CHAPTER VI

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT: ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ITS GROWTH

Modern music and modern history; characteristics of the music of the romantic period--Schubert and the German romantic movement in literature--Weber and the German reawakening--The Paris of 1830: French romanticism--Franz Liszt--Hector Berlioz--Chopin; Mendelssohn--Leipzig and Robert Schumann--Romanticism and classicism.

I

Modern history--the history of modern art and modern thought, as well as that of modern politics--dates from July 14, 1789, the capture of the Bastille at the hands of the Parisian mob. Carlyle says there is only one other real date in all history, and that is one without a date, lost in the mists of legends--the Trojan war. There is no political event, no war or rumor of war among the European nations of to-day which, when traced to its source, does not somehow flow from that howling rabble which sweated and cursed all day long before the prison--symbol of absolute artistocratic power--overpowered the handful of guards which defended it and made known to the king, through his minister, its message: ‘Sire, this is not an insurrection; it is a revolution!’

For a century and a quarter the mob of July 14th has stood like a wall between the Middle Ages and modern times. No less than modern politics, modern thought and all its artistic expression date from 1789. For, against the authority of hereditary rules and rulers, the mob of the Bastille proclaimed another authority, namely that of facts. The notion that forms should square with facts and not facts with forms then became the basis of men’s thinking. This truth had existed as a theory in the minds of individual thinkers for many decades--even for many centuries. But the Parisian mob first revealed the truth of it by enacting it as a fact. From that fact the truth spread among men’s minds, forcing them, according to their lights, to bring all forms and authorities to the test of facts. Babies, who were to be the next generation’s great men, were brought up in this kind of thought and were subtly inoculated with it so that their later thinking was based upon it, whether they would or no. And so men have come to ask of a monarch, not whether he is a legitimate son of his house, but whether he derives his authority from the will of the nation. They have come to ask of a philosophy, not whether it is consistent, but whether it is true. And they have come to ask of an art-form, not whether it is perfect, but whether it is fitting to its subject-matter.

When we come to compare the music of the nineteenth century with that of the century preceding we find a contrast as striking as that between the state of Europe as Napoleon left it with that as he found it. The Europe of the eighteenth century was for the most part a conglomeration of petty states, without national feeling, without standing armies in the modern sense--states which their princes ruled as private property for the supplying of their personal wants, with power of life and death over their subjects; states whose soldiers ran away after the second volley and whose warfare was little more than a formal and rather stupid chess game; states whose statesmanship was the merest personal intrigue of favorites. Among these states a few half-trained mobs of revolutionary armies spread terror, and the young Napoleon amazed them by demonstrating that soldiers who had their hearts in a great cause could outfight those who had not.

So, in contrast to the crystal clear symphonies of the eighteenth century and the vocal roulades and delicate clavichord suites, we find in the nineteenth huge orchestral works, grandiose operas, the shattering of established forms, an astonishing increase in the size of the orchestra and the complexity of its parts, the association of music with high poetic ideas, and the utter rejection of most of the prevailing harmonic rules. And with this extension of scope there came a profound deepening in content, as much more profound and human as the Parisian mob’s notion of society was more profound and human than that of Louis XVI. The revolution and the Napoleonic age, which had been periods of dazzling personal glory, in which individual ability and will power became effective as never before, had stimulated the egotistic impulses of the nineteenth century. People came to feel that a thing could perhaps be good merely because they wanted it. Hence the personal and emotional notes sound in the music of the nineteenth century as they never sounded before. The sentimental musings of Chopin, the intense emotional expression of Schumann’s songs, the wild and willful iconoclasm of Berlioz’s symphonies were personal in the highest degree. And, as the complement to this individual expression, there dawned a certain folk or mob-expression, for the post-Napoleonic age was also an age of national awakening. The feeling of men that they are part of a group of human beings rather than of a remote empire is the feeling which we have in primitive literature, in the epics and fairy stories, the ballads and folk epics. This folk-feeling came to brilliant expression in Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, and the deep heroic note sounds quite as grandly in his symphonic poems. Music took on a power, by the aid of subtle suggestion, of evoking physical images; and, in deeper sincerity, it achieved something like accurate depiction of the emotions. A thousand shades of expression, never dreamed of before, were brought into the art. Men’s ears became more delicate, in that they distinguished nuance of tone and phrase, and particularly the individual qualities of various instruments, as never before; it was the great age of the pianoforte, in which the instrument was dowered with a musical literature of its own, comparable in range and beauty with that of the orchestra. The instruments of the orchestra, too, were cultivated with attention to their peculiar powers, and the potentialities of orchestral expression were multiplied many times over.

It was the great age of subdivision into schools and of the development of national expression. The differences between German, French, and Italian music in the eighteenth century are little more than matters of taste and emphasis--variations from one stock. But the national schools which developed during the romantic period differ utterly in their musical material and treatment.

It was the golden age of virtuosity. The technical facility of such men as Kalkbrenner and Czerny came to dazzling fruition in Liszt and Paganini, whose concert tours were triumphal journeys and whose names were on people’s lips like those of great national conquerors. This virtuosity took hold of people’s imaginations; Liszt and Paganini became, even during their lifetimes, glittering miracular legends. Their exploits were, during the third and fourth decades of the century, the substitute for those of Napoleon in the first fifteen years. Their exploits expanded with the growing interrelation of modern life. The great growth of newspaper circulation in the Napoleonic age, and the spread of railroads through the continent in the thirties, increased many times the glory and extent of the virtuoso’s great deeds.

But the travelling virtuoso was a symbol of a far more important fact. For in this age musicians began to break away entirely from the personal patron; they appealed, for their justification and support, from the prince to the people. The name of a great musician was, thanks to the means of communication, spread broadcast among men, and there was something like an adequate living to be made by a composer-pianist from his concerts and the sale of his compositions. From the time of the revolution on it was the French state, with its Conservatory and its theatres, not the French court, which was the chief patron of the arts. And from Napoleonic times on it was the people at large, or at least the more cultured part of them, whose approval the artist sought. In all essentials, from the fall of Napoleon onward, it was a modern world in which the musician found himself.

