Franz Liszt and His World

2003).

Preface

Viewing Franz Liszt’s career as a whole, one is continually struck by the sheer range of his activities and the diversity of his affiliations. As a young boy in Vienna during the early 1820s, he absorbed the legacy of Czerny, Salieri, and Beethoven. When he died in 1886, his example was being carried forward by such radicals as Strauss, Debussy, and Busoni. His achievements in pianism, composition, teaching, and institution building are of lasting significance. He promoted musical Classicism alongside musical Romanticism. He cultivated deep and sustained social networks in Paris, Vienna, Weimar, Rome, Budapest, and elsewhere. The number of people he knew and influenced probably exceeds that of any other figure in the history of music. His personal life has been a source of fascination for nearly two centuries. Cast simultaneously as a saintly figure of extraordinary generosity who took minor religious orders in mid-life, and as a satanic virtuoso notorious for his vanity, love affairs, and habitual indulgence in tobacco and alcohol, the contradictions are striking. If it seems too much of a cliché to say he was the first rock star among pianists (a portrayal presented in Ken Russell’s film Lisztomania), one finds in Liszt nonetheless an uneasy and confounding juxtaposition of spiritual fervor with a 19th-century expression of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Out of this extraordinary variety, how does one condense a unified, embracing image or interpretive angle? With Liszt, most historians and critics throw up their hands at the thought of reconciling the contradictions into a coherent whole, preferring to regard them as evidence of a historical era ridden with inconsistencies. As his first biographer pointed out in 1835, and as Leon Botstein reasserts in the title to his concluding essay in this volume, Liszt bears the imprint of his world more completely than any artist of the 19th century. Understanding Liszt, then, demands that we understand also the world that formed him and continued to shape him well beyond his youth.

Over the past twenty years scholars have shown an impressive determination to organize and clean up Liszt’s shop, which was left messy by a huge output of letters and music, by the geographical and linguistic dispersion of his papers, and by an enduring capacity for mythmaking on the part of his admirers as well as his detractors. In his imposing three-volume biography, the most complete work of its kind, Alan Walker has produced an engaging narrative and important reference. In the recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Rena Charnin Mueller and Mária Eckhardt have updated the list of works with meticulous and patient researches into Liszt’s manuscripts and first editions. Long-needed critical editions of his works and writings are well under way. The difficulty of negotiating Liszt’s correspondence has been alleviated considerably by Charles Suttoni’s bibliographic explorations and by new editions of letters to individual correspondents such as Anna Liszt, Olga von Meyerdorff, Marie d’Agoult, and Agnes Street-Klindworth. Two large documentary collections compiled by Adrian Williams, one of letters, the other of observations and reminiscences by Liszt and his contemporaries, offer English readers a textured, close-up view of his life and circumstances. All of these projects have put Liszt’s legacy on a far more solid foundation and made it much easier for the curious to find reliable information and documentation than was possible even as recently as 1985.

A disadvantage of these preoccupations is that they have tended to isolate Liszt studies in a hermetic world, relatively out of touch with the larger field of musicology, not to mention other disciplines. The resulting loss of intellectual vitality has found poor compensation in the defensive or even righteous tone that one characteristically finds in liner notes and biographies. Once unfairly attacked in his lifetime, Graham Robb wrote in his 1995 biography of Balzac, the writer will forever be unfairly defended, even to his detriment, and even when the court has long since been empty. Balzac has suffered more than any other novelist from this kind of critical defense. The words could be transferred directly to Liszt: he is defended to his detriment. He is a complex and elusive subject who can make us rethink some of the basic hierarchies of traditional historiography and analysis. His music alone confounds boundaries between national styles, between genres, between work and performer, between authentic and revised versions, between pure classical form and poetic program. Approaching him thus requires an openness to non-traditional, flexible, self-aware models of understanding. The values of an older generation of musicology—favoring structural integrity and consistency in the music, and ascetic artistic commitment in the life—tend to work against Liszt. So too does the hagiographic tone adopted by so many of his commentators and biographers, which all too clearly replicates the cultish admiration of his own audiences, colleagues, and students. The values of more recent musicology and cultural studies—with their embrace of plurality and boundary-crossing, of performance, self-fashioning, and associative meaning—should be working in his favor. Jim Samson’s embrace of these methods, combined with the best in traditional scholarship, has borne fruit in his recent, magnificent book on the Transcendental Etudes, entitled Virtuosity and the Musical Work.

