Liszt’s third innovation was his perfection of a keyboard style that shimmered and gleamed, an aural equivalent of the blurred vibrancy of an oil painting by Monet, where sounds melted and smudged into one another like colours. This technique in music has since been described as ‘impressionistic’ and specifically attached to the works of the French composer Claude Debussy, whose pieces had visually evocative titles such as ‘Reflections in the water’, ‘Footprints in the snow’, ‘The Hills of Anacapri’ and ‘Gardens in the rain’. Debussy’s ‘Gardens in the rain’, though, was composed in 1903, a good thirty years after the Impressionist painters had first begun exhibiting their works to a disconcerted Parisian public. If the term ‘impressionistic’ belongs to anyone, it is not Debussy – who disliked the comparison between the movement in art and his music – but Liszt, whose Fountains of the Villa d’Este, for example, dates from 1877, just three years after the First Impressionist Exhibition. This was a piece that was well known to the young Debussy, who revered Liszt as a disciple, and who was honoured to be able to play for him in person in 1888.
Liszt’s fourth innovation was in the field of orchestral music. He invented what he called the ‘symphonic poem’ and wrote thirteen of them, templates of a form that was to be taken up enthusiastically by composers as varied as the Czechs Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvořák and Leoš Janáček, Russians Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov, Germany’s Richard Strauss and Finland’s Jean Sibelius.
The idea behind Liszt’s symphonic poems was to reduce the traditional four-movement symphony as exemplified by Beethoven into one concentrated, shorter piece that would be a musical response to a non-musical artwork. His subjects ranged from Prometheus, mythical hero of Ancient Greece and muse of Beethoven et al, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from Orpheus in the Underworld to a contemporary painting of a battle in AD 451 between Attila the Hun, the Visigoths and the Roman Empire. While Beethoven had framed his Sonata Form Pastoral symphony around visual images – a walk in the country, a thunderstorm, peasants’ merry-making – he was more interested in his own feelings than in the pictorial effect of his scenes. Liszt’s symphonic poems, on the other hand, were a departure from this trend in that they intended to conjure up in music the pictures or the stories themselves. Liszt was moving away from the idea of music as an abstract entity, something to be listened to attentively for forty or so minutes, towards orchestral music as a representation of something extra-musical. In its purest form, the symphonic poem style is what orchestral film music grew out of in the 1920s and ’30s, its job to support and describe something outside music.
Though old-style, four-movement symphonies continued to be written, even until the mid-twentieth century, lots of composers leapt enthusiastically on Liszt’s symphonic poem alternative. Beethoven’s third symphony, Eroica, had had at its core an idea – heroism (and its betrayal) – but it nonetheless retained the musical form of a symphony. Much the same can be said about Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture (1830): it may have had a guiding thought – a holiday visit to those islands, in particular Fingal’s Cave – but its form was still determined by a musical template. Liszt’s Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo, however, followed the path of an actual period in the life of the sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, to the extent of weaving in a traditional gondoliers’ folk song to evoke Tasso’s relationship with Venice, and creating an anguished first section in the mental asylum where Tasso, possibly suffering from schizophrenia, was for a while imprisoned. The form of the piece, crucially, was dictated by the story.
This was a new emphasis for purely orchestral music. (Opera, of course, had been shaped by story and characterisation for many years.) Liszt’s own comments about Tasso, which was completed in 1849 and revised in 1851 and 1854, reveal how specific his approach to telling the tale was intended to be:
Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara, he was avenged at Rome, and even today lives in the popular songs of Venice. These three moments are inseparable from his immortal fame. To reproduce them in music, we first conjured up the great shade as he wanders through the lagoons of Venice even today; then his countenance appeared to us, lofty and melancholy, as he gazes at the festivities at Ferrara, where he created his masterworks; and finally we followed him to Rome, the Eternal City, which crowned him with fame and thus pays him tribute both as martyr and as poet.1
This shift in emphasis spearheaded by Liszt, from purely orchestral to more illustrative music, is particularly notable in his symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht, the one devoted to the 1850 painting of Attila the Hun’s battle by Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Fought in AD 451, against the now Christian Roman Empire and their allies, the encounter was a rare occasion on which Attila and his heathen Huns were beaten. At the beginning of the piece, Liszt’s music is meant to depict the ghostly armies of the battle mustering for the fight; it is marked to be played ‘tempestuously’, and to recreate the effect of the painting’s spirit soldiers in the sky, the strings are instructed to play with their mutes on, thus dampening and thinning the sound. Interspersed among the lively, whispery strings are little military outbursts from the horns. In the painting there are relatively few actual soldiers depicted, the emphasis being more on the ordinary men and women engulfed unwittingly in the conflict, so Liszt is careful not to make his orchestra too percussive and martial, at least near the opening.
