Poetic Music for the Theatre and the Concert Hall: Where the Creative Paths of Wagner and Liszt Diverge
Alisa Yuko Bernhard
The 1850s saw Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner crowned the corulers of an aesthetic movement, which was to become one of the two major branches that claimed to inherit the Beethovenian tradition in the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 Neither their supporters, who hailed them as the “New Germans,” nor their opponents, condemning them as the “musicians of the future,” denied them their progressive stance; and according to Hugh Macdonald, in 1853 Wagner “undoubtedly felt that he and Liszt were moving into a new world of music, leaving Schumann and his supporters far behind.”2 This aesthetic alliance is surprising when one considers the many differences in their respective lives and characters. The personal relationship between Liszt and Wagner, “a deep and generous love that survived — just about — the vicissitudes of four decades,”3 has frequently been understood as one of dependence and indebtedness on Wagner’s part, financially as well as in the production of his operas during his political exile from Germany. Hueffer described the relationship thus:
It is a well-known French saying that in every love affair there is one person who adores while the other allows himself to be adored…. Petrarch and Boccaccio, Schiller and Goethe, Byron and Shelley immediately occur to the mind in such a connection; but in none of these is the mutual position of giver and receiver of worshipper and worshipped so distinctly marked as in the case [of Liszt and Wagner] under discussion.
Susan Bernstein, too, refers to this view of an unbalanced love affair:
“[t]he formula ‘Wagner and Liszt’ is in fact a predicate modifying
Wagner. It has become commonplace to link Liszt to Wagner in this
way, to imply that Liszt is a mere continuation of what Wagner
began.”5 It is a view which Hanslick was one of the first to express:
“Only those who do not know the works of Berlioz or Richard
Wagner could mistake Liszt for a musical discoverer or reformer.”
However, by emphasising Liszt’s role as virtuoso (meaning the
performer, interpreter and realiser of a composer’s works) and
Wagner’s dependence on Liszt in the production of his own works,
Bernstein argues that Liszt’s accomplishment was to alter “the
paternal relation between composer and performer to one of
fraternity,” “standing side by side with, rather than beneath, the
composer.”7 The hierarchy is lost, but there still remains a gap in role
and position between the two: the creative flow still begins with
Wagner. Detlef Altenburg presents an almost opposing view
involving a reversal of primacy when he describes Liszt’s symphonic
poems as having “prepared the way for Richard Wagner’s music
drama” (though even here, the model of Liszt as giver and Wagner as
receiver is barely escaped).8 Altenburg, like Bernstein, echoes Hueffer,
in suggesting an analogy in the Liszt-Wagner and Schiller-Goethe
pairings, but in the sense that Liszt “legitimised” himself and Wagner
as the heirs of the earlier Weimar poets.9 Liszt is understood here as
composer as well as virtuoso, and the gap between the statuses of the
two composers, as shown by Bernstein, is narrowed.
