Franz Liszt, Vol. 3: The Final Years 1861-1886 by Alan Walker Faber & Faber 594pp, £45 in UK
For a proof of how Liszt's stock as a composer has risen in the past thirty years, you need only consult the record catalogues. This access of popularity can hardly be called a "rediscovery", since during his lifetime, and for decades after, the bulk of his music was unknown to the average music-lover, or even to many informed scholars and critics - few of whom thought it worth knowing. Until quite recently there was no "Liszt Industry" to tempt any exploration in depth by theorists and academics, no quick reputation to be earned by ambitious conductors. The line of great pianists (e.g. Busoni) who continued to play his keyboard music could make little headway against an indifferent public and generally hostile criticism. Even the magnificent B minor Sonata was strictly a minority taste.
His reputation as a pianist apart, there were heavy odds against him almost from the beginning. In his lifetime, Chopin admired his playing but dismissed his music, and the German symphonic composers of the Brahms-Schumann line were his declared enemies; on the other side of the fence, the Wagnerians merely tolerated him as a kind of John the Baptist figure to their own Christ-Messiah. In this century Liszt's High Romanticism was anathema to Stravinsky and most Neo-Classicists, though Bartok (his fellow-countryman) did call him "the father of modern music". Richard Strauss and - rather surprisingly - Ravel greatly admired him as a composer, but they were exceptions.
Alan Walker's monumental life has been in progress over some decades and is surely as important an achievement as Ernest Newman's life of Wagner was in its day. This volume is the last and has a decided dying fall; Liszt was entering into his final phase both as a man and a musician. Basically there are three main periods in his life, starting with the years as an international piano virtuoso based mainly in Paris, where he was the friend and fellow-Romantic of Heine, Chopin, Balzac, Berlioz, Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, Delacroix, Alkan, etc., etc. This is climaxed by his ten-year liaison with Countess Marie d'Agoult, the mother of his three children, and his growing vocation to compose rather than perform.
Then comes his emotional domination by the bluestocking, eccentric Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, and the Weimar-based period in which he gives up his public career as a pianist and composes ambitious orchestral works such as the Faust symphony and the symphonic poems (admittedly, a mixed bag). In the present volume, he slowly distances himself from the Princess (no easy task!), takes minor orders as an abbe, and leads what he called his vie trifurqee divided between Weimar, Rome and Budapest. He only plays the piano in public for charitable or patriotic causes, though he often performs in private for friends, admirers and pupils. Liszt has now become a great teacher, whose "master classes" in Weimar are famous not only through Europe, but in Russia and America.
The book opens with the build-up to Liszt's long-postponed marriage to the Princess in Rome, where she had negotiated for years through clerical and other friends to obtain an annulment from her Russian husband. At last the Vatican consented and the wedding day was named, but at the thirteenth hour renewed and powerful pressures were applied behind the scenes. The Princess herself seems to have lost heart or lost her nerve, or both (among other factors, her daughter would become illegitimate), and the marriage project was dropped for good. We still do not really know whether Liszt himself was glad or sorry at heart; most probably, his feelings were mixed.
However, he had other troubles to oppress him. His daughter Blandine, aged 26 and married to the French lawyer-politician Ollivier, died after a childbirth infection - a double tragedy since he had already lost his son Daniel. His aged, devoted mother died in Paris and he could not even get to the funeral in time. And to drive home the final nail, his surviving daughter Cosima, married to the musician Hans von Bulow, was drifting apart from her husband (who had been one of Liszt's favourite pupils) and into the waiting arms of Wagner, recently returned from exile in Switzerland. Liszt tried hard to come between Wagner and his daughter, but the only effective result was that all three were estranged for several years.
His taking of minor orders brought widespread incredulity and even ridicule, though he was merely fulfilling a wish he had nursed since boyhood. Liszt did not become an ordained priest, nor did he wish to be one, though he spent periods in seclusion at a monastery just outside Rome. He had close friends in the Vatican and was granted private audiences by Pope Pius IX ("Pio Nono"), who visited him in turn to hear him play - the Pope was musical and had a fine singing voice. Later he found a congenial haven in the Villa d'Este, whose fountains and sighing pine woods enter into the sound-world of his music.
Back in Germany, his friend the Grand Duke of Weimar gave him a house in the ducal park, fully furnished and with a piano, where he spent part of every year. It was here that he gave his famous piano lessons to chosen pupils from all over the world, many of whom became famous in turn - he charged nothing, incidentally, and even helped some of them financially. And for the third part of the vie trifurqee, his native Hungary claimed his services in setting up a music academy in Budapest, where he went for several months annually to teach and administrate.
So between Rome, Weimar and Budapest Liszt carried a demanding workload, but that did not prevent him from composing prolifically, appearing regularly in public as a conductor and/or speaker, taking a lead role in many musical societies, fund-raising for deserving causes (including flood victims), carrying on an enormous correspondence, and helping virtually anyone who came to him for aid. He had organising gifts, a conquering social charm that made even kings and princes treat him with respect, and an electric energy, combined with a strong and genuine social conscience.
The reverse side of this outward triumphalism was an increasing melancholia and sense of isolation, accentuated by his lack of success as a composer as well as by the failures and tragedies of his private life. Old friends, too, were dying off, and even old enemies - including Marie d'Agoult, who had pursued him for years with spite and slander. In the last decade of his life Liszt drank fairly heavily - usually a bottle of brandy a day, as well as wine in plenty. Intermittently he seems to have been tempted by the idea of suicide, though his religion and his vocation as an artist stood in the way.
The result of all this was that the man of the final decade was scarcely recognisable as the slender, leonine young virtuoso of the Paris years - as photographs confirm. Dropsy (and possibly drinking) made him put on weight, most of his teeth were gone, his sight was failing, and he found it increasingly hard to get about. A fall down the stairs of his Weimar house had lasting effects, though in the last year of his life he travelled to London, where for a giddy fortnight he was lionised like royalty. Within months, however, he was to die of pneumonia on a visit to Bayreuth, and Cosima (now three years a widow) was widely accused of neglecting him in his last hours. To judge from Professor Walker's careful account, she appears to have been maligned.
In recent decades there has been a great deal of interest in the very late piano pieces (Nuages Gris, Le lugubre gondole, etc) in which Liszt is claimed to have anticipated atonality. In fact, he had worked all his career towards formulating an ordre omnitonique which would eventually replace tonic-and-dominant harmony, so these spare, reflective miniatures were probably a final development rather than a new departure. The core of his later output is actually made up of choral religious works, such as the Christus oratorio, The Story of Saint Elizabeth, and the Via Crucis - a musical legacy in which he placed his faith (in every sense) and hoped that posterity would listen to them as few of his contemporaries did.
So far, critical response has been ambivalent and these works have been slow to enter the repertory (incidentally, did they influence Messiaen?). It may turn out, however, that Liszt has been ahead of us once again and that a new religious phase in the West - there are some signs of it already - will find in his devotional scores something like the spiritual sustenance which Lassus and Palestrina gave to Renaissance Europe. Whether or not they are great music, they are the testament of a great soul and a questing intelligence - one of the real universal spirits of the 19th century.
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times