But it is evident that we cannot get along far in this examination of romantic music without reviewing the outward social history of the time. It is a time of colors we can never discover from a mere observation of outward facts and dates, for it is a time of complexities of superficial intrigue likely to obscure its meaning. We must, therefore, see the period, not as most historians give it to us, but as a movement of great masses of people and of the growing ideas which directed their actions. Royal courts and popular assemblies were not the real facts, but only the clearing houses for the real facts. The balances, on one or the other side of the ledger, which they showed bear only the roughest kind of relation to the truth.

It is well to skeleton this period with five dates. The first is the one already met, 1789. The next is the assumption of the consulate by Napoleon in 1799, which was practically the beginning of the empire. The next is the fall of Napoleon, which we may place in 1814, after the battle of Leipzig, or in 1815, after Waterloo, as we prefer. The next is 1830, when, after conservative reaction throughout Europe, the mobs in most of the great capitals raised insurrections, and in some cases overthrew governments and obtained some measure of constitutional law. And the last is 1848, when these popular outbreaks recurred in still more serious form, and with a proletarian consciousness that made this revolution the precursor of the twentieth century as certainly as 1789 was the precursor of the nineteenth.

We cannot here give the details of the mighty and prolonged struggle--we shall only recall to the reader the astounding sequence of cataclysms and exploits that shook Europe; roused its consciousness strata by strata; remodelled its face, its thought, its ideals, its laws, and its arts. Paris was the nervous centre of this upheaval, the stage upon which the most conspicuous acts were paraded; but every blow struck in that arena reëchoed, multiplied, throughout Europe, just as every wave of the turmoil originating in any part of Europe recorded itself upon the seismograph of Paris. From the tyranny and unthinking submission of before 1789 we pass to a period of constitutional tolerance of the monarchical form; thence to the aggressive propaganda for republican principles and the terror; thence to the personal exploits of a popular hero, arousing wonder and admiration while imposing a new sort of tyranny. Stimulated imaginations now give birth to new enthusiasms, stir up the feelings of national unity and pride; to consciousness of nationality succeeds consciousness of class--reactions and restorations bring new revolutions, successful mobs impose terms on submissive monarchs, at Paris in 1833 as at Berlin in 1848; then finally follows the communist manifesto. France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, even England, were convulsed with this glorious upheaval; and not kings and soldiers alone, but men of peaceful moods--workingmen, men of professions, poets, artists, musicians--were borne into this whirlpool of politics. Musicians of the eighteenth century had no thoughts but of their art; those of the nineteenth were national enthusiasts, celebrants of contemporary heroes, political philosophers, propagandists, and agitators. What wonder? Since the days of Julius Cæsar had there been any concrete events to take hold of men’s imaginations as these did? They set all men ‘thinking big.’ If the difference between a Haydn symphony of 1790 and Beethoven’s Ninth of 1826 is the difference between a toy shop and the open world, is not the cause to be found mainly in these battles of the nations? Not only Beethoven--Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner, the political exile, were affected by the successive events of 1789 to 1848. As proof of how closely musical history coincides with the revolution wrought by these momentous years, let us recall that Beethoven, the real source of romantic music, lived at the time of Napoleon and by the _Eroica_ symphony actually touches Napoleon; and that by the year 1848, which is the last of those dates which we have chosen as the historic outline of the romantic movement in music, Schubert and Weber were long dead, Mendelssohn was dead, Chopin was almost on his deathbed, Schumann was drifting toward the end, Berlioz was weary of life, and Liszt was working quietly at Weimar, which had been for years one of the most liberal spots in Germany. And, as if Wagner’s dreams of a mighty national music attended the realization of the dream of all Germany, the foundation stone of the national theatre at Bayreuth was laid hardly a year after the unity of the German empire was declared at Versailles in 1871.

How shall we characterize the music of this period? In musical terms it is almost impossible to characterize it as a whole, for the steady stream of tradition had broken up violently into a multitude of forms and styles, and these must be characterized one by one as they come under our consideration. As a whole, it must be characterized in broader terms. For the assertion of the Parisian mob was at the bottom of it all. Previously men’s imaginations had been bounded by the traditional types; they took it for granted that they must contain themselves within the limitations to which they had been born. But since a dirty rabble had overturned the power of the Bourbons, and an obscure Corsican had married into the house of Hapsburg, men realized that nothing is impossible; limitations are made only to be broken down. The intellectual giant of the age had brought this realization to supreme literary expression in ‘Faust,’ the epic of the man who would include within himself all truth and all experience. And, whereas the ideal of the previous age had been to work within limits and so become perfect, the ideal of this latter age was to work without limits and so become great. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century this sense of freedom to achieve the impossible was the presiding genius of music.

And with it, as a corollary to it, came one thing more, a thing which is the second great message of Goethe’s ‘Faust’--the idea that truth must be personally experienced, that while it is abstract it is non-existent. Faust could not know love except by being young and falling in love. He could not achieve his redemption by understanding the beauty of service; he must redeem himself by actually serving his fellowmen. And so in the nineteenth century men came to feel that beautiful music cannot be merely contemplated and admired, but must be lived with and felt. Accordingly composers of this period emphasized continually the sensuous in their music, developing orchestral colors, dazzling masses of tone, intense harmonies and biting dissonances, delicate half-lights of modulation, and the deep magic of human song. The change in attitude from music as a thing to be admired to music as a thing to be felt is perhaps the chief musical fact of the early nineteenth century.

II

Let us now consider the great romantic composers as men living amid the stress and turmoil of revolution. All but Schubert were more or less closely in touch with it. All but him and Mendelssohn were distinctly revolutionists, skilled as composers and hardly less skilled to defend in impassioned prose the music they had written. As champions of the ‘new’ in music they are best studied against the background of young Europe in arms and exultant.

But in the case of Franz Schubert we can almost dispense with the background. His determining influences, so far as they affected his peculiar contributions to music, were almost wholly literary. He was an ideal example of what we call the ‘pure musician.’ There is nothing to indicate that he was interested in anything but his art. He lived in or near Vienna during all the Napoleonic invasions, but was concerned only with escaping military service. Schubert was the last of the musical specialists. From the time when his schoolmaster father first directed his musical inclinations he had only one interest in the world, outside of the ordinary amusements of his Bohemian life. If Bach was dominated by his Protestant piety and Handel by the lure of outward success, Schubert worked for no other reason than his love of the beautiful sounds which he created (and of which he heard few enough in his short lifetime).

