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Liszt

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Sacheverell Sitwell

Liszt

Dover, Paperback, 1967.
8vo. xxxvi, 400 pp. Preface to the Dover edition, January 1967 [xi-xii]. New Introduction to the Revised Edition, November 1954 [xix-xxxvi]. Catalogue of Works [pp. 338-357]. Postscript to the Revised Edition, March 1955 [pp. 369-375].

First published, 1934.
Revised Edition, 1955.

Contents

New introduction to the Revised Edition

Book I: 1811-1839, Childhood and youth
Book II: 1839-1847, The years of transcendental execution
Book III: 1847-1861, Liszt at Weimar
Book IV: 1861-1869, The Roman period
Book V: 1869-1886, Rome, Weimar, Budapest

Appendixes
I. A note upon Alkan
II. Liszt plays to me: an extract from My Musical Life, by the Rev. H. Haweis
III. A note upon Sivori, the only pupil of Paganini
IV. A note upon John Field
V. A note upon Walter Bache, the English disciple of Liszt

A catalogue of works by Liszt
Chronological table of the life of Liszt
Bibliography
Postscript to the Revised Edition
Index

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In a way, this is a rather fascinating book. It was first published as early as 1934, in a very anti-Lisztian climate (to say the least, the same year Newman's notorious character assassination was first published, too), and then revised in 1955. This Dover edition is a reprint of the latter. It has been out of print for some 40 years or so and this is likely to remain so.

On the positive side, Sacheverell Sitwell, a poet and a writer but no musician or musical critic, has a remarkably positive attitude towards Liszt, at least as far as the man is concerned, without any silly adulation. It is pleasant to read about Liszt's religious inclination or about his generosity of spirit (in so stark a contrast to a Berlioz and especially to a Wagner) to be granted sincerity. There is no gushing in Mr Sitwell's prose, though. He makes no bones about Liszt's incredible vanity and tons of mannerisms during his legendary virtuoso career, yet he never overestimates their significance for the personality of this ever-fascinating man, especially later in his life. On the whole, Mr Sitwell does have a certain amount of insight into Liszt's personality which, though now dated, is not without historical importance. It is touching to read in an almost ecstatic footnote how he once held in his hands Liszt's copy of 'Faust' with his own pencil marks inside. Perhaps the single most perceptive observation of Mr Sitwell is what should be the most obvious one yet it is often overlooked: Liszt's phenomenal early success as virtuoso was the greatest obstacle to his success as a composer, during his life as well as long after his death.

Mr Sitwell's also has a most remarkable talent for bringing people and places vividly to life. Liszt's lived through remarkable times and travelled whole Europe: from Scotland to Ukraine and from Sevilla to Constantinople. The great erudition of Mr Sitwell captures the epoch as few others have. He discusses a number other arts beside music - from painting to poetry - and he obviously knows a great deal about European history, be it political or artistic. To take but few among numerous examples, the magnificence of Papal Rome and the semi-barbarous charm of Kiev are brilliantly evoked. There are many historical digressions of conspicuous interest. My personal favourite here is a compelling passage on the life and tribulations of Tasso and the putative way in which Liszt might have identified with his personality since the lives of both men were 'ruined by early genius'. Information about the brilliant, if mentally unstable, Italian poet is pretty scarce on the web and thus Mr Sitwell's digression is most welcome.

Being a poet himself, Mr Sitwell has a most poetic way of describing Liszt's works. There are a good many such descriptions in the book and some of them have become oft-quoted classics. Perhaps the most well-known example is one about the Second Ballade being concerned more with 'great happenings on an epic scale, barbarian invasions, cities in flames - tragedies of public, rather than private, import'. Such descriptions are, admittedly, pointless stuff but, when charmingly sincere as in this case, they are a fine tribute to the power of Liszt's music to stimulate the imagination.

HOWEVER, the book has numerous drawbacks, minor and major ones, which reduce its value, such as it is, almost to a purely historic one.

To begin with, Mr Sitwell's writing style is generally lucid and engaging enough to guarantee a high degree of readability, but it often tends to be way too purple for my taste; the author's attempts at humour are often high-handed and rather unsuccessful, too. Even when he is not occupied with florid descriptions of people, places or works, Mr Sitwell is prone to use a style much too elaborate for his subject, with awkward punctuation and unnecessarily florid vocabulary. Indeed, I sometimes think that the author should have written this biography as a long dramatic poem, rather than in the form of prose. Last but not least, the habit of quoting heavily in French without any translation whatsoever is severely reprehensible. At least Mr Sitwell is kind enough to translate the few Italian sentences he uses - sometimes.

