CHAPTER II.
DIVERTISSEMENTS HONGROIS.
The Power of Music—Its Origin and Influence—Relation to Nature—Bach, Mozart and Beethoven—Sources of their Inspiration—Autobiographical Sketch—Liszt as a Lad—His Voluntary Exile—Revival of the Home Feeling—His Love of Nature—Religious Feeling—The Gypsies—A Famous Visit to them—Picturesque Surroundings—Wild Dances—Talks with the Old Men—The Gypsy Hags—An Impromptu Orchestra and Wonderful Music—A Weird Night Scene—Salvator Rosa Effects—Grotesque Cavalcade—The Concert at the Inn—A Demoniac Symphony—Wild Revel in a Thunder Storm—Liszt’s Hungarian Music.
THE work of artistic genius will always remain an enigma to be silently admired by us, like the incomprehensible and creative phenomena of nature, of which it is, by its very essence, a part and a speaking likeness. Transporting the whole nature and again rousing a secret awe in the presence of its mysterious power, which like nature itself, knows neither good nor evil, deliciously reveling in a flood of light, as when the first morning of creation revealed the boundless fullness of its form, and again filling one with fear and dread of the overpowering immeasurability and the mysterious depths of the original creative power—with such varied emotions this creative force of genius fills us, especially in music, when it confronts us almost face to face with the sense of that secret incomprehensible world-force which, endlessly destroying, creates again and creates only to destroy.
Whence comes the power to a single individual which subdues millions of hearts, which for centuries has dictated the laws of thought and feeling, which seems even to broaden the limits of creation, while it produces pictures and images which were not pre-existent? Is it not the same with the images of tragic poetry? Does it not, like the antique, live an imperishable life by the side of and yet above humanity? Do not these melodies of Mozart and Beethoven give us a new and different view of our kind, and does not the mighty Leipsic cantor, Sebastian Bach, construct a dome of mere tones which is a part of the plan and order of the universe we call the cosmos, a tangible and perceptible mental structure, as apparent as the everlasting abode of Deity?
Whence comes, we repeat, this incomprehensible power, this knowledge we are almost inclined to regard as something unprecedented and impossible? Is it an accident of natural endowment, a mysterious inner combination of powers, which have no connection with the customary mental processes but expand and work in a time and place which we must consciously recollect in order to comprehend the designated results of its immeasurable creative power?
The higher spiritual perceptions in their widest development must spread out before the poetical genius ere he can collect the beams which make a new sun-life for the world. Homer and Sophocles, like Shakespeare and Goethe, in their overpowering creations, represent a new world-period in the growth of humanity, and Beethoven well knew what he said when in a letter to Bettina he called the great, that is, the true poet, “the most precious treasure of a nation.” The highest flights of the plastic perceptions, combined with the objective results of technical skill through long generations, at last make possible the appearance of a Phidias and a Raphael. Who has fully comprehended that grand musical architect, Sebastian Bach, who looks down from the true heights of humanity on a whole generation of spirits who lived and thought in that other world, in which the very creation seemed to repeat itself through mere ethereal tone-vibrations, nay more, a creation was fashioned having nothing to do with the other world, and, if one may credit the bold hypotheses of the philosophers, able to exist without it.
And Mozart! Can we fancy an existence in which the tenderest graces of life bloom like roses and violets without a development of those sources in the human breast in their endless breadth and ineffable depth and reaching their full maturity, from which melody flows and in which the eternal power of creation reveals itself like the reason in idea and word? And then, Beethoven! Deeply concealed, world-pervading and far-reaching influences must have preceded the supernatural power of volition and inspiration, before such a phenomenon could appear and like a new solar system enter the firmament which seems already opened for him. Had we not these remote and world-old proofs of this highest human inspiration preceding all culture—did we not know the deeds, did we not possess the songs of our mighty ancestors which sing them, were it not for these known and observed influences, a phenomenon like Beethoven could not be comprehended. As he sprang from the old lower Germany, there was revealed in him the undaunted hero-spirit of the earlier ages, which in its struggle with foreign popular forms upheld its independence and fitted it to help prepare a new and higher culture for the world.
Let us now observe the source and career of a still further fragment of a similarly overwhelming artistic phenomenon which leads us nearer to the source of its wonderful success, and by the recognition of the intimate union of the mysteriously working forces of nature with the understanding, enables us to clearly comprehend what needs to be made clear to the senses when it is brought before them in the master’s playing and creation.