Yet even here we are forced back for a moment to the political background. For it is to be noticed that the great German composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found their activities centred in and near Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert are all preëminently Austrian. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century--that is, after the death of Schubert--there is not a single great composer living in Vienna for more than a short period of time. The political situation of Vienna, the stronghold of darkness at this time, must have had a blighting effect on vigorous and open-minded men. At a time when the most stimulating intellectual life was surging through Germany generally, Vienna was suffering the most rigid censorship and not a ray of light from the intellectual world was permitted to enter the city. Weber felt this in 1814 in Austrian Prague. He wrote: ‘The few composers and scholars who live here groan for the most part under a yoke which has reduced them to slavery and taken away the spirit which distinguishes the true free-born artist.’ Weber, a true free-born artist, left Prague at the earliest opportunity and went to Dresden, where the national movement, though frowned upon, was open and aggressive. Schubert, on the contrary, because of poverty and indolence, never left Vienna and the territory immediately surrounding. In the preceding generation, when music was still flowing in the calm traditions, composers could work best in such a shut-in environment. (It is possibly well to remember, however, that Austria had a fit of liberalism in the two decades preceding Napoleon’s régime.) But with the nineteenth century things changed; when the beacon of national life was lighting the best spirits of the time, the composers left Vienna and scattered over Germany or settled in Paris and London. Schubert alone remained, his imagination indifferent to the world beyond. In all things but one he was a remnant of the eighteenth century, living on within the walls of the eighteenth century Vienna. But this one thing, which made him a romanticist, a link between the past and the present, a promise for the future, was connected, like all the other important things of the time, with the revolution and the Napoleonic convulsions. It was, in short, the German national movement expressed in the only form in which it could penetrate to Vienna; namely, the romantic movement in literature. Not in the least that Schubert recognized it as such; his simple soul doubtless saw nothing in it but an opportunity for beautiful melodies. But its inspiration was the German nationalist movement.

The fuel was furnished in the eighteenth century in the renaissance of German folk-lore and folk poetry. The researches of Scott among the Scotch Highlands, Bishop Percy’s ‘Reliques’ of English and Scottish folk poetry, the vogue which Goethe’s _Werther_ gave to Ossian and his supposed Welsh poetry, and, most of all, the ballads of Bürger, including the immortal ‘Lenore,’ contributed, toward the end of the century, to an intense interest in old Germanic popular literature. Uhland, one of the most typical of the romantic poets, fed, in his youthful years, on ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures, descriptions of travel in lands where the inhabitants had but one eye, placed in the centre of the forehead, and where there were men with horses’ feet and cranes’ necks, also a great work with gruesome engravings of the Spanish wars in the Netherlands.’[74] When he looked out on the streets he saw Austrian or French soldiers moving through the town and realized that there was an outside world of romantic passions and great issues--a thing Schubert never realized. Even then he was filled with patriotic fervor and his beloved Germanic folk-literature became an expression of it. In 1806-08 appeared Arnim and Brentano’s _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_, a collection of German folk poetry of all sorts--mostly taken down by word of mouth from the people--which did for Germany what Percy’s ‘Reliques’ had done for England. Under this stimulus the German romantic movement became, in Heine’s words, ‘a reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it had manifested itself in its songs, paintings, and architecture,’[75] placed at the service of the national awakening.

But patriotic fervor was the ‘underground meaning’ of the romantic movement. This hardly penetrated to Schubert. He saw in it only his beautiful songs and the inspiration of immortal longings awakened by ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures.’ He had at his disposal a wonderful lyrical literature. First of all Goethe, originator of so much that is rich in modern German life; Rückert and Chamisso, and Müller, singers of the personal sentiments; Körner, the soldier poet, and Uhland, spokesman for the people and apologist for the radical wing of the liberal political movement; Wieland and Herder; and, in the last months of his life, Heine, ultra-lyricist, satirist, and cosmopolite.

From this field Schubert’s instinct selected the purely lyrical, without regard to its tendency, with little critical discrimination of any sort. Thanks to his fertility, he included in his list of songs all the best lyric poets of his time. And to these poets he owed what was new and historically significant in the spirit of his musical output. This new element, reduced to its simplest terms, was the emotional lyrical quality at its purest. His musical training was almost exclusively classical, so far as it was anything at all. He knew and adored first Mozart and later Beethoven. But these composers would not have given him his wonderful gift of expressive song. And since it is never sufficient to lay any specific quality purely to inborn genius (innate genius is, on the whole, undifferentiated and not specific), we must lay it, in Schubert’s case, to the romantic poets. From the earliest years of his creative (as opposed to his merely imitative) life, he set their songs to music; he found nothing else so congenial; inevitably the spontaneous song called forth by these lyrics dominated his musical thinking. The romantic poets had taught him to create from the heart rather than from the intelligence.

Franz Schubert was born at Lichtenthal, a suburb of Vienna, in 1797, one of a family of nineteen children, of whom ten survived childhood. Instructed in violin playing by his father--nearly all German school-masters played the violin--he evinced an astounding musical talent at a very early age, was taken as boy soprano into the Vienna court chapel, and instructed in the musical choir school--the _Convict_--receiving lessons from Rucziszka and Salieri. At sixteen, when his voice changed, he left the _Convict_ and during three years assisted his father as elementary school teacher in Lichtenthal. But in the meantime he composed no less than eight operas, four masses, and other church works and a number of songs. Not till 1817 was he enabled, through the generosity of his friend Schober, to devote himself entirely to music; never in his short life was he in a position to support himself adequately by means of his art: as musical tutor in the house of Esterhàzy in Hungary (1818-1824) he was provided for only during the summer months; Salieri’s post as vice-kapellmeister in Vienna as well as the conductorship of the Kärntnerthor Theatre he failed to secure. Hence, he was dependent upon the meagre return from his compositions and the assistance of a few generous friends--singers, like Schönstein and Vogl, who made his songs popular. Narrow as his sphere of action was the circle of those who appreciated him. Public recognition he secured only in his last year, with a single concert of his own compositions. He died in 1828, at the age of thirty-one. During that short span his productivity was almost incredible; operas, mostly forgotten (their texts alone would make them impossible) and some lost choral works of extraordinary merit; symphonies, some of which rank among the masterpieces of all times; fourteen string quartets and many other chamber works; piano sonatas of deep poetic content, and shorter piano pieces (_Moments musicals_, impromptus, etc.) poured from his magic pen, but especially songs, to the number of 650, a great many of which are immortal. Schubert was able to publish only a portion of this prodigious product during his lifetime. Much of it has since his death been resurrected from an obscure bundle of assorted music found among his effects, and at his death valued at 10 florins ($2.12)! A perfect stream of posthumous symphonies, operas, quartets, songs, every sort of music appeared year after year till the world began to doubt their authenticity. Schumann, upon his visit to Vienna in 1838, still discovered priceless treasures, including the great C major symphony.

