DREAMING OF LISZT

Philip Hale once wrote that they buried Richard Wagner in the back yard like a cat; which is irreverent yet a bald statement of the fact. Liszt is also buried at Baireuth, in a forlorn pagoda designed by his grandson, Siegfried Wagner, who, at the time of his grandfather’s death, was a student of architecture. After a pilgrimage to this tomb in the cemetery in the Erlangerstrasse, for I count myself among the Lisztianer, and also after hearing several operas of Siegfried I reached the conclusion that, notwithstanding critical opinion to the contrary, the young man wisely abandoned his architectural dreams. But it is another kind of dream that I would describe this Sunday morning. When a young chap, I was crazy to see, to hear, Liszt, and while I think that the old man with long white hair and warts on his face was the real Liszt—I met him on the Rue de Rivoli in 1878—still the possibility of a closer view haunted my sleeping and waking hours, and, finally armed with letters of introduction from a well-known French pianist, a pupil of the musical Merlin, and a Paris music publisher, I found myself one evening at the Gare de l’Est, en route for Strasburg, thence to Stuttgart, and Weimar. In those times, forty years ago, we travelled slowly.

A lovely morning in May saw me walking through a sun-smitten lane on the road to the garden-house where his Serene Highness was living. I had sent my introductions to the royal household the previous evening. I had been summoned. The hedges were white with spring blossoms, the air redolent of bockbier. Ah! thronging memories of youth. Suddenly a man on horseback, his face red with excitement, his beast covered with lather, dashed by, shouting, “Make way for the Master. He comes. He comes!” Presently a venerable being with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose—appeared, and walking. His hair streamed in the wind. He wore a monkish habit, and on his head was a huge shovel-shaped hat of the pattern affected by Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville. “It must be Liszt or the Devil,” I cried, and the only Liszt smiled, his warts growing more purple, his expression most benignant. He waved to me a friendly hand, that formidable hand, which, like a steam-hammer, could crush steel or crack the shell of an egg, so sensitive was it. “Both Liszt and the Devil,” he grunted, and then I knew my man. I kissed his hand, made the sign of the cross, for I was addressing an ecclesiastic, an Abbé, though one without a tonsure, and created a deacon by Pope Pius IX, called Pio Nono in Italy, but in Rome affectionately nicknamed “Pianino” because of his love of piano music, Liszt’s in particular.

He invited me to refreshments at the Czerny Café, but as it was crowded we went across the street to the garden of the Elephant Hotel, there to be surrounded by a throng of little Liszts, pupils, male and female, who mimicked the old, old gentleman in an absurd manner. They wore their hair on their shoulders, they sprinkled this hair with flour, they even went so far as to paint purplish excrescences on their chins and brows. They donned semi-sacerdotal robes, they held their hands in the peculiar style of the Master; they, too, sported shovel-shaped hats, and from time to time they indulged in patibulary gestures. But, good Lord, how they could down the beer!

Enfin, after some diplomatic skirmishing I was invited to the afternoon musicale and went with the gang to the pretty little home of Liszt in the ducal park. Liszt was amiable. He knew that I was nervous, so he asked a few promising young beginners, such as Arthur Friedheim, Alfred Reisenauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil Sauer, Richard Burmeister, to open the ball. After I heard them I wished myself in Buxtehude. I had proclaimed myself as an ardent upholder of the Thalberg school, which champions a singing touch and pearly scales. I had studied all the Thalberg fantasies on operatic airs with Charles H. Jarvis of Philadelphia, who could read prima vista any music composed by man, god, or devil. You will estimate my musical and intellectual equipment of those days when I tell you that my battle-horse was the Prayer from Moses in Egypt, arranged by Thalberg, and my favorite reading the prose of Chateaubriand; in few words, lush, luxuriant, and overblown romanticism. The step to Ouida’s novels and the Henselt études was not far. All that I detest now in music and literature was then my passion. Like Ephraim I was sealed to my idols, and the chiefest was Thalberg, natural son of Prince Lichtenstein, a handsome piano virtuoso with aristocratic side-whiskers, a smooth pianistic style, and a euphonious touch.