The essays in this volume all concern Liszt without isolating him in the spotlight. They strive instead for a dual focus, taking full measure of the specialized literature and in some cases adding new archival research, but placing this information in broader historical and critical perspective than has been usual in Liszt studies. The most common second focus is the public culture of the 19th century, the domain where he arguably had the deepest and most lasting impact. Ryan Minor highlights the power of choral music in defining national and cultural communities. Comparing Liszt’s two relatively unknown Beethoven cantatas, written decades apart, he traces the evolution of Beethoven’s symbolic status for the broader public, of which Liszt considered himself something of a curator. James Deaville’s research into the archives of publisher Friedrich Hofmeister sheds new light on how Liszt, as represented in his published works, circulated in the commercial and material culture of the 19th century. His essay here provides uncommonly concrete evidence of the intimate links between virtuosos and sheet music publishing in the 1840s and beyond. Dana Gooley’s essay reconstructs the critique of instrumental virtuosos that developed in the early 19th century—which was founded on a social and ethical perspective as much as it was an aesthetic one—and offers explanations for how Liszt escaped it. Leon Botstein’s concluding contribution takes a long-range view of Liszt in relation to public musical culture, demonstrating multiple ways in which he adapted the older, more aristocratic values of Viennese Classicism, which he inherited as a boy, to the contexts of urban modernity of mid-19th-century musical culture, where audiences were larger, less communally educated, and immersed in a culture of fiction reading that reconstructed their experiences of time and imagination.

The two essays engaging most directly with Liszt’s musical language, which remains the least developed area of Liszt scholarship as a whole, are Susan Youens’s essay on the Heine songs, and Rainer Kleinertz’s study of the symphonic poem Orpheus in relation to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. While Liszt’s songs are generally agreed to be among his best compositions and have recently been treated with survey-like commentary, they have received remarkably little critical or interpretive attention. Youens’s essay raises the bar. Combining acute insights on Liszt’s compositional strategies with an informed view of Heine, she argues that Liszt’s progressivism in the songs is more than a merely musical project, but an extension of Heine’s own progressive program for poetry. Kleinertz’s essay on Liszt and Wagner, without engaging the vexed old question of who influenced whom, identifies Orpheus as a key link between the two composers. He fills a significant gap in music analysis: a vocabulary for discussing phrase relationships that are not organized by closure or classical periodicity.

Liszt lived or spent significant periods of time in an astonishing variety of places—Vienna, Paris, Geneva, Venice, Weimar, Budapest, and Rome—and each left an imprint on his outlook and music. Two essays here explore Liszt in relationship to specific locales. Anna Celenza provides a new angle on Liszt’s years of pilgrimage (1835–39) by showing how invested he was in a Romantic construct of Italy as a republic of the imagination. Her essay, with its eye for literary detail, reminds us that no matter how real the Italian journey was, his travel essays and evocative compositions filter his voyages through the prism of Romantic fantasy. Christopher Gibbs’s richly documented essay places Liszt’s 1838 triumphs in Vienna, which were decisive for his career, within the context of that city’s broader concert life. Comparing Liszt with other major virtuosos in the city, notably Sigismond Thalberg and Clara Wieck, it offers new perspective on the distinct physiognomy of Liszt’s concert strategies and corrects a number of errors long perpetuated in biographies.

The nineteenth century was a century of the monumental biography: Spitta on Bach, Abert on Mozart, Thayer on Beethoven, to mention some examples from music. The earlier efforts of Lina Ramann and Peter Raabe notwithstanding, tradition has only caught up with Liszt in recent times, with the work of Alan Walker, complementing significant biographical explorations by Bernard Gavoty, Serge Gut, Klára Hamburger, Emmerich Karl Horvath, and Dezsö Legány. Liszt’s contemporaries had to make do with shorter biographies written to meet tight deadlines. Three documents presented in Part II put the biographical enterprise into historical context and assist us in reimagining how Liszt might have appeared to his contemporaries. Each of these documents was produced by a confidant of Liszt and took shape from its author’s background and priorities. Joseph d’Ortigue’s 1835 study from the French press accents Liszt as a product of modern intellectual and spiritual culture—performing Zeitgeist as Benjamin Walton puts it in his introduction. Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab’s biographical sketch from 1842, intended as a pamphlet to accompany Liszt’s German tours and prefaced here by Allan Keiler, pays closer attention to the virtuoso’s advocacy of German masters and his charity efforts. Rena Mueller’s presentation of Ramann’s written questionnaires to Liszt documents the methods of his first major biographer. Liszt’s written responses provide unusual glimpses into how he sought to be presented and remembered while suggesting that he was not entirely at ease with her modern philological methods. Liszt is given another chance to speak directly in Part II through a translation of one of his own writings. The issue of the true authorship of much of what was published under his name has vexed the Liszt literature since his own time, but about the contribution presented here there can be little question. The final installment of Liszt’s humanitarian essay On the Situation of Artists and on Their Condition in Society, a rare example of a text that survives in his own hand, is a brief but fully representative sample of the heady, somewhat chaotic mix of philosophy, spirituality, and Romantic inspiration that engulfed the young artist in the early 1830s.