As a man Schubert never got far away from the peasant stock from which he came. He was casual and careless in his life; a Bohemian rather from shiftlessness than from high spirits; content to work hard and faithfully, and demanding nothing more than a seidel of beer and a bosom companion for his diversion. He was never intellectual, and what we might call his culture came only from desultory reading. He was as sensitive as a child and as trusting and warm-hearted. His musical education had never been consistently pursued; his fertility was so great that he preferred dashing off a new piece to correcting an old one. Hence his work tends to be prolix, and, in the more academic sense, thin. Toward the end of his life, however, he felt his technical shortcomings, and at the time of his death had made arrangements for lessons in counterpoint from Sechter. It is fair to say that we possess only Schubert’s early works. Though they are some 1,800 in number, they are only a fragment of what he would have produced had he reached three-score and ten. By the age at which he died Wagner had not written ‘Tannhäuser’ nor Beethoven his Third Symphony.

In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart, excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. Yet in actual subject matter he is more closely connected to Beethoven--it is no detraction to say that in his earlier period he freely borrowed from him, for, in Mr. Hadow’s words, Schubert always ‘wears his rue with a difference.’ Again, in his procedure, in his harmonic progression and the rhythmic structure of his phrases, he harks back to Haydn; the abruptness of his modulations, the clear-cut directness of his articulation, the folk-flavor of some of his themes are closely akin to that master’s work. But out of all this material he developed an idiom as individual as any of his predecessors’.

The essential quality which distinguishes that idiom is lyricism. Schubert is the lyricist _par excellence_. More than any of the Viennese masters was he imbued with the poetic quality of ideas. His musical phrases are poetic where Mozart’s are purely musical. They have the force of words, they seem even translations of words, they are the equivalents of one certain poetic sentiment and no other; they fit one particular mood only. In the famous words of Lizst, Schubert was _le musicien le plus poète qui fût jamais_ (the most poetic musician that ever lived). We may go further. Granting that Mozart, too, was a poetic musician, Schubert was a musical poet. What literary poet does he resemble? Hadow compares him to Keats; a German would select Heine. For Heine had all of that simplicity, that unalterable directness which we can never persuade ourselves was the result of intellectual calculation or of technical skill; he is so artless an artist that we feel his phrases came to him ready-made, a perfect gift from heaven, which suffered no criticism, no alteration or improvement.

Schubert died but one year after Beethoven, a circumstance which alone gives us reason to dispute his place among the romantic composers. He himself would hardly have placed himself among them, for he did not relish even the romantic vagaries of Beethoven at the expense of pure beauty, though he worshipped that master in love and awe. ‘It must be delightful and refreshing for the artist,’ he wrote of his teacher Salieri upon the latter’s jubilee, ‘to hear in the compositions of his pupils simple nature with its expression, free from all oddity, such as is now dominant with most musicians and for which we have to thank one of our greatest German artists almost exclusively....’ Yet, as Langhans says, ‘not to deny his inclination to elegance and pure beauty, he was able to approach the master who was unattainable in these departments (orchestral and chamber music) more closely than any one of his contemporaries and successors.’[76] Yes, and in some respects he was able to go beyond. ‘With less general power of design than his great predecessors he surpasses them all in the variety of his color. His harmony is extraordinarily rich and original, his modulations are audacious, his contrasts often striking and effective and he has a peculiar power of driving his point home by sudden alterations in volume of sound.’[77] In the matter of form he could allow himself more freedom--he could freight his sonatas with a poetic message that stretched it beyond conventional bounds, for his audience was better prepared to comprehend it. And while his polyphony is never like that of Beethoven, or even Mozart, his sensuous harmonic style, crystal clear and gorgeously varied, with its novel and enchanting use of the enharmonic change and its subtle interchange of the major and minor modes, supplies a richness and variety of another sort and in itself constitutes an advance, the starting point of harmonic development among succeeding composers. By these tokens and ‘by a peculiar quality of imagination in his warmth, his vividness and impatience of formal restraint, he points forward to the generation that should rebel against all formality.’ But, above all, by his lyric quality. He is lyric where Beethoven is epic; and lyricism is the very essence of romanticism. Whatever his stature as a symphonist, as a composer in general, his position as song writer is unique and of more importance than any other. Here he creates a new form, not by a change of principle, by a theoretically definable process, but ‘a free artistic creative activity, such as only a true genius, a rich personality not forced by a scholastic education into definitely limited tracks, could accomplish.’

The particular merit of this accomplishment of Schubert will have more detailed discussion in the following chapter. But, aside from that, he touched no form that he did not enrich. By his sense of beauty, unaided by scholarship or the inspiration of great deeds in the outer world, he made himself one of the great pioneers of modern music. Together with Weber, he set the spirit for modern piano music and invented some of its most typical forms. His _Moments Musicals_, impromptus, and pieces in dance forms gave the impulse to an entire literature--the _Phantasiestücke_ of Schumann, the songs without words of Mendelssohn are typical examples. His quartets and his two great symphonies (the C major and the unfinished B minor) have a beauty hardly surpassed in instrumental music, and are inferior to the greatest works of their kind only in grasp of form. His influence on posterity is immeasurable. Not only in the crisp rhythms and harmonic sonorities of Schumann, in the sensuous melodies and gracious turns of Mendelssohn, but in their progeny, from Brahms to Grieg, there flows the musical essence of Schubert. Who can listen to the slow movement of the mighty Brahms C minor symphony without realizing the depth of that well of inspiration, the universality of the idiom created by the last of the Vienna masters?

