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Overview
This classic study surveys the compositions in chronological order and the medium for which they were written. The author examines in detail the most important pieces and fully reviews Liszt's place in history. Subjects include romantic pieces, symphonic poems, songs, symphonies, and other works. A biographical summary illustrates the relationship between significant works and events in the composer's life. Acclaimed by Library Journal as "a balanced, long-overdue treatment," this study is essential for every true Lisztian student.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486786407 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2013 |
| Series: | Dover Books On Music: Composers |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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The Music of Liszt
By Humphrey Searle
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-78640-7
CHAPTER 1
THE EARLY WORKS (1822-39)
Liszt was one of the most prolific of all the great composers. Although out of the seven hundred works or so which will be found in the catalogue at the end of this book many are new versions of earlier pieces, or transcriptions for a different medium of works by other composers or by Liszt himself, nevertheless, when one takes into account the enormous number of activities which he managed to crowd into his very varied life, his output remains astonishing. Of these works well over half are for the piano (including piano duet and two pianos) and in his early period, before he set off on his travels as a virtuoso pianist, he wrote for practically no other medium; even the works which he wrote for piano and orchestra at this time do not appear to have been scored by Liszt himself.
Liszt's earliest recorded composition (now lost) was a Tantum Ergo for choir, written in 1822, when he was an eleven-year-old pupil of Salieri in Vienna; in later years he dimly remembered this as being similar in mood to the Tantum Ergo of 1869. Apart from this work, and the short opera Don Sanche, all his youthful compositions were, naturally enough, for piano. The earliest surviving piece is a variation, also written in 1822, on the famous theme of Diabelli, for the collection to which fifty Austrian composers were invited to contribute one variation each, and to which Beethoven replied by sending thirty-three; other composers taking part included Schubert, Czerny, Hummel and Kalkbrenner, so this was a decided honour for Liszt. The variations were arranged in alphabetical order of the composers' names, and Liszt's is thus the twenty-fourth. It is published in the Breitkopf Collected Edition of Liszt's works; though certainly it is very competently written, it shows practically no individuality at all.
The same is true of the majority of the works written in his teens. Most of these were composed after his removal to Paris, and already in 1824 Czerny wrote to Adam Liszt that Franz had ready "2 Rondos di bravura, for which offers have been made here, but I will not sell, I Rondo, I Fantasia, Variations on several themes, and I Amusement or rather Quodlibet on various themes of Rossini and Spontini, which he played to His Majesty with much applause." In the following year he mentions also two Concertos, a Sonata for four hands, a Trio and a Quintetto, remarking that the Concertos make those of Hummel seem quite easy by comparison.
Of all these works the only surviving ones are the Huit Variations in A flat, dedicated to Sebastian Érard, the founder of the well-known piano and harp manufacturing firm, who helped Liszt considerably during this time; the Variations brillantes sur un thème de G. Rossini, a rare work of which copies are only to be found in the British Museum and the library of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna (the theme is from Rossini's Ermione); the Impromptu brillant sur des thèmes de Rossini et Spontini, from the Donna del Lago and Armida of the former, and the Olympia and Fernand Cortez of the latter; the Allegro di Bravura and Rondo di Bravura, dedicated to Count Thaddeus Amaddé, one of the Hungarian magnates who helped to provide for Liszt's education; the opera Don Sanche ou le Chateau d'Amour, which was produced at the Paris Opera on 17 October 1825; a Scherzo in G minor dating from 1827; two pieces called "Zum Andenken" (1828), which are interesting as being Liszt's first essays in the Hungarian style; and, most important of all, the Étude en 48 Exercices dans tous les Tons Majeurs et Mineurs—the earliest version of the Transcendental Studies. In addition the Liszt Museum at Weimar possess sketches for a piano concerto which is the forerunner of the so-called Malediction for piano and strings, and clearly dates from about this time.