Part III, Criticism and Reception, offers some key 19th-century documents concerning Liszt and his circle that have not been accessible, or only incompletely so, in English. Although Belgian critic François-Joseph Fétis was initially little inclined toward the Romantic young virtuoso, in his 1841 review of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, introduced here by Peter Bloom, he found himself at last won over. José Antonio Bowen’s selection of reviews of Liszt playing and conducting at the Bonn Beethoven festival of 1845 isolate a crucial historical moment where the values of performance and the values associated with Beethoven were being transformed by the younger generation of musicians. Of Heinrich Heine’s three incomparably entertaining and perceptive essays on Liszt, only one has been fully available in English translation (in Charles Suttoni’s An Artist’s Journey). Here we offer the other two, the second of which, as Rainer Kleinertz explains, has a complicated genesis shedding new light on the relationship between Liszt and Heine. The two published versions of this essay are presented here on facing pages to clarify how Heine changed his views and his strategies of articulation. Felix Draeseke’s defense of Liszt’s symphonic poems, introduced by James Deaville, gives voice to the progressive party in the so-called War of the Romantics, thus balancing out the better-known conservative manifesto signed by Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms.

Two worlds of Liszt not prominently featured in this book, although inevitably touched upon at various points, are his relationship to the Hungarian nation, which played an especially significant role during the last third of his life, and his religious faith, a lifelong preoccupation that also bloomed in his later years. The lack of emphasis upon these two areas in no way reflects the editors’ convictions about the importance of these subjects. Readers interested in Liszt’s connections with Hungary will find thorough coverage in Deszö Legány’s two-volume Liszt and His Country. Paul Merrick’s book Revolution and Religion in the Music of Franz Liszt touches upon many of the key issues in Liszt’s religious music.

Liszt’s achievements as pianist, composer, and teacher all evince a commitment to immediacy and efficacy of communication. In performance he promoted audience engagement by expressing the sense of the music in his facial expressions and body language. In his numerous piano transcriptions he would unhesitatingly violate the letter of Schubert’s and Beethoven’s scores if in doing so it would help convey to listeners the spirit of the original. In the symphonic poems Liszt articulated feelings and ideas—such as heroism, lament, passion, and love—in a direct, no-nonsense manner, so as not to interfere with the elevated themes, characters, or causes he wanted to convey. This set his symphonic music apart from Wagner, who was inclined to invest his works with metaphysical or symbolic weight, and from Brahms, where musical ideas were invented with constructive and developmental possibilities in mind. Liszt resisted esotericism and devoted himself to effective communication in protest of the inertia of urban modernity, where music was fast becoming commodified as entertainment and luxury, and thereby risked becoming trivial and marginal. Whether arguing (early on) that artists ought to be the focal point of social regeneration, or trying (later on) to revitalize the music of the weakening Catholic church through an infusion of modern music resources, he strove to close the gap between artists and contemporary audiences. In today’s world, where the task of generating audience sympathy for classical music is largely assigned to professional agents and marketers, Liszt serves as an example of where we may want to go.

