I
My title may appear provocative, but I doubt whether anyone is likely to disagree that of all the great composers Liszt is the one most frequently accused of bad taste, and also that the accusation has never threatened his status among the great. Indeed, as Charles Rosen once suggested, the accusation in some sense actually identifies Liszt’s particular position in the pantheon.
Rosen put it in the form of a trumped-up paradox, saying of Liszt that his “early works are vulgar and great; the late works are admirable and minor.” Very cagey, this: Liszt’s most-admired works, say the Faust-Symphonie or the B-minor Sonata, came in between. Take away the invidious comparison, and take away the sophistry, and Rosen’s point still resonates. But take away the vulgarity, and Liszt is no longer Liszt. Reviewing the first volume of Alan Walker’s biography of Liszt in the New York Review of Books, Rosen went even further in his baiting, asserting that “to comprehend Liszt’s greatness one needs a suspension of distaste, a momentary renunciation of musical scruples.” And then, for good measure: “Only a view of Liszt that places the Second Hungarian Rhapsody in the center of his work will do him justice.”
That was not an endorsement of the Rhapsody, which Rosen, along with Hanslick and Bartók, thought “trivial and second-rate.” What made the provocation doubly surefire was the racial innuendo that tainted not only Liszt and the Rhapsody, but all who came in contact with them. Did not Pierre Boulez say of Bartók that his “most admired works are often the least good, the ones which come closest to the dubious-taste, Liszt-gypsy tradition”? And does that not go a long way toward accounting for Bartók’s overt hostility toward a tradition, that of the so-called verbunkos, on which he remained covertly dependent? The taint even tainted the tainter — all of which was simply too much for Alfred Brendel, who, exasperated, took Rosen’s bait:
Though enjoying, once in a while, some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies and operatic paraphrases, I wince at Charles Rosen’s assertion [that] in the matter of taste, no composer could be more vulnerable than Liszt. . . . In contrast to Charles Rosen, I consider it a principal task of the Liszt player to cultivate such scruples [as Rosen bids us renounce], and distil the essence of Liszt’s nobility. This obligation is linked to the privilege of choosing from Liszt’s enormous output works that offer both originality and finish, generosity and control, dignity and fire.
I sympathize with Brendel’s aversion to Rosen’s deliberately annoying formulations, but I find Brendel’s fastidiousness insufficiently generous toward Liszt and the impulses that his work embodies, which, though not always noble, are undoubtedly great. Rosen came closer than Brendel did to pinpointing the fascination that Liszt exerted over his times, and continues to exert over us. Especially worthy of pursuit is Rosen’s most irritating pronouncement of all: “Good taste,” he teased, “is a barrier to an understanding and appreciation of the nineteenth century.”
If the remark grates, it is because of the aspersion it seems to cast on the century that now looms in retrospect as the greatest century of all for music — or at least as the century in which music was accorded the greatest value. But suppose we read the aspersion the other way — as a critique of good taste? Ever since reading the Rosen-Brendel exchange a quarter of a century ago, I have had an itch to use Liszt and his reception as a tool to situate good taste (along with greatness) in social and intellectual history, and to fathom the profound ambivalence with which virtuosity has always been regarded.
So let me begin again, with another quotation — something that has been rattling in my head even longer, more than half a century now. When I was an undergraduate, I read Thomas Mann’s last novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. At one point the social-climbing title character receives guidance from a nobleman, the Marquis de Venosta, whose world he wants to crash. Among the many insights that the Marquis offers him is this: “You come, as one now sees, of a good family — with us members of the nobility, one simply says ‘of family’; only the bourgeois can come of a good family.”
What does this mean? What is the difference between “family” and “good family”? What it seems to come down to is that “family” is an existential category, while “good family” is an aspirational one. The bourgeoisie is the aspiring class. The aristocracy simply is. And so it is with “taste” and “good taste.” “Taste” is something the elect possess and exercise without calculation or necessary self-awareness. “Good taste” is exhibited rather than exercised: it is something attributed to the maker of deliberate and calculated choices in recognition of their correctness, as a mark of social approval. “Taste” is a matter of predilection, “good taste” is a matter of profession. A display of good taste is a mark of aspiration to social approbation, and the standard to which exhibitors of good taste must aspire is never their own. To show good taste is to seek admission to an elite station which the possessor of “taste” occupies as an entitlement. A show of good taste is thus never a mark of election; rather, it marks one as an outsider wanting in. It implies submission as well as aspiration, hence inhibition. Like Felix Krull, people who display their good taste are trying to crash a social world.
Recall now the famous words that Haydn spoke to Leopold Mozart in February 1785:
Before God, and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.
Imagine for a moment that Haydn had said to Leopold not that Wolfgang “has taste,” but that “he has good taste.” The compliment would have crumbled. “Taste” (Geschmack), in the sense that Haydn used the word, was an existential category. Either you were of the elect or you weren’t; and if you did not have taste as a birthright you could not acquire it, even though you had “the most profound knowledge of composition.”
But what did it consist of? In this context, clearly enough, “taste” was an unerring and intuitive insider awareness of what was fitting. The closest any musician came to enunciating such a definition may have been Johann Mattheson in 1744, at the outset of a chapter entitled “Vom musikalischen Geschmack” in a book devoted to the aesthetics of opera:
Taste, figuratively speaking, is the inner awareness, preference, and judgment by which our intellect impinges upon sensory matters. If, as Pliny would have it, the tongue has a mind of its own, so the mind can be said to have its own tongue, with which it tastes and evaluates the objects of its attention.
In that figurative sense, “taste” was comparable to the securely inculcated breeding that the Marquis de Venosta had in mind when he distinguished “family” from “good family.”
Mattheson’s ingenious, opportunistic inversion of a dimly remembered Pliny provides a link between the gustatory and the derivative or conceptual meanings of the term, while also giving off an echo of its social history; for as soon as the word “taste” was elevated beyond its purely sensory meaning in the seventeenth century, it connoted an attribute of aristocracy. The sociologist Stephen Menell locates that origin at the French court, where members of the old noblesse d’épée, threatened by the ever-aspiring, ever-rising bourgeoisie, secured positions at court as “specialists in the art of consumption” (at first of food), developing hierarchies of taste and codes of behavior that stressed the restraint of gluttony and refinement of table manners. Taste had become a metaphor for discrimination.
The turn from food to art as the arena for the exercise of taste can be traced first in Italy. Giulio Mancini, the personal physician to Pope Urban VIII and a famous collector of fine painting, equated gusto and giudizio (taste and judgment) in his Considerazioni sulla pittura, an essay published in 1623. Half a century later, in 1670, the attempt to acquire taste without breeding was satirized for all time in Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme. The butt of the satire could be described, long avant la lettre, as “good taste,” which was the quality or attainment to which Monsieur Jourdain aspired. Good taste, in effect, was imitation taste, not the real thing.