In the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” of the year 1838, there is a letter of his which gives us his impressions of his revisit to his Hungarian home. We learn from it that Hungary had been and continued to be a home to this genius whose cosmopolitan art, as well as his rare international culture, seemed to render any distinctive national life unnecessary.
Nearly fifteen years ago, this letter says,—it dated in reality from 1821, and was thus more than seventeen—the father forsook his peaceful abode to go out into the world with him, and exchange the simple freedom of country life for the brilliant career of the artist. France at once appeared to him the most fitting sphere for the development of his genius, as he in his simple pride denominated his son’s musical talent. He thoughtfully describes that important period from his fifteenth to his twenty-fifth year, which he had passed in Paris, and which for the time had caused him to forget his home, and to regard France as his fatherland. People, things, events and places powerfully affect his ideas. He says that a flood of radiance streams from his heart. The absolute necessity of loving is so strong in his nature that a little part of himself goes out to everything that is near him. He is disquieted by the tumult of his own emotions. He does not actually live; he merely strives for life. He is full of curiosity, longing and restless desire. A continuous ebb and flow of contending emotions surges through him. He exhausts himself in a labyrinth of confused longings and passions. He can only regard with pity everything simple, slight and natural. He oversteps all bounds, boldly searches after difficulties and the good things which he might do, the feelings which might be a blessing to him he considers scarcely of any value. In a word he is mercilessly tortured with these thorns of youth.
The soil of France, where he passed this time of feverish strife, of wasted powers, of energetic but perverted life-vigor, received the mortal remains of his father. There was his grave—the holy place of his first sorrow. “How could I help regarding myself as the child of a country in which I loved and suffered so much,” said he.
And yet there is a still more sacred home than the one where we have had our first personal experiences and appreciations. It is the place of our birth, where our earliest feelings and emotions impressed us. Speaking of this longing for home, he says: “On one occasion an accident aroused the feeling which had only slumbered, while I thought it lost.” One morning in Venice he read a description of the calamity which an inundation had caused in the capital of his fatherland. “Their misfortune affected me deeply and I was impelled by an irresistible longing to help the unfortunate sufferers,” he says. “But how could I help, I, who possessed neither the means, the money nor the influence which power confers? ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘I will find no rest for the heart, no sleep for the eyes until I have contributed my little mite for the relief of so great a need. Heaven will bless the artist’s penny as much as the millionaire’s gold.’” In such a mood, the real import of the word, “Fatherland,” suddenly became clear to him. “My memory reverted to the past. I looked into myself and discovered with ineffable delight, pure and without blemish, all the treasures of childhood’s recollections.”
He then gives a description of Raiding, his birthplace, accompanied with the warmest and heartiest praise of Hungary and its people. To them, though of older stock, belong the gypsies, apparently the most scattered and wasted of all people on earth, and yet a homogeneous race which more than all others has its own peculiar gift and has given it to the world as its contribution to the aggregate of human culture—the gypsy music.
Young Liszt, “Ferencz,”[A] like them, was also a musician in the sense that nothing in the world could transcend in his estimation such a soul-possession, while he, and perhaps he alone, could fully realize that blessing which is the holiest thing to men and which is born spontaneously in all its perfection and purity, of this art of tone—Religion. Liszt knew this unfortunately-fortunate wandering people. With their music they had first revealed to his soul that deep supernal world, as we above characterized their music. Out of the passionate stir of all the mental powers as well as of pleasure in their impetuous rhythms had come to him the irrepressible longing for a purer and higher mental expression which resounded in their gypsy melodies like the soul-lament of the world. He had experienced and realized that to him, as to the gypsies, music was an All, a hold upon life itself scarcely weaker than the natural bonds of the closest human intimacy or of the love of children and parents. He knew, that to this miserable people, without home or place, without social affiliations or culture, even without religion, this spontaneous art of music was all that the world offers beyond mere nature and her gifts, culture and customs. It was to them those higher thoughts and deeper emotions of human life we call religion and God himself.
