Have you read Thoreau'sWaldenwith its smell of the woods and its ozone-permeated pages? I recommend the book to all pianists, especially to those pianists who hug the house, practising all day and laboring under the delusion that they are developing their individuality. Singular thing, this rage for culture nowadays among musicians! They have been admonished so often in print and private that their ignorance is not blissful, indeed it is baneful, that these ambitious ladies and gentlemen rush off to the booksellers, to libraries, and literally gorge themselves with the "ologies" and "isms" of the day. Lord, Lord, how I enjoy meeting them at a musicale! There they sit, cocked and primed for a verbal encounter, waiting to knock the literary chip off their neighbor's shoulder.
"Have you read"—begins some one and the chattering begins,furioso. "Oh, Nietzsche? why of course,"—"Tolstoi'sWhat is Art?certainly, he ought to be electrocuted"—"Nordau! isn't he terrible?" And the cacophonous conversationalsymphony rages, and when it is spent, the man who asked the question finishes:
"Have you read the notice of Rosenthal's playing in theKölnische Zeitung?" and there is a battery of suspicious looks directed towards him whilst murmurs arise, "What an uncultured man! To talk 'shop' like a regular musician!" The fact being that the man had read everything, but was setting a trap for the vanity of these egregious persons. The newspapers, the managers and the artists before the public are to blame for this callow, shallow attempt at culture. We read that Rosenthal is a second Heine in conversation. That he spills epigrams at his meals and dribbles proverbs at the piano. He has committed all of Heine to memory and in the greenroom reads Sanscrit. Paderewski, too, is profoundly something or other. Like Wagner, he writes his own program—I mean plots for his operas. He is much given to reading Swinburne because some one once compared him to the bad, mad, sad, glad, fad poet of England, begad! As for Sauer, we hardly know where to begin. He writes blank verse tragedies and discusses Ibsen with his landlady. Pianists are now so intellectual that they sometimes forget to play the piano well.
Of course, Daddy Liszt began it all. He hadread everything before he was twenty, and had embraced and renegaded from twenty religions. This volatile, versatile, vibratile, vivacious, vicious temperament of his has been copied by most modern pianists who haven't brains enough to parse a sentence or play a BachInvention. The Weimar crew all imitated Liszt's style in octaves and hair dressing. I was there once, a sunny day in May, the hedges white with flowers and the air full of bock-bier. Ah, thronging memories of youth! I was slowly walking through a sun-smitten lane when a man on horse dashed by me, his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather. He kept shouting "Make room for the master! make way for the master!" and presently a venerable man with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose—came towards me. He wore a monkish habit and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat, the sort affected by Don Basilio inThe Barber of Seville.
"It must be Liszt or the devil!" I cried aloud, and Liszt laughed, his warts growing purple, his whole expression being one of good-humor. He invited me to refreshment at the Czerny House, but I refused. During the time he stood talking to me a throng of young Liszts gathered about us. I call them "young Liszts" because they mimicked the old gentleman in an outrageousmanner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled it with flour; they even went to such lengths as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They wore semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar and affected style of Liszt, and they one and all wore shovel hats. When Liszt left me—we studied together with Czerny—they trooped after him, their garments ballooning in the breeze, and upon their silly faces was the devotion of a pet ape.
I mention this because I have never met a Liszt pupil since without recalling that day in Weimar. And when one plays I close my eyes and hear the frantic effort to copy Liszt's bad touch and supple, sliding, treacherous technic. Liszt, you may not know, had a wretched touch. The old boy was conscious of it, for he told William Mason once, "Don't copy my touch; it's spoiled." He had for so many years pounded and punched the keyboard that his tactile sensibility—isn't that your new-fangled expression?—had vanished. His "orchestral" playing was one of those pretty fables invented by hypnotized pupils like Amy Fay, Aus der Ohe, and other enthusiastic but not very critical persons. I remember well that Liszt, who was first and foremost a melodramatic actor, had a habit of striding to the instrument,sitting down in a magnificent manner and uplifting his big fists as if to annihilate the ivories. He was a master hypnotist, and like John L. Sullivan he had his adversary—the audience—conquered before he struck a blow. His glance was terrific, his "nerve" enormous. What he did afterward didn't much matter. He usually accomplished a hard day's threshing with those flail-like arms of his, and, heavens, how the poor piano objected to being taken for a barn-floor!
Touch! Why, Thalberg had the touch, a touch that Liszt secretly envied. In the famous Paris duel that followed the visits of the pair to Paris, Liszt was heard to a distinct disadvantage. He wrote articles about himself in the musical papers—a practice that his disciples have not failed to emulate—and in an article on Thalberg displayed his bad taste in abusing what he could not imitate. Oh yes, Liszt was a great thief. His piano music—I mean his so-called original music—is nothing but Chopin and brandy. His pyrotechnical effects are borrowed from Paganini, and as soon as a new head popped up over the musical horizon he helped himself to its hair. So in his piano music we find a conglomeration of other men's ideas, other men's figures. When he wrote for orchestra the hand is the hand of Liszt, but the voice is that of Hector Berlioz.I never could quite see Liszt. He hung on to Chopin until the suspicious Pole got rid of him and then he strung after Wagner. I do not mean that Liszt was without merit, but I do assert that he should have left the piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.