The notion of taste as an absolute standard, sanctioned by a consensus of the capable (“men of sentiment”) and associated in the first instance with one of David Hume’s most famous essays, has persisted since the eighteenth century despite the rise of less intransigent definitions. Its staying power is attributable to the conviction, among the politically conservative, that (to quote Wye J. Allanbrook) “the agreement of cultivated people about what is good and beautiful was a force for the political cohesion of the community” and a support, or occasional pinch-hitter, for hereditary aristocracy. As Schiller emphasized in On the Aesthetic Education of Man in 1794, “No privilege, no autocracy of any kind, is tolerated where taste rules”; but that is because taste itself offered an alternative standard of excellence, working through positive rather than negative reinforcement (the promise of esteem replacing the threat of coercion) to internalize the pressure. Where its autonomy and universality are believed in, spontaneous fellow-feeling and disinterested fraternity can seem to rule. But such belief, far from spontaneous, must be cultivated, or rather, instilled.
A century and more after Schiller, T. S. Eliot echoed his sentiments when he defined “the function of criticism” as “roughly speaking, . . . the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” This was the formulation of a man who would shortly declare himself to be “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” The word for it, and it has become a fighting word, is elitism.
Where Eliot went, Stravinsky tagged dependably behind. In the Poétique musicale, his own pinnacle of intransigence delivered at Harvard a decade later, in 1939–1940, Stravinsky devoted the last of his six leçons ostensibly to musical performance, but in fact he made it clear from the outset that the subject matter of the lecture, which outwardly took the form of a diatribe against virtuosos expressly intended as a correction of taste, was in fact d’ordre éthique plutôt que d’ordre esthétique — “of an ethical rather than of an aesthetic order.” At the height of his dudgeon, Stravinsky declared: “Whereas all social activities are regulated by rules of etiquette and good breeding, performers are still in most cases entirely unaware of the elementary precepts of musical civility, that is to say of musical good breeding — a matter of common decency that a child may learn.” And yet, when invoking the grand thème de la soumission, the “great principle of submission,” that runs like a thread through all six lessons, Stravinsky contradicts himself, proclaiming instead that “this submission demands a flexibility that itself requires, along with technical mastery, a sense of tradition and, commanding the whole, an aristocratic culture that is not merely a question of acquired learning.” There is your existential taste: something that one possesses as a birthright, as an aristocrat possesses (and is possessed by) “family.”
How far this is, we are apt to think, from our colloquial concept of taste as mere personal preference, the thing that is proverbially beyond dispute. That definition, too, has a long history, going back to the anonymous Latin maxim — De gustibus non est disputandum — that everybody knows. That maxim, however, is less ancient than it might appear. It is by no classical author. Its origin, rather, is presumed to be medieval and scholastic by virtue of its concern to distinguish between matters open to reason and persuasion and those which philosophers, or at least scholastics, had better leave alone. As the economists George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker put it, at the outset of a famous article in which they broke the old taboo and embarked on a path that led, for one of them, to the Nobel Prize:
The venerable admonition not to quarrel over tastes is commonly interpreted as advice to terminate a dispute when it has been resolved into a difference of tastes, presumably because there is no further room for rational persuasion. Tastes are the unchallengeable axioms of a man’s behavior.
Taste as axiomatic (and professed) personal preference seems a bulwark of personal autonomy, a democratic or egalitarian notion. As Liszt himself once said, “It is a matter of taste whether the old or the new is more charming. Taste is quite certainly a personal thing.” But consider this story, which will bring us back to music. It comes from a famous pamphlet, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, issued in 1704 by Jean Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, Lord of Freneuse, in answer to a like-named pamphlet, Paralèle des Italiens et des Français, issued in 1702 by another French aristocrat, Abbé François Raguenet. As Lecerf relates, a courtier fond of the brilliance and grandeur of Italian music brought before King Louis XIV a young violinist who had studied under the finest Italian masters for several years, and bade him play the most dazzling piece he knew. When he was finished, the king sent for one of his own violinists and asked the man for a simple air from Cadmus et Hermione, an opera by his own court composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully. The violinist was mediocre, the air was plain, nor was Cadmus by any means one of Lully’s most impressive works. But when the air was finished, the king turned to the courtier and said, “All I can say, sir, is that that is my taste.”
The king did effectively put an end to the argument by invoking his taste, but was that because there can be no disputing tastes or because there can be no talking back to a king? Lecerf’s argument with Raguenet, who had waxed rapturous about the voices of castrati, was really all about authority, not taste. In disputes or assertions regarding tastes, authority has many surrogates. Among professionals, including musical professionals, the chief surrogate is experience. Consider this famous footnote from Johann David Heinichen’s thoroughbass treatise of 1725.
If experience is needed in any art or science, it is certainly needed in music. . . . But why must we seek experience? I will give you one little word that encompasses the three basic requirements in music (talent, knowledge, and experience), and its heart and its outer limits as well, and all in four letters: Goût. Through application, talent, and experience, a composer needs to acquire above all an exceptional sense of taste in music. The distinguishing feature of a composer with well-developed taste is simply the skill with which he makes music pleasing to and beloved by the general, educated public; in other words, the skills by which he pleases our ear and moves our sensibilities. . . . An exceptional sense of taste is the philosopher’s stone and principal musical mystery by means of which the emotions are unlocked and the senses won over.
This is the kind of taste — something acquirable through labor and application (provided one has good instruction), hence available not only to the aristocracy of birth but also to an aristocracy of talent and training — to which Francesco Geminiani referred in the title of A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (c. 1749), a title that on the surface might seem to offer a counterexample to the distinction between “taste” and “good taste.” In the body of the treatise, however, Geminiani (who had lived in London since 1714 and was writing in idiomatic English) usually inserts the indefinite article before “good taste.” Thus, at the beginning of the preface: “The Envy that generally attends every new Discovery in the Arts and Sciences, has hitherto deferr’d my publishing these rules of Singing and Playing in a good Taste”; and, at the end: “Thus I have collected and explain’d all the Ingredients of a good Taste.”
