Liszt’s Great Resolve—Reply to a Scoffer—Religion and Music—Religion at the Foundation of Culture—George Sand’s Testimony—Relations of Religion and Music—Music in the Catholic and Protestant Churches—Peculiarities of the Musical Services—Influence of the Catholic Church on Music—A gradual Lowering of the Standards—Opera Music in the Church—Liszt’s Ambition to Reform it—His Early Piety—Views on Church Music—The Religious Element in his Compositions—The Hungarian Coronation Mass—The Choral Mass—Departure to Rome—Takes Orders—Why he did not Remain—Germany his Field for Work.
“IS that then a life object?” was the reply of a Prussian school-director on one occasion, when in answer to his question why Liszt had specially taken orders, he was informed that in pursuance of his life-mission it was indispensable for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope and Sistine chapel, in order to accomplish the reform of Catholic church music. If we were also to make the reply to that question, “Yes, perchance at this very time especially more important than the elevation of education,” which would certainly turn the school-man round and make him step aside, we should not encroach upon the domain of politics, but strikingly characterize with this one remark the sad indifference and ignorance of the entire, and for the time the predominating multitude of our educated people, who make and dominate our culture.
How can one, himself outside of the confession, after a little reflection, have any doubt that the only ties which bind and unite the immense mass of the people, besides the desperate occasions of overwhelming necessity, are the ideal conceptions which religion offers in a very crude and yet powerful and forcible shape? On that account the church remains, let her be what she may, so long as this is true, the only source for the great multitude of men which approaches them with such conceptions, and, while it elevates them above themselves and the ordinary necessities, makes them believe in a human community and in mutual duties. Where again is the substitute for such an indispensable institution, so long as we have no other, which in a common union unites the masses upon a sure foundation, and without which cement they would be dashed to atoms. Even granting that state and culture have reached high attainments, no one but a short-sighted person will say that they have reached their utmost possibilities. It was this very feeling which, following upon the mental intoxication of former centuries, and the fearful ones that came after with their outbreaking revolutions and wars, made all the stronger minds and more earnest spirits turn to the existing assurance which we possess in ideal things as permanent realities—Religion and the Church. “Religion is the true cement of the social edifice. The more numerous the stones and details, the stronger should be the cement that unites them,” writes George Sand, in 1830, in the “Lettres d’un Voyageur.” That the assaults of the Catholic church upon the State are as discreditable as the insolent self-elevation of Protestant orthodoxy over all intellectual work and culture, goes without saying. Now, as ever, the church, still more the service, in both confessions, is the sure foundation for all really educated people. Its loftiest purpose can only be to improve the mind religiously and thus secure for it a higher effectiveness. State and church must be regarded from the same point of view as Alberich and Mime, who struggled for the ring upon which depended the heritage and power of the world, while Siegfried possessed it. And as it is rightly claimed on behalf of the Protestant church that its purpose is to give to worship such a form and value that it shall unite and satisfy, in itself, the noblest aspirations and the essentially ideal wants of all mankind, so the Catholic church, as far as a stranger may judge, fails not by earnest consideration and inward endeavor, far removed from the clamor of the day and the warring of dominating factions and parties in the church, to restore again its world-conquering, because world-redeeming power, in that it seeks to give that spirit to its worship in which is the real safety of our time. And as it is not a matter of chance that art has been awakened by this characteristic spirit of the later times, to which it has given a new language, to give a fitting expression to the fullness and depth of feeling, like the infinity of the spirit which springs from the spirit itself, as it is not a matter of chance that music is pre-eminently the daughter of the church and of its service, so from the oldest to the most recent times, this daughter, who meanwhile has become so unspeakably affluent and above all so independent, has been loudly called upon to establish herself in the church and its service in all the perfection and richness of her nature.
