Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 9 May 1841
Just as there are periods of tranquility for societies, so too are there periods of tranquility for artists, periods in which they live on the basis of an idea or form which they polish, develop, enlarge, or reduce to its essentials, an idea or form that serves them throughout their career, because, as its progenitors, they have ample time to consider all of its possible resources and manifestations. Art, after all, still pure, can be transformed only slowly; the least flight of the imagination becomes an event that can occupy an entire generation. Originality is not even a necessary condition for success; perfect workmanship can by itself do the trick. Consider the case of Clementi, that master of the elegant and brilliant school of pianism, that embodiment of proper technique, of naïve and spirited thinking, of the rounded musical phrase. Reflect upon the fact that he captured the attention of his contemporaries by imposing his work as a model and by molding the classic shape of the “brilliant” sonata just as Haydn had molded the shape of the “harmonic” sonata. Looking at his magisterial authority, at his universal reputation, and at all the keyboard artists of his day who felt it necessary to imitate him, you would take Clementi for a great inventor. And yet what he really knew how to do was to perfect the ideas of others, thus establishing himself as a man endowed more with good taste than with inner genius. The truly great inventor was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who, with his inexhaustible imagination, endowed Germany with some sixty concertos and more than three hundred sonatas, but who became well-known only to the Germans, because in his day communications took place essentially via armies and ambassadors. Emanuel Bach invented both the “harmonic” sonata and the “brilliant” sonata. Haydn would develop the former; Clementi would develop the latter. The great designs of Emanuel Bach were created before 1740; sixty years later they were still not exhausted, as one may observe in the works of Dussek, Cramer, and Steibelt, all followers of Clementi, albeit with eminently personal characteristics of their own.
Art, precisely because of the works of these extraordinary men, existed in the realm of the gentle pleasures: to caress the ear, to touch the heart—those were its goals. Not aiming at stirring strong emotions, music did not make full use of the feelings it aroused. The very quality of these feelings resulted in keeping as they were the forms of composition that inspired those gentle pleasures in the first place.
A new order of forms and ideas was born when Mozart introduced into instrumental music the expressive qualities of drama and passion. The potentially disturbing aspects of this development were not immediately understood, and it encountered resistance from those who preferred the traditionally more soothing conventions; the agitation mixed with pleasure that Mozart’s development produced found more detractors than supporters. Post-Mozartian piano music, with its richly expressive accents and incisive harmonies, had therefore to contend for some time with the light, elegant, and charming school of Clementi. But Beethoven’s daring imagination came to its support, and the number of admirers of the new way began slowly but surely to grow. That same powerful thinker supplied the first examples of the formal instability that became inevitable in this newly expressive era. Because he was immediately seduced by the sheer splendor that characterized the products of Mozart’s inventive genius, Beethoven at first merely followed the path that had been traced by his illustrious predecessor. But he soon began to contrive structures that were more robust and more adventurous; he replaced brilliant passagework with tonal development; he sought out harmonic richness with particular care and introduced into it a profusion of dissonance; and he did not hesitate to formulate associations between chords that were at the time totally unfamiliar and yet appear to us today as effortless and natural.
A new kind of fingering was the inevitable consequence of these developments, and this new fingering met with criticism from the students of Clementi and Cramer. But the Viennese school nonetheless adopted and presented the new system as the most advanced fingering available to the art of playing the piano. And the dynamic energies that have over the last forty years moved pianism to its current state of development were in fact derived from that Viennese school. Still, the works of Beethoven, considered by pianists as too weighty for the larger public, remained reserved for performance in intimate surroundings, and artists of great technical prowess continued to seek more brilliant if superficial success by playing the works from the “school of pianism” properly speaking, until Hummel arrived and furnished them with new objects of study embodying yet another transformation of music for the piano. In his day a virtuoso of the first rank, Hummel was also a highly gifted composer. His music was not the equivalent of Beethoven’s in terms of boldness and originality, but it showed the composer to be a man of learning and of good taste. With remarkable dexterity, Hummel knew how to lend musical interest to virtuoso passages, and to play them in a way never encountered before. His approach gave rise to a host of imitators.
Note that we are only in 1807, that only fifteen years have elapsed since the death of Mozart, and that we have already witnessed the birth of three new and different movements promulgated by that great man. The style of Hummel fulfilled its mission for the next ten years. During this period, Carl Maria von Weber appeared on the scene with his own unique artistic gifts, putting forth a quite remarkable variant of the dramatically expressive genre as applied to the piano. But at that time Weber was in fact what others have sometimes pretentiously and mistakenly considered themselves to be: a misunderstood genius. Rejected equally by artists and amateurs, his piano music led publishers to fear financial ruin. It took nothing less than the overwhelming success of Der Freischütz to recover his piano music from the total obscurity into which it had fallen.
