Franz Liszt

Liszt's Birthplace, Raiding

The year 1811 was the year of the great comet. Its wine is said to have been of a richness; some well-known men were born, beginning with Thackeray and John Bright; Napoleon's son, the unhappy Duc de Reichstadt, first saw the light that year, as did Jules Dupré, Théophile Gautier, and Franz Liszt. There will be no disputes concerning the date of his birth, October 22d, as was the case with Chopin. His ancestors, according to a lengthy family register, were originally noble; but the father of Franz, Adam Liszt, was a manager of the Esterhazy estates in Hungary at the time his only son and child was born. He was very musical, knew Joseph Haydn, and was an admirer of Hummel, his music and playing. The mother's maiden name was Anna Lager (or Laager), a native of lower Austria, with German blood in her veins. The mixed blood of her son might prove a source of interest to Havelock Ellis in his studies of heredity and genius. If Liszt was French in the early years of his manhood, he was decidedly German the latter half of his life. The Magyar only came out on the keyboard, and in his compositions. She was of a happy and extremely vivacious nature, cheerful in her old age, and contented to educate her three grandchildren later in life. The name Liszt would be meal or flour in English; so that Frank Flour might have been his unromantic cognomen; a difference from Liszt Ferencz, with its accompanying battle-cry of Eljen! In his son Adam Liszt hoped to realise his own frustrated musical dreams. A prodigy of a prodigious sort, the comet and the talent of Franz were mixed up by the superstitious. Some gipsy predicted that the lad would return to his native village rich, honoured, and in a glass house (coach). This he did. In Oedenburg, during the summer of 1903, I visited at an hour or so distant, the town of Eisenstadt and the village of Raiding (or Reiding). In the latter is the house where Liszt was born. The place, which can hardly have changed much since the boyhood of Liszt, is called Dobrjan in Hungarian. I confess I was not impressed, and was glad to get back to Oedenburg and civilisation. In this latter spot there is a striking statue of the composer.

Anna Liszt

Liszt's Mother

It is a thrice-told tale that several estimable Hungarian magnates raised a purse for the boy, sent him with his father to Vienna, where he studied the piano with the pedagogue Carl Czerny, that indefatigable fabricator of finger-studies, and in theory with Salieri. He was kissed by the aged Beethoven on the forehead-Wotan saluting young Siegfried-though Schindler, ami de Beethoven, as he dubbed himself, denied this significant historical fact. But later Schindler pitched into Liszt for his Beethoven interpretations, hotly swearing that they were the epitome of unmusical taste. The old order changeth, though not old prejudices. Liszt waxed in size, technique, wisdom. Soon he was given up as hopelessly in advance of his teachers. Wherever he appeared they hailed him as a second Hummel, a second Beethoven. And he improvised. That settled his fate. He would surely become a composer. He went to Paris, was known as le petit Litz, and received everywhere. He became the rage, though he was refused admission to the Conservatoire, probably because he displayed too much talent for a boy. He composed an opera, Don Sancho, the score of which has luckily disappeared. Then an event big with consequences was experienced by the youth-he lost his father in 1827. (His mother survived her husband until 1866.) He gave up concert performances as too precarious, and manfully began teaching in Paris. The revolution started his pulse to beating, and he composed a revolutionary symphony. He became a lover of humanity, a socialist, a follower of Saint-Simon, even of the impossible Père Prosper Enfantin. His friend and adviser was Lamenais, whose Paroles d'un Croyant had estranged him from Rome. A wonderful, unhappy man. Liszt read poetry and philosophy, absorbed all the fashionable frenzied formulas and associated with the Romanticists. He met Chopin, and they became as twin brethren. Fran?ois Mignet, author of A History of the French Revolution, said to the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Liszt: "In the brain of this young man reigns great confusion." No wonder. He was playing the piano, composing, teaching, studying the philosophers, and mingling with enthusiastic idealists who burnt their straw before they moulded their bricks. As Francis Hackett wrote of the late Lord Acton, Liszt suffered from "intellectual log-jam." But the current of events soon released him.

