Liszt on his Creative Process
..1832..
Here is a whole fortnight that my mind and fingers have been working
like two lost spirits, -- Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Bryon, Hugo,
Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber, are
all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury;
besides this I practice four to five hours of exercises…. Ah! Provided I don’t
go mad, you will find an artist in me!1
..1839..
I worked immensely hard in Italy. Without exaggeration I think I
have written four to five hundred pages of pianoforte music.2
..1852..
I should have like to be able to send you some of my new works for
piano…but, as I have been altering them and touching them up, the
publication of them has been delayed…..3
…..
What you tell me of the prodigious activity of your Muse obliges me to
make a somewhat shameful acknowledgement of my relative slowness and
idleness. The pupil is far from the master in this as in other points.
Nevertheless I think I have made a better use of the last three years than of
the preceding ones; for one thing I have gone through a rather severe work
of revision, and have remodeled entirely several of my old works…. I have
been continuing writing in proportion as ideas came to me, and I fancy I
have arrived at last at the point where the style is adequate to the thought.4
…..
1
Letter to Pierre Wolff, Paris, May 2, 1832.
2
Letter to Clara Schumann, Budapest, Dec. 25, 1839.
3
Letter to Carl Reinecke, Weimar, April 16, 1852.
4
Letter to Carl Czerny, Weimar, April 19, 1852.
1
[On excelling in the religious style] You have only to assimilate
Palestrina and Bach – then let your heart speak….5
..1855…
In literature the production of very much altered, increased, and
improved editions is no uncommon thing. In works both important and
trivial, alterations, additions, varying divisions of periods, etc., are a common
experience of an author. In the domain of music such a thing is more minute
and more difficult – and therefore it is seldom done. None of less do I
consider it very profitable to correct one’s mistakes as far as possible, and to
make use of the experiences one gains by the editions of the works
themselves.6
…..
During these last weeks I have spun myself into my Mass…. I do not
know how it will sound, but may say that I have prayed it rather than
composed it.7
..1857..
By the many performances [of the Gran Mass], which have been of
great use to me in this work, many additions, enlargements and details of
performance have occurred to me, which will enhance the effect of the whole,
and will make some things easier in performance.8
…..
That in composing I do not quite work at haphazard and grope about
in the dark, as my opponents in so many quarters reproach me with doing,
will be gradually acknowledged….
…..
Binding together and rounding off a whole piece at its close is
somewhat my own idea, but it is quite maintained and justified from the
standpoint of musical form.
…..
5
Letter to Peter Cornelius, Weimar, Sept. 4, 1852.
6
Letter to Alfred Dorffel, Jand. 17, 1855.
7
Letter to Richard Wagner, Weimar, May 2, 1855.
8
Letter to Joachim Raff, February, 1857.
2
In face of the most wise proscription of the learned critics I shall,
however, continue to employ instruments of percussion, and think I shall yet
win for them some effects little known.9
..1858..
The Dresden performance was a necessity to me, in order to realize its
effect. As long as one has only to do with lifeless paper one can easily make a
slip of the pen. Music requires tone and resonance!
…..
The chief thing is that my present works should prove themselves to
be taking a firm footing in musical matters, and should contribute something
towards doing away with what is corrupt….10
..1859..
To practice art and even to practice it successfully is, however, not the
same as possessing the supreme power of creation. To create is to call into
being from nothing; it is to give a new form to a feeling already known; an
aspect as yet unknown to an expression which is familiar. To “practice” art
is simply to vary the tonality of sentiments already expressed, the contexture
of forms already existing, the modulation of tints which are already there.
The genius sings by virtue of a personal inspiration in whatever way it
dictates and suggests; but talent can only retouch what others have already
said. The talent may be extraordinary, but it is not an initiator. Between
creating and innovating there is the same difference as between genius and
talent; the same as between Bach and Mendelssohn, or Beethoven and
Meyerbeer.
…..
Being unable by nature to confine himself to mere receptivity, man is
possessed by an involuntary desire to communicate, in his turn, the
impressions by which he has been suddenly and unexpectedly charmed. He
is inwardly moved to incorporate, in some act of his own, the moral
emanations which have penetrated to him by outside means, and the
emotions which he has sought and found; either in the spectacles of nature or
in the contemplation of art. Both the one and the other cause his heart to
palpitate, without any immediate agency; bring him to tears, without any
misfortune having overtaken him; and provoke him to smile, without any
subject for mirth being at hand. It is a generous tendency which inclines him
to reproduce the impressions drawn from these two divine sources, though
vague and without direct application. His desire is to bring them into active
life, to seek their return in scenes – not fictional but real – where destinies are
9
Letter to Eduard Liszt, Weimar, March 26, 1857.
