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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Life of Liszt," Ludwig Nohl presents an intricate tapestry of the life and genius of the famed pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Nohl combines meticulous biographical detail with a lyrical narrative style, capturing Liszt's tumultuous relationships and artistic evolution. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century European music and culture, the book marries personal anecdotes with critical insights, reflecting the complexity of Liszt's contributions to the Romantic era and his pioneering role in the development of modern piano performance and composition. Nohl's acute observations and vivid portrayals immerse the reader in the vibrant milieu that surrounded Liszt, making the text a compelling read for both musicologists and casual enthusiasts alike. Ludwig Nohl, a contemporary of Liszt, was deeply enmeshed in the music circles of his time, which afforded him unique access to the composer's life and thoughts. His background as a pianist and musicologist equipped him with the skills to critically assess Liszt's work, while his personal acquaintance with the composer provided an authentic lens through which he crafted this biography. Nohl's insights were shaped by the Romantic ideals of his era, stressing emotional depth and individual experience in art. I highly recommend "Life of Liszt" to anyone interested in understanding the confluence of personal narrative and artistic innovation in the life of one of music's most transformative figures. Nohl's work not only sheds light on Liszt's unparalleled talent but also contextualizes his legacy within the broader movements of the Romantic period, making it an essential addition to any serious music library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Life of Liszt
Table of Contents
Life of Liszt
CHAPTER I.LES PRELUDES.
Liszt’s Childish Characteristics—The Home at Raiding—The Father and his Musical Abilities—His Ambition for his Son—Selections from his Diary—Young Liszt’s First Appearances—Peculiarities of his Playing—The Gypsies[2]—The Influence of their Life and Music upon him—Paganini and Bihary—Generosity of Counts Amadee and Szapary—His Studies with Czerny[3]—Old Artists Astonished—Plays before Beethoven—The great Master kisses the Boy—The Journey to Paris—Cherubini’s Churlishness—Liszt’s immense Success—Ovations and Triumphs—A great Favorite among the Ladies—French and German Tributes.
“Behold a young virtuoso, seemingly dropped from the clouds, who arouses the greatest astonishment. The performances of this boy border on the miraculous, and one is tempted to doubt their physical possibility when he hears the young giant thunder forth Hummel’s difficult compositions,” says a Vienna account of this boy, scarce eleven years of age. Only a year afterward, we see Paris wild with amazement over a phenomenon never beheld before. Like that of young Mozart at Naples, the piano was turned round so that they could see what they did not believe to be possible, thereby revealing the genial and manly characteristics of the young artist, which afterward became the delight of the world, like his playing. “His eyes gleam with animation, mischievousness and joy. He is not led to the piano, he rushes up to it. They applaud and he looks surprised. They applaud afresh and he rubs his hands,” it is said, and then are pointed out the national quality, the inspired fury, the unmistakable originality, and at another time the proud, manly expression, which gained for him the appellation of the “Hungarian Wonder-Child[1].” We shall further notice the indications of these peculiarities, particularly as they are given in a longer biographical notice, which, in its main features, seems to have been taken from his own communication that appeared about the year 1830, in one of the first of Parisian musical journals, the “Revue et Gazette Musicale,” which collapsed a few years ago.