Schubert’s music was indeed the swan-song of the Viennese period of the history of music, and it is remarkable that a voice from that city, more than any other in Europe bound to the old régime, should have sung of the future of music. But so Schubert sang from a city of the past. Meanwhile new voices were raised from other lands, strong with the promise of the time.

III

The great significance of Weber in musical history is that he may fairly be called the first German national composer. Preceding composers of the race had been German in the sense that they were of German blood and their works were paid for by Germans, and also in that their music usually had certain characteristics of the German nature. But they were not consciously national in the aggressive sense. Weber’s works are the first musical expression of a German patriotism, cultivating what is most deeply and typically German, singing German unity of feeling and presenting something like a solid front against foreign feelings and art. But we are too apt to wave away such a statement as a mere phrase. At a distance we are too liable to suppose that a great art can come into being in response to a mere sentimental idea. But German patriotism was a passion which was fought for by the best brains and spirits of the time. It was in the heat of conflict that Weber’s music acquired its deep meaning and its spiritual intensity.

To understand the state of affairs we must again go back to the French Revolution. Germany was at the end of the eighteenth century more rigidly mediæval than any other European country, save possibly Russia and parts of Italy. The German patriot Stein thus described the condition of Mecklenburg in a letter written in 1802: ‘I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pastures or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire laboring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farm houses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country; an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, who devastates everything about him and surrounds himself with the silence of the grave.’ If Stein was perhaps inclined to be pessimistic in his effort to arouse German spirits, it is because he has in his mind’s eye the possibility of better things, and the actual superiority of conditions in France and England. Most observers of the time viewed conditions with indifference. Goethe showed little or no patriotism; ‘Germany is not a nation,’ he said curtly.

After the peace of Lunéville and the Diet of Ratisbon the greater part of Germany fell under Napoleon’s influence. The German people showed no concern at thus passing under the control of the French. The German states were nothing but the petty German courts. Fyffe[78] humorously describes the process of political reorganization which the territory underwent in 1801: ‘Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became known that by common consent the free cities of the empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant, Mathieu, had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to maneuver for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up four flights of stairs to the lodging of the needy secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty minister. They hugged Talleyrand’s poodle; they played blind-man’s buff and belabored each other with handkerchiefs to please his little niece. The shrewder of them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.’

Such were the issues which controlled the national destiny of Germany in 1801. Napoleon unintentionally gave the impetus to the German resurgence by forcing some vestige of rational organization upon the land. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance kept life down to an inert monotony. The free cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. The new régime centralized administration, strengthened the financial system, and relieved the peasants of the most intolerable of their burdens, and thus gave them a stake in the national welfare.

Five years later Napoleon helped matters further by a rule of insolence and national oppression that was intolerable to any educated persons except the ever servile Prussian court. The battle of Jena and the capture of Berlin had thrown all Prussia into French hands, and the court into French alliances. Stein protested and attempted to arouse the people. He met with indifference. Then came more indignities. Forty thousand French soldiers permanently quartered on Prussian soil taught the common people the bitterness of foreign domination. When the Spanish resistance of 1808 showed the weakness of Napoleon a band of statesmen and patriots, including the poet Arndt, the philosopher Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher, renewed their campaign for national feeling, the only thing that could put into German armies the spirit needful for Napoleon’s overthrow. In all this the House of Hohenzollern and the ministers of the court of Potsdam played a most inglorious rôle. The patriots were frowned upon or openly prosecuted. Schill, a patriotic army officer, who attempted to attack the French on his own account, was denounced from Berlin. Even when Napoleon was returning defeated from Moscow, the jealousies of the court stood out to the last against the spontaneous national uprising. Finally Frederick William, the Prussian king, made a virtue of necessity and entered the field in the name of German unity.

But the nationalist movement had become a constitutionalist, even a republican, movement. The German soldiers, returning home victorious after the battle of Leipzig, received the expected promise of a constitution from Frederick William. After two years of delay the promise had been practically withdrawn. Only the examples of Weimar, Bavaria, and Baden, together with the propaganda of the liberals, kept the issue alive and growing, until it came to partial culmination in 1848.

It was into this Napoleonic situation that Weber was thrown in his most impressionable years. On a little vacation trip from Prague he went to Berlin and saw the return of Frederick William and the victorious Prussians from Paris after the battle of Leipzig. The national frenzy took hold of him and, at his next moment of leisure, he composed settings to some of Körner’s war songs, including the famous _Du Schwert an meiner Linken_, which made him better known and loved throughout Germany than all his previous works. To this day these songs are sung by the German singing societies, and nothing in all the literature of music is more truly German. To celebrate Waterloo he composed a cantata, _Kampf und Sieg_, which in the next two years was performed in a number of the capitals and secured to Weber his nationalist reputation. It was well that he was thus brilliantly and openly known at the time; he needed this reputation five years later when his work took on a changed significance.

Carl Maria Freiherr von Weber was born at Eutin, Oldenburg, in 1786, of Austrian parentage, into what we should call the ‘decayed gentility.’ His father was from time to time ‘retired army officer,’ director of a theatre band, and itinerant theatre manager. His mother, who died when he was seven, was an opera singer. The boy, under his stepbrother’s proddings, became something of a musician, and, when left to his own resources, a prodigy. His travellings were incessant, his studies a patchwork.[79] Nevertheless he had success on his infantile concert tours, and showed marked talent in his early compositions. At the age of thirteen he wrote an opera, _Das Waldmädchen_, which was performed in many theatres of Germany, and even in Russia. From the age of sixteen to eighteen he was kapellmeister at the theatre in Breslau. After some two years of uncertainty and rather fast life he became private secretary to the Duke Ludwig of Württemberg. His life became faster. He became involved in debts. Worse, he became involved in intrigue. The king was suspicious. Weber was arrested and thrown into prison. He was cleared of the charges against him, but was banished from the kingdom. Realizing that the way of the transgressor is hard, Weber now devoted himself to serious living and the making of music. Then followed three undirected years, filled with literature and reading, as well as music. In 1812, during a stay in Berlin, he amused himself by teaching a war-song of his to the Brandenburg Brigade stationed in the barracks. No doubt his life in the court of Stuttgart had shown him the insincerity of aristocratic pretensions and had turned his thoughts already to the finer things about him--that popular liberal feeling which just now took the form of military enthusiasm. In the following year he accepted the post of kapellmeister of the German theatre at Prague, with the difficult problem of reorganizing the opera, but with full authority to do it at his best. From this time on his life became steady and illumined with serious purpose. He brought to the theatre a rigor of discipline which it had not known before, and produced a brilliant series of German operas.