If the great difficulty with the Protestant service lies in the fact that it does not easily assimilate music, and, so to speak, make it a part of divine worship, so that its employment makes religious service partake of the nature of a sacred concert, thereby destroying religion itself, if in this case also, peculiar but in no way insuperable difficulties stand in the way of such a result, on the other hand in the Catholic service, music is an indispensable part of it and in the real sense its central part, for transubstantiation, besides the elevation of the Host, which is only a symbol, is felt as a deep inward reality in the music, which at that instant is poured forth at the true Mass even in the most insignificant church like a sacred flood, deeply refreshing the hearts which turn to it. We may say that but for this recalling of the wandering heart to the harmony of the Eternal and the All, but for this return of the individual to the everlasting foundations of being, as they are revealed in transubstantiation, we should not securely hold that art which in its very essence reveals the fixity of the world, outwardly as well as inwardly. It should also be said that the Catholic service, that is, its highest attainment, the Mass, without its daughter, Music, which in an actual sense is in turn its mother, or can at any time become so, could not reach its ultimate possibilities and by its life prolong its own.
There has been endless complaint that with the progress of its dominion, which has immeasurably enhanced the outward pomp of the church, and which has not scorned to make use of the dramatic for its purposes, the music of its worship has become superficial and theatrical. There is also a Jesuitic style in the music, and he who perfects his artistic taste by the ever true and really classical, will find good proofs in Beethoven’s greater Masses as well as in Mozart’s “Requiem,” that since the seventeenth century the opera has invaded the church, and that the peculiar fineries of the Saints’ statues of that time denominated the fundamental character of its music. This is true of Germany as well as of the Roman countries, and any one who has been to Italy knows to his own satisfaction that the latest operatic melodies can be heard to-day upon the organ, even in sublime St. Peter’s at Rome. From Mozart to Mendelssohn, among musicians there is the same complaint of this impropriety, and since Goethe, almost every writer on Italy has spoken of this matter, which is a disgrace to the church and a calamity to the religious elevation of the poor.
Under these circumstances, how could a nature like that of Liszt’s hesitate? As we have seen over and over again, the modern way of regarding things had become, in fact, his second nature, an irresistible and yet spontaneous motive power in all his thoughts and actions. We have an additional test of this artist, which brings us to the very source of his life, even to the very basis of life itself. We have the facts for our information, and need not contemplate the phenomenon of Liszt as a reformer of art in his church in any sense as a wonder or a mere accident. It rests upon the very foundation of his life and it works accordingly.
“From youth up, Franz’s spirit was naturally inclined to devotion, and his passionate feeling for art was blended with a piety which was characterized by all the frankness of his age,” reads an entry in the diary of his father, who died when the son was in his sixteenth year. In 1857, Liszt himself speaks of the poor little church in his Hungarian home, “in which, as a child, I had prayed with such ardent devotion.” Even in his youth he thought that he was called to the church, and it was only the earnest wish, at first, of his father, and afterwards of his mother, an extremely kind-hearted Upper-Austrian, that kept him in the path of art and its practice. The biographical sketch in the “Gazette Musicale de Paris,” of 1834, to which we are indebted for the first reliable accounts of Liszt, significantly says, however: “His piety was rational and imparted a certain freedom to his ideas and their execution. It did not exhibit the stiffness, roughness, dogmatism or brutality of the canting devotee. It was sincere and was the outcome of liberal reason from the Catholic standpoint.” Heine says in one of his Paris letters, 1830, that he has a great talent for speculation, and he dwells upon his “boundless thirst for light and the deity, which bear evidence to the holiness and religion in his nature.”
Enough has already been said to make further reference unnecessary, but the biographical sketch goes on to state that he had undertaken to compose religious music, and says in that connection: “The so-called music of our time did not seem to him to correspond to a manly conception of it, and thus the idea was forced upon him to create religious music.” “We talk of the reformation of church music,” Liszt writes in 1834. “Although this expression ordinarily implies only music like that performed during the ceremonies of divine service, I use it here in its most significant meaning. When the service expressed and satisfied the confessions, the necessities and the sympathies of the people, when men and women found an altar in the church where they could bow the knee, a pulpit where they could draw near to the divine, and it was a sight which refreshed their minds and uplifted their hearts in holy rapture, then church music only needed to retire to its own mysterious sphere and content itself with serving as an accompaniment to the splendor of the Catholic liturgy. In these days, when the altar shakes and totters; in these days, when the pulpit and religious ceremonies serve for the sport of the mocker and doubter, art must leave the inner temple and spreading out through the world seek a place to exhibit its magnificent accomplishments. As in former time—nay, even more than it did then—music must recognize the people and God as the sources of its life. It must speed from one to the other, ennobling, consoling and purifying man, blessing and glorifying God.”
