Alan Walker

Liszt as Cultural Ambassador

"Liszt was what a prince should be."
Grand Duke Carl Alexander to Busoni

...

Liszt's position in the world of musical diplomacy was well illustrated when he went to London, in 1840. He mixed with high society, met royalty, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and had an encounter with Lady Blessington, an intimate of Lord Byron, whose claim to literary fame still rests on her "Con-versations with Byron." She examined Liszt admiringly through her lorgnette, paused, and exclaimed: "What a pity to put such a man to the piano!" That was at the beginning of the Victorian Era, when the career of a musician was not considered to be a suitable activity for a gentleman. Even so, the remark went deeper than we may realize. Liszt's diplomatic skills were already well honed. He had assumed a position of leadership in the profession of music. When Liszt walked on stage wearing his medals, and his clanking sword-of-honour given to him by the Hungarians, it was not merely to display them to the world, but rather to raise the status of musicians everywhere. "Here," he seemed to say, "is a musician with as many decorations and titles as a prince."
Consider his famous reply to Tsar Nicholas I of Russia when the two men had their first encounter in St. Petersburg, in 1842. Nicholas made a noisy entrance in one of Liszt's recitals, and continued chatting to his entourage during the performance. Liszt stopped playing, and sat before the keyboard with bowed head. When Nicholas inquired why he had stopped playing, Liszt replied: "Music herself should be silent when Nicholas speaks." The remark has earned a place in the history of musical diplomacy. As Sacheverell Sitwell pointed out, "It was the first time in history that 'Music herself' had answered back."
To another reigning monarch, Napoleon III of France, who complained that the burdens of office were now so great that he often felt as if he were a century old, Liszt replied: "Sire, you are the century!" Who would not feel the burden roll away after receiving such a compliment?
Finally, there is a much more private incident concerning Robert Schumann, which throws light on Liszt the man. Liszt visited the Schumanns in Dresden, in 1848, and got into an argument about the merits of Felix Mendelssohn who had just passed away. Schumann became so agitated in defence of Mendelssohn that he struck Liszt on the chest and disappeared from the room. Liszt calmly turned to Clara Schumann with the remark: "Please tell your husband that he is the only man in the world from whom I would take so calmly the words just offered me."2 Liszt showed exceptional grace under pressure. These anecdotes, with their verbal adroitness, suggest that he was cut from the same cloth as an ambassador, a man for all seasons, someone who rose to every occasion. Incidentally, Clara Schumann went on to ban Liszt's music from the Frankfurt Conservatory when she eventually became Head of the piano department there, while Liszt never ceased to play and promote the music of Robert Schumann.
In the third volume of my life of Franz Liszt, I tried to enumerate all the titles and medals that Liszt received during his long and productive life. Altogether I counted forty-eight, and I am sure that the list is incomplete. Even so, it ranges from an Austrian knighthood to the Freedom of the City of Weimar; from Commander of the French Legion of Honour to the Hungarian Sword of Honour; from the Order of St. Michael of Bavaria (bestowed on him by King Ludwig II) to the Freedom of the City of Jena. It would be an impressive enough catalogue for an aristocrat. For a musician it probably remains unmatched in history.
Towards the end of his life, when his pioneering battles to secure a better deal for musicians had been won, Liszt noticed that such decorations were being devalued, especially by the French, because unworthy people were receiving them. That explains his acid remark: "Whenever one is in Paris one must wear one's medals, otherwise one is so noticeable on the boulevards."