Liszt called to me. “Tiens! let us hear some music by an admirer of my old friend Sigismund Thalberg.” I did not miss the veiled irony of the speech, the slight underlining of “friend,” for I had read of the historical Liszt-Thalberg duel in Paris during the third decade of the last century. But memories soon annulled my agony. What a via dolorosa I traversed from my chair to the piano—by the way, a Steinway concert-grand. I shall not forget to my dying hour that chamber wherein I stood the most fateful afternoon of my life. Liszt, with his powerful profile of an Indian chieftain, lounged in the window embrasure, the light streaking his hair, silhouetting his brow, nose, and projecting chin. He was the illuminated focus of a picture that is burnt into my memory cells. The pupils were wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious points of light for eyes. I, too, felt like a disembodied being in this spectral atmosphere of which Liszt was the living reality.

Urged by a hypnotic will I went to the piano, sat before it, and in my nervous misery lifted the fall-board and paused to decipher the name of its maker; that’s how I discovered Steinway. My act did not pass unperceived. Whispering ensued, followed chuckling, and some one said: “He must have begun as a piano salesman.” It was the voice of the witty Rosenthal, and it utterly disconcerted me. Facing me on the wall was Ary Scheffer’s portrait of Chopin, and doubtless prompted by the subject, my fingers groped among the keys and I began, without rhyme or reason, the weaving prelude in D of the immortal Pole. My insides were shaking like a bowl of disturbed jelly, though outwardly I was as calm as growing grass. Oddly enough my hands did not falter, the music seemed to ooze from my wrists. I had not studied in vain Thalberg’s Art of Singing on the Pianoforte. I finished. Not a murmur was heard. Then Liszt’s voice cut the sultry air: “I had expected Thalberg’s tremolo study,” he casually remarked, avenging himself with an epigram on his old rival a half century after their battles. But Thalberg didn’t hear it. I did. I took the hint and bowed myself out of the royal presence, permitted by the boss to kiss his technique-laden fingers, and without stopping for my hat and walking-stick in the ante-chamber I went away. Then tempted by the cool of the woods I strayed across to Goethe’s Garden House. At the moment I preferred poetry to music. Nevertheless, I had played for Liszt. Rotten playing, of course, yet a historical fact. But when I compiled a life of the Grand Old Man of Hungary I hadn’t the courage to put my name in that long list of reputed pupils, though I dare say I didn’t play any worse than some of them. Ask Arthur Friedheim.

My hat and stick I sent for. I was not precisely in a jubilant mood, though I joined the Liszt lobby that night at the Hotel “Zum Elefanten.” It was a goodly crowd, the majority of whom achieved musical fame later. In the Weimar of those days Liszt walked and talked, smoked big black cigars, drank his share of brandy, played, composed, and prayed—he seldom missed early mass. Despite his Hungarian origin, his early French training, there emerged through the palimpsest of his brilliant and complex personality the characteristics of his mother, an Austrian born. He loved German music, German ways. He liked to speak that tongue in preference to French. Of the Magyar language he knew little. But his music is Hungarian enough; Hungarian in the sense that Tchaikovsky’s is Russian—i. e., cosmopolitan. However, there’s a lot of nonsense written about that fetish of a certain critical school, the fetish of nationalism in music. Liszt would have been invincibly Liszt even if he had been born in Boston. And that tropically passionate town does not in the least resemble Budapest.

At the Liszt museum his old housekeeper Paulina Apel—I must ask Albert Morris Bagby if she still lives—showed me its numerous memorials. What a collection of trophies, jewels, manuscripts, orders, pictures, letters, and testimonials from all over the globe. I read a letter from Charles Baudelaire to Liszt, which is not to be found in the volume dedicated to his correspondence. Gifts from royalty abound. In glass cases are the scores of Christus, the Faust Symphony, Orpheus, Hungaria, the Berg Symphony, Totentanz, and Festklaenge. Besides the Steinway in the music-room there was an old instrument dating back to the forties; for the little piano upon which he studied as a child you must go to the Budapest museum. At Weimar may be seen marble hands of Liszt’s, Beethoven’s, and Chopin’s; also the long, nervous, spider-like fingers of Liszt clasping the slender hand of the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein. Like Chopin, Liszt attracted princesses and other exalted personages in petticoats as does sugar buzzing flies.

And then I woke up. I had been dreaming in my Parisian attic in 1878. When I went for the first time to Weimar in 1896 Liszt had been dead ten years.