ilop241Carl Maria von Weber
Carl Maria von Weber
The scene now shifts to Paris, a city unbelievably frenzied and complex, the Paris that gives the tone to a good half of the music of the romantic period.
‘As I finished my cantata (Sardanapalus),’ writes Berlioz in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious sight. Grapeshot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the façade, women screamed, and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages of my cantata and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets, pistol in hand, with the “blessed riff-raff,” as Barbier said. I shall never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.”’
This was Paris in Berlioz’s and Liszt’s early years there. In Paris at or about this time were living Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Vigny, Balzac, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Lamartine, Dumas the elder, Heine, Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand among the poets, dramatists, and novelists; Guizot and Thiers among the historians; Auguste Compte, Joseph le Maistre, Lamennais, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon among the political philosophers. It is hard to recall any other city at any other time in history (save only the Athens of the Peloponnesian War) which had such a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Thanks to the centralization effected by Napoleon, thanks to the tradition of free speech among the French, the centre of Europe had shifted from Vienna to Paris.
A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodlyclaque, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the romantic school was indisputable.
This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and, in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences, outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’sFaust, as well as our old friendWerther; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the political revolutionists—perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals of ‘purity.’
For the French intellectuals had perhaps had enoughof political life, whereas the Germans were starved for it. At any rate, the French romanticists were almost wholly concerned with artistic canons. To them romanticism meant freedom of the imagination, the demolishing of classical forms and traditional rules, the mixing of the genres ‘as they are mixed in life’; the rendering of the language more sensuous and flexible, and, above all, the expression of the subjective and individual point of view. They had a great cult for the historic, and their plays are filled with local color (real or supposed) of the time in which their action is laid. They supposed themselves to be returning to real life, using everyday details and painting men as they are. In particular they made their work more intimately emotional; they substituted the image for the metaphor, and the pictorial word for the abstract word. This last fact is of greatest importance in its influence on romantic music. The painting of the time, though by no means so radical in technique as that of music, showed the influences of the great social overturning. Subjects were taken from contemporary or recent times—the doings of the French in the Far East, the campaigns of Napoleon, or from the natural scenery round about Paris, renouncing the ‘adjusted landscape’ of the classicists with a ruined temple in the foreground. Scenes from the Revolution came into painting, and the drama of the private soldier or private citizen gained human importance. Géricault emphasized sensuous color as against the severe classicist David. The leader, and perhaps the most typical member, of the romantic school was Delacroix, a defender of the art of the Middle Ages as against the exaggerated cult of the Greeks. He took his subjects ‘from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron (heroes of the literary romanticism); from the history of the Crusades, of the French Revolution, and of the Greek revolt against the Turks.He painted with a feverish energy of life and expression, a deep and poetic sense of color. His bold, ample technique thrust aside the smooth timidities of the imitators and prepared the way for modern impressionism.’[80]
But there was still another result of the suppression of political tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time, under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous. The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation comes to insurrection inWilliam Tell; Catholicism and Protestantism grapple to the death inLes Huguenots. But not only extensively but intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick; Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in the G flat section of the fourth act duet fromLes Huguenots. And this heroicquality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of whose themes, like that of Tasso
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or that ofLes Préludes
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seem to say,Arma virumque cano.
