Liszt and Modernism

Many examinations of Franz Liszt and his influence have been and will be presented in the form “Liszt And X” or “Liszt Through X,” studying him through different lenses that illuminate facets of this complex, long-lived musician. On the surface of it, a talk titled “Liszt and Modernism” might seem misguided. For doesn’t Liszt typify the 19th century artist better than anyone? A genius for virtuosity with a healthy sense of his own worth, a man whose massive grasp could encompass all of Europe—from Chopin’s Parisian salons to Wagner’s operatic palaces in Germany. The man who could marry Byron to monasticism embodies the Romantic spirit at its most expansive, and this seems rather far removed from the “modernist” age. If “modernism” centers on the First World War, how could it relate to a man who died in 1886?

Much of what Liszt sought and achieved in music was experimental, even radical, in its day, but that does not necessarily make it “Modernist.” Is any discussion of Liszt as a “modernist” just a conceit or academic slight of hand, substituting the generic meaning of “modern” (that is, new, novel, experimental, forward-looking) for the specific features of “modernism”? Of course, the first step toward answering such a question is to come to a shared understanding of “modernism”. While I don’t want to get caught up in debates about modernism per se, I also don’t see how we can proceed to consider “Liszt and Modernism” without articulating its main principles.


 
“Modernism” refers to a loosely bounded period from, say, 1890 to about 1960. It is marked most distinctly by rejecting both Enlightenment sureties and the Romantic era’s idealization of nature. Moreover, this rejection is part and parcel of the Modernist aesthetic—breaking with the past becomes the central motivating and guiding force. A modernist consciously, intentionally distances himself or herself from the forms, tropes, assumptions, and axioms of the past.

In addition, modernist literature turns increasingly toward first-person point of view, since the nature of reality is seen to be defined by the creator alone. Relativism carries the day. With the turn to first person, modernism also borrows heavily from contemporary psychology, carrying the Freudian ego into the realm of art. We move from “man within nature” to the very nature of man himself, his psychoses, inner monologue, perception of external events through the filter of a unique psychological framework. Even when the subject is nature, as in an Impressionist landscape, careful realism gets replaced by a spontaneous impression that is specific to its creator.

Focusing more and more on one’s inner world, man becomes increasingly isolated. Isolation feeds a sense of mistrust and betrayal toward the easy truths or received conventions of the past. The most concrete source of this betrayal was clearly the First World War, which, in all of its brutality and apparent senselessness, made it nearly impossible to cling any longer to faith in man’s ultimate goodness, impossible to implicitly trust the promises made by our leaders, impossible to express the unprecedented gravity of feeling through inherited and outmoded forms. This schism inspired unbridled enthusiasm in some and crushing despair in others.

 
Bearing these thoughts in mind, let’s turn now to Liszt and Modernism. I propose to spend equal time with the man and the music, and I’ll start with the man. His life amply demonstrates and defines many Romantic conventions, but let me play devil’s advocate for a competing view. To some, Liszt was a god among men, performing unrivaled feats at the piano, the keyboard itself transformed into an altar. To others, he embodied patriotism and early nationalism, and his greatest achievements were in service of Hungary’s modernization. Both conceptions are actually problematic, and Liszt’s failure or refusal to embrace either one or the other persona throughout his long life suggests a touch of “modernist” discontent. Let me elaborate.

First, the problem of Liszt and Hungary. This touches on matters of politics and identity. Liszt is still today regarded as the greatest musical son of Hungary, despite the fact that he was born in a German-speaking household in Raiding, in the modern land of Austria, and never learned to speak Hungarian to any appreciable degree. Not long before his birth, the family name had been altered from L-I-S-T to include the idiomatic Hungarian “sz” pairing. In education he was decidedly cosmopolitan. True, it rankled that the Paris Conservatory denied him admission as a foreigner, but Liszt did not then go home to study in Budapest or the Hungarian countryside. He stayed in Paris, read voraciously, and met Berlioz, Chopin, Paganini, and Wagner in close succession. Bela Bartok, coming of age in Liszt’s shadow at the Budapest Conservatory, felt that Liszt’s style was nearly always “French.”