Adam Liszt

Liszt's Father

He met the Countess d'Agoult in the brilliant whirl of his artistic success. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her contemporaries declare she was not of a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de Flavigny, at Frankfort-on-Main in 1805. Her father was the Vicomte de Flavigny, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich banker, originally from Amsterdam and a reformed Hebrew. She had literary ability, was proud of having once seen Goethe, and in 1827 she married Comte Charles d'Agoult. But social sedition was in the air. The misunderstood woman-no new thing-was the fashion. George Sand was changing her lovers with every new book she wrote, and Madame, the Countess d'Agoult-to whom Chopin dedicated his first group of Etudes-began to write, began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt appeared. He seems to have been the pursued. Anyhow, they eloped. In honour he couldn't desert the woman, and they made Geneva their temporary home. She had in her own right 20,000 francs a year income; it cost Liszt exactly 300,000 francs annually to keep up an establishment such as the lady had been accustomed to-he earned this, a tidy amount, for those days, by playing the piano all over Europe. Madame d'Agoult bore him three children: Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. The first named married Emile Ollivier, Napoleon's war minister-still living at the present writing-in 1857. She died in 1862. Cosima married Hans von Bülow, her father's favourite pupil, in 1857; later she went off with Richard Wagner, married him, to her father's despair-principally because she had renounced her religion in so doing-and to-day is Wagner's widow. Daniel Liszt, his father's hope, died December, 1859, at the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatised the birth of his children, had educated them, had dowered his daughters, and they proved all three a source of sorrow.

Blandine Ollivier

Daughter of Liszt

He quarrelled with the D'Agoult and they parted bad friends. Under the pen name of Daniel Stern she attacked Liszt in her souvenirs and novels. He forgave her. They met in Paris once, in the year 1860. He gently told her that the title of the souvenirs should have been "Poses et Mensonges." She wept. Tragic comedians, both. They were bored with one another; their union recalls the profound reflection of Flaubert, that Emma Bovary found in adultery all the platitudes of marriage. Perhaps other ladies had supervened. Like Byron, Liszt was the sentimental hero of the day, a Chateaubriand René of the keyboard. Balzac put him in a book, so did George Sand. All the painters and sculptors, Delaroche and Ary Scheffer among others made his portrait. Nevertheless, his head was not turned, and when, after an exile of a few years, Thalberg had conquered Paris in his absence, he returned and engaged in an ivory duel, at the end worsting his rival. Thalberg was the first pianist in Europe, contended every one. And the Belgiojoso calmly remarked that Liszt was the only one. After witnessing the Paderewski worship of yesterday nothing related of Liszt should surprise us.

Daniel Liszt

Son of Liszt

In the meantime, Paganini, had set his brain seething. Chopin, Paganini and Berlioz were the predominating artistic influences in his life; from the first he appreciated the exotic, learned the resources of the instrument, and the value of national folk-song flavour; from the second he gained the inspiration for his transcendental technique; from the third, orchestral colour and the "new paths" were indicated to his ambitious spirit. He never tired, he always said there would be plenty of time to loaf in eternity. His pictures were everywhere, he became a kind of Flying Hungarian to the sentimental Sentas of those times. He told Judith Gautier that the women loved themselves in him. Modest man! What charm was in his playing an army of auditors have told us. Heine called Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a Sibyl, and Doehler-a pianist. Scudo wrote that Thalberg's scales were like pearls on velvet, the scales of Liszt the same, but the velvet was hot! Louis Ehlert, no mean observer, said he possessed a quality that neither Tausig nor any virtuoso before or succeeding him ever boasted-the nearest approach, perhaps, was Rubinstein-namely: a spontaneous control of passion that approximated in its power to nature ... and an incommensurable nature was his. He was one among a dozen artists who made Europe interesting during the past century. Slim, handsome in youth, brown of hair and blue-eyed, with the years he grew none the less picturesque; his mane was white, his eyes became blue-gray, his pleasant baritone voice a brumming bass. There is a portrait in the National Gallery by Lorenzo Lotto, of Prothonotary Giuliano, that suggests him, and in the Burne-Jones picture, Merlin and Vivien, there is certainly a transcript of his features. A statue by Foyatier in the Louvre, of Spartacus, is really the head of the pianist. As Abbé he was none the less fascinating; for his admirers he wore his soutane with a difference.

Useless to relate the Thousand-and-One Nights of music, triumphs, and intrigues in his life. When the Countess d'Agoult returned to her family a council, presided over by her husband's brother, exonerated the pianist, and his behaviour was pronounced to be that of a gentleman! Surely the Comic Muse must have chuckled at this. Like Wagner, Franz Liszt was a Tragic Comedian of prime order. He knew to the full the value of his electric personality. Sincere in art, he could play the grand seignior, the actor, the priest, and diplomat at will. Pose he had to, else abandon the profession of piano virtuoso. But he bitterly objected to playing the r?le of a performing poodle, and once publicly insulted the Czar, who dared to talk while the greatest pianist in the world played. He finally grew tired of Paris, of public life. He had been loved by such various types of women as George Sand-re-christened by Baudelaire as the Prudhomme of immorality; delightful epigram!-by Marie Du Plessis, the Lady of the Camellias, and by that astounding adventuress, Lola Montez. How many others only a Leporello catalogue would show.