PART I

ESSAYS

Liszt, Italy, and the Republic

of the Imagination

ANNA HARWELL CELENZA

Liszt’s first encounter with Italy has been told time and again in various guises: as a romance, a travelogue, and a Bildungsroman.¹ Italy’s breathtaking beauty has been credited with luring him over the Alps. As Chateaubriand once said, Nothing is comparable to the beauty of the Roman horizon, to the sweet inclination of the plains as they meet the soft and flowing contours of the hills.² Such sensual descriptions attracted many visitors to Italy, but there was more to Liszt’s travels than scenic diversion. When he journeyed south in 1837, he joined a steady stream of artists, aristocrats, writers, and musicians who for centuries had made the long and difficult trip. Like these travelers, Liszt was drawn by Italy’s reputation as the cradle of European culture, by the beauty of its art, and by the mystery of its past. Although it is true that he was in the middle of a scandalous relationship with Marie d’Agoult when he journeyed south with her, this was old news; their first child had already been born, in 1835. Liszt was escaping more than mere gossip when he left Paris. He was on a quest to discover his creative essence, a new artistic identity. Liszt had a premeditated master plan concerning the future course of his career, and during the second half of the 1830s he planned on distinguishing himself in intellectual pursuits that were accorded more prestige than mere performing—namely composition and literature.³ Italy offered beauty and comfort; but more important, it held the promise of an intellectually rich escape.

The image of Italy as a destination for the cultured and well educated took shape in the mid-eighteenth century. Painters such as Canaletto captured the beauty of Italian cities and landscapes, and archaeological excavations across the peninsula fueled a growing interest in antiquity. Scholars like Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Germany and Comte Anne-Claude-Philippe de Caylus in France pondered Italy’s ancient past. Their studies drew countless travelers from across Europe, and the Grand Tour became a required activity in the education of every European gentleman. Rome, in particular, served as a living textbook—the undisputed capital of the visual arts (figure 1).⁴ Some scholars have described Liszt’s first journey to Italy as his own Grand Tour.⁵ This description is valid as far as it goes, since it is clear that Liszt sought an education of sorts as he traveled. But self-enlightenment was not at the core of his motivation. Simply put, Liszt traveled to Italy to escape his own past. Troubled by the music politics he had recently experienced in Paris, he sought refuge, and Italy seemed the perfect sanctuary.

Scholars have mapped every step of Liszt’s journey, from the moment he first crossed the Alps to his twilight days in Tivoli late in life. My goal is somewhat different. Instead of describing Liszt in Italy, I reflect on the image of Italy he alluded to in his music, specifically the second volume of his Années de pèlerinage (Years of pilgrimage)—Deuxième Année: Italie (Second year: Italy).⁶ Liszt published this work in 1858, three years after Première Année: Suisse (First year: Switzerland), appeared.⁷ The first volume consists of nine pieces, all of which are related to impressions of nature and scenic Swiss locales. In contrast, the Italy volume contains seven pieces directly related to the visual arts and poetry of early-modern Italy:

Sposalizio (a painting by Raphael)

Il penseroso (a sculpture by Michelangelo)

Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa

Sonetto 47 del Petrarca

Sonetto 104 del Petrarca

Sonetto 123 del Petrarca

Après une lecture du Dante (Fantasia quasi Sonata)

In addition to revealing the art and literary works Liszt encountered in Italy, year two of Années de pèlerinage roughly replicates the itinerary he followed, from Milan and Venice to Florence and Rome.⁸ By the time he crossed the Alps, these cities had become reputed havens for political and social exiles. The end of the Napoleonic era marked a new chapter in the region’s history. Humbled politically, Italy had become a cultural refuge, the Paradise of Exiles as Shelley described it in 1824.⁹ Lord Byron had much to do with the creation of this image. In the final installment (Canto IV) of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (published in 1818), Byron blended the popular image of the poet as rebel and bearer of freedom with that of the social outcast and solitary wanderer. Italy offered self-exiles like Liszt a new start—a chance to face up to his mission as a poet in the Romantic sense of the word and define his artistic identity as an expatriate in a foreign land.

Various pieces in the first two volumes of Années de pèlerinage are framed by quotations from Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Like Byron, Liszt consciously created a public image of himself as a lone pilgrim, an intellectual poet whose travels across Switzerland served as the scenic prelude to a full artistic awakening in Italy. Liszt presented this Byronic image of himself to Parisian readers through a series of articles (commonly referred to as Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique) published in Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris and L’Artiste during his years abroad. The authorship of these articles has been a topic of debate for nearly a century. Although Liszt’s name appeared as the sole author, even he acknowledged that d’Agoult sometimes contributed to their production. To date, Rainer Kleinertz has given the most even-handed assessment of the Liszt-d’Agoult authorship issue. In the commentary to his edition of Liszt’s complete writings, Kleinertz describes d’Agoult’s contributions to various article drafts written between 1837 and 1841 and, in so doing, convincingly demonstrates that the overall structure and content of the articles should be attributed primarily to Liszt.¹⁰ Charles Suttoni expressed a similar opinion in his own study of Liszt’s literary works, claiming that they were the result of an active and fluid literary partnership where Liszt’s ideas were at times expressed in d’Agoult’s words.¹¹ Despite their authorship, Liszt’s articles drew attention to his travel experiences and intellectual inquiries—they also highlighted many of the literary and artistic influences that later defined his Années de pèlerinage.

