Franz Liszt

ation Sentimentale re-written into twenty volumes by a prodigious journalist-twenty huge balloons which bob about the streets, sometimes getting clear of the housetops. Maupassant cut it into numbe

r general consumption, but, watered and prep

plundered almost before the ink was dry on his manuscript, and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came to pass that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel, first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Sa?ns, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers and a half-hundred besides of the

untains and dim distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs." Liszt's music often evokes the golden opium-haunted prose o

t Pisa), Matthew Grünwald; or among the moderns, Gustave Doré, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch, Matisse or Picasso. Ugliness mingled with voluptuousness, piety doubted by devilry, the quaint and the horrible, the satanic and the angelic, these states of soul (and body) appealed to Liszt quite as much as they did to Berlioz. They are all the apex of delirious romanticism;-now as dead as the classicism that preceded and produced it-of the seeking after recondite sensations and expressing them by means of the eloquent, versatile orchestral apparatus. Think what r?les Death and Lust play in the over-strained art of the Romantics (the "hairy romantic" as Thackeray called Berlioz, and no doubt Liszt, for he met him in London); what bombast, what sonorous pomp and pag

contrapuntal Reger?). Both the French and Hungarian masters seem to have concocted rather than have composed their fugues. All of which is the eternal rule of thumb over again. The age of the fugue, like the age of manufactured miracles, is forever past. If you don't care for the fugal passages and part-writing in the Graner Mass or in the organ music, then there is nothing more to be said. Charles Lamb inveighed against concertos and instrumental music because, as he wrote, "words are something; but to gaze on empty frames, and to be forced to make the pictures for yourself ... to invent extempore tragedies is to answer the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime." This unimaginative condition is the precise one from which suffered so many early and too many later critics of Liszt's original music. If you are not in the mood po

lar he ranks next to Bach and Beethoven-in rhythmic invention; after Bach and Beethoven, Liszt stands nearest as regards the variety of his rhythms. His

e interest in his music and, perhaps, open the ears of the present generation to the fact that Strauss, Debussy and others are not as original as they sound. But I fear that Liszt, like any other dead composer-save the few gian

ing and prestige; before his time a pianist, violinist, organist, singer, was hardly superior to a lackey. Liszt was the aristocrat of his art; his essenti

else find oneself in the predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The sting and g

me, in the last century, this extraordinary debauch, in which the man who has never seen a battle, loved a woman, or worshipped a god may not only ideally but through the response of his nerves and pulses to immediate rhythmical atta