Franz Liszt was born October 22, 1811, at Raiding, near Oedenburg. The comet year appeared to his parents a good omen of his future. The father, belonging to a not very wealthy family of the old nobility, was, in his prime, accountant at Eisenstadt with that Prince Nicholas Esterhazy for whom Joseph Haydn was Capellmeister. As he enjoyed the personal acquaintance of the honored master of the quartet, mostly at card-playing, which he practiced as a recreation in the midst of his always severe labor, he was brought into a sphere which was peculiarly musical in its character, and which furnished his own nature with the richest food, for father Liszt was on terms of personal friendship also with that best scholar of Mozart’s, the distinguished pianist, Hummel, born at Presburg in 1778, who officiated many years as the Prince’s Capellmeister at Eisenstadt and Esterhaz. No one esteemed him more highly as a pianist. His playing had made an indelible impression upon him. He was also musical himself in a high degree, playing nearly every instrument, particularly the piano and violoncello, and was only restrained by the displeasure of his family relatives from perfecting himself as a thorough musician. So much the more his dreams and hopes of artistic power were transferred to his eldest son, whose rare talent had manifested itself early. “Thy destiny is fixed.[1q] Thou wilt realize that art ideal which fascinated my youth in vain. In thee will I grow young again and transmit myself,” he often said to him. He was so strongly impressed with all the signs of promise in the boy that he devoted a diary to him in which he entered his notes “with the most minute and solicitous punctiliousness of a tender father.” Here is a leaf from the recollections of that childhood:
“After his vaccination, a period commenced in which the boy had to struggle alternately with nervous pains and fever, which more than once imperiled his life. On one occasion, in his second or third year, we thought him dead and ordered his coffin made. This disquieted state continued until his sixth year. In that year he heard me playing Ries’ concerto in C sharp minor. He leaned upon the piano and was all ears. Towards evening he returned from the garden and sang the theme. We made him repeat it but he did not know what he sang. That was the first indication of his genius. He incessantly begged that he might commence piano-playing. After three months’ instruction, the fever returned and compelled us to discontinue it. His delight in instruction did not take away his pleasure in playing with children of his own age, although from this time forth he sought to live more for himself alone. He was not regular in his practice but was always tractable up to his ninth year. It was at this period that he played in public for the first time in Oedenburg. He performed a concerto by Ries in E major and extemporized. The fever attacked him just before he seated himself at the piano and yet he was strengthened by the playing. He had long manifested a desire to play in public and exhibited much ease and courage.”
We interrupt the narrative at this point to inquire what was the active source of this inner consecration to art as well as of the passionate impulse to exhibit it in public. Neither Ferdinand Ries, who merely imitated the ornamentations of his great teacher, Beethoven, nor Mozart’s pupil, Hummel, who succeeded Haydn at Esterhaz, nor the great father of instrumental music himself even felt remotely that genius for execution, the wonderful results of which were already filling the youthful soul like a creative impulse and with a passionate longing for expression urging him on to public performance. In a letter from Paris to Schumann’s musical paper in 1834, it is said: “He often plays tenderly and with gentle melancholy;” then again: “With overpowering passion and with such fire and even fury, that it seems as if the piano must give way beneath his fingers. It often creaks and rattles during his playing. You see head, eyes, hands, the whole upper part of the body moving impetuously in every direction.” On one occasion he fell back from the piano exhausted. Whence this unprecedented devotion to music? Whence, as one might say, this merging of his very identity in his playing?
There are a peculiar people, scattered from the Himalayas even to the Ebro and the Scottish Highlands, possessing nothing, in this wide world of God, but themselves and nature. Neither house nor hearth, neither state nor social forms restrain them. They have no fixed pursuit, no calling which makes a firmly settled existence, based on duty and inclination. They have no manners, no church, no God. And yet these people have lived for centuries, as we know, unchanged in kind and number, yet nowhere settled. They are the gypsies, who seemingly possess nothing which the earth offers men or which makes life valuable. And still more, wherever they appear they are completely ignored and even looked upon with utter contempt. Truly they have nothing and are, as it were, a miserable fragment of the human race, everlastingly forgotten by God. But they have one thing that vies with our culture and art—their music. As they feel the complete rapture of an existence in nature which is boundlessly free, free from everything which hinders the slightest movement or inclination, so in their habits, but particularly in their improvisations, they express the God-given freedom of the inner sensibility in all its emotions, from the proudest human consciousness to the inmost longing of the soul for sympathetic communion. This music is to them as it were their world and God, life and happiness, the sun and all that world-movement with which we feel ourselves closely associated. In a paper, worthy of notice, Liszt has sought to clear up the mystery of the vitality remaining in these dissevered fragments of the old Indian race, and explain the greater mystery how a people so destitute of any social and intellectual basis of life, possess one art and one of such originality, depth and power. We must follow him still further to understand the wonderful effect of his own performances.