Figure 1. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Roma Antica, or Views of Ancient Rome with the Artist Finishing a Copy of the Aldobrini Wedding. Stuttgart, Staatsgallerie.

In recent years, scholars interested in Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage have concentrated on purely musical aspects, namely the composition’s genesis and form.¹² My approach is markedly different. Focusing on the extra-musical origins of the Italy volume, I describe in detail the cultural and historical circumstances that informed Liszt’s reception of Italian art and literature. As I hope to demonstrate, the literary and artistic sources Liszt encountered during his travels across Italy profoundly influenced his self-image as a composer and his creation of Années de pèlerinage. In Liszt’s mind, Italy became part of an ideal landscape that I call the Republic of the Imagination. This term is closely tied to George Sand’s descriptions of a republic of music and holy colony of artists in her letters to Liszt.¹³ When Sand coined these ideas in the early 1830s, their political resonance was especially strong, and my use of the phrase Republic of the Imagination makes reference to this.¹⁴ Sand’s ideas clearly influenced Liszt’s perception of Italy; his Republic of the Imagination was a state of mind, an imaginary place where artists, writers, and musicians interacted freely, unbound by political or historical ties. Specifically, it was a creative space where Liszt interacted with an imagined community of artists derived from early-modern Italian art and literature.

Like many northern travelers before him—including Goethe, Byron, and Heine—Liszt toured Switzerland before venturing on to Italy.¹⁵ Sand wrote to him at this time, describing the divine inspiration she knew he would find there. Encouraging him to forget about music politics in Paris, she recommended he join the holy colony of artists and pledge allegiance to the metaphorical republic of music—a land that would be revealed to him via the wondrous beauty of nature.¹⁶ Liszt attempted to follow her advice, but as he explained in a response published in the Revue et Gazette musicale in December 1835, he was unable to fathom the treasures of the snow as she had. The wall-nettles, bindweeds, and harts’ tongues that had whispered harmonious secrets in her ear, remained silent in his presence. Liszt was at a loss, and he described his state of mind in great detail:

The republic of music, already established by a leap of your young imagination, is still only a dream for me…. I blush with shame and confusion when I reflect seriously on my life and pit your dreams against my realities:…your noble presentiments, your beautiful illusions about the social effects of the art to which I have dedicated my life, against the gloomy discouragement that sometimes seizes me when I compare the impotence of the effort with the eagerness of the desire, the nothingness of the work with the limitlessness of the idea;—those miracles of understanding and regeneration wrought by the thrice-blessed lyre of ancient times, against the sad and sterile role to which it is seemingly confined today.¹⁷

Liszt’s self-doubt was exacerbated by the fact that Sigismond Thalberg had recently descended on Paris and was being hailed as le premier pianiste du monde.¹⁸ Intent on confronting this new mysterious rival, Liszt postponed his travel plans to Italy and returned to Paris.¹⁹ On 8 January 1837, he published a mean-spirited review of Thalberg’s music in the Revue et Gazette musicale. This article angered many of Liszt’s colleagues, especially the critic François-Joseph Fétis, who later came to Thalberg’s defense in an article of his own.²⁰ Reactions such as this turned Liszt into something of a pariah in Parisian musical politics, and he soon took up his pen again—this time in the guise of a persecuted artist. In an article addressed To a Poet-Voyager (i.e., George Sand), Liszt expressed his desire to escape.²¹ Using language strikingly similar to that found in Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne ou Italie, he lamented Italy’s political misfortune and explained why it was the perfect refuge for those exiles from heaven, like himself, who suffer and sing all in the name of poetry:

Italy! Italy! The foreigner’s steel has scattered your noblest children far and wide. They wander among the nations, their brows branded with a sacred curse. Yet no matter how implacable your oppressors might be, you will not be forsaken, because you were and will always be the land of choice for those men who have no brothers among men, for those children of God, those exiles from heaven who suffer and sing and whom the world calls poets.