LISZT’S ONLY PIANO SONATA

That two young American-born pianists, John Powell and Louis Cornell, should have selected recently Liszt’s only piano sonata for their programmes, and during the same week, is sufficiently significant to call for comment. It is a sign of the times. Many of the innovations in modern writing for the instrument may be directly traced to this same B minor sonata, and when we name it as the composer’s solitary excursion into the classical domain, it is with full consciousness that Liszt’s “fantasia quasi-sonata,” after a reading of Dante, in Années de Pèlerinage, is hardly to be described as a sonata. What is a sonata? Liszt answers the question in his highly original work. He rejects the old order of three or four separate movements, substituting a more complete organism. It may not be, formally speaking, the Haydn, Mozart, or early Beethoven sonata. Liszt employs as a spring-board the last sonatas of Beethoven to launch him into novel territory (study opus 110 in A flat and you will recognize the truth of this contention).

Charles Souilier has declared that the sonata expired with the eighteenth century, which gave it birth. This is a rather risky statement. If true, we should have missed such beautiful music in the form—Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt. The Hungarian’s astonishing use of the leading-movement and its metamorphosis, one theme of the slow introduction, as Shedlock, in his book on The Pianoforte Sonata, is the source whence he derives the principal part of his tone picture, and, adds Mr. Shedlock, “everything depends on the quality and latent power of the fertilizing germ.” But on the first page of the B minor sonata may be found Wotan’s chief theme, the scream of Kundry, and a color scheme which Wagner later incorporated in the Ring and Parsifal. So the “fertilizing germ” is not missing. As for the form, that is easily discernible. Liszt has spun a complex web, his sonata is an arabesque, and a logical one, for nothing is more inexorably logical than a seemingly loose rhapsody. The chief fault of this composition is not its form or lack of melodic invention, but its length—it demands at least thirty-five minutes to play—caused by repetitions, though in different keys, thus defeating the very purpose for which it was composed, i. e., suppression of unnecessary episodes and breaks in the continuity. The same criticism holds good for the Symphonic Poems.

Liszt’s influence was not only profound upon his contemporaries—witness Wagner—but on the latter-day school, headed by Richard Strauss, whose tone poems are inconceivable without Liszt’s discoveries. He also inspired the Russians, and his impressionism is the base of Debussy and Ravel’s piano music. Rimsky-Korsakoff we long ago christened the Russian Berlioz, yet he owes Liszt more; from Berlioz he learned how to paint orchestrally, but in his manner of composition he leans heavily on the Hungarian. Sadko comes from Liszt’s symphonic poem, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, while Antar and Scheherazade come from Harold and the Faust symphony. As a French critic has written: “The brand of Liszt remains ineffaceable” on those charming works of Rimsky-Korsakoff. Like Moses, Liszt saw the Promised Land, but was destined never to enter it. He suffered the fate of intermediate types. He was recognized too late. Dr. Frederick Niecks, the biographer of Chopin, has wisely said: “Be, however, the ultimate fate of his works what it may, there will always remain to Liszt the fame of a daring striver, a fruitful originator, and a wide-ranging quickener.”

The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt’s original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy told the present writer that the B minor sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it “lies” so beautifully for the hand. No work of Liszt, with the possible exception of his études, is as interesting. Agreeing with those critics who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure, and also with those who assert the work to be an organic amplification of the old obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven’s last sonata period as a starting-point for his plunge into futurity—agreeing with these warring factions, we find fascinating music in this sonata. What a dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (Wotan’s theme), the leap from C to the A sharp below—how Liszt has stamped this and the succeeding intervals as his own! Power there is, sardonic power, like the first phrase of the E flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D’s! What follows might be a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz and Saint-Saëns and Raff come to the mind as masters of the grisly and supernatural. But the thin, sharp flames of hell hover about the brass, wood-wind, and shrieking strings in the Liszt orchestra.

The chorale, usually the meat of the Lisztian composition, now appears and in dogmatic affirmation proclaims the religious belief of the composer; our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it all in the harmonic sequences. Here, surely, it is not a whole-hearted belief, only theatric attudinizing; after the faint return of the first motive is heard the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engenders the suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling in prayer he was prostrate before woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.

But the rustle of silken attire is behind every bar; sensuous imagery, a delicate perfume of femininity lurks in each trill and cadence. Ah! naughty Abbé, have a care! After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tresses! Wilt thou permit her to make away with thy spiritual resolutions? Vade retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme, so triumphantly proclaimed at the outset, is now solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power. Then begins the hue and cry of diminished sevenths, and this tonal panorama with its swirl of intoxicating colons kaleidoscopically moves onward. Again the devil tempts our musical St. Antony, this time in octaves and in the key of A major. He momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Satan is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugato, which, like the domestic ailment known as a bad conscience, is happily short-winded. Another flank movement of the Eternal Feminine, this time in the seductive key of B, made mock of by this musical Samson, who in stretta quasi presto views his weakness with contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the bass triplets frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.

All this finally leads to prestissimo finale of startling splendor. In the literature of the piano there is nothing more exciting. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is painted on every bar. What gorgeous swing and how the very bases of the musical anvil tremble under the sledge-hammer blows of this tonal Attila. Then follow a few bars of the Beethoven-andante, a moving return to the earlier themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean abode, whence it emerges, a Magyar Wotan, majestically vanishing not in the mists of Valhalla but in the bowels of Gehenna; then a genuine Lisztian chord-sequence followed by a profound stillness in the major. The B minor sonata displays Liszt’s power, Liszt’s weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long—infernal, not a “heavenly length”—it is noble, drastic, cerebral, and it is blazing with exotic hues. It is also cynical and insincere. Liszt, more than other composers, Meyerbeer and Berlioz excepted, excelled in depicting a sneering, cynical sensuality. Also insincerity. And when you come to think it over, it takes genius to suggest in tones the insincere. This feat Liszt achieved. In his symphony to Faust he succeeds better with the Mephisto picture than in his characterization of Marguerite. But to deny the B minor sonata a commanding position in the Pantheon of piano music would be folly. And interpreted by an artist saturated in the Liszt tradition, such as Arthur Friedheim—who has intellectual power and never resorts to mere sentimentalism—the work almost compasses the sublime.

Away from the glitter of the concert-room this extraordinary Hungarian, inspired after the loftiest in art, yet in the atmosphere of aristocratic salons, or of the papal court, Liszt was not altogether admirable. We have heard certain cries calling heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord (which he was not); also that if he had not cut and run to sanctuary to escape the petticoats—one was his egregious Polish Princess—we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. This theory is not far from the truth. Among the various penalties undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck, the composer Liszt has had many things read into his music which do not belong there. He set great store by his sacred compositions, his masses and his psalms, and he was bitterly disappointed because Rome did not espouse his reforms in churchly music, notwithstanding his close friendship with Pope Pius IX. But there is a vein of insincerity running throughout this music, despite its ecclesiastic pomp and operatic coloring. Perhaps the best estimate of Franz Liszt is the purely human one. He was a virile musical genius, and was compact of the usual pleasing and unpleasing faults and virtues as is any great man not born of a book.