The majority of these works need little discussion; they are the products of a clever schoolboy who happened also to be a brilliant pianist and to possess a good deal of imagination. The general style is that of Liszt's master Czerny; the piano writing is always competent and often brilliant, but there is little in these pieces to indicate the experimental and revolutionary composer that Liszt was later to become. The most interesting musically (apart from the Studies, to which we shall return in connection with their later versions) is perhaps the little Scherzo in G minor, with its wide leaps and free use of the diminished seventh; the Hungarian pieces, of which the title "In Memory" may perhaps refer to the death of Liszt's father in the previous year, also deserve attention.
(The unpublished MS. is reported to be in the Prussian State Library in Berlin; perhaps publication will be possible in due course.)
The one-act opera, Don Sanche, ou le Chateau d'Amour, has a text by Théaulon and Rancé after a story by Claris de Florian (1755-94). The plot is a simple one. The Castle of Love can only be entered by those who both love and are loved. The knight Don Sanche is in love with Princess Elzire, but she wishes to marry the Prince of Navarre. However the master of the castle, the wizard Alidor, resolves to help Don Sanche. He leads the Princess and her followers astray in a storm and brings them near the castle, but will only allow her to enter if she loves Don Sanche. She refuses; but while she is asleep in the wood the savage Romuald (who is Alidor in disguise) comes to kidnap her. Don Sanche tries to defend her, and is carried in after a fight, apparently mortally wounded. Now at last her heart is touched and she confesses her love for Don Sanche; Alidor reveals himself, and the happy pair enter the castle, where a brilliant feast is prepared for them. The librettists saw to it that almost every theatrically effective device in the repertoire was included, among them peasant dances, Cupids descending from clouds, a Sleep aria, a storm scene, a fight off-stage, a funeral march and a final ballet. The text has been published by Roullet, Librairie de l' Académie royale de Musique; the music was long considered to be lost (apart from one chorus which is in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna), but was later rediscovered and is now in the Paris Opera Library. Extracts from it have been published by Jean Philippe Chantavoine in "Die Musik," Vol. III, No. 16 (1904), and reproductions of the costumes by M. D. Calvocoressi in his "Franz Liszt" (Paris, 1905). The music shows a real melodic gift and a considerable power of characterisation; but the opera was written and put on more for propaganda purposes than anything else, and one cannot imagine that Liszt felt much interest in a conventional plot of this kind. It was not a great success, and there were only four performances.
Liszt completed his next original work in 1834; and the six years after 1828 marked the transition to maturity. External events wrought a great change in his character; first his illness in 1828-9, and the outbreak of religious fervour which accompanied it, gave him a strong distaste for the career of a travelling virtuoso for which he seemed to be destined; then the revolution of 1830 infected him with romantic revolutionary ardour; at the same time his entry into contact with the literary and artistic world of Paris at the moment of the birth of the Romantic Movement revealed to him how defective his general education had been—a defect which he determined to remedy as speedily as possible; and finally the successive impacts of Berlioz, Paganini and Chopin gave him a completely new musical outlook. This rapid series of events, coming at a time when adolescence was giving way to maturity, completely altered the whole course of his life and work. Hitherto he had been merely a successful infant prodigy, composing in his spare time works bounded by his technical powers and partly (at any rate) influenced by the views of his teachers; from now on his horizon was incomparably widened in all directions. Berlioz was of course to affect him more considerably later on, in his orchestral works; but already he derived from him the force and vehemence of thought, the nervous and diabolical energy, the feeling of wild and incoherent ambition, the striving after "Babylonian grandeur," which can be found only a few years later in the earliest versions of the Vallée d'Obermann and the Dante Sonata, as well as in the Grandes Études of 1838.
From Paganini he derived, first of all, a new transcendental technique which was as far in advance of anything previously written for the piano as Paganini's was in advance of anything written for the violin; secondly, as Mr. Saeheverell Sitwell suggests, that sense of showmanship (in the best meaning of the word) which enabled him to overcome his worst enemies once he sat down at the piano; and thirdly that feeling of Mephistopheleanism and diabolism which both Paganini and Berlioz had in common. The personality of Paganini was held in almost superstitious terror during his lifetime; and though his compositions sound harmless enough to us to-day, there is something in their chill perfection which makes one realise that they could well have excited a feeling of awe among contemporary hearers. A whole section of Liszt's works expresses this kind of feeling; it includes the Faust Symphony, the Totentanz, the Dante Sonata, the Mephisto Waltzes and a great number of the late piano pieces. Indeed Liszt's whole personality in later years took on a diabolical flavour; one remembers Gregorovius's description of him in 1865 as "Mephistopheles disguised as an Abbe."