That indefinite article does a lot of work: it is incompatible with both of the categories of taste with which we are concerned, whether with “taste” as the superior existential endowment Haydn attributed to Mozart, or with the “good taste” in which Liszt was held by Rosen and Brendel to be deficient. When you put Geminiani’s odd usage together with the title of his previous treatise, to which A Treatise of Good Taste was a supplement and on which it was dependent — that is, Rules for Playing in a True Taste on the Violin, German Flute, Violoncello, and Harpsichord (London, c. 1745) — it is clear that the two expressions “a good taste” and “a true taste” are interchangeable equivalents of “correct (or elegant) style.” And indeed, it turns out that the Treatise on Good Taste is merely a manual on embellishment, consisting of a table of ornaments followed by models for application, chiefly to familiar Scots airs furnished with a thoroughbass. As Robert Donington comments in his foreword to the facsimile edition:
“Good taste” was almost a technical term of the period. It was used not merely for a refined and cultured attitude toward music in general; it was used for a refined and cultured ability to invent more or less improvised ornamentation for melodies often notated in plain outline, but requiring such ornamentation in order to be given a complete performance.
Corroboration of this usage in eighteenth-century English comes from Dr. Burney, who in his musical travelogue of 1771 defined “taste” as “the adding, diminishing, or changing [of] a melody, or passage, with judgement and propriety, and in such a manner as to improve it.” In short, therefore, and ironically, Geminiani’s brand of “good taste,” insofar as it implies the addition of impromptu passagework to written compositions, virtually coincides with the “bad taste” of which Liszt and his contemporaries would be accused a century after Geminiani’s time, and up to the present day. It did not take long for fashions to start changing. At the very end of his General History of Music, in the twelfth chapter of the fourth volume, published in 1789, devoted to the “General State of Music in England at our National Theatres, Public Gardens, and Concerts, during the Present Century,” the same Dr. Burney wrote off Geminiani’s guides to “a good taste” as having appeared “too soon for the present times. Indeed, a treatise on good taste in dress, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, would now be as useful to a tailor or milliner, as the rules of taste in Music, forty years ago, to a modern musician.”
II
Yet insofar as Geminiani offered instruction in correct practice, his good taste did imply submission to a standard, a matter of meeting expectations. The taste or ability about which Heinichen and Geminiani wrote was not the personal preference of any particular performer or composer, nor of the authors themselves, nor even the consciously formulated demand of the “general, educated public.” Effort and education can give us all equal access to correct style: the taste of one is (or ought to be) the taste of all. It is on the promise to impart that universal taste, which all successful composers must master, that the authority of Heinichen’s or Geminiani’s manuals depended. It was an authority that, in the guise of classicism, could become authoritarian.
Take, for example, Voltaire’s article on Goût in the seventh volume of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, issued in 1757 — the same year as Hume’s seminal essay, but expressing what seems to be a pre-Humean formulation, in which l’homme du goût, “the man of taste” (compare Hume’s “men of sentiment” or the Marquis de Venosta’s “person of family”) is expressly equated with le connoisseur, the one who knows the rules of style as the gourmet knows the rules of the kitchen and the dining table. “If the gourmet immediately perceives and recognizes a mixture of two liqueurs, so the man of taste, the connoisseur, will see at a glance any mixture of styles” — and, of course, disapprove. The standard is one of purism, and failure to meet it constitutes le goût dépravé, debased taste, otherwise known more simply as bad taste. When Voltaire admits the phrase un bon goût, it is as the back-formed opposite of un mauvais gout. Only the latter can be personal. As an idiosyncrasy it is tantamount to a flaw that one must eliminate so as to restore the universal norm, which is simply le goût, with no qualifier. “They say there is no point disputing tastes,” Voltaire concedes:
and this is right enough when it is only a matter of sensory taste, . . . because one cannot correct defective organs. It is different with the arts; as their beauties are real, there is a good taste that discerns them and a bad taste that does not; and the mental defect that gives rise to a wayward taste can often be corrected.
Here Voltaire anticipates Eliot: taste, for him, is no mere matter of fallible individual preference, but one of conformity to an established criterion, hence subject to correction. From there, Voltaire connects “good taste” to the idea of perfected style, or what literary historians would eventually christen “classicism”:
The taste of an entire nation can be corrupted. This misfortune usually comes about after periods of perfection. Artists, for fear of being imitators, seek untraveled paths; they flee the natural beauty that their predecessors had embraced; there is some merit in their efforts; this merit covers their faults; the novelty-besotted public runs after them; it soon loses interest, however, and others appear who make new efforts to please; they flee even further from nature; taste disappears amid a welter of novelties that quickly give way one to another; the public no longer knows where it is, and it longs in vain for the age of good taste that will never return. It has become a relic that a few sound minds now safeguard far from the crowd.
This wholly aristocratic, existential notion of “good taste,” ever resistant to destabilizing innovation, is a decreed taste, sanctioned by tradition. Still a child of the seventeenth century, Voltaire locates its source dogmatically in “nature.” D’Alembert, the editor of the Encyclopédie, in an appendix to Voltaire’s article, somewhat modernizes (that is, relativizes) Voltaire’s position by vesting the power of decree in “philosophy,” which at least implies human agency:
In matters of taste, a smattering of philosophy can lead us astray, while philosophy better understood can bring us back. It is an insult to literature and philosophy alike to think that they could harm or exclude one another. Everything that pertains, not only to our way of thinking, but also to our way of feeling, is philosophy’s true domain. . . . How could the true spirit of philosophy be opposed to good taste? On the contrary, it is its strongest support, because this spirit consists in returning everything to its true principles, in recognizing that every art has its own particular nature, each condition of the soul its own character, each thing its own particular tint—in one word, that one should never transgress the limits of a given genre.
These extracts exhaust references to le bon goût (rather than the more usual goût, unmodified) in the Encyclopédie. The addition of the adjective does not change the meaning; “good taste” here does not differ from “taste” tout simple, the sense of suitability that Haydn recognized as Mozart’s mark of election. And that is because the philosophes located the criterion of correct discrimination not in the perceiving subject but in the object perceived, rightly apprehended according to “its own particular nature,” of which philosophy is the arbiter. To acquire taste, on the encyclopedists’ terms, one had to submit to their authority. It became a task for a new cohort of eighteenth-century thinkers to emancipate the notion of taste from that of external authority, while nevertheless remaining faithful to the idea of its universality or its status as what Kant called a sensus communis, a “common sense,” meaning “a sense shared by all.” This required some fancy skating.
Kant’s solution was to posit that taste was subjective in that it concerned not the properties of objects but the pleasure or displeasure of contemplating subjects. Hence “it is absolutely impossible to give a definite objective principle of taste . . . for then the judgment would not be one of taste at all.” And yet such reactions were ideally universal because they derived from a faculty possessed by humans, only by humans, and by all humans. Within Kant’s careful definitions, all have taste, and all have the same taste. It must, therefore, enjoy “a title to subjective universality,” or what we now somewhat less paradoxically call intersubjectivity.
