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Introduction to Liszt series
Liszt is a composer I
have been fascinated with since my student days. I have always
been attracted not only to the colossal emotional power of the
music, but also to its extraordinary range and diversity, and
the fearless experimentation with new harmonic and formal
innovations, in his final works even anticipating the music of
the 20th century. Of all the great romantic period composers
Liszt was the one who most emulated Beethoven in believing that
music had no expressive bounds. I was also intrigued by how
much of his music was generally unknown, and how much
significant music was lying around virtually unexplored more
than one hundred years after his death. As a personality he was
one of the most remarkable of the whole 19th century, a man of
incredible generosity, using his extraordinary celebrity and
influence to further the careers of any talented musician he
thought worthy (most notably Wagner), never expecting anything
in return. One of the ways to explore an artist's contributions
to his medium could be to question how later art would be
different if he hadn't existed - in Liszt's case the whole
music world of the late 19th and first part of the 20th would
have to be radically different. Would Wagner have been as well
known, would his works ever have been produced, would his
harmonic language have evolved in the direction it took? Styles
of piano writing from Brahms to Debussy to Bartok and Prokofiev
would certainly be changed.
I have always been
disturbed by the pervasive misconceptions that surround Liszt's
music, his contributions to music historically, as well as his
personality. Even among musicians one hears the opinion that
Liszt's music is all flash and no substance, that it is only a
vehicle for technical display. Many performers will play it
from this point of view, having grown up hearing this typical
outlook on Liszt's music from teachers and writers on music,
perpetuating the stereotype. The tremendous emotional depth of
the music, its originality, and its countless influences on
later composers are regularly overlooked. Even Liszt's
personality is often characterized as that of the vain
performer, one who used the music solely as a vehicle to
exhibit his own personality.
character obviously meant to be
Chopin.All of these past inaccuracies have been detailed in
Alan Walker's recent three-volume Liszt biography.)
As Liszt's
best music was too advanced to be appreciated by critics and
the public during his lifetime, and with the change in artistic
esthetic of the early 20th century to a rather anti-romantic
style in a reaction against the 19th century, much of Liszt's
music was overlooked (extremely ironic in that of all the
composers of his time he was the most interested in new
developments, and foreshadowed much of the early 20th century
in his last works.) In our rather self-important, "music
is just the perfect reproduction of the composer's notation on
the page" time, Liszt's passion and grandeur, humanity,
and humor are regarded with suspicion, and his works are too
rarely seriously investigated.
(Copyright 2004 by Mark Salman)