“Recollections of the gypsies are associated with memories of my childhood and some of its most vivid impressions,” the world-renowned “Magician of the Hungarian Land,” writes in his fiftieth year: “Afterwards I became a wandering virtuoso, as they are in our fatherland. They have pitched their tents in all the countries of Europe, and I have traversed the tangled maze of roads and paths over which they have wandered in the course of time, my experiences some years, in a certain sense, being very similar to their historical destiny. Like them I was a stranger to the people of every country. Like them I pursued my ideal in the continual revelations of art, if not of nature.” In recalling these early recollections, he confesses that few things impressed him so strongly as these gypsies soliciting alms at the threshold of every palace and cottage for a few words softly whispered in the ear, a few loudly played dance-melodies, or a few songs, such as no minstrel sings, that throw lovers into rapture without their knowing why. How often he himself has sought the solution of this charm, which held all with unchallenged sway! As the weak pupil of a strong master, his father, he had as yet had no other insight into the world of phantasy than the architectural framework of notes in their artificial arrangement together, and when we think of the old-fashioned composers, like Hummel and Ries, we imagine that it must have doubly fascinated him to exercise that charm, which these calloused gypsy hands practiced before all eyes, when they drew the bow across the sighing instrument or made the metal ring with powerful defiance.
We now see how these children of nature, with their most mysterious and spontaneous power of sensibility, blossoming out in their art, absorbed him and filled a soul incapable of jealousy with a natural envy of the incredible effect they produced. His waking dreams had been filled with these bronzed faces, prematurely old with the vicissitudes of centuries and dissolute habits of every sort, their defiant smiles, their dull, red eyes, in which laughs a sardonic unbelief and gleams flash out which glisten but do not glow. Their dances always floated through his visions with their languid, elastic, bounding and tempting movements. By degrees the conviction was borne in upon him that “in comparison with the continuously dull and sombre days imaged upon the background of our civilized world, upon which only here and there some moments beaming with joy or lurid with pain are conspicuous, these beings had fashioned a defter texture of joy and sorrow, alternating with love, song, wine and the dance, as they were excited and soothed by these four elements of passion and voluptuousness.”
Thus early his soul had discovered the supernatural, throned like a sphynx in the inmost recesses of nature. He had felt that mysterious creative power which shapes and maintains the world. He felt it as belonging to his own inner nature and power, and his heart, in the profound consciousness of this magical possession, must have bounded more exultantly, since those other lofty human acquirements of culture and art-work, which first invest the deep outreachings of life with the nobility and loftiness of thought, were open to him also. Henceforth his genius illuminated him, but the activity of this genius, in other words, its creative power, he attributed to his always profound recognition of the mysterious operations of the creative power of nature. A Parisian description of his playing, and that of the similarly “demonish” Paganini, about the year 1834, says: “Music is to them the art which gives man the presentiment of his higher existence, and leads him from the occurrences of ordinary life into the Isis-temple, where nature speaks with him in sacred tones, unheard before and yet intelligible.”
Let us now observe how the success of his playing, which this boy had already evidently achieved by his vigorous expression of his own feelings, influenced his future fortunes. “The tones of his bewitching violin fell upon my ear like drops of some fiery, volatile essence,” he says of the gipsy virtuoso, Bihary, whom he heard in Vienna in 1822. “Had my memory been of soft clay, and every one of his notes a diamond nail, they could not have clung to it more tenaciously. Had my soul been the ooze from which a river-god had returned to his bed, and every tone of the artist a fructifying seed-corn, it could not have taken deeper root in me.”
His father took him at this time to Prince Esterhazy, in whose family musical patronage was hereditary. “I believe that female influence alone succeeds with him,” wrote the great Beethoven two years later, when he proffered the “Missa Solemnis” to him, as he had to another prince, for a subscription. He did not anticipate much kindly feeling on his part towards himself. Of what use, then, for a mere young beginner in art to expect anything? The Prince made him a gift of a few hundred francs. That was little for the heir of Haydn’s patron. In contrast with this, the boy met with a merited reception in the larger and more cultivated city of Presburg. Six noblemen, among them Counts Amadee and Szapary, settled upon him for six years an annuity of six hundred gulden, which satisfied the father’s desire to give the boy a fitting education.
Soon afterward, in the year 1821, he resolved to give up his position and settle in Vienna with his wife and child. He was met with the anxious misgivings of his wife (born in Upper Austria), who could not bear to see her darling exposed to the vicissitudes of an artistic career, and who tremblingly asked what would become of them, if, at the expiration of the time, their hopes were disappointed. “What God wills,” cried the boy of nine, who had listened to the conversation with a quiet timidity. The objections and solicitude of the mother were dispelled, all the more readily, as she was of a deeply and genuinely religious nature.
