Chapter 13
Section 13 of Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians by Albert Hubbard, read by Dini Steyn of Kelowna, Canada, for LibriVox.org. Franz Liszt, Part 1. Were I to tell you what my feelings were on carefully perusing and re-perusing this essay, I could hardly find terms to express myself.
Let this suffice. I feel more than fully rewarded for my trials, my sacrifices and artistic struggles on noting the impression I have made on you in particular. To be thus completely understood was my only ambition, and to have been understood is the most ravishing gratification of my longing. Liszt in a letter to Wagner In writing of Liszt, there is a strong temptation to work the superlative to its limit.
In this instance, it is well to overcome temptation by succumbing to it. That word, genius, is much bandied and often used without warrant. But for those rare beings who leap from the brain of Jove, fully armed, it is the only appellation. No fine-spun theory of pedagogics or heredity can account for the marvelous talent of Franz Liszt. He was one sent from God.
Yet we find a few fortuitous circumstances that favored his evolution. Possibly, on the other hand, there are those who might say the boy attracted to himself the human elements that he required, and thus worked out his freedom, acquiring that wondrous ability to express his inmost emotion. Art is the beautiful way of doing things. All art is the expression of sublime emotions, and there seems a strong necessity in every soul to impart the joy and the aspiration that it feels.
And further, art is for the artist first, just as work is for the worker. It is all just a matter of self-development. And how blessed is it to think that every soul that works out its own freedom gives freedom to others. Liszt is the inspirer of musicians, just as Shakespeare is the inspirer of writers. Strong men make it possible for others to be strong.
No man of the century gave the signs of music such an impulse for good as this man. To go no further in way of proof, let the truth be stated once again that it was Franz Liszt who threw a rope to the drowning Wagner. On October 22nd in the year 1811, when a man-child was born at the village of Riding, Hungary, the heavens gave no sign and no signal flags nor couriers proclaimed the event, all as had been done a week before when a babe was born to the prince and princess Esterhazy at the same place. Now the child born last was the son of obscure parents, the father being an underling secretary of the prince known as Liszt.
The child was very weak and frail, and for some months it was thought hardly possible it could live, but destiny decreed that the boy should not perish. The first recollections of Liszt take in, in a happy view, four men playing cards at a square table. One of these men was the boy's father, another was Mein Herr Josef Haydn, and the other two players are lost in the fog of obscurity. Did they ever know what a wonderful game they played, as little Franz Liszt, sitting on a corner of the table, listened to their talk and admired the
buttons on the coat of the Kapellmeister. After the card game, Haydn sat at the piano and played, and the boy, just three years old, thought he could do that too. Then there was another kapellmeister in the employ of Prince Nicholas Esterhazy at Eisenstadt, and his name was Hummel. He was a pupil of Mozart and used to tell of it quite often when he came up to riding on little visits, after the wine had been sampled. Liest the elder used to help Hummel straighten out his
accounts, and where went least the elder, there too went little Franz least, who wasn't very strong and banked on it, and had to be babied. And so little Franz became acquainted with Hummel, and used to sit on his knee at the piano, and together they played funny duets that set the company in a roar, two tunes at a time, harmonious discords and counterpoints such as no one ever heard before or since. At this time there was no piano at the Liszt cottage, but the boy learned
to play at the neighbors and practiced at the palace of the prince. His father and mother once took him there to hear Hummel. On this occasion, Hummel played the concerto by Reis in C minor. At the close of the performance, little Franz climbed up on the piano stew and very solemnly played the same thing himself, to the immense delight of the listeners. The father of Liszt has recorded that at this time the child was but three years old, but after taking off the proper
percent for the pride of a fond parent, the probabilities are the boy was five. This is the better attested when we remember that it was only a few weeks later that, on the request of Prince Esterhazy, the boy played at a concert in Oedenburg. This launched the boy on that public career, which was to continue for just 70 years. There is good evidence that the boy could read music before he could read writing, and that he threw into his playing such feeling and expression as
Ferdinand Reis, who merely imitated his master Beethoven, had never anticipated. That is to say, when he played rice, he improved on him, with variations all his own, attempts often made with the work of great composers, but which incur risks not advised. It will be seen that Liszt, although born in poverty, was from the very first in a distinctly musical environment, he could not remember a time when he did not attend the band concert. His parents wanted to go
and took the baby because there were no servants to take charge of him at home. Music was in the air, and everybody discussed it, just as in Italy you may hear the beggars in the street criticizing art. The delightful insouciance of the child pianist won the heart of every hearer, and his success quite turned the head of his father, the worthy bookkeeper.
