The world of music in nineteenth-century Paris, as in many other periods and places, was highly politicized. Reviews in the daily and weekly French press, which underwent tremendous development in what is commonly referred to as the Romantic era, were conditioned by alliances and enmities of a sort still well-known to today’s readers and listeners. One of the conspicuous artistic friendships that developed in the early 1830s was between the brilliant young virtuoso Franz Liszt and the fiery young composer Hector Berlioz. And one of the more heated squabbles at the time occurred between that same revolutionary Berlioz and the old-school composer-historian-theorist François-Joseph Fétis, who in 1827 had founded the first serious periodical uniquely devoted to music, the Revue musicale, and would long contribute seminal articles to its distinguished successor, the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. No one would have been surprised to find Fétis expressing suspicion of a “friend of Hector’s,” or to find him greeting with pleasure, for example, the arrival in the French capital of Frédéric Chopin—for the Polish pianist’s accomplishments, with all of their inspired inventiveness, were couched in recognizable forms of modest proportion.
Despite such a tendentious atmosphere, it was probably more by coincidence than by design that, one week before publishing the article by Fétis translated here, which was prompted by Liszt’s new etudes for solo piano, the Revue et Gazette musicale printed Liszt’s own review of the concert that Chopin gave in Paris on 26 April 1841, thus putting before the day’s musically literate public some deeply penetrating thoughts on the two greatest pianists of the age. In Chopin, Liszt discovers a “poet—elegiac, profound, wistful, and pure.” He also discovers a pianist of only limited renown, which causes him to set down a question that reveals the conflict by which he, Liszt, had begun to be tormented: “Is it not the case that the most noble and the most sincere kind of satisfaction an artist can experience is that of feeling above and beyond his established celebrity, superior to his acknowledged success, and even greater than his widely recognized achievement?”1
Liszt, at the time nearing the apex of the astonishing period of his career, which had begun with his first public recital in 1820 and which clearly had among its goals the domination of all rivals in the arena of the piano, was only beginning to come to terms with the affirmative answer to this question that would, before the decade was out, cause him to withdraw from the virtuoso stage. And yet, try as he might to elevate what one might call the virtuosity of art above the art of virtuosity, he could not yet free himself, in 1841, from the unfailingly successful dazzle to which Fétis alludes in his article by mentioning the sparkling new Réminiscences de Robert le diable. Liszt was compelled by popular demand to perform it—“Je suis le serviteur du public; cela va sans dire!”—at the otherwise all-Beethoven concert he gave with Berlioz on 25 April 1841 for the purpose of raising funds for the Beethoven monument in Bonn.2
Fétis displays more the historian than the critic, more the writer of the Biographie universelle des musiciens than the editor of the Revue musicale in his article. He begins by offering a historical overview of keyboard compositions from those of C. P. E. Bach through those of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and on to those of certain contemporary composers, most notably Liszt’s rival, Sigismond Thalberg. Quite evident is Fétis’s role as author (together with Ignaz Moscheles) of the freshly minted Méthode des méthodes de piano, that avowedly eclectic treatise founded on the principle of extracting from past teachings—regarding hand placement, articulation, sound production, and fingering—only the best of the best techniques.3 The article displays its author as an enemy of “progress”: not because he rejected modern invention, but because he saw such invention as the result of a process he preferred to call transformation. “L’ art ne progresse pas, il se transforme”: this was his motto and his credo; it had the excellent effect of promoting the aesthetic validity and the appreciation of music both past and present. Fétis thus surveys the various styles and schools of pianism that have led to what he is now constrained to admit, given Liszt’s new work, is a highly advanced state of art. In doing so he distinguishes music whose goal is sheer virtuosity from music whose goal is of a higher order, thus taking up a subject that concerned many at the time, including Richard Wagner, whose own variation on the theme appeared in this very same journal.4
In fact, Fétis pays so little attention to the ostensible subject of the article, new etudes by Liszt, that we cannot be sure what actually prompted it. Was it the publication of the work we know in its definitive version as the Études d’exécution transcendante? Liszt’s studies under that conspicuous title were not published until 1852 (by Breitkopf & Härtel, in Leipzig). Their earlier incarnations were published, first, in 1827, under the title of Étude pour le piano en quarante-huit exercices, and second, in 1839, as 24 Grandes Études pour le piano.5 The latter printing was issued simultaneously in Vienna by Tobias Haslinger, in Milan by Giovanni Ricordi, and in Paris by Maurice Schlesinger, the owner of the Revue et Gazette musicale, who first advertised a collection called 24 Grandes Études on 14 April 1839—a collection he continued to advertise under that title through 1842.6
Was it therefore Fétis, deploying the crucial word transcendant, who first suggested the definitive title for the Grandes Études, eleven years avant la lettre? Or did Fétis rather have in hand Liszt’s Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini, published in Paris by Georges Schonenberger in late 1840 and advertised in the Revue et Gazette musicale on 14 February 1841, only three months before the appearance of the article in question?7 We simply cannot be sure; we know only that Fétis had earlier associated Liszt with “une école transcendante du piano,”8 and that in the present article he finally expresses admiration for Liszt the composer as well as the pianist.9 It may seem surprising that the Paganini Études, essentially arrangements of preexisting works, should have inspired such a long and thoughtful article. But it would be even more remarkable if the Transcendental Etudes had in fact been given their ultimate title by François-Joseph Fétis.
