Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

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