To give the child the advantage of an education was now his parents' one ambition. Having no money of his own, the father importuned his employer, the prince, who rather smiled at the thought of spending time and money on such an elfin-like child. His playing was, of course, phenomenal, unaccountable, a sort of bursting out of the sun's rays, and, like the rainbow, a thing not to be seized upon and kept. It was mere precocity, and precocity is a rare ripe fruit,
with a worm at the core. This discouragement of the over-ambitious father was probably wise, for it gave the child a chance to play I spy and leapfrog in the streets of the village, and to roam the fields. The lad became strong and well, and when ten years of age he had grown into a handsome youngster with already those marks of will and purpose on his beautiful face, that were to be his credentials to place and power. He had often played at concerts in the
towns and villages about, and when there were visitors at the palace, this fine, slim son of the bookkeeper was sent for to entertain them. This attention kept ambition alive in the hearts of his parents, and after many misgivings they decided to hazard all and move to Vienna to give their boy the opportunities they felt he deserved. The entire household effects being sold, the bookkeeper found he had nearly 600 francs, $150. To this amount, Prince Esterhazy added $50,
and Hummel gave his might, and with tears of regret at breaking up the home nest, but with high hope, flavored by chill intervals of fear, the father, mother, and boy started for Vienna. Arriving in that city, the distinguished Karl Czerny, pupil of Beethoven, was importuned to take the lad. Only the letter from Hummel secured the boy an audience, for Czerny was already overburdened with pupils. But when he had listened to the lad's playing, he consented to
take him as a pupil, merely saying that he showed a certain degree of promise. It is sternly true that Czerny did not fully come into the Liszt faith until after that concert of April 13, 1823, when Beethoven, ripe with years, crowded his way to the front and kissed the player on both cheeks, calling him my son. Such a greeting from the great master spoke volumes when we consider the lifelong aversion that Beethoven held towards prodigies, and his disinclination
to attend all concerts but his own. And thus did Franz Liszt begin his professional pilgrimage, consecrated by the kiss of the master. Paris was the next step, to Paris the musical and artistic center of the world. To win in Paris meant fame and fortune wherever he wished to exhibit his powers. The way the name of Franz Liszt swept through the fashionable salons of Paris is too well known to recount. Scarcely 13 years of age, he played the most difficult pieces with peculiar
precision and power, and his simple, boyish, unaffected manner, his total lack of self-consciousness, won him the affection of every mother heart. He was fondled, fated, caressed, and took it all as a matter of course. He had not yet reached the age of indiscretion. Music is a secondary sexual manifestation, just as are the songs of birds, their gay and gaudy plumage, the color and perfume of flowers that so delight us, and the luscious fruits that nourish us. All is sex. And then,
do you not remember that expression of renance, the unconscious coquetry of the flowers? Without love there would be no poetry and no music. All the manifest beauty of earth is only nature's nuptial decoration. James Hoenecker, not always judicious, but a trifle more judicial than others that might be named, declares that two women, making a simultaneous attack upon the great composer, caused him to cut for sanctuary, and hence we have the Abbe Liszt, thus proving again
that love and religion are twin sisters. The old-time biographers can easily be placed in two classes, those who sought to pillory their man and those who sought to protect him. Neither one told the truth, but each gave a picture, more or less blurred, of a being conjured forth from their own inner consciousness. Franz Liszt was naturalized in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was here that he was first hailed as the infant prodigy, and proud ladies, at his performances,
pressed to the front and struggled for the privilege of imprinting on his fair forehead a chaste and motherly kiss. Eight years had passed, years of work and travel and constant growing fame. The youth had grown into a man, and his return to the scene of his former triumphs was the signal for a regathering of the clans to note his progress, or decline. The verdict was that from Le Petit Prodige he had evolved into something far more interesting, Le Grand Prodige.
Tall, handsome, strong, and with a becoming diffidence and a half-shy manner, his name went abroad, and he became the rage of the salons. His marvellous playing told of his hopes, longings, fears, and aspirations. Proud, melancholy, imploring, sad, sullen, his tones told all. Fair votaries followed him from one performance to another, leaving out of the equation such mild incidents as the friendship for Georges Sand, which began with a brave avowal of platonics and speedily drifted into something more complex. Also the equally interesting incident of his being invited to visit the chateau of the lovely Adèle La Prunerede,
and the alpine winter catching the couple and holding them willing captives for three months, blocked there in a castle with nothing worse than a conscience and an elderly husband to appease. We reach the one supreme love passion in the life of Liszt. The Countess d'Agoul is worthy of much more than a passing note. At twenty years of age, she had been married to a man twenty-one years her senior. It was a mariage de convenance,
arranged by her parents and a notary in a powdered wig. It is somewhat curious to find how many great women have contracted just such marriages. Grim disillusionment following, true love holding nothing in store for them. They turned to books, politics, or art, and endeavored to stifle their women's nature with the husks of philosophy.
Count Dagoul was a hard-headed man of affairs, stern, sensible, and reasonably amiable. That is to say, he never smashed the furniture nor beat his wife. She submitted to his will, and all the fine, girlish, bubbling qualities of her mind and soul
were soon held in check through that law of self-protection which causes a woman to give herself unreservedly only to the one who understands. Yet the Countess was not miserable. Only at rare intervals did there come moods of a sort of dread longing, homesickness and unrest. But calm philosophy soon put these moods to rout. She had focused her mind on sociology and had written a short history of the revolution, a volume that yet commands the respect of students.