As a boy he had realized the expiation which must be made for the attainment of such a spiritual condition. He had heard these tones rising from the lowest depths of a mysterious being and pervading his earliest emotions with all the energy of a heart full of the inexhaustible power of youth, and he had felt himself alternating between rapture and sorrow, between tears and delight, between pride and desire, the plaything of those uncomprehended and eternal powers which nevertheless are the source and essence of life. For years he had acquired and exercised in the great world that immense skill which complete devotion to an external object secures. He was deeply absorbed as well as passionately delighted, as his hands rested upon the keys, as his spirit floated in tones, as his eyes were full of a higher delight in the sight of a world transcending the senses, as his breast heaved with the unaccustomed fullness of the impressions of such feelings and of such a spectacle, and he fully shared the boundless and enthusiastic impressions which his art, his magical playing exercised. All this he had realized a hundred-fold. Why then should his heart not beat when he saw the gypsies again and when he heard again those tones which, so to speak, had summoned him to life? For his life was and is yet only music, and these gypsy melodies are, as it were, the soul of the country to which above all other countries of the world they peculiarly belong. It was this country which first appreciated this music, for Hungary or a Magyar festival without it, is no Hungary, no festival. The gypsies and their music are like another and ideal fatherland in that of Hungary, the most sadly longing as well as the most deliriously passionate expression of its national existence.
Liszt, unquestionably the greatest son which this Hungary has yet produced, has paid a tribute to that race, the gypsies, apparently the weakest of all earth’s people, which with conscientious fidelity tells the story of what they really are and what he himself owes to them. The description of his Hungarian fatherland, of his beloved countrymen, and then of the manner of life and ideas of those restless wanderers, their mysterious origin and still more mysterious endurance as a people, the mystery of their moral duration, if one may so call it, in all their outward change and constant privation, the atmosphere of poetry, or of the actual world-spirit, as one might say, which surrounds them, as it does all the simple products of nature—all this one must read in the volume, “The Gypsies and their Music in Hungary.” For tender love, delicate observation, faithful portraiture, deep intellectual perception, ethical criticism and genuine poetico-ideal clearness, one can find no parallel to the manner in which he has described for us this apparently God and world-forsaken people, maintaining their right to exist. It is a beautiful heart and soul-tribute which the great artist has paid them.
One part of this volume, his visit to the gypsies, confirms in every particular what we have said above of the influence of their art upon him, and of the divine, free inspiration and untrammeled genius of music as the direct outcome of the primitive force of the world itself. We shall let our volume tell the story. It is a variegated picture, and as Salvator Rosa among the robbers is once said to have studied the absolute unrestraint and individuality of their natural life, and the consequent incomparable variety of character and characteristics of landscape, figures, groups, costumes, colors and forms, so we shall find in this highly colored picture at least one of the numerous germs and shoots which, in Liszt, developed into such a strong and vigorous tree. From these genuine children of nature he acquired at least the one indispensable element of all art-creation, a complete freedom and absolute consecration of the entire nature to it.
Liszt relates that on his first return to Hungary, in the summer of 1838, he wished to refresh his youthful recollections with some of their liveliest impressions, and to see again these gypsy bands in the woods and fields, in the picturesque promiscuity of their marches and halting-places, with all the contrast of the union of ages, passions and varying moods, free from any conventional gloss or mask, rather than in the stifled city streets, whose dust they gladly shake off, preferring to wound their feet with the thorns and stubble of the heath than with the rough pavements. “I visited them in their outdoor kingdom, slept with them under the open heavens, played with the children, made presents to the maidens, gossiped with their rulers and chiefs, listened at concerts given to gratuitous audiences, by a hearth-fire whose place chance determined.” Salvator Rosa among the robbers! Thereupon follows a description which strikingly contrasts the extreme naturalness of these wandering hordes with the splendor of cities, particularly of the world-ruling Paris, and with the education and polish of the child of the salon, who was nevertheless an artist, and who could say of himself: “Afterwards I became myself a wandering virtuoso in my fatherland, like them. I was, like them, a stranger to the people. Like them, I pursued my ideal in a complete devotion to art if not to nature.”