Let us consider some of his compositions.
Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas—not, however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through theLuciafantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before she mounts her bicycle.
And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare theDon Juanof Liszt and theDon Juanof Thalberg! See which is the more musical, the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies, bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thinghe could lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated theTannhäuseroverture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors, appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy.
The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudesà laChopin; clever, I admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up intoTwelve Etudes Transcendentales—listen to the big, boastful title!—is better than the furbished up later collection. His three concert studies are Chopinish; hisWaldesrauschenis pretty, but leads nowhere; hisAnnées des Pèlerinagesickly withsentimentalism; hisDante Sonataa horror; hisB-minor Sonataa madman's tale signifying froth and fury; his legendes, ballades, sonettes, Benedictions in out of the way places, all, all with choral attachments, are cheap, specious, artificial and insincere. Theatrical Liszt was to a virtue, and his continual worship of God in his music is for me monotonously blasphemous.
The Rhapsodies I reserve for the last. They are the nightmare curse of the pianist, with their rattle-trap harmonies, their helter-skelter melodies, their vulgarity and cheap bohemianism. They all begin in the church and end in the tavern. There is a fad just now for eating ill-cooked food and drinking sour Hungarian wine to the accompaniment of a wretched gypsy circus called a Czardas. Liszt's rhapsodies irresistibly remind me of a cheap, tawdry, dirtytable d'hôte, where evil-smelling dishes are put before you, to be whisked away and replaced by evil-tasting messes. If Liszt be your god, why then give me Czerny, or, better still, a long walk in the woods, humming with nature's rhythms. I think I'll readWaldenover again. Now do you think I am as amiable as I look?
I'm an old, old man. I've seen the world of sights, and I've listened eagerly, aye, greedily, to the world of sound, to that sweet, maddening concourse of tones civilized Caucasians agree is the one, the only art. I, too, have had my mad days, my days of joys uncontrolled—doesn't Walt Whitman say that somewhere?—I've even rioted in Verdi. Ah, you are surprised! You fancied I knew my Czernyet voilà tout? Let me have your ear. I've run the whole gamut of musical composers. I once swore by Meyerbeer. I came near worshiping Wagner, the early Wagner, and today I am willing to acknowledge thatDie Meistersingeris the very apex of a modern polyphonic score. I adored Spohr and found good in Auber. In a word, I had my little attacks of musical madness, for all the world like measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, and the mumps.
As I grew older my task clarified. Having admired Donizetti, there was no danger of being seduced by the boisterous, roystering Mascagni. Knowing Mozart almost by heart, Gounod and his pallid imitations did not for an instant impose onme. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being violently self-conscious, I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's music to another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more than Beethoven? At last, one day, and not many years ago, I cried aloud, "Bach, it is Bach who does it, Bach who animates the wooden, lifeless limbs of these classicists, these modern men. Bach—once, last, and all the time."
And so it came about that with my prying nose I dipped into all composers, and found that the houses they erected were stable in the exact proportion that Bach was used in the foundations. If much Bach, then granted talent, the man reared a solid structure. If no Bach, then no matter how brilliant, how meteoric, how sensational the talents, smash came tumbling down the musical mansion, smash went the fellow's hastily erected palace. Whether it is Perosi—who swears by Bach and doesn't understand or study him—or Mascagni or Massenet, or any of the new school, the result is the same. Bach isthe touchstone. Look at Verdi, the Verdi ofDon Carloand the Verdi who planned and builtFalstaff. Mind you, it is not that big fugued finale—surely one of the most astounding operatic codas in existence—that carries me away. It is the general texture of the work, its many voices, like the sweet mingled roar of Buttermilk Falls, that draws me toFalstaff. It is because of Bach that I have forsworn my dislike of the later Wagner, and unlearned my disgust at his overpowering sensuousness. The web he spins is too glaring for my taste, but its pattern is so lovely, so admirable, that I have grown very fond ofThe Mastersingers.
Bach is in all great, all good compositions, and especially is he a test for modern piano music. The monophonic has been done to the death by a whole tribe of shallow charlatans, who, under the pretence that they wrote in a true piano style, literally debauched several generations of students. Shall I mention names? Better disturb neither the dead nor the quick. In the matter of writing for more voices than one we have retrograded considerably since the days of Bach. We have, to be sure, built up a more complex harmonic system, beautiful chords have been invented, or rather re-discovered—for in Bach all were latent—but, confound it, children!these chords are too slow, too ponderous in gait for me. Music is, first of all, motion, after that emotion. I like movement, rhythmical variety, polyphonic life. It is only in a few latter-day composers that I find music that moves, that sings, that thrills.
How did I discover that Bach was in the very heart of Wagner? In the simplest manner. I began playing theE-flat minor Preludein the first book of theWell-tempered Clavichord, and lo! I was transported to the opening ofGötterdämmerung.