His third artistic period began in 1847, his sojourn at Weimar. It was the most attractive and fruitful of all. From 1848 to 1861 the musical centre of Germany was this little town immortalised by Goethe. There the world flocked to hear the first performance of Lohengrin, and other Wagner operas. A circle consisting of Raff, Von Bülow, Tausig, Cornelius, Joseph Joachim, Schumann, Robert Franz, Litolff, Dionys Pruckner, William Mason, Lassen, with Berlioz and Rubinstein and Brahms (in 1854) and Remenyi as occasional visitors, to mention a tithe of famous names, surrounded Liszt. His elective affinity-in Goethe's phrase-was the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who with her child had deserted the usual brutal and indifferent husband-in fashionable romances. Her influence upon Liszt's character has been disputed, but unwarrantably. She occasionally forced him to do the wrong thing, as in the case of the ending of the Dante symphony; vide, the new Wagner Autobiography. Together they wrote his chief literary works, the study of Chopin-the princess supplying the feverish local colour, and the book on Hungarian gipsy music, which contains a veiled attack on the Jews, for which Liszt was blamed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein was an intense, narrow nature-she has been called a "slightly vulgar aristocrat," and one of her peculiarities was seeing in almost every one of artistic or intellectual prominence Hebraic traits or lineaments. Years before the Geyer and the Leipsic Judengasse story came out she unhesitatingly pronounced Richard Wagner of Semitic origin; she also had her doubts about Berlioz and others. The Lisztian theory of gipsy music consists, as Dannreuther says, in the merit of a laboured attempt to prove the existence of something like a gipsy epic in terms of music, the fact being that Hungarian gipsies merely play Hungarian popular tunes in a fantastic and exciting manner, but have no music that can properly be called their own. Liszt was a facile, picturesque writer and did more with his pen for Wagner than Wagner's own turbid writings. But a great writer he was not-many-sided as he was. It was unkind, however, on the part of Wagner to say to a friend that Cosima had more brains than her father. If she has, Bayreuth since her husband's death hasn't proved it. Wagner, when he uttered this, was probably in the ferment of a new passion, having quite recovered from his supposedly eternal love for Mathilde Wesendonck.

Cosima von Bülow

Daughter of Liszt

A masterful woman the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, though far from beautiful, she so controlled and ordered Liszt's life that he quite shed his bohemian skin, composed much, and as Kapellmeister produced many novelties of the new school. They lived on a hill in a house called the Altenburg, not a very princely abode, and there Liszt accomplished the major portion of his works for orchestra, his masses and piano concertos. There, too, Richard Wagner, a revolutionist, wanted by the Dresden police, came in 1849-from May 19th to 24th-disguised, carrying a forged passport, poor, miserable. Liszt secured him lodgings, and gave him a banquet at the Altenburg attended by Tausig, Von Bülow, Gille, Draeseke, Gottschalg, and others, nineteen in all. Wagner behaved badly, insulted his host and guests. He was left in solitude until Liszt insisted on his apologising for his rude manners-which he did with a bad grace. John F. Runciman has said that Liszt ought to have done even more for Wagner than he did-or words to that effect; just so, and there is no doubt that the noble man has put the world in his debt by piloting the music-dramatist into safe harbour; but while ingratitude is no crime according to Nietzsche (who, quite illogically, reproached Wagner for his ingratitude) there seems a limit to amiability, and in Liszt's case his amiability amounted to weakness. He could never say "No" to Wagner (nor to a pretty woman). He understood and forgave the Mime nature in Wagner for the sake of his Siegfried side. There was no Mime in Liszt, nothing small nor hateful, although he could at times play the benevolent, ironic Mephisto. And in his art he mirrored the quality to perfection-the Mephistopheles of his Faust Symphony.

Intrigues pursued him in his capacity as court musical director. The Princess Maria-Pawlowna died June, 1859; the following October Princess Marie, daughter of Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, married the Prince Hohenlohe, and Liszt, after the opera by Peter Cornelius was hissed, resigned his post. He remembered Goethe and his resignation, caused by a trained dog, at the same theatre. But he didn't leave Weimar until August 17, 1861, joining the princess at Rome. The scandal of the attempted marriage there is told in another chapter. Again the eyes of the world were riveted upon Liszt. His very warts became notorious. Some say that Cardinal Antonelli, instigated by Polish relatives of the princess, upset the affair when the pair were literally on the eve of approaching the altar; some believe that the wily Liszt had set in motion the machinery; but the truth is that at the advice of the Cardinal Prince Hohenlohe, his closest friend, the marriage scheme was dropped. When the husband of the princess died there was no further talk of matrimony. Instead, Liszt took minor orders, concentrated his attention on church music, and henceforth spent his year between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. He hoped for a position at the Papal court analogous to the one he had held at Weimar; but the appointment of music-director at St. Peter's was never made. To Weimar he had returned (1869) at the cordial invitation of the archduke, who allotted to his use a little house in the park, the Hofg?rtnerei. There every summer he received pupils from all parts of the world, gratuitously advising them, helping them from his impoverished purse, and, incidentally, being admired by a new generation of musical enthusiasts, particularly those of the feminine gender. There were lots of scandals, and the worthy burghers of the town shook their heads at the goings-on of the Lisztianer. The old man fell under many influences, some of them sinister. He seldom saw Richard or Cosima Wagner, though he attended the opening of Bayreuth in 1876. On that occasion Wagner publicly paid a magnificent tribute to the genius and noble friendship of Liszt. It atoned for a wilderness of previous neglect and ingratitude.

