One of the advantages (?) of being a historian is that one realizes that everything has “already happened.” Franz Liszt was the 19th century’s greatest pianist, causing shrieks of adulation and hysteria everywhere he appeared. He was also a composer, a tireless promoter of other composers’ works, and a prolific letter-writer and fund-raiser for countless charities and other causes. Unfortunately, many of his nobler achievements are forgotten amid the glitter and flash of a few of his most celebrated piano works. In this, the bicentennial year of his birth, let us appreciate his “prescience.”
“The human spirit, far from remaining in greater stability than the rest of nature, seems, on the contrary, more mobile than anything else. However one wishes to designate its constant activity, as a progressive development, as a spiral shaped motion, or as a simple circle, on thing stands assured: that nations, like individuals, never are subject to total stagnation. All things appear and disappear in constant transformation like a dream, like the waves of a surf ever flooding the coastlines of the centuries, so that, on one hand, appearances ceaselessly change; as, on the other hand, they can be differently perceived. This dual impulse brings about that many points of view within our spiritual orientation necessarily change, that our intelligence contains them in many different frames, that they are reflected in our spirit in totally altered colorations. Of this infinite transformation of objects and impressions some few, however, are exempted, which survive every change, which are unalterable by their very nature. This, among others and above all is grief, whose somber presence instills in us always the same shudder, coerces us to a respectful bow, attracts us sympathetically while filling us with terror, lets us experience ever the same trembling whether it haunts the good or the evil, the victor or the vanquished, the sage or the senseless, the mighty or the weak. In whosoever’s heart, on whatever soil it may spread its vegetation so pregnant with poison, wherever it originated and from whatever cause, as soon as it confronts us in its true greatness, it is hallowed and demands our respect. Generated by two hostile camps and drenched with freshly spilled blood, all grief discloses itself as generating from the same trunk; it is the fate-dispensing, unavoidable leveler of all pride, the unmerciful equalizer of all destinies. Everything in human society is subject to change, custom and cult, law and idea: grief always remains one and the same as it has been since the beginning of time. Kingdoms are destroyed, civilizations wither, science discovers new worlds, the human spirit radiates with more and more intensity—but nothing blanches the intensity of grief, nothing can budge it from the throne whence it dominates our soul, nothing can deprive it of the rights of primogeniture, nothing can soften its solemn, unmerciful rule. It always starts the flow of the same bitter burning tears, its sobs modulate forever with the same penetrating sounds, with unalterable monotony its despair renews itself. Its dark vein streams through all hearts dispensing indivisible wounds within them. Over all times and places waves its winding sheet. . . .One would say that man only bedecks himself with the costume of triumph of the feast so as to hide the black of mourning which, like an epidermis, is closely ingrown into his mortal covering.”
(from the Introduction to Liszt’s symphonic poem “Helden Klage” [Heroes Lament])
© 2011 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs
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