Franz Liszt Reconsidered

Author(s): Paul Bekker and Arthur Mendel

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Apr., 1942), pp. 186-189
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/739213
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Musical Quarterly

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 FRANZ LISZT RECONSIDERED

By PAUL BEKKER1
T HE DEATH of Franz Liszt, in 1886, ended an artistic career that
was uniquely brilliant and at the same time was essentially
based on inner renunciation. It is symbolic of his nature that the
end should have come to him in Bayreuth, where by his presence
he was lending support to the Festival, whose survival was in grave
danger after the death of Wagner. For it was characteristic of
Liszt to be of service to others right up to the last moment, at the
expense of his own interests, and without any desire for acknowl-
edgement from those whom he was helping. He was glad to let
himself be made use of, for he felt that he owed what help he
could give. He never asked that his own wishes should be taken
into account, nor ever sought to advance his own personal in-
terests. He always extended a helping hand to others, whenever
and wherever the opportunity presented itself; but his own work,
he felt, must take care of itself. Without a trace of envy, he always
recognized greatness in others and never worried whether they
returned his admiration; he knew no principle of reciprocity in
these matters. He gave with a lavish hand-money, support in the
advancement of other men's careers, help of every sort, wherever
he saw something that he could do. Looked at from the purely
human point of view, Liszt is one of the most attractive figures of
history.
The majority of people cannot bear such figures, who are held
to exceed the bounds of credibility. Selfish motives, or at least im-
pulses of ostentation, are suspected to underlie the noblest actions.
Many people are inclined to assume in others a meanness of spirit
which corresponds to their own. Liszt has been a particularly re-
warding subject for suspicious contemplation of this sort, for he
was not only a man of exceptional greatness of mind and spirit,
but a pioneering and trail-blazing creator as well. Did his excep-
tional achievements as both man and artist seem credible? Was it
1 This article was written in I936, fifty years after Liszt died at Bayreuth, on July
31, i886; now it is already five years since Bekker himself disappeared from among us.
The present article was found among his papers after his death, and appears by
courtesy of his widow.-Ed.
i86

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 Franz Liszt Reconsidered I87
not simpler and more plausible to cite the virtuoso to discredit the
composer, and the man to discredit the virtuoso? In this way it
was easy to establish a "tragic deception", which could then be
commented upon with a sympathetic tear or with biting scorn
according to the disposition of the individual observer.
It was the fate of Liszt, who valued faith above all things, and
whose whole life's work was built up by the power of faith, not to
be met with faith in either his personality or his achievements.
Criticism, even unfavorable criticism, is no tragedy. It can be sur-
mounted. But to come up against mistrust is the hardest experience
that an artist can have. This was the cup Liszt had to drink. But he
did not complain. His remark "lch kann warten" ("I can wait")
shows that he clearly understood the situation, without either illu-
sion or resignation. Today the question is: what was he waiting
for, and why did he think he must wait, while other fighting
spirits, like Berlioz and Wagner, were already beginning to estab-
lish their positions? Why did he consider it important to help them
first, and why did he think that his own work would need more
time?
First of all, no doubt, he felt the resistance to his personality.
He was a successful virtuoso-in fact, the most spectacular one of
the Igth century with the sole exception of Paganini. Liszt knew
that the world would accept one such success from a man, though
it might not easily forgive it, but that from the moment when he
abandoned the career of virtuoso for that of composer and con-
ductor he would have to pay for his earlier successes with corre-
sponding failures. He knew that the opposition to him in these
capacities would persist as long as he lived and continued to fur-
nish a personal target for it. Though a true enthusiast and idealist,
he was far too skeptical not to realize that people do not judge a
man by his achievements but by their preconceived opinions.
But now we may ask whether what he had to say was really
suited to his time at all? It had its origin in quite unfamiliar regions;
it came not from the sphere of the music-makers but from a quite
different spiritual clime. What was surprising or difficult in Liszt's
music? To be sure, its form was new, but it was not unprece-
dented: Berlioz had already dared similar things, and in much
more drastic form. Neither the expression of Liszt's music nor its
melodic or harmonic form offered such difficulties as were present
in the new music of Brahms and Bruckner. On the contrary, it