With Wagner's death in 1883 his hold on mundane matters began to relax. He taught, he travelled, he never failed to pay the princess an annual visit at Rome. She had immured herself, behind curtained windows and to the light of waxen tapers led the life of a mystic, also smoked the blackest of cigars. She became a theologian in petticoats and wrote numerous inutile books about pin-points in matters ecclesiastical. No doubt she still loved Liszt, for she set a spy on him at Weimar and thus kept herself informed as to how much cognac he daily consumed, how many pretty girls had asked for a lock of his silvery hair, also the name of the latest aspirant to his affections.

What a brilliant coterie of budding artists surrounded him: D'Albert, Urspruch, Geza Zichy, Friedheim, Joseffy, Rosenthal, Reisenauer, Grieg, Edward MacDowell, Burmeister, Stavenhagen, Sofie Menter, Toni Raab, Nikisch, Weingartner, Siloti, Laura Kahrer, Sauer, Adele Aus der Ohe, Moszkowski, Scharwenka, Pachmann, Saint-Sa?ns, Rubinstein-the latter not as pupil-Borodin, Van der Stucken, and other distinguished names in the annals of compositions and piano playing. Liszt's health broke down, but he persisted in visiting London in the early summer of 1886, where he was received as a demi-god by Queen Victoria and the musical world; he had been earlier in Paris where a mass of his was sung with success. His money affairs were in a tangle; once in receipt of an income that had enabled him to throw money away to any whining humbug, he complained at the last that he had no home of his own, no income-he had not been too shrewd in his dealings with music publishers-and very little cash for travelling expenses. The princess needed her own rents, and Liszt was never a charity pensioner. During the Altenburg years, the Glanzzeit at Weimar, her income had sufficed for both, as Liszt was earning no money from concert-tours. But at the end, despite his devoted disciples, he was the very picture of a deserted, desolate old hero. And he had given away fortunes, had played fortunes at benefit-concerts into the coffers of cities overtaken by fire or flood. Surely, the seamy side of success. "Wer aber wird nun Liszt helfen?" This half humorous, half pathetic cry of his had its tragic significance.

Liszt last touched the keyboard July 19, 1886, at Colpach, Luxemburg, the castle of Munka?zy, the Hungarian painter. Feeble as he must have been there was a supernatural aureole about his music that caused his hearers to weep. (Fancy the pianoforte inciting to tears!) He played his favourite Liebestraum, the Chant Polonais from the "Glanes de Woronice" (the Polish estate of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein) and the sixteenth of his Soirées de Vienne. He went on to Bayreuth, in company with a persistent young Parisian lady-the paramount passion not quite extinguished-attended a performance of Tristan and Isolde, through which he slept from absolute exhaustion; though he did not fail to acknowledge in company with Cosima Wagner the applause at the end. He went at once to bed never to leave it alive. He died of lung trouble on the night of July 31st or the early hour of August 1, 1886, and his last word is said to have been "Tristan." He was buried, in haste-that he might not interfere with the current Wagner festival-and, no doubt, is mourned at leisure. His princess survived him a year; this sounds more romantic than it is. [Madame d'Agoult had died in 1876.] A new terror was added to death by the ugly tomb of the dead man, designed by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner; said to be a composer as well as an amateur architect. Victories usually resemble each other; it is defeat alone that wears an individual physiognomy. Liszt, with all his optimism, did not hesitate to speak of his career as a failure. But what a magnificent failure! "To die and to die young-what happiness," was a favourite phrase of his.

"While remaining itself obscure," wrote George Moore of L'Education Sentimentale, by Flaubert, "this novel has given birth to a numerous literature. The Rougon-Macquart series is nothing but L'Education Sentimentale re-written into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist-twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numberless walking-sticks; Goncourt took the descriptive passages and turned them into Passy rhapsodies. The book has been a treasure cavern known to forty thieves, whence all have found riches and fame.

The original spirit has proved too strong for general consumption, but, watered and prepared, it has had the largest sale ever known."