10
Letter to Felix Draseke, Weimar, Jan. 10, 1858.
3
decided; to experience them afresh in the episodes which incite and develop
his individual passions and personal sentiments, on the very battle-ground of
real existence.
…..
Everything that imagination can picture can be called up at the
artist’s will. It may be lugubrious or charming, grandiose or delicious; that
depends upon whether the master makes his appeal to the laughing or
weeping faculties of the listener, whether he wishes to darken his soul by
enveloping it in somber shrouds through which terrifying visions are to be
discerned, or whether he chooses to inundate it with light and cradle it in
azure bands fringed with transparent droplets; for the soul is capable of
being transported into an atmosphere of sensations nearly approaching a
state of ravishment – sensations which inject into the veins some unknown
beneficial influence, the pulsations of which render the body lighter,
communicating to all its articulations an elasticity thought to be the attribute
only of demi-gods.11
…..
I require my whole time for my further works, which must go on
incessantly….12
…..
Our own winter here will be wan and grey – for consolation, I shall let
the ink fairly snow on my Music paper!13
..1860..
In these latter weeks I have been completely absorbed in my
composing. If I mistake not, my power of production has materially
increased, while some things in me are made clear and others are more
concentrated.14
…..
The three Chansons and arrangement of the three Quartets for men’s
voices are all completed in my head; you shall have them as a new
manuscript at the end of the week.15
11
Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, 1859.
12
Letter to Felix Draseke, Weimar, Oct. 20, 1859.
13
Letter to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Nov. 25, 1859.
14
Letter to Eduard Liszt, Weimar, July 9, 1860.
15
Letter to C. F. Kahnt, Weimar, Dec. 2, 1860.
4
..1861..
Unfortunately I have been able to do but very little work this winter.
Revisions and proof-correcting took up almost my whole time.16
..1862..
I am firmly resolved for some length of time to continue working on
here undisturbed, unremittingly and with an object. After having, as far as I
could, solved the greater part of the Symphonic problem set me in Germany,
I mean now to undertake the Oratorio problem…. The Legend of Saint
Elizabeth, which was altogether finished a couple of months ago, must not
remain an isolated work, and I must see to it that the society it needs is
forthcoming! To other people this anxiety on my part may appear trifling,
useless, at all events thankless, and but little profitable; to me it is the one
object in art which I have to strive after, and to which I must sacrifice
everything else.17
…..
“O friends, to these tones, rather let us strike up pleasanter ones,”
sings Beethoven. The Elizabeth, it is to be hoped, contains something of the
sort. At least, as far as possible, I have labored carefully at the work, and, so
to say, lived it through for more than a year.18
..1863..
To find myself in a net of social civilities is vexatious to me; my mental
activity requires absolutely to be free, without which I cannot accomplish
anything.19
..1865..
My old musical weaknesses have not left me! The weakest and worst
thing about them is perhaps that I never cease composing; but such
wondrous things go wandering about in my head that I cannot help putting
them down on paper.20
16
Letter to Peter Cornelius, Weimar, April 18, 1861.
17
Letter to Franz Brendel, Nov. 8, 1862.
18
Letter to A. W. Gottschlag, Rome, Nov. 15, 1862.
19
Letter to Franz Brendel, Rome, April 14, 1863.
20
Letter to Breitkopf and Hartel, Rome, May 27, 1865.
5
..1868..
In Grotta mare I wrote about 20 pages of the technical exercises.
Unfortunately a host of correspondence prevents my making progress with
the work I have already begun and which is finished in my head.21
..1871..
Now I have become terribly scrupulous and cautious in discharging
my profession of musician. In order to go on writing I have to put everything
else aside, and the setting down of my ideas, as such, takes an amount of the
time vastly disproportionate to their slight value.22
...1872..
Regensburg being on the way to Vienna I prefer to stop there. The
cathedral is grandiose. In the past I dreamed there of a Music which I know
now how to write….23
..1874..
So long as I am engaged in composing music, it absorbs me
passionately; then, when it is a matter of performing it, of publishing it, etc.,
I have to make an effort to reinvolve myself even slightly in it, and generally I
prefer to forget it completely.24
..1875..
I am especially pleased with the close of an article by Kulke: “In the
same way as Sebastian Bach could not conceive a musical thought in any
other way than from a contrapuntal point of view, Liszt cannot conceive a
theme in any other way than from a thematic point of view.”25
21
Letter to Siegmund Lebert, Rome, Sept. 10, 1868.
22
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Budapest, March 7, 1871.
