Where Liszt differed from
‘competitors’ such as the Swiss pianist, Sigismond Thalberg was, of course, his
greatness as a composer and the ultimate seriousness, despite the magical side
of things, with which he approached and understood his social role – especially
as time went on, but the distinction may be observed all along, if not
necessarily entirely without exceptions. The celebrated ‘duel’ between Liszt
and Thalberg fought itself out both on stage and in the Parisian press,
following Liszt’s arrival in the city in 1836. Parisians have always enjoyed an
artistic controversy, whether between Gluckists and Piccininists or
Thalbergians and Lisztians. Liszt’s programmes were of course not free of
display, far from it, but they were eminently more ‘serious’ – in a sense even
Wagner would have appreciated – than Thalberg’s; for instance, he gave what may
have been the first (semi-public) performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata in the city.
Berlioz sang his praises, writing of Liszt, and foretelling future talk of the
‘music of the future’ of their so-called New German School, as ‘the pianist of
the future’, who, in his performance of that technically but above all musically challenging work had shown
highly commendable fidelity to the score – a sign again of seriousness – whose
difficulties recalled ‘the riddle of the Sphinx’. Liszt had made
‘comprehensible a work not yet comprehended,’ not through interventionism but
quite the contrary: ‘Not a note was left out, not one added … no inflection was
effaced, no change of tempo permitted.’ I have my doubts that our modern-day
apostles of ‘authenticity’ would agree – and in any case, so much the worse for
them – but Berlioz’s words and message rankled with Thalberg’s supporters, and
the situation became more explosive when Liszt himself reviewed Thalberg, whose
music he found frankly worthless, for the Revue
musicale. The celebrated duel, in a
princess’s salon, as the climax – I am honestly not making this up! – of a
three-day charity bazaar, fetched prices of 40 francs a ticket. As pianism,
both musicians acquitted themselves finely; it was certainly not the decisive
Lisztian victory that many early biographers claimed it. But it was equally
acknowledged that there was far more to Liszt than being simply a piano
virtuoso; even the hostess, Princess Belgiojoso, commented: ‘Thalberg is the
first pianist in the world –Liszt is unique.’
How, then, did Liszt go on to
show himself ‘unique’, as a pianist-composer? Essentially by out-‘virtuosoing’,
as it were, the virtuosi, albeit through musical, compositional as much as
musical, performative means. (However, it must be said that defeating them on
their own territory was a necessary part, though only part, of the plan,
whether conceived as such or not.) The following years, roughly 1839-47, have
often been termed by writers on Liszt, his ‘years of transcendental execution’.
His rate of performance was quite extraordinary, utterly unlike anything that
had come before or indeed since; travelling from Britain to Turkey, from Russia
to Portugal, he was often giving three or four concerts a week. He was also to
all intents and purposes the inventor of the modern piano recital, giving
entire programmes from memory, playing the whole repertoire – at least as it
existed and was understood then, and, also as enlarged by him – from Bach to
Chopin. In the words of Alan Walker, the author of a splendid modern
three-volume biography of Liszt, ‘Whatever else the world may debate about his
life and work, one thing is generally conceded: Liszt was the first modern
pianist. The technical “breakthrough” he achieved … was without precedent in
the history of the piano.’ Indeed, as Walker goes on, ‘All subsequent schools’
– and, I should add, perhaps the very idea of schools of piano playing in a
modern sense – ‘were branches of his tree. Rubinstein, Busoni, Paderewski,
Godowsky, and Rachmaninoff – all those pianists who together formed what
historians later dubbed “the golden age of piano playing” – would be
unthinkable without Liszt.’ And crucially for us, that is as much through his
composition as through his admittedly unparalleled virtuoso career, which was
actually surprisingly short.
To become a little more
technical – in performing rather than analytical terms – Liszt seems both to
have invented and to have solved a good number of keyboard problems. Despite
attempts, some of them doubtless interesting and valuable, to resurrect older
methods of keyboard playing – organists amongst you will not need to be told
about French Baroque fingering and so forth – for the most part, modern
keyboard performance and modern keyboard composition can helpfully be
understood in a post-Lisztian manner. That is not to say that everything comes
directly from him, but a great deal comes from him either directly or indirectly
through his successors and theirs. To quote Walker again, in an invaluable
chapter from that biography, entitled ‘Liszt and the Keyboard’, ‘Liszt’s
influence … had to do with his unique ability to solve technical problems.
Liszt is to piano playing what Euclid is to geometry. Pianists turn to his
music in order to discover the natural laws governing the keyboard.’ I am a
little wary of speaking about natural laws; such matters are surely more
constructed, but if we replace the ‘natural’ with a more historical
understanding, then there is surely little to argue with there. Although he
would later turn to the orchestra and indeed would enter court service at
Weimar largely with the idea in mind that he would have an orchestra there at
his disposal, as a new ‘instrument’ almost on which to experiment, for these
earlier years and indeed beyond, he was resolved in often quite systematic
fashion to explore the capabilities of his first and most beloved instrument.