Eventually the battle proper kicks off and, in the midst of the tumult and chaos, Liszt introduces on trombones an old plainsong chant, ‘Crux fidelis’ (Cross of faith), to represent the caped figure in one corner of the painting who carries a gleaming, golden cross. This is followed by a triumphant fanfare and then the introduction of a gentle, holy organ. The plainsong theme is carefully interwoven into increasingly agitated string activity in the final three minutes or so, giving a general sense of the great victory about to be celebrated, which, when it is, leaves you in no doubt whatever of the scale and meaning of the Roman-Christian forces of civilisation coming out on top. The muscular victory music is topped off with extra off-stage brass reinforcements and an instruction regarding the organ, ‘Dans le cos où l’harmonium ne serait pas assez puissant pour couvrir l’orchestra à la fin, n’en faire aucun usage’ which translates roughly as ‘if it can’t be louder than the whole orchestra, don’t bother’. The final climax is the kind of heavyweight flourish you have heard in countless Hollywood adventure film scores, from Elmer Bernstein’s parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956) to Hans Zimmer’s body-shaking battle music for Gladiator (2000).
Liszt’s fifth innovation was a product of the particular political geography into which he was born. The small town of his birth, Doborján, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, now Raiding in Austria, was populated by a mixture of Magyar Hungarians and German-speaking Austrians, all of whom were absorbed into the Austrian, later Austro-Hungarian, Empire under the Habsburg monarchy. By the nineteenth century many of the majority ethnic Magyars in Hungary were dejected by their lack of self-government – though Liszt himself was far from the turmoil for most of his life. As a child his musical ability had quickly been spotted and he was soon in Vienna receiving training from, among others, Salieri, and encountering both Beethoven and Schubert. As an adolescent, after his father’s death, Liszt and his mother moved to Paris, where he adopted French as his ‘first’ language. For the rest of his life he was thoroughly cosmopolitan, travelling widely, living for twenty years in Weimar, and for six years near Rome, where he took holy orders. A recent centenary conference and festival devoted to him in modern Hungary simply described him, correctly, as ‘European’. But even though he wasn’t brought up in Hungary, Liszt held on to some vestiges of Hungarian patriotism beneath his pan-European façade. In 1839 he returned to his homeland for the first time since his childhood and was greeted rapturously by crowds chanting ‘Hail! Franz Liszt!’. He ostentatiously wore national costume as a gesture of solidarity with the Magyar ca
use and defiantly performed in public his piano arrangement of the popular but banned ‘Rákóczy March’, honouring Prince Francis Rákóczy, who had led a revolt against Austrian domination in 1703–11. In an emotional speech at Hungary’s National Theatre in January 1840, Liszt declared his support for his countrymen’s aspirations for independence.
It is this same sympathy with the country of his birth that is reflected in Liszt’s set of eleven piano arrangements of folk songs, the Magyar dalok (which includes the ‘Rákóczy March’), compiled in 1839–40, and his nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies for solo piano, composed on and off between 1846 and 1885. That they were intended to have a patriotic, as well as a nostalgic, purpose is clear from his dedication of the most famous of the set, no. 2, composed in 1847, to the Hungarian nationalist, revolutionary and statesman Count László Teleki. Teleki’s association with the Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule in March 1848, a revolt that was crushed by Imperial armies and followed by a punitive policy of Germanisation, led to him being sentenced to death.
Liszt’s musical identification with the folk song and dances of his native Hungary was, alongside Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, the first wave of a movement that was to sweep through music over the ensuing half-century, given powerful momentum by the fact that so many of Liszt’s contemporaries – Brahms, Grieg, Joachim Raff, Smetana, Tchaikovsky, César Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov, to name just a handful – were in thrall to him and his every move.
The formula that Liszt put to use in his Hungarian Rhapsodies, and which was much imitated thereafter, was simple enough. It started with a stately, meandering, slightly exotic first section, known as a lassan or lassu, which was paired with a frantic second section called the friska, from the German word frisch, meaning brisk. The third important component of the collection and all subsequent spin-offs was the ultra-vigorous csárdás dance, which had much impressed Liszt when he was treated to a private recital in May 1846 by the Jewish ‘father of the csárdás’, Márk Rózsavölgyi. Rózsavölgyi’s background was poor and he was most likely introduced as a child to the Eastern European Jewish folk music known as klezmer, and as a young man he travelled through Hungary, Slovakia and Romania picking up the local folk dances on his violin. Later he became a well-known musical figure in Budapest; some of his melodies (either newly composed or collected by him, that is) were integrated into Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. (Liszt did not claim the melodies were his, merely that he was arranging them for piano in his own style.)
But Liszt, like the other composers of his time, was more than a little confused about what indigenous Hungarian music actually was, believing it to be the same as ‘gypsy’ music, which in turn was often muddled up with ‘Turkish’ music. In reality, gypsy (Romani) music was in fact quite distinct from Turkish folk music and also quite distinct, as it happened, from Hungarian (Magyar) folk music. For the well-to-do Viennese of the late-eighteenth century onwards, however, including composers like Haydn and Mozart, using the terms ‘gypsy’, ‘Hungarian’ or ‘Turkish’ was like saying ‘random foreign music by poor people’. Indeed, we now know that Liszt and his contemporaries were quite wrong about the provenance of what they called ‘gypsy’ music. The music they all thought was ‘gypsy’ was in fact either Hungarian folk music played by Lautari (professional Romani musicians) in Budapest and Vienna for the benefit of restaurant or café patrons, or it was ‘gypsy-style’ pastiche based not on old, anonymous folk songs and dances but on tunes from popular stage shows or drawing-room ballads, their original composers’ names wittingly or unwittingly lost over time. (They have since mostly been identified.) The real Romani of nineteenth-century central Europe, whose fundamental ethnic origins were Indian, kept their own music to themselves.