Pretty smart boy that Richard Geyer to know his Bach so well! Yet the resemblance is far fetched, is only a hazy similarity. The triad of E-flat minor is common property, but something told me Wagner had been browsing on Bach; on this particular prelude had, in fact, got a starting point for the Norn music. The more I studied Wagner, the more I found Bach, and the more Bach, the better the music. Chopin knew his Bach backwards, hence the surprisingly fresh, vital quality of his music, despite its pessimistic coloring. Schumann loved Bach and built his best music on him, Mendelssohn re-discovered him, whilst Beethoven played theWell-tempered Clavichordevery day of his life.
Allmypupils study theInventionsbefore theyplay Clementi or Beethoven, and what well-springs of delight are these two- and three-part pieces! Take my word for it, if you have mastered them you may walk boldly up to any of the great, insolent forty-eight sweet-tempered preludes and fugues and overcome them. Study Bach say I to every one, but study him sensibly. Tausig, the greatest pianist the world has yet heard, edited about twenty preludes and fugues from the Clavichord. These he gave his pupilsafterthey had played Chopin's opus 10. Strange idea, isn't it? Before that they played theInventions, the symphonies, theFrenchandEnglish Suites—Klindworth's edition of the latter is excellent—and thePartitas. Then, I should say, the Italian concert and that excellent three-voiced fugue in A minor, so seldom heard in concert. It is pleasing rather than deep in feeling, but how effective, how brilliant! Don't forget the toccatas, fantasias, and capriccios. Such works asThe Art of Fugueand others of the same class show us Father Bach in his working clothes, earnest if not exactly inspired.
But in his moments of inspiration what a genius! What a singularly happy welding of manner and matter! TheChromatic Fantasiais to me greater than any of the organ works, with the possible exception of theG minorFantasia. Indeed, I think it greater than its accompanyingD minor Fugue. In it are the harmonic, melodic, and spiritual germs of modern music. The restless tonalities, the agitated, passionate, desperate, dramatic recitatives, the emotional curve of the music, are not all these modern, only executed in such a transcendental fashion as to beggar imitation?
Let us turn to theWell-tempered Clavichordand bow the knee of submission, of admiration, of worship. I use the Klindworth, the Busoni and sometimes the Bischoff edition, never Kroll, never Czerny. I think it was the latter who once excited my rage when I found the C sharp major prelude transposed to the key of D flat! This outrageous proceeding pales, however, before the infamous behavior of Gounod, who dared—the sacrilegious Gaul!—to place upon the wonderful harmonies of the master of masters a cheap, tawdry, vulgar tune. Gounod deserved oblivion for this. I think I have my favorites, and for a day delude myself that I prefer certain preludes, certain fugues, but a few hours' study of its next-door neighbor and I am intoxicated withitsbeauties. We have all played and loved theC minor Preludein Book one—Cramer made a study on memories of this—and who has not felt happy at its wonderful fugue! Yet a fewpages on is a marvelousFugue in C sharp minorwith five voices that slowly crawl to heaven's gate. Jump a little distance and you land in theE flat Fuguewith its assertiveness, its cocksure subject, and then consider the pattering, gossiping one in E minor. If you are in the mood, has there ever been written a brighter, more amiable, graceful prelude than the eleventh in F? Its germ is perhaps theF major Invention, the eighth. A marked favorite of mine is the fifteenth fugue in G. There's a subject for you and what a jolly length!
Bach could spin music as a spider spins its nest, from earth to the sky and back again. Did you ever hear Rubinstein play theB-flat Prelude and Fugue?If you have not, count something missed in your life. He made the prelude as light as a moonbeam, but there was thunder in the air, the clouds floated away, airy nothings in the blue, and then celestial silence. Has any modern composer written music in which is packed as much meaning, as much sorrow as may be found in theB-flat minor Prelude?It is the matrix of all modern musical emotion.
I don't know why I persist in saying "modern," as if there is any particular feeling, emotion, or sensation discovered and exploited by the man of this time that men of other ages did not experience!But before Bach I knew no one who ranged the keyboard of the emotions so freely, so profoundly, so poignantly.
Touching on his technics, I may say that they require of the pianist's fingers individualization and, consequently, a flexibility that is spiritual as well as material. The diligent daily study of Bach will form your style, your technics, better than all machines and finger exercises. But play him as if he were human, a contemporary and not a historical reminiscence. Yes, you may indulge inrubato. I would rather hear it in Bach than in Chopin. Play Bach as if he still composed—he does—and drop the nonsense about traditional methods of performance. He would alter all that if he were alive today.
I know but one Bach anecdote, and that I have never seen in print. The story was related to me by a pupil of Reinecke, and Reinecke got it from Mendelssohn. Bach, so it appears, was in the habit of practising every day in the Thomas-Kirche at Leipsic, and one day several of his sons, headed by the naughty Friedmann, resolved to play a joke on their good old father. Accordingly, they repaired to the choir loft, got the bellows-blower away, and started in to give the Master a surprise. They tied the handle of the bellows to the door of the choir, and with a longrope fastened to the outside knob they pulled the door open and shut, and of course the wind ran low. Johann Sebastian—who looked more like E. M. Bowman than E. M. B. himself—suddenly found himself clawing ivory. He rose and went softly to the rear. Discovering no blower, he investigated, and began to gently haul in the line. When it was all in several boys were at the end of it. Did he whip them? Not he. He locked the door, tied them to the bellows and sternly bade them blow. They did. Then the archangel of music went back to his bench and composed the famousWedgefugue. How true all this is I know not, but anyhow it is quaint enough. Let me end this exhortation by quoting some words of Eduard Remenyi from his fantastic essay on Bach: "If you want music for your own and music's sake—look up to Bach. If you want music which is as absolutely full of meaning as an egg is full of meat—look up to Bach."
