Franz Liszt (1811-86): 8-12/5/17

[LeMartinPecheur]

I feel the same way. I think it was Gerald Abrahams who described Liszt's variational technique, applied repetitively ad nauseam, as "wallpaper form"...

I like a lot of Liszt and I keep trying with the other bits. But it's often his excessive repetitions that bug me. The worst case, his setting of 'Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh'. Absolutely perfect through to, and including, the last line, '...balde ruhest du auch.' But then he just keeps repeating that last line till I'm sick of it!

[gurnemanz]

I am a late discoverer of Liszt. Recently I have become very appreciative of Via Crucis since I got a compelling recording of the solo piano version by Irene Russo. https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...-liszt-angelus
I can't listen to it enough at the moment. I love the late pared-down style, reminiscent for me of Satie, Mompou, Cage and others. Unpublished and unperformed in his lifetime.

[Bryn]

I am a late discoverer of Liszt. Recently I have become very appreciative of Via Crucis since I got a compelling recording of the solo piano version by Irene Russo. https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...-liszt-angelus
I can't listen to it enough at the moment. I love the late pared-down style, reminiscent for me of Satie, Mompou, Cage and others. Unpublished and unperformed in his lifetime.

Funny you should mention Liszt, Satie and Cage together, there. The Via Crucis was the first Liszt that really grabbed my attention in my youth, a Saga LP (BBC Northern Singers, Gordon Thorne. However, more recently I was very taken with the piano duet version:

[gurnemanz]

Funny you should mention Liszt, Satie and Cage together, there. The Via Crucis was the first Liszt that really grabbed my attention in my youth, a Saga LP (BBC Northern Singers, Gordon Thorne. However, more recently I was very taken with the piano duet version:

Thanks. I shall investigate the piano duet version. I enjoyed the duet versions of the Symphonic Poems on CD (also download) with Leslie Howard and Mattia Ometto. They offer much more than note-for-note transcriptions, with informative sleevenotes by Leslie Howard.

Re Cage, coincidentally, around the same time I got another well-priced and recommendable Brilliant Classics download from Presto

[Bryn]

Thanks. I shall investigate the piano duet version. I enjoyed the duet versions of the Symphonic Poems on CD (also download) with Leslie Howard and Mattia Ometto. They offer much more than note-for-note transcriptions, with informative sleevenotes by Leslie Howard.

Re Cage, coincidentally, around the same time I got another well-priced and recommendable Brilliant Classics download from Presto

Yes, I got the CD sets of the Cage works with Giancarlo Simonacci et al on Brilliant Classics as they were released. Not quite up to Mode standards but well worth hearing.

[gurnemanz]

However, more recently I was very taken with the piano duet version

Just listened to it. Interesting to compare with solo version. Duet is more forthright, less contemplative. I thought immediately of "Pictures at an Exhibition" and in a way that is what Via Crucis also is.

[Serial_Apologist]

He's back on - this time for an examination of his dual character, apparently. Listening right now to the first piano concerto I can't get the famous Tom & Jerry out of my head, Jerry attacking the hammers in those ridiculously extended trills the composer favoured and somehow got away with reputation untarnished, along with a few other things! Strange composer, Liszt: passages of prophetic genius bang next to others of a banality even the worst of Schumann (not alone among the early Romantics) could never match down to.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002454y

[smittims]

Liszt's music was denigrated for years by critics who mistook some of it for the sentimental idiom which 20th-century light and film music composers derived from some of his chromatic phrases. It took serious Liszt enthusiasts such as Sacheverell Sitwell and Humphrey Searle who knew his less well-known music to show what a genius he was. The 'showman' side of his personality should be placed in context with such works as Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe.

[Mandryka]

New recording of the complete Années released this week - Muraro.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Liszt's music was denigrated for years by critics who mistook some of it for the sentimental idiom which 20th-century light and film music composers derived from some of his chromatic phrases. It took serious Liszt enthusiasts such as Sacheverell Sitwell and Humphrey Searle who knew his less well-known music to show what a genius he was. The 'showman' side of his personality should be placed in context with such works as Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe.

Yes indeed. Arguably the most significant musical figure of the post Beethoven 19th century after Wagner. Innovative and a tireless advocate of other composers. His Bellini’s Norma Reminiscences are in many ways superior to the original. That B major section - one of the noblest pieces of piano writing around - real genius in
just the way he arranges it to create that “third hand” effect . His non piano orchestral works, Années de Pelerinage , Valse Oubliées sadly not that frequently played live . Unlike Campanella and the Dflat cross -hands Concert Etude both of which featured yesterday. Interesting that so many Pianists don’t tackle the opera fantasies / transcriptions live - they are very effective in live performance but they really sort the wheat from the chaff pianistically.

[gurnemanz]

Since my last contribution to this thread I've acquired several recommendable recordings from the less well-trodden recesses of the Liszt repertoire:

Orchestral Songs: https://www.prestomusic.com/classica...chestral-songs
The final disc from Hyperion's Complete Songs - Julia Kleiter/Julius Drake (on offer at Presto)
Liszt does lighter Schubert - Soirées de Vienne. I had an extract or two already but Alberto Ferro on Piano Classics does the lot. It says on the label: "elaborate compositions written in Liszt’s inimitable pianistic idiom, refined, perceptive and utterly charming" - fair enough.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes indeed. Arguably the most significant musical figure of the post Beethoven 19th century after Wagner. Innovative and a tireless advocate of other composers. His Bellini’s Norma Reminiscences are in many ways superior to the original. That B major section - one of the noblest pieces of piano writing around - real genius in
just the way he arranges it to create that “third hand” effect . His non piano orchestral works, Années de Pelerinage , Valse Oubliées sadly not that frequently played live . Unlike Campanella and the Dflat cross -hands Concert Etude both of which featured yesterday. Interesting that so many Pianists don’t tackle the opera fantasies / transcriptions live - they are very effective in live performance but they really sort the wheat from the chaff pianistically.

