Liszt’s Childish Characteristics—The Home at Raiding—The Father and his Musical Abilities—His Ambition for his Son—Selections from his Diary—Young Liszt’s First Appearances—Peculiarities of his Playing—The Gypsies—The Influence of their Life and Music upon him—Paganini and Bihary—Generosity of Counts Amadee and Szapary—His Studies with Czerny—Old Artists Astonished—Plays before Beethoven—The great Master kisses the Boy—The Journey to Paris—Cherubini’s Churlishness—Liszt’s immense Success—Ovations and Triumphs—A great Favorite among the Ladies—French and German Tributes.
“BEHOLD a young virtuoso, seemingly dropped from the clouds, who arouses the greatest astonishment. The performances of this boy border on the miraculous, and one is tempted to doubt their physical possibility when he hears the young giant thunder forth Hummel’s difficult compositions,” says a Vienna account of this boy, scarce eleven years of age. Only a year afterward, we see Paris wild with amazement over a phenomenon never beheld before. Like that of young Mozart at Naples, the piano was turned round so that they could see what they did not believe to be possible, thereby revealing the genial and manly characteristics of the young artist, which afterward became the delight of the world, like his playing. “His eyes gleam with animation, mischievousness and joy. He is not led to the piano, he rushes up to it. They applaud and he looks surprised. They applaud afresh and he rubs his hands,” it is said, and then are pointed out the national quality, the inspired fury, the unmistakable originality, and at another time the proud, manly expression, which gained for him the appellation of the “Hungarian Wonder-Child.” We shall further notice the indications of these peculiarities, particularly as they are given in a longer biographical notice, which, in its main features, seems to have been taken from his own communication that appeared about the year 1830, in one of the first of Parisian musical journals, the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” which collapsed a few years ago.
Franz Liszt was born October 22, 1811, at Raiding, near Oedenburg. The comet year appeared to his parents a good omen of his future. The father, belonging to a not very wealthy family of the old nobility, was, in his prime, accountant at Eisenstadt with that Prince Nicholas Esterhazy for whom Joseph Haydn was Capellmeister. As he enjoyed the personal acquaintance of the honored master of the quartet, mostly at card-playing, which he practiced as a recreation in the midst of his always severe labor, he was brought into a sphere which was peculiarly musical in its character, and which furnished his own nature with the richest food, for father Liszt was on terms of personal friendship also with that best scholar of Mozart’s, the distinguished pianist, Hummel, born at Presburg in 1778, who officiated many years as the Prince’s Capellmeister at Eisenstadt and Esterhaz. No one esteemed him more highly as a pianist. His playing had made an indelible impression upon him. He was also musical himself in a high degree, playing nearly every instrument, particularly the piano and violoncello, and was only restrained by the displeasure of his family relatives from perfecting himself as a thorough musician. So much the more his dreams and hopes of artistic power were transferred to his eldest son, whose rare talent had manifested itself early. “Thy destiny is fixed. Thou wilt realize that art ideal which fascinated my youth in vain. In thee will I grow young again and transmit myself,” he often said to him. He was so strongly impressed with all the signs of promise in the boy that he devoted a diary to him in which he entered his notes “with the most minute and solicitous punctiliousness of a tender father.” Here is a leaf from the recollections of that childhood:
“After his vaccination, a period commenced in which the boy had to struggle alternately with nervous pains and fever, which more than once imperiled his life. On one occasion, in his second or third year, we thought him dead and ordered his coffin made. This disquieted state continued until his sixth year. In that year he heard me playing Ries’ concerto in C sharp minor. He leaned upon the piano and was all ears. Towards evening he returned from the garden and sang the theme. We made him repeat it but he did not know what he sang. That was the first indication of his genius. He incessantly begged that he might commence piano-playing. After three months’ instruction, the fever returned and compelled us to discontinue it. His delight in instruction did not take away his pleasure in playing with children of his own age, although from this time forth he sought to live more for himself alone. He was not regular in his practice but was always tractable up to his ninth year. It was at this period that he played in public for the first time in Oedenburg. He performed a concerto by Ries in E major and extemporized. The fever attacked him just before he seated himself at the piano and yet he was strengthened by the playing. He had long manifested a desire to play in public and exhibited much ease and courage.”