Without going into detail, since this point has been treated amply by other scholars, Liszt made a diplomatic faux-pas with his book about Hungarian music, where he blurred or misunderstood important differences between the Magyar and the Gypsy (or Roma). So for instance, it seems his Hungarian Rhapsodies are not more “authentic”—and perhaps less authentic—than Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. Despite viewing himself as Hungarian at heart, his allure and career knew no boundaries. He is possibly more European than anything else.

 
Second, Liszt as Byronic hero. Liszt retired from solo performance in 1847 at the very height of his powers. He did occasionally play in public after that date, though it was usually for charity or for his students and only, only when he chose to do it. He intentionally tried to close the door on his virtuosic years of wandering in order to concentrate on what he regarded—by then—as a more noble cause, one for which he hoped to be remembered to posterity: that, of course, is composition.

(As a sidenote, his life’s trajectory provides an interesting contrast with the case of Sergei Rachmaninoff, who abandoned his first career—as a composer—in order to become a touring solo pianist. Rachmaninoff made the change at age 45 largely for financial reasons, as he worked to support his family while living in exile from Soviet Russia.
Liszt’s case is closer to Schumann, though here there is an important distinction to be made, too. Schumann’s initial efforts to become a virtuoso performer were cut short by a physical handicap (the notorious overtaxing of his hand), so he also turned more actively to composition as his outlet. The difference is that Schumann’s choice was forced upon him, whereas Liszt’s departure from the stage appears to be elective. This aspect—choice rather than compulsion—is critical, for it shows in Liszt a level of existential doubt rather than external limitation.


Liszt’s letters from the middle of his life reveal how he try to tried to discourage performances of his early, virtuosic works. Unfortunately, critics tended to pan the middle-period works; already, Liszt’s status as a serious composer was overshadowed by his son-in-law, Richard Wagner. Professional setbacks mirrored personal ones, including the deaths of two of his children and the gradual estrangement from his third child, Cosima, and Wagner, and eventually the break after 30 years with Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt’s emotional state in his later years hit rock-bottom, and he contemplated suicide on more than one occasion. As he cut ties with the present world, he continued boldly composing for the future, for listeners as yet unborn. The most often cited image, found in letter to Caroline, is that Liszt “threw his lance into the future.”

 
Though Liszt did not live to see “the war to end all wars,” I doubt he would have been surprised when it erupted. His musical career had taken him from one end of the continent to the other and back again, from the largest cities to the smallest villages. He was a cultural ambassador from the keyboard. Throughout these years, Liszt moved regularly between three major centers: Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. Had there been more politics involved in these travels, we would regard Liszt as the inventor of shuttle diplomacy a century before Henry Kissinger. He was more aware than many of the tensions breaking through across Europe, in both art and politics. He observed the formal declaration of a German Empire in 1871; he lived through the gradual demise of the Ottoman Empire and 1879 Dual Alliance between Germany and Austro-Hungary. Even as he withdrew into the spiritual protection of the church, Liszt surely recognized the new wind sweeping away the world of his youth.


As we move now to the late piano music, I stress again that we should separate “modern” from “modernist”. Any composer of such transcendent technical knowledge is going to be innovative—that is, writing works that push the limits of what players and instruments can handle. But more than this, where in Liszt’s treatment of harmony, tonal structure, and form does one encounter the seeds or even direct examples of musical modernism? He did influence everyone from Debussy and Ravel to Bartók and Ligeti, but the details of that transmission are too broad a topic to handle here. Suffice it to say that many of the most intriguing late works—the funereal works for Wagner, the Bagatelle Without Tonality, Nuages gris, --were not published until the 1950s.

For today let’s focus on two aspects that show Liszt’s modernism: texture and harmony. As harmony is the more complex topic, let me start by addressing texture. (I would also like to cite two fuller accounts of the late piano works; these appear in Franz Liszt: the man and his music, edited by Alan Walker, and essays by James M. Baker in the Cambridge Companion to Liszt.)


Many creative artists evolve a late style that is marked by a modicum of means; the words are fewer but more potent, the brushstrokes fewer but more suggestive, the notes fewer but painstakingly chosen. Spare texture in music can be unsettling, like a painting that is mostly white canvas. I would argue that the bare textures in Liszt’s late works become even more powerful because his earlier works often took texture to a maximalist extreme. Who else could transfer an entire symphony onto the piano like Liszt could? Whose scores had so many notes that pages sometimes appear more black than white? Liszt’s spare gestures likely were inspired by his increasing devotion and his study of medieval plainchant. Of course, not all the late pieces show a minimalist aesthetic, but it is equally true that the younger Liszt never wrote so many pieces that celebrated such barren textures. It is a distinctly late trend.


