its greatness.

Wagner, in his openly vehement style, made no concealment of his feelings toward[84] Liszt, and so it could not fail to happen that one day he heard what Wagner thought about him. It was at the time when “Rienzi” was attracting general attention at Dresden and Liszt had already settled down at Weimar as Hofcapellmeister. Liszt was astonished to find that he was so violently misunderstood by a man with whom he was scarcely acquainted, and in 1851, Wagner writes in his “Communications to my Friends” that when he looks back he is still greatly moved at the solicitude and actual persistence which Liszt displayed, and the trouble which he took to change the opinions which he entertained toward him. He had not even known anything of his works. He was urged on by the simple wish to remove this accidental want of harmony between himself and another person, and perhaps also he felt a delicate misgiving whether he himself might not have unconsciously injured him. “He who knows,” continues Wagner, “all the disputatious hardness of human life and the boundless selfishness in all our social relations, and particularly in the relations of artists to each other, must be more than astonished when he realizes[85] how I was treated by that extraordinary man.”

But, he continues, notwithstanding all that had been done, he was yet to experience the peculiar beauty of Liszt’s gracious and loving nature in a stronger manifestation. He at last observed these approaches with actual wonder, and had been inclined to give them still less credit, now that Liszt’s circumstances had changed and he had come to be a famous man and the Royal Saxon Hofcapellmeister. Now the actual basis, the essence, so to speak, of Liszt’s manner of action and demeanor shows itself for the first time. He had seen “Rienzi,” “and,” says Wagner, “from every corner of the world, where, in the course of his artistic career he had communicated with others, I received, now through this person and now through that, evidences of the restless ardor of Liszt and of the satisfaction he had experienced in hearing my music.” This happened at the time when Wagner himself was more and more losing ground with his dramatic creations. As Liszt had now settled down quite permanently in Weimar, he made it a matter of prime importance to establish a[86] new and fixed abode for the creations of this mistaken and proscribed artist. “Everywhere and always caring for me, always quickly and decisively helping, when help was necessary, with an open heart for my every wish, with a self-sacrificing love for my very self, Liszt was something to me which I had never found before and in a measure the fullness of which we only comprehend when it actually embraces us to its full extent.” With this most beautiful tribute, Wagner describes the circumstance which was so decisive for him—and who can recall one more beautiful?

In the following year, 1841, in contrast with his own and Wagner’s self-sacrificing natures, Liszt had publicly accused Paganini, his greatest rival, of being a “narrow egotist,” and referred to the “artistic royalty” and even to “the divine service of devotion,” which elevates genius to a priestly power—that reveals the very souls of men to their God. He closes with the significant words: “May the artist of the future with joyful heart renounce a frivolous, egotistical role, which we hope has found its last brilliant representative[87] in Paganini! May he fix his goal in and not outside of himself and virtuosity be to him a means, not an end! May he never forget that, although it is a customary saying, ‘Noblesse oblige,’ it is a far more honorable saying, ‘Genie oblige.’”

“It must be frankly conceded that Liszt has devoted himself with the greatest enthusiasm to the laudable task of securing the appreciation of new works which are unknown or misunderstood and old works which have been forgotten, as well as of the latest works belonging to the opposition school,” says a notice of him, written in 1876. “Thus we owe to Liszt our nearer acquaintance with Berlioz, the introduction of many unknown works of Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Raff, Baerwald, Frank in Paris, and other masters, which secured their first public performance through him.”

There is still further evidence of this in the following letter which has only recently come to light. It was written in the year 1849, when Wagner had been compelled to be a fugitive, and was bargaining for “Lohengrin,” and is addressed to one Herr B., in Paris, but[88] not Berlioz. “Dear B.,” it says, “Richard Wagner, Capellmeister of Dresden, has been here since yesterday. He is a man of astonishing genius, of a genie si trepantique, as befits this country, a new and brilliant appearance in art. Recent events in Dresden have forced him to a plan in the execution of which I am determined to help him with all my power. Meanwhile I have had a long interview with him. Listen to what we have planned and what must be realized from it. First, we will create a success for some grand, heroic and fascinating music, the score of which was finished a year ago. Perhaps it will be in London. Chorley, for instance, can be of great service to him in this undertaking. Then if Wagner comes, with his success in his pocket, to Paris in the winter, the doors of the opera, at which he has always been knocking, will open to him. It is unnecessary to trouble you with any further explanations. You understand and must learn whether there is at this moment an English theatre in London—for the Italian opera would be of no service to our friend, and whether there is any prospect that a great and beautiful work by a master-hand[89] could make a success. Reply as soon as possible. Later, that is, toward the end of the month, Wagner will pass through Paris. You will see him, and he will speak with you personally about the direction and extent of his plan, and will be royally thankful for every favor. Write soon and help me as ever. It is a noble purpose for the accomplishment of which all this must be done.”

Richard Wagner himself, in confirmation of what we have said, relates the most beautiful thing of all. At the close of his brief Paris visit, in 1849, when, sick, miserable and despairing, he sat brooding over his situation, he happened to espy the score of his almost forgotten “Lohengrin.” It suddenly struck him with a sense of pity, that the music on this death-pale paper would never be heard: “I wrote two words to Liszt and he replied that extensive preparations were being made for the performance of the work. Whatever men and circumstances could accomplish there (in Weimar,) should be done. Success rewarded him and after this success he approached me and said: ‘See, thus far have we come. Now create us a new work, that we may go still further.’”

[90]Wagner created it. It was the “Nibelungen.”

And what occurred, when in the summer of 1876, this colossal work, the glory of modern art as well as of modern culture, one might say of all the culture of the world, for every nation was represented there, was at last produced in an artistic manner worthy of it?

“Here is one who first gave me faith in my work, when no one knew anything of me,” said the artist, in the midst of a joyful company, at the close of the first performance. “But for him perhaps you would not have had a note from me to-day. It is my dear friend, Franz Liszt.”

All this shows that what he did was only the fulfillment of duty. With him, as with one of the greatest spirits of all the centuries, it was his pride to be of service in his art. The proud words apply to him who truly feels the greatness which he himself helps to create, beyond and above all else in universal service, “genie oblige.”

Goethe writes in 1805, of Winckelmann, the author of the “History of Modern Art”: “He sees ineffable works with the eye, he comprehends them with the sense, yet he feels the unmistakable difficulty of describing them in words and characters. The complete majesty, the idea whence sprang the form, the feeling which aroused the sense of beauty in him, he would communicate to the hearer or reader, and while he musters the[92] entire arsenal of his abilities, he realizes that it is demanded of him to seize upon the strongest and worthiest he has at command. He must be a poet, whether he realizes it or not.”

Thus Winckelmann became the originator of the reflective style of statement in our language, which had not previously existed, and what Goethe himself learned from it is shown very clearly in the poetical description of the Greek myths, like Leda and the Swan, in the second part of “Faust.”

Have we a similar language for the art of music, which reveals to us, as it were, the nature, the soul-image of mankind as the plastic art reveals its exterior? Have our language and literature acquired afresh such far-reaching capabilities, such a fixed scope and self-enrichment as the plastic art has, through Winckelmann? This question is all the more worthy of attention since music, embodying the very essence of things and not their appearance, reflecting the idea of the world itself by its own hand and with its own power, is more essentially poetical than the plastic art. We have in Liszt’s writings a significant incentive to consider the question further.

[93]It is certainly taking a narrow and one-sided view of musical talent, to assert, like Riehl, that he who writes about music as a musician can not be a correct musician. On the contrary, the truest tone-poets among musicians have written the best about music, and in part about their own, and at the same time by their clear comprehension of the poetical idea in tone-poems have intensified the poetical force of the language.

The first who wrote with a definite purpose as an artist, about the peculiar form and the poetico-dramatic development of his art—for we do not refer here to the old and learned musical pundits, was Gluck, and this is specially manifest in his writings about his own works. Partly consisting of prefaces to scores, partly of letters to newspapers, these writings were prompted by the necessities of art itself. That is, the free poetical movement of the composer and his sympathetic delineation of the salient circumstances and phases of life were assailed, and they tried to confine him to established forms, to fine melodies of a set style, to a fashion as it were. Then the German drew his sword, for the quarrel had been[94] restricted mainly to Paris and Italy, and thrust it sharply into the confused mass of theoretical ideas, which are most prized by people who know little or nothing of music. Drastic in comparison, striking in characterization, mercilessly ridiculing all lordly authority, upon the literary, or true throne, he settles in defiance of the theoretical, every concrete, individual and intellectual question. When one considers the peculiarly Italian or French text, there is something of Bismarck’s style about it. How far removed from the theorist or delving fancy-monger was this artist, who was at the same time a man of facts, a practician! Although we notice some extremely striking and poetical, though merely incidental images, such as only the creative spirit would discover, there is little to be found of the externals of music, that is of musical description, so that these writings produced an admirable effect and furnished the proof that musical problems might engage the attention of the highest literary circles. For the language itself was of little account in this controversy, not even the two foreign idioms, which Gluck, by the way, handled with great ease.

[95]Another illustration forces itself upon us, as viewed from the standpoint of Luther’s translation of the Bible, which unquestionably belongs to the poetical literature of our fatherland, namely, that music, poetically considered, lay at the basis of early German as a language. Luther’s German sprang from the texts of Sebastian Bach, the sublimity of which reached the highest point of all art and which is as thoroughly German as the ordinary plain recitative is Italian. Instrumental music was now closely allied to this language, and as Gluck produced a poetical form upon the living basis of actual language, which afterwards especially delighted Goethe and Schiller, as it had Klopstock, and certainly must have had an influence upon their poetry, so the later ones, by personal intercourse with Philip Emanuel Bach in Hamburg, had the opportunity to perceive by actual observation, that German instrumental music began to assume a peculiarly German form. Mozart’s melodies, from the “Entfuehrung” to the “Zauberfloete,” speedily proved that music in its “beloved German” was not inferior to the highest beauties of the poetical classics.

