(This essay was originally published in a 2018 Salzburg Festival programme for a recital by Igor Levit.)
Wagner, arr. Liszt: 'Solemn March to the Holy Grail' from
Parsifal
Liszt, arr. Busoni: Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale 'Ad nos,
ad salutarem undam'
Beethoven: Piano Sonata in B-flat major, op. 106 – 'Hammerklavier'
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| Caricature by Theodore Hosemann, 1842 |
Inventor of the
piano recital
The piano recital is a more recent phenomenon than many might
suspect. After all, the tradition of Western art music boasts several
centuries’ worth of dedicated solo keyboard music from which the modern pianist
may draw in devising programmes for performance. However, if modern concert
life extends back to at least the seventeenth century – much depends on what
one means by the term – the idea of a keyboard player giving a public concert
of devoted to music of his or her instrument is very much of the age after
Beethoven. Indeed, not only is it of Liszt’s age; it may reasonably be
considered his invention: both the term, or rather the particular usage, and
the event.
Private performance had hitherto been considered the better
arena for display of an instrumentalist’s technique, certainly for his or her musicality.
Public benefit concerts involving a variety of performers, vocal and non-vocal,
had offered a mixture of genres, often with a strong emphasis on opera
(instrumental fantasias as well as excerpted arias). Appear with the renowned
soprano, Mme X, and you might be offered a well-paid appointment to teach Mlle
Y piano. Beethoven’s demanding music was not an obvious option; it most likely
would be, however, in recital programmes from the later nineteenth century.
That development is difficult to imagine without the example of Liszt and the
piano ‘recital’, the first event advertised as such being his appearance at
London’s Hanover Square Rooms in 1840. Soon virtuosi the length and breadth of
Europe and beyond would follow suit, albeit in programmes whose musical and
technical demands were not always granted equal weight, as increasingly (if not
always) they would with Liszt.
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| Hanover Square, Principal Room (Illustrated London News, 1843) |
Propagandist
for Wagner
Liszt’s operatic transcriptions, paraphrases, and fantasias varied
greatly; it is doubtless beside the point to separate their functions entirely.
Even the most outlandish vehicles for virtuoso display were not necessarily
without musical value, nor without missionary intent as calling card for
composers ranging from Donizetti to Wagner. Nevertheless, with Wagner – Liszt’s
close friend, musico-revolutionary comrade-in-arms, eventually son-in-law too –
there was always a greater seriousness to the musical treatment and a greater imperative
to proselytise. Given the paucity of opportunities to hear Wagner’s dramas –
Liszt also conducted the 1850 Weimar premiere of Lohengrin, whilst Wagner languished in Zurich exile – Liszt’s work helped
spread the word. By the time that Liszt wrote his final such piece, not only
for Wagner but for any other composer, the sole intent was to honour the
composer who freely admitted to having borrowed a theme from Liszt’s own Excelsior! for his own Parsifal. Musical interrelationships
between the two composers are far more complex, far more interesting than
partisans of either will allow, or even know.
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| Paul von Joukowsky's stage design for Parsifal, Bayreuth, 1882 |
The ‘Solemn March to the Holy Grail’ may be understood as a
written-down example of the instances at Wagner’s Villa Wahnfried when Liszt,
having long since given up recital appearances, would regale guests with
excerpts or impressions from the score of Wagner’s final drama. It is not a
transcription as such; it corresponds to no one section; it is a self-standing
work, albeit strongly tied to music in which, to the tolling of Monsalvat’s
bells, knights approach the Grail. Perhaps we might think of it and many of
Liszt’s Wagner pieces as symphonic poems for piano. It never rejects
conventional tonality, yet its tonal ambiguities, both Liszt’s and Wagner’s,
remind us that, in some cases, Liszt already had – and composers such as
Debussy and Schoenberg very soon would. Even as the trudging bass line grounds
the operatic scenes unfolding and referred to above, both threaten to dissolve
and dissociate. What, then, to make of the repeated figure from the Voice from
Above, ‘Enlightened through compassion, the pure fool’? Its enigma is not
lessened by loss of the words.
Liszt as organist,
brought home to the piano by Busoni
Liszt’s contribution to nineteenth-century organ repertoire
and performance may be on a smaller scale than that for the piano, yet it is no
less significant for the instrument. There is, moreover, nothing small-scale
about the Fantasy and Fugue on the
Chorale ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’ from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera, Le Prophète. Much of Liszt’s organ music
is transcription or paraphrase; this, however, is a thirty-minute-long original
work, taking Meyerbeer’s chorale as its theme. Not entirely unlike that Parsifal Voice from Above – Wagner, in
general hostile, would occasionally acknowledge his debt to Meyerbeer – the
chorale is heard ‘angelically’ high, in Liszt’s traditional ‘divine’ key of
F-sharp major. The first of the work’s three sections resembles a first-class
organist’s improvisation. For all its structural integrity, it retains a sense
that anything, melodically, tonally, virtuosically, might happen. A central,
developmental Andante, notably also in
that ‘divine key’ of F-sharp, speaks of a love in the line of Goethe’s ‘eternal
feminine’, soon to be explored further in Liszt’s own Faust Symphony. Even when, particularly
when, Liszt prays, the chastity of Wagner’s dying community of Monsalvat could
not be more foreign to him. There is something Mephistophelian to the final,
fugal section, not least in the ‘negation’ of the chorale theme into a more
angular subject for the fugue. As so often with Liszt, the structure permits of
multiple readings: formal, literary, theological, and more.
