r LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA PRESENTED BY MRS. VICTOR GORTON AND ISABEL PARRY FRANZ LISZT BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER PUBIJBHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Franz Liszt. Illustrated. 12mo. (Postage extra) net, $2.00 Promenades of an Impressionist. 12mo. net, 11.50 Egoists: A Book of Supermen. 12mo, net, $1.50 Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. 12mo, net, $1.50 Overtones: A Book of Temperaments. 12mo net, $1.50 Mezzotints in Modern Music. 12mo, . . $1.50 Chopin: The Man and His Music. With Portrait. 12mo $2.00 Visionaries. 12mo, $1.50 Melomaniacs. 12mo $1.50 The Youthful Liszt FRANZ LISZT BY JAMES HUNEKER WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1911 COPYRIGHT, IQII, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 191 1 TO HENRY T. FINCK " enie oblige," F. LISZT CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. LISZT: THE REAL AND LEGENDARY . . i II. ASPECTS OF His ART AND CHARACTER . 34 III. THE B-MINOR SONATA AND OTHER PIANO PIECES 59 IV. AT ROME, WEIMAR, BUDAPEST .... 78 V. As COMPOSER 103 VI. MIRRORED BY His CONTEMPORARIES . . 201 VII. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF LISZT .... 327 VIII. LISZT PUPILS AND LISZTIANA .... 353 IX. MODERN PIANOFORTE VIRTUOSI . . . 418 INSTEAD OF A PREFACE 439 INDEX 443 ILLUSTRATIONS The Youthful Liszt Frontispiece FACING PAGE Liszt's Birthplace, Raiding 8 Adam Liszt Liszt's father 12 Anna Liszt Liszt's mother 12 Daniel Liszt Son of Liszt 16 Blandine Ollivier Daughter of Liszt 16 Cosima von Biilow Daughter of Liszt 20 Liszt, about 1850 36 Liszt at the piano 40 The Princess Sayn- Wittgenstein 50 A Matinee at Liszt's 66 Countess Marie d'Agoult 80 Liszt in his atelier at Weimar 100 Pauline Apel Liszt's Housekeeper at Weimar . . 328 Liszt and His Scholars, 1884 358 Liszt's Hand 404 Last Picture of Liszt, 1886, Aged Seventy-five Years 416 The Final Liszt Circle at Weimar Liszt at the Upper Window 436 LISZT: THE REAL AND LEGENDARY FRANZ LISZT remarked to a disciple of his: "Once Liszt helped Wagner, but who now will help Liszt ? " This was said in 1874, when Liszt was well advanced in years, when his fame as piano virtuoso and his name as composer were wellnigh eclipsed by the growing glory of Wagner truly a glory he had helped to create. In youth, an Orpheus pursued by the musical Maenads of Europe, in old age Liszt was a Merlin dealing in white magic, still followed by the Viviens. The story of his career is as romantic as any by Bal- zac. And the end of it all after a half century and more of fire and flowers, of proud, brilliant music-making was tragical. A gentle King Lear (without the consolation of a Cordelia), fol- lowing with resignation the conquering chariot of a man, his daughter's husband, who owed him so much, and, despite criticism, bravely acknowl- edged his debt, thus faithful to the end (he once declared that by Wagner he would stand or fall), Franz Liszt died a quarter of a century ago at FRANZ LISZT Bayreuth, not as Liszt the Conqueror, but a world-weary pilgrim, petted and flattered when young, neglected as the star of Wagner arose on the horizon. If only Liszt could have experi- enced the success of poverty as did Wagner. But the usual malevolent fairy of the fable en- dowed him with all the gifts but poverty, and that capricious old Pantaloon, the Time-Spirit, had his joke in the lonesome latter years. As regards his place in the musical pantheon, this erst- while comet is now a fixed star, and his feet set upon the white throne. There is no longer a Liszt case; his music has fallen into critical perspective; but there is still a Liszt case, psy- chologically speaking. Whether he was an archangel of light, a Bernini of tones, or, as Jean- Christophe describes him, "The noble priest, the circus-rider, neo-classical and vagabond, a mixture in equal doses of real and false nobility," is a question that will be answered according to one's temperament. That he was the captain of the new German music, a pianist without equal, a conductor of distinction, one who had helped to make the orchestra and its leaders what they are to-day; that he was a writer, a reformer of church music, a man of the noblest impulses and ideals, generous, selfless, and an artist to his finger- tips these are the commonplaces of musical history. As a personality he was an apparition; only Paganini had so electrified Europe. A charmeur, his love adventures border on the leg- endary; indeed, are largely legend. As amor- THE REAL AND LEGENDARY ous as a guitar, if we are to believe the romancers, the real Liszt was a man of intellect, a deeply religious soul; in middle years contemplative, even ascetic. His youthful extravagances, in- separable from his gipsy-like genius, and with- out a father to guide him, were remembered in Germany long after he had left the concert-plat- form. His successes, artistic and social espe- cially the predilection for him of princesses and noble dames raised about his ears a