Look up to Bach. Sound advice. Profit by it.
The missing meteors of November minded me of the musical reputations I have seen rise, fill mid-heaven with splendor, pale, and fade into ineffectual twilight. Alas! it is one of the bitter things of old age, one of its keen tortures, to listen to young people, to hear their superb boastings, and to know how short-lived is all art, music the most evanescent of them all. When I was a boy the star of Schumann was just on the rim of the horizon; what glory! what a planet swimming freely into the glorious constellation! Beethoven was clean obscured by the romantic mists that went to our heads like strong, new wine, and made us drunk with joy. How neat, dapper, respectable and antique Mendelssohn! Being Teutonic in our learnings, Chopin seemed French and dandified—the Slavic side of him was not yet in evidence to our unanointed vision. Schubert was a divinely awkward stammerer, and Liszt the brilliant centipede amongst virtuosi. They were rapturous days and we fed full upon Jean Paul Richter, Hoffmann, moonshine and mush.
What the lads and lassies of ideal predilectionsneeded was a man like Schumann, a dreamer of dreams, yet one who pinned illuminative tags to his visions to give them symbolical meanings, dragged in poetry by the hair, and called the composite, art. Schumann, born mentally sick, a man with the germs of insanity, a pathological case, a literary man turned composer—Schumann, I say, topsy-turvied all the newly born and, without knowing it, diverted for the time music from its true current. He preached Brahms and Chopin, but practised Wagner—he was the forerunner to Wagner, for he was the first composer who fashioned literature into tone.
Doesn't all this sound revolutionary? An old fellow like me talking this way, finding old-fashioned what he once saw leave the bank of melody with the mintage glitteringly fresh! Yet it is so. I have lived to witness the rise of Schumann and, please Apollo, I shall live to see the eclipse of Wagner. Can't you read the handwriting on the wall?Dinna ye hear the sloganof the realists? No music rooted in bookish ideas, in literary or artistic movements, will survive the mutations of theZeitgeist. Schumann reared his palace on a mirage. The inside he called Bachian—but it wasn't. In variety of key-color perhaps; but structurally no symphony may be built on Bach, for a sufficientreason. Schumann had the great structure models before him; he heeded them not. He did not pattern after the three master-architects, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; gave no time to line, fascinated as he was by the problems of color. But color fades. Where are the Turners of yester-year? Form and form only endures, and so it has come to pass that of his four symphonies, not one is called great in the land where he was king for a day. The B-flat is a pretty suite, the C-major inutile—always barring the lyric episodes—the D-minor a thing of shreds and patches, and theRhenish—muddy as the river Rhine in winter time.
TheE-flat piano Quintetwill live and also the piano concerto—originally a fantasia in one movement. Thus Schumann experimented and built, following the line of easiest resistance, which is the poetic idea. If he had patterned as has Brahms, he would have sternly put aside his childish romanticism, left its unwholesome if captivating shadows, and pushed bravely into the open, where the sun and moon shine without the blur and miasma of adecadentliterature. But then we should not have had Schumann. It was not to be, and thus it is that his is a name with a musical sigh, a name that evokes charming memories, and also, I must admit, a name thatgently plucks at one's heart-strings. His songs are sweet, yet never so spontaneous as Schubert's, so astringently intellectual as Robert Franz's. His opera, his string quartets—how far are the latter from the noble, self-contained music in this form of Beethoven and Brahms!—and his choral compositions are already in the sad, graypenumbraof the negligible. His piano music is without the clear, chiseled contours of Chopin, without a definite, a great style, yet—the piano music of Schumann, how lovely some of it is!
I will stop my heartless heart-to-heart talk. It is too depressing, these vagaries, these senile ramblings of a superannuated musician. Ah, me! I too was once in Arcady, where the shepherds bravely piped original and penetrating tunes, where the little shepherdesses danced to their lords and smiled sweet porcelain smiles. It was all very real, this music of the middle century, and it was written for the time, it suited the time, and when the time passed, the music with the men grew stale, sour, and something to be avoided, like the leer of a creaking, senescentbeau, like the rouge and grimace of a debilecoquette. My advice then is, enjoy the music of your epoch, for there is no such thing as music of the future. It is always music of the present. Schumann has had his day, Wagner is havinghis, and Brahms will be ruler of all tomorrow.Eheu Fugaces!
