These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man, have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is. Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the most part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart, but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like Beethoven, Schumann, Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.
In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his piano sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in octaves. This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its strongly individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses, its exciting use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer acquaintance its theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely rhetorical effectiveness, become only too apparent; like a sentence printed all in italics, it is impotent through very excess of emphasis. Or take the well-known opening motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto. With its attention-seizing rhythm and its chromatic melody it seems at first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an edict, a proclamation. But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we go on, except that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the hearer, at first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a piece of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills, of his chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic that the listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew how to manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he relieved the wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth measure by setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the opening.