[96]Their leading features were also closely connected. As Winckelmann gained his talent for the representation of the plastic art through the idea of language, from the antique, so the later ones had to go to the immediate sources of music to find the necessary “inspiration,” as Gluck denominated the creative faculty of our natures, for the expression of their conceptions. Thus things were in a bad way. The musicians did not understand writing and the writers knew little or nothing about music.

Let us trace in the history of events the most striking features of both styles of writing. In a literary sense Heinse was the first to treat of music. This Thuringian was musical in the fullest sense, and since the poet as a writer can not know much in this direction of his endowments, the Musical Lexicon is literally correct when it particularly specifies Heinse’s talent and mentions Hildegarde of Hohenthal as ever memorable to the musician. How the charms of the Italian landscape and the fascinations of this land of music work upon him and impart to his style the warmth and color of that very land itself! Above all else the sentient, nay more, the material[97] aspect of things preponderates, for how often in the sweet voice of a soprano the sad “Benedetto il Coltello” has fallen upon his ravished ear, and “his soul felt as if carried away by a flood.” Here for the first time the effect of our art is definitely connected with the very essence of speech, and the current histories of literature have therefore taken little notice of this circumstance, because our classic writers made it so. The effect of these writings first appeared when it became known through the great masters of poetry in music, Mozart and Beethoven, even more clearly about the year 1830, when Heinrich Laube gave it new expression and Jean Paul illustrated it with his lofty conceptions of the tone-art.

Now appear distinctive musical writers whose works belong both to the domain of literature and music—Reichardt, Rochlitz and Schubart, the latter by far the most prominent of the three. His “Ideas of the Esthetics of Music” first appeared in 1806, after his death. The “Spitz von Giebichenstein,” as Goethe called Reichardt, had a strong intellectual basis and development. He understood Bach and Handel in their colossal works and Gluck in[98] his dramatic achievements. He had not a correct idea of Mozart’s poetry and Beethoven’s powerful blows almost overwhelmed his brain and heart. Yet what he has said about the old classics is not without influence upon men like Rochlitz, in Leipsic, and Marx, in Berlin, who have also comprehended yet more clearly the free action of poetry in music. “There spoke spirit to spirit,” says the latter of Reichardt’s analysis of the Handel songs.

Frederick Rochlitz has done that work for Mozart, and Marx for Beethoven, and in many circles of the reading public the first knowledge and direct appreciation of this new world of music was obtained from their writings. And yet the one always shows something too much of authorship and but little of the free poetical flow, while the other struggles and is too obscure in the expression of the emotions which music awakens in him. He merely feels and does not grasp the expression of it firmly and forcibly and thus neither of them are far from the significance of an achievement like the narrative of Winckelmann.

This is in the highest degree characteristic of Schubart, who was an actual poet. With him[99] begins that genuine musical authorship which has gradually become a possession of our literature. This brings us to the solid array of writers who were equally at home in both provinces and thus could embody music in language as they had acquired the talent for expression from literature. It includes, and very prominently, too, Franz Liszt and his numerous musical writings.

Richard Wagner, as Heinrich Laube says, in that peculiarly able sketch of his life, which appeared in the “Zeitung fuer die elegante Welt,” in 1843, from an opera composer became a writer, by the “Parisian stress.” An entirely different reason actuated Liszt. It was the longing to secure for his art the name and master which it required. “Errors and misunderstandings thwarted the desired success,” says Wagner, speaking of that Weimar performance of “Tannhauser,” by Liszt, in 1849. “What was to be done to meet the requirements necessary to a good understanding on all sides? Liszt comprehended it quickly and did it. He gave the public his own judgment and impression of the work in a manner, the persuasive eloquence and[100] overwhelming efficacy of which have had no parallel.”

There is a notice in the “Journal des Debats,” of 1849, which appeared in Leipsic in 1851, together with a second under the title of “Lohengrin et Tannhauser de Richard Wagner,” with which publication, translated into German, at Cologne, in 1852, Liszt also makes his appearance as a writer.

And yet, not so; for when had he not expressed, pen in hand, the extraordinary activity of his feelings and thoughts? Since 1836, numerous outspoken and generous tributes of his had appeared, as for instance that concerning the position of artists in the “Revue et Gazette Musicale de Paris,” and it may be said not one of the artists mentioned, Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Paganini, Berlioz, Boieldieu, Meyerbeer, Thalberg, Auber, Schubert, Schumann, Field and Mendelssohn, are left without description. These sketches an delineations made such a great and immediate sensation that Lamartine, who was so renowned at that time, declared he would consider it a crime if Liszt did not exclusively devote himself to this branch of his art. In[101] addition to the writings, “De la Fondation-Goethe a Weimar” (1849), “F. Chopin,” “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary,” and the numerous essays in the “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” like the more important ones about “The Flying Dutchman” (1854), and “Robert Franz” (1855), Liszt’s literary works, like Wagner’s, form an imposing array of volumes, which are not second in importance to those of any other art-writer and contribute an essential addition to our general literature.

And how is it to-day with this musical authorship? The poet Schubart in his “Esthetics of Music,” had only sounded the first notes of that tone-language which, with the beginning of the opera was incorporated with our art. The Italian language, which was its basis, had reached the highest degree of perfection and the French of the Gluck operas had scarcely increased the “speaking” which melody had acquired by these idioms. All instrumental music speedily assumed this character of personal language. It was as in the simple lyric, the personal world-Ego that spoke in it. But when the German language[102] reached the height of its perfection and pervaded music, entirely new beauties were revealed in our art. In one of his many notes of travel, written at Vienna, in 1838, Liszt says that he has listened to the songs of Franz Schubert with great pleasure and has been often moved to tears by them, and he adds: “Schubert is the most poetical of all musicians who have ever lived. The German language impresses the mind wonderfully and the childlike purity and melancholy shading with which Schubert’s music is permeated can only be fully understood by a German.” This was true. The language of Goethe and Schiller had come to music and bedewed it as with heavenly blessings. It returned a hundred-fold what it had received in the old-time choral. We know the almost extravagant reverence of Gluck for Klopstock’s Odes and particularly for the “Hermannschlacht.” Mozart had written “The Violet” and the spirit of its language pervaded the “Zauberfloete,” notwithstanding the rough verses of the librettist destroyed all its beauty of shading. At first Beethoven averred there was nothing loftier than Klopstock. He preferred the soaring[103] flights of fancy of this ideal, poetical soul, but when he came to know Goethe it was all over. “He has finished Klopstock for me,” he said. Goethe’s friend Bettina heard him declare: “Goethe’s poems exercise a great power over me, not alone by the subject-matter, but also by the rhythm. I should be induced and urged on to composition by these verses, which are constructed upon a higher plane, as if with spiritual help, and bear in themselves the secret of harmony.” So said Beethoven, the purport of his judgment always being: “a musician is also a poet.” In fact, through language, music has completely associated itself with personal speech and what wonder is it that it now, again enkindled with poetry, affected the world? From that time on there have been masters of music who give us information about it and although they are only instructors in the history and dogmas of music, the professors of composition must state the essentially artistic and poetical in words. In the perfection of language as applied to the expression of musical things, these tone-masters have been creatively constructive.

The first of these is C. M. Von Weber,[104] whose famous and almost world-wide critique on the “Eroica” appeared in 1809. In spite of his jealous misunderstanding, he shows a closer conception of Beethoven and particularly of music than any of the purely literary critics of that time and we know that afterwards the composer of “Der Freischuetz” wrote much and very well and commenced to compose an artistic romance. A year later, Bettina wrote that “soulful fantasy about music,” which in Goethe’s “Correspondence with a Child,” made a powerful impression upon musical authors and inspired their better natures. Rochlitz’s “Musikzeitung,” from 1809 to 1812, contains Hoffmann’s analyses of the Beethoven symphonies, which to-day would have secured him the title of “Wagnerian.” He not only gave a wonderful flight and new character to language but he even extended its limits, for he describes in the “Kreisleriana,” with nothing but mere verbal expression, the mysteries of the art, its subject-matter, the keys and their character. He enhanced the possibilities of language, enriched its treasury of words and gave it a new significance. He[105] was enabled to do this as he was both musician and author and in a different style from that Prussian Capellmeister, Reichardt. He also declared that after he had once spoken of music, thenceforth he could only discourse of it as a poet. And yet there is in this still more of brilliancy than fire, more of the extravagant and even fantastic than the striking power of poetry and soaring fancy which Bettina’s simple poetical nature showed, the manifestations of which gave Goethe such presages of the power of musical genius. It was not merely the poetical nature, it was the actual poet, as in Winckelmann’s revelation of the plastic art, that was needed to hit the mark.

Let us be brief. Jean Paul’s deeply musical, poetical nature fired Robert Schumann with the might of his spirit and with the heavenly fire of true poetical perception, and inspiration. For the first time in Germany, in his “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” he collected about him the spirits who lived thoughtfully and contemplatively in their art. In comparison with these poetical writers where are now those theorists, Wendt, in whose writings Beethoven found thoughts full of wisdom, and[106] Thibaut with his “Parity of Music,” a little book certainly expressing with fervor the beauty of music, which even to-day reveals to many a spirit its better self? Added to these the expressions of Mozart, in his letters about music, have come to light, and Beethoven reveals his lofty regard for it in Bettina’s letters to Goethe. The writings of the poet Heine about music are revived again and from France an earnest spirit of art was wafted over to us in the literary productions of that phenomenon, Hector Berlioz. We recognize in this that music is not confined within the bounds of any language and we almost imagine that its spirit and being must actually dwell in the general modern idioms and thus impart to them the distinctive characteristics of the old languages. For Liszt also—and now we come to our subject—wrote in French and only in French, and yet we can say that he has enriched, beautified and extended the German language, for he wrote our modern speech from the inner spirit, because he wrote from the spirit of music, which above all belongs to us.