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i88 The Musical Quarterly
seemed too light, not serious and learned enough. Its Hungarian
accent, particularly, gave it an air of worldliness which was
scorned as banal by the pharisalc prudery and over-earnestness of
the period.
For that is the main point, and we may observe it over and
over again: the more decadent musical taste becomes, the more
sensitively it reacts against anything easy to understand, i.e., the
more stubbornly it stands upon the dignity of its cultural rank.
Liszt's innovations cannot be labelled in terms of musical detail.
They consist rather in a new spiritual bearing-the bearing of a
man who was master of the entire culture of his period, but who
stood in inner opposition to it, and whose music sprang from the
soil of a new social and artistic outlook. Basically, Liszt had no
more in common with Wagner than with his other contem-
poraries. The fact that he helped him, both as man and as artist,
was, so to speak, a private affair; for the goals of the two men were
very different. Wagner was a comprehensive nature, who summed
up what had preceded him. Liszt was an innovator and a revolu-
tionary. One way of estimating such figures is by their works; in
this way we shall find that Wagner represents fulfillment, while
Liszt represents the statement of the problem. But there are other
ways: we may compare the eruptive force of the native impulses
of the two men. Such a comparison will reveal to us in Wagner
the creator of rounded forms; in Liszt the Promethean bringer of
light. Liszt's work belongs among the Forever Unfinished of man's
treasures; yet, like other contributors to that store, he was among
the torchbearers of mankind.
Natures like Liszt's live almost entirely in the future, and look
upon the present as something imperfect-something important
only as a basis for the future. It is this view that gives them their
tremendous elan, the stormy, sweeping impulse that shows itself
in all their expressions. For Liszt, this elan is embodied in the idea
of the artist, as most strikingly symbolized in Victor Hugo's
Mazeppa: fettered, driven into the wilderness by a demon, a help-
less prey to all the buffetings of fate, only to be freed by a miracle,
to arise as king, and now as law-giver to proclaim the triumph of
the spirit.
For Liszt the only true mastery of the world was based upon
faith in the power of the creative spirit. His ideal was not redemp-
tion, but the triumph of action. His works are not filled with the

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 Franz Liszt Reconsidered I89

twilight of tragic conflict; they glow rather with an ever bright-

ening light, and their inner message is one of homage to the artist
and the concept of creative power. It was of secondary importance
to Liszt what field of activity a creator was engaged in, whether
as poet, painter, philosopher, or, on the highest level, prophet,
saint, Messiah. Music was for him a mediator among all the forms
of artistic expression, translating them all into the universal lan-
guage of feeling. Its task was to transmute all intellectual and
speculative knowledge, to strip it of its purely rational integu-
ment, and to act as its interpreter, conveying the results of all
conceptual and rationalistic activity in terms which would be clear
to those whose only approach to truth must be through feeling.
This was an eminently social view of the nature of music,
completely opposed to the ideas of all the art-devotees and aca-
demicians of Liszt's time as well as ours. This feeling of opposition
to the "cultural" conception of the nature of music may be what
most strongly determined Liszt's inner reserve. What mattered to
him was not success, but a change in the inmost core of men. But
how and where was such a change to be accomplished, if it could
be accomplished at all?
Liszt's whole work, nay, his whole personality, is an embodi-
ment of the great question put by creative idealism, striving to
realize and actualize itself, to the world in which it exists. The
question involves the vitality-and even the very ability to sur-
vive-of the spiritual movement based on the critical idealism of
the 8th century, which achieved its last visible expression in the
upsurge of 848. Upon the ruins of this ideal world, apparently
doomed to break up on the rocks of reality, the artist constructs
for himself a new realm of the spirit, an indestructible symbol of
what he has visioned, a musical token of his faith in the future of
mankind and in the power of his own impulse and creative will.
Are we then to love Liszt, or to criticize him, or to reject him?
Whatever we do, we shall be revealing only something about our-
selves. For in this domain there are no esthetic or artistic or scien-
tific yardsticks, but only a recognition of the phenomenon and of
the laws that govern its actions. This phenomenon is a flame that
soars above the medium of the particular art in which it manifests
itself. That is the secret of its abiding spell, and of the essential
greatness of Liszt.
(Translated by Arthur Mendel)

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