Supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg) 29 April 1841
Paris, April 20. 1 This year’s salon revealed nothing but a many-hued paralysis. 2 One might almost think that the renewed flowering of the visual arts here is at an end; it was no new springtime, but a disagreeable old Indian summer. Painting and sculpture, even architecture, enjoyed a joyful resurgence soon after the July Revolution, but the wings were merely tacked on from the outside, and the forced flight was followed by a most pathetic fall. Only the young sister art, music, had lifted herself up with authentic, particular strength. Has she already reached her shining summit? Will she be able to maintain her position there for long? Or will she quickly sink back down again? These are questions only a later generation can answer. But, in any case, it seems that in the annals of art our contemporary era could preferably be recorded as the age of music. The arts, too, are keeping pace with the gradual spiritualization of the human race. In the most ancient period, architecture necessarily had to emerge alone, glorifying unconscious, raw greatness with its masses, as we can observe, for example, among the Egyptians. Later on, among the Greeks, we see the period of the flowering of sculpture, and the latter already testifies to an external dominance over the material—intelligence chiseled a sense of expectant musing into the stone. But the spirit nevertheless found the stone much too hard for its growing need for revelation, and it chose paint, colored shadows, to represent a transfigured and twilit world of love and suffering. Then arose the great age of painting, which unfolded brilliantly at the end of the Middle Ages. With the development of the life of the conscious mind, all talent for the plastic arts diminishes among humans; and finally even the sense of color, which is, after all, always tied to specific drawing, disappears, and heightened spirituality, abstract thought, reaches for sounds and tones in order to express a babbling enthusiasm that is perhaps nothing but the dissolution of the entire material world—music may be the last word of art, as death is the last word of life.
I have prefaced my comments with these brief remarks in order to suggest why the musical season arouses in me more anxiety than joy. That one practically drowns in music here, that there is in Paris almost no single home in which one can take refuge, as in an ark, from this aural flood, that the noble art of music engulfs our whole life—this is for me a worrisome sign, and on this account I am sometimes gripped by an ill humor that even degenerates into the most irritable injustice toward our great maestros and virtuosi. Under these circumstances one can expect no all-too-cheerful song of praise from me for the man whom the musical world here adores at this moment with an almost insane enthusiasm, and who in fact is one of the most remarkable representatives of music. I am speaking of Franz Liszt, the pianist of genius, whose playing sometimes seems to me like a melodic agony of the world of appearances. Yes, Franz Liszt is here again and gives concerts that exert a magic that borders on the fabulous. Compared with him, all piano players are nothing—with the exception of one, Chopin, that Raphael of the fortepiano. Indeed, with this one exception, all other piano players, whom we heard this year in innumerable concerts, are nothing but piano players, they excel through the skill with which they manipulate the strung wood; whereas with Liszt, one no longer thinks of triumphed-over difficulties—the piano disappears and what is revealed is music. In this respect Liszt has made the most marvelous progress since the last time we heard him. With this advantage he combines a calm that we previously missed. For example, when he played a thunderstorm on the fortepiano, we saw the lightning bolts flicker over his face, his limbs shook as if in a gale, and his long tresses seemed to drip, as it were, from the downpour that was represented. Now, when he plays even the most powerful thunderstorm, he rises above it like the traveler who stands on the summit of a mountain while thunder rolls in the valley. The clouds lie far below him, the lightning bolts slither around his feet like snakes, he lifts his head, smiling, into the pure ether. Despite his genius, Liszt encounters an opposition here in Paris that may be a result of that very genius. This quality is in certain eyes an enormous crime that cannot be sufficiently punished. “Talent is quickly pardoned, but genius is unforgivable!” Thus once spake the late lamented Lord Byron, with whom Liszt shares many similarities.
Liszt has already given two concerts in which, contrary to all conventions, he played without other musical collaborators, entirely alone. He is now preparing a third concert for the benefit of the Beethoven monument. 3 This composer must be the most appealing to the genius of a Liszt. Beethoven, in particular, drives the spiritualist art to the point of that destruction of nature that fills me with a horror I have no desire to conceal, though my friends may shake their heads over it. For me it is a very significant circumstance that Beethoven, at the end of his life, became deaf and even the invisible world of tones no longer had any sounding reality for him. His tones had become mere memories of a tone, ghosts of sounds that had died away, and his last productions bear an uncanny mark of death on their brow.
Less gruesome than Beethoven’s music for me was the friend of Beethoven, l’ami de Beethoven , as he ubiquitously presented himself here, I believe even on visiting cards—a black-haired beanpole with a dreadfully white cravat and a mournful expression. 4 Was this friend of Beethoven’s really his Pylades? 5 Or was he one of those casual acquaintances with whom a man of genius occasionally surrounds himself all the more, the more insignificant they are and the more prosaic their blabber, which affords the genius relaxation after tiring poetic flights of fancy? In any case, we saw here a new kind of exploitation of genius, and the little journals made not a little fun of the ami de Beethoven. “How could the great artist stand such an un-uplifting, spiritually impoverished friend!” cried the French, who lost all patience when faced with the monotonous blather of that tiresome guest. They were not thinking of the fact that Beethoven was deaf.
The number of concert-givers during this year’s season was legion, and there was no lack of mediocre pianists who were hailed as miracles in the papers. Most of them are young people who either modestly themselves, or through some modest brother, provide these panegyrics to the press. The self-deifications of this sort, the so-called réclames , make for extremely entertaining reading. One réclame , which was recently contained in the Gazette musicale , reported from Marseilles that the famous Döhler charmed all hearts there, too, and claimed the special attention of high society with his interesting pallor, the consequence of an illness he had suffered. The famous Döhler has meanwhile returned to Paris and has given several concerts; he also played in the concert of Mr. Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale , which rewarded him most liberally with laurels. France musicale also holds him in high esteem, with equal objectivity; this journal is inspired by a blind enmity against Liszt, and in order to irritate this lion indirectly, it praises the little rabbit. What significance, however, does the real worth of the famed Döhler possess? Some say he is the last of the pianists of second rank; others claim he is the first among the pianists of third rank! In fact, he plays prettily, neatly, and attractively. His interpretation is most pleasing, reveals an astonishing digital skill, but shows neither strength nor spirit. Decorative weakness, elegant paralysis, interesting pallor.
1. Source: Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe , vol. 10, ed. Lucienne Netter, pp. 92–102.
2. The “Salon” was the annual exposition of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre. In 1841 it opened on 15 March.
3. The first concert took place in the Salle Erard on 27 March 1841, the second on 13 April. The third concert on 25 April with orchestra was for the benefit of the Beethoven monument in Bonn. The program included only works by Beethoven.
4. Heine refers to Anton Schindler (1796–1866), Beethoven’s secretary and factotum since 1820. In 1840 he published the first edition of his Beethoven biography. Schindler tried to present himself as a close friend of Beethoven. To maintain this image he destroyed about two-thirds of Beethoven’s conversation books and falsified entries in those he preserved.
5. In Greek mythology Pylades was the friend of Orestes.