Fingering, then, is always well
worth studying in his music – and, when one can, in his editions of other
composer’s music. They exist of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and other
composers – and one sees in them the essential truth of Berlioz’s claim
regarding fidelity. Liszt’s editorial practice is not ours, but he is at all
times clearly concerned to bring out what he regards as the truth of the work,
certainly not to impose anything external upon it – just as, for instance,
Wagner was concerned to divine what he called the melos of a work he conducted, whether his own, Beethoven’s, or
someone else’s. But to return to fingering: Liszt practised every scale with
the fingering of every other scale, so as to achieve the utmost independence of
every finger. As Walker puts it, a central truth concerning Liszt’s technique
was, however, that ultimately ‘he did not conceive of a pianist’s hands as
consisting of two parts of five fingers each, but as one unit of ten fingers’.
Interchangeability and interlocking of fingers were important goals – and
achievements. Let us, then, listen to ‘La campanella’, the third of his Six Grandes études de Paganini, written in
1838 and revised in 1851. The chromatic scales interspersed between the hands
in a sense took Paganini as an initial inspiration yet went far beyond him, and
not only on account of the greater capabilities of Liszt’s own instrument.
Likewise the persistent leaps across the keyboard and the notorious repeated
notes, reimagining the violin in pianistic terms and ultimately having one
forget the original.
It was in the Paganini and the Transcendental Etudes that that technical foundation for modern
pianism was laid. And they remain, like Chopin’s essays in the genre, so much
more than mere ‘studies’, despite Liszt’s dedication of the latter to his
sometimes teacher, Carl Czerny, ‘in gratitude and respectful friendship’.
However, he extended his distinction from the ‘mere’ virtuosi by putting his
discoveries in such works, admittedly as much musical as technical even there,
to more overtly ‘poetic’ and even ‘absolute’ – in the dubious sense of
‘absolute music’ – ends.
The whole issue of ‘programme
music’ has, as Carl Dahlhaus noted some time ago, been clouded by unhelpful
debates concerning superiority and inferiority, which date back to the dawning
of the very notion and its opposite, Wagner’s derogatory coinage of ‘absolute
music’, later reclaimed by Eduard Hanslick’s school as a badge of honour. We
need not trouble ourselves too much, or indeed at all, by such issues; we can
surely now appreciate Liszt and Brahms. But Liszt’s exploration of the
keyboard, and especially the piano, as a poetic instrument, as a way of
expanding music’s Romantic connections with other art-forms such as literature,
painting, and architecture, as well as the natural world, is deserving of our
attention in itself. An especially celebrated example of such expression and
connection is the three-volume collection of pieces, Années de pèlerinage. Poetic, natural, literary, visual artistic
varieties of inspiration are palpable in far more than the individual titles –
as indeed is the composer’s love of travel. ‘Au Bord d’un source’ from the
first, Swiss book sounds, inevitably for us, to look forward beyond his own
late Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este to
the water-inspired music of Ravel, and indeed the music of Ravel and Debussy –
call it impressionism, or whatever we like – is inconceivable without that of
Liszt. The water music of all three is, moreover, quite inconceivable without
the technical advances Liszt had made during this time, and arguably without
his poetic imagination too. Let us now listen to ‘Au Bord d’un source,’ whose
leaps and hand crossings owe so much to his studies and yet which now seem more
rarefied in their æsthetic.
Such explorations also laid the
seeds for many of Liszt’s later orchestral explorations too, especially with
respect to his symphonic poems, a form of his own invention. Wagner, who was
certainly not wont to extol the music of any of his contemporaries, let alone
to do so unduly, went so far as to posit them as an intermediary stage between
Beethoven’s symphonies and his own music dramas, to a certain extent in
defiance of the chronology. Liszt’s poetically-inspired motivic transformation – a
technique that would have implications beyond, for Schoenberg and indeed even
later serialism – was here being presented as a crucial step in the ability of
the orchestra to depict, to represent, to comment, even to think and certainly
to have us think. Wagner elsewhere – it is worth noting in passing that he was
certainly no great pianist – noted that Liszt’s move away from the purely
instrumental was a sign of progress, shunning what he, Wagner, that is,
understood to be, the desire of the purely instrumental
musician to divorce himself from the community and to make music alone.
