Or without Liszt. Like Chopin he was a brilliant technician (he gave his first solo at ten), and like Beethoven (whose Broadwood he acquired) and Berlioz, he had charisma.104 Good-looking, which was part of that charisma, Liszt invented bravura piano playing. Before him, pianists had played from the wrist, holding their hands close together and near the keyboard. He, however, was the first of the pianists whose performance would begin with his arrival on stage. He would sit down, throw off his gloves, dropping them anywhere, hold his hands high, and then attack the keyboard (women would fight to obtain one of Liszt’s gloves).105 He was, then, a showman, and for many people that has made him a charlatan.106 But he was undoubtedly the most romantic of piano players, arguably the greatest there has ever been, who absorbed the influence of Berlioz, Paganini and Chopin. He invented the solo recital and pianists from all over Europe flocked to study with him. He influenced Wagner enormously, introducing new musical forms, in particular the symphonic poem – one-movement programme music with great symbolism inspired by a poem or a play.107 In his bold chromaticism, he introduced dissonances that were copied by everyone from Chopin to Wagner. Liszt grew into the grand old man of music, outliving most of his contemporaries by several decades. One of ‘the snobs of history’, his flowing white hair and ‘collection of warts’ gave his head as distinctive an appearance in old age as it had had in his youth.108
Felix Mendelssohn was possibly the most widely accomplished musician after Mozart. A fine pianist, he was also the greatest conductor of his day and the greatest organist. He was an excellent violinist and was well read in poetry and philosophy. (He was the romantic classicist, says Alfred Einstein.109) He came from a wealthy Jewish banking family, and was the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A fervent German patriot, he believed that his compatriots were supreme in all the arts. Indeed, if there is such a thing, Mendelssohn was over-cultured. As a boy he was made to get up at 5.00 am to work on his music, his history, his Greek and Latin, his science and his comparative literature. When he had been born his mother had looked at his hands and remarked ‘Bach fugue fingers!’110 Like so many of the other romantic musicians, he was a child prodigy, though he was doubly fortunate in that his parents could afford to hire their own orchestra and he could have them play his own compositions, where he would conduct. He went to Paris and met Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz. For his first work he took as his inspiration Shakespeare: this was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairyland that was perfect romantic material (though Mendelssohn never had much in the way of internal demons).111 After Paris, he went to Leipzig as musical director and in a short while made it the musical capital of Germany. One of the first conductors to use the baton, he employed it to turn the Leipzig orchestra into the foremost instrument of music of the day – precise, sparing, with a predilection for speed. He increased the size of the orchestra and revised the repertoire. In fact, Mendelssohn was probably the first conductor to adopt the dictatorial manner that seems so popular today, as well as being the main organiser of the basic repertoire that we now hear, with Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone, Haydn, Bach (whose St Matthew Passion he rescued from a hundred years’ slumber) and Handel not far behind, and with Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann also included.112 It was Mendelssohn who conceived the shape of most concerts as we hear them: an overture, a large-scale work, such as a symphony, followed by a concerto. (Until Mendelssohn, most symphonies were considered too long to hear at one go: interspersed between movements there would be shorter, less demanding pieces.)113
The seal was set on the great romantic onslaught in music by developments in what is possibly the most passionate of all art forms – opera. The nineteenth century produced the two great colossi of opera, one Italian, the other German.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was unlike most of his musical contemporaries in that he was no child prodigy. His piano playing was weak and he failed to get into the Milan conservatory at his first attempt. His first opera was a modest success, his second a failure but his third, Nabucco, made him famous throughout Italy. During rehearsals for this opera no work was done off-stage because the painters and machinists were so excited and so moved by the music they heard being put together that they left their tasks to crowd round the orchestra pit. Besides the music, and the fact that Verdi used a larger than conventional orchestra, Nabucco became popular in Italy because it was seen as symbolic of the Italian resistance to Austrian domination and occupation of the country. ‘The “Va, pensiero” chorus, which concerns the longing of the Jewish exiles for home, was identified by all Italian listeners with their own longing for freedom.’114 On the first night the audience stood up and cheered.115 Verdi was a fervent nationalist himself, who lived to see the unification of Italy, and later became a (reluctant) deputy in the new parliament. The letters V.E.R.D.I., scratched on a wall in any Italian town under Austrian occupation, were understood to mean: ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia’.116
In the operas that followed Nabucco – I Lombardi and Ernani, and in particular Macbeth – Verdi produced a type of opera music that hadn’t been heard before, but took as its cue what was happening among the romantic composers. Instead of pretty, melodious, controlled music, Verdi was looking for the sounds produced by the singers’ voices to reflect their inner states, their turmoil, their love, their hate, their psychological stress and distress. Verdi himself explained this explicitly in a letter he wrote to the director of the Paris Opera just as Macbeth was about to go into rehearsal. Among other things, he objected to the choice of Eugenia Tadolini, one of the great singers of the day. ‘Tadolini has too great qualities for this role [as Lady Macbeth]. Perhaps you think that is a contradiction! Tadolini’s appearance is good and beautiful, and I would like Lady Macbeth twisted and ugly. Tadolini sings to perfection, and I don’t wish Lady Macbeth to sing at all. Tadolini has a marvellous, brilliant, clear, powerful voice, and for Lady Macbeth I should like a raw, choked, hollow voice. Tadolini’s voice has something angelic. Lady Macbeth’s voice should have something devilish . . .’117 Verdi was moving toward musical drama, melodrama, in which raw emotion is presented on stage ‘in great primary colours: love, hate, revenge, lust for power’.118 It was led by melody rather than the harmony of the orchestra and so has a humanism that is lacking in Wagner.119 Even so, it was quite different from anything that had gone before, and meant that while his operas were hugely popular with audiences (the doors for the first performance had to be opened four hours in advance, the crush was so great), they received an unprecedented critical onslaught. For one performance of Rigoletto, in New York in 1855, two men tried to take the production to court, to have it banned on grounds that it was too obscene for women to see it.120
At the end of his long life, when he was an institution in Italy, Verdi returned to Shakespeare, with Otello and Falstaff. As in the original Shakespeare story, Falstaff is both a comedy and a tragedy, perhaps the hardest of genres to pull off (it was in Verdi’s contract that he could withdraw the opera after the dress rehearsal if it wasn’t right). We do and we do not like Falstaff. It is hard to feel that a fool can be a tragic character, but of course he is to himself. Verdi’s music – its very grandeur – adds to Shakespeare’s stories, to enable us to see that tragedy can indeed take place, even when there is no tragic hero in an obvious way. In this sense, Verdi’s Falstaff, premiered at La Scala in Milan in February 1893, brings romanticism to a close.121