Franz Liszt in his study.

AT The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes of Franz Liszt’s “passionate fusion of musical art and religious conviction:” 

Wagner, before Nietzsche, was a revaluator of values. Liszt, while never as verbally astute as Wagner, was a re-revaluator of values, a natural agent of the type of counter-revolution recommended by Joseph de Maistre, whom Liszt read and admired. Liszt naturally – in his life and work – understood that while Wagner had recorded history accurately, he had interpreted history inaccurately. In Wagner’s aesthetic-ethical history, the crumbling away of religious illusion opened the space for the belated self-divination of the genius or hero, who as artist-politician would redeem society from its corruption through the éclat of his example. Wagner could adore the music of Palestrina and Bach, or “Christian Harmony,” as magnificent instances of musical self-expression, but not as signs pointing to a transcendental referent – he enjoyed them shorn, that is, of the deity to whom the polyphony was worshipfully directed. For Liszt, a loss, for example the loss of faith, was real, and could only be made good through reinstitution.

In reaching back to plainsong and chorale, in resurrecting the contrapuntal ambitions of Bach, and in reviving mass and oratorio as living forms, Liszt sought first to revivify a moribund musical practice within Catholicism and second to draw the faithless back to faith.

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