Evidence of universality is to be sought in consensus, which must be discernible despite the great variety in subjective preference that strikes the casual observer. For Hume, this made it all the more imperative to seek, or establish, “a Standard of Taste: a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.” The problem for Enlightened theories of universal taste was that of outliers, people of ostensibly normal endowment who nevertheless diverged from the intersubjective consensus. Is it possible to speak of “wrong” taste, even if, as Kant maintained (and as everyone beginning with Hume seems to agree), “the judgment of taste is . . . not a judgment of cognition,” and therefore cannot be considered factual? If there can be wrong taste, then there can be bad taste; and if there is bad taste, then there can be normative good taste — something that can be aspired to. We are approaching the crux of our problem.
The most ingenious attempt to account for wrong taste within a universalist theory of taste is found in the introduction to Edmund Burke’s famous Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, first published in 1757, the same bumper year that saw the publication of both the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie and Hume’s essay on taste. Having defined taste as “that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts,” Burke invoked John Locke’s distinction between wit and judgment. “Mr. Locke,” he writes, “very justly and finely observes of wit, that it is chiefly conversant in tracing resemblances: he remarks, at the same time, that the business of judgment is rather in finding differences.” As we know from experience, wit is much the more pleasurable function, as the perception of resemblances is a matter of immediate sensibility, whereas the discrimination of differences requires expertise and mental effort. Thus, Burke argues, taste being a judgment, its exercise is more or less correct depending not upon what he calls “a superior principle in men,” but rather “upon superior knowledge,” in the sense of wide acquaintance.
That is the crucial move. Once we postulate that taste is not a simple idea but a compound of sensibility and knowledge, it follows that a deficiency of taste can be the result of a deficiency in either category. “From a defect in [sensibility],” Burke writes, “arises a want of taste,” which is to say an inability or disinclination to render any judgment at all; whereas “a weakness in [knowledge] constitutes a wrong or a bad [taste].” This passage, coeval with Voltaire’s Encyclopédie entry but the work of a newer breed of thinker, constitutes, to my knowledge, the earliest recognition that there can be such a thing as bad taste, as distinct from a want of taste. The latter can only be deplored or pitied, as it was by Voltaire and by Mann’s Marquis de Venosta, whereas one can aspire, with Burke or Eliot, to correct the former.
The consequences of this distinction are far-reaching, and baleful; and Burke, to his credit, did not flinch from them. If “the cause of a wrong taste” is “a defect of judgment,” he allowed, then the mis-evaluation of works of art
may arise from a natural weakness of understanding, . . . or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from . . . ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province.
But if “bad or wrong taste” can be taken as a symptom of vice or perversion, the door has been opened wide to abuse. Burke recognizes this in an especially pregnant passage that enlarges upon an earlier point — that discrimination diminishes rather than enhances pleasure because it lessens the number of objects from which we can naively derive satisfaction.
The judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling-blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke of our reason: for almost the only pleasure that men have in judging better than others, consists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority, which arises from thinking rightly; but then, this is an indirect pleasure, a pleasure which does not immediately result from the object which is under contemplation.
What we are witnessing here is the birth, or at least the christening, of aesthetic snobbery, which is always and only social snobbery in disguise. An indirect or even perverse pleasure it may be, but snobbery is a powerful pleasure; and Burke’s explanation of snobbery, as the sole compensation we receive for the loss of immediacy and naive pleasure that our critical judgment exacts from us, is the best account I have ever encountered of its value to snobs (a category that at times — let’s admit it — tempts us all). It amounts also to an account and critique of aspirational “good taste,” which arises alongside and in response to aesthetic snobbery, the most quintessentially bourgeois of all snobberies, and might even be deemed tantamount to it.
It is not taste (pace Stravinsky) but “good taste” that conflates aesthetic and moral quality, and sits in judgment over them conjointly. Since it is the bastard child of snobbery, “good taste” requires the ever more exacting exercise of negative judgment. Forgetting, or affecting to reject, the Kantian proviso that taste is a property not of contemplated objects but of contemplating subjects, “good taste” constructs spurious existential categories such as “kitsch,” a term that arose in the course of the emergence we are now tracing (and Google can tell you how often it is attached to Liszt). As snobbery’s surrogate, aspirational “good taste” easily turns competitive. Critics who earn followings do so (as Louis Menand smirked about Pauline Kael) because they have recognized, and pander to, “the truth” that “people, at least educated people, like not to like movies, especially movies other people like, even more than they like to like them.”
The conjoint promise of safety and self-congratulation gives one an incentive to expand the range of objects one can consign to the outer darkness, so as to maximize one’s “conscious pride and superiority,” to recall Burke’s more elegant expression. Hence such impressive works of pseudo-scholarship as Gillo Dorfles’ extravagant compendium Il Kitsch: Antologia del cattivo gusto, published in Milan in 1968 and translated into English as Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, which contains, alongside what anyone might expect (Nazi and Soviet poster art, eroticized religious images, the Mona Lisa imprinted on bath towels and eyeglass cases), several items that can only have been calculated to shock the reader by their inclusion, such as New York’s Cloisters, the museum of medieval art endowed by John D. Rockefeller in 1938. A caption explains that “The structure is entirely modern but incorporates authentic architectural features from the cloisters of medieval monasteries. Authentic objects and works of art are displayed in the halls, which are always full of tourists.” We are left in little doubt as to what — or rather, who — the aspersion is meant to degrade.
The inevitable race to the limit in the fastidious exercise of captious “good taste” was well captured by Joseph Wood Krutch in 1956 when reviewing a book by Mary McCarthy, an especially exigent arbiter. “Her method is one of the safest,” he remarked.
If you deny permanent significance to every new book or play time will prove you right in much more than nine cases out of ten. If you damn what others praise there is always the possibility that your intelligence and taste are superior. But if you permit yourself to praise something then some other superior person can always take you down by saying “So that is the sort of thing you like.”
That fear afflicts performers as well as critics. There is a coruscating passage on taste in the treatise Du chant, from 1920, by Reynaldo Hahn, the singer, composer, and voice teacher who perhaps better than any other musician — and not only because he was Marcel Proust’s lover — embodies the spirit of the belle époque, a time synonymous with elegance, as elegance may be thought synonymous with taste. But the writing drips with sarcasm:
When singing is not directed by the heart (and you know that one cannot lightly command the service of the heart), when singing is not guided by feeling, by understanding, by the direct outpourings of the heart, it is taste that assumes control, directing and presiding over everything. Then it must be everywhere at once, acting in a hundred different ways. Think of it! Every detail of the vocal offering must be submitted to the dictates of taste.