Along with the striking use of texture, Liszt’s final works push toward the edge of tonality. The contrast with his earlier music was too much for many friends and admirers. They saw Liszt going down a dead-end path, indulging the pitiful neo-medievalism of an eccentric, possibly bordering on insanity. In truth, it’s more accurate to see Liszt as someone opening up enormous vistas into post-tonal pitch collections and open-ended tonal forms. As we look at some particular instances, let me add that I am not one who is overly concerned about claiming that Liszt, or any other composer, for that matter, was “the first” to use a certain pitch set or scale. To me, it is more important to consider how it is used, in what context, and for what expressive reasons. The late works are replete with chromatic scales, tritones, and diminished seventh chords—but these had all been equally abundant in his earlier music too. There are three features that I would isolate, in Liszt’s treatment of harmony and dissonance, that are characteristic of the piano works of his final decade.

 
First, chromaticism—but not just chromaticism, not just melodic decoration or brilliant chromatic scale runs. We are talking here about sustained voice leading and chord progressions that move by semitone. Individual chords still carry an implication to move, but the resolution is evaded and a slip up or down by semitone takes place—creating a whole new implication to resolve somewhere else. This effect was valued by Debussy and others for its “atmospheric,” moment-to-moment aesthetic. We will hear an example in a moment.

Second, and this is perhaps more subtle: deep level dissonance. If you are familiar at all with Heinrich Schenker’s theories of tonal music, you know that Schenkerians regard tonal music as the unfolding of a fundamental background progression usually restricted to tonic and dominant harmonies. Liszt manages to prolong certain “other” chords, such as dominant 7ths and diminished 7ths, to the point where they become essential, deep-level pillars of structure—supported by their own embellishing subordinate harmonies.

Third, unresolved final sonorities. Most of Liszt’s works, even the late ones, are tonal. The duality between consonance and dissonance has certainly become strained by, say, 1880, but it is nevertheless still intact. However, Liszt did take an important step toward the complete “emancipation of dissonance,” to borrow Schoenberg’s phrase. He did so by experimenting with non-tonic, non-triadic, and dissonant final chords. A few instances include the 9th chord of Nuages gris, the augmented triad of La Lugubre Gondola, and the diminished 7th chord of the Bagatelle Without Tonality. When dissonances go unresolved, or when larger tonal trajectories are left suspended in mid-air, one gradually reinterprets that inconclusive final sonority as being a de facto conclusion. That, in turn, endows the dissonance with greater stability, simply by virtue of occupying the expressively significant final position. The dissonance has the last word. Dissonances gradually become less dependent on a consonance that is supposed to resolve it. And it is this weakened relationship that ultimately opened the Pandora’s Box of true atonality.

 
You will hear many of these features in his late piano works, so let me instead take a minute to introduce—if you don’t know it—a fabulous song Liszt published in 1860. Indeed, not all of these novelties are exclusive to the 1880s. Based on a poem by Friedrich Hebbel, Liszt’s Blume und Duft (Flower and Fragrance) contains many of the features just discussed. It could suggest many other questions or avenues to explore, but I will intentionally not go into those today. Rather I hope it leaves your curiosity piqued, ready for the program to come and eager to explore “modernist” elements in other areas of Liszt’s extensive body of work.

So as you listen to this recital of Liszt’s late, or shall we say “modernist,” piano works, I offer you an image of a man aware of his impending demise, hoping that his musical children would live long, productive lives well after he was gone. This is a man at home in Europe, as a whole, born in the center of all the turmoil to come, caught up in emerging nationalism and German imperialism, but one who knew many homes, spoke French mostly, and was both adored and berated by the Hungarians. He knew alienation—from individuals and entire states—and he suffered toward the end from debilitating sadness. His late works cast their light on a new approach to tonality, rejecting the closed forms of the past and reveling in ambiguity, chromatic voice leading, and bare textures. Paralleling Nietzsche’s turn from dense prose to poetic aphorisms, Liszt’s late music says more with less. And that, in turn, makes us all the more conscious of what he is trying to say.

(c) Jason Stell