There was a time,mes enfants, when I played at all the Schumann piano music. TheAbeggvariations, thePapillons, theIntermezzi—"an extension of thePapillons," said Schumann—Die Davidsbündler, that wonderfultoccata in C, the best double-note study in existence—because it is music first, technics afterward—the seldom attemptedAllegro, opus 8, theCarnaval, tender and dazzling miniatures, the twelve settings of Paganini, much more musical than Liszt's, theImpromptus, a delicate compliment to his Clara. It is always Clara with this Robert, like that other Robert, the strong-souled English husband of Elizabeth Browning. Schumann's whole life romance centered in his wife. A man in love with his wife and that man a musician! Why, the entire episode must seem abnormal to the flighty, capricious younger set, the Bayreuth set, for example. But it was an ideal union, the woman a sympathetic artist, the composer writing for her, writing songs, piano music, even criticism for and about her. Decidedly one of the prettiest and most wholesome pictures in the history of any art.
Then I attacked theF-sharp Minor Sonata, with its wondrous introduction like the vast,somber portals to some fantastic Gothic pile. TheFantasiestücke opus 12, still remain Schumann at his happiest, and easiest comprehended. TheSymphonic Variationsare the greatest of all, greater than theConcertoor theFantasie in C. These almost persuade one that their author is a fit companion for Beethoven and Chopin. There is invention, workmanship, and a solidity that never for a moment clashes with the tide of romantic passion surging beneath. Here he strikes fire and the blaze is glorious.
TheF-minor Sonata—the so-calledConcert sans orchestre—a truncated, unequal though interesting work; theArabesque, theBlumenstück, the marvelous and too seldom playedHumoreske, opus 20, every one throbbing with feeling; the eightNovelletten, almost, but not quite successful attempts at a new form; the genial but unsatisfactoryG-minor Sonata, theNachtstücke, and theVienna Carnaval, opus 26, are not all of these the unpremeditated outpourings of a genuine poet, a poet of sensibility, of exquisite feeling?
I must not forget those idylls of childhood, theKinderscenen, the half-crazyKreisleriana, true soul-states, nor theFantasie, opus 17, which lacks a movement to make it an organic whole. Consider the little pieces, like the three romances,opus 28, the opus 32, theAlbum for the Young, opus 68, the four fugues, four marches, theWaldscenen—Oh, never-to-be-forgottenVogel als ProphetandTrock'ne Blumen—theConcertstück, opus 92, the secondAlbum for the Young, theThree Fantasy Pieces, opus 111, theBunte Blätter—do you recall the one in F-sharp minor so miraculously varied by Brahms, or that appealing one in A-flat? TheAlbumblätter, opus 124, the seven pieces in fughetta form, the never-playedConcert allegro in D-minor, opus 134, or the two posthumous works, theScherzoand thePresto Passionata.
Have I forgotten any? No doubt. I am growing weary, weary of all this music, opiate music, prismatic music, "dreary music"—as Schumann himself called his early stuff—and the somber peristaltic music of his "lonesome, latter years." Schumann is now for the very young, for the self-illuded. We care more—being sturdy realists—for architecture today. These crepuscular visions, these adventures of the timid soul on sad white nights, these soft croonings of love and sentiment are out of joint with the days of electricity and the worship of the golden calf. Do not ask yourself with cynical airs if Schumann is not, after all, second-rate, but rather, when you are in the mood, enter his houseof dreams, his home beautiful, and rest your nerves. Robert Schumann may not sip ambrosial nectar with the gods in highest Valhall, but he served his generation; above all, he made happy one noble woman. When his music is shelved and forgotten, the name of the Schumanns will stand for that rarest of blessings, conjugal felicity.
To write from Bayreuth in the spring-time as Wagner sleeps calmly in the backyard ofWahnfried, without a hint of his music in the air, is giving me one of the deepest satisfactions of my existence. How came you in Bayreuth, and, of all seasons in the year, the spring? The answer may astonish you; indeed, I am astonished myself when I think of it. Liszt, Franz Liszt, greatest of pianists—after Thalberg—greatest of modern composers—after no one—Liszt lies out here in the cemetery on the Erlangerstrasse, and to visit that forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson Siegfried Wagner, I left my comfortable lodgings in Munich and traveled an entire day.
Now let me whisper something in your ear—I once studied with Liszt at Weimar! Does this seem incredible to you? An adorer of Thalberg, nevertheless, once upon a time I pulled up stakes at Paris and went to the abode of Liszt and played for him exactly once. This was a half-century ago. I carried letters from a well-known Parisian music publisher, Liszt'sown, and was therefore accorded a hearing. Well do I recall the day, a bright one in April. His Serene Highness was at that time living on the Altenberg, and to see him I was forced to as much patience and diplomacy as would have gained me admittance to a royal household.
Endlich, the fatal moment arrived. Surrounded by a band of disciples, crazy fellows all—I discovered among the rest the little figure of Karl Tausig—the great man entered thesaalwhere I tremblingly sat. He was very amiable. He read the letters I timidly presented him, and then, slapping me on the back with an expression ofbonhomie, he cried aloud in French: "Tiens!let us hear what this admirer of my old friend Thalberg has to say for himself on the keyboard!" I did not miss the veiled irony of the speech, the wordfriendbeing ever so lightly underlined; I knew of the famous Liszt-Thalbergduello, during which so much music and ink had been spilt.