If ever a man was made to respond to this Paris of 1830 it was Franz Liszt. Heroic virtuosity was a solid half of its Credo. Victor Hugo, as a virtuoso of language, must be placed beside the greatest writers of all time—Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and whom else? No less can be said for Liszt in regard to the piano. He was born in 1811 in Raiding, Hungary. He is commonly supposed to be partly Hungarian in blood, although German biographers deny this, asserting that the name originally had the common German form of List. Almost before he could walk he was at the piano. At the age of nine he appeared in public. And at the age of twelve he was a pianist of international reputation. How such virtuosity came to be, no one can explain. Most things in music can be traced in some degree to their causes. But in such a case as this the miracle can be explained neither by his instruction nor by his parentage nor by any external conditions. It is one of the things that must be set down as a pure gift of Heaven. Prominent noblemen guaranteed his further education and, after a few months of study in Vienna, under Czerny and Salieri, he and his father went to Paris, which was to be the centre of his life for some twenty years. He was the sensation of politeParis within a few months after his arrival and he presently had pupils of noble blood at outrageous prices. Two years after his arrival—that is, when he was fourteen—a one-act operetta of his,Don Sanche, was performed at the Académie Royale. Two years later his father died and he was thrown on his own resources as teacher and concert pianist. Then, in 1830, he fell sick following an unhappy love affair, and his life was despaired of until, in the words of his mother, ‘he was cured by the sound of the cannon.’
How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French literature.’ Here is a new thing in music—a musician who dares take all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them, meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration for Hugo’sMarion de Lormeand Schiller’sWilhelm Tell. Be sure, too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic poem,Heroïde Funèbre. He made a brilliant arrangement of theMarseillaiseand wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.
The early manifestations of modern socialistic theory were then in the making—in the cult of Saint-Simon—and Liszt was drawn to them. For many years it was supposed that he was actually a member of the order, though he later denied this. The Saint-Simonians had a concrete scheme of communistic society, and a sortof religious metaphysic. This latter, if not the former, impressed Liszt deeply, especially because of the place given to art as expressing the ideal toward which the people—the whole people—would strive. But a still stronger influence over Liszt was that of the revolutionary abbé, Lamennais. Lamennais was a devout Catholic, but, like many of the priesthood during the first revolution, he was also an ardent democrat. He took it as self-evident that religion was for all men, that God is no respecter of persons. He was pained by the rôle of the Catholic Church in the French Revolution—its continual siding with the ministers of despotism, its readiness to give its blessing and its huge moral influence to any reactionary government which would offer it material enrichment. He felt it was necessary—no less in the interest of the Church than in that of the people—that the Catholic Church should be the defender of democracy against reactionary princes. He was doing precisely what such men as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are trying to do in England to-day. His influence in Paris was great and he became the rallying point for the liberal party in the Church. Perhaps if his counsel had prevailed the Church would not have become in the people’s minds the enemy of all their liberties and would have retained its temporal possessions in the war for Italian unity forty years later. Liszt had always been a Catholic, and in his earlier youth had been prevented from taking holy orders only by his father’s express command. Now he found Lamennais’ philosophy meat to his soul, and Lamennais saw in him the great artist who was to exemplify to the world his philosophy of art. In 1834 Liszt published in theGazette Musicale de Parisan essay embodying his social philosophy of art.
Several points in this manifesto are of importance in indicating what four years of revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt the artist. Though primarily a virtuoso, Liszt had been raised above the mere vain delight of exciting admiration in the crowd. He had made up his mind to become a creative artist with all his powers. He had asserted the artist’s right to do his own thinking, to be a man in any way he saw fit. He had accepted as gospel the romanticist creed that rules must be broken whenever artistic expression demands it and had imbibed to the full the literary and romantic imagery of the school. He had linked up his virtuoso’s sense of the crowd with the only thing that could redeem it and make it an art—the human being’s sense of democracy. And he had outlined with great accuracy (so far as his form of speech allowed) the nature of the music which he was later to compose. We can nowhere find a better description of the music of Liszt at its best than Liszt’s own description of the future ‘humanitarian’ music—which partakes ‘in the largest possible proportions of the characteristics of both the theatre and the church—dramatic and holy, splendid and simple, solemn and serious, fiery, stormy, and calm.’ In this democracy Liszt the virtuoso and Liszt the Catholic find at last their synthesis.