Let me be precise. By taste, I do not mean that superior and transcendent ability to comprehend what is beautiful which leads to good esthetic judgment. In fact, we cannot ask all singers to be people of superior taste, since such a requirement would reduce still further the very limited number of possible singers. By taste, I mean a wide-ranging instinct, a sure and rapid perception of even the smallest matters, a particular sensitivity of the spirit which prompts us to reject spontaneously whatever would appear as a blemish in a given context, would alter or weaken a feeling, distort a meaning, accentuate an error, run counter to the purposes of art.
I repeat: A particular sensitivity of the spirit is necessary in this sort of taste, as well as emotion and a certain fear of ridicule. It is no doubt for this reason that women display a better sense of taste in singing than men.
A certain fear of ridicule. It is obvious that Hahn is speaking not of existential but aspirational taste; taste that hedges against the depredations of snobs, who censor idiosyncrasy along with sincerity and force artists (and especially, in Hahn’s bigoted view, those of the weaker sex) to retreat into what Russell Lynes, the social historian of art, in a famous article in 1949 that proclaimed a new social order based not on “wealth or family” but on “high thinking,” derided as the “entirely inoffensive and essentially characterless” precincts of “good taste.”
Of course, Lynes was writing in the age of Rosen and Brendel, and describes a late stage in the socio-aesthetic process whose beginnings Edmund Burke had charted long before the stultifying category of “good taste” had gained momentum, although he may be said to have predicted it. At the end of his discussion of (universal) taste, Burke notes optimistically that “the taste . . . is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.” To boil it down to a formula, he proposes that taste = judgment = knowledge, and he who knows most judges best. Appeals to the ignorant, therefore, are subversive of taste, because they thwart the advancement of knowledge. Those who seek, or gain, the applause of the ignorant are threats to the maturation of taste.
III
The stage has been set for our hero. But before he enters, there remains one last matter to broach, namely the ambiguous character of virtuosity and the ambivalent attitude toward it in Liszt’s day on the part, not of audiences, surely, but of the newly professionalized class of tastemakers — what Liszt, in exasperation, called “the aristocracy of mediocrity.”
Gillen D’Arcy Wood, a social historian of literature and music and their interrelations under romanticism, identifies Liszt’s wry phrase with “an increasingly influential middle-class cultural regime that wished to be purified of virtuosic display,” an aspiration he calls, straightforwardly enough, virtuosophobia. Virtuosophobia is obviously akin to what the literary historian Jonas Barish called “the antitheatrical prejudice,” in a book that traced — from ancient Greece to the middle of the twentieth century -— the curious inconsistency whereby “most epithets derived from the arts” — words such as poetic or epic or lyric or musical or graphic or sculptural — “are laudatory when applied to the other arts, or to life,” with the conspicuous exception of terms derived from the theater, such as theatrical or operatic or melodramatic or stagey, which, by contrast, “tend to be hostile or belittling.” One reason for the antitheatrical prejudice is that theatrical acting, being by definition an act of dissembling, transgresses against ideals of sincerity; and virtuosos are often similarly accused, the terrific effect of their performances being unrelated, or not necessarily related, to genuine feeling.
This was an observation constantly made about Liszt during his lifetime, and not always invidiously. His American pupil Amy Fay, who attended his master classes in Weimar1873, wrote in her memoir, Music Study in Germany, that
when Liszt plays anything pathetic, it sounds as if he had been through everything, and opens all one’s wounds afresh. . . . [He] knows the influence he has on people, for he always fixes his eyes on some one of us when he plays, and I believe he tries to wring our hearts. . . . But I doubt if he feels any particular emotion himself when he is piercing you through with his rendering. He is simply hearing every tone, knowing exactly what effect he wishes to produce and how to do it.
To Liszt’s manner, Fay contrasted that of Joseph Joachim (once Liszt’s protégé, later his most zealous detractor) who exemplified the submissive and antitheatrical attitude later associated with Werktreue. Where the one was “a complete actor who intends to carry away the public,” the other was (that is, acted) “totally oblivious of it.” Where the one “subdues the people to him by the very way he walks on the stage,” the other is “‘the quiet gentleman artist’ who advances in the most unpretentious way, but as he adjusts his violin he looks his audience over with the calm air of a musical monarch, as much as to say, ‘I repose wholly on my art, and I’ve no need of any “ways or manners.”’”
Which of course is also a means of taking possession of one’s public. What Fay described were two species of charismatic — that is, histrionic — “ways or manners,” as she surely knew. (And Liszt was well aware of the alternative species. Describing the charismatic playing of John Field, he showed the same subtle irony as Fay describing Joachim: “It would be impossible to imagine a more unabashed indifference to the public. . . . He enchanted the public without knowing it or wishing it. . . . His calm was all but sleepy, and could be neither disturbed nor affected by thoughts of the impression his playing made on his hearers [since] art was for him in itself sufficient reward.”) The affectation of quiet absorption was the truly romantic (“disinterested”) attitude, as was the antitheatrical prejudice itself and the virtuosophobia that was its musical outlet; for it was romanticism that made a fetish of sincerity. As early as 1855, in a famous letter to Clara Schumann explaining his defection from Liszt’s orchestra in Weimar, Joachim broadened the antitheatrical, virtuosophobic rhetoric to encompass Liszt’s compositions as well, focusing on the sacred works as especially flagrant breaches of propriety. By the end of the passage, it is impossible to separate the bad taste of Liszt the composer from that of Liszt the performer as the butt of Joachim’s righteous indignation.
For a long time now I have not seen such bitter deception as in Liszt’s compositions; I must admit that the vulgar misuse of sacred forms, that a disgusting coquetterie with the loftiest feelings in the service of effect was never intended — the mood of despair, the emotion of sorrow, with which the truly devout man is raised up to God, Liszt mixes with saccharine sentimentality and the look of a martyr at the conductor’s podium, so that one hears the falseness of every note and sees the falseness of every action.
Most explicit of all was Nietzsche. In Der Fall Wagner he asked, rhetorically, where Wagner belonged, and his answer went beyond Wagner to indict Wagner’s father-in-law as well. Wagner belongs “not in the history of music. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the actor in music: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: ‘Wagner and Liszt.’” But at least Wagner did his acting in the theater. About Liszt, who turned instrumental performance into a branch of theater, one can only think worse. Nietzsche’s peroration, in three italicized “demands,” points the final finger at the musician, not the actor, for music is brought down as the theatrical is elevated. “What are the three demands for which my wrath, my concern, my love of art has this time opened my mouth?” thunders Nietzsche. They are these:
That the theater should not lord it over the arts.
That the actor should not seduce those who are authentic.
That music should not become an art of lying.