We interrupt the narrative at this point to inquire what was the active source of this inner consecration to art as well as of the passionate impulse to exhibit it in public. Neither Ferdinand Ries, who merely imitated the ornamentations of his great teacher, Beethoven, nor Mozart’s pupil, Hummel, who succeeded Haydn at Esterhaz, nor the great father of instrumental music himself even felt remotely that genius for execution, the wonderful results of which were already filling the youthful soul like a creative impulse and with a passionate longing for expression urging him on to public performance. In a letter from Paris to Schumann’s musical paper in 1834, it is said: “He often plays tenderly and with gentle melancholy;” then again: “With overpowering passion and with such fire and even fury, that it seems as if the piano must give way beneath his fingers. It often creaks and rattles during his playing. You see head, eyes, hands, the whole upper part of the body moving impetuously in every direction.” On one occasion he fell back from the piano exhausted. Whence this unprecedented devotion to music? Whence, as one might say, this merging of his very identity in his playing?
There are a peculiar people, scattered from the Himalayas even to the Ebro and the Scottish Highlands, possessing nothing, in this wide world of God, but themselves and nature. Neither house nor hearth, neither state nor social forms restrain them. They have no fixed pursuit, no calling which makes a firmly settled existence, based on duty and inclination. They have no manners, no church, no God. And yet these people have lived for centuries, as we know, unchanged in kind and number, yet nowhere settled. They are the gypsies, who seemingly possess nothing which the earth offers men or which makes life valuable. And still more, wherever they appear they are completely ignored and even looked upon with utter contempt. Truly they have nothing and are, as it were, a miserable fragment of the human race, everlastingly forgotten by God. But they have one thing that vies with our culture and art—their music. As they feel the complete rapture of an existence in nature which is boundlessly free, free from everything which hinders the slightest movement or inclination, so in their habits, but particularly in their improvisations, they express the God-given freedom of the inner sensibility in all its emotions, from the proudest human consciousness to the inmost longing of the soul for sympathetic communion. This music is to them as it were their world and God, life and happiness, the sun and all that world-movement with which we feel ourselves closely associated. In a paper, worthy of notice, Liszt has sought to clear up the mystery of the vitality remaining in these dissevered fragments of the old Indian race, and explain the greater mystery how a people so destitute of any social and intellectual basis of life, possess one art and one of such originality, depth and power. We must follow him still further to understand the wonderful effect of his own performances.
“Recollections of the gypsies are associated with memories of my childhood and some of its most vivid impressions,” the world-renowned “Magician of the Hungarian Land,” writes in his fiftieth year: “Afterwards I became a wandering virtuoso, as they are in our fatherland. They have pitched their tents in all the countries of Europe, and I have traversed the tangled maze of roads and paths over which they have wandered in the course of time, my experiences some years, in a certain sense, being very similar to their historical destiny. Like them I was a stranger to the people of every country. Like them I pursued my ideal in the continual revelations of art, if not of nature.” In recalling these early recollections, he confesses that few things impressed him so strongly as these gypsies soliciting alms at the threshold of every palace and cottage for a few words softly whispered in the ear, a few loudly played dance-melodies, or a few songs, such as no minstrel sings, that throw lovers into rapture without their knowing why. How often he himself has sought the solution of this charm, which held all with unchallenged sway! As the weak pupil of a strong master, his father, he had as yet had no other insight into the world of phantasy than the architectural framework of notes in their artificial arrangement together, and when we think of the old-fashioned composers, like Hummel and Ries, we imagine that it must have doubly fascinated him to exercise that charm, which these calloused gypsy hands practiced before all eyes, when they drew the bow across the sighing instrument or made the metal ring with powerful defiance.
We now see how these children of nature, with their most mysterious and spontaneous power of sensibility, blossoming out in their art, absorbed him and filled a soul incapable of jealousy with a natural envy of the incredible effect they produced. His waking dreams had been filled with these bronzed faces, prematurely old with the vicissitudes of centuries and dissolute habits of every sort, their defiant smiles, their dull, red eyes, in which laughs a sardonic unbelief and gleams flash out which glisten but do not glow. Their dances always floated through his visions with their languid, elastic, bounding and tempting movements. By degrees the conviction was borne in upon him that “in comparison with the continuously dull and sombre days imaged upon the background of our civilized world, upon which only here and there some moments beaming with joy or lurid with pain are conspicuous, these beings had fashioned a defter texture of joy and sorrow, alternating with love, song, wine and the dance, as they were excited and soothed by these four elements of passion and voluptuousness.”
