Liszt: A Wellspring Overflowing with Artistic Gifts

He lived, died, and was immortalized a martyr of art. He roamed the climes of France, Switzerland, and England, sacrificing and striving in the cause of the creed of his age — that man who lived in Paris, Weimar, Bayreuth, Budapest, and Rome, and who drew from the various tendencies of these artistic climates a special tendency of his own, by which he was marked and which he proclaimed in every one of his musical pieces. For he united the French idea, the German influence, the Latin culture, and the Catholic creed. He was influenced by Goethe's mystical literature and joined the ends of German literature and Latin literature, so that balance shone forth in his creed in its most splendid and beautiful qualities.

"Liszt" lived in an age in which the cultural and artistic morale of the people had been killed, for the class of the nobility alone was adorned with refined taste and penetrating thought. So he began calling for the people to be given their literary and artistic rights, and joining together the various philosophical schools so as to bring them nearer to the understanding of the people, then still in darkness. He first presented the great artists to the people, publishing and interpreting their compositions without any concern for what he himself produced, thinking that if he sought to benefit the people by means of his own art he might come near to selfishness. So he made famous "Schubert" and "Schumann" and "Berlioz" and "Mendelssohn" and "Chopin"; then at the end of his life he took up solving the problem of Russian music, such as the music of "Mussorgsky," and presented the music of "Brahms," from which was drawn the music of "Smetana, Franck" and "Saint-Saëns," in which he came later to be taken as a kind of father of "the musical family." He grew, matured, and was reared upon this principle: everything is permitted in art if the law of beauty is established in it.

In Liszt's music there is loftiness and thought, for in the measure that a man detaches himself, his thought rises in loftiness and his principles ascend — since selfishness touches thought and leads it always toward interest, and interest and art are two elements that do not come near one another.

Liszt's genius came as a completion of the movement of the great French Revolution, and he demanded the rights of humanity, especially in the rhapsody, joining the revolution of thought and the revolution of music. He was the first to introduce into the art of performance those powerful accents that belong to a violent clash in the soul of the performer and of the composer possessed of powers. Yes, he sacrificed his life and his glory for the sake of his contemporaries among the musicians, and no gratitude was kept for him, so he withdrew into himself, portraying for us the hopes of the people and their ambition, and especially the imbalance of their thinking.

He wrote in his memoirs in 1778: "The sane man among people is half mad." And this is what led him to a state of pessimism, interspersed at times with thoughts or scatterings of hope in the renewal of the people's retrograde mentality.

His musical conduct is the conduct of one faithful to his art. He fought for the art of "Wagner" more than "Wagner" himself did, when he could have taken him as a rival; instead he rendered him material and moral services with a strange generosity.

This is Liszt the man, and we have analyzed him before analyzing his musical pieces, because we are usually directed to honoring the production without any sound knowledge of the source of the producer — as though the creed were more complete than its believer. For a man may produce without offering to the people all the vital resources he stores up. It would therefore have been more fitting to devote ourselves to the study of the composers before our study of the music, and this is what led us to analyze Liszt as a man before studying him as a great artistic genius.

Liszt the artist knocked at many doors of instrumental music, among them: the rhapsody, the sonata, and the concerto, and then symphonic music, in which he excelled in the Faust-Symphonie, and then the Préludes. In the "Préludes" he portrayed violent revolutionary ideas which he loosed upon his listeners in a splendid mold of grace, joining sweetness and violence.

As for the "Faust-Symphonie," in it Goethe's idea appeared in the prime of its development. He was the first to go deep into the study of Goethe and to portray his creed in plaintive melodies that delight the ears — Gounod did not follow his path. He portrayed for us human thought in its perpetual contradiction, and how divine glory, and man's rising toward it, deliver him from this contradiction. For man in the symphony always inclines to contradict what he has said, as if he does not acknowledge the existence of a laboratory in the mind that tests creeds before releasing them as ideas upon the listeners. In this symphony Liszt may be said to embrace the pure mystical doctrine, the doctrine of Goethe, throughout the fourth decade of his life. Then he hastens to compose for the piano alone, inasmuch as he was the unrivaled performer of his age. He composed the rhapsody, a charming piece that portrays for us the life of the Hungarian people, their principles, and their ambition. The famous rhapsodies demonstrated in Liszt's soul a wellspring overflowing with artistic gifts and musical methods. As for the sonata, Liszt did not succeed greatly, because he introduced into it personal idioms at a time when it was a classical mold into which musicians poured the essence of their thought and their unbridled feeling.