Nor can virtuosos ever be “disinterested,” to invoke Kant’s principal aesthetic yardstick. Like other theatrical performers, they are never without a Zweck, an ulterior purpose, namely to impress us into thunderous vanity-stroking applause and exorbitant pocket-lining expenditures; and our interest in their overcoming obstacles is a human, rather than an aesthetic, interest — the sort of interest that attends to the performances of athletes and prestidigitators as well as musicians. D’Arcy Wood gave this a social twist when writing of the “antagonism,” so evident in Georgian England, and especially when Liszt tried to storm its aesthetic barricades with so much less success than he had enjoyed on the continent, “between literary (and academic) culture and the sociable practices of music, between Romantic middle-class ‘virtues’ and aristocratic virtuosity.”
We are back again to the Marquis de Venosta, and the distinction between “family” and “good family.” The former is an unearned status; the latter, a reputation earned through the exercise of virtue — which demanded vigilance against virtue’s false cognate. Though etymologically descended from virtue, virtuosity, in the middle-class view, was sheer vice, inextricably associated with all the other vices, and that remains our incorrigibly Romantic, middle-class view today. The author of a serious scholarly book on Paganini, published in 2012, wanted to know, for example, whether “the greed, lust, pride, and vainglory that [were] manifested in multiple aspects of the virtuoso’s life [can] be viewed any longer as separate from the aesthetic of virtuoso performance.”
Hence one of the paradoxes of nineteenth-century musical reception that continues to haunt us in the twenty-first century is the simultaneous denigration of virtuosity and fetishizing of difficulty. To unpack it we might begin by returning to Edmund Burke and his famous treatise. The section on the sublime contains a short paragraph, seemingly an afterthought, on difficulty as a “source of greatness”:
When any work seems to have required immense force and labor to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposition nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different enough from this.
Thus, difficulty overcome too dexterously is not sublime; or rather, the dexterous overcoming of difficulty destroys the sublime effect and vitiates the awe that it inspires. Substitute “virtuosity” for Burke’s “dexterity” and the reason will become apparent why the English critics who wrote about Liszt in the 1840s so belittled or even deplored his “transcendent” virtuosity, associating it with triviality rather than with grandeur. The very act of transcendence was virtuosity’s transgression — a transgression against the virtue of difficulty.
The works of Beethoven were, in Burke’s sense, the Stonehenge of music. Even before his sketchbooks exposed “the immense force necessary for such a work” to the inquisitive eye, his labor was a proverbial struggle per aspera ad astra. And performing his music was likewise a proverbial struggle it became a sacrilege to appear to transcend. The approved attitude toward Beethoven — the tasteful attitude — was Stravinsky’s grand thème de la soumission, epitomized in Artur Schnabel’s famous remark that “I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.” And if Schnabel’s piety represents the epitome, way beyond epitome was the British conductor Colin Davis, who said of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, “It’s such a great work, it should never be performed.”
Beethoven’s unique social situation was bound up equally with the new attitude toward works and difficulty — or rather, the new valuation placed on old attitudes toward them — and with his removal from society as a result of deafness. It put Beethoven at the opposite social extreme from the virtuoso, who (like Beethoven himself in the earlier stages of his career) was sociability personified. Beethoven’s vaunted difficulty was abetted by his aristocratic patrons, while the virtuoso was seen as playing to the common crowd. The newly reified concept of artwork that Beethoven’s talent and fate so abetted is our concept still. It is what made possible the notion of “classical music,” which is to say, music conceptualized as a permanent and immutable object, at the same level of reification as the products of other artistic media like painting or sculpture: a concrete entity deserving the designation “work.” From something that elapses in time, music was thus reconceptualized as something that exists ontologically in an “imaginary museum,” as Lydia Goehr put it in the title of her celebrated book — a kind of notional space.
So let us imagine a reified musical work that way — as an article somehow located in a curated space. The humility so demonstratively voiced by Schnabel or Davis (whether or not we accept it at face value) is located below it. It looks up, like anything aspirational. But the attitude of the virtuoso — who transcends all difficulties, makes light of them, and makes everything seem easy (as the commonplace accolade would have it) — is located, like anything transcendent, above the work. It looks down. And therefore it is an arrogant crossing of an ethical line, a hubristic affront to aspiration; a fortiori, it is an affront to “good taste.” A London critic’s review of Liszt’s rendition of the Emperor Concerto, which casts him in the role of a bad curator, is a perfect summation of these strictures: “The many liberties he took with the text were evidence of no reverential feeling for the composer. The entire concerto seemed rather a glorification of self, than the heart-feeling of the loving disciple.”
And yet — as always — one man’s transgression is another man’s transcendence. There is always a more “spiritual” way of viewing virtuosity: as a literal triumph over the physical. Heine wrote that where others “shine by the dexterity with which they manipulate the stringed wood, . . . with Liszt one no longer thinks of difficulty overcome — the instrument disappears and the music reveals itself.” But then he immediately turns around and contradicts himself in his fascination, all but universally shared by those who experienced Liszt in the flesh, with the pianist’s physical presence, obsessing over his way of “brush[ing] his hair back over his brow several times,” turning his listeners into viewers, or rather voyeurs, who feel “at once anxious and blessed, but still more anxious.” The phobia, repressed, returns.
The strongest avowal of virtuosophobia, the censorious distinction between virtuosity and difficulty, comes from Liszt himself, in the second of his so-called Baccalaureate Letters, published in the Parisian Gazette musicale on February 12, 1837, with a dedication to George Sand. The relevant passage runs as follows:
In concert halls as well as in private drawing rooms . . . , I often played works of Beethoven, Weber, and Hummel, and I am ashamed to say that for the sake of winning the applause of a public which was slow in appreciating the sublime and beautiful, I did not scruple to change the pace and the ideas of the compositions; nay, I went so far in my frivolity as to interpolate runs and cadenzas which, to be sure, brought me the applause of the musically uneducated, but led me into paths which I fortunately soon abandoned. I cannot tell you how deeply I regret having thus made concessions to bad taste, which violated the spirit as well as the letter of the music. Since that time absolute reverence for the masterworks of our great men of genius has completely replaced that craving for originality and personal success which I had in the days too near my childhood.
Thus, with a presumed literary assist from Marie d’Agoult, Liszt accuses himself of mauvais goût, a locution that was still a novel one at the time of writing. But confessions can also be a form of boasting, and self-abasement a form of self-promotion. I think it pretty clear that Liszt, at that moment engaged in a very public rivalry with Sigismund Thalberg, was using the rhetoric of penitence and contrition in this way, as part of a campaign to show that he, and not his challengers, had become (to quote a famous passage from a letter he had written several years before) “an artist such as is required today.” That is to say, an artist who was abreast of the latest intellectual fashions, who was prepared to use the press to establish good public relations, and who was therefore able to maintain preeminence in the new era of publicity. Unlike his rivals, he was displaying himself as an artist who possessed both taste and “good taste,” who cultivated the aspirational posture, who looked up, not down, at “the masterworks of our great men of genius.”
