Performance Artist
Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861-1886
by Alan Walker
Knopf. 640 pp. $50.00
To say that Franz Liszt was the most famous pianist of the 19th century barely suggests the extent of his celebrity. Born in Hungary in 1811, he made his debut at the age of nine, met Beethoven three years later, and was known throughout Europe by the time he was thirteen. As an adult, his public appearances were greeted, especially by women, with an enthusiasm that would strikingly anticipate the reception of such 20th-century popular musicians as Elvis Presley and the Beatles. “Admirers swarmed all over him,” Alan Walker writes in his multi-volume biography, the third and last installment of which has just been published, “and ladies fought over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they then ripped to pieces as souvenirs.”
If tabloid journalism had existed in the 19th century, Liszt’s sexual escapades would have appeared regularly on the front pages. (He fathered three illegitimate children, one of whom became the mistress and, later, the second wife of Richard Wagner.) Still, it was not his love life but his piano playing that was the source of his celebrity. Contemporary accounts would defy belief were it not for the fact that they all say more or less the same thing: he was a performer of extraordinary and unprecedented virtuosity. The word Liszt himself used to describe his playing was “transcendental.”
Liszt died in 1886, a decade too soon to have made recordings. But if we cannot hear how he sounded in performance, evidence of a different kind—namely, his compositions—suggests that he was, at the very least, die greatest musical executant of his time. Indeed, Liszt was incontestably a composer of significance. His output was vast (the catalogue of his works in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians takes up 21 closely printed pages) and, though uneven, full of pieces of astonishing individuality. He invented the single-movement “symphonic poem,” and his harmonic innovations directly influenced Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde, the fountainhead of musical modernity, could not have been written without Liszt’s example. To this day, Liszt’s music continues to be played regularly, and such works as the B Minor Sonata, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Transcendental Etudes, and the two concertos are part of the repertoire of every aspiring virtuoso pianist.
And yet, popular though Liszt’s music has remained, it is regarded with considerable ambivalence by critics and scholars, and sometimes even by the musicians who play it. Alfred Brendel, among the finest present-day interpreters of Liszt’s piano works, speaks revealingly of the composer’s penchant for
facile melody, the compulsion to say something two or three times, lack of formal economy, and a reliance on the glorious and idealistic. . . . Liszt’s variety extends from the sacred to the utterly profane, from the lavishly sumptuous to the ascetic—and from the careless to the masterly.
By contrast, Alan Walker’s biography is a brief for the defense: it contends unequivocally that Liszt was both a great man and a great composer. Walker’s advocacy is so fervent, in fact, that to some it may seem obtrusive. But his claim to have undertaken his three volumes in order to present “a more truthful picture of Liszt, one . . . not warped by all the old unthinking generalizations that still pass for the story of his life,” deserves to be treated seriously. While this superbly written biography is important for many reasons, not least its painstaking scholarship—it is the first fully reliable account of Liszt’s amazingly eventful life—Walker’s most notable achievement is to have stripped away a century’s worth of anachronistic preconceptions.
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The key to understanding, as Walker makes clear, lies in Liszt’s notion of the artist (i.e., himself) as a genius, singled out by destiny for greatness. “It was left to Liszt,” Walker writes,
to foster the view that an artist is a superior being, because divinely gifted, and that the rest of mankind, of whatever social class, owed him respect and even homage. This view of the artist who walks with God and brings fire down from heaven with which to kindle the hearts of mankind became so deeply entrenched in the Romantic consciousness that today we regard it as a cliché. Nonetheless, the cliché is important, since it explains much about Liszt that would otherwise remain a mystery. When he walked on stage wearing his medals and his Hungarian sword of honor, it was not out of vanity but rather . . . the most telling gesture he could make to show the world that the times had changed.
What made this posturing palatable was the fact that Liszt was not just a traveling virtuoso, playing solely for cash and applause. His oft-repeated motto was génie oblige (genius obligates), and the reference to noblesse oblige was not accidental. At the age of thirty-five, he stopped giving recitals altogether: thereafter, he never again played in public for his own profit, concentrating instead on teaching, composing, and conducting. Even during his touring days, Liszt devoted much of his time and energy to playing the music of other composers, and as music director of the dukedom of Weimar (a post he held from 1848 to 1861), he continued this practice, conducting the premieres of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.
Indeed, such ambitious undertakings—largely forgotten today, save by scholars—obscured Liszt’s own achievements as a composer. “The world persisted to the end in calling him the greatest pianist,” Saint-Saëns once said, “in order to avoid the trouble of considering his claims as one of the most remarkable of composers.”
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The third volume of Franz Liszt is particularly valuable for its detailed discussion of the little-known compositions of Liszt’s old age, which Walker describes in terms whose effusiveness is—as so often in the course of these volumes—initially startling but in the end persuasive:
From the vantage-point of the 20th century, everything seems to have flowed from him. His experiments in harmony, his audacious handling of form, his unparalleled ability to draw strange sonorities from his instruments—all confirm that his was one of the truly revolutionary spirits in music.1
But are Walker’s powers of persuasion likely to bring about a general revaluation of Liszt as a composer? That may be doubtful. The “problem” posed by his music is that its Romantic rhetoric is as alien to modern sensibilities as, say, the poetry of Shelley. Older critics, their tastes shaped by modernism, find Liszt’s florid theatricality a near-insurmountable obstacle; younger ones, who view the world with the reflexive irony of postmodernism, balk at the sincerity which lies just beneath the theatricality. For the same reasons, many pianists (Alfred Brendel is an important exception), though attracted by the opportunities Liszt offers for technical display, are incapable of playing his music convincingly: what was wholly sincere in conception becomes grandiloquent and unserious in realization.
On records, the strongest case for Liszt’s music, not surprisingly, was made by those prewar artists who—unlike today’s musicians—took his romanticism for granted.2 And those same qualities have continued to ensure Liszt’s popularity among the vast majority of music lovers whose tastes are founded not in ideology but in immediate experience, and who find his best music beautiful, thrilling, and emotionally compelling. It is only among the intellectuals that, Alan Walker’s formidable labors notwithstanding, Liszt’s achievement will in all likelihood remain—as it has been since his death 110 years ago—in question.
1 Four pieces for solo piano which are representative of Liszt's innovative late style, Nuages gris, Unstern!-Sinistre, La lugubre gondola I, and R.W.-Venezia, have been recorded by Maurizio Pollini (DGG 427 322-2GH); “Via Crucis,” the masterpiece of Liszt's old age and the finest of his compositions on religious themes, is available in an excellent recording by the Danish chamber choir Vox Danica, conducted by Ebbe Munk (Danica DCD 8145).
2 Fortunately, many early recordings of Liszt's music have been reissued on CD, among the most notable of which are Simon Barere's matchless 1934 performances of Reminiscences de Don Juan and the Rapsodie espagnole, both of which are part of Simon Barere: The Complete HMV Recordings, 1934-36 (Appian CDAPR 7001, two CD's); Alfred Cortot Plays Liszt, an indispensable collection which includes the great French pianist's 1929 recording of the B Minor Sonata (Pearl GEMM CD 9396); Willem Mengelberg's volatile 1929 performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of the symphonic poem Les Préludes, currently available in Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra: The Complete Columbia Recordings, Vol. 1 (Pearl GEMM CDS 9018, three CD's); and the Schubert, Verdi, and Wagner transcriptions recorded by the Dutch pianist Egon Petri, Ferruccio Busoni's most distinguished pupil, all of which are collected in Egon Petri: His Recordings, 1929-1942, Vol. 1 (Appian CDAPR 7023, two CD's).