23
Ibid., Bayreuth, Oct. 20, 1872.
24
Ibid., Rome, Nov. 11, 1874.
25
Letter to Eduard Liszt, Rome, Oct. 31, 1875.
6
..1876..
My Via Crucis is barely sketched, and is still more in my head than on
26
paper.
..1877..
A well-disposed program composer uses such hints (“as prefaces and
poems”) more than is generally supposed.27
…..
I have spent this week here very much absorbed in the silly things I
am writing on music paper – continually scraping, changing, and rechanging,
without managing to express what I feel, and yet would like more or less to
express musically.28
…..
I pursue my labors while trying not to become too much discouraged
in my musical work, which I have resolved not to give up short of either total
infirmity or death. A few more leaves have been added…no less boring and
redundant than the previous ones! To tell the truth I sense in myself a
terrible lack of talent compared with what I would like to express; the notes I
write are pitiful. A strange sense of the infinite makes me impersonal and
uncommunicative.29
..1878..
A harmonic combination or progression may be against the rules of a
system.30
…..
I am often quite anxious about further writing of music, but I do not
give it up, although I do not imagine at all that I can express that which floats
before my mind.31
26
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Rome, Feb. 4, 1876.
27
Letter to Breitkopf and Hartel, Rome, Sept. 26, 1877.
28
Letter to Olga von meyendorff, Rome, Oct. 27, 1877.
29
Ibid., Rome, Nov. 9, 1877.
30
Letter to Walter Bache, Budapest, March 19, 1878.
31
Letter to Kornel von Abranyi, Rome, Sept. 13, 1878.
7
…..
I have hardly opened a magnificent Erard piano installed in my
sitting room. I am absorbed in the composition of the Via Crucis and in
order not to spoil it I refrain from playing it until the manuscript is
completed.32
…..
These last two weeks I have been completely absorbed in my Via
Crucis. It is at last complete (except for the indications of the fortes, pianos,
etc.) and I still feel quite shaken by it. Day after tomorrow I will go back to
writing letters, a task impossible for me to undertake so long as music
torments my brain. I am barely able to keep up a few indispensable though
brief conversations during pauses in my work; and in the evening I feel very
tired. I go to bed at 9:30 and read for another half an hour; then the
wretched notes of the morning and of the day to come enter my mind and
disturb my slumber. In music as in moral matters one rarely does the good
one would wish, but often the evil which one would not wish.33
…..
I’m working feverishly six or seven hours a day on a task which is not
suited to drawing rooms.34
…..
I have been dreadfully industrious with my music writing since the
middle of September. I sit and walk in it like one possessed!35
..1879..
I’m so weary and even so harassed by the music I am writing, while
composing it, revising the copy and the proofs, that afterwards I don’t like to
talk about it.36
32
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Rome, Sept. 22, 1878.
33
Ibid., Rome, Oct. 23, 1878.
34
Ibid., Oct. 29, 1878.
35
Letter to Eduard Liszt, Rome, Nov. 21, 1878.
36
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Rome, Dec. 26, 1879.
8
..1880..
Formerly, people never looked at libretti very closely; today more
care and poetic rapport have become necessary, particularly for
Oratorios….37
…..
Zola’s study on Flaubert is most remarkable. What interested me
most is Flaubert’s lengthy method of work in eager search of the mot juste,
suitable, expressive, simple, and unique. I know similar torments in music.
This or that chord, or even pause, have cost me hours and numerous
erasures. Those who know the meaning of style are a prey to these strange
torments.38
..1881..
There is so much admirable music written that one is ashamed to
write any more. With me it only happens in cases of urgency and from inner
necessity.39
..1882..
One can rub out easily on this paper, which is one of the most
important things – that is to say, unless one tears up the whole manuscript,
which would often be advisable.40
..1883..
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing nothing but write music.
The oars of a Gondole Lugubre beat on my brain. I have tried to write them
and had to rewrite them twice, whereupon other lugubrious things come
back to mind and, willy-nilly, my scrawls on music sheets continued to the
exclusion of all else.41
37
Letter to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, June 11, 1880.
38
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Rome, Dec. 25, 1880.
39
Letter to Otto Lessmann, Weimar, Sept. 8, 1881.
40
Letter to Carl Riedel, Venice, Dec. 9, 1882.
41
Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, Venice, Jan. 7, 1883.
9
..1884..
Still writing music, as I am, I sometimes ask myself at such and such a
passage, “Would that please Saint-Saens?” The affirmative encourages me
to go on, in spite of the fatigue of age and other wearinesses.42
42
Letter to Camille Saint-Saens, late 1884.
10