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Liszt’s aspirations. But as Kenneth Hamilton has observed, “numerous reviews of his concert tours of the 1840s indicate that [as of 1837], he cultivated an attitude akin to St. Augustine’s famous exhortation, ‘Oh Lord, grant me chastity — but not yet!’” He was still ready and able, in the words of Carl Reinecke, to “dazzle the ignorant throng.” Still, the social animus in that charge should caution us against too readily slapping a “populist” label on Liszt. Dana Gooley reminds us that some of Liszt’s concert practices suggest the opposite. He imposed higher ticket prices than did any of his contemporaries, which Gooley interprets as an attempt “to siphon out the middle bourgeoisie” and ensure that his recitals remained high-prestige events, not popular entertainments. The Baccalaureate Letters themselves show him striving to found his reputation on “his nearness to the intellectual and political elites of Paris,” the “cultural trendsetters.”
One of the most revealing portraits of Liszt the composer-performer in all the glorious inconsistency of his behavior, accurately reflecting the ambivalences of mores in transition, is the recollection of Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, first published in 1889, of the great pianist’s debut in St. Petersburg forty-seven years earlier, in 1842:
Everything about this concert was unusual. First of all, Liszt appeared alone on the stage throughout the entire concert: there were no other performers — no orchestra, singers or any other instrumental soloists whatsoever. This was something unheard of, utterly novel, even somewhat brazen. What conceit! What vanity! As if to say, “all you need is me. Listen only to me — you don’t need anyone else.” Then, this idea of having a small stage erected in the very center of the hall like an islet in the middle of an ocean, a throne high above the heads of the crowd, from which to pour forth his mighty torrents of sound. And then, what music he chose for his programs: not just piano pieces, his own, his true métier — no, this could not satisfy his boundless conceit — he had to be both an orchestra and human voices. He took Beethoven’s “Adelaïde,” Schubert’s songs — and dared to replace male and female voices, to play them on the piano alone! He took large orchestral works, overtures, symphonies — and played them too, all alone, in place of a whole orchestra, without any assistance, without the sound of a single violin, French horn, kettledrum! And in such an immense hall! What a strange fellow!
In a somewhat earlier memoir, “The Imperial School of Jurisprudence Some Forty Years Ago,” Stasov recalled that, after the first item on the program, Rossini’s William Tell overture, Liszt “moved swiftly to a second piano facing in the opposite direction. Throughout the concert he used these pianos alternately for each piece, facing first one, then the other half of the hall.” Stasov was seated near the composer Glinka, and overheard his conversation before the concert. When one noble lady, Mme. Palibina, asked Glinka whether he had already heard Liszt, Glinka replied that he had heard him the previous evening, at an aristocratic salon.
“Well, then, what did you think of him?” inquired Glinka’s importunate friend. To my astonishment and indignation, Glinka replied, without the slightest hesitation, that sometimes Liszt played magnificently, like no one else in the world, but other times intolerably, in a highly affected manner, dragging tempi and adding to the works of others, even to those of Chopin, Beethoven, Weber, and Bach, a lot of embellishments of his own that were often tasteless, worthless, and meaningless. I was absolutely scandalized! What! How dare some “mediocre” Russian musician, who had not yet done anything in particular himself [by that time, Glinka had written both his operas!], talk like this about Liszt, the great genius over whom all Europe had gone mad! I was incensed. It seemed that Mme. Palibina did not fully share Glinka’s opinion either, for she remarked, laughingly, “Allons donc, allons donc, tout cela ce n’est que rivalité de métier!” [Come now, come now, all this is nothing but professional rivalry!] Glinka chuckled and, shrugging his shoulders, replied, “Perhaps so.”
So if Liszt knew enough to pay tribute, or at least lip service, to the new Romantic ideals, his public acclaim and his consummate, irrepressible virtuosity continued to threaten them. Even after his true capitulation to good taste, when he withdrew from the concert stage to devote himself to what was considered at the time a particularly high-minded species of modern composition, he was regarded as threatening by musicians with a different notion of high-mindedness. Liszt came to symbolize the danger of the mass audience and those who catered to it — a danger that his composing may have posed even more drastically, in the eyes of some, than his piano playing.
In the later nineteenth century the chief threat to musical idealists was no longer exercised by virtuosos, but by composers who subordinated musical values to mixed media: opera composers, to be sure, who as always commanded the largest and least discriminating audiences, but also — and worse — those who tried to turn their instrumental music into wordless operas, as Liszt did in his symphonic poems and programmatic symphonies. Whether embodied in the corruption of texts or in the corruption of media, the corruption that the fastidious really feared was the corruption of taste and mores, which looked to guardians of good taste like corruption of the flesh. In the early correspondence of Brahms and Joseph Joachim, the adjective Lisztisch was already a code word. In one letter, Joachim writes to Brahms of a certain passage that Brahms had written: “Es bleibt mir häßlich — ja verzeih’s — sogar Lisztisch!” (“I think it’s awful, even — forgive me — Lisztish!”). Or consider Brahms writing to Clara Schumann in 1869:
Yesterday Otten [G. D. Otten, conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic] was the first to introduce works by Liszt into a decent concert: “Loreley,” a song, and “Leonore” by Bürger, with melodramatic accompaniment. I was perfectly furious. I expect that he will bring out yet another symphonic poem before the winter is over. The disease spreads more and more and in any event extends the ass’ ears of the public and young composers alike.
This diagnosis of social pathology became quite explicit among the Brahmins, among whom Theodor Billroth, the famous surgeon, was the exemplary figure. Writing to the composer after a performance of Brahms’ First Symphony, Billroth gave voice to a new aristocracy of Bildung, of education, taste, and culture — or was it just Liszt’s old aristocracy of mediocrity?
I wished I could hear it all by myself, in the dark, and began to understand [the Bavarian] King Ludwig’s private concerts. All the silly, everyday people who surround you in the concert hall and of whom in the best case maybe fifty have enough intellect and artistic feeling to grasp the essence of such a work at the first hearing — not to speak of understanding; all that upsets me in advance.
Billroth stands in a resistant line that gathered strength as it moved into the twentieth century: the modernist line that helped create the storied Great Divide between art and mass culture. It passes through Schoenberg — for whom “if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art” — on its way to the likes of Adorno, Dwight Macdonald, and others who insisted that art identify itself in the twentieth century by creating elite occasions, which is to say occasions for exclusion. Liszt, with his generous and inclusive impulse, created many problems for that project.