But my agony! Thevia dolorosaI traversed from my chair to the piano! Since then the modern school of painter-impressionists has come into fashion. I understand perfectly the mental, may I say the optical, attitude of these artists to landscape subjects. They must gaze upon a tree, a house, a cow, with their nerves at highest tension until everything quivers; the sky isbathed in magnetic rays, the background trembles as it does in life. So to me was the lofty chamber wherein I stood on that fateful afternoon. Liszt, with his powerful profile, the profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, gray and brown, and silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He alone was the illuminated focus of this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere.
Yet urged by an hypnotic will I went to the piano, lifted the fall-board, and in my misery I actually paused to read the maker's name. A whisper, a smothered chuckle, and a voice uttering these words: "He must have begun as a piano-salesman," further disconcerted me. I fell on to the seat and dropped my fingers upon the keys. Facing me was the Ary Scheffer portrait of Chopin, and without knowing why I began the weaving Prelude in D-major. My insides shook like a bowl of jelly; yet I was outwardly as calm as the growing grass. My hands did not falter and the music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vainThalberg'sArt of Singing on the Piano. I finished. There was a murmur; nothing more.
Then Liszt's voice cut the air:
"I expected Thalberg's tremolo study," he said. I took the hint and arose.
He permitted me to kiss his hand, and, without stopping for my hat and walking-stick in the antechamber, I went away to my lodgings. Later I sent a servant for the forgotten articles, and the evening saw me in a diligence miles from Weimar. But I had played for Liszt!
Now, the moral of all this is that my testimony furthermore adds to the growing mystery of Franz Liszt. He heard hundreds of such pianists of my caliber, and, while he never committed himself—for he was usually too kind-hearted to wound mediocrity with cruel criticism, yet he seldom spoke the unique word except to such men as Rubinstein, Tausig, Joseffy, d'Albert, Rosenthal, or von Bülow. A miraculous sort of a man, Liszt was ever pouring himself out upon the world, body, soul, brains, art, purse—all were at the service of his fellow-beings. That he was imposed upon is a matter of course; that he never did an unkind act in his life proves him to have been Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman: "One who never inflicts pain." And only now is the real significance of the manas a composer beginning to be revealed. Like a comet he swept the heavens of his early youth. He was a marvelous virtuoso who mistook the piano for an orchestra and often confounded the orchestra with the piano. As a pianist pure and simple I prefer Sigismund Thalberg; but, as a composer, as a man, an extraordinary personality, Liszt quite filled my firmament.
Setting aside those operatic arrangements and those clever, noisy Hungarian Rhapsodies, what a wealth of piano-music has not this man disclosed to us. Calmly read the thematic catalog of Breitkopf and Härtel and you will be amazed at its variety. Liszt has paraphrased inimitably songs by Schubert, Schumann, and Robert Franz, in which the perfumed flower of the composer's thoughts is never smothered by passage-work. Consider the delicious etudeAu bord d'une Source, or theSonnets After Petrarch, or those beautiful concert-studies in D-flat, F-minor, and A-flat; are they not models of genuine piano-music! The settings of Schubert marches Hanslick declared are marvels; and theTranscendental Studies!Are not keyboard limitations compassed? Chopin, a sick man physically, never dared as did Liszt. One was an æolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these studies in their revised form; Icontent myself with the first sketches published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen. Later Liszt expanded thecroquisinto elaborate frescoes. And yet they say that he had no thematic invention!
Take up his B-minor sonata. Despite its length, an unheavenly length, it is one of the great works of piano-literature fit to rank with Beethoven's most sublime sonatas. It is epical. Have you heard Friedheim or Burmeister play it? I had hoped that Liszt would vouchsafe me a performance, but you have seen that I had not the courage to return to him. Besides, I wasn't invited. Once in Paris a Liszt pupil, George Leitert, played for me theDante Sonata, a composition I heard thirty years later from the fingers of Arthur Friedheim. It is theDivine Comedycompressed within the limits of a piano-piece. What folly, I hear some one say! Not at all. In several of Chopin's Preludes—his supreme music—I have caught reflections of the sun, the moon, and the starry beams that one glimpses in lonely midnight pools. If Chopin could mirror the cosmos in twenty bars, why should not a greater tone-poet imprison behind the bars of his music the subtle soul of Dante?
To view the range, the universality of Liszt's genius, it is only necessary to play such a tinypiano-composition,Eclogue, fromLes Années de Pèlerinageand then hear hisFaust Symphony, hisDante Symphony, his Symphonic Poems. There's a man for you! as Abraham Lincoln once said of Walt Whitman. After carefully listening to theFaust Symphonyit dawns on you that you have heard all this music elsewhere, filed out, triturated, cut into handy, digestible fragments; in a word, dressed up for operatic consumption, popularized. Yes, Richard Wagner dipped his greedy fingers into Liszt's scores as well as into his purse. He borrowed from the pure Rhinegold hoard of the Hungarian's genius, and forgot to credit the original. In music there are no quotation marks. That is the reason borrowing has been in vogue from Handel down.