Thus early his soul had discovered the supernatural, throned like a sphynx in the inmost recesses of nature. He had felt that mysterious creative power which shapes and maintains the world. He felt it as belonging to his own inner nature and power, and his heart, in the profound consciousness of this magical possession, must have bounded more exultantly, since those other lofty human acquirements of culture and art-work, which first invest the deep outreachings of life with the nobility and loftiness of thought, were open to him also. Henceforth his genius illuminated him, but the activity of this genius, in other words, its creative power, he attributed to his always profound recognition of the mysterious operations of the creative power of nature. A Parisian description of his playing, and that of the similarly “demonish” Paganini, about the year 1834, says: “Music is to them the art which gives man the presentiment of his higher existence, and leads him from the occurrences of ordinary life into the Isis-temple, where nature speaks with him in sacred tones, unheard before and yet intelligible.”
Let us now observe how the success of his playing, which this boy had already evidently achieved by his vigorous expression of his own feelings, influenced his future fortunes. “The tones of his bewitching violin fell upon my ear like drops of some fiery, volatile essence,” he says of the gipsy virtuoso, Bihary, whom he heard in Vienna in 1822. “Had my memory been of soft clay, and every one of his notes a diamond nail, they could not have clung to it more tenaciously. Had my soul been the ooze from which a river-god had returned to his bed, and every tone of the artist a fructifying seed-corn, it could not have taken deeper root in me.”
His father took him at this time to Prince Esterhazy, in whose family musical patronage was hereditary. “I believe that female influence alone succeeds with him,” wrote the great Beethoven two years later, when he proffered the “Missa Solemnis” to him, as he had to another prince, for a subscription. He did not anticipate much kindly feeling on his part towards himself. Of what use, then, for a mere young beginner in art to expect anything? The Prince made him a gift of a few hundred francs. That was little for the heir of Haydn’s patron. In contrast with this, the boy met with a merited reception in the larger and more cultivated city of Presburg. Six noblemen, among them Counts Amadee and Szapary, settled upon him for six years an annuity of six hundred gulden, which satisfied the father’s desire to give the boy a fitting education.
Soon afterward, in the year 1821, he resolved to give up his position and settle in Vienna with his wife and child. He was met with the anxious misgivings of his wife (born in Upper Austria), who could not bear to see her darling exposed to the vicissitudes of an artistic career, and who tremblingly asked what would become of them, if, at the expiration of the time, their hopes were disappointed. “What God wills,” cried the boy of nine, who had listened to the conversation with a quiet timidity. The objections and solicitude of the mother were dispelled, all the more readily, as she was of a deeply and genuinely religious nature.
It was estimated that six hundred francs was a fair price for their household effects. On their arrival in Vienna the father selected the distinguished and unassuming Carl Czerny for the boy’s teacher, for Czerny had been Beethoven’s pupil a short time and played nearly all his compositions by heart. It was only the wonderful endowment of the boy that induced the overburdened teacher to accept him, and when he had finished playing to him he won his complete affection, as he did Beethoven’s. How could a boy of such a fiery musical spirit, who had enjoyed such a free and overflowing life in this art of his youth, play the dry, pedantic Clementi, which Czerny at first selected as the pedagogical groundwork? “If he visited a music store he never found a piece difficult enough to suit him,” says our informant. Once a publisher showed him the B minor concerto of Hummel. The boy turned over the leaves and intimated that it was nothing, and that he could play it at sight, making the assertion in the presence of the first piano-players of the city. The gentleman, astonished at the self-confidence of the boy, took him at his word and led him into the hall where there was a piano. He performed the concerto with equal skill and ease. It was the same composition which he played before Beethoven a year afterwards. Nothing could now restrain him from giving himself entirely to the public. “There is no greater pleasure for me than to practice and display my art,” Beethoven also wrote in his earlier years, and should not a genius who had acquired to his own thorough satisfaction the utmost freedom and highest success by such characteristic performances in public, seek its own free course, the open sea of the great public? “I still remember to have seen and heard this virtuoso whose manly, beautiful personnel displayed all the characteristics of his race,” writes Liszt at the time he first heard Bihary in Vienna. “I can still recall the absolute fascination which he exercised when with an absorbed and at the same time melancholy listlessness, in striking contrast with the apparent buoyancy of his temperament and the flashing glances which, as it were, fathomed the souls of his hearers, he took his violin in his hands and for hours, forgetful that time was also flying, unloosed cascades of tones which streamed on in their wild plunges, anon rippling away as over velvety moss.” On the 18th of December of the same year, 1822, the “Young Hercules” in that concert when he “thundered out” the Hummel composition, so united and as it were kneaded into one whole, the andante of Beethoven’s A major symphony with an aria of Rossini’s, who was at that time idolized in Vienna, that the relator excitedly cries out—“Est deus in nobis.” Verily a god directed the creative and executive power of this little one, with his open brow, his haughty nose, and his countenance lit up by his large, deep eyes, which seemed set in the streaming hair, appearing as it were, like emanations of his power. All this it was that may have urged our serious Beethoven, who could so unerringly distinguish between the true and the false, the great and the little, to go up to the boy at the close of that concert of April 13, 1823, embrace and kiss him.