This particular passage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his obligations to Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz-as, indeed, Flaubert owed something to Chateaubriand, Bossuet, and Balzac-he invented a new form, the symphonic poem, invented a musical phrase, novel in shape and gait, perfected the leading motive, employed poetic ideas instead of the antique and academic cut and dried square-toed themes-and was ruthlessly plundered almost before the ink was dry on his manuscript, and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came to pass that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel, first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Sa?ns, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers and a half-hundred besides of the new men, beginning with the name of Richard Strauss-that most extraordinary personality of latter-day music. And Liszt sat in Weimar and smiled and waited and waited and smiled; and if he has achieved paradise by this time he is still smiling and waiting. He often boasted that storms were his métier, meaning their tonal reproduction in orchestral form or on the keyboard-but I suspect that patience was his cardinal virtue.

Henry James once wrote of the human soul and it made me think of Liszt: "A romantic, moonlighted landscape, with woods and mountains and dim distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs." Liszt's music often evokes the golden opium-haunted prose of De Quincy; it is at once sensual and rhetorical. It also has its sonorous platitudes, unheavenly lengths, and barbaric yawps.

Despite his marked leaning toward the classic (Raphael, Correggio, Mickelangelo, and those frigid, colourless Germans, Kaulbach, Cornelius, Schadow, not to mention the sweetly romantic Ary Scheffer and the sentimental Delaroche), by temperament Liszt was a lover of the grotesque, the baroque, the eccentric, even the morbid. He often declared that it was his pet ambition to give a piano recital in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, where, surrounded by the canvases of Da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Veronese, and others of the immortal choir, he might make music never to be forgotten. In reality, he would have played with more effect if the pictures had been painted by Salvator Rosa, El Greco, Hell-Fire Breughel, Callot, Orcagna (the Dance of Death at Pisa), Matthew Grünwald; or among the moderns, Gustave Doré, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch, Matisse or Picasso. Ugliness mingled with voluptuousness, piety doubted by devilry, the quaint and the horrible, the satanic and the angelic, these states of soul (and body) appealed to Liszt quite as much as they did to Berlioz. They are all the apex of delirious romanticism;-now as dead as the classicism that preceded and produced it-of the seeking after recondite sensations and expressing them by means of the eloquent, versatile orchestral apparatus. Think what r?les Death and Lust play in the over-strained art of the Romantics (the "hairy romantic" as Thackeray called Berlioz, and no doubt Liszt, for he met him in London); what bombast, what sonorous pomp and pageantry, what sighing sensuousness, what brilliant martial spirit-they are all to be found in Liszt. In musical irony he never had but one match, Chopin-until Richard Strauss; Berlioz was also an adept in this disquieting mood. Liszt makes a direct appeal to the nerves, he has the trick of getting atmosphere with a few bars; and even if his great solo sonata has been called "The Invitation to Hissing and Stamping" (thus named by Gumprecht, a blind critic of Berlin, about 1854) the work itself is a mine of musical treasures, and a most dramatic sonata-that is if one accepts Liszt's definition of the form. Here we recall Cabaner's music-as reported by Mr. Moore-"the music that might be considered by Wagner as a little too advanced, but which Liszt would not fail to understand."

Liszt's music is virile and homophonic, despite its chromatic complexities. Instead of lacking in thematic invention he was, perhaps, a trifle too facile, too Italianate; he shook too many melodies from his sleeve to be always fresh; in a word, he composed too much. Architecturally his work recalls at times the fantastic Kremlin, or the Taj Mahal, or-as in the Graner Mass-a strange perversion of the gothic. Liszt was less the master-builder than the painter; color, not form, was his stronger side. And like Chateaubriand his music is an interminglement of religious with moods of sensuality. An authority has written that his essays in counterpoint are perhaps more successful than those of Berlioz, though his fugue subjects are equally artificial; and he fails to make the most of them (but couldn't the same be said of Beethoven, or of the contrapuntal Reger?). Both the French and Hungarian masters seem to have concocted rather than have composed their fugues. All of which is the eternal rule of thumb over again. The age of the fugue, like the age of manufactured miracles, is forever past. If you don't care for the fugal passages and part-writing in the Graner Mass or in the organ music, then there is nothing more to be said. Charles Lamb inveighed against concertos and instrumental music because, as he wrote, "words are something; but to gaze on empty frames, and to be forced to make the pictures for yourself ... to invent extempore tragedies is to answer the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime." This unimaginative condition is the precise one from which suffered so many early and too many later critics of Liszt's original music. If you are not in the mood poetical, whether lyric, heroic, or epic, then go to some other composer. And I protest against the parenthetical position allotted him by musical commentators, mostly of the Bayreuth brood. The Wagner family saw to it that the mighty Richard should be furnished with an appropriate artistic pedigree; Beethoven and Gluck were called his precursors. Liszt is not a transitional composer, except that all great composers are a link in the unending chain. But, though he helped Wagner to his later ideas and style, he had nothing whatever to do with the Wagnerian music-drama or the Wagnerian attitude toward art. Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner are all three as different in conception and texture as Handel and Haydn and Mozart; yet many say Handel and Haydn, or, worse still, Mozart and Beethoven. Absurd and unjust bracketings by the fat-minded unmusical.

