Franz Liszt and His World by Gibbs Christopher H. Gooley Dana

Author:Gibbs, Christopher H., Gooley, Dana [Gibbs, Christopher H., Gooley, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781400828616
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2006-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

JOSEPH D’ORTIGUE

Frantz Liszt

Gazette musicale de Paris

14 June 1835

The great work of the human mind today consists in its effort to pull itself away in every intellectual sphere from all ties to convention, to replace the arbitrary prescriptions and shackles of pure form with the free action of nature; and in its tendency to move back toward the fundamental and immutable laws governing beings. People who mistake the arduous and ephemeral play of human activities for the essential order, and call any agitation a disorder, are troubled when facing the process and effort we are describing, and see in it only violent symptoms of endless upheaval. Yet for anyone who does not misunderstand the principle and direction of its movement, it is clear that our age is searching at once for order within freedom, for freedom within order, and for tranquility within the two; which is to say that it ardently desires the reestablishment of the complete and natural course of the primary laws on which mankind’s stability and development are based.

It has perhaps not been sufficiently noted that this general need is particularly felt among artists. And as we attempt here to describe the way it shows itself in this class of society, we believe we are placing art on the noblest ground: we are considering it in its relationship with man’s most elevated and powerful instincts; we are placing it, in short, on a par with the fundamentals of civilization.

It was on such bases that we made a previous attempt to appraise the work of a young composer who, through the ups and downs of his career, is sustained by an indomitable confidence and a virile sense of independence.17 It is from that same perspective that we now propose to examine the talent of an even younger artist, one who occupies an extremely elevated rank among our pianists: nobody denies his talent, to be sure, yet leaving matters of technique aside, this talent is far from being unqualifyingly embraced; the only reason for this, in our opinion, is that he is judged too much from the perspective of the individual, without taking into account his intimate affinity with the body of prevailing ideas and his relationship to the true direction of art.

The comparative method by which a man confronts his times, however, could not possibly offer more interesting aspects or truer parallels than in the case of the artist now being considered. We do not believe that any contemporary has drawn more broadly from the common reservoir of his time or reflected its diverse characteristics as fully as he has. Subjected at a very young age to the crucible of society, so impressionable, and, as it were, so responsive to it, he reflects the most vivid and faithful imprint of the various social types that have reproduced themselves in him. Religious aspirations and arid doubts, enthusiasms and depressions, excess of independence and search for authority—his soul absorbs it all, experiences it all every day; and it is not clear

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