Yes, not all Liszt's music is as bad as the impression I gave yesterday. Some of it undoubtedly is, but then again that could be said of Messiaen; at its best, especially in the last works "Nuages gris" etc., it represented that arrow into the future Boulez spoke of. I think I'm right in quoting Boulez also also citing the Piano Sonata as foundational to 20th century Modernism: notwithstanding a few faults it was to my mind the most innovative piano sonata since Beethoven's Hammerklavier, on which to an extent it was modelled. I think one has to say had there been no Liszt Les préludes there would have been no César Franck, no Saint-Saens; no harmonic and structural foundations other than the Austro-German lineange (Bach -> Beethoven) to furnish the tone poems of Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin's 3 symphonies; no tone poems per se as generically distinct from the programme symphony pioneered by Beethoven and Berlioz; maybe even (as was suggested long ago on this forum) no "Tristan chord"! One could go on. I would say that what the best of Liszt's influence achieved was to be found in composers of maybe lesser stature who made much that was equally personal to themselves as he had done while at the same time not repeating his aesthetic mistakes. And besides, furthermore, extending the possible sonorous and technically playable range of the concert piano in that tradition that extends from Field to Debussy, Busoni and Bartok to Messiaen, we mustn't overlook the huge gift Liszt bestowed on populations geographically remote from the operatic centres in the piano transcriptions of orchestral and operatic works they would otherwise never have had a chance of experiencing.

[mopsus]

Singing in York Minster last week reminded me of the first time I sang there, when we performed Liszt's Missa Choralis on a choir tour. In a resonant acoustic it made more sense than in the dead acoustic of the college chapel where we'd previously sung it - the long rests were filled with sound. But I still feel that Liszt's church music for choir lacks the extrovert quality which is what I appreciate most in his other works (unlike his organ fantasy and fugue on Ad nos, ad salutarem undam). I'm about to perform his setting of Ave Maris Stella which may help to persuade me otherwise.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Yes, not all Liszt's music is as bad as the impression I gave yesterday. Some of it undoubtedly is, but then again that could be said of Messiaen; at its best, especially in the last works "Nuages gris" etc., it represented that arrow into the future Boulez spoke of. I think I'm right in quoting Boulez also also citing the Piano Sonata as foundational to 20th century Modernism: notwithstanding a few faults it was to my mind the most innovative piano sonata since Beethoven's Hammerklavier, on which to an extent it was modelled. I think one has to say had there been no Liszt Les préludes there would have been no César Franck, no Saint-Saens; no harmonic and structural foundations other than the Austro-German lineange (Bach -> Beethoven) to furnish the tone poems of Balakirev, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin's 3 symphonies; no tone poems per se as generically distinct from the programme symphony pioneered by Beethoven and Berlioz; maybe even (as was suggested long ago on this forum) no "Tristan chord"! One could go on. I would say that what the best of Liszt's influence achieved was to be found in composers of maybe lesser stature who made much that was equally personal to themselves as he had done while at the same time not repeating his aesthetic mistakes. And besides, furthermore, extending the possible sonorous and technically playable range of the concert piano in that tradition that extends from Field to Debussy, Busoni and Bartok to Messiaen, we mustn't overlook the huge gift Liszt bestowed on populations geographically remote from the operatic centres in the piano transcriptions of orchestral and operatic works they would otherwise never have had a chance of experiencing.

point me in the direction of some bad Liszt . I don’t recollect hearing any. And what are the “ few faults “ in the B minor sonata ? - arguably the greatest 19th century work in the genre after Beethoven’s and Schubert’s.

[Serial_Apologist]

point me in the direction of some bad Liszt . I don’t recollect hearing any. And what are the “ few faults “ in the B minor sonata ? - arguably the greatest 19th century work in the genre after Beethoven’s and Schubert’s.

Well you've picked a couple of sentences out of an otherwise overwhelmingly laudatory post, but for what it's worth my criticism of Liszt essentially comes down to lapses of taste - I think this is the general complaint about Liszt. Just at the point where the music reaches an apogee of inspired exultation, you're hoping, just hoping, he won't "blow it" with some facile rounding off of a long lead up, which often turns out to be the case. And then there's the bombast: the main theme soon after the start of "Les Preludes" is one instance. Harmonically there's an over-dependence on diminished chords as a means for sustaining tension for over-protracted periods. Examples are too legion to instance as they are so characteristic they tell you who the composer is even with a work you haven't heard before. The Piano Sonata was one of the rare instances where Liszt engaged creatively and successfully with organic sonata form development; usually the "thematic transformation" methods of which he was the innovator amounted to little more than repeating thematic material with just changes in tempo, rhythm or harmony rather than expanding new thematic materials the way Beethoven had and Brahms, Mahler, Sibelius, Schoenberg, Bartok et al would do. Liszt was one of those "all or nothing" instinctualist composers thrown up by the Romantic movement at its most unbuttoned, so one is bound to find excesses and lapses, which is fine as long as they are not predominant, which in the cases of Liszt, Berlioz and Messiaen they generally aren't. That's my case made!