But the composer who was perhaps to have the most immediate influence on him in these years was Chopin. They were of the same age and in similar circumstances; they came from similar environments, for in both Poland and Hungary there was no bourgeois class, and any talented artist tended to be drawn into the aristocratic salons in order to make his career. Chopin had had the advantage of a better upbringing than Liszt, and was more experienced; what he chiefly showed to Liszt was the poetical approach to music. Liszt had been reading intensively in the last few years, and the effect of Chopin was to make him connect music more closely with the rest of his thought. Instead of writing music to fill the academic forms he had been taught in his youth, he now began to see every piece as the musical expression of a certain idea or state of mind, sometimes derived from literature or art, sometimes from experience. It is this, chiefly, that has caused him to be misjudged by those who regard all music as "abstract" and therefore incapable of portraying a mood oran idea; to Liszt, Chopin and the Romantic Movement in general, on the other hand, it was part of the essence of music to be able to do this. Debussy rightly wrote in Monsieur Croche Antidilettante: "The undeniable beauty of Liszt's work arises, I believe, from the fact that his love for music excluded every other kind of emotion. If sometimes he gets on easy terms with it and frankly takes it on his knee, this is surely no worse than the stilted manner of those who behave as if they were being introduced to it for the first time; very polite but rather dull. Liszt's genius is often disordered and feverish, but that is better than rigid perfection, even in white gloves."
In the years 1829-34, then, Liszt was gradually developing a totally new approach to music. He began with two brilliant Fantasies, one on themes from Auber's La Fiancée, written in 1829, which already shows complete command of virtuoso technique and much originality, and one on "La Glochette" (La Campanella) of Paganini, written in 1832 under the immediate impact of hearing Paganini play—to this we must return when considering the Paganini studies in general. Between the two came the idea for a far more interesting work, a Revolutionary Symphony, inspired by the July Revolution of 1830. According to Liszt's "official" biographer Lina Ramann, Liszt took as his example the Battle of Vittoria of Beethoven, and like his model, intended to introduce national themes into his work. These were to include a Hussite chorale from the fourteenth century, Ein Feste Burg and the Marseillaise; this choice of revolutionary songs from the Slavonic, Teutonic and Latin worlds no doubt symbolised the universal brotherhood of revolution against oppression. The work was never completed, though some of it was later used in the symphonic poem Héroïde Funébre; however some sketches of it are preserved in the Weimar Liszt Museum, and some of these are reproduced in facsimile in the first volume of Peter Raabe's "Franz Liszt" (Stuttgart, 1931). At the side of the music Liszt sketched out a "programme," which, in so far as it can be deciphered, reads as follows: "indignation, vengeance, terreur, liberté! désordre, cris confus (vague, bizarrerie), fureur ... refus, marche de la garde royale, doute, incertitude, parties croisantes ... 8 parties differentes, attaque, bataille ... marche de la garde nationale, enthousiasme, enthousiasme, enthousiasme! ... fragment de Vive Henri IV disperse. Combiner ' Allons enfants de la patrie '." The sketch is headed "Symphonie" and is dated "27, 28, 29 Juillet—Paris." Musically the sketches reveal very little, though a clear reference to the Marseillaise is apparent; but it is interesting to note that twenty years later, presumably as the result of the European uprisings of 1848-9, Liszt felt impelled to take up the project again, this time in the form of a five-movement symphony. The first was to be Héro?de Funébre, the second a setting of "Tristis est anima mea," the third was to be based on the Rákóczy and Dombrowski marches (symbolising Hungary and Poland), the fourth on the Marseillaise, and the last movement was to be a setting of Psalm 2, "Quare fremuerunt gentes?" From this whole plan only Héeroide Funébre was completed; but fragments of both the earlier and later versions appeared separately; the Hussite chorale, Vive Henri IV, and the Marseillaise were arranged for piano, and we find Ein Feste Burg both in the "Huguenots" Fantasy and in Liszt's transcription of Nicolai's Kirchliche Festouverture; in addition the Rákoczy March was arranged both for piano and for orchestra.