‘Truly,’ Wagner wrote in his Opera and
Drama, ‘the entirety of our modern art resembles the keyboard: in it, each
individual component carries out the work of a mutuality, but, unfortunately, in abstracto and with utter lack of
tone. Hammers – but no men!’ It was no accident, Wagner then commented in a
footnote, that Liszt, the miracle worker of the piano, was now turning his
attentions to the orchestra, and thereby, to the human voice. Whatever we think
of that, we know, as indeed did Wagner, that Liszt had only been enabled to
paint on a grander canvas by virtue of his explorations of the piano – for
which he in any case would of course continue to write until the end of his
life.
We should also remember the
formal achievement of a work such as the B minor Sonata. (I am using it as an
exemplar rather than as a sole case.) Many of Liszt’s
piano works, let alone his others, are terribly neglected; one cannot make the
claim of this sonata. But that perhaps offers a different danger, of coming off
poorly in the wrong sort of performance. What it should not sound like – and I
realise I am being prescriptive here, but Liszt often needs help – is a
celebration of that ‘mere’ virtuosity Liszt first disdained and then
vanquished. Of course it requires virtuosic, almost transcendental, technique,
but that, as Liszt realised, is only a starting point: a way to beat the mere
virtuosi at their own game. After that, and above all, stand the musical
challenges. Analysis of this score can operate upon so many levels that it is
difficult to know where to begin, but only briefly to consider its formal
ingenuity and the dramatic issues that presents is to realise the scale of the
achievement – and of the challenge. The Introduction will initially baffle; in
what key do we find ourselves; what are those mysterious scales? Yet it
prepares the way with well-nigh Schoenbergian economy for the thematic material
of so much that is to come, much of it undergoing that thematic transformation
in which Liszt’s pianistic and orchestral explorations came to influence one
another. One commentator even went so
far as to suggest a ‘programme’ of ‘the transformation of Man brought about
through Christ. Let us listen to the very opening of the sonata, so full of
potentiality, from which the very tonality of the work itself evolves:
Drawing upon
Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, Liszt goes at least as far as anyone before
Schoenberg (I think especially of the First Chamber Symphony, op.9) in
synthesising and radicalising the relationship between individual sonata
‘movements’, if indeed they may now be thought of as such, and the form of the
whole. Within what must in some respects at least be considered a single
movement, we also hear the traditional four, and that is before we even begin
to consider issues such as the false dawn of a recapitulation denied, or rather
deferred. A similar path is taken in the piano concertos, amongst other works,
but here the tightness of construction and singularity of purpose are, if
anything, still greater. And what does it all mean? Should it be considered in
extra-musical terms? Faustian? Christian? Both possibilities, and indeed
others, have been suggested. Then again, do we perhaps pay Liszt a disservice
by stressing potential or even real extra-musical associations? Are we again
implying a certain lack of ‘absolute’ compositional rigour? As I mentioned a
little earlier, æsthetic debates about the superiority or otherwise of
‘absolute music’ take us nowhere, just as they did at the time, yet at times we
seem destined to replay them. Might Liszt now actually offer us a way out? A
work such as this shows us that we can appreciate its stature with or without a
‘programme’, perhaps with equally satisfactory results.
Liszt was also, of course, a great
populariser of, advocate for, and arguably commentator on other music, not just
as a performer but also as a transcriber. His sympathies ranged widely both as
a performer and, more crucially for our purposes, as a transcriber. The
operatic fantasies, for instance, should not be considered with a broad brush. There
is a world of difference between the virtuoso antics – perhaps he comes closer,
though still only closer, to the ‘mere’ virtuoso here – of some of the early
French and Italian paraphrases and the more earnest, musically rewarding, work
on Wagner’s behalf. The astonishing dramatic re-imagination of Mozart in the Réminiscences de Don Juan is another
thing again: though highly virtuosic in its demands, this ‘grandest of the
Liszt paraphrases’, to quote Charles Suttoni, remains ‘virtually free of
virtuosity for its own sake’. The principal interest today of a work such as
his 1829 Grande fantaisie sur la
Tyrolienne de l’opéra “La Fiancée”, that is a grand fantasy from Auber’s
now-forgotten opera, would for most be the ways in which, to quote Alan Walker,
‘the opening pages, black with hemidemisemiquavers, confirm that tendency
towards extreme virtuosity,’ thus leading towards the ‘transcendental’
technical breakthroughs of the 1830s. There he was perhaps exploiting Auber’s
frankly rather slight music to other ends, though there is no reason to doubt
Liszt’s genuine interest, at least at this stage in his life and career, in the
world of the opera as it existed rather than as Wagner would later wish to
reform it. Brahms, as distant from a
fervent Lisztian as any sensible man could be, admired greatly what he
described as ‘the true classicism of the piano’ present in such fantasies and
paraphrases. However, that is a very different world, both in source and in
fantasy, from what Liszt would describe as ‘modest propaganda on the inadequate
piano for the sublime genius of Wagner.’