In musicianship Liszt had no contemporary who could pretend to tie his shoe-strings, with the possible exception of Felix Mendelssohn. And in one particular he ranks next to Bach and Beethoven-in rhythmic invention; after Bach and Beethoven, Liszt stands nearest as regards the variety of his rhythms. His Eastern blood-the Magyar came from Asia-may account for this rhythmic versatility. It is a point not to be overlooked in future estimates of the composer.

How then account for the rather indifferent fashion with which the Liszt compositions are received by the musical public, not only here, but in Europe? This year (1911) the festivals in honor of the Master's Centenary may revive interest in his music and, perhaps, open the ears of the present generation to the fact that Strauss, Debussy and others are not as original as they sound. But I fear that Liszt, like any other dead composer-save the few giants, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven-will be played as a matter of course, sometimes from piety, sometimes because certain dates bob up on the calendar. His piano music, the most grateful ever written, will die hard, yet die it will.

Musicians should never forget Liszt, who, as was the case with Henry Irving and the English speaking actors, was the first to give musicians a social standing and prestige; before his time a pianist, violinist, organist, singer, was hardly superior to a lackey. Liszt was the aristocrat of his art; his essential nobility of soul, coupled with his flaming genius, made him that. And he came from a cottage that seemed like a peasant's. A point for your anarch in art.

Whatever the fluctuations of the chameleon of the Seven Arts, the best music will be always beautiful; beautiful with the old or the new beauty. Ugliness for the sheer sake of ugliness never endures; but one must be able to define modern beauty, else find oneself in the predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The sting and glamour of the Liszt orchestral music has compelling quality. Probably one of the most eloquent tributes paid to music is the following, and by a critic of pictorial art, Mr. D. S. MacColl, now keeper of the Wallace Collection in London. He wrote:

"An art that came out of the old world two centuries ago with a few chants, love-songs, and dances, that a century ago was still tied to the words of a mass or an opera, or threading little dance movements together in a 'suite,' became, in the last century, this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god may not only ideally but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical attack, enjoy the ghosts of struggle, rapture and exaltation with a volume and intricacy, an anguish, a triumph, an irresponsibility unheard of. An amplified pattern of action and emotion is given; each man fits to it the images he will."

The feminine friendships of Franz Liszt gained for him as much notoriety as his music making. To the average public he was a compound of Casanova, Byron and Goethe, and to this mixture could have been added the name of Stendhal. Liszt's love affairs, Liszt's children, Liszt's perilous escapes from daggers, pistols and poisons were the subjects of conversation in Europe three-quarters of a century ago, as earlier Byron was both hero and black-sheep in the current gossip of his time.

And as Liszt was in the public eye and ubiquitous-he travelled rapidly over Europe in a post-chaise, often giving two concerts in one day at different places-he became a sort of legendary figure, a musical Don Juan. He was not unmindful of the value of advertisement, so the legend grew with the years. That his reputation for gallantry was hugely exaggerated it is hardly necessary to add; a man who, accomplished as much as he, whether author, pianoforte virtuoso or composer, could have hardly had much idle time on his hands for the devil to dip into; and then his correspondence. He wrote or dictated literally thousands of letters. He was an ideal letter-writer. No one went unanswered, and a fairly good biography might be evolved from the many volumes of his correspondence. Nevertheless he did find time for much philandering, and for the cultivation of numerous platonic friendships. But the witty characterisation of Madame Plater holds good of Liszt. She said one day to Chopin: "If I were young and pretty, my little Chopin, I would take thee for husband, Ferdinand Hiller for friend, and Liszt for lover." This was in 1833, when Liszt was twenty-two years of age and the witticism definitely places Liszt in the sentimental hierarchy.

La Mara, an indefatigable and enthusiastic collector of anecdotes about unusual folk, has just published a book, Liszt und die Frauen. It deals with twenty-six friends of Liszt and does not lean heavily on scandal as an attractive adjunct; indeed La Mara (Marie Lipsius) sees musical life through rose-coloured spectacles, and Liszt is one of her gods. For her he is more sinned against than sinning, more pursued than pursuer; his angelic wings grow in size on his shoulders while you watch. Only a few of the ladies, titled and otherwise, mentioned in this book enjoyed the fleeting affection of the pianist-composer. Whatever else he might have been, Liszt was not a vulgar gallant. Over his swiftest passing intrigues he contrived to throw an air of mystery. In sooth, he was an idealist and romanticist. No one ever heard him boast his conquests.

