1: Geist
Geist (Spirit) is a German term used in philosophy as well as music. It describes the essence of the discussed matter and in our case, the key elements of a piece of music. It is no question then that the more a performer can bring the essential aspects of a piece out, the more successful the performance will be, as well as the contrary. This obvious importance is why people have been emphasizing it throughout the history of music education, and the case of young Franz Liszt was no exception. The Liszt family arrived in Vienna in early spring of 1822 to seek out the teachers for the eleven-year-old Franz; they settled in a living quarter arranged by Antonio Salieri, who would be teaching the boy general bass, score reading, and composition. Franz would spend almost every morning taking piano lessons with Carl Czerny, one of the most important piano pedagogues and a pupil of Beethoven. Czerny spent from then until 1823 guiding Liszt through his pianistic pedagogy, from scales to sonatas and music by various composers before he felt right to introduce the boy to the music of Bach and Beethoven— "enabling a focus on the “spirit” (Geist) and “character” (Charakter) of the music instead of wrestling with technical problems."1 Their relationship would go on to be a lifelong friendship and colleague, with shared passion and admiration for Beethoven music and his legacy. This direct link to Beethoven is crucial in our understanding of Liszt’s ideas of Geist in Beethoven music, how he later performed the works, and how he passed on Beethoven’s legacy in his teachings.
1.1: Let us step back to discuss the meaning of the term Geist and the problems that come with the attempt to identify where it resides in a piece of music and even more important, in the performance of the music. Daniel Gottlob Türk used the term Affekt in his book: “School of Clavier Playing” to describe what I believe to be the same as Geist, he wrote:
Whoever performs a composition so that the affect (character, etc.), even in every single passage, is most faithfully expressed (made perceptible) and that the tones become at the same time a language of feelings, of this person it is said that he is a good executant. Good execution, therefore, is the most important, but at the same time, the most difficult task of making music.2
There are several things that concern us here, first, I would like to point out that Türk used the term character to support what I believe to be his definition of Geist, ‘Affect’. This parallels Czerny’s idea that Geist and character are two separate entities, although quite intertwined. Characters are what philosophers call ‘properties’ in ontological discussions.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the definition of ‘properties’ as follows:
Properties are those entities that can be predicated of things or, in other words, attributed to them. Thus, properties are often called predicables. Other terms for them are “attributes”, “qualities”, “features”, “characteristics”, “types”3
1.2: Just like its uses in our daily lives, its importance in musical context is obvious; our understanding of the properties in a music composition is responsible for contextualization and (re)expression of the work. But communicating musical properties relies heavily on our contemporary interpretation of those terms, when we say that a piece of music has a ‘sad’ character, we rely on the mutual understanding and the current preconceived notion of the term, and we express and experience it accordingly. Czerny and Liszt understood the necessity to convey the characters of a piece in different ways. Czerny did not hesitate to call for different means as he deemed necessary to express “a different view of the spiritual conception” of Beethoven’s music in response to “different times and tastes.”4
The “spiritual conception” of a musical work is thus seen as independent of the means of its realisation; it is even in need of modernisation when encountering different instruments or tastes. . .manifesting the “original” intention of the com poser by completing it. [George] Barth understands Czerny’s perception of tradition as “one in which the primary vessel is the person who embodies ‘the spirit of the work,’” rather than the notated score.5
Czerny’s idea of the ‘Character’ as a representation of “a different view of the spiritual conception” resonated a lot with Schopenhauer’s philosophy in his book: The World as Will and Representation. He explored the concept of ‘Will’, the ultimate, metaphysical essence of reality that is the driving force behind all existence, which we are unable to perceive through our senses.
‘Phenomenal World’ is the filtered reality we perceive through the representations of the Will, governed by the principles of space, time, and causality. to quote the famous opening sentence: "The world is my representation."6
1.3: I believe that musical characters have one foot within the realm of Will, and that might be the reason why both Czerny and Türk held the term ‘Character’ so closely to the essence of music.
‘Character’ in linguistic, pragmatic senses are similar to the applications of properties in our society, we use these attributes to share what we can expect from things and thus it belongs in Schopenhauer’s category of ‘Representation’ and not in his deeper concept of ‘Will’.
But the conveyance of these characters in a musical performance can somehow be received in a universal way; we transmit our conceptual understanding of the characters, and the audience perceive them as their conceptual understanding of said characters, therefore the communication lies in the realm of Will itself without the need to translate to the representations:
. . . music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as ideas are . . . Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the ideas, but a copy of the will itself. . . for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.7
G. W. F. Hegel also expressed the idea that music communicates its contents from a subjective consciousness to one another since it does not manifest itself into ‘objective appearances’:
. . .music. Thus viewed, it forms the real centre of that presentation which takes the subjective as such for both form and content, because as art it communicates the inner life and yet even in its objectivity remains subjective, i.e., unlike the visual arts, it does not permit the manifestation in which it flourishes to become free and independent and reach an existence self-reposing and persistent but, on the contrary, cancels it as objective and does not allow the external to assume in our eyes a fixed existence as something external.8