The year 1817 saw the appearance of another pianist-composer of superior talent, another man born to put his own stamp upon the art of his day. I am speaking here, obviously, of Ignaz Moscheles. More vigorous and more dazzling than Hummel in inventing virtuoso pieces, Moscheles infused them with many elegant innovations; the variations of his Marche d’Alexandre served some of the most gifted pianists as a model for this type of music. Somewhat later the composer broadened and elevated his style in the Souvenirs d’Irlande. No less distinguished a composer in his more serious works, Moscheles demonstrated in his piano concertos a profound knowledge of harmony and dramatic sentiment, and this became progressively more intense in his concertos known as the Fantastique and the Pathétique, both works remarkable for their emotional qualities, their inventiveness, and their craftsmanship. The piano étude as invented by Cramer was further developed by Moscheles, and the highly muscular forms in which he cast them became the seeds from which grew the work that is the principal object of this article.
Moscheles was at the peak of his career when there arrived in Paris a frail boy, phenomenally gifted but of limited technical prowess. That boy was Liszt, “Little Liszt,” as we said at the time, and as we continued to say even after his capacities proved that he was not “little” at all.14 I have written elsewhere of the moment at which these capacities, fully developed, took on the qualities of grandeur that have now elevated Liszt to the highest ranks of the pianists.15 I spoke of the tremendous efforts that are responsible for the development of his prodigious technique and for the supremacy of his playing that now stupefies the entire world (a world that has now become his public). But even after this supremacy was established as unassailable, Liszt still had something to learn: this was to add to his magnificently distinctive musical personality some element that could be transmissible, which could serve as the foundation of a school that would remain in the history of art as a self-contained phase. Liszt’s earliest compositions had no such distinguishing feature: the difficulty of their execution was the sole sign of their author’s distinctive personality, but that difficulty in itself had no palpable form and led to no “system” susceptible to transformation.
All of a sudden Thalberg appeared in Paris and caused a sensation such as had never before been seen—not because the power of his playing was superior to Liszt’s, or even equal to it, for that matter, but because the source of his great flair derived from a felicitous and readily graspable idea: to wit, filling in the empty space traditionally left in the middle range of the keyboard during the playing of virtuoso lines by employing the fingers normally unused during those rapid passages to play the melodies for which they provided nothing more than accompaniment. The magical effect associated with this novelty, the artist’s facility in making the most of this technique, the lovely sonority he obtained from the instrument, and the lyrical quality he was able to lend to those interior lines via the use of the pedals, which no one ever exploited more adroitly than he—all of these things, I repeat, were responsible for and justified Thalberg’s great success. More recently Thalberg has been attacked for his innovations by those who say that they do not originate with him, that they occur earlier in the sonatas of Beethoven. It has further been suggested that these innovations are useless in the creation of serious music, that Thalberg himself tends to overuse them, and that they lend to his music a regrettable uniformity of sound and effect. To refute these criticisms would take me too far from the subject at hand. Let me simply say, first, that Thalberg’s system succeeds only when employed in the manner that he invented (which will guarantee his proprietary rights to it), and, second, that the system is so likely to lead to success that other extremely well-known artists have been led, whether by chance or by design, to imitate it, at least in certain ways, something that proves its practical value.
Liszt was away from Paris at the time of Thalberg’s great triumphs. But it was not long before the exasperating news of his success reached Liszt’s ears and caused him sleepless nights. Let us peer for a moment into the soul of an artist who—confidently aware of his powers, confidently aware of his lack of real rivals—suddenly finds himself displaced and, worse, outstripped in the public’s opinion by another. This is cruel punishment indeed! If it is inflicted upon an artist when he is nearing the end of his career, he only becomes morose and cantankerous. If it is inflicted upon him when he is still young, however, then he rather becomes mortified and angry. It was thus anger that began to boil in Liszt’s blood when, as fast as his horses could carry him, he arrived from Geneva in Paris. Thalberg was no longer there. I do not care to recall the circumstances surrounding this trip, nor the polemical arguments that followed upon its heels. I prefer to follow the great artist in his peregrinations to Milan and to Lake Como.16 There he becomes for us the object of highly interesting study; there we see him looking inward and saying to himself:
“I now have a rival! This rival has produced something that is now stunning the musical world. This something, I believe and I say, has been overvalued. But be this as it may, I can neither deny nor conceal its success—and success is always a historical fact. This something is thus a reality, or at least it has the reality of a form. But really, is this the last word in art? Is my career now over? And am I now destined forever to work with the old forms, or to become an imitator of the person against whom I am now pitted? Was I not also born to create new forms? And did not nature endow me with the facility to be the single most astonishing interpreter of the creations of others?”