nest of per- nicious scandal-hornets. Had he not run away with Countess D'Agoult, the wife of a nobleman! Had he not openly lived with a married princess at Weimar, and under the patronage of the Grand Duke and Duchess and the Grand Duch- ess Maria Pawlowna, sister of the Czar of all the Russias! Besides, he was a Roman Catholic, and that didn't please such prim persons as Mendelssohn and Hiller, not to mention his own fellow-countryman, Joseph Joachim. Germany set the fashion in abusing Liszt. He had too much success for one man, and as a composer he must be made an example of; the services he ren- dered in defending the music of the insurgent Wagner was but another black mark against his character. And when Wagner did at last suc- ceed, Liszt's share in the triumph was speedily forgotten. The truth is, he paid the penalty for being a cosmopolitan. He was the first cosmo- politan in music. In Germany he was abused as a Magyar, in Hungary for his Teutonic tend- encies he never learned his mother tongue 3 FRANZ LISZT in Paris for not being French born; here one recalls the Stendhal case. But he introduced into the musty academic at- mosphere of musical Europe a strong, fresh breeze from the Hungarian puzta; this wandering piano- player of Hungarian-Austrian blood, a genuine cosmopolite, taught music a new charm, the charm of the unexpected, the improvised. The freedom of Beethoven in his later works, and of Chopin in all his music, became the principal factor in the style of Liszt. Music must have the shape of an improvisation. In the Hungarian rhapsodies, the majority of which begin in a mosque, and end in a tavern, are the extremes of his system. His orchestral and vocal works, the two sympho- nies, the masses and oratorios and symphonic poems, are full of dignity, poetic feeling, religious spirit, and a largeness of accent and manner though too often lacking in architectonic; yet the gipsy glance and gipsy voice lurk behind many a pious or pompous bar. Apart from his invention of a new form or, rather, the con- densation and revisal of an old one, the sym- phonic poem Liszt's greatest contribution to art is the wild, truant, rhapsodic, extempore element he infused into modern music ; nature in her most reckless, untrammelled moods he inter- preted with fidelity. But the drummers in the line of moral gasolene who controlled criticism in Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. Even the piquant triangle THE REAL AND LEGENDARY in his piano-concerto was suspected as possibly suggesting the usual situation of French comedy. The Liszt- Wagner question no longer presents any difficulties to the fair-minded. It is a simple one; men still living know that Wagner, to reach his musical apogee, to reach his public, had to lean heavily on the musical genius and in- dividual inspiration of Liszt. The later Wag- ner would not have existed as we now know him without first traversing the garden of Liszt. This is not a theory but a fact. Bee- thoven, as Philip Hale has pointed out, is the last of the very great composers; there is nothing new since Beethoven, though plenty of persua- sive personalities, much delving in mole-runs, many "new paths," leading nowhere, and much self-advertising. With its big drum and cym- bals, its mouthing or melting phrases, its start- ling situations, its scarlet waistcoats, its hair-oil and harlots, its treacle and thunder, the Roman- tic movement swept over the map of Europe, irresistible, contemptuous to its adversaries, and boasting a wonderful array of names. Schu- mann and Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt, Wagner in a class by himself are a few that may be cited; not to mention Victor Hugo, Delacroix, Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal. Georg Brandes assigns to Liszt a prominent place among the Romantics. But Beethoven still stood, stands to-day, four square to the universe. Wagner construed Beethoven to suit his own grammar. Why, for example, Berlioz should 5 FRANZ LISZT have been puzzled (or have pretended to) over the first page of the Tristan and Isolde prelude is itself puzzling; the Frenchman was a deeply versed Beethoven student. If he had looked at the first page of the piano sonata in C minor the Pathetic, so-called the enigma of the Wagnerian phraseology would have been solved; there, in a few lines, is the kernel of this music- drama. This only proves Wagner's Shake- sperian faculty of assimilation and his extraor- dinary gift in developing an idea (consider what he made of the theme of Chopin's C minor study, the Revolutionary, which he boldly annexed for the opening measures of the pre- lude to Act II of Tristan and Isolde); he bor- rowed his ideas whenever and wherever he saw fit His indebtedness to Liszt was great, but equally so to Weber, Marschner, and Beethoven; his indebtedness to Berlioz ended with the exter- nals of orchestration. Both Liszt and Wagner learned from Berlioz in this respect Neverthe- less, how useless to compare Liszt to Berlioz or Berlioz to Wagner. As