Did Liszt ever love? It has been questioned by some of his biographers. His first passion, however, seems to have been genuine, as genuine as his love for his mother and for his children; he proved more admirable as a father than he would have been as a husband. In 1823 as "le petit Litz" he had set all musical Paris wondering. When his father died in 1827 he gave lessons there like any everyday pianoforte pedagogue because he needed money for the support of his mother. Among his aristocratic pupils was Caroline de Saint-Criq, the daughter of the Minister of Commerce, Count de Saint-Criq. It must have been truly a love in the clouds. Caroline was motherless. She was, as Liszt later declared, "a woman ideally good." Her father did not enjoy the prospect of a son-in-law who gave music lessons, and the intimacy suddenly snapped. But Liszt never forgot her; she became his mystic Beatrice, for her and to her he composed and dedicated a song; and even meeting her at Pau in 1844, just sixteen years after their rupture, did not create the disenchantment usual in such cases. Berlioz, too, sought an early love when old, and in his eyes she was as she always had been; Stendhal burst into tears on seeing again Angela Pietagrua after eleven years absence. Verily art is a sentimental antiseptic.

Liszt, about 1850

Caroline de Saint-Criq had married like the dutiful daughter she was, and Liszt's heart by 1844 was not only battle-scarred but a cemetery of memories. She died in 1874. They had corresponded for years, and at the moment of their youthful parting, caused by a cruel and extremely sensible father, they made a promise to recall each other's names at the hour of the daily angelus. Liszt averred that he kept his promise. The name of the lyric he wrote for her is: "Je voudrais m'évanouir comme la pourpre du soir" ("Ich m?chte hingehn wie das Abendrot").

Before the affair began with the Countess d'Agoult, afterward the mother of his three children, Liszt enjoyed an interlude with the Countess Adèle Laprunarède. It was the year of the revolution, 1830, and the profound despondency into which he had been cast by his unhappy love for Caroline was cured, as his mother sagely remarked, by the sound of cannon. He became a fast friend of Countess Adèle and followed her to her home in the Alps, there, as he jestingly said, to pursue their studies in style in the French language. It must not be forgotten that the Count, her husband, was their companion. But Paris wagged its myriad tongues all the same. Liszt's affiliation with Countess Louis Plater, born Gr?fin Brzostowska, the Pani Kasztelanowa (or lady castellan in English; no wonder he wrote such chromatic music later, these dissonantal names must have been an inspiration) was purely platonic, as were the majority of his friendships with the sex. But he dearly loved a princess, and the sharp eyes of Miss Amy Fay noted that his bow when meeting a woman of rank was a trifle too profound. (See her admirable Music Study in Germany.) The truth is that Liszt was a courtier. He was reared in aristocratic surroundings, and he took to luxury as would a cat. With the cannon booming in Paris he sketched the plan of his Revolutionary Symphony, but he continued to visit the aristocracy. In 1831 at Stuttgart his friend Frédéric Chopin wrote a "revolutionary" study (in C minor, opus 10) on hearing of Warsaw's downfall. Wagner rang incendiary church bells during the revolutionary days at Dresden in May 1849. Brave gestures, as our French friends would put it, and none the less lasting. Liszt's symphony is lost, but its themes may have bobbed up in his Faust and Dante symphonies. Who remembers the Warsaw of 1831 except Chopin lovers? And the rebellious spirit of Wagner's bell-ringing passed over into his Tetralogy. Nothing is negligible to an artist, not even a "gesture." Naturally there is no reference to the incident in his autobiography. If you are to take Wagner at his word he was a mere looker-on in Dresden during what Bakounine contemptuously called "a petty insurrection." Nietzsche was right-great men are to be distrusted when they write of themselves.

With the Madame d'Agoult and Princess Wittgenstein episodes we are not concerned just now. So much has been written in this two-voiced fugue in the symphony of Liszt's life that it is difficult to disentangle the truth from the fable. La Mara is sympathetic, though not particularly enlightening. Of more interest, because of the comparative mystery of the affair, is the friendship between George Sand and Liszt. Naturally La Mara, sentimentalist that she is, denies a liaison. She errs. There was a brief love passage. But Liszt escaped the fate of De Musset and Chopin. Balzac speaks of the matter in his novel Béatrix, in which George Sand is depicted as Camille Maupin, the Countess d'Agoult as Béatrix, Gustave Planché as Claude Vignon, and Liszt as Conti. Furthermore, the D'Agoult was jealous of Madame Sand, doubly jealous of her as a friend of Liszt and as a writer of genius. Read the D'Agoult's novel, written after her parting with Liszt, and see how in this Nélida she imitates the Elle et Lui. That she hated George Sand, after a pretended friendship, cannot be doubted; we have her own words as witnesses. In My Literary Life, by Madame Edmond Adam (Juliette Lamber), she said of George Sand to the author: "Her lovers are to her a piece of chalk, with which she scratches on the black-board. When she has finished she crushes the chalk under her foot, and there remains but the dust, which is quickly blown away." "How is it, my esteemed and beloved friend, you have never forgiven?" sadly asked Madame Adam. "Because the wound has not healed yet. Conscious that I had put my whole life and soul into my love for Liszt she tried to take him away from me."