As the line of social resistance passed through the twentieth century it got ever shriller, culminating in the pronouncements we have sampled by Rosen and Brendel, allies in snobbery despite their disagreement over Liszt. Charles Rosen never claimed to be a historian (as anyone knows who has read the introduction to The Classical Style), but it takes a singular disregard of history to assert, as he did, that “‘good taste’ is a barrier to an understanding and appreciation of the nineteenth century,” when in fact good taste was the invention of the nineteenth century. It was the invention of nineteenth-century bourgeoises who aspired to the condition of royalty — Billroths who wanted to be Ludwigs, surgeons who wanted to be kings.
In its present state of devolution, the line of good taste has descended to the likes of Jack Sullivan, whose Wikipedia entry identifies him as “an American literary scholar, professor, essayist, author, editor, musicologist, concert annotator, and short story writer,” and who was quoted in the New York Times, on the very day I was drafting the paragraph you are now reading, as complaining in the Carnegie Hall program book about the standard performing version of Chaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, as revised after its premiere in 1877 by the original performer and dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, at the composer’s request. Under the impression that the original version was to be performed by Yo-Yo Ma, with Valeriy Gergiyev and the Mariyinsky Orchestra, and paraphrasing a letter to Chaikovsky from his publisher, Sullivan grumbled that Fitzenhagen had taken Chaikovsky’s “cannily constructed Neo-Classical piece and ‘celloed it up’ for his own grandstanding purposes.” Thrice-familiar strictures, these; as is the tone of social derision that the phrase “celloed up” (compare “gussied up” or “lawyered up”) is calculated to convey.
In fact, like every self-respecting virtuoso, Yo-Yo Ma had played the Fitzenhagen version, which includes all the passages (like the famous octaves at the end) that have made the Variations a concert perennial instead of the rarity it remained during Chaikovsky’s lifetime. “Well, who better than Mr. Ma to play something celloed up,” wrote the sharp reviewer for the Times, James Oestreich, exposing the obtuseness of the class warriors with a well-aimed shaft of contrarian bad taste. As I chuckled, I thought of Baudelaire and his immortal sally, “Ce qu’il y a d’enivrant dans le mauvais goût, c’est le plaisir aristocratique de déplaire,” “the heady thing about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.” And I recalled the bravura defiance of William Gass, novelist and critic and curmudgeon supreme, in his immortal essay “What Freedom of Expression Means, Especially in Times Like These”:
It is a tough life, living free, but it is a life that lets life be. It is choice and the cost of choosing: to live where I am able, to dress as I please, to pick my spouse and collect my own companions, to take pride and pleasure in my opinions and pursuits, to wear my rue with a difference, to enjoy my own bad taste and the smoke of my cooking fires, to tell you where to go while inspecting the ticket you have, in turn, sent me.
What makes this story and its attendant ruminations more than a digression is the letter in which Fitzenhagen reported to Chaikovsky about his first performance, in Wiesbaden in 1879, of the celloed-up version. “I produced a furor,” he assured the composer. “I was recalled three times.” And then he describes the reaction of one particular member of the audience: “Liszt said to me: ‘You carried me away! You played splendidly.’ And regarding your piece he observed: ‘Now there, at last, is real music!’” Mark that it was the sixty-eight-year-old Liszt who was encouraging Fitzenhagen to cello up, thirty years after his retirement from the concert stage and almost forty years since the baccalaureate letter in which he recanted “runs and cadenzas which [bring] the applause of the musically uneducated, but violated the spirit as well as the letter of the music.” Now at peace, the venerable abbé was declaring his solidarity with the applauders.
In closing, a few words about the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Yes, of course it is a central work for Liszt; without it, he would not be what he is in our imaginations. But what do those who object to it find objectionable? Why does Brendel exclude it from the category of “works that offer both originality and finish, generosity and control, dignity and fire”? When I hear it well played, I am amazed at the originality with which Liszt imitated the cimbalom, and I marvel at the beautifully realized (and “finished”) form and pacing of the piece, and I fail to see where it is deficient either in control or in dignity. The derision with which it is treated, even by those (like Brendel) who have put in the time and effort to master it, seems a particularly crisp instance of the antitheatrical prejudice as applied to a composition that has become the test par excellence of a pianist’s ability to enact the role of virtuoso, an enactment that achieves its zenith with those special performers, such as Rachmaninoff or Horowitz or Marc André Hamelin, who can top the piece off with their own nonchalant cadenzas, the nonchalance signifying the truly Lisztisch transgressive transcendence that drives aspirational musicians mad.
And there is more: like a gas (and of course it is a gas), the Second Hungarian Rhapsody has escaped its container and leeched out into the popular culture — which is only meet, after all, since that is where its inspiration had come from. (That, of course, is what objectors object to.) Many other works by nineteenth-century masters had a similar source in restaurant and recruitment music; one need think only of all those Brahms finales — to concertos for piano, for violin, and for cello plus violin, or to his piano quartets. Like Liszt’s Rhapsody, they adapted the sounds of environmental music to the special precinct of the concert hall. But unlike Liszt’s Rhapsody, they were never reabsorbed into the environment. Liszt’s Rhapsody inhabits animated cartoons: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, and Tom and Jerry have all played it, not to mention (arranged by King Ross) a whole animal orchestra, courtesy of Max Fleischer. It was heard, and used, in dance halls; it was in the repertoire of every swing band. It even haunts sports arenas: I am informed by Wikipedia that in the 1970s the St. Louis Cardinals’ organist Ernie Hays played Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 to signal that pitcher Al Hrabosky (nicknamed “The Mad Hungarian”) was warming up before appearing as a relief pitcher. It is everywhere. There is even an LP recording of the Rhapsody by a Communist-era Hungarian fakelore ensemble, purporting to return it to an “authentic” environment from which it had never come.
Is this something to condemn, something to resist? Or is this interpenetration of the artistic and the vulgar worlds an ineluctable mark, perhaps the defining mark, of Liszt’s greatness? To attempt, like Brendel, to purge Liszt of these impolite associations is indeed to misunderstand his place in our world; but Rosen, too, beholds the vulgar Liszt with distaste. Far better, in the words of Kenneth Hamilton, is to “embrace our own inner Second Hungarian Rhapsody.” We’ve all got one, and Liszt knew it. To accept his invitation to flout snobbish “good taste” might help us reassert, or recover, taste — which is to say, Mozart’s taste as defined by Haydn: namely, a reliable sense of what is fitting, and when.