What came after this interior monologue was silence—silence for some three years, interrupted only from time to time by the reverberation of the name of Liszt, thrown into space like a bolt of lightning. The life of a powerful man sometimes does indeed offer us an example of this sort of sublime silence, during which he is able to revitalize himself. Precisely what Liszt did during this period remains known only to a few, despite the widespread approval he has met with since putting an end to it, because the charming Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor and the admirably varied Réminiscences de Robert le diable give only a very incomplete idea of his accomplishments.17 Those who, at the concert he gave in Liège, heard him improvise, as I did, a marvelous caprice upon apparently incompatible themes suggested by members of the audience; those who saw him read at sight music laced with death-defying technical difficulties and hastily set down in all but unreadable hands, playing at speeds that surprised even the authors, with such effortlessness as to suggest the performance of mere bagatelles; those, finally, who know that all music of any value whatsoever is stored away in Liszt’s mind in such a way that he is able instantaneously to perform whatever piece by whatever celebrated pianist or composer that one might care to name—those persons, I say, know that Liszt is the most complete musician of our time as well as the most accomplished virtuoso.18 And yet those same persons remain ignorant of the revolution that took place in his creative imagination during the several years he spent in “retirement.”19
Permit me to recall, in order to explain this revolution, that in one of the meetings of the course on the philosophy of music that I gave in Paris in 1832, I spoke of the future of harmony and of tonality, whose final stage ought to be the establishment of relationships among all the keys, major and minor, and as a consequence, the establishment of harmonic progressions heretofore unheard of—an artistic phenomenon to which I have given the name ordre omnitonique. Liszt was present at this lecture; he was struck by the novelty of my idea and, later on, he accepted it as a kind of incontrovertible truth. He then determined he would try to apply the idea to piano music. Accordingly, by combining in newly composed works the new modulatory procedures he had discovered in the transformations effected by Thalberg and now considered compositional necessities, and the new effects and processes of transcendental execution available only to someone of Liszt’s spectacular technique, he created a genre of piano music that belongs only to himself, and that answers in the affirmative the question that has so often been posed: Will Liszt become a distinguished composer?
A colossal unpublished composition, whose various parts combine to form some twelve to fifteen hundred pages of music, and whose title is, I believe, Trois années de pèlerinage or de pérégrinations, is the work into which Liszt has poured his artistic thinking in its newest guises. The first part includes his recollections of Switzerland; the second, his recollections of Italy; the last, his recollections of Germany.20
The celebrated pianist played some excerpts from this work for me and I had to render justice to him by saying that he had now assumed a preeminent position in the field of music.21 Perhaps, once this work is published, some will say that the composer has woven too much of the orchestra into traditional keyboard music rather than contenting himself with the piano; but it may well be that this commentary will turn out to be more of a compliment than a criticism.
Be that as it may, wishing in no way to anticipate the judgments that will eventually be made by the virtuosos, I limit myself here to expressing my feelings based on my first impressions. To speak only of what is today known to artists, I will mention solely the Études d’exécution transcendante, which are the subject, or rather the impetus, of this article, and whose new forms have rendered necessary my long preamble, because to analyze this kind of work in detail is at this point not even conceivable. There is far too much originality in its details for one to be able to comprehend the forms without hearing them construed by the powerful hands of their composer. Let us simply say this: one need only cast his eyes upon this music to be persuaded it represents the most advanced state of the art in terms of piano performance and it offers at the same time conceptions that are both daring and bold.
—Fétis père
Directeur du Conservatoire de Bruxelles
1. “La plus noble et la plus légitime satisfaction que puisse éprouver l’artiste n’estelle pas de se sentir au-dessus de sa renommée, supérieur même à son succès, plus grand encore que sa gloire?” Revue et Gazette musicale, 2 May 1841.
2. Liszt’s exclamation—“I am the servant of the public, that’s for sure!”— is quoted in French in Richard Wagner’s report on the concert that appeared in the Dresdener Abendzeitung of 14 June 1841.