Transcriptions for the organ
tended to be more along such lines too, and, as with the piano, lines would
often be blurred between transcription and ‘original’ composition, a piece such
as the Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine,
based on Allegri’s Miserere and
Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, providing
both, first in its piano version and then later in its organ version.
Liszt’s final piece of such
‘propaganda’ would be based on music from Parsifal.
Let us hear the Solemn March to the Holy
Grail, as distant from
grandstanding as possible.
Another way in which Liszt’s
super-virtuosity was arguably able to defeat ‘mere’ virtuosity lay in his
increasing inclination also to write musically fascinating yet technically
quite simple music. No one could accuse him of writing in such a manner out of
any technical inability, but older age perhaps brought a greater willingness to
distil to essentials, although certainly not to eschew experimentation. Such
experimentation would, however, often be of a harmonic or other ‘musical’
variety; after all, the composer seemed pretty much to have conquered the
piano. In some of the extraordinary pieces of his old age, he approached and
even achieved the abandonment, or perhaps better, suspension, of tonality. Not
for nothing did composers such as Schoenberg, Bartók, and Debussy revere him.
In a 1911 tribute, so after he had made his own break with tonality in the 1908
Second String Quartet, Schoenberg lauded Liszt for his ‘fanatical faith’.
‘Normal men,’ he wrote, ‘possess a
conviction,’ whereas ‘the great man is possessed
by a faith’. Schoenberg praised Liszt for the degree to which there was
much that was ‘truly new musically’ in his work, ‘discovered by genuine
intuition. Was he not after all,’ Schoenberg asked, ‘one of those who started
the battle against tonality, both through themes which point to no absolutely
definite tonal centre, and through many harmonic details whose musical
exploitation has been looked after by his successors?’ In a sense, Schoenberg
suspected, the consequences might prove to be even greater than Wagner’s, since
Wagner had ‘provided a work too perfect for anyone coming later to be able to
add anything to it.’ Busoni, who when he re-examined his work, his piano
technique included, turned to Liszt, thought similarly on both accounts. Pierre
Boulez programmed no fewer than five works by Liszt in his first season at the
New York Philharmonic, the 1971 opening concert
featuring Totentanz, with Jorge Bolet as soloist, the second introducing
Malédiction, and the third given over entirely to Die Legende von der
Heiligen Elisabeth.
Introversion, desperation,
bitterness, and death were the hallmarks of Liszt’s late piano pieces, whether
explicitly elegies – for instance, for Wagner and for Seven Hungarian Historical Portraits – or not. Chords constructed
on fourths and sevenths, augmented chords, the so-called ‘Gypsy’ scale we heard
at the beginning of the B minor Sonata, biting clashes between major and minor
scales and intervals: such devices and more are very much part of what may
perhaps rest as the ultimate ‘late’ experimentalism. A Bagatelle without Tonality from 1885, the year before Liszt’s
death, made explicit what Liszt considered the future to be. The grey clouds of
Nuages gris, written in 1881, proved
especially interesting to Debussy and even to Stravinsky. Its harmonies appear
not so much to have rejected as to have drifted away from tonality.
And so, as Liszt looked forward
in his spoken utterances, even if he did not yet use them, to quarter-tones and
to something approaching twelve-note music, being preoccupied with the idea of
a twelve-note chord from which composition would subtract notes, he saw his
late mission, as he told Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, as being to
‘hurl my lance into the boundless realms of the future’. He even went so far as
to discourage his pupils from performing his late music, lest they damage their
careers by doing so – a considerable extension of the idea of Beethoven’s
writing for posterity in his late quartets. This truly was ‘music of the future’,
by the erstwhile ‘pianist of the future’. Liszt is, I think, the greatest
musical avant-gardist of the nineteenth century, perhaps the greatest before
Webern or Boulez. Wagner might often be thought of as such, and, to be fair, he
has a very important claim, but Liszt probably pips him to the post. (The
relationship between Wagner and Liszt is in any case endlessly fascinating and
endlessly complex.) Schoenberg might often popularly be thought of as such, but
there is such a strong current of traditionalism to his thought and indeed to
his practice – not for nothing did he write the celebrated lecture, ‘Brahms the
Progressive’ – that the picture is far more mixed and subject to qualification
in his case. Liszt, on the other hand, could write: I calmly persist in staying
stubbornly in my corner, and just work at becoming more and more
misunderstood.’
He had perhaps come a long way since his virtuoso years, but
as I have tried to argue, it was those years and their triumphs that enabled
the future triumph – perhaps still lying in our
future – of his later works. Still suffering from hostility towards his
virtuosity as a pianist – ‘how could he also be a great composer?’ – and from
hostility and indifference towards his avant-gardism as a composer, Liszt
remains a cause for which we need to fight. Understanding a little more clearly
and deeply the relationship between those two crucial strands, virtuosity and
avant-gardism, might just help.
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