Liszt thought, though, that Hungarian folk music was gypsy music and the publication of his first book of Hungarian Rhapsodies in 1853, in a generic folkloric style dressed up for the sophisticated Western European salon, prompted a craze that virtually all composers in Europe emulated. Some plundered their own country’s rustic folk dances, some opportunistically arranged the folk music of other countries, while others dipped into the non-specific well of travelling gypsy band music. This boom has subsequently been labelled ‘musical nationalism’, but I find this terminology problematic. The flaw in describing it as ‘nationalist’ is that, while it was sometimes identified with political movements seeking self-determination, as in the case of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies or Sibelius’s Finlandia, in other cases it was merely an excuse for inserting ethnic idioms and sounds into salon or concert-hall music with no national or political motivation whatever. Or at best a confused motivation, as with Liszt’s well-intentioned misunderstanding of Romani music. Likewise, the magpie-like composers of the nineteenth century sometimes even made use of such material from regions that were not their own, or, as members of the imperial ruling class, found inspiration in the music of subjugated tribes and communities within their empire’s domain – in which cases the term ‘nationalist’ is, surely, highly inappropriate. We will encounter examples of all these variants.
To be clear, the phenomenon of repackaging ethnic music may in many cases have been motivated by a deep and sincere love of country, and of the traditions and roots of peoples who felt oppressed by other more powerful nations, no doubt about it, but what it was not was a bottom-up, grass-roots movement whereby peasant troubadours presented the treasures of their communities to the world. In all cases, the movement that used to be called ‘nationalism’ in music was concocted by highly trained, sophisticated, well-travelled, middle-class composers, mostly trained in Leipzig, Vienna or Paris, who took bits and pieces of folk song and dance that they had heard, probably in city taverns, not even in the rural heartland, and whipped them up into what were essentially mainstream Austro-German musical caricatures for the amusement of an audience who had no interest in the genuine struggles of peasant culture at all.
Among the most popular collections of the type that Liszt’s example engendered were Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dances of 1869 and 1880, which exploit all the usual folksy dance forms of lassan, friska and csárdás. Brahms, who was more than a little in awe of Liszt’s talent and status (but found his music too progressive to enjoy), was a self-confessed musical conservative, following in the more formal tradition of Beethoven, Schubert and (his friend) Schumann, and though his unsheltered boyhood was partly scarred by piano playing in seedy bars and brothels near the Hamburg docks, his familiarity with genuine Hungarian folk music would have been wholly second- if not third-hand. His Hungarian Dances are great fun and highly polished but – make no mistake – if you had played one of them to a passing Magyar milkmaid on the banks of Lake Balaton in 1870 and asked her what it was she would have likely answered, ‘Nice. Some kind of fancy German music.’
The integration of pseudo-peasant style into the piano and orchestral mainstream was an unstoppable flood, yielding many of the best-loved gems of nineteenth-century music, from the Bohemian (Czech) composer Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances of 1878 and 1886 to Finnish composer Sibelius’s Karelia suite of 1893, from Bohemian (Czech) Smetana’s Má vlast (My country) of 1879 to Hugo Alfvén’s Swedish rhapsody, Midsommarvaka (Midsummer vigil) of 1903. Popular csárdás dances were pastiched by Frenchman Delibes (in his ballet Coppelia of 1870), Russian Tchaikovsky (in his ballet Swan Lake of 1877) and, perhaps best known of them all, Italian Vittorio Monti, whose ‘Csárdás’ of 1904 was later adopted by genuine Romani Lautari bands and orchestras across Europe to play to their foot-tapping clientèle. What goes around comes around. Liszt himself wrote three piano csárdás, between 1881 and 1884, including, naturally, a ‘Csárdás macabre’.
Nowhere were the moral questions surrounding the borrowing of elements from ethnic music and putting them into mainstream music more sharply highlighted than in the United States, where one composer in particular found himself at the centre of a highly divisive debate.
Middle-class Americans of the late nineteen
th century were keen not to be outdone by their European counterparts, so they built concert halls, established orchestras and invited star names across the Atlantic to perform. Antonin Dvořák, by the late 1880s already well known outside his homeland, especially in Britain, was invited to New York by a wealthy philanthropist in 1892, to become director of the new National Conservatory of Music, at twenty-five times the salary he had been paid to do the same in Prague. He lived in New York for three years, producing, among other things, his now extremely familiar ninth symphony, From the New World, in 1894.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 19
