Liszt, the Christian thinker

“You belong to art, not the church,” Ádám Liszt admonished his son, when the 15-year-old Franz Liszt, tired of his role as the celebrated “artistic-household pet” of the salons, began to show increasing interest in religious literature and even in the priesthood as a career. Paternal authority won the day, but Liszt always devoted part of his attention, even in his stormiest years as a virtuoso, to the eternal questions of faith as well as to current questions of the church and church music. He admired the Abbé Lamennais, the liberal Catholic thinker who linked Christian ideals with political democracy and the struggle against social oppression; he gave his name to the boldly anti-clerical articles written by his lover Marie d’Agoult, and already in 1845 spoke with sarcastic indignation against the disillusioning effect of profane music heard during church ceremonies. Right up until his death the secular melodies played in Catholic churches aroused his anger, as his grandson Siegfried Wagner recalled in the following passage of his memoirs: “In Venice on a big feast of Mary he took me with him to church... The high mass began, when galops and polkas were heard from the organ, as was the custom at that time in Italy. During the transubstantiation of the bread and wine we heard the lovely song: ‘I long to kiss your black eyes.’ I noticed how restless my grandfather became... the ceremony had barely finished when he seized my hand and hurried out of the church with me. Not far from the finely ornamented doors the naïve organist rushed up to him and asked how he liked the music. Liszt replied: “Know the truth: it was rubbish and filth.”

In his old age Liszt regularly appeared in public in a priestly robe, as he had taken minor church orders in April 1865 and so became a cleric: “I entered the church order – but certainly not out of any disdain for the world, or even less because I had grown weary of art… My attraction to Catholicism has been present from my childhood and has now become a constant and predominant sentiment.” Because although he had originally travelled to Rome to obtain papal permission for his marriage to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, after the failure of the attempt Liszt felt an increasingly strong urge to become a man of the church and– as the innovator of Catholic church music – to become a veritable “new Palestrina”. Pope Pius IX, who received Liszt at a private audience, encouraged both aspirations but the universal Catholic church was passing through a serious crisis as the ecclesiastical state came into conflict with the process of Italian unification and had very little energy left for the reform of church music.

Nevertheless, over the years Liszt composed a host of works arousing religious devotion: piano pieces and masses (such as the Coronation Mass written for the coronation of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth), organ pieces and church choral works, psalms and oratorios – among them the monumental Christus oratorio written between 1855 and 1867. Both before and after his years in Rome, as already in the 1850s Liszt could confidently write the following lines to the Grand Duke of Weimar: “It is a fact and I believe I can say with good conscience and despite my modesty, that not one of the composers known to me approaches church music with such intensive and deep emotions.”