3. The full title of this treatise, which officially appeared on 15 November 1840, is sufficient to describe its intent: Méthode des méthodes de piano ou Traité de l’art de jouer de cet instrument basé sur l’analyse des meilleurs ouvrages qui ont été faits à ce sujet et particulièrement des méthodes de Ch. P. E. Bach, Marpurg, Türk, A. E. Müller, Dussek, Clementi, Hummel, MM. Adam, Kalkbrenner et A. Schmidt, ainsi que sur la comparaison et l’appréciation des différents systèmes d’exécution et de doigter de quelques virtuoses célèbres tels que MM. Chopin, Cramer, Döhler, Henselt, Liszt, Moscheles, Thalberg (Paris: 1840). The second part of the treatise is made up of études de perfectionnement, all expressly composed for this volume (testifying to the wide network of personal relationships maintained in the musical world by the two authors), by Julius Benedict, Frédéric Chopin (the Trois nouvelles études), Theodor Döhler, Stephen Heller, Adolf Henselt, Franz Liszt (a morceau de salon later published as Ab irato), Felix Mendelssohn, Amédée Méreaux, Ignaz Moscheles, Jacques Rosenhain, Sigismond Thalberg, and Édouard Wolff.
4. Wagner, “Du métier de virtuose et de l’indépendance des compositeurs,” Revue et Gazette musicale, 28 October 1840.
5. The collection, marked “œuvre 6,” was published in that year by Boisselot in Marseilles and by Dufaut et Dubois in Paris. Friedrich Hofmeister in Leipzig reissued this work—which, despite its title, contained only twelve exercices—as Études pour le piano en douze exercices, œuvre 1, apparently in 1839; a facsimile of the title page may be found in Ernst Burger, Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of His Life in Pictures and Documents, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton, N.J.: 1989), p. 46.
6. A facsimile of the title page of the Haslinger edition is given in Burger, Franz Liszt, p. 119. Schlesinger’s advertisements of the same work appeared in the issues of the Revue et Gazette musicale of 14 April 1839; 2 May 1839; 20 October 1839; 26 April 1840; 25 October 1840; 4 April 1841; 28 November 1841; 5 June 1842; and beyond. These prove that the word transcendant was not publicly applied to the Grandes Études in the 1830s or early 1840s. (Schlesinger had first advertised this work, on 4 April 1839, as Vingt-Cinq Grandes Études brillantes; he corrected the title in the advertisement of 14 April.)
7. The Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini were subsequently issued, in 1851, by Breitkopf & Härtel, as the Grandes Études de Paganini. The word transcendant, common in French at the time, must not be confused with transcendental, rare in French and sometimes associated with the philosophy of Kant. It has, of course, been argued that Liszt’s mature thinking was influenced by Kantian aesthetics. See, for example, Jim Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work (Cambridge, Eng.: 2003), pp. 194–95. But Liszt presumably understood the word to mean, as did the Dictionaire de l’Académie française from the seventeenth through twentieth century, “élevé, sublime, qui excelle en son genre” (lofty, superior, advanced in its class). The word transcendant is sometimes (as in the New Liszt Edition) rendered as “in increasing degree of difficulty.” This is not the case for the études by Liszt, but may be the sense of the word as first found in the Revue musicale, when the Praktische Orgel-Schul (Darmstadt: 1819–21) of Johann Christian Heinrich Rinck was reviewed by Fétis in the issue of October 1828 (vol. 4, p. 305) in the translation by Alexandre Choron: L’École pratique d’orgue, méthode transcendante formée de la reunion de plusieurs recueils offrant une série graduée de tout genre propre à l’étude de cet instrument.
8. In the Revue et Gazette musicale of 25 April 1837, Fétis, chastising Liszt for having openly criticized Thalberg (in an article for that magazine of 8 January 1837), suggests that Liszt’s friends should have said to him: “Vous êtes l’homme transcendant de l’école qui finit et qui n’a plus rien à faire, mais vous n’êtes pas celui d’une école nouvelle. Thalberg est cet homme: voilà toute la différence entre vous deux.” (You are the transcendent figure of the school that is coming to an end and that has nothing more to say, but you are not the transcendent figure of a new school. That figure is Thalberg. That is the difference between the two of you.) This is the article to which Liszt himself made a virulent rebuttal in the issue of 14 May 1837, excoriating Fétis for his ignorance and arrogance yet stating that the dispute was “much ado about nothing.” Fétis concluded the exchange with a more neutral response in the issue of 21 May 1837.