Fétis favors speaking of history in terms of “schools” and “systems,” just as he favors speaking of his own thinking in terms of “doctrines” and “philosophies.” History for him is “an abstraction made from the individual lives and works” of those who lived it, “men of genius…who, as a result of their powerful independence, break the bonds that restrain their contemporaries and cause their art to forge ahead.”10 Fétis’s preference for generic purity and his desire to incorporate all musical phenomena into larger logical categories can thus come into conflict with his recognition of the uniqueness of certain observable facts, just as his insistence on speaking of transformation rather than progress can inhibit his perfectly normal desire to assert that one new practice might be better than another.
It was surely this “conservative” tendency that led him initially to favor the now lesser-known virtuoso in the Liszt-Thalberg “duel” which took place on 31 March 1837 in the Parisian salons of the Princess Belgiojoso. In a general sense, what was at issue here, before an elite audience of artists, writers, and politicians, was the determination to prove who was the greatest pianist of the day and, more subtly, what constituted great playing. Thalberg’s particular novelty—readily graspable—was to attribute a principal melodic line to the middle register of the keyboard in such a way as to give the impression that it was magically played by a “third hand.” Liszt’s pyrotechnical improvisations, no less remarkable, were surely less easy for a lexicographer like Fétis to label. In his article, Fétis criticizes Liszt for somehow failing to infuse his earlier music with the mysterious element that in fact founds a “school” that is susceptible to transformation, that leads to imitation; and he asserts that precisely this sort of element—a “system,” the joining together of the “bravura” school of piano playing with the “singing” school, as he put it elsewhere—was responsible for Thalberg’s meteoric rise to the top.
Here Fétis speaks about the interior turmoil that Liszt suffered because of Thalberg’s success. How does he know about this? It is reasonable to suppose—since Fétis relates Liszt’s having played for him privately—that the younger man actually confided in the fatherly fifty-seven-old “sage of Brussels,” whose acquaintance Liszt may well have made as a boy, Fétis’s neighbor in the rue Montholon, and whose lectures on the future of harmony Liszt had indeed attended in the summer of 1832, as Fétis self-importantly recalls in his article.11 It was in one of those lectures that Fétis advanced the notion of the ordre omnitonique—in essence a prescient if apprehensive description of the possibilities of post-Wagnerian chromaticism—which apparently caused Liszt to sketch a work, long since lost, called Prélude omnitonique.12 Although they had clashed in 1837 over Thalberg, the two men, after 1840, had clearly restored what became a mutually respectful relationship for many years to come. Liszt would have come to understand that Fétis had a conviction about where the art of music ought to go—toward the same sort of eclectic ideal he preached in the Méthode des méthodes de piano, that Fétis was inclined to judge new music on the basis of the historical tendency it represented, and that Fétis particularly approved of those tendencies on which he had lectured and sermonized himself.
In a letter dated 17 May 1841, Liszt generously responded to Fétis’s article: “Reading it, I felt that sincere gratification, that noble satisfaction (so rarely experienced!) that you have on being understood and judged by a man who has the right to judge you and by whom it is well worthwhile being understood.”13