Stretched out upon the close, crisp fleeces of their lamb skin mantles, out of which they prepare a couch of honor resting upon freshly plucked and fragrant flowers, before it a row of lofty ash trees, whose wide-spread branches seemed to support the blue sky, stretched out like a broad pavilion and ornamented with curtains of vapory clouds, at his feet a mossy turf, sprinkled with the brightest meadow-flowers, like those tapestries of the Mexican Caciques, he spent hours listening to one of the best of the gypsy orchestras, whose playing was animated by the beauty of the summer day and the abundance of its favorite drink, and accompanied with indescribable ardor the dances of their women, who shook their tamborines with gentle cries and fascinating gestures. During the intervals of rest, so he says, he heard the creaking of the poorly greased axles of their wagons, which had been removed to one side to leave more room for the dancers and the huzzas of the boys in their own jargon, which the musicians politely translated into “Elyen Liszt Ferencz” or “hurrah for Franz Liszt.” Then came shouts of delight at sight of a meal, composed of meat and honey, a noisy cracking of nuts by white-toothed children, and bright laughter, mad leaps, somersaults and a wild whirl and bustle—a genuine lyric of untamed nature and caprice. Actual battles were fought over favorite delicacies, such as some sacks of peas, around which tattered Megaras with disheveled hair, bleared eyes, toothless jaws, hands trembling like aspen leaves, danced incredible sarabands for these gifts which promised to satisfy their greediness. The men to whom he had given beautiful horses, laughingly showed their dazzling teeth and cracked their finger-joints like castanets, threw their caps high in air, strutted about like peacocks and then commenced the fiery rhythms of their dances with a vigor which soon became a frenzy and at last reached that delirious whirl which forms the culminating point of the ecstacy of the dervish dances. Truly a tempting bit for the brush of a genuine Netherlander, but can any one paint their music as well? We shall see, but we will first continue the narrative which leads us to the very verge of this singular, unrestrained and apparently purposeless nomadic existence.
He conversed for a long time with the old men of the tribe and besought them to tell him some of their experiences from their own recalling. Their memory, however, did not extend beyond the limits of the living generation and he was obliged to help them in recalling the course of events so that they could keep them in regular order. Once they have secured the thread of a story, so this close observer informs us, they experience extraordinary pleasure and seem to regain, in all their original freshness, feelings which have been long concealed under later impressions. The less frequently this occurs, however, the greater is the delight with which they again sound the strains of the old time and with growing enthusiasm, often with a bizarre kind of poetry, and with imagery tinted with a constantly increasing oriental glow, they describe the scenes which they have drawn from their recollections.
The description itself was only the expression of momentary and accidental passion, not of a well considered purpose or regularly developed plan, hence these impetuous, unrestrained, unsubdued impulses make dissimulation unnecessary. The originality of the occurrence consists chiefly in the more or less energetic or fanciful passion of the hero who accompanies it with impromptu accessories. The remarkable simplicity of these natural relations prevents that sequence of events, that change of circumstances, that development of the emotions like germinating seeds, which in their maturity are turning points in our destiny. Too quick, prompt and self-willed for patience or perseverance, they as quickly seize what they desire; they take swift revenge for any assault; sometimes, like a wounded animal, they bear away the shaft that has pierced them and to conceal their wounds forsake their tribe. Our narrator further mentions that they observe a haughty and timid silence, a feeling of manly shame, as it were, about their own feelings, and speaking of their companions they only allude to the dead or the faithless, and a word, a nod of the head or a gesture suffices for all they have to say. Thus Liszt could obtain only individual adventures in love-intrigues, strife and crafty tricks, and in these the most important thing, namely, the part played by the principal himself and the controlling passion at work, were persistently and regularly concealed, and yet in spite of all the craftiness which the necessity of procuring alms has taught them they manifest a very poetical sense in picturing the scenes of which they were witnesses, so much so indeed, that the little narratives “can be strung upon the same thread, like pearls of the same color.”
The picture becomes gayer and more animated when he returns to his friends the second time. It was on those same plains of the Oedenburg county where he was born. He had not forgotten his old hosts and they still thought well of him also, for when he left the plain old church, after the mass, where he had prayed so fervently as a child, in which all his neighbors had loudly sung in honor of this same boy, who, the good dames of the village prophesied, would come back in “a carriage of glass,” that is, in a glistening equipage, a great crowd of gypsies swarmed about him and received him with every manifestation of joy and delight, prepared to do him honor.
Their orchestra was soon ready in a neighboring oak-grove. Barrels placed on end and covered with boards formed a table and around it “Roman couches” were made of stacks of hay, one of them a genuine throne of thyme, butterfly-shaped flowers, flax blooms in elegant half-mourning, anemones in white tunics, wild mallows, cornflowers, irises, and golden bells, a “flowery mound fit to offer to Titania.” Nightshades, with their broad, shield-shaped leaves spread a colossal fan about the rural festival. And then follows a description of nature, the counterpart of which may be found in music: “Bees, attracted by the fragrance of the fresh hay, forsook their hives in the neighboring tree-trunks by swarms. Crickets chirped in the rye and wheat fields. Hornets and wasps buzzed their contralto. The dragon-flies came in flights with a whirr like the rustling of taffeta robes. The quails and larks sang. The frightened sparrows called out. The little emerald frogs croaked among the rushes of the brook and a whole swarm of shelterless insects flew about us with the most confused sounds. What polyphony! What ethereal music! What smorzandos on organ points! All this must have floated before Berlioz when he composed the ‘Dance of the Sylphs.’” But, say we, such a picture of the surprisingly varied activity of creative nature must have filled the daring and at all times active fancy of the same artist who quickly makes the living human heart, with all its foolish pride and restless longings, realize “the pain and pangs of almighty nature,” as he terms it, with an effect as wonderfully vivid as only a Salvator Rosa or a Ruysdael could paint it. Farther on we have a genuine Inferno in mere word-pictures.
