Nothing in the bravura
disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
spectacularly magnificent?
Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it.
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