Before attempting any more original works, Liszt now turned his attention to transcriptions and fantasias. He first set himself what might seem the completely impossible task of transcribing Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique for piano—surely one of the most unpianistic works ever written! Yet Sir Charles Halle in his memoirs relates an occasion, at which he was present, when Liszt played his transcription of the March to the Scaffold immediately after an orchestral performance of the same piece, and received even more applause than the orchestra. Looking at Liszt's "partition de piano," as he called this type of transcription, one can well believe it, for it is astonishingly well done; Liszt has not simply arranged the notes for piano, but has recast the texture in such a way as to make the piano give an orchestral effect. The extract from the March to the Scaffold on p. 7 indicates the type of writing he used. The purpose of the transcription was of course to help Berlioz at a time when he found it difficult to get orchestral performances of his works: Liszt not only played it in his own concerts, but actually bore the expenses of its publication, so that it could reach as wide a public as possible. He followed this up by writing a short piano piece, L'I dée Fixe, Andante amoroso, on the main theme of the Symphony, and also by transcribing Berlioz' overture Les Francs-Juges. Next year (1834) he wrote a Grande Fantaisie Symphonique on themes from Lélio for piano and orchestra, and in 1836 he also transcribed Harold in Italy and the King Lear overture.
Liszt has often been attacked for writing these transcriptions and fantasies, and it is as well to discuss this question before we proceed further. To begin with, these works fall into two main classes: the "partitions de piano," which are more or less straight transcriptions from one medium to another, and the fantasies, which are original works based on other composers' themes. There are of course borderline cases, where a transcription is so embellished with added detail that it almost becomes an original composition; but in general these two classes hold good. The purpose of the "partition de piano" was normally to help the composer by making his orchestral works more easily accessible to a wider audience. Berlioz, as we have seen, was the first whom Liszt helped in this way; but many others followed including Wagner, Glinka, Gounod, Saint-Saens, Cui, Dargomijsky and a number of the younger German composers. In addition Liszt was able to make the works of Bach, Beethoven and Schubert known at a time when they were insufficiently appreciated by the concert audiences of the day. These transcriptions therefore served approximately the purpose of the modern gramophone record, that of presenting in a convenient form works which would not otherwise be easily available; and there is no doubt that Liszt's transcriptions usually give as good an idea of a work as is possible in a totally different medium. It is true that some of his transcriptions of Beethoven and Schubert contain a good deal of added decoration which may not always be felt to be in keeping with the original; but in most cases Liszt also gave a simpler form as an ossia for those who prefer it, and his transcription of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasia for piano and orchestra, for instance, is generally agreed to be a brilliant realisation of an extremely difficult task. It is also true that many of the works transcribed by Liszt, at all periods of his life, are by third- or fourth-rate composers; many of these were transcribed either as compliments to Liszt's aristocratic friends, or for the benefit of young and comparatively unknown composers to whom the name of Liszt on the cover of their pieces would be a great help. A further point is that in Liszt's later years payments from his publishers represented practically his entire source of income; he had given up playing the piano professionally, and he never accepted a fee for teaching. He may have wasted a good deal of time on some of these transcriptions, but at least they provided an outlet for his abounding energy.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
I. The Early Works (1822-39),II. The Virtuoso Period (1839-47),
III. The Weimar Years (1848-61),
IV. The Final Period,
Part I. Rome (1861-9),
Part II. Rome, Weimar, Budapest (1869-86),
Biographical Survey,
Catalogue of Works,
Bibliography,
Index of Works Mentioned,
Index of Names,