He thus begins his communication to the[107] “Gazette Musicale” in 1838: “Nearly fifteen years ago my father forsook his peaceful roof to go with me into the world. He settled down in France, for he thought that here was the fittest sphere for the development and perfection of my genius, as he, in his simple pride, called my musical talents. Thus early I forgot my home and learned to recognize France as my fatherland.” He recompensed his new fatherland with his perfect use of its language, which no native Frenchman to-day employs more correctly, accurately or with better constructive ability than he, so that the charge of “neologism and Germanism” which has been laid to him is based for the most part only on a noticeable jealousy of his extraordinary style. It is characterized by a vigor, power, delicacy and richness which are at once surprising and fascinating. “A single glance of his flashing eye” in the incorrect and beggarly translations of him that have thus far appeared, tell us we have to do with a Siegfried. One of his translators rightly asserts: “Liszt is as unprecedented and unapproachable in his playing as he is unparalleled and original in his style. They are his own possessions.[108] In both we feel the same genial inclinations, but even in the highest flights of his inspirations he never mars their beauty. If one were to find any fault it would only be with the exuberance of thought and the riotous luxuriance of his fancy which is inexhaustible in pictures and blending of color. This is only the natural result of the abundant richness of his surroundings. When Englishmen and Germans in their statements about music, especially where Beethoven is concerned, complain of the obscurity and mystery of his meaning, it is because music in its real form is still ‘a book with seven seals’ to them.”

To specify his writings in detail would take too much space. It is enough to state that Liszt was so familiar with the substance of all the modern languages that he was enabled, by merely skimming over them, to catch their general spirit and thus express the corresponding sense and form of music, so that in reality, according to the historical statement that we have given above, whenever these writings have been translated into good German they have broadened and perfected our language.[109] One such translation appeared long since. It is the volume, “Robert Franz.” The historical and technical are certainly the weaker qualities of these writings, for they belong to science and investigation, not to the art and the creative faculty as a special province. And yet, in these respects, the last named volume is very conspicuous. It contains an analysis of what we call the “Lied,” which is more thorough in a historical and theoretical sense than any that have ever been made. The entire volume is characterized by calm consideration rather than by the flight of inspiration.

To show how accurately and delicately Liszt could sketch a subject which up to that time had not been treated, and how fruitful, therefore, the statements are for the history of the art, we give a brief illustration from his sketch of “Lohengrin,” with which, as a further illustration of the style of all his writings, we close. He is speaking of the melody with which the Knight of the Grail takes leave of his marvelous guide, the swan: “Music had not, as yet, acquired those types which the painter and poet have so often[110] endeavored to portray. It had not, as yet, expressed the purity of feeling and the sacred sorrow which the angels and the beings above us, who are better than we, feel, when they are exiled from heaven and sent into our abode of trouble on errands of beneficence. We believe that music, in this respect, need no longer envy the other arts, for we are convinced that no one has yet expressed this feeling with such lofty and even heavenly perfection.”

We may say here, as Goethe said of Winckelmann’s prose: “He must be a poet, whether he realizes it or not.” As this description of the forms of plastic art has enriched our language for a century with illustrations which are familiar to every one, so the description of the creation of these new spiritual forms which music has produced, will give a deeper soul and new wings to language. Liszt’s writings for that reason have done a special work for the German language, for they display the all-pervading spirit of modern culture, and thus help to build up the essential and ultimate form of language. The introduction to his pathetically enthusiastic essay[111] on “The Place of the Artist,” which forms the close of this chapter, shows us that Liszt was as real as he was ideal when he took up his pen in 1835, impelled by his literary activity.

“Truly it were a beautiful and noble duty to establish the definite place of musicians in our social life—to group together their political, individual and religious ideas—to describe their sorrows, their sufferings, their difficulties and their errors—to tear away the coverings from their bleeding wounds, and to raise an energetic protest against the pressing injustice and the shameless prejudice which injures and torments them, and condescends to use them as playthings—to examine their past, to disclose their future, to bring all their titles of honor to light, to teach the public and the thankless materialistic society of men and women whom we entertain and who support us, whence we come, whither we go, the nature of our mission, in a word, who we are—to teach them who those chosen ones are who were ordained of God Himself to bear witness to the highest feelings of humanity and cherish them with noble trust, these divinely[112] anointed ones who strike off the fetters which enshackle men, who have stolen the holy fire from heaven, who invest life with its material and thought with its form, and while they achieve for us the realization of our ideals, draw us up with irresistible power to their spiritual heights, to the heavenly revelations—who they are, these human creators, these evangelists and priests of an irredeemable religion, constantly increasing in mystery and incessantly penetrating every heart—to preach and to prophesy all this, which of itself is so loudly proclaimed, with still louder voice even to the deafest ears, certainly were a beautiful and noble duty.” Who has more nobly fulfilled this duty by the deeds and words of a life-time than he!

After the orchestral composition of Beethoven how many thought they would be obliged to acknowledge that his great “Ninth” was also to be the last symphony!

“There rose a towering genius, a sparkling, flaming spirit, summoned to wear a double crown of fire and gold. He boldly dreamed, as poets dream, to fix his aim so high that if it could ever be attained by art, it would certainly happen at a time when the public was no longer made up of that vacillating, heterogeneous, unprogressive, ignorant and conceited crowd, which in our time sits in judgment and dictates decrees, which the boldest scarcely venture to question.” Thus[114] Liszt once said of Wagner, and to whom does it apply with more force than to himself?

Let us listen to an account of the new Siegfried-achievement which has been famous for almost a quarter of a century. It is the flower of the grand journalistic labor of a distinguished, theoretical musician of the future, now dead, and only retouched and amplified in some places to suit our more accurate estimate of things. It is in the “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik,” of the year 1858, and thus reads: “Goethe has already compared the progress of the physical sciences, as it appeared to him, to a wanderer, who approaches the rising luminary, and when it suddenly bursts upon him with blinding effulgence, is forced to turn away, because he can not endure it. The achievements in the musical world surpass this, for music pictures the grandest phenomena of modern culture.

“Just as every one must see the grand future which Richard Wagner has assured to the musical drama, so Liszt, by the freshness of his individuality has animated instrumental music, in that he has utilized its form for his purposes. The perception of the programme,[115] the union of the known and unknown, these are what instrumental music have acquired for our time and for the future. Originally, music alone was sufficient, now we have the totality of culture.

“In marked contrast with the earlier style is the Symphonic Poem, which is extraordinarily striking in character. Such a title is the egg of Columbus, and it expresses the thoroughly accurate knowledge of the author. The poetical method was the only one left for progress, or the combination of the instrumental work with a general texture of poetical ideas, and thus complete mastery of the programme was achieved. We see in Beethoven how one with perfect knowledge seizes upon the fresh material of the intellectual life about him. It is (as Liszt’s favorite scholar, Hans Von Buelow expresses it,) the lamentation of the eagle whose flight is checked by the ardor of the sunbeams, the mournful roar of the lion whom the impenetrable darkness has overtaken. A newer, grander horizon looms up—a spiritual world full of poetry.

“Liszt grasped this manifold material with the strength of his imagination, and introduced[116] it in the world of music. Having gradually arrived at complete maturity he gave his attention to a great variety of themes and taking them from the outer world he adapted them to the inner. With Germans that feeling is uppermost and it arouses the activity of the fancy. Reversing the process, the fancy seizes the object and arouses activity of feeling. There are spirit-tones, corresponding to the emotions of the soul, which form the substance of the early music. One has the feeling that here humanity approaches the highest questions, reflectively, not merely feeling them intuitively. It is consequently a new form above the bounds of music and musical knowledge, a spiritual form, yet coupled with a corresponding artistic natural skill, a form of higher intelligence and grander structure as time advanced and the relations of life were increased, for the most of the earlier musicians only foreshadowed it. We recognize, at a glance, the individuality of Liszt, and the requirements demanded by our times as well as the absence of that continual obtruding exclusiveness, that obstinate conservatism of the earlier times of[117] music. At the very foundation of this lies a strong and solid individuality. Only the branches and twigs come in contact with the outer world, thus leaving space for development and drawing nourishment from it, while the trunk defies every storm. A brilliant, sentient basis, a grand and powerful array of passion, a depth of expression and spiritual value, a great, broad horizon, are the results.

“In the single works we do not find the variety of tone, the exuberance of emotion, nor the multitude of situations to be found in the works of the earlier masters, but when we consider them as a whole, their immense richness is disclosed. A great multitude of new ideas appear as revealed in the music, taking the place of what had been already settled and what was lost and gone. There was a joyous astonishment when this new world arose and when one realized its richness and diversity. There are the ‘Preludes,’ with their naivete and simple but strong texture. With what sad and tender, yet grand emotions the poet appears in ‘Tasso!’ A poetical glory illuminates ‘Orpheus.’ Antique austerity, boldness and ruggedness are the predominating[118] peculiarities of ‘Prometheus.’ An enticing fascination carries us to the height of the ideal in the ‘Berg Symphony.’ Brilliancy, festal revelry, chivalrous elegance and knightliness are the traits which characterize the ‘Festklaenge.’ German tenderness and intensity, German dignity and intellectual power confront us in ‘Faust.’ The Adagio, called ‘Gretchen,’ fills our very souls with the sad ecstatic words of Faust: ‘Can it be that woman is so fair?’ A mystical meaning lies hidden in ‘Dante,’ fantastic weirdness in the ‘Hungaria,’ the sublimity of sorrow in the ‘Héroide funébre.’ Every work is a unit in itself, and as different works represent different moods, they can be worked out with greater sharpness and precision.”

Thus originated that richness of inward variety, that full scale of human possibilities manifested in the complete development and mastery of situations, which we call Liszt’s “Symphonic Poems.”