well compare a ruby to an opal, an emerald to a ruby. Each of these three composers has his individual excellences. The music of all three suffers from an excess of profile. We call Liszt and Wagner the leaders of the moderns, but their aims and methods were radically different Wagner asserted the su- premacy of the drama over tone, and then, in- consistently, set himself down to write the most emotionally eloquent musk that was ever con- 6 THE REAL AND LEGENDARY ceived; Liszt always harped on the dramatic, on the poetic, and seldom employed words, believ- ing that the function of instrumental music is to convey in an ideal manner a poetic impression. In this he was the most thorough-going of poetic composers, as much so in the orchestral domain as was Chopin in his pianoforte compositions. Since Wagner's music-plays are no longer a nov- elty " the long submerged trail of Liszt is making its appearance," as Ernest Newman happily states the case. But to be truthful, the music of both Liszt and Wagner is already a little old- fashioned. The music-drama is not precisely in a rosy condition to-day. Opera is the weakest of forms at best, the human voice inevitably lim- its the art, and we are beginning to wonder what all the Wagnerian menagerie, the birds, dragons, dogs, snakes, swans, toads, dwarfs, giants, horses, and monsters generally, have to do with music. The music of the future is already the music of the past. The Wagner poems are uncouth, cum- bersome machines. We long for a breath of humanity, and it is difficult to find it outside of Tristan and Isolde or Die Meistersinger. Alas! for the enduring quality of operatic music. Noth- ing stales like theatre music. The rainbow vi- sion of a synthesis of the Seven Arts has faded forever. In the not far distant future Wagner will gain, rather than lose, by being played in the concert-room; that, at least, would dodge the ominously barren stretches of the Ring, and the early operas. The Button-Moulder awaits at the 7 FRANZ LISZT cross-roads of time all operatic music, even as he waited for Peer Gynt. And the New Zealander is already alive, though young, who will visit Europe to attend the last piano-recital: that species of entertainment invented by Liszt, and by him described in a letter to the Princess Bel- giojoso as colloquies of music and ennui. He was the first pianist to show his profile on the concert stage, his famous profit (Tivoire; before Liszt pianists either faced the audience or sat with their back to the public. The Princess Sayn- Wittgenstein one nat- urally drops into the Almanac de Gotha when writing of the friends of Liszt averred that Liszt had launched his musical spear further into the future than Wagner. She was a lady of firm opinions, who admired Berlioz as much as she loathed Wagner. But could she have foreseen that Richard Strauss, Parsifal-like, had caught the whizzing lance of the Klingsor of Weimar, what would she have said? Put the riddle to contemporary critics of Richard II who has, at least, thrown off the influence of Liszt and Wagner, although he too frequently takes snap- shots at the sublime in his scores. Otherwise, you can no more keep Liszt's name out of the music of to-day than could good Mr. Dick the head of King Charles from the pages of his me- morial. His musical imagination was versatile, his impressionability so lively that he translated into tone his voyages, pictures, poems Dante, 8 w> -5 rt O, THE REAL AND LEGENDARY Goethe, Heine, Lamartine, Obermann, (Senan- cour), even Sainte-Beuve (Les Consolations,) legends, and the cypress-haunted fountains of the Villa d' Este (Tivoli); not to mention can- vases by Raphael, Mickelangelo, and the unin- spired frescoes of Kaulbach. All was grist that came to his musical mill. In a moment of self-forgetfulness, Wagner praised the music of Liszt in superlative terms. No need of quotation; the correspondence, a classic, is open to all. That the symphonic poem was secretly antipathetic to Wagner is the bald truth. After all his rhapsodic utterances con- cerning the symphonies and poems of Liszt from which he borrowed many a sparkling jewel to adorn some corner in his giant frescoes he said in 1877, "In instrumental music I am a reactionnaire, a conservative. I dislike every- thing that requires verbal explanations beyond the actual sounds." And he, the most copious of commentators concerning his own music, in which almost every other bar is labelled with a leading motive! To this Liszt wittily answered in an unpublished letter (1878) that lead- ing motives are comfortable inventions, as a com- poser does not have to search for a new melody. But what boots leading motives as old as the hills and Johann Sebastian Bach or symphonic poems nowadays? There is no Wagner, there is no Liszt question. After the unbinding of the classic forms the turbulent torrent is become the new danger. Who shall dam its speed ! Brahms FRANZ LISZT or Reger? The formal formlessness of the new school has placed Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner on the shelf, almost as remotely as are Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The symphonic poem is now a monster of appalling lengths, thereby, as Mr. Krehbiel suggests, defeating its chiefest reason for existence, its brevity. The foam and fireworks of the impressionistic school, Debussy, Dukas, and Ravel, and the rest, are enjoyable; the piano music of Debussy has the iridescence of a spider's web touched by the fire of the set- ting sun; his orchestra is a jewelled conflagra- tion. But he stems like the others, the Russians included, from Liszt. Charpentier and his fol- lowers are Wagner a la coule. Where it will all end no man dare predict. But Mr. Newman is right in the matter of programme-music. It has come to stay, modified as it may be in the future. Too many bricks and mortar, the lust of the ear as well as of the eye, glutted by the materialistic machinery of the Wagner music -drama, have driven the lovers of music-for-music's-sake back to Beethoven; or, in extreme cases, to novel forms wherein vigourous affirmations are dreaded as much as an eight- bar melody; for those meticulous temperaments that recoil from clangourous chord, there are the misty tonali- ties of Debussy or the verse of Paul Verlaine. However, the aquarelles and pastels and land- scapes of Debussy or Ravel were invented by Uruater Liszt caricatured by Wagner in the person of Wo tan; all the impressionistic school 10 THE REAL AND LEGENDARY may be traced to him as its fountain-head. Think of the little sceneries scattered through his piano music, particularly in his Years of Pilgrimage; or of the storm and stress of the Dante Sonata. The romanticism of Liszt was, like so many of his contemporaries, a state of soul, a condition of exalted or morbid sensibility. But it could not be said of him as it could of all the Men of Fine Shades Chateaubriand, Heine, Stendhal, Ben- jamin Constant, Sainte-Beuve that they were only men of feeling in their art, and decidedly the reverse in their conduct. Liszt was a pattern of chivalry, and if he seems at times as indulg- ing too much in the Grand Manner set it down to his surroundings, to his temperament. The idols of his younger years were Bonaparte and Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, while in the background hovered the prime corrupter of the nineteenth century and the father of Roman- ticism, J. J. Rousseau. II The year 1811 was the year of the great com- et. Its wine is said to have been of a richness; some well-known men were born, beginning with Thackeray and John Bright; Napoleon's son, the unhappy Due de Reichstadt, first saw the light that year, as did Jules Dupr, Theophile Gautier, and Franz Liszt. There will be no disputes con- cerning the date of his birth, October 22d, as was ii FRANZ LISZT the case with Chopin. His ancestors, according to a lengthy family register, were originally noble; but the father of Franz, Adam Liszt, was a manager of the Esterhazy estates in Hungary at the time his only son and child was born. He was very musical, knew Joseph Haydn, and was an admirer of Hummel, his music and playing. The mother's maiden name was Anna Lager (or Laager), a native of lower Austria, with Ger- man blood in her veins. The mixed blood of her son might prove a source of interest to Havelock Ellis in his studies of heredity and genius. If Liszt was French in the early years of his manhood, he was decidedly German the latter half of his life. The Magyar only came out on the keyboard, and in his compositions. She was of a happy and extremely vivacious nature, cheerful in her old age, and contented to educate her three grandchildren later in life. The name Liszt would be meal or flour in English; so that Frank Flour might have been his unromantic cognomen; a difference from Liszt Ferencz, with its accompanying battle-cry of Eljen! In his son Adam Liszt hoped to realise his own frustrated musical dreams. A prodigy of a prodigious sort, the comet and the talent of Franz were mixed up by the supersti- tious. Some gipsy predicted that the lad would return to his native village rich, honoured, and in a glass house (coach). This he did. In Oedenburg, during the summer of 1903, I visited at an hour or so distant, the town of 12 KS 3 , c -S < 3 THE REAL AND LEGENDARY Eisenstadt and the village of Raiding (or Reiding). In the latter is the house where Liszt was born. The place, which can hardly have changed much since the boyhood of Liszt, is called Dobrjan in Hungarian. I confess I was not impressed, and was glad to get back to Oedenburg and civilisation. In this latter spot there is a striking statue of the composer. It is a thrice-told tale that several estimable Hungarian magnates raised a purse for the boy, sent him with his father to Vienna, where he studied the piano with the pedagogue Carl Czerny, that indefatigable fabricator of finger- studies, and in theory with Salieri. He was kissed by the aged Beethoven on the forehead Wotan saluting young Siegfried though Schindler, ami de Beethoven, as