23. Liszt as teacher.

From 1869 Liszt pursued what he called his ‘vie trifurquée’, or threefold life, in which he divided each year between Rome, Weimar and Budapest. The grand duke of Weimar had never ceased to inquire when Liszt would return to the city, and in February 1869 Liszt acceded to his request. A new home was found for him, the former Hofgärtnerei, or Court Gardener’s house, which adjoined the Goethe Park. The grand duchess herself supervised the furnishings, and the firm of Bechstein provided a grand piano whenever Liszt was in residence. It was in the music room that he held his famous masterclasses three times a week.

Liszt was one of the greatest teachers of his generation. He taught from his earliest years in Paris, and was still giving lessons during the last month of his life, nearly 60 years later. More than 400 students are said to have studied with him, although this number is impossible to prove; so much depends on how the phrase ‘a pupil of Liszt’ is defined. Some of those who later claimed him as a teacher received only one or two lessons from him (Liszt called them ‘one-day flies’), others none at all. (A comprehensive list is given in Walker, H1983–96, iii, 249–52.)

Liszt invented the masterclass, a concept which has come to dominate instrumental teaching. It was his belief that young masters would stimulate one another and achieve ever higher standards of perfection. The custom was for one pupil to play, Liszt and the others looking on, after which Liszt would make some observations about the performance and perhaps play portions of the work himself. These were moments to treasure. Simply to be in the same room as Liszt, as more than one pupil testified, turned one temporarily into a better pianist. His first generation of great students, whom he taught during the 1850s, had included Tausig, von Bülow, Klindworth and Hans von Bronsart, and it was arguably the finest group to pass through his hands. But the later generation also included some impressive talents, such as d’Albert, Rosenthal, von Sauer, Joseffy, Friedheim, Siloti and Sophie Menter. Clearly this exceptional group of peers formed one of the most critical audiences imaginable. If a young pianist could survive such a baptism of fire he could survive whatever lay in store in the world outside.

Liszt’s pupils were like the members of an extended family. Once admitted to his inner circle they were allowed privileges normally denied to students of other teachers. They accompanied him on trips to such nearby towns as Jena, Erfurt and Eisenach to hear concerts, to attend social functions and to celebrate special anniversaries. A number of students kept diaries, recording their life together, and helped to fulfil Liszt’s own best maxim: ‘Create memories!’

Liszt was not interested in playing the pedagogue. He had no method, no system, and little technical advice to offer his students. When playing the piano, the physical problems associated with it were his last consideration. A favourite aphorism was: ‘Technique should create itself from spirit, not from mechanics’. He expected his students to ‘wash their dirty linen at home’, as he put it, a phrase that became much dreaded among his students. Of course, by observing Liszt himself play – watching the lie of his hands on the keyboard, seeing how certain passages were fingered, studying his pedal-effects – his pupils undoubtedly received the best possible guidance, and learnt far more than they might have done from a dry, academic description of these events. Liszt generally liked to have before him some poetical image in order to draw an appropriate interpretation from his pupils. ‘Do I care how fast you can play your octaves?’ he once thundered at a pupil in the middle of the celebrated octave passage of Chopin’s A Polonaise. ‘What I want to hear is the canter of the Polish cavalry before they gather force and destroy the enemy’ (Lamond, E1949, p.68).

This emphasis on musical interpretation made Liszt’s classes exceptional. He would take apart a Beethoven sonata, phrase by phrase, in an effort to get his pupils to comprehend the meaning behind the notes, and in so doing he established traditions of performance which survive to this day. His comments were spiced with anecdote, metaphor and wit. To a young student tapping out the opening chords of the Waldstein Sonata he remarked drily: ‘Do not chop beefsteak for us’. And to another who had blurred the rhythm in Gnomenreigen (usually played too fast for him): ‘There you go, mixing salad again’. He sat through many performances of La campanella, with its infamously high D s which force the player’s right hand to leap back and forth at speed across the void. To those who hesitated before striking the key he would declare: ‘Do not look for the house number’. Liszt also believed in preserving artistic individuality; he was not interested in making carbon copies of himself. This stood in marked contrast to his contemporaries. Kullak, Breithaupt, Deppe and others were known for their methodology and for drilling their pupils into conformity, like soldiers. The theory was that the ‘soldiers’ would eventually come marching out of the conservatories of Berlin, Cologne and Leipzig, and conquer the world. Not a single great pianist appears to have been produced by such methods, although one or two may have emerged despite them.

Many pen-sketches have come down to us from those times, written by August Göllerich, Carl Lachmund, Amy Fay and others. Lachmund, an American who studied with Liszt during the years 1882–4, once heard him play Feux-follets (A173/5).

The spirit and passion that this man still possesses at the age of 71 is marvellous; and how his hands flew from passage to passage! I had taken a position next to the keyboard … My heart bubbled with the captivating joy he put into this music. I smiled; my interest was all intense, self-forgetful, and before I realized it, I gave vent to my delight in a loud laugh. Just then he stopped. He looked up, as I thought, a little surprised; I blushed and reproached myself for having broken the spell, and in a way he might have misconstrued into levity. But I think he understood. (Lachmund, 68)

Liszt had many hangers-on who took advantage of his kindness. Hans von Bülow, much feared for his banter, was perhaps somewhat cruel when he remarked that ‘at the best pianist’s house one can hear the worst pianists playing’. In the summer of 1881, when Liszt was indisposed, Bülow took over the Weimar masterclasses and almost caused a revolution at the Hofgärtnerei when he expelled the incompetents and ne’er-do-wells. Bülow insisted that he was doing no more for Liszt than he would do for his own dog by ridding it of its fleas. Shortly afterwards, however, Liszt was back and with him the ‘fleas’. There were many in Weimar who criticized the hot-house atmosphere of the Hofgärtnerei, generated by an unthinking admiration of Liszt; and it was said (somewhat unkindly) that admiration was the price of admission to the class. Walter Damrosch visited Weimar in 1882 and came away with an unflattering picture of Liszt surrounded by ‘a pitiful crowd of sycophants … a band of cormorants in the shape of ostensible piano students’. This drew a powerful response from Carl Lachmund, who pointed out that the ‘band of cormorants’ had included some of the most famous names in piano playing, including Arthur Friedheim, Moriz Rosenthal, Frederic Lamond and Alexander Siloti (Walker, ed., E1995, p.xxiv).

Liszt never charged for his lessons. He lived by the motto ‘Génie oblige!’ He was troubled when the German newspapers published details of Theodor Kullak’s will, revealing that the great pedagogue had left more than a million marks generated from his lucrative teaching practice. (Kullak’s Neue Akademie der Tonkunst had become the biggest private teaching institution of its kind in Germany.) ‘As an artist, you do not rake in a million marks without performing some sacrifice on the altar of Art’, Liszt declared to Lina Ramann (E1983, pp.297–8). He wrote a letter to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in which he urged Kullak’s sons to create an endowment for needy musicians (5 September 1885). From anyone else, such an idea would have been presumptuous. But through his personal example, Liszt had earned the right to propose it.

Liszt, Franz