Early in 1817 he accepted a position as kapellmeister of the German (as opposed to the Italian) opera of Dresden. It was a challenge to his best powers, for the German opera of Dresden was practically non-existent. For a century Italian opera had held undisputed sway, with French a respected second. The light German _singspiele_, the chief representative of German opera, were performed by second-rate artists. All the prestige and influence of the city was for the Italian and French. For the court of Dresden, like that of Berlin half a century before, was thoroughly Frenchified. The king of Saxony owed his kingdom to Napoleon and aristocratic Germans still regarded what was German as mean and common.

But there was a more significant reason for Weber’s peculiar position, a reason that gave the color to his future importance. What was patriotic was, as we have seen, in the eyes of the court liberal and dangerous. To foster German opera was accordingly to run the risk of fostering anti-monarchical sentiments. If, just at this time, the court of Dresden chose to inaugurate a separate German opera, it was as a less harmful concession to the demands of the populace, and more particularly as a sort of anti-Austrian move which crystallized just at this time in opposition to Metternich’s reactionism. But, though the court wished a German opera, it felt no particular sympathy for it. In the preliminary negotiations it tried to insist, until met with Weber’s firm attitude, that its German kapellmeister should occupy a lower rank than Morlacchi, the Italian director. And, as Weber’s fame as a German nationalist composer grew, the court of Dresden was one of the last to recognize it. In the face of such lukewarmness Weber established the prestige of the German opera, and wrote _Der Freischütz_, around which all German nationalist sentiment centred. But to understand why _Freischütz_ occupied this peculiar position we must once more turn back to history.

‘On the 18th of October, 1817,’ says the ever-entertaining Fyffe, ‘the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther’s Wartburg castle, sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to, dined, drank to German liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God, and to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach, fraternized with the _Landsturm_ in the market-place, and attended divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the recognized symbol of German vigor, and lighted a great bonfire on the hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of Luther’s dealing with the Pope’s Bull, a quantity of what they deemed un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz’s pamphlet (which attacked the _Tugendbund_ and other liberal German political institutions of the Napoleonic period). They also burnt a soldier’s straitjacket, a pigtail, and a corporal’s cane--emblems of the military brutalism of past times which was now being revived in Westphalia.’

The affair stirred up great alarm among the courts of Europe, an alarm out of all proportion to its true significance. The result--more espionage and suppression of free speech. ‘With a million of men under arms,’ adds Fyffe, ‘the sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow upon schoolboys’ shoulders.’ The liberal passion, in short, was there, burning for a medium of expression. It was not allowed to appear on the surface. The result was that it must look for expression in some indirect way--in parables; in short, in works of art. In such times art takes on a most astonishing parallel of double meanings. The phenomenon happened in striking form some forty years later in Russia, when the growing and rigidly suppressed demand for the liberation of the serfs found expression in Turgenieff’s ‘Memoirs of a Sportsman,’ which is called ‘the Russian “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”’ The book was a mere series of literary sketches, telling various incidents among the country people during a season’s hunting. It showed not a note of passion, contained not a shadow of a political reference. There was no ground on which the censor could prohibit it, nor did the censor probably realize its other meaning. But it proved the storm centre of the liberal agitation. And so it has been with Russian literature for the last half century; those whose hearts understood could read deep between the lines.

And this was the position of _Der Freischütz_. The most reactionary government could hardly prohibit the performance of a fanciful tale of a shooting contest in which the devil was called upon to assist with magic. But it represented what was German in opposition to what was French or Italian. Its story came from the old and deep-rooted German legends; its characters were German in all their ways; the institutions it showed were old Germanic; its characters were the peasants and the people of the lower class, who were, in the propaganda of the time, the heart of the German nation. And, lastly, its melodies were of the very essence of German folk-song, the institution, above all else save only the German language, which made German hearts beat in tune. The opera was first performed in Berlin, at the opening of the new court theatre, on the sixth anniversary of the battle of Waterloo--that is in 1821. The success was enormous and within a year nearly every stage in Germany had mounted the work. It was even heard in New York within a few months. At every performance the enthusiasm was beyond all bounds, and, after nine months of this sort of thing, Weber wrote in his diary in Vienna: ‘Greater enthusiasm there cannot be; and I tremble to think of the future, for it is scarcely possible to rise higher than this.’ As for the court of Dresden, it realized slowly and grudgingly that it had in its pay one of the great composers of the world.

After _Freischütz_ it was indeed ‘scarcely possible to rise higher,’ but Weber attempted a more ambitious task in a purely musical way in his next opera, _Euryanthe_, which was a glorification of the romanticism of the age--that of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who represented to the Germans of the time vigor of the imagination and the freedom of the individual. Both _Euryanthe_ and _Oberon_, which followed it, are very fine, but they could not repeat the success of _Der Freischütz_, chiefly because Weber could not find another _Freischütz_ libretto. The composer died in England on June 4, 1826, after conducting the first performances of _Oberon_ at Covent Garden.

Personally we see Weber as a man of the world, yet always with a bit of aristocratic reserve. He had been one of a wandering theatrical troupe, had played behind the scenes of a theatre, had known financial ups and downs, had lived on something like familiar terms with gentlemen and ladies of the court, had been a _roué_ with the young bloods of degree, had intrigued and been the victim of intrigue, had been a concert pianist with the outward success and the social stigma of a virtuoso musician, had been a successful executive in responsible positions, had played the litterateur and written a fashionable novel, had been a devoted husband and father, and had felt the meaning of a great social movement. Certainly Weber was the first of that distinguished line of musicians who cultivated literature with marked talent and effect; his letters reveal the practised observer and the literary craftsman, and his criticisms of music, of which he wrote many at a certain period, have the insight of Schumann, with something more than his verve. Finally, he was the first great composer who was also a distinguished director; his work at Prague and Dresden was hardly less a creative feat than _Der Freischütz_.