It was a difficult matter to get the old master out to such a concert. His ill health, deafness and many other troubles had kept him from the public many years. He was moreover restrained by his aversion to prodigies, who were all the rage at that time, and by his fixed displeasure with Czerny, some of whose works were certainly noble, and yet they had not kept him from the faults of a frivolous virtuosity. At last the persuasion of his friends, his own good-heartedness and interest in art prevailed, as they wrote to him the boy and himself were in the same situation which he and Mozart had occupied in their youth. “The presence of the renowned composer, far from intimidating the boy, increased his imaginative power,” says the account. It also expressly mentions that Beethoven encouraged him, but in that reserved manner which was characteristic of him in his last years, and which was ascribed either to his personal circumstances or to his great sorrow about his deafness. Beethoven’s life is to-day fully revealed to us in the firm assurance of his spiritual condition in these last years, when the Ninth Symphony begins with its “Ode to Joy.” It may be found set forth in its historical connection in the book: “Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner.” Thus the young Liszt started upon his way in the great world, consecrated by the kiss of the freest poetical spirit in his art.
The next move was to Paris, which at that time, indeed, was the most important place in the world for artistic, and above all musical productivity. Besides, as the opportunity for full musical development was wanting in Vienna, since Beethoven himself was no longer active in such matters, it seemed best to apply to the Paris Conservatory, at that time under the world-renowned Cherubini. “The boy was pleased with the excellent receipts,” says our last concert report, and their means for the journey were soon increased in Munich, where he succeeded in rivaling the very eminent Moscheles, and heard himself called “the second Mozart.” It was the same also at Stuttgart. Then they went to Paris.
“The two strangers made application to Cherubini, with letters of recommendation from Prince Metternich,” says a Parisian sketch. He met them with the reply: “A foreigner can not enter the Conservatory!” The Director forgot that he himself was an Italian. The disappointed father fell into despair. Had he then risked his very existence on the hope of the complete artistic development of his son?
Meanwhile his hope for the success and artistic perfection of the boy was at last gratified. The public and the friends of the noble art itself supplied the place of a narrow-minded and envious clique and became father and godfather alike to this true “wonder-child” of the nineteenth century, of whom one account aptly says: “We believe that no other contemporary has created so profusely or reflected so faithfully his varied acquirements as he.” They were next summoned to the Palais Royal. It was on New Year’s, 1824. The boy charmed every one. The Duke of Orleans, afterwards King Louis Philippe, in his delight bade him ask for any gift he liked. “This harlequin,” cried the boy, and pointed to a beautiful automaton hanging on the wall.
This incident, as in the case of Mozart, illustrates the utter unselfishness of the real artist, who continually gave and desired nothing for himself. These frank, manly traits, like the incomparable genius of the boy, who was no longer a boy, powerfully affected every one within his circle. The biography of his youth tells us his sensibility was as perceptible as it was attractive to every one.
A year passed, and the young Liszt became in the mean time, so to speak, the plaything of all the ladies of Paris. Everywhere he was caressed and fondled. His roguish tricks and pranks, his whims and caprices were all observed and told over and over. Every one was delighted. Scarcely thirteen years of age, he had awakened love, aroused envy, kindled enmity. All were attracted to him and were completely infatuated with him.