In closing, we may say, to quote from “The Meistersaenger”: “The witnesses, I think, were well selected. Is your Hans Sachs on that account disturbed?” The best literary[119] test of the matter is contained in Richard Wagner’s “Letters on Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems,” which appeared in 1857. Liszt himself demonstrated his clear understanding of the far-reaching progress he had made for his art in his analysis of Beethoven’s “Egmont” music, in 1854.

“In ‘Egmont’ we recognize one of the first illustrations of the modern period. A great musician derives his inspiration directly from the works of a great poet,” says he. “At this time Beethoven appears to us as bold and rich in meaning as he was uncertain and wavering in his first attempts. When he composed these fragments he began to open up a new path for art. With mighty hand he felled the first tree in this hitherto unknown forest. Even while he cleared away the first obstacles and laid his hand to his work he entered upon the path himself. The world regarded this first step without particular attention, but the time came when art advanced upon this path and found it illuminated and laid out by him.”

Liszt describes himself when he thus characterizes the present epoch of music: “Going[120] back to antiquity and searching for material scarcely anywhere do we fail to find a period of poetical life. Imagery and color characterize the tone-work of the people of the Orient as well as of the Occident. A full flooded magnetic stream unites poetry and music, those two forms of human thought and feeling.” He above all others has in reality done for music what was prophesied by Joseph Haydn, the father of the symphony, who was the first to invest it with a distinctively poetical character. At the close of his days he declared that what was yet to happen in music would be far greater than what had happened in it.

“Is that then a life object?” was the reply of a Prussian school-director on one occasion, when in answer to his question why Liszt had specially taken orders, he was informed that in pursuance of his life-mission it was indispensable for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope and Sistine chapel, in order to accomplish the reform of Catholic church music. If we were also to make the reply to that question, “Yes, perchance at this very time especially more important than the elevation[122] of education,” which would certainly turn the school-man round and make him step aside, we should not encroach upon the domain of politics, but strikingly characterize with this one remark the sad indifference and ignorance of the entire, and for the time the predominating multitude of our educated people, who make and dominate our culture.

How can one, himself outside of the confession, after a little reflection, have any doubt that the only ties which bind and unite the immense mass of the people, besides the desperate occasions of overwhelming necessity, are the ideal conceptions which religion offers in a very crude and yet powerful and forcible shape? On that account the church remains, let her be what she may, so long as this is true, the only source for the great multitude of men which approaches them with such conceptions, and, while it elevates them above themselves and the ordinary necessities, makes them believe in a human community and in mutual duties. Where again is the substitute for such an indispensable institution, so long as we have no other, which in a common union unites the masses upon a sure foundation, and[123] without which cement they would be dashed to atoms. Even granting that state and culture have reached high attainments, no one but a short-sighted person will say that they have reached their utmost possibilities. It was this very feeling which, following upon the mental intoxication of former centuries, and the fearful ones that came after with their outbreaking revolutions and wars, made all the stronger minds and more earnest spirits turn to the existing assurance which we possess in ideal things as permanent realities—Religion and the Church. “Religion is the true cement of the social edifice. The more numerous the stones and details, the stronger should be the cement that unites them,” writes George Sand, in 1830, in the “Lettres d’un Voyageur.” That the assaults of the Catholic church upon the State are as discreditable as the insolent self-elevation of Protestant orthodoxy over all intellectual work and culture, goes without saying. Now, as ever, the church, still more the service, in both confessions, is the sure foundation for all really educated people. Its loftiest purpose can only be to improve the mind religiously and thus[124] secure for it a higher effectiveness. State and church must be regarded from the same point of view as Alberich and Mime, who struggled for the ring upon which depended the heritage and power of the world, while Siegfried possessed it. And as it is rightly claimed on behalf of the Protestant church that its purpose is to give to worship such a form and value that it shall unite and satisfy, in itself, the noblest aspirations and the essentially ideal wants of all mankind, so the Catholic church, as far as a stranger may judge, fails not by earnest consideration and inward endeavor, far removed from the clamor of the day and the warring of dominating factions and parties in the church, to restore again its world-conquering, because world-redeeming power, in that it seeks to give that spirit to its worship in which is the real safety of our time. And as it is not a matter of chance that art has been awakened by this characteristic spirit of the later times, to which it has given a new language, to give a fitting expression to the fullness and depth of feeling, like the infinity of the spirit which springs from the spirit itself, as it is not a matter of chance that[125] music is pre-eminently the daughter of the church and of its service, so from the oldest to the most recent times, this daughter, who meanwhile has become so unspeakably affluent and above all so independent, has been loudly called upon to establish herself in the church and its service in all the perfection and richness of her nature.

If the great difficulty with the Protestant service lies in the fact that it does not easily assimilate music, and, so to speak, make it a part of divine worship, so that its employment makes religious service partake of the nature of a sacred concert, thereby destroying religion itself, if in this case also, peculiar but in no way insuperable difficulties stand in the way of such a result, on the other hand in the Catholic service, music is an indispensable part of it and in the real sense its central part, for transubstantiation, besides the elevation of the Host, which is only a symbol, is felt as a deep inward reality in the music, which at that instant is poured forth at the true Mass even in the most insignificant church like a sacred flood, deeply refreshing the hearts which turn to it. We may say that but for this[126] recalling of the wandering heart to the harmony of the Eternal and the All, but for this return of the individual to the everlasting foundations of being, as they are revealed in transubstantiation, we should not securely hold that art which in its very essence reveals the fixity of the world, outwardly as well as inwardly. It should also be said that the Catholic service, that is, its highest attainment, the Mass, without its daughter, Music, which in an actual sense is in turn its mother, or can at any time become so, could not reach its ultimate possibilities and by its life prolong its own.

There has been endless complaint that with the progress of its dominion, which has immeasurably enhanced the outward pomp of the church, and which has not scorned to make use of the dramatic for its purposes, the music of its worship has become superficial and theatrical. There is also a Jesuitic style in the music, and he who perfects his artistic taste by the ever true and really classical, will find good proofs in Beethoven’s greater Masses as well as in Mozart’s “Requiem,” that since the seventeenth century the opera has invaded[127] the church, and that the peculiar fineries of the Saints’ statues of that time denominated the fundamental character of its music. This is true of Germany as well as of the Roman countries, and any one who has been to Italy knows to his own satisfaction that the latest operatic melodies can be heard to-day upon the organ, even in sublime St. Peter’s at Rome. From Mozart to Mendelssohn, among musicians there is the same complaint of this impropriety, and since Goethe, almost every writer on Italy has spoken of this matter, which is a disgrace to the church and a calamity to the religious elevation of the poor.

Under these circumstances, how could a nature like that of Liszt’s hesitate? As we have seen over and over again, the modern way of regarding things had become, in fact, his second nature, an irresistible and yet spontaneous motive power in all his thoughts and actions. We have an additional test of this artist, which brings us to the very source of his life, even to the very basis of life itself. We have the facts for our information, and need not contemplate the phenomenon of Liszt as a reformer of art in his church in any[128] sense as a wonder or a mere accident. It rests upon the very foundation of his life and it works accordingly.

“From youth up, Franz’s spirit was naturally inclined to devotion, and his passionate feeling for art was blended with a piety which was characterized by all the frankness of his age,” reads an entry in the diary of his father, who died when the son was in his sixteenth year. In 1857, Liszt himself speaks of the poor little church in his Hungarian home, “in which, as a child, I had prayed with such ardent devotion.” Even in his youth he thought that he was called to the church, and it was only the earnest wish, at first, of his father, and afterwards of his mother, an extremely kind-hearted Upper-Austrian, that kept him in the path of art and its practice. The biographical sketch in the “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” of 1834, to which we are indebted for the first reliable accounts of Liszt, significantly says, however: “His piety was rational and imparted a certain freedom to his ideas and their execution. It did not exhibit the stiffness, roughness, dogmatism or brutality of the canting devotee. It was sincere and[129] was the outcome of liberal reason from the Catholic standpoint.” Heine says in one of his Paris letters, 1830, that he has a great talent for speculation, and he dwells upon his “boundless thirst for light and the deity, which bear evidence to the holiness and religion in his nature.”

Enough has already been said to make further reference unnecessary, but the biographical sketch goes on to state that he had undertaken to compose religious music, and says in that connection: “The so-called music of our time did not seem to him to correspond to a manly conception of it, and thus the idea was forced upon him to create religious music.” “We talk of the reformation of church music,” Liszt writes in 1834. “Although this expression ordinarily implies only music like that performed during the ceremonies of divine service, I use it here in its most significant meaning. When the service expressed and satisfied the confessions, the necessities and the sympathies of the people, when men and women found an altar in the church where they could bow the knee, a pulpit where they could draw near to the[130] divine, and it was a sight which refreshed their minds and uplifted their hearts in holy rapture, then church music only needed to retire to its own mysterious sphere and content itself with serving as an accompaniment to the splendor of the Catholic liturgy. In these days, when the altar shakes and totters; in these days, when the pulpit and religious ceremonies serve for the sport of the mocker and doubter, art must leave the inner temple and spreading out through the world seek a place to exhibit its magnificent accomplishments. As in former time—nay, even more than it did then—music must recognize the people and God as the sources of its life. It must speed from one to the other, ennobling, consoling and purifying man, blessing and glorifying God.”

Thus music was to him a service completely divine. More than one witness of that day testifies to the strong impression which the religious agitation of the time of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and the Abbe Lamennais made upon him, which had been already foreshadowed in his own fantasie, the “Berg symphony,” as well as the “Consolation.” In[131] the same year, 1834, appeared the “Pensée des Morts” a fragment of the “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for piano, which he prefaced with some words of Lamartine’s. It also seems to be one of his first attempts to intimately associate poetry and music. This preface reads: “There are contemplative souls which in their solitary meditations are irresistibly elevated by the infinite ideas of religion. All their thoughts are turned to inspiration and prayer, all their being is a silent hymn to the divinity and the divine hope. In themselves and in the surrounding creation they seek the steps that ascend to God, the images and symbols with which to elevate themselves, with which to raise themselves to Him. O, that I could offer such to them! There are hearts broken by sorrow, crushed by the world, who fly to the world of their thoughts and to the solitude of their own souls to weep, to watch and to pray; O, that they might search for a muse as solitary as themselves, find sympathy in her tones, and listening, many a time declare: ‘We pray in thy language, we weep with thy tears, we are uplifted by thy songs.’”