Musically Weber has many a distinction. He is the acknowledged founder of German opera (though Mozart with _Zauberflöte_ may be regarded as his forerunner), and the man who made German music aggressively national. Wagner, as we know him, would hardly have been possible without Weber. Weber is the father of the romanticists in his emphasis upon the imagination, in his ability to give pictorial and definite emotional values to his music. It is only a slight exaggeration of the truth to call him the father of modern instrumentation; his use of orchestral timbres for sensuous or dramatic effects, so common nowadays, was unprecedented in his time. With Schubert he is the father of modern pianoforte music; himself a virtuoso, he understood the technical capacities of the piano, and developed them, both in the classical forms and in the shorter forms which were carried to such perfection by Schumann, with the romantic glow of a new message. He is commonly regarded as deficient in the larger forms, but in those departments (and they were many) where he was at his best there are few musicians who have worked more finely than he.

IV

The scene now shifts to Paris, a city unbelievably frenzied and complex, the Paris that gives the tone to a good half of the music of the romantic period.

‘As I finished my cantata (_Sardanapalus_),’ writes Berlioz in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious sight. Grapeshot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the façade, women screamed, and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages of my cantata and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets, pistol in hand, with the “blessed riff-raff,” as Barbier said. I shall never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.”’

This was Paris in Berlioz’s and Liszt’s early years there. In Paris at or about this time were living Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Vigny, Balzac, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Lamartine, Dumas the elder, Heine, Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand among the poets, dramatists, and novelists; Guizot and Thiers among the historians; Auguste Compte, Joseph le Maistre, Lamennais, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon among the political philosophers. It is hard to recall any other city at any other time in history (save only the Athens of the Peloponnesian War) which had such a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Thanks to the centralization effected by Napoleon, thanks to the tradition of free speech among the French, the centre of Europe had shifted from Vienna to Paris.

A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodly _claque_, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the romantic school was indisputable.

This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and, in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences, outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’s _Faust_, as well as our old friend _Werther_; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the political revolutionists--perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals of ‘purity.’

For the French intellectuals had perhaps had enough of political life, whereas the Germans were starved for it. At any rate, the French romanticists were almost wholly concerned with artistic canons. To them romanticism meant freedom of the imagination, the demolishing of classical forms and traditional rules, the mixing of the genres ‘as they are mixed in life’; the rendering of the language more sensuous and flexible, and, above all, the expression of the subjective and individual point of view. They had a great cult for the historic, and their plays are filled with local color (real or supposed) of the time in which their action is laid. They supposed themselves to be returning to real life, using everyday details and painting men as they are. In particular they made their work more intimately emotional; they substituted the image for the metaphor, and the pictorial word for the abstract word. This last fact is of greatest importance in its influence on romantic music. The painting of the time, though by no means so radical in technique as that of music, showed the influences of the great social overturning. Subjects were taken from contemporary or recent times--the doings of the French in the Far East, the campaigns of Napoleon, or from the natural scenery round about Paris, renouncing the ‘adjusted landscape’ of the classicists with a ruined temple in the foreground. Scenes from the Revolution came into painting, and the drama of the private soldier or private citizen gained human importance. Géricault emphasized sensuous color as against the severe classicist David. The leader, and perhaps the most typical member, of the romantic school was Delacroix, a defender of the art of the Middle Ages as against the exaggerated cult of the Greeks. He took his subjects ‘from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron (heroes of the literary romanticism); from the history of the Crusades, of the French Revolution, and of the Greek revolt against the Turks. He painted with a feverish energy of life and expression, a deep and poetic sense of color. His bold, ample technique thrust aside the smooth timidities of the imitators and prepared the way for modern impressionism.’[80]

But there was still another result of the suppression of political tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time, under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous. The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation comes to insurrection in _William Tell_; Catholicism and Protestantism grapple to the death in _Les Huguenots_. But not only extensively but intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick; Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in the G flat section of the fourth act duet from _Les Huguenots_. And this heroic quality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of whose themes, like that of Tasso

or that of _Les Préludes_

seem to say, _Arma virumque cano_.

V

If ever a man was made to respond to this Paris of 1830 it was Franz Liszt. Heroic virtuosity was a solid half of its Credo. Victor Hugo, as a virtuoso of language, must be placed beside the greatest writers of all time--Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and whom else? No less can be said for Liszt in regard to the piano. He was born in 1811 in Raiding, Hungary. He is commonly supposed to be partly Hungarian in blood, although German biographers deny this, asserting that the name originally had the common German form of List. Almost before he could walk he was at the piano. At the age of nine he appeared in public. And at the age of twelve he was a pianist of international reputation. How such virtuosity came to be, no one can explain. Most things in music can be traced in some degree to their causes. But in such a case as this the miracle can be explained neither by his instruction nor by his parentage nor by any external conditions. It is one of the things that must be set down as a pure gift of Heaven. Prominent noblemen guaranteed his further education and, after a few months of study in Vienna, under Czerny and Salieri, he and his father went to Paris, which was to be the centre of his life for some twenty years. He was the sensation of polite Paris within a few months after his arrival and he presently had pupils of noble blood at outrageous prices. Two years after his arrival--that is, when he was fourteen--a one-act operetta of his, _Don Sanche_, was performed at the Académie Royale. Two years later his father died and he was thrown on his own resources as teacher and concert pianist. Then, in 1830, he fell sick following an unhappy love affair, and his life was despaired of until, in the words of his mother, ‘he was cured by the sound of the cannon.’

How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French literature.’ Here is a new thing in music--a musician who dares take all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them, meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration for Hugo’s _Marion de Lorme_ and Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_. Be sure, too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic poem, _Heroïde Funèbre_. He made a brilliant arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ and wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.

