Papers by AMFITHEA AIVALIOTI
This particular passage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his obligations to Beethoven, Cho... more This particular passage is suited to the case of Liszt. Despite his obligations to Beethoven, Chopin and Berlioz as, indeed, Flaubert owed something to Chateaubriand, Bossuet, and Balzac he invented a new form, the symphonic 26 THE REAL AND LEGENDARY poem, invented a musical phrase, novel in shape and gait, perfected the leading motive, employed poetic ideas instead of the antique and academic cut and dried square-toed themes and was ruthlessly plundered almost before the ink was dry on his manuscript, and without due acknowledgment of the original source. So it came to pass that the music of the future, lock, stock, and barrel, first manufactured by Liszt, travelled into the porches of the public ears from the scores of Wagner, Raff, Cornelius, Saint-Saens, Tschaikowsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, and minor Russian composers and a half-hundred besides of the new men, beginning with the name of Richard Strauss that most extraordinary personality of latter-day music. And Liszt sat in Weimar and smiled and waited and waited and smiled; and if he has achieved paradise by this time he is still smiling and waiting. He often boasted that storms were his metier, meaning their tonal reproduction in orchestral form or on the keyboard but I suspect that patience was his cardinal virtue. Henry James once wrote of the human soul and it made me think of Liszt: "A romantic, moonlighted landscape, with woods and mountains and dim distances, visited by strange winds and murmurs," Liszt's music often evokes the golden opium-haunted prose of De Quincy; it is at once sensual and rhetorical. It also has its sonorous platitudes, unheavenly lengths, and barbaric yawps. 27 FRANZ LISZT Despite his marked leaning toward the classic (Raphael, Correggio, Mickelangelo, and those frigid, colourless Germans, Kaulbach, Cornelius, Schadow, not to mention the sweetly romantic Ary Scheffer and the sentimental Delaroche), by temperament Liszt was a lover of the grotesque, the baroque, the eccentric, even the morbid. He often declared that it was his pet ambition to give a piano recital in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, where, surrounded by the canvases of Da Vinci, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Veronese, and others of the immortal choir, he might make music never to be forgotten. In reality, he would have played with more effect if the pictures had been painted by Salvator Rosa, El Greco, Hell-Fire Breughel, Callot, Orcagna (the Dance of Death at Pisa), Matthew Grunwald; or among the moderns, Gustave Dore, the macabre Wiertz of Brussels, Edward Munch, Matisse or Picasso. Ugliness note their nationalities, only sex and alphabetical order is employed. Place auoc dames.
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Papers by AMFITHEA AIVALIOTI