TheRing of the Nibelungswould not be heard today if Liszt had not written its theme in hisFaust Symphony.Parsifalis altogether Lisztian, and a German writer on musical esthetics has pointed out recently, theme for theme, resemblance for resemblance, in this Liszt-WagnerVerhältniss. Wagner owed everything to Liszt—from money to his wife, success, and art. A wonderful white soul was Franz Liszt. And he is only coming into his kingdom as a composer. Poor, petty, narrow-minded humanity could not realize that because a man was a pianist amongpianists, he might be a composer among composers. I made the error myself. I, too, thought that the velvet touch of Thalberg was more admirable than the mailed warrior fist of Liszt. It is a mistake. And now, plumped on my knees in Liszt's Bayreuth tomb, I acknowledge my faults. Yes, he was a greater pianist than Thalberg. Can an old-fashioned fellow say more?
With genuine joy I sit once more in my old arm-chair and watch the brawling Wissahickon Creek, its banks draped with snow, while overhead the sky seems so friendly and blue. I am at Dussek Villa, I am at home; and I reproach myself for having been such a fool as ever to wander from it. Being a fussy but conscientious old bachelor, I scold myself when I am in the wrong, thus making up for the clattering tongue of an active wife. As I once related to you, I recently went to New York, and there encountered sundry adventures, not all of them of a diverting nature. One you know, and it reeks in my memory with stale cigars, witless talk, and all the other monotonous symbols of Bohemia. Ah, that blessed Bohemia, whose coast no man ever explored except gentle Will Shakespeare! It is no-man's-land; never was and never will be. Its misty, alluring signals have shipwrecked many an artistic mariner, and—but pshaw! I'm too old to moralize this way. Only young people moralize. It is their prerogative. When they live, when they fathom good and evil and their mysteries, charity willcheck their tongues, so I shall say no more of Bohemia. What I saw of it further convinced me of its undesirability, of its inutility.
And now to my tale, now to finish forever the story of my experiences in Gotham! I declaimed violently against Tchaikovsky to my acquaintances of the hour, because my dislike to him is deep rooted; but I had still to encounter another modern musician, who sent me home with a headache, with nerves all jangling, a stomach soured, and my whole esthetic system topsy-turveyed and sorely wrenched. I heard for the first time Richard Wagner'sDie Walküre, and I've been sick ever since.
I felt, with Louis Ehlert, that another such a performance would release my feeble spirit from its fleshly vestment and send it soaring to the angels, for surely all my sins would be wiped out, expiated, by the severe penance endured.
Not feeling quite myself the day after my experiences with the music journalists, I strolled up Broadway, and, passing the opera-house, inspected themenufor the evening. I read, "Die Walküre, with a grand cast," and I fell to wondering what the wordWalküremeant. I have an old-fashioned acquaintance with German, but never read a line or heard a word of Wagner's. Oh, yes; I forget the overture toRienzi, which always struck me as noisy and quite in Meyerbeer's most vicious manner. But the Richard Wagner, the later Wagner, I read so much about in the newspapers, I knew nothing of. I do now. I wish I didn't.
Says I to myself, "Here's a chance to hear this Walkover opera. So now or never." I went in, and, planking my dollar down, I said, "Give me the best seat you have." "Other box-office, on 40th Street, please, for gallery." I was taken aback. "What!" I exclaimed, "do you ask a whole dollar for a gallery seat? How much, pray, for one down-stairs?" The young man looked at me curiously, but politely replied, "Five dollars, and they are all sold out." I went outside and took off my hat to cool my head. Five good dollars—a whole week's living and more—to listen to a Wagner opera! Whew! It must be mighty good music. Why I never paid more than twenty-five cents to hear Mozart'sMagic Flute, and with Carlotta, Patti, Karl Formes, and—but what's the use of reminiscences?
I could not make up my mind to spend so much money and I walked to Central Park, took several turns, and then came down town again. My mind was made up. I went boldly to the box-office and encountered the same young man."Look here, my friend," I said, "I didn't ask you for a private box, but just a plain seat, one seat." "Sold out," he laconically replied and retired. Then I heard suspicious laughter. Rather dazed, I walked slowly to the sidewalk and was grabbed—there is no other word—by several rough men with tickets and big bunches of greenbacks in their grimy fists. "Tickets, tickets, fine seats forDe Volkyuretonight." They yelled at me and I felt as if I were in the clutches of the "barkers" of a downtown clothing-house. I saw my chance and began dickering. At first I was asked fifteen dollars a seat, but seeing that I am apoplectic by temperament they came down to ten. I asked why this enormous tariff and was told that Van Dyck, Barnes, Nordica, Van Rooy, and heaven knows who besides, were in the cast. That settled it. I bargained and wrangled and finally escaped with a seat in the orchestra for seven dollars! Later I discovered it was not only in the orchestra, but quite near the orchestra, and on the brass and big drum side.
