Music: Last on Liszt

Ernest Newman started out to be an Indian Civil Servant and ended up by being Britain’s foremost musical critic. When this London musicologist publishes a new biography, his fellow critics are inclined to accept his findings as sound, scholarly, vividly final. To his works on Gluck, Wolf, Richard Strauss, Elgar, Beethoven, Bach, Berlioz and Wagner, Ernest Newman, at 66, last week added his last word, on Franz Liszt.†

Most laymen think of Liszt as a saintly white-haired old man who crowned a rich musical life by dedicating himself to God. Critic Newman thinks differently, takes sides with Countess Marie d’Agoult who sacrificed a proud position, bore Liszt three children and saw him truly as a superficial showman so dependent on adulation that he could never adjust himself to solitude and concentrated work. Liszt kept his shallow ways even after he turned to the Church. He repented periodically but he reverted always to the spotlight, to flatterers who kissed his hand, cherished his cigar butts, begged for locks of his hair. Critic Newman does not deny that Liszt did much for struggling Rich ard Wagner. But he spoils the effect of other generosities by showing how careful Liszt was to have them widely publicized.

Newman damns Liszt’s music when he says that it closely resembles his life. Liszt pronounced his own tragic epitaph when after an unusually flattering ovation he once said: “I would gladly give up all this . . . if I could only produce one really creative work.”

† The Man Liszt—Scribner’s ($3).