It was left to Ferruccio Busoni to transcribe the work for piano – and thus, perhaps, to come close to out-virtuoso-ing Liszt himself, albeit in Liszt’s serious, proselytising mode. Many have thought Busoni’s faithful, far from pedantic, version superior to Liszt’s original, returning the music to the instrument Liszt knew best of all. Whatever the truth of that – with Liszt, there is rarely good reason to choose – the relative clarity of the concert hall offers a fine alternative to the echoing, Gothic grandeur of the church.
Pianist of the future
Writing to his publisher, Artaria, Beethoven suggested that
his new sonata might become performable in fifty years’ time: music, no doubt,
to its commercial ears. In his late music, we encounter, probably for the first
time in the tradition of art music, yet certainly not for the last, a composer
explicitly writing for posterity. It was an example Liszt would follow, in those
tonally ambiguous – occasionally even atonal – late piano works, actively
discouraging his pupils from performing them, lest they damage their careers.
His younger self, moreover, had given, in 1835, perhaps the first public
performance – again it depends precisely what one means here, and our knowledge
here is limited – anywhere and almost certainly in Paris, of a work hitherto
considered unperformable and incomprehensible.
In his review, Berlioz extolled Liszt’s efforts, seemingly
fully achieved, to present what we might now call a ‘definitive’ performance.
Liszt was a new Oedipus, the notoriously difficult-to-impress composer-critic
wrote. He had solved the ‘riddle of the sphinx’. Liszt had ‘explained’ (note the interpretative claim
that it does not necessarily speak for itself) ‘the work in such a way that,
had the composer himself had returned from the grave, joy and pride would have
swept over him. Not a note was left out, not one added … no tempo change was
made that was not indicated in the text.’ It is not clear whether Berlioz
refers there to Beethoven’s metronome markings; therein lies a musicological
hornet’s nest I shall leave undisturbed for now. Liszt had shown himself to be
‘the pianist of the future’.
Beethoven’s 1818 Sonata in B-flat major, written after a fallow year for
the composer, will always remain explosive ‘music of the future’. Pierre
Boulez, a great admirer of Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner, felt a reckoning
necessary, to attempt its deconstruction, in his own Second Piano Sonata;
later, he claimed that Beethoven’s late music would always remain an
intellectual challenge. Written ‘for’ an instrument, a Hammerklavier, most likely incapable of rising to its challenge –
Beethoven had been completely deaf since 1816 – the sonata defies all attempts at
its taming. Its scale forms part of our experience of the work; yet the three
quarters of an hour, give or take, over which it extends are the frame rather
than the painting itself. Innumerable technical challenges notwithstanding, the
most extreme difficulties of all remain musical rather than technical.
In practice, the two are inseparable. Try playing the opening, left-hand upbeat to the B-flat major chords; it is far more difficult than it might seem, without cheating and using the right hand. And yet, the dynamic propulsion unleashed is crucial to the forging of a performative unity both there and not there in the work ‘itself’. Perhaps the falling interval of a third is integral to the work; a performance will most likely render it such. For dialectical contrasts, in the opening sonata form movement, ‘traditional’ and yet anything but, are the dramatic material of possibility and impossibility. The commanding assertion of the opening theme, fanfare-like is balanced, called into question, and corroded by the lyrical, almost melting response. Forte and piano, harmony and counterpoint, major and minor, B-flat major and B minor (a ‘black key’, Beethoven once described it, playing a crucial role in every movement): these and countless other forces, both complementary and opposing, propel the musical drama.
In the scherzo, Beethoven offers what William Kinderman describes as ‘a
humorous yet dark parody of the opening Allegro’.
Mahler surely took note here. Its trio, once again rich in imitative writing,
takes one of the ‘traditional’ tonal options, the tonic minor, carried through
into the ‘Presto’ section, prior to a varied – always developing – da capo for the scherzo and coda. The Adagio sostenuto, Beethoven’s longest
slow movement, is written in endlessly developing sonata form – the
recapitulation essentially a second development – in the distant, rare key of
F-sharp minor. The radicalism of still later works, the tiny piano Bagatelles and the great Missa solemnis alike, seems prefigured
here: we
seem to have reached a final frontier: a challenge surely to the young, serialist Boulez.
The finale’s
opening, likewise the reappearances of that material, sounds almost as if from
the world of late Liszt, whilst at the same time clearly emerging from the
transition between the two movements. Trills – on the angels’ side, or the
Devil’s? – strike the fear of God into performer and listener alike. Moments in
which an almost neo-Gluckian ‘noble simplicity’ reasserts itself sound all the
more shocking – and necessary. All the way, the array of contrapuntal
procedures to which Beethoven subjects his material continue not to satisfy, as
they might in Bach, but to bring the music to the edge of dissolution. A great
performance will reveal the music no longer, perhaps, as unperformable, but as
impossible. It will do that, as presumably Liszt once did, even as it hurtles
before our ears.