[132]As soon as Liszt, after his long, long wanderings, was in the right mood to actually compose—for the French account rightly calls Liszt’s work “no mechanical exercise but composition in the real sense, the actual artistic creation”—when he had so arranged these creations of his nature, for such we must call these reproductions, as to make sure of artistic results, from the thoughts of his early years, in reality out of a time almost a generation remote from us, sprang the larger part of his religious and church compositions, which we now possess.

The “lofty festival greetings” of the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the Fest Mass for the consecration of the Graner Cathedral (Graner Mass) which preceded that work of 1856, moving along with stately splendor, prove that it was not a mere reflection of the outward show but that it reached the very spirit of the occasion. Still grander was it, so to speak, to offer the daily bread when, alas, so often a stone had been tendered to the hungering multitude. The little Missa Choralis (Choral Mass) is enough to show that he had attained to the desire of his youth and that a truly[133] religious music had been achieved for the church service of our time. It was practically performed for the first time in Vienna, in 1877, by the Cecilia Verein, at the court church. There is nothing of the conventional mass form of the last century in it, and although the arrangement for male voices is in the style of Palestrina, it does not at all remind one of him. It is original, new and modern throughout; in other words, it is in consonance with our own actual feelings. It must have deeply impressed the soul of the layman that this art not merely embellished and animated the service but that he freshly elevated its living spirit, just as Palestrina preserved and handed down to us the lofty religious spirit of the old church.

Liszt was not satisfied with this. He desired his work to be of a practical nature so that the music of the church should be purified, renovated and improved. He resolved to leave Weimar at once, and in 1861 left for Rome. It was necessary for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope, in order to accomplish what he wished. In accordance with ancient usage such an one must separate himself[134] from the world by taking the first orders. Palestrina was the last Capellmeister at the Sistine who was not in orders. He was married and it was only the impossibility of filling his place that kept him in his position. Thus Liszt, who had always felt like a priest in his art, took orders and is to-day an Abbe.

And why did he not remain in Rome? “I was thwarted by the lack of culture among the cardinals,” he says, speaking in a musical sense, and besides most of the princes of the church are Italian. He felt it was only in Germany that the heart of music could be regenerated. So he came back to us in the North and devoted himself immediately to the encouragement of schools of a better and more original style of church music, such as those established in Regensburg, and Eichstaett and to the Scuola Gregoriana in Rome, in 1881. May they accomplish their purpose though it takes generations. They supply anew that elementary sustenance of the spirit which nothing else can, and which grows more pressing from decade to decade. We recognize anew that here as in every instance of creative[135] activity the man and the artist are one. Securely settled and grounded inwardly he can outwardly rule like a king and as lavishly bestow.

“Christus, Oratorio, with texts from the Holy Scriptures and the Catholic Liturgy,” is the title of Liszt’s greatest church work, finished in 1866.

“Oratorio” is derived from the oratory, or prayer-apartment, in which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries upon sacred occasions in Rome and at the “Azione Sagra” elsewhere, sacred plays were performed, partly recited in costume in the so-called Collect style, and partly sung. With the contemporary appearance of the opera, the oratorio,[137] through the influence of the Italian cantata, gradually assumed its very form, and was only distinguished from it that it was not acted but was merely sung, and had a well sustained harmony throughout. Thus with a change of the recitative, aria, duets, terzets and chorus, Handel’s oratorios as well as Haydn’s “Creation” are given to us. Mendelssohn also does not essentially differ from them, but he has added to it the chorale from the ordinary Protestant church music, while his recitative in its increased proportion is operatic in style. From the scenic point of view Liszt’s “Holy Elisabeth,” brought out in 1864, is very similar, but even in this the “only one” has a high purpose and reveals the loftiest mission. In these respects Liszt has treated the “Christus” in a style different from all the other masters. He has not even adopted the basis of the oratorio, or the arrangement of the materials in a definite order dependent on the narrative and made conspicuous in its salient points by the power of the music. On the contrary, the oratorio gives no trace of its origin or its affiliation with the opera but is simply a revelation of the sacred events. It[138] is not for that reason a mere narrative, but like Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” it describes events by the grand colossal imagery such as music can display when allied to religion. Not only is the recitative completely detached, and the little that is told in narrative form restored to the Collect, which the Catholic church employed for its old liturgy, but the aria as such is confined to a single instance that could not be avoided, the lament of Christ in Gethsemane. Wherever, indeed, solo or ensemble appear, there is no trace of the personal nature of the dramatic. It is a calm self-manifestation of the subject itself.

In its entirety it consists of a series of choral scenes which connect and embody the details of the subject. A grand colossal world-history is revealed to us. At the outset the composer turned to Friedrich Rueckert’s “Evangelic Harmony” and selected therefrom detached and lofty numbers like the “Seeligpreisungen” and “Vater Unser,” which appeared in 1850, and upon this groundwork, he grouped together with an accurate perception of details that must ever serve as an artistic model, the salient features of the life of religion[139] and the workings of the church, according to the Vulgate and the Catholic liturgy.

In the ordinary sense also “Christus” is not an oratorio. The composer indeed retained the name because it truly denominates a general style of music. But it goes further than this. It is a very powerful and clearly realistic expression of the actual spirit of the subject in contradistinction to the operatic style. It is, in fact, a pure epic poem, which an oratorio must be as distinguished from dramatic music, besides being a calm and thoughtful principal features. We behold a great world-moving event arising and passing before us. The particular acts and salient phases come and go, like the heroes of the epic, in quiet, simple grandeur. All the gloss of action is avoided. We recognize that in this work we have an artistic invention and a model which directs the world of music into a new course. This we may observe in the arrangement of the subject.

The series is laid out, not only in three distinct divisions, but also in separate numbers. There is deep and bold thoughtfulness in the[140] church portions, which breaks with all traditions, and builds up the subject in an original style. We believe, therefore, that the general character of the work, as may be gathered from its array of texts, indicates the abiding in an invisible church, which, by the pure agencies of an art which it created itself for the expression of its deepest mysteries, has acquired a beauty of imagery revealing the holy faith it serves in all its purity and unity. At the very outset we realize that we have to do with an artist who is thoroughly at home in the faith in which he was brought up, who regards it with clear perception, who lays his foundations and builds thereon with a steady hand. This, in and by itself, is a new treatment of the subject. In this respect the master inwardly sympathizes with the spirit of the church, as Sebastian Bach did with his. The difference does not consist so much in the creative powers of the artists as in the peculiar character of the subjects. Let us now attempt to describe more closely some of the details of the scenes.

The work is divided into three principal sections: I. The Christmas oratorio. II. After[141] Epiphany. III. The Passion and Resurrection. The nature of the work is declared in the motto, Paul’s words to the Ephesians: “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.” The instrumental introduction built upon the theme, “Resound ye heavens above,” many times repeated and closely bound together in musical unity, as its strong esthetic character frees the mind from the manifold distractions of the world and by a deeply impressive harmony prepares it for entrance into a new and loftier sphere, which is revealed at the close by the soaring tremolos of the violins, leads directly to a longer “Pastoral,” which, the old theme disappearing, introduces the announcement of the angels to the shepherds. At the commencement this is the simple Collect music, replied to by the chorus, at first accompanied by the string quartette and then by the full orchestra. The chorus of the heavenly hosts shouts the “Gloria in Excelsis” with majestic breadth and in mighty accords, until at the close the life of the simple shepherds is again pictured, to whom for the first time the announcement[142] of the long expected salvation has come. The third scene is the old hymn, “Stabat Mater speciosa,” the Holy Virgin at the cradle of her Son, lento misterioso, a six part a capella chorus, supported by the organ in simple accords, and varied here and there by five or six voices in solo. Poetically it is an almost ecstatic rapture of devotion, such as the rude and violent Middle Ages developed. It is the mystery of the mother-love, which gives us the first clue to the living self-devotion of all time, and in which the world-forming power of all human actions was first foreshadowed. As childlike simplicity and purity of heart characterize the shepherd scenes, so innocence and fervent feeling are the predominating traits of this. The full expression of this feeling reaches its height in the “Inflammatus.” The scene closes with a deeply inspired and loftily-soaring “Amen.” The fourth and fifth scenes are purely instrumental in character. The “Pastoral Scene at the Manger,” in which the Italian oboes are used with fine effect, and the march of “The three holy Kings,” significant of the worldly splendor of the church, impress themselves[143] upon the senses by their mere sound and rhythm, so that the music itself appeals to deeply seated longings. Both scenes are the al fresco style of modern orchestral music and are very broadly treated.

The second part is introduced with the “Seligkeit,” expressing the return of the world to its general ethical consciousness, a baritone song in melodious declamatory style, continuously answered by a six part chorus, as if the acceptance of such a truth by the world should become a fact. The groundwork here is the objective organ sound nor is the congregation itself overlooked. The “Paternoster” is characterized by a quiet, fervent utterance of prayer between the precentors and the congregation to which the peculiarly majestic closing “Amen” forms a pedestal of granite. Repose and dignity are the features of both these phases of the fundamental tone. The music is not specially considered, but one may imagine the images of the saints standing there and with clear utterance declaring the truth which helps all.