The early manifestations of modern socialistic theory were then in the making--in the cult of Saint-Simon--and Liszt was drawn to them. For many years it was supposed that he was actually a member of the order, though he later denied this. The Saint-Simonians had a concrete scheme of communistic society, and a sort of religious metaphysic. This latter, if not the former, impressed Liszt deeply, especially because of the place given to art as expressing the ideal toward which the people--the whole people--would strive. But a still stronger influence over Liszt was that of the revolutionary abbé, Lamennais. Lamennais was a devout Catholic, but, like many of the priesthood during the first revolution, he was also an ardent democrat. He took it as self-evident that religion was for all men, that God is no respecter of persons. He was pained by the rôle of the Catholic Church in the French Revolution--its continual siding with the ministers of despotism, its readiness to give its blessing and its huge moral influence to any reactionary government which would offer it material enrichment. He felt it was necessary--no less in the interest of the Church than in that of the people--that the Catholic Church should be the defender of democracy against reactionary princes. He was doing precisely what such men as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are trying to do in England to-day. His influence in Paris was great and he became the rallying point for the liberal party in the Church. Perhaps if his counsel had prevailed the Church would not have become in the people’s minds the enemy of all their liberties and would have retained its temporal possessions in the war for Italian unity forty years later. Liszt had always been a Catholic, and in his earlier youth had been prevented from taking holy orders only by his father’s express command. Now he found Lamennais’ philosophy meat to his soul, and Lamennais saw in him the great artist who was to exemplify to the world his philosophy of art. In 1834 Liszt published in the _Gazette Musicale de Paris_ an essay embodying his social philosophy of art.

Several points in this manifesto are of importance in indicating what four years of revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt the artist. Though primarily a virtuoso, Liszt had been raised above the mere vain delight of exciting admiration in the crowd. He had made up his mind to become a creative artist with all his powers. He had asserted the artist’s right to do his own thinking, to be a man in any way he saw fit. He had accepted as gospel the romanticist creed that rules must be broken whenever artistic expression demands it and had imbibed to the full the literary and romantic imagery of the school. He had linked up his virtuoso’s sense of the crowd with the only thing that could redeem it and make it an art--the human being’s sense of democracy. And he had outlined with great accuracy (so far as his form of speech allowed) the nature of the music which he was later to compose. We can nowhere find a better description of the music of Liszt at its best than Liszt’s own description of the future ‘humanitarian’ music--which partakes ‘in the largest possible proportions of the characteristics of both the theatre and the church--dramatic and holy, splendid and simple, solemn and serious, fiery, stormy, and calm.’ In this democracy Liszt the virtuoso and Liszt the Catholic find at last their synthesis.

How many purely musical influences operated upon Liszt in these years it is hard to say. We know that he felt the message of Meyerbeer and Rossini (such as it was) and raised it to its noblest form in his symphonic poems--the message of magnificence and high romance. But it is fair to say, also, that he appreciated at its true value every sort of music that came within his range of vision--Schubert’s songs, Chopin’s exquisite pianistic traceries, Beethoven’s symphonies, and the fashionable Italian operas of the day. He arranged an astonishing number and variety of works for the piano, catching with wizard-like certainty the essential beauties of each. But probably the most profound musical influence was that of Berlioz, who seemed the very incarnation of the spirit of 1830. Berlioz’s partial freeing of the symphonic form, his radical harmony, and, most of all, his use of the _idée fixe_ or representative melody (which Liszt later developed in his symphonic poems) powerfully impressed Liszt and came to full fruit ten years later.

One more influence must be recorded for Liszt’s early Parisian years. It was that of Paganini, who made his first appearance at the capital in 1831. Here was the virtuoso pure and simple. He excited Liszt’s highest admiration and stimulated him to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. In 1826 Liszt had published his first études, showing all that was most characteristic in his piano technique at that time. After Paganini had stormed Paris he arranged some of the violinist’s études for the piano, and the advance in piano technique shown between these and the earlier studies is marked.

But Liszt had by this time thought too much and too deeply ever to believe that the technical was the whole or even the most important part of an artist. He appreciates the value of Paganini and the place of technical virtuosity in art, but he writes: ‘The form should not sound, but the spirit speak! Then only does the virtuoso become the high priest of art, in whose mouth dead letters assume life and meaning, and whose lips reveal the secrets of art to the sons of men....’ Finally, note that, amid all this dogma and cocksureness, Liszt understood with true humility that he was not expressing ultimate truth, that he spoke for art in a transition stage, and was the artistic expression of a transitional culture. ‘You accuse me,’ he said to the poet Heine, ‘of being immature and unstable in my ideas, and as a proof you ennumerate the many causes which, according to you, I have embraced with ardor. But this accusation which you bring against me alone, shouldn’t it, in justice, be brought against the whole generation? Are we not unstable in our peculiar situation between a past which we reject and a future which we do not yet understand?’ Thus revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt a conscious instrument in the transition of music.

For some ten years Liszt remained the concert pianist. His concert tours took him all over Europe, ‘like a wandering gypsy.’ He even dreamed of coming to America. In 1840 he went to Hungary and visited his birthplace. He rode in a coach, thus fulfilling, in the minds of the villagers, the prophecy of an old gypsy in his youth, that he should return ‘in a glass carriage.’ In his book, ‘The Gypsies and Their Music,’ he gives a highly colored and delightful account of how he was received by the gypsies, how he spent a night in their camp, how he was accompanied on his way by them and serenaded until he was out of sight. The trip made a lasting impression on his mind. He had heard once more the gypsy tunes which had so thrilled him in his earliest childhood, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies were the result.

In 1833, in Paris, he was introduced to the Countess d’Agoult, and between the two there sprang up a violent attachment. They lived together for some ten years, concerning which Liszt’s biographer, Chantavoine, says bluntly, ‘the first was the happiest.’ They had three children, one of them the wife of the French statesman, Émile Ollivier, and another the wife of von Bülow and later of Richard Wagner. Eventually they separated.

In 1842 Liszt was invited by the grand duke of Weimar to conduct a series of concerts each year in the city of Goethe and Schiller. Soon afterward he became director of the court theatre. He gave to Weimar ten years of brilliant eminence, performing, among other works, Wagner’s _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, and ‘Flying Dutchman’; Berlioz’s _Benvenuto Cellini_; Schumann’s _Genoveva_ and his scenes from _Manfred_; Schubert’s _Alfonso und Estrella_; and Cornelius’ ‘The Barber of Bagdad.’ The last work, an attempt to apply Wagnerian principles to comic opera, was received with extreme coldness, and Liszt in disgust gave up his position, leaving Weimar in 1861. But during these years he had composed many of the most important of his works.