“Night came before they were weary. To light up the darkness a dozen pitch torches blazed in a circle. The flames arose like cylinders of glowing iron, for not a breath stirred the atmosphere laden with heat and the fragrance of invisible aromatic herbs that had been mowed down in the morning. To our half-closed dreamy eyes the torches appeared like columns supporting the dark canopy of the heavens. The smoke wavered in the air, now concealing and anon revealing the golden stars. The darkness was like a solid wall around a fantastic wood palace, while the gnarled tree-trunks with their curiously twisted branches stood out like statuary. The children leaped about like gnomes and stripped the bushes. The scene constantly grew more strange and fantastic. The women appeared like specters when they suddenly emerged from some dark corner with eyes gleaming like coals and with magical beckoning hands to tell us our ‘good fortune.’ That evening the phrase was not a meaningless one.” As a happy close, one of those humorous scenes occurred which are never wanting among the children of simple nature.
“On the next morning, the men would not hear of an immediate separation, and gave us their company as protectors, some on horseback, some running on foot, to the nearest village. The closeness of the day before was followed by a rain storm but they refreshed themselves with parting drinks and glowed with delight, rejoicing in the fitful rushes of the rain. In their turned lamb’s skins they looked like bears on raging steeds, for they spurred their horses so furiously that they leaped about like carps. The abandon of these people, could scarcely be kept within bounds any longer. They reached a tavern not far off, and here this extraordinary carnival came to an end with a morning serenade under a huge shed, and pretending that it did not rain, the symphony began with an animated flourish, con estro poetico, but the circulating morning’s wine and the liquor of the day before infused them with fresh vigor and soon led to a rinforzado con rabbia. The thunder growled in the distance like a continuous bass. The high beams and the half-fallen walls of the shed gave back such an echo that every sound struck upon the ear with redoubled power. Passionate passages and feats of virtuosity followed each other and were confusedly mixed. This musical morning roar was rent into tatters of tones, and in the stormy finale it seemed as if all the sounds were piled upon each other like a mountain ridge. One could hardly tell whether the old building had not tumbled in, so deafening was the instrumentation of this concert, which certainly would not have received a favorable verdict from any conservatory, and which I myself must declare was somewhat daring.” With this spirited description, this vigorous picture of life closes.
But what is all this in comparison with the effect when the artist takes his own pencil and depicts these scenes in music, the spirit of which re-echoes them all. When Salvator Rosa dashes off his passionately excited scenes from nature, his bold conceptions of bandit characteristics, and other weird pictures of outdoor life and its accessories, as if they were living figures passing before us, we can not help realizing that he must have actually lived among the robbers. The artist has given us his own account of this unpolluted nature and her children. Our musical picture-gallery has been remarkably enriched with his “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” in which he has successfully painted in tones all that life which he has sketched in words and thus has preserved it to the world of art. The “Hungarian Fantasy,” for piano and orchestra, and the stately symphonic poem, “Hungaria,” give us a memorial picture of this animated Hungarian life, so full of strange power and extreme contrasts, with which also, in this regard, the nature-world of the gypsies was fully identified. It was important to give a definite description of it, for it seems in this connection above all else necessary to furnish the details and essentials of a music, which, in contrast with our European musical creations in their accepted forms, is a world in itself, in harmony, rhythm, melody and instrumentation, and one which we recognize as wonderfully fanciful and rich in color and yet full of the germs of life. Did we not possess the inimitable magic of that web of nature in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” we should declare that in the artistic presentation of the wonderful poetry of absolute nature, these works of Liszt, based upon the gypsy music, were the most poetical of all. At all events, by the side of these picturesque, genre pictures, they suffer but little in power, delicacy and reality, and we may call them studies made directly from nature.