he dubbed him- self, denied this significant historical fact. But later Schindler pitched into Liszt for his Bee- thoven interpretations, hotly swearing that they were the epitome of unmusical taste. The old order changeth, though not old prejudices. Liszt waxed in size, technique, wisdom. Soon he was given up as hopelessly in advance of his teachers. Wherever he appeared they hailed him as a second Hummel, a second Beethoven. And he improvised. That settled his fate. He would surely become a composer. He went to Paris, was known as le petit Litz, and received everywhere. He became the rage, though he was refused admission to the Conservatoire, probably because he displayed too much talent 13 FRANZ LISZT for a boy. He composed an opera, Don Sancho, the score of which has luckily disappeared. Then an event big with consequences was expe- rienced by the youth he lost his father in 1827. (His mother survived her husband until 1866.) He gave up concert performances as too preca- rious, and manfully began teaching in Paris. The revolution started his pulse to beating, and he composed a revolutionary symphony. He became a lover of humanity, a socialist, a fol- lower of Saint-Simon, even of the impossible Pere Prosper Enfantin. His friend and adviser was Lamenais, whose Paroles d'un Croyant had estranged him from Rome. A wonderful, unhappy man. Liszt read poetry and philoso- phy, absorbed all the fashionable frenzied for- mulas and associated with the Romanticists. He met Chopin, and they became as twin brethren. Francois Mignet, author of A History of the French Revolution, said to the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Liszt: "In the brain of this young man reigns great confusion." No wonder. He was playing the piano, compos- ing, teaching, studying the philosophers, and mingling with enthusiastic idealists who burnt their straw before they moulded their bricks. As Francis Hackett wrote of the late Lord Acton, Liszt suffered from "intellectual log- jam." But the current of events soon released him. He met the Countess d'Agoult in the brilliant whirl of his artistic success. She was beautiful, 14 THE REAL AND LEGENDARY accomplished, though her contemporaries de- clare she was not of a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, at Frank- fort-on-Main in 1805. Her father was the Vi- comte de Flavigny, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, orig- inally from Amsterdam and a reformed Hebrew. She had literary ability, was proud of having once seen Goethe, and in 1827 she married Comte Charles d'Agoult. But social sedition was in the air. The misunderstood woman no new thing was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every new book she wrote, and Madame, the Countess d'Agoult to whom Chopin dedicated his first group of Etudes began to write, began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued. Anyhow, they eloped. In honour he couldn't desert the woman, and they made Geneva their temporary home. She had in her own right 20,000 francs a year income; it cost Liszt exactly 300,000 francs annually to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been accustomed to he earned this, a tidy amount, for those days, by playing the piano all over Europe. Madame d'Agoult bore him three children: Blandine, Cosima, and Dan- iel. The first named married Emile Ollivier, Napoleon's war minister still living at the present writing in 1857. She died in 1862. Cosima married Hans von Biilow, her father's favourite pupil, in 1857; later she went off with 15 FRANZ LISZT Richard Wagner, married him, to her father's despair principally because she had renounced her religion in so doing and to-day is Wagner's widow. Daniel Liszt, his father's hope, died December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatised the birth of his children, had educated them, had dowered his daughters, and they proved all three a source of sorrow. He quarrelled with the D'Agoult and they parted bad friends. Under the pen name of Daniel Stern she attacked Liszt in her souve- nirs and novels. He forgave her. They met in Paris once, in the year 1860. He gently told her that the title of the souvenirs should have been "Poses et Mensonges." She wept. Tragic come- dians, both. They were bored with one another; their union recalls the profound reflection of Flau- bert, that Emma Bo vary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladies had supervened. Like Byron, Liszt was the sentimental hero of the day, a Chateaubriand Rene* of the keyboard. Balzac put him in a book, so did George Sand. All the painters and sculp- tors, Delaroche and Ary Scheffer among others made his portrait. Nevertheless, his head was not turned, and when, after an exile of a few years, Thalberg had conquered Paris in his ab- sence, he returned and engaged in an ivory duel, at the end worsting his rival. Thalberg was the first pianist in Europe, contended every one. And the Belgiojoso calmly remarked that Liszt was the only one. After witnessing the Pade- 16 O *