When I reached the opera-house after my plain supper of ham and eggs and tea it must have been seven o'clock. I was told to be early and I was. No one else was except the ticket speculators, who, recognizing me, gave me another hard fightuntil I finally called a policeman. He smiled and told me to walk around the block until half-past seven, when the doors opened. But I was too smart and found my way back and everything open at 7.15, and my seat occupied by an overcoat. I threw it into the orchestra and later there was a fine row when the owner returned. I tried to explain, but the man was mad, and I advised him to go to his last home. Why even the ushers laughed. At 7.45 there were a few dressed up folks down stairs, and they mostly stared at me, for I kept my fur cap on to heat my head, and my suit, the best one I have, is a good, solid pepper-and-salt one. I didn't mind it in the least, but what worried me was the libretto which I tried to glance through before the curtain rose. In vain. The story would not come clear, although I saw I was in trouble when I read that the hero and heroine were brother and sister. Experience has taught me that family rows are the worst, and I wondered why Wagner chose such a dull, old-fashioned theme.
The orchestra began to fill up and there was much chattering and noise. Then a little fellow with beard and eyeglasses hopped into the conductor's chair, the lights were turned off, and with a roar like a storm the overture began. I tried to feel thrilled, but couldn't. I had expecteda new art, a new orchestration, but here I was on familiar ground, so familiar that presently I found myself wondering why Wagner had orchestrated the beginning of Schubert'sErlking. The noise began in earnest and by the light from a player's lamp I saw that the prelude was intended for a storm. "Ha!" I said, "then it was theErlkingafter all." The curtain rose on an empty stage with a big tree in the middle and a fire burning on the hearth.
There was no pause in the music at the end of the overture—did it really end?—which I thought funny. Then a man with big whiskers, wearing the skin of an animal, staggered in and fell before the fire. He seemed tired out and the music had a tired feeling too. A woman dressed in white entered and after staring for twenty bars got him a drink in a ram's horn. The music kept right on as if it were a symphony and not an opera. The yelling from the pair was awful, at least so it seemed to me. It appears that they were having family troubles and didn't know their own names. Then the orchestra began stamping and knocking, and a fellow with hawk wings in his helmet, a spear and a beard entered, and some one next to me said "There's the Hunding motive." Now I know my German, but I saw no dog, besides, what motive could theanimal have had. The three people, a savage crew, sat down and talked to music, just plain talk, for I didn't hear a solitary tune. The girl went to bed and the man followed. The tenor had a long scene alone and the girl came back. They must have found out their names, for they embraced and after pulling an old sword out of the tree, they said a lot and went away. I was glad they had patched up the family trouble, but what became of the big, black-bearded fellow with the hawk wings in his helmet?
The next act upset me terribly. I read my book, but couldn't make out why, ifWotanwas the God of all and high much-a-muck, he didn't smash all his enemies, especially that cranky old woman of his,Fricka?What a pretty name! I got quite excited when Nordica sang a yelling sort of a scream high up on the rocks. Not at the music, however, but I expected her to fall over and break her neck. She didn't, and shouting Wagner's music at that. Why it would twist the neck of a giraffe! Quite at sea, I saw the brother and sister come in and violently quarrel, and Nordica return and sing a slumber song, for the sister slept and the brother looked cross. Then more gloom and a duel up in the clouds, and once more the curtain fell. I heard the celebratedRide of the Valkyriesand wondered if it was music orjust a stable full of crazy colts neighing for oats. Dean Swift's Gulliver would have said the latter. I thought so. The howling of the circus girls up on the rocks paralyzed my faculties.
It was a hideous saturnalia, and deafened by the brass and percussion instruments I tried to get away, but my neighbors protested and I was forced to sit and suffer. What followed was incomprehensible. The crazy amazons, the Walk-your-horses, and the disagreeableWotankept things in a perfect uproar for half an hour. Then the stage cleared and the father, after lecturing his daughter, put her to sleep under a tree. He must have been a mesmerist. Red fire ran over the stage, steam hissed, the orchestra rattled, and the bass roared. Finally, to tinkling bells and fourth of July fireworks, the curtain fell on the silliest pantomime I ever saw.
The music? Ah, don't ask me now! Wait until my nerves get settled. It never stopped, and fast as it reeled off I recognized Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Weber—lots of Weber—Marschner, and Chopin. Yes, Chopin! The orchestration seemed overwrought and coarse and the form—well, formlessness is the only word to describe it. There was an infernal sort of skill in the instrumentation at times, a short-breathed juggling with other men'sideas, but no development, no final cadence. Everything in suspension until my ears fairly longed for one perfect resolution. Even in theSpring Songit does not occur. That tune is suspiciously Italian, for all Wagner's dislike of Italy.
And this is your operatic hero today! This is your maker of music dramas! Pooh! it is neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Give me one page from theMarriage of Figaroor the finale toDon Giovanniand I will show you divine melody and great dramatic writing! But I'm old-fashioned, I suppose. I have since been told the real story ofDie Walküreand am dumfounded. It is all worse than I expected. Give me my Dussek, give me Mozart, let me breathe pure, sweet air after this hot-house music with its debauch of color, sound, action, and morals. I must have the grip, because even now as I write my mind seems tainted with the awful music of Richard Wagner, the arch fiend of music. I shall send for the doctor in the morning.