Rapid summaries of this famous quarrel (there have been many) cannot do it justice, for both men cast light as well as aspersions. It should be noted that Liszt was writing with the editorial assistance of Marie d’Agoult, in a letter to whom he speaks “de mon (ou de notre) article sur Thalberg”—of my (or our) article on Thalberg. Correspondance de Liszt et de Madame d’Agoult, ed. Daniel Ollivier, 2 vols. (Paris: 1933–34), vol. 1, p. 187 (my emphasis). In the same letter, dated 13 February 1837, he notes how Chopin had told him that Fétis’s positive view of Thalberg was paid for by Thalberg’s father, Count Moritz Dietrichstein.
9. Joseph d’Ortigue, long an admirer of Liszt, was apparently surprised by the positive tone of Fétis’s article, as Marie d’Agoult reported to Liszt on 18 May 1841. Correspondance de Liszt et de Madame d’Agoult, vol. 2, p. 138.
10. Revue musicale, 7 December 1834 and 3 December 1831.
11. In a letter of 1852 Liszt mentions his talks “of the rue Montholon” with Wilhelm von Lenz, in Paris in 1828. See Liszt, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Adrian Williams (Oxford, Eng.: 1998), p. 335. It is conceivable that some of those talks included Fétis. Fétis left Paris in May 1833, when he became director of the Conservatoire in Brussels and Maître de chapelle for King Léopold I.
12. “If [the Prélude, last seen in a London exhibition of 1904] ever turns up again, historians may have some serious rethinking to do.” See Alan Walker, “Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” in Franz Liszt: The Man and His Music, ed. Alan Walker (London: 1970), p. 362.
13. See Julien Tiersot, Lettres de musiciens écrites en français du XVe au XXe siècle, (Turin: 1924), vol. 2, p. 362. This letter may have prompted the offer from Fétis to appoint Liszt to a post at the Conservatoire in Brussels, to which Marie d’Agoult alludes in a letter of June 1841, Correspondance de Liszt et de Madame d’Agoult, vol. 2, pp. 156, 164.
14. The Liszt family arrived in Paris on 11 December 1823.
15. Fétis refers to the article on Liszt in volume 6 of the first edition of the Biographie universelle des musiciens (Paris: 1840).
16. Liszt went to Lake Como and to Milan in the period from August 1837 to March 1838, after the “duel” with Thalberg (31 March 1837) that provoked the polemics Fétis, his chronology defective, prefers not to rehearse here. The last word on the contest was probably the Princess Belgiojoso’s, who said something to the effect that Thalberg was the “greatest” pianist and that Liszt was the “only” pianist. See also note 8.
17. Composed and published (by Maurice Schlesinger, in Paris) in 1841.
18. Liszt played in Liège on 13 February 1841.
19. In order to enliven his narrative, Fétis seems to have invented the notion of Liszt’s years “passées dans la retraite”: the pianist may not have appeared in Paris, but in the later 1830s he was performing and composing extensively, including arrangements that were crucial to the rediscovery of Franz Schubert.
20. The definitive title would be Années de pèlerinage (sometimes appears as pélerinage or pélérinage). The first of these appeared in the summer of 1841, when Simon Richault published seven fascicles under the title Année de pélerinage [sic]. See György Kroo, “Années de Pélerinage—Première Année: Versions and Variants,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 34 (1992): 13. The third part of the Années de pèlerinage, published years later, in 1877, would not consist of “recollections of Germany,” although Fétis’s intriguing remark, reflected nowhere else in the literature, suggests that this may have been Liszt’s original intention—something that would counter Dolores Pesce’s hypothesis that Liszt “may indeed have conceived Book 3 with his native Hungary in mind.” See Pesce, “Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, Book 3: A ‘Hungarian’ Cycle?” 19th-Century Music 13 (1990): 208.
21. Liszt played at a private concert organized by Fétis on 11 February 1841. The next day he wrote to Marie d’Agoult: “J’ai joué hier soir chez Fétis; il y avait 150 personnes. Après mon premier morceau Fétis s’est crié: ‘Voilà la création du piano. On ne savait pas ce que c’était jusqu’ici’.” (Last night I played at Fétis’s; there were 150 people in attendance. After the first piece, Fétis cried out: ‘There you have it—the creation of the piano. We didn’t know what it was until now.’) See Correspondance de Liszt et de Madame d’Agoult, vol. 2, p. 120.