What is a great deal worse than the eccentricity of Mr Sitwell's writing style in his overall lack of clear vision what kind of book he wanted to write: Liszt's Life, Liszt's Music or Liszt's Times? Or all three together? Well, as I have already hinted, he has scored some notable success only with the last one of these. As we shall see presently, Mt Sitwell is almost totally incapable of analyzing Liszt's personality in depth without going astray and he is especially inept when it comes to Liszt's music. One of the intentions of the book, as stated by the author himself, was to investigate the influence of other composers over Liszt, such as Paganini, Chopin and Berlioz. Commendable intentions, but it must be admitted that Mr Sitwell has failed miserably in this endeavour of his. On the whole, the biography is well-structured and the historical digressions are generally finely handled, but this unfortunately does not extent to the composers whose influence Mr Sitwell proposed to investigate. In fact, he has written page after page full of biographical details from the lives of Paganini, Chopin or Berlioz which hardly have anything to do with Liszt. The result is that this is probably the biography of Liszt that contains the greatest number of pages in which his name is not even mentioned. Now, I do find Paganini, Berlioz and especially Chopin truly captivating, but the idea was to discuss their influence over Liszt, not their own lives, was it not? Just about everything Mr Sitwell can tell about the former is perfectly pedestrian: Paganini influenced Liszt's virtuosity, Chopin his piano writing, Berlioz his orchestration. We all know that.

When I come to Liszt's music I am simply dumbfounded by Mr Sitwell's unbelievably negative attitude, so starkly contrasting to the discreet affection and admiration he has for the man Liszt. The examples are numerous and it is difficult not to throw all of them at the author's head. Before plunging into them, it is worth remembering that Mr Sitwell was a mere music lover who, apparently, could not read music fluently but had to rely entirely on recordings, radio and concerts (and I shudder to think what kind of performances he might have experienced in those Liszt-hating times). This is a great limitation but, on the other hand, it is bound to elicit some warm feelings for the author from those who are similarly handicapped in terms of technical knowledge of music. That said, many of Mr Sitwell's opinions are inexcusable, to say nothing of his appallingly hackneyed, amateurish musical analyses and his annoying name dropping as he often boasts how many times he heard Busoni or this or that pupil of Liszt in concert.

Probably what detracts most from the value of this book is Mr Sitwell's astonishingly presumptuous dismissal of Liszt's orchestral works. This has to be read to be believed. The author tells us without ceremony that Liszt has come to the orchestra too late and then goes on to throw in the garbage all of his symphonic poems - except three ('Hungaria', 'Festklänge' and 'Hunnenschlacht') which he declares to 'redeem' the others, with the last of these three being the 'finest of all'. Ironically, these are actually some of the weakest poems among Liszt's 13 works in this genre: the first two, though containing many beautiful passages, are a little over-repetitive and 'Hunnenschlacht' has all of the 'original sins': too obvious a program and not too distinguished thematic material, plus a great deal of rhetoric for that matter. It is curious that Mr Sitwell should not be offended by the explicit nature of the program in this case, for he certainly is in the case of 'Mazeppa', which he boldly describes as 'flat and shallow', and even in the cases of 'Die Ideale', 'Les Preludes', 'Prometheus' and 'Bergsymphonie' whose origins, we are told, are too much rooted in the literature. All this is terrific nonsense. Liszt may well have been highly susceptible to literature which must have inspired a number of his works, but to claim that he composed his symphonic poems closely following the literary originals, so closely indeed that the works ended as episodic and loose in structure for that reason, is to misunderstand Liszt profoundly. Mr Sitwell's praise for the 'Faust Symphony' is grudgingly generous and he obviously needs all his self-restraint not to dismiss the 'Dante Symphony' as pure trash.