Liszt was the first musician in history to articulate a great idea. Namely, that music functions best when placed in the service of some ethical or humanitarian cause. He had a watchword: "Génie oblige!". Genius has obligations. Liszt argued that because music is a gift from Nature, even from God, we have a duty to give something back. During his lifetime a river of gold poured in, but a river of gold also poured out. Liszt gave generously to all and every charitable cause: to the victims of the Danube floods; the casualties in the great fire of Hamburg; to the building fund of Cologne Cathedral; to the establishment of schools and music conservatories; to the erection of statues to Beethoven and Bach. And he also did much good by stealth, giving money away to people who needed it but were hardly known to him. His Hungarian pupil Janka Wohl recalls seeing Liszt in old age, sitting at his desk putting bank notes into envelopes and addressing them to people in Budapest who had pleaded with him for help. Liszt called it "playing Providence." It is a compelling image.
Because Liszt believed that Art was God-given, he often likened the vocation of music to that of the priesthood. He wrote: "A sacred predestination marks him at birth. It is not he who chooses his profession - it is his profession which chooses him."3 The musician, like the priest, was the intermediary between God and Man. We could almost call the musician a Spiritual Ambassador. Music was divine fire brought down to earth from heaven, so that lesser mortals could warm their spirits and enrich their souls. Liszt once famously defined the musician as "The Bearer of the Beautiful".
It often comes as a surprise to learn that Liszt practiced what a later generation would call "music therapy". He was music's ambassador to the poor, the sick, and the down-trodden as well. As a young man Liszt visited hospitals, insane asylums, and prison-cells containing those condemned to die. He brought music to society's outcasts, and gave these unfortunates a degree of comfort in their hour of distress. The gripping account of his visits to the Salpetričre hospital in Paris, in 1833, where his piano-playing eased the symptoms of an incurably autistic woman, or to the insane asylum in Cork, Ireland, in 1841, make haunting reading still. When he entered the asylum in Cork, it was with the intent of playing the piano to the inmates - his usual practice. But he was so overcome at the horrors he witnessed that after a time he was obliged to withdraw. About thirty females were confined to one area, some howling, some bent up like animals, some scraping the walls, others rolling on the stone floor. To this menagerie of depraved human beings he offered the balm of music. We cannot begin to imagine what his distinguished contemporaries Brahms, Wagner, Mendelssohn, or the fastidious Chopin, would have made of his attitude. Without exception, they would not have gone near the building.
Music, for Liszt, was there for the common good, not for personal aggrandizement, and especially not for the accumulation of wealth. His dislike of Mammon-worship came out strongly at the time of the death of the famous pedagogue Theodor Kullak, who ran one of the largest music conservatories in Europe, with hundreds of pupils enrolled in its courses. One day a student handed Liszt a Berlin newspaper containing details of Kullak's will. It revealed that Kullak had made a fortune of more than one million Deutsche marks which was to be divided among his sons. Liszt exploded in anger, and remarked: "You cannot be allowed to rake in a million marks from teaching without making some sacrifice on the Altar of Art."4 He then wrote an open letter to the editor of the Allgemeine Musikzeitung accusing Kullak of "forgetfulness" and pleading with his sons to establish scholarships for needy musicians.5 Of course, nothing happened. Not everybody shared Liszt's idealistic views. Is not a man's hard-earned wealth his to dispose of as he himself thinks fit? But if anybody had the right to protest, it was Liszt, who at this late stage in his life was living in genteel poverty, having given away most of the vast wealth he had acquired in earlier years.
When Liszt wrote, "The musician does not choose his profession; his profession chooses him," he was not only telling us that music is a vocation, but more importantly that music is innate. This is a deeply Romantic notion. Music, Liszt argued, must not be confused with a trade, although it frequently is. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker can all exchange places with one another; but not one of them can exchange places with a musician. No one is chosen to become a candlestick-maker! Even in Liszt's time, he knew that there were candlestick-makers in the music profession, people for whom music was a mere trade, a way of making a livelihood. Liszt despised them. They not only lacked a sense of vocation, they lacked what he called "a sacred predestination."
If we think this through, it would mean that one could no more determine to become a musician than one could determine the colour of one's eyes. You can de-velop your talent, but you cannot acquire it. This is a deeply Freudian notion, and Freud himself found the words for it in his timeless aphorism, "We are lived". We are not drawn from in front, but are pushed from behind. Such a fatalistic notion was not unknown to Arnold Schoenberg, who once declared that the true musician is in the grip of forces he cannot understand but has no alternative but to obey.

It is in the final years of his life that the image of "Liszt as Cultural Ambassador" assumes its full significance. Liszt himself described his life after 1869 as "Une vie trifurquée", a life split in three, divided each year between Weimar, Rome and Budapest, in an endless circle, with visits to Paris, Vienna, Brussels and other cities thrown in. We have calculated that he traversed more than six thousand miles a year on such journeys, which were often accomplished at night, sometimes by horse-drawn coach, sometimes by train. Also, Liszt never missed attending the annual festivals of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, and he usually attended every concert. He undertook all this travelling not because he was restless (one of the more preposterous claims put forward in the popular biographies) but because he was fulfilling his ambassadorial duties. In Weimar it was to teach his masterclasses and maintain his links with the Grand Duke; in Budapest, it was to undertake his duties as President of the Royal Academy; in Rome it was to strengthen his ties with Roman Catholic clerics (he had taken minor orders in 1865), and to sustain his life-long relationship with Princess Carolyne. Remove these reasons, and you remove the need for Liszt to have travelled at all. He covered those miles not for himself, but for others.
In his twilight years, Liszt was often likened to a "grand seigneur". That shock of flowing white hair, the lined but kindly face, the piercing green/gray eyes, the abbé's collar, and the overwhelming sense of authority that emanated from everything that he did, gave him an aura that all who bathed in it never forgot. By now, most of the musical world turned to Liszt for help and support. He was weighed down with an avalanche of correspondence, mostly from people he had never met, but who wanted his assistance. He himself tells us that he received upwards of fifty letters a week. "Some write for money, some ask for letters of reference, some ask for concerts and for decorations, others send parcels of their manuscripts for me to read."9 A lesser man would have ignored them. Liszt responded, often with unparalleled generosity.
His large-heartedness, allied to his sense of duty, may well have hastened his end. The only reason Liszt went to the Bayreuth Festival during that fatal summer of 1886, was to lend his name and fame to an enterprise that had started to flag. Wagner was dead and the Festival, which was now run by his widow, Liszt's daughter Cosima, was almost bankrupt. Liszt saw through the situation and described himself as "Bayreuth's poodle", but went anyway. He arrived in poor health, and after a life-and-death struggle which lasted for ten days, he died in Bayreuth, on July 31, 1886.

Alan Walker
is the author of a three-volume, prize-winning biography of Franz Liszt, published by Alfred A Knopf. This article is a modified version of the keynote address delivered at the American Liszt Society Conference in Gainesville, Florida, on March 27, 2003.