One would suppose from the above that Liszt was faithful to Madame d'Agoult or that George Sand had separated the runaway couple, whereas in reality Liszt knew George Sand before he met the D'Agoult. What Madame Sand said of Liszt as a gallant can hardly be paraphrased in English. She was not very flattering. Perhaps George Sand was a reason why the relations between Chopin and Liszt cooled; the latter said: "Our lady loves had quarrelled, and as good cavaliers we were in duty bound to side with them." Chopin said: "We are friends, we were comrades." Liszt told Dr. Niecks: "There was a cessation of intimacy, but no enmity. I left Paris soon after, and never saw him again." It was at the beginning of 1840 that Liszt went to Chopin's apartment accompanied by a companion. Chopin was absent. On his return he became furious on learning of the visit. No wonder. Who was the lady in the case? It could have been Marie, it might have been George Sand, and probably it was some new fancy.

After an oil painting by J. Danhauser

Victor Hugo Paganini Rossini

Dumas George Sand Countess d'Agoult

Liszt at the Piano

More adventurous were Liszt's affairs with Marguerite Gautier, the lady of the camellias, the consumptive heroine of the Dumas play, as related by Jules Janin, and with the more notorious Lola Montez, who had to leave Munich to escape the wrath of the honest burghers. The king had humoured too much the lady's extravagant habits. She fell in love with Liszt, who had parted with his Marie in 1844, and went with him to Constantinople. Where they separated no one knows. It was not destined to be other than a fickle passion on both sides, not without its romantic aspects for romantically inclined persons. Probably the closest graze with hatred and revenge ever experienced by Liszt was the Olga Janina episode. Polish and high born, rich, it is said, she adored Liszt, studied with him, followed him from Weimar to Rome, from Rome to Budapest, bored him, shocked him as an abbé and scandalised ecclesiastical Rome by her mad behaviour; finally she attempted to stab him, and, failing, took a dose of poison. She didn't die, but lived to compose a malicious and clever book, Souvenirs d'une Cosaque (written at Paris and Karentec, March to September, published by the Libraire Internationale, 1875, now out of print), and signed "Robert Franz." Poor old Liszt is mercilessly dissected, and his admiring circle at Weimar slashed by a vigourous pen. In truth, despite the falsity of the picture, Olga Janina wrote much more incisively, with more personal colour and temperament, than did Countess d'Agoult, who also caricatured Liszt in her Nélida (as "Guermann"), and the good Liszt wrote to his princess: "Janina was not evil, only exalted." [I have heard it whispered that the attempt on Liszt's life at Rome was a melodramatic affair, concocted by his princess, who was jealous of the Janina girl, with the aid of the pianist's valet.]

La Mara shows to us twenty-six portraits in her Liszt and the Ladies; they include Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Caroline Unger-Sabatier, Marie Camille Pleyel, Charlotte von Hagn, Bettina von Arnim, Marie von Mouchanoff-Kalergis, Rosalie, Countess Sauerma, a niece of Spohr and an accomplished harp player; the Grand Duchess of Saxony, Maria Pawlowna, and her successor, Sophie, Grand Duchess of Weimar, both patronesses of Liszt; the Princess Wittgenstein, Emilie Merian-Genast, Agnes Street Klindworth, Jessie Hillebrand Laussot, Sofie Menter, the greatest of his women pupils; the Countess Wolkenstein and Bülow, Elpis Melena, Fanny, the Princess Rospigliosi, the Baroness Olga Meyendorff (this lady enjoyed to an extraordinary degree the confidence of Liszt. At Weimar she was held in high esteem by him-and hated by his pupils), and Nadine Helbig-Princess Nadine Schahawskoy. Madame Helbig was born in 1847 and went to Rome the first time in 1865. She became a Liszt pupil and a fervent propagandist. Her crayon sketch drawing of the venerable master is excellent. In her possession is a drawing by Ingres, who met Liszt in Rome, 1839, when the pianist was twenty-eight years of age. We learn that Liszt never attempted "poetry" with the exception of a couplet which he sent to the egregious Bettina von Arnim. It runs thus, and it consoles us with its crackling consonants for the discontinuance of further poetic flights on the part of its creator:

"Ich kraxele auf der Leiter

Und komme doch nicht weiter."