Very powerful in character is the “Founding[144] of the Church,” noble in its import, “Tu es Petrus,” and of tender softness the “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?” The perishable, sinful world in its every form is here contrasted with an undoubting faith in an everlastingly constant higher ideal, to give it this name. That it is the spirit of the subject, not its mere perishable husk, is shown by the nature of the melody which rises to the most powerful expression of the final victory of this spirit of love. Now again the full orchestra joins the double choir, for the world, the whole world is meant. The ninth scene is a marvel. “The storms rage in contention”—not the storms of the sea, but the storm of desires to which the weak of faith are exposed. It is not the outward marvel or superstition, that is to be strengthened, but the faith of human nature in itself and its higher power and destiny. Hence the actual inner tranquillity, when after the raging orchestral tumult, “a great stillness” succeeds Christ’s words, which is ingeniously introduced with the motif of the “Seligkeit,” because such inner purity alone bestows upon mankind effective power over the savage forces of the world.

[145]The “Entrance into Jerusalem” is a graphic picture of animated human life, a prelude to the entrance of religious truth into the great wide world painted perceptively as Paul Veronese paints. In the “Benedictus” for mezzo-soprano there is an expression of inward contentment and happiness such as only the individual heart feels and utters. This chorus is very similar to the finale of the first part but it carries the glory and power of religion yet further into the realms of the ideal.

The third part has four scenes. In it we reach the powerful climax of the whole. The spiritual events of the world’s history and the sorrowful struggles of passion, which have given another aspect to humanity, pass before our eyes. It is manifest here, as it is with Sebastian Bach, that only these powerful choral scenes can give the complete and exhaustive sense and the intrinsic importance of the subject in the music in which this art is enabled to disclose alike its cosmic as well as its spiritual being. The first of the scenes is the walk to Gethsemane, where the most sorrowful of necessities grows into open resolution, and it is only in consonance with this condition of[146] the soul that here and here alone solo singing proves effective. This solo represents to us the all-grasping, superhuman resolution of mankind. Its sympathy with this soul-suffering is shown in the orchestral accompaniment. The Spaniard, Ribera, painted in these deep, dark colors. The “Quod Tu” breathes in its deep content all the blessing which this highest of all human sacrifices the world has ever seen, can confer.

A truly sublime reality is it then that the history of sorrow is reflected in us as in a mirror. It is the deeply impressive Middle Age sequence, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa,” which here relates the unprecedented events afresh with its self-created old melody. The skill to construct upon the basis of the countless inner moods and aspects, and out of them a four-lined, rhythmical choral melody, and architectonic work of such strength and fullness can not be found in any single church work of our time. It has the dimensions of the “Last Judgment” in the Sistine. It is not like Bach’s gigantic chorales, Gothic-polyphonic in character, but it is written in pure harmonic-melodic style and in its thematic treatment,[147] like the style of the Renaissance art, only freely develops the motif of the subject in the text, and is built up symmetrically to an astonishing climax, reminding one of the colors and striking characteristics of Rubens.

This number alone would doubtless establish the permanence of the work. It proves that the value of church composition is not confined to either church style, that of Palestrina or Bach, but that the most modern and progressive of the arts is enabled to clearly express whatever is required of it, and that the increased methods of expression of our day can furnish even yet entirely new means of expressing a subject. As a conspicuous instance of this, the twice recurring “Inflammatus,” with chorus, solo, quartette, orchestra and organ is well nigh overpowering in its simple grandeur and impressive strength, and all the more so as it only turns upon the tones of the principal motif of the piece.

In this most solemn of the world tragedies, the blissful old Easter Song, “O Filii et Filiae,” sung by boys with harmonium, sounds pathetic. At the close of the “Stabat Mater,” a succession of expanding chords had already[148] announced the salvation of the world, almost unheard, as if from distant worlds, but here it sounds forth as if the blessing were actually gained by the ransomed human heart. That children possess it is a double proof of its certainty. Like a sunbeam in a church this chorus penetrates the gloom of the Passion.

The last scene consecrates the surety of this possession and expresses with firm and massive power the final victory of christianity, whereupon a short “Amen” upon the original connecting motif, “Rorati Coeli,” closes the series. It is a cycle of scenes such as only the victorious mastery of the subject by inward perception can give, and such as only the artist can draw who dominates all the conditions of art like a king and has directed his soul to the absolute truth and power of the Eternal.

On the 30th of April, 1837, Liszt writes to George Sand:

“Happy, a hundred times happy, the wanderer! Happy he who does not have to traverse the beaten paths and to walk in the old tracks! Restlessly rushing on, he sees things only as they seem, and men only as they show themselves. Happy he who gives up the warm, friendly hand before its pressure grows icily chill; who does not[150] wait for the day on which the affectionate glances of the loved one change to blank indifference! In fine, happy he who breaks with relations before he is broken by them! Of the artist it is specially true that he only pitches his tent for the hour and never settles down in any permanent place.”

Thus declares the youthful storming Apollo and many a Marsyas he flayed on these journeys of investigation, personal as well as social, over all Europe; on many a Midas grew asses’ ears in sight of the world. Read the “Letters of Travel of a Baccalaureate in Music.” There is nothing more spiritedly humorous, more serene in its earnestness.

Scarce ten years later, what was the experience of Richard Wagner, to whom a second supplementing genius was even more indispensable than the tenor Nourrit to Rossini, with “the masterwork which sprang from the brain of the Olympian god,” and still appeals to the multitude to combine art with art, the spirit with spirit, light with light?

During his abode as an exile in Weimar, in May, 1849, he writes: “Wonderful! through the love of this rarest of all friends, I gained[151] at a time when I was homeless, the real home for my art, long looked for, always sought in the wrong places and never found. At the close of my exile, my wandering about led me to a little place which was to make a home for me.” This he did for him and for many another musician, after his change in 1842, for he knew that the artist’s only home is his art.

“Is he not always a stranger among men,” he continues, in his letter to George Sand. “Whatever he may do, wherever he may go, he always feels himself an exile. To him it is as if he had known a purer heaven, a warmer sun, a better existence. What can he do to escape this boundless sorrow, this unvoiced pain? Singing, must the artist rush through the world and in hurrying by scatter his thoughts without inquiring on what soil they fall, whether calumnies stab them, whether laurels mockingly cover them. Sorrowful and great is the destiny of the artist. A sacred predestination affixes its seal upon him at birth. He does not elect his calling but his calling elects him and incessantly urges him forward. However unpropitious his relations,[152] the hostility of family and the world and the pressure of his mournful wretchedness may be, however insuperable the obstacles may seem, his will stands firm and remains unalterably turned to the pole. This pole to him is his art; it is his devotion to the mysterious and the divine in man and nature.

“The artist stands alone. The circumstances of his life force him into society, and so his soul creates in the midst of inharmonious influences an impenetrable solitude in which no voice of man is heard. All the passions which agitate men—vanity, ambition, envy, jealousy, even love itself, are outside the magic circle which incloses his inner world. Withdrawing into this, as into a sanctuary, he contemplates and worships that ideal which it is the object of his life to realize. Here appear to him divine and incomprehensible forms, and colors such as his eyes never beheld on the most beautiful flowers in the brightness of spring. Here he listens to the harmony of the eternal, whose cadence rules the worlds, and in which all the voices of creation join in a marvelous celestial concert. Then an ardent fever seizes him. His[153] blood flows more quickly. A thousand consuming thoughts revolve in his brain from which only the sacred labor of art can release it. He feels as if he were the victim of an unutterable disease. An unknown power urges him to reveal by words, colors or tones, the ideal which dwells in him and fills him with a thirst of desire, with a torment for possession, such as no man has ever experienced for an object of actual passion. But when his work is ended and the whole world applauds, he is not wholly satisfied. In his discontent he would perhaps destroy it, did not some new phenomenon avert his glance from his creations, to throw him anew into those heavenly, painful ecstacies which make his life a constant struggle toward an unattainable goal, a continual effort of all the powers of the spirit to raise itself to the realization of that which he has conceived in those favored hours when the eternal beauty disclosed itself without a cloud.”

Again he describes, with more gloomy tints, the social reception of the artist to-day, in our enlightened century, and the necessity which has been laid upon him, the mighty[154] and high-throned one, at all times, and now more than ever, to associate with the meanest existence, provided it truly longs for the marvels of art, to lavish upon them the water of life.

“The artist dwells these days outside of the social community,” he writes, “for the poetical element, especially the religious agitation of humanity, has disappeared from our modern public. What have they who attempt to solve the problem of human happiness by granting a few privileges, by an unlimited expansion of industry and of egoistic well being—what have they to do with a poet or an artist? Why should they trouble themselves with those who wander about, of no use to the State-machinery of the world, to kindle sacred flames, noble feelings and lofty inspirations, that by their achievements they may satisfy the restless longing for the beautiful and the great which rests more or less securely in the depths of every soul? Such beautiful times are no more as when the blooming verdure of art spread itself and exhaled its perfume over all Greece. Every citizen was then an artist,[155] for law-givers, warriors, philosophers, all were imbued with the idea of moral, spiritual and physical beauty. The majestic astonished no one, and great achievements were as common as those creations which at the same time exhibited and prompted them.

“The strong and mighty art of the Middle Ages which built cathedrals and summoned the enraptured people to them with peal of bells and the sound of the organ, became extinct when faith was animated anew. There is to-day the inward interest which unites art and society, but that which brought power and glory to those other deep agitations, is destroyed. The social art has gone and has not yet returned. Whom do we principally meet in these days? Sculptors? No, the manufacturers of statues. Painters? No, the manufacturers of pictures. Musicians? No, the manufacturers of music. Everywhere artisans, nowhere artists. Hence, there can only be cruel pain to one who was born with the pride and the wild freedom of a genuine child of art. He is surrounded by a swarm of mechanical workers who obsequiously devote their services to the caprices of the populace[156] and the fancies of the uncultivated wealthy, at whose nod they bow themselves down to the earth, as if they could not get close enough to it. The artist must accept them as his brothers and as the multitude confounds them together, must see himself and them rated at the same value and regarded with the same childish, stupid astonishment. It can not be said that these are the complaints of vanity and self-conceit. No, no—they who stand so high that no rivalry can reach them, they know this. The bitter tears which our eyes have shed belong to the worship of the true god, whose temple is defiled with idols for whose sake the silly people have forsaken the worship of the living god and bowed the knee before these degrading divinities of stone.”

