Virtuosity tU0Sity Liszt. By Sacheverell Sitwell. (Faber and Faber. 15s.)
THE modern biographer of Franz Liszt is bound to insist upon a quality in that astonishing man which the popular legend has slurred over : his greatness of mind. That Mr. Sitwell has concentrated his remarkable powers of literary virtuosity on throwing this quality in his hero into high relief, is a matter for gratitude ; M. Pourtales, in a book published some years ago, did not make nearly enough of it. For this dis- interested benevolence, this perpetual, life-long generosity to all and sundry, was the clue to Liszt's character, as well as to the grandeurs and feeblenesses of his works. And when we come to review the jealousies and petty malice of so many great composers, it becomes obvious that much of the reason for Liszt's lack of artistic rancour must lie in' the fact that, unlike those other composers, he had never had occasion to feel envy. He was never poor (except latterly, and then of his own free will), and his success was one steady crescendo, from his first concerts at Esterhazy and Vienna, through the early Paris triumphs, down to the final apotheosis in nearly all the chief towns of Europe. His life, for all its romantic storms and stress, must be accounted a happy one ; for not only was his triumph as a virtuoso unabating, but his personal relation- ships were on the -whole remarkably successful, in spite of the wasteful result of his affair with- Mme. d'Agoult, which, it may be added, brought far more grief to her .than it did to him.
Mr. Sitwell is at his best in his account of this affair and he rightly emphasizes the fact that Mme. d'A. was really respons- ible for turning Liszt into a serious composer, by forcibly removing him from the debilitating atmosphere of his early and too facile success in the Paris salons of the 'thirties. The direct result of their elopement (this and the society which centred round them on the lake of Geneva are brilliantly described) was the magnificent Annies de Peterinage, which first revealed Liszt to others—and, more important still, to himself—as something more than a mere composer of fireworks.
But it is the end of his love-affair and the beginning of the Weimar period (and with it that of his second great love-affair, with Princess Carolyne of Sayn-Wittgenstein) which cuts Liszt's life into two contrasted periods. During the first, as Mr. Sitwell points out, he was to all intents and purposes a Frenchman ; at Weimar the weight of Germany, reinforced by the ludicrous and romantic seriousness of the Princess, began to affect his imagination. ,(Mr. Sitwell seems to deny this later on, when his inveterate anti-Wagner prejudice leads him to dismiss Wagner's relations with Liszt in six inadequate and proportionless pages.) The result of this new influence was the Symphonic Poems, the Faust and Dante Symphonies, and—when the influence of Wagner had sunk more deeply in— the B minor Piano Sonata.
Thenceforw' ard he gravitated slowly, but inevitably, to- siiirdsRome, helped on his way by the remorseless earnestness of the Princess. Mr. Sitwell finds that "the interest of his life, artistic and episodic, is in his repentance." But it seems doubtful if Liszt really repented the life he had led—especially as, unlike most romantics, he "tottered on in business to the end." Mr. Sitwell tells an amusing story of the Cossack Countess—the last- and straugestAff Liszt's loves- ; how she asked him if the smoke of her cigar would not offend the figures of Christ and the Virgin which adorned his room, and how he answered : "Mon Dieu, non, pour mix c'est comnie sine cariete d'encens." This remark is symbolical of his whole emotional attitude in the last years of his life. There is no question of insincerity : to those who have understood his earlier life and—still more—that life as reflected in his music, his religious emotions will appear adequate.
No full account of Liszt and his surroundings could fail to be fascinating, and Mr. Sitwell certainly provides what is known as a rich and varied entertainment. But, viewed as a biography, his book is clumsily constructed, repetitive and strangely amateurish in style, and lacking in proportion ; the large sections devoted to Berlioz and Paganini, though in themselves they exhibit their author at his best, would have been better published separately as essays ; that these com- posers should have been allowed to-loom so large in a book on
Liszt, and Wagner so small, is a sign that the author has not been able to resist displaying his hatred of Wagner at the expense of his own work.
When we turn to the purely musical aspect of the book, our dissatisfaction increases. For in this sphere Mr. Sitwell shows himself very much less than adequate, and his shoddy musicianship becomes painfully apparent wherever (and this is often) he attempts to deal with music itself. Fragments of impressionistic autobiography, a . discourse on Salvator Rosa, Berlioz compared to El Greco and Chopin to.: Watteau, a description of the Dante Symphony in terms which recall the older form of programme-note : these cannot be accepted as an efficient substitute for genuine musical criticism. That Mr. Sitwell is technically ill-equipped to write about music is further revealed by the fact that his very personal style deserts him in the composition of these "descriptions," leaving him to fall back upon emphatic repetitions of such phrases as "must be heard to be believed," t` such a pitch of triumph that it is intoxication itself." That Liszt was not a mere virtuoso but also, on occasion, a great and original composer, was in urgent need of being pointed out ; but mere enthusiasm, unsupported by a fundamental ability to describe music in terms of itself, does not carry much conviction. Indeed, Mr. Sitwell's admiration. sometimes defeats its own ends, as in the case of the Dante...Fantasia, which he loads- with such ecstatic praise that when, later on, he comes to deal with works admittedly of greater importance, his vocabulary fails to produce a more ringing series of superlatives. The bibliography of Liszt's compositions, given at the end of the book and " starred " in the manner of Baedeker, is a good deal more helpful, though even there the starring is not invariably judicious. The book is charm- ingly got up and illustrated.
EDWARD SACIEVILLE-WEST.
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