How many purely musical influences operated upon Liszt in these years it is hard to say. We know that he felt the message of Meyerbeer and Rossini (such as it was) and raised it to its noblest form in his symphonic poems—the message of magnificence and high romance. But it is fair to say, also, that he appreciated at its true value every sort of music that came within his range of vision—Schubert’s songs, Chopin’s exquisite pianistic traceries, Beethoven’s symphonies, and the fashionable Italian operas of the day. He arranged an astonishing number and variety of works for the piano, catching with wizard-like certainty the essential beauties of each. But probably the most profound musical influence was that of Berlioz, who seemed the very incarnation of the spirit of 1830. Berlioz’s partialfreeing of the symphonic form, his radical harmony, and, most of all, his use of theidée fixeor representative melody (which Liszt later developed in his symphonic poems) powerfully impressed Liszt and came to full fruit ten years later.
One more influence must be recorded for Liszt’s early Parisian years. It was that of Paganini, who made his first appearance at the capital in 1831. Here was the virtuoso pure and simple. He excited Liszt’s highest admiration and stimulated him to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. In 1826 Liszt had published his first études, showing all that was most characteristic in his piano technique at that time. After Paganini had stormed Paris he arranged some of the violinist’s études for the piano, and the advance in piano technique shown between these and the earlier studies is marked.
But Liszt had by this time thought too much and too deeply ever to believe that the technical was the whole or even the most important part of an artist. He appreciates the value of Paganini and the place of technical virtuosity in art, but he writes: ‘The form should not sound, but the spirit speak! Then only does the virtuoso become the high priest of art, in whose mouth dead letters assume life and meaning, and whose lips reveal the secrets of art to the sons of men....’ Finally, note that, amid all this dogma and cocksureness, Liszt understood with true humility that he was not expressing ultimate truth, that he spoke for art in a transition stage, and was the artistic expression of a transitional culture. ‘You accuse me,’ he said to the poet Heine, ‘of being immature and unstable in my ideas, and as a proof you ennumerate the many causes which, according to you, I have embraced with ardor. But this accusation which you bring against me alone, shouldn’t it, in justice, be brought against the whole generation? Are we not unstable in our peculiar situation between a past which we reject and a future which we do not yet understand?’ Thus revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt a conscious instrument in the transition of music.
For some ten years Liszt remained the concert pianist. His concert tours took him all over Europe, ‘like a wandering gypsy.’ He even dreamed of coming to America. In 1840 he went to Hungary and visited his birthplace. He rode in a coach, thus fulfilling, in the minds of the villagers, the prophecy of an old gypsy in his youth, that he should return ‘in a glass carriage.’ In his book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ he gives a highly colored and delightful account of how he was received by the gypsies, how he spent a night in their camp, how he was accompanied on his way by them and serenaded until he was out of sight. The trip made a lasting impression on his mind. He had heard once more the gypsy tunes which had so thrilled him in his earliest childhood, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies were the result.
In 1833, in Paris, he was introduced to the Countess d’Agoult, and between the two there sprang up a violent attachment. They lived together for some ten years, concerning which Liszt’s biographer, Chantavoine, says bluntly, ‘the first was the happiest.’ They had three children, one of them the wife of the French statesman, Émile Ollivier, and another the wife of von Bülow and later of Richard Wagner. Eventually they separated.
In 1842 Liszt was invited by the grand duke of Weimar to conduct a series of concerts each year in the city of Goethe and Schiller. Soon afterward he became director of the court theatre. He gave to Weimar ten years of brilliant eminence, performing, among other works, Wagner’sTannhäuser,Lohengrin, and ‘Flying Dutchman’; Berlioz’sBenvenuto Cellini; Schumann’sGenovevaand his scenes fromManfred; Schubert’sAlfonso und Estrella; and Cornelius’ ‘The Barber of Bagdad.’ The last work, an attempt to apply Wagnerian principles to comic opera, was received with extreme coldness, and Liszt in disgust gave up his position, leaving Weimar in 1861. But during these years he had composed many of the most important of his works.