Thus speaks this proud and truly noble soul whose best efforts and talents have been sacrificed to the silliness of idle caprice and to the obstinate humors of shallow minds. He knows that the only remedy is the old Grecian one, the personal contemplation of noble forms, of true skill.

“It is a fact that thorough musical culture is[157] confined to a very few,” he says. “The majority are ignorant of the first rudiments of art and in the upper circles nothing is rarer than an earnest study of our masters. They are content with hearing a few good works from time to time, and without choice, amongst a mass of miserable stuff which spoils the taste and accustoms the ear to wretched poverty. In contrast with the poet who speaks all languages and besides only devotes himself to mankind, and whose mind has been cultivated by classical study, the musician reveals himself in a mysterious language, the comprehension of which, if it does not presuppose particular study, shows at least a long accustomed familiarity with it. Besides that, in contrast with the painter and sculptor, he has the disadvantage that they are devoted more to the expression of form, which is more universal than the inward conception of nature and the feeling for the infinite which are the essence of music.”

How firmly also his knowledge was founded upon personal experience is shown by the fact that like photography now-a-days, which represents all and every phase of the treasures of[158] the plastic arts, so the piano for him could “gather the harvest, make use of the garnered treasures, and invest with life again those which conduce to ideas of happiness.”

In his twenty-fifth year, he writes to Adolf Pictet, asking why he was surprised that he devoted himself exclusively to the piano. He hardly realized that he had touched upon the most sensitive point of his very existence. “You do not know,” he says, “that if I should give up my piano, which speaks so much, it would be to me a day of gloom, robbing me of the light which illuminated all my early life and has grown to be inseparable from it. For, look you, my piano is to me what his vessel is to the seaman, his horse is to the Arab—nay, even more, till now it has been myself, my speech, my life. It is the repository of all that stirred my nature in the passionate days of my youth. I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys and sorrows. Its strings vibrated with my emotions and its flexible keys have obeyed my every caprice. Would you have me abandon it and strive for the more brilliant and sounding triumphs of the theater or orchestra? O, no! Even[159] admitting that I were competent for music of that kind, even then my resolution would be firm not to abandon the study and development of piano-playing, until I had accomplished whatever is practicable, whatever it is possible to attain now-a-days.”

In this he discloses those deep aspirations which now have a more lively interest and higher significance for us, since we know that they have not disappointed him.

“Perhaps the mysterious influence which binds me to it so strongly, prejudices me,” he writes, “but I consider the piano as of great consequence. In my estimation it holds the first place in the hierarchy of instruments. It is the most enjoyable and the most common of all. Its importance and popularity are due to the harmonious power which it almost exclusively possesses, in consequence of which it is also capable of compressing the whole art of music in itself. In the compass of its seven octaves it includes the entire scope of the orchestra and the ten fingers suffice for the harmony which is produced by a band of a hundred performers. By its agency it is possible to diffuse works which, owing to the difficulty[160] of collecting an orchestra, would remain unknown to the great majority. Consequently it is to the orchestral composition what the steel engraving is to painting, which it repeats over and over, and though it lacks color yet it can exhibit light and shade.”

In order to reach the goal of an art which has been rightly designated as the idea of the world and the soul of humanity, and to behold it spreading over our age and extending to posterity, he settled down to rest after his career as a virtuoso, and founded “Weimar.” It must be in that Germany of which he wrote to his friend Berlioz, in 1838, “the study of art is universally less superficial here, the feeling is truer, the usages are better. The traditions of Mozart, Beethoven and Weber are not lost. These three geniuses have taken deep root in Germany.” Without this Weimar we should certainly have had no artistic execution to-day which would be worthy of the modern or classic productions. Indeed Munich and Baireuth themselves, how could they have been possible without the master-scholars who by Liszt’s piano instruction displayed in every form the expressive, soaring,[161] flaming revelation of minute details as well as of the whole.

In bringing to a close the review of Liszt’s moral and artistic influence, alike fruitful and far-reaching, we give first of all an animated descriptive sketch by a pupil of this Weimar school and then the list of master-scholars, whom Liszt has educated, and who have continuously assisted in the realization of his ideal wishes and hopes.

“Music Study in Germany,” says the “Allgemeine Deutsche Musikzeitung,” of 1881, “is the name of a very comprehensive, elegant and spiritedly written little American book. It is in the form of letters which the American author, Miss Amy Fay, sent from Germany to her home, during her studies with Tausig, Kullak and Deppe. She manifests not only great musical and artistic intelligence in general, but also an unusual knowledge of human nature. Miss Fay has a feeling for the finest emotions of the soul. With genuine stereoscopic fidelity she points out the grand characteristics and the little peculiarities of the important personages with whom she has had the good fortune to come in contact. Of[162] the many beauties and charms contained in these letters, those which relate to Liszt must naturally awaken the greatest, most universal and lasting interest. We select from them a few brief extracts, because we know that the feelings of reverence, love and intense admiration, which the author cherishes for Liszt, are shared to the full by thousands and thousands of hearts.”

Miss Fay saw the master first at the theater in Weimar, with three ladies, one of whom was very handsome. “He sat,” so she says, “with his back to the stage, not paying the least attention, apparently, to the play, for he kept talking all the while himself, and yet no point of it escaped him, as I could tell by his expression and gestures. Liszt is the most interesting and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep set eyes, shaggy eyebrows and iron-gray hair. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives him, when he smiles, a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow, with long and slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as other people’s. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous[163] to look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his hand on his heart and made his final bow, not with affectation or in mere gallantry, but with a quiet courtliness which made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper. It was most characteristic. But the most extraordinary thing about Liszt is his wonderful variety of expression and play of feature. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next, insinuating, amiable, ironical, sarcastic, but always the same captivating grace of manners. He is a perfect study. He is all spirit, but half the time at least, I should say, a mocking spirit. All Weimar adores him, and people say that women still go perfectly crazy over him. When he goes out every one greets him as if he were a king. Liszt looks as if he had been through everything, and has a face seamed with experience. He wears a long Abbe’s coat, reaching nearly down to his feet. He made me think of an old-time magician and I felt with a touch of his wand he could transform us all.”

[164]The recommendations of the Countess von Schleinitz secured the author’s introduction to Liszt. She continues: “To-morrow I shall present myself, though I don’t know how the lion will act when I beard him in his den. I brought the B minor sonata of Chopin and intended to play only the first movement, for it is extremely difficult and it cost me all the labor I could give to prepare that. But playing to Liszt reminds me of trying to feed the elephant in the Zoological Gardens with lumps of sugar. He disposes of whole movements as if they were nothing and stretches out gravely for more. One of my fingers fortunately began to bleed and that gave me a good excuse for stopping. Liszt sat down and played the whole last three movements himself. It was the first time I had heard him and I don’t know which was the most extraordinary, the Scherzo, with its wonderful lightness and swiftness, the Adagio, with its depth and pathos, or the last movement where the whole key-board seemed to thunder and lighten. There is such a vividness about everything he plays that it does not seem as if it were mere music you were listening to, but[165] it is as if he had called up a real living form and you saw it breathing before your face and eyes. It gives me almost a ghostly feeling to hear him, and it seems as if the air were peopled with spirits. Oh! he is a perfect wizard! It is as interesting to see him as it is to hear him, for his face changes with every modulation of the piece and he looks exactly as he is playing. He has one element that is most captivating and that is a sort of delicate and fitful mirth that keeps peering out at you here and there! It is most peculiar, and when he plays that way the most bewitching little expression comes over his face. It seems as if a little spirit of joy were playing hide and go seek with you.

“On Friday Liszt came and paid me a visit and even played a little on my piano. Only think what an honor! At the same time he invited me to a matinee he was going to give on Sunday for some countess of distinction. * * * He played five times, the last three times duets with Capellmeister Lassen, and made me come and turn the leaves. Gracious! how he does read! It is very difficult to turn for him, for he reads ever so far ahead of what[166] he is playing, and takes in fully five bars at a glance, so you have to guess about where you think he would like to have the page over. Once I turned it too late, and once too early, and he snatched it out of my hand and whirled it back. Not quite the situation for timorous me, was it? At home Liszt doesn’t wear his long Abbe’s coat, but a short one in which he looks much more artistic. It is so delicious in that room of his. It was furnished and put in order for him by the Grand Duchess of Weimar herself. The walls are pale gray with gilded border running round the room, or rather two rooms which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains. The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable—such a contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand piano stands in one window. The other window is always wide open and looks out on the park. There is a dove cote just opposite the window, and the doves promenade up and down on the roof of it and fly about and sometimes whirr down on the sill itself. That pleases Liszt. His writing-table is beautifully fitted up with things that[167] all match. Everything is in bronze—ink-stand, paper-weight, match-box, etc., and there is always a lighted candle standing on it by which the gentlemen can light their cigars.

“There is a carpet on the floor, a rarity in Germany, and Liszt generally walks about, and smokes, talks and calls upon one or other of us to play. From time to time he will sit down and play himself where a passage does not suit him and when he is in good spirits he makes little jests all the time. His playing was a complete revelation to me and has given me an entirely new insight into music. You can not conceive, without hearing him, how poetic he is, or the thousand nuances which he can throw into the simplest thing. He is equally great on all sides. From the zephyr to the tempest the whole scale is equally at his command.

“But Liszt is not at all like a master and can not be treated as one. He is a monarch, and when he extends his royal scepter you can sit down and play to him. You never can ask him to play anything for you no matter how much you are dying to hear it. You can not even offer to play yourself. You lay[168] your notes on the table so he can see that you want to play, and sit down. He takes a turn up and down the room, looks at the music, and if the piece interests him, he will call upon you.