This sudden conquest of the leading society of the Europe of that day, which was noted in the public prints, may be found more amply detailed in the volume, “Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner.” Heaven must have remarkably endowed that extraordinary child, who at the age of twelve was without a rival, and that too in an art in which he accomplished and understood what no mortal could boast to have produced of himself. The “genius for performance,” whose sources we have sought to locate, without, however, the skill to disclose their lowest depths, since they lie in that combination of the freest and most individual power, as applied to universal individuality and to the artistic, which we call “genius”—this unsurpassed skill of performance was so irresistibly overwhelming at that time, for example upon an actor like Talma, that one evening in the Italian theatre, while they rushed around the boy from all the boxes, he threw his arms about him and embraced him so closely, that the poor little fellow had great difficulty in releasing himself so that he could see his enthusiastic friends. It was developed to its ultimate perfection by the continuous and hearty recognition of his gifts by a great and sympathetic public in France and England. His face more and more assumed the likeness of an Apollo, with the types of the two royal animals, the lion and the eagle, as we observe in an excellent picture of him in his youth. In his playing he also resembled that Pythian deity, who in the glowing embrace of the proud Muse disclosed her hidden secret and threw the world into rapturous amazement.
It was Paganini who had the first and most decisive influence upon the unapproachable playing of the young artist. It was the language of unfathomable nature, the same which he had heard among the gypsies, but translated into the higher language of genius, without which the superhuman, which is so mysteriously throned in our deeper natures, would remain unexpressed. It was in the year 1831 that this hero of violinists appeared in Paris, and carried everything before him with his concerts. The most inconceivable difficulties were overcome in his consummate achievements and seemed to be the essential methods of expressing particular emotions, like those of the deepest sorrow or the most extravagant humor. Liszt, at that time in his nineteenth year, was touched to his inmost soul by this playing. “He became convinced,” says a contemporary musical writer, “it was only through new and unusual means that a large audience could be roused into unexampled enthusiasm, and that the same methods could be applied to the piano, which had been used with the violin. He determined to become the Paganini of the piano. That he became even greater, we now know. We close these preludes of his life with some little known accounts of these first reproductive periods.”
In that excellent Parisian musical journal, to which Liszt himself contributed many years, the following appeared in 1834, when he was in his twenty-second year: “His playing is his language, his soul. It is the very poetical essence of all the impressions he has felt, of all that have captivated him. These impressions, which in all likelihood he could not render in language, and express in clear and precise ideas, he reproduced in their full meaning, with an accurate skill, a natural power, an energy of feeling and a charming grace, which have never been equaled. At one time his art is passive, an instrument, an echo; it expresses and interprets. At another it is active again; it speaks. It is the organ which he uses for the development of his ideas. Hence it is that Liszt’s playing is not a mechanical, material exercise, but much more than this, in the genuine sense a composition, a successful creation of art.”
The details of his performances are then noted, as for instance, that in the Weber “Concert-Stueck” he drowned a tutti of the orchestra with his piano and its thunder overpowered the hundred voices of its instruments and the thousand-fold bravas which rang through the hall at that instant. “How is it that we feel a sudden and irresistible pressure in the breast and a stoppage of the breath as soon as Liszt sits down to the piano to play the simplest thing, a capriccio, a waltz, an etude of Cramer, Chopin or Moscheles,” wonderingly asks this admirer. Then he refers to his playing of Beethoven’s music. “Beethoven is a divinity to Liszt, before whom he bows his head. He regards him as a savior whose advent in the world through the freedom of poetical thought has been signalized by his annihilation of superannuated practices. You must hear him while he plays one of those melodious poems which are distinguished by the commonly accepted name of sonata. You must see his eyes when he raises them as if to receive an inspiration from above, and when again he lowers them sadly to the earth. You must see him, hear him, and—be silent. For here you feel only too well how feeble is any expression of admiration.”
About the same time appeared a very considerate German account in Robert Schumann’s musical paper. “In Paris they did not have much faith in the young artist’s talent for composing or originating ideas, but on the other hand credited him with divining the thoughts of the great masters by his perceptions and study. So far as his playing was concerned, they could only use the expression, ‘marvelous.’ He plays with unrivaled facility and purity, elegantly, tenderly and with fire. He carries the listener along with him and often makes him fear that he will not hold out. It is related that at the close of one day, after a too continuous and lavish display of his vigor and power, he was exhausted by weariness. He triumphs over all, only he can not conquer his nerves, which I fear, will conquer him,” says our countryman in conclusion. “In a word, you behold an immensely nervous man who plays the piano immensely.”
The world knows to-day, by hundreds and hundreds of his victorious achievements, that by the “ideality of his personal presence” as well as by the fascinating and magical beauty of his playing, he has marched through the world like another Alexander the Great, and that it yielded not merely to the purest enjoyment of human nature but to the highest possible proofs of truth and beauty—brother and sister to each other as it were, yet in our inmost being they are one.