At intervals, she read her essays aloud to invited guests. She studied art, delved a little in music, became acquainted with the leading thinking men and women of her time, and opened her salon for their entertainment. Three children had been born to her in six years. Maternity is a very necessary part of every good woman's education. This woman's flesh demands its natural pains, says a great writer in a certain play. A staid, sensible woman was the Countess D'Agoul,
tall, handsome, graceful, and with a flavor of melancholy, reserve, and disinterredness in her makeup that made her friendship sought by men of maturity. She talked but little and won through the fine art of listening. She was neither happy nor unhappy, and if the gaiety of girlhood had given way to subdued philosophy, there were still wit, smiles, and gentle irony to take the place of laughter. Life, she said, consists in molting one's illusions. The countess was 29 years of age
when Le Grand Prodige, aged 23, arrived in Paris. She had known him when he was Le Petit Prodige, when she was a girl with dreams and he but a child. She wished to see how he had changed, and so went to hear him play. He was insincere, affected, and artificial, she said. His mannerisms absurd, and he's playing acrobatic. At the next concert where he played, she sought him out, and half laughingly told him her opinion of his work. He gravely thanked her with his hand upon
his heart and said that such honesty and frankness were refreshing. After the concert, Liszt remembered this woman. She was the only one he did remember. She had made her impression. He did not like her. Soon, Liszt was invited to the salon of the Countess d'Agoul, and he, the plebeian, proudly repulsed the fair aristocrat when her attentions took on the note of patronage. They mildly tiffed a very good way to begin a friendship once, said Chateau Briand. The feminine
qualities in the heart of Liszt made allure of the person who dared affront him. He needed the flint of which his mind could strike fire. Nothing is so depressing as a continual mushy adulation. He sought out the Countess, and together they traversed the borderland of metaphysics and surveyed, as the days passed, all that intellectual realm which the dawn of the twentieth century thinks it has just discovered. She taunted him into a defense of Georges Sand, who had but recently returned from her escapade to Venice with Alfred de Musette. Lis defended the author of Léon Leoni and read to the Countess from her books to prove his case.
When haughty, proud and religious ladies mix mentalities with sensitive youths of 24, the danger line is being approached. The grand passions that live in history, such as that of Abelard and Héloïse, Petrarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice, swing in their orbit around world weariness. Love does not concern itself with this earth alone. It demands a universe for its free expression. expression. And the only woman who is capable of the grand passion, who stakes all in one throw of
the dice, is the melancholy woman with this fine religious reserve. No one suspected the Countess Dagoul of indiscretion. She was too cold and self-contained for that. And so is the world deceived by the eternal paradox of things, that law of antithesis that makes opposites look alike, beneath the calm dignity of matronly demeanor, the fires of love were banked. Probably even the countess herself did not know of the volcano that was smoldering in her heart. But there came a day
when the flames burst forth and all the reserve, poise, quiet dignity, caution, and discretion were dissolved into nothingness in love's alembic. Poor Franz Liszt, poor Countess d'Agoul. They were powerless in the coils of such passion. It was a mad tumult of wild intoxication, of delicious pain, of burning fears, and vain tossing unrest. The woman's nature, stifled by its six years of coaxing marital repression, was asserting itself. Lise did not know that a woman
could love like this, neither did the woman. Once they parted, after talking the matter over solemnly and deciding on what was best for both, they parted coldly, with a mere touching of the lips in a last goodbye. The next week they were together again. Then Liszt fled to the Abbe Lamne, and in tears sought, at the confessional and in dim retirement, a surcease from the passion that was devouring him. Here was a pivotal point in the life of Liszt, and the church came near him,
claiming him for her own, and such would have been the case were it not for the fact that one of the children of the Countess d'Agoul was sick unto death. He knew of the sleepless vigils, the weary watching of the fond mother. The child died, and Franz Liszt went to the parent in her bereavement to offer the solace of religion and bid her a decent, respectful farewell, ere he left Paris forever. He thought grief was a cure for passion, and that in the presence of
death love itself was dumb. How could he understand that in most strong natures tears and pain and hope and love are kin, and that each is in turn the manifestation of a great and welling heart? Liszt stood by the side of the countess as the grave closed over the body of her first-born child. as they stood there under the darkening sky her hand went groping blindly for his she wrote of this years and years later when 70 winters had silvered her hair and her steps were
feeble she wrote of this in her book called souvenirs and tells how in that moment of supreme grief when her life was widened and purified by the fires of pain her hand sought his the deep current of her love swept the ashes of grief away, and she reached blindly for the hands, those wonderful music-making hands of least, that they might support her. And standing there, side by side, as the priest intoned the burial service, he whispered to her,
Death shall not divide us, nor is eternity long enough to separate thee from me. End of section 13