“Yesterday I had prepared for him his ‘Au Bord d’une Source.’ I was nervous and played badly. He was not to be put out, however, but acted as if he thought I had played charmingly, and then he sat down and played the whole piece himself, oh, so exquisitely! It made me feel like a wood-chopper. The notes just seemed to ripple off his fingers’ ends with scarce any perceptible motion. As he neared the close I remarked that the funny little expression came over his face which he always has when he means to surprise you, and he suddenly took an unexpected chord and extemporized a poetical little end, quite different from the written one. Do you wonder that people go distracted over him?”

A talented pupil of Henselt’s arrived and played for Liszt with great success. Miss Fay says: “She played with the greatest aplomb, although her touch had a certain roughness about it to my ear. But all playing sounds[169] barren by the side of Liszt, for his is the living, breathing impersonation of poetry, passion, grace, wit, coquetry, daring, tenderness and every other fascinating attribute that you can think of.

“I’m ready to hang myself half the time when I’ve been to him. Oh! he is the most phenomenal being in every respect! All that you’ve heard of him would never give you an idea of him. In short, he represents the whole scale of human emotions. He is a many-sided person and reflects back the light in all colors, no matter how you look at him. His pupils adore him, as in fact every one else does, but it is impossible to do otherwise with a person whose genius flashes out of him all the time so, and whose character is so winning.

“One day this week, when we were with Liszt, he was in such high spirits that it was as if he had suddenly become twenty years younger. A student from the Stuttgart Conservatory, played a Liszt concerto. His name is V. Liszt kept up a little running fire of satire all the time he was playing, but in a good-natured way. Everything that he says[170] is so striking. In one place where V. was playing the melody rather feebly Liszt suddenly took his place at the piano, and said: ‘When I play, I always play for the people in the gallery so that those persons who pay only five groschen for their seats may also hear something.’ Then he began and I wish you could have heard him. The sound didn’t seem very loud, but it was penetrating and far-reaching. When he had finished he raised one hand in the air, and you seemed to see all the people in the gallery drinking in the sound. That is the way Liszt teaches you. He presents an idea to you and it takes fast hold of your mind, and it sticks there. Music is such a real, visible thing to him that he always has a symbol, instantly, in the material world to express his idea.

“How he can bear to hear us play, I can not imagine. I assure you, no matter how beautifully we play any piece, the minute Liszt plays it, you would scarcely recognize it. His touch and his peculiar use of the pedals are the secrets of his playing, and then he seems to dive down into the most hidden thoughts of the composer, and fetch them to[171] the surface, so they gleam out at you, one by one, like stars.

“The more I see and hear Liszt the more I am lost in amazement. I can neither eat nor sleep on those days that I go to him. I often think of what Tausig said once: ‘Oh! compared with Liszt, we other artists are all blockheads!’ I did not believe it at the time, but I’ve seen the truth of it.

“Liszt does such bewitching little things. The other day, for instance, Fraulein Gaul was playing something to him, and in it were two runs, and after each run two staccato chords. She did them most beautifully and struck the chords immediately after.

“‘No, no,’ said Liszt, ‘after you make a run you must wait a minute before you strike the chords as if in admiration of your own performance. You must pause, as if to say, ‘now nicely I did that.’ Then he sat down and made a run himself, waited a second, and then struck the two chords in the treble, saying as he did so, ‘Bra-vo,’ and then he played again, struck the other chord, and said again, ‘Bra-vo,’ and positively, it was as if the piano had softly applauded! That is the way he[172] plays everything. It seems as if the piano were speaking with a human tongue.

“You can not conceive anything like Liszt’s playing of Beethoven. When he plays a sonata it is as if the composition rose from the dead and stood transfigured before you. You ask yourself, ‘did I ever play that?’”

Once Miss Fay asked the master to tell her how he produced a certain effect in one of his great passages. He smiled and then immediately played the whole passage. “‘Oh! I’ve invented a great many things,’ he said, indifferently, ‘this for instance,’ and he began playing a double roll of octaves in chromatics in the bass of the piano. It was very grand and made the room reverberate. ‘Magnificent,’ said I. ‘Did you ever hear me do a storm?’ said he. ‘No.’ ‘Ah! you ought to hear me do a storm, storms are my forte.’ Then to himself between his teeth, while a weird look came into his eyes as if he could indeed rule the blast—‘Then crash the trees.’ How ardently I wished he would play a storm, but he did not. Alas, that we poor mortals here below should share so often the fate of Moses and have only a glimpse of the[173] Promised Land, and that without the consolation of being Moses!

“Liszt sometimes strikes wrong notes when he plays, but it does not trouble him in the least, on the contrary he rather enjoys it when he comes down squarely wrong, as it affords him an opportunity of displaying his genius and giving things such a turn that the false note will appear simply a key leading to new and unexpected beauties. An accident of this kind happened to him in one of the Sunday matinees when the room was full of distinguished people and of his pupils. He was rolling up the piano in arpeggios in a very grand manner indeed, when he struck a semi-tone short of the high note upon which he had intended to end. I caught my breath and wondered whether he was going to leave us like that, in mid air, as it were, and the harmony unresolved or whether he would be reduced to the humiliation of correcting himself like ordinary mortals and taking the right chord. A half smile came over his face, as much as to say, ‘don’t fancy that this little thing disturbs me,’ and he instantly went meandering down the piano in harmony with[174] the false note he had struck, and then rolled deliberately up in a second grand sweep, this time striking true. I never saw a more delicious piece of cleverness. It was so quick-witted and so exactly characteristic of Liszt. Instead of giving you a chance to say ‘He has made a mistake,’ he forces you to say, ‘He has shown how to get out of a mistake.’

“Another day I heard him pass from one piece into another by making the finale of the first one play the part of prelude to the second. So exquisitely were the two woven together that you could hardly tell where the one left off and the other began. Ah, me! such a facile grace! Nobody will ever equal him with those rolling basses and those flowing trebles. And then his Adagios! When you hear him in one of those you feel that his playing has got to that point where it is purified from all earthly dross and is an exhalation of the soul that mounts straight to heaven.”

This little book contains many more beautiful passages but we are reluctantly forced to desist. One charming trait of Liszt is related, however, which we can not pass over in closing. Miss Fay says:

[175]“Gottschal, organist in Weimar, told me that one time when Tausig was ‘hard up’ for money, he sold the score of Liszt’s ‘Faust’ for five thalers, to a servant, along with a great pile of his own notes. Gottschal, hearing of it, went to the man and purchased them. Then he went to Liszt and told him that he had the score. As it happened, the publisher had written for it that very day and Liszt was turning the house upside down, looking for it everywhere. He was in an awful state of mind because his score was nowhere to be found. ‘A whole year’s labor lost,’ he cried, and he was in such a rage that when Gottschal asked him for the third time what he was looking for, he turned and stamped his foot at him and said: ‘You confounded fellow, can’t you leave me in peace and not torment me with your stupid questions?’ Gottschal knew perfectly well what was wanting but he wished to have a little fun out of the matter. At last he took pity on Liszt and said: ‘Herr Doctor, I know what you have lost! It is the score to your Faust.’ ‘O,’ said Liszt, changing his tone immediately, ‘do you know anything of it?’ ‘Of course, I do,’ said Gottschal,[176] and proceeded to unfold Master Tausig’s performance and how he had rescued the precious music. Liszt was transported with joy that it was found and cried out: ‘We are saved, Gottschal has rescued us,’ and then Gottschal said that Liszt embraced him in his transport, and could not say or do enough to make up for his having been so rude to him. Well, you would have supposed that it was now all up with Master Tausig, but not at all. A few days after was Tausig’s birth-day. Madame C. took Gottschal aside and begged him to drop the subject of the note-stealing, for Liszt doted so on his Carl that he wished to forget it. Sure enough, Liszt kissed Carl and congratulated him on his birth-day and consoled himself with his same old observation: ‘You’ll either turn out a great blockhead, my little Carl, or a great master.’”

“O, thou amiable grand master Liszt!”

Thus closes our notice of this genial book. Since the “soulful fantasies” of Bettina about Beethoven, nothing comparable with it from a lady’s hand has appeared.

In closing, we append, with the master’s own approval, as the fac-simile in our own[177] little work shows, a list of his principal scholars. We preface it with a sentiment of the master, which shows how much that remark of Beethoven’s to Bettina about music was to him—“The elevated types of the moral sense also constitute its foundations,” or truth and the will combined. It reads:

“It belongs to the higher mission of art, not only to exhibit and celebrate in song the heroic spirit but to inspire it. Hence the artist should feel it, preserve it and diffuse it like a sacred flame.”

[178]

A LETTER FROM LISZT’S FATHER.

The Harmonicon, an English musical journal, of June, 1824, contains the following interesting letter, addressed to its editor by Liszt’s father:

Accompanying this letter is the following editorial comment:

[183]

LISZT’S ONE OPERA.

A German correspondent of the Harmonicon sent that paper the following account of the performance of Liszt’s Opera, “Don Sancho,” on Oct. 18, 1825, at the Academie Royale de Musique, Paris:

[187]

BIHARY.

A review of Liszt’s “Bohemiens” which appeared in the London Athenæum of 1859 gives the following interesting sketch of Bihary, the gypsy virtuoso:

[189]

THE HUNGARIAN GYPSY MUSIC.

[192]

HEINE ON LISZT.

[194]

A LETTER FROM BERLIOZ TO LISZT.

The following is an extract from a letter written by Berlioz to Liszt in 1843, as it appears in the former’s “Musical Wandering through Germany:”

[196]

HESSE’S CRITICISM OF LISZT.

Hesse, the famous German organist, after hearing Liszt play at Breslau, in 1859, recalls his playing sixteen years previously in the same place. He writes to the Breslauer Zeitung:

[198]

LISZT’S PRINCIPAL SCHOLARS.