Thus music was to him a service completely divine. More than one witness of that day testifies to the strong impression which the religious agitation of the time of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and the Abbe Lamennais made upon him, which had been already foreshadowed in his own fantasie, the “Berg symphony,” as well as the “Consolation.” In the same year, 1834, appeared the “Pensée des Morts” a fragment of the “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for piano, which he prefaced with some words of Lamartine’s. It also seems to be one of his first attempts to intimately associate poetry and music. This preface reads: “There are contemplative souls which in their solitary meditations are irresistibly elevated by the infinite ideas of religion. All their thoughts are turned to inspiration and prayer, all their being is a silent hymn to the divinity and the divine hope. In themselves and in the surrounding creation they seek the steps that ascend to God, the images and symbols with which to elevate themselves, with which to raise themselves to Him. O, that I could offer such to them! There are hearts broken by sorrow, crushed by the world, who fly to the world of their thoughts and to the solitude of their own souls to weep, to watch and to pray; O, that they might search for a muse as solitary as themselves, find sympathy in her tones, and listening, many a time declare: ‘We pray in thy language, we weep with thy tears, we are uplifted by thy songs.’”
As soon as Liszt, after his long, long wanderings, was in the right mood to actually compose—for the French account rightly calls Liszt’s work “no mechanical exercise but composition in the real sense, the actual artistic creation”—when he had so arranged these creations of his nature, for such we must call these reproductions, as to make sure of artistic results, from the thoughts of his early years, in reality out of a time almost a generation remote from us, sprang the larger part of his religious and church compositions, which we now possess.
The “lofty festival greetings” of the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the Fest Mass for the consecration of the Graner Cathedral (Graner Mass) which preceded that work of 1856, moving along with stately splendor, prove that it was not a mere reflection of the outward show but that it reached the very spirit of the occasion. Still grander was it, so to speak, to offer the daily bread when, alas, so often a stone had been tendered to the hungering multitude. The little Missa Choralis (Choral Mass) is enough to show that he had attained to the desire of his youth and that a truly religious music had been achieved for the church service of our time. It was practically performed for the first time in Vienna, in 1877, by the Cecilia Verein, at the court church. There is nothing of the conventional mass form of the last century in it, and although the arrangement for male voices is in the style of Palestrina, it does not at all remind one of him. It is original, new and modern throughout; in other words, it is in consonance with our own actual feelings. It must have deeply impressed the soul of the layman that this art not merely embellished and animated the service but that he freshly elevated its living spirit, just as Palestrina preserved and handed down to us the lofty religious spirit of the old church.
Liszt was not satisfied with this. He desired his work to be of a practical nature so that the music of the church should be purified, renovated and improved. He resolved to leave Weimar at once, and in 1861 left for Rome. It was necessary for him to become a Capellmeister of the Pope, in order to accomplish what he wished. In accordance with ancient usage such an one must separate himself from the world by taking the first orders. Palestrina was the last Capellmeister at the Sistine who was not in orders. He was married and it was only the impossibility of filling his place that kept him in his position. Thus Liszt, who had always felt like a priest in his art, took orders and is to-day an Abbe.
And why did he not remain in Rome? “I was thwarted by the lack of culture among the cardinals,” he says, speaking in a musical sense, and besides most of the princes of the church are Italian. He felt it was only in Germany that the heart of music could be regenerated. So he came back to us in the North and devoted himself immediately to the encouragement of schools of a better and more original style of church music, such as those established in Regensburg, and Eichstaett and to the Scuola Gregoriana in Rome, in 1881. May they accomplish their purpose though it takes generations. They supply anew that elementary sustenance of the spirit which nothing else can, and which grows more pressing from decade to decade. We recognize anew that here as in every instance of creative activity the man and the artist are one. Securely settled and grounded inwardly he can outwardly rule like a king and as lavishly bestow.