Liszt's piano music fares only a trifle better under Mr Sitwell's pen. The B minor Sonata is a great work but not a favourite of his, none of the Two Polonaises or The Three Concert Etudes is first rate, the Transcendental Studies are a mixed bag of works far too programmatic to be truly engaging, etc. Mr Sitwell deals with these magnificent studies in so perfunctory a manner that I am left totally stupefied; he doesn't even mention masterpieces like 'Ricordanza' or 'Harmonies du Soir', and the program of 'Mazeppa' is of course all too obvious and blatant. Yet again, Mr Sitwell's attaches absurd importance to program titles, apparently not knowing that the evocative names in this case, charming as they are, came into being only with the last version from the 1850s; the early and fearsomely difficult edition of the Transcendentals (1838) contained pretty much the same pieces, though more technically challenging of course, but none of them had been given any title whatsoever. Liszt's piano concerti are given equally harsh, almost scathing, treatment; the Hungarian fantasy is dismissed as 'tawdry'. The merit of 'Totentanz' is admitted with the usual grudge.

At least the Second Ballade and the Two Legendes arouse Mr Sitwell's admiration. Still, it is mind-boggling to find the author raving about, of all pieces, the Paganini Etudes; he confesses a special affection for 'La Campanella' and 'La Chasse' and then spends on these two works alone several extremely purple pages - more than what he dedicated to all of the Transcendentals! Now, the Paganini Etudes are of course important compositions and an overwhelming testimony of Liszt's boundless ingenuity at the keyboard. But even 'La Campanella', by far the finest of them and virtually an original composition, is by far NOT among Liszt's most compelling works; it cannot even be compared to the Transcendental Studies or the Sonata in B minor. Yet Mr Sitwell raves and raves about his having heard Busoni is concert playing these Paganini Etudes and that's that.

As far as Liszt's operatic transcriptions and paraphrases are concerned, Mr Sitwell has a commendably positive opinion of them but his treatment, again, is so trite and perfunctory that it hardly amounts to anything of lasting value. His extolling, such as it is, of Liszt's outstanding transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies or Schubert's songs is touching, but his declaring the transcriptions from 'Lohengrin' and 'Tannhäuser' to be 'painful' for his ears is incomprehensible. What EXACTLY is painful, Mr Sitwell? The tender Bridal Chorus and the ebullient March from the last act of 'Lohengrin'? Or the tremendous 'Overture to Tannhäuser' and the majestic Pilgrim's Chorus from the same opera? In order to retain any respect for Mr Sitwell at all, one may assume that he either never heard these pieces or he did but in horrible performances. To finish the topic, it is worth noting Mr Sitwell's almost equally scathing attitude to the Hungarian Rhapsodies as a whole and especially his ludicrous claim that Liszt is mostly responsible for the modern (for his time) junk in music halls and the like.

Finally, it needs to be said that even Mr Sitwell's sympathetic attitude to Liszt's personality - by far the most enduring quality of his book - is open to serious debate. For it includes such rubbish that Liszt, though a 'great artist' and a 'genius', never really reached the highest planes of greatness; the reasons and the proofs remain elusive. Who actually did? Wagner, perhaps, if Mr Sitwell's mild admiration behind ill-concealed dislike is any measure, and probably Berlioz for whom, despite quite a few harsh words, Mr Sitwell had a great admiration as the finest master of the orchestra ever lived.

Last but not least, the book is, of course, a great deal dated. Many new sources have come to light long after Mr Sitwell had finished his work, most notably Lina Ramann's 'Lisztiana' and the diary of Lina Schmalhausen, to say nothing of enormous amount of hitherto unknown compositions unearthed from Leslie Howard. Besides, though Mr Sitwell does show some promise as a researcher, since he obviously read Liszt's correspondence and a lot of literature about his times and circle very carefully, but he is rather careless with the indication of his sources and he seldom examines them critically; and when he does, he is usually either unconvincing or pedestrian, or both. Sometimes the author describes certain scenes in so great a detail, and from such fishy or obscure sources, that I take leave to doubt their veracity. In short, years, events, works, relationships, motives and the like from Mr Sitwell's pen should be taken 'cum grano salis'. Indeed, his biography should be read, if at all, only after one is intimately familiar with Alan Walker's three-volume magnum opus and his painstaking research of Liszt's life and personality. Then and only then one may give few hours to Mr Sitwell's biography, for it is an enjoyable ride with some perceptive points about Liszt's character and relationships, though there is in addition a great deal of junk about his music and quite a bit of semi-fiction about his life.

P. S. The monstrously dated catalogue of Liszt's works in the end of the book is just another example of Mr Sitwell's appallingly presumptuous and idiosyncratic to the point of mental disorder attitude. Here he offers even a rating system, one or two stars, which are so sparingly used that their presence is not without some importance for the value of the work in question, modestly tells us the author.