The Music of Franz Liszt

Stylistic Development and Cultural Synthesis

Michael Saffle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351243315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Much of Franz Liszt's musical legacy has often been dismissed as 'trivial' or 'merely showy, ' more or less peripheral contributions to nineteenth-century European culture. But Liszt was a mainstream composer in ways most of his critics have failed to acknowledge; he was also an incessant and often extremely successful innovator. Liszt's mastery of fantasy and sonata traditions, his painstaking settings of texts ranging from erotic verse to portions of the Catholic liturgy, and the remarkable self-awareness he demonstrated even in many of his most 'entertaining' pieces: all these things stamp him not only as a master of Romanticism and an early Impressionist, but as a precursor of Postmodern 'pop.' Liszt's Music places Liszt in historical and cultural focus. At the same time, it examines his principal contributions to musical literature -- from his earliest operatic paraphrases to his final explorations of harmonic and formal possibilities. Liszt's compositional methods, including his penchant for revision, problems associated with early editions of some of his works, and certain aspects of class and gender issues are also discussed. The first book-length assessment of Liszt as composer since Humphrey Searle's 1956 volume, Liszt's Music is illustrated with well over 100 musical examples.

1 Liszt’s apprenticeship

The performer as emerging composer

Franz Liszt began his musical career as a performer, but he rapidly transformed performance practices – most particularly, fantasizing and improvisation – into compositional matrices. His years as an apprentice extended from 1819 and his first encounter with Carl Czerny, his most influential teacher, to the publication in 1829 of his first representative virtuoso composition: the Grande fantasie sur la Tyrolienne de La fiancée (S. 385i).¹ What Liszt learned at the keyboard and learned to do at the keyboard (two somewhat different activities), he subsequently taught himself to do “in the leaf” – not only with the piano, but also with the organ, the orchestra, instrumental ensembles, and eventually the voice. This was true especially of the keyboard fantasy, its conventions, and the fantasies Liszt himself composed are considered in detail in Chapter 2.

The present chapter examines the most musically significant aspects of Liszt’s apprenticeship and compares what he did during the 1820s with the accomplishments of his contemporaries, especially Frédéric Chopin. It also addresses Liszt’s lessons with Czerny and other teachers, and it refers briefly to the styl brillant of the Biedermeier era, harmonic aspects of sonata form, Sturm und Drang music and other topical gestures, and other modes of musical expression.

The prodigy as piano improviser and interpreter

Liszt’s earliest musical experiences contributed directly to his reputation as a keyboard prodigy. His father, Adam Liszt, was a man of some education who studied philosophy briefly at the University of Preßburg,² and who played for a time in an orchestra occasionally conducted by Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Ludwig van Beethoven. As Alan Walker observes, “hardly any documentary evidence” survives about the lessons Adam Liszt gave his son.³ Apparently the boy played pieces by a number of composers after just three months of instruction. Anecdotes concerning Liszt’s prescience resemble those told of many geniuses; once, for instance, he is supposed to have pointed toward a portrait of Beethoven hanging on a wall and announced that he wanted to be ein solcher (like him).⁴ We do know the young Liszt heard Gypsy musicians, including the celebrated violinist János Bihari.⁵ Among the earliest and most important influences on some of Liszt’s compositions were the “dreamily free improvisation, rich ornamentation and sparkling fury” of Bihari and other instrumentalists he first encountered in and around Raiding, his childhood home.⁶

Most of Liszt’s early public performances date from 1822–1827 in Austria, England, France, and Germany. His debut, however, took place at a private home in Oedenburg,⁷ Hungary, on November 26, 1820. A review published two days later in the Pressburger Zeitung announced that Liszt’s “extraordinary skill” and “ability to decipher the most difficult scores and to play at sight everything placed before him was beyond admiration and justifies the highest hopes.”⁸ This report, which also mentions the boy’s ethnic costume – an important detail, considering Hungary’s subordinate status within Vienna’s empire – makes it clear that Liszt appeared in public, and from the very first, as a musical nationalist as well as a showman.

Even before his 1820 debut, Liszt may have begun studying occasionally with Czerny. Only during the ten months that began in May 1822, however, and after his family settled in Vienna, did he take regular lessons from Czerny in piano and composition, and he also took a few lessons from Antonio Salieri. When Liszt first met him, Czerny was not yet thirty years old; unlike Salieri, who retired in 1824 from his appointment as composer to the Royal and Imperial Austrian Court, Czerny was just beginning his career. Full of energy and determination, he was a demanding taskmaster. Among other things, Czerny made Liszt improve his technique, including his altogether haphazard attitude toward fingering, before he allowed the boy to practice actual pieces by the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach, Beethoven, Muzio Clementi, Hummel, and Ignaz Moscheles.

The results were quick in coming. After eight months of regular lessons, Liszt won praise in December 1822 from Leipzig’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for the “unabated force” of his Viennese debut.⁹ Held in the Landesständlicher Saal, one of the city’s public performance venues, the concert provided the boy with opportunities to improvise a fantasy of his own and play Hummel’s Concerto in B minor with orchestral accompaniment – the latter, the Zeitung reported, with a skill that “borders on the incredible.”¹⁰

Liszt, however, was not invariably successful as a prodigy, a fact some of his biographers ignore. At a second public concert, held in Vienna’s Redoutensaal on April 23, 1823, he again played the Hummel concerto as well as a set of variations for piano and orchestra by Moscheles. Writing for Der Sammler, a local critic proclaimed the eleven-year-old pianist “a little virtuoso of the highest accomplishment” who already possessed “dexterity, fire, passion, and even elegance.”¹¹ When the “little virtuoso” called for a theme on which to improvise, however, things began to go awry. Confronted with a twenty-four-measure-long melody handed him by one “Herr N.N.,” Liszt broke down, although he “remained brave” in the face of his inability to deal extemporaneously with so lengthy a tune – one the Sammler critic identified as previously unknown to the general public and, in several respects, “unsuitable for a fantasy.”¹² The critic ultimately blamed composer Johann Peter Pixis, whose student “N.N.” seems to have been.

For the most part, though, Liszt triumphed over obstacles wherever he went. After he and his family left Vienna in April 1823, the Liszts paid a “farewell” visit to Pest, Hungary’s capital; there the “eleven-year-old” pianist from the “District of Sopron” publicly proclaimed his national loyalty and improvised on several themes with such success that Hazai’s Külföldi Tudósitások, a local periodical, predicted he would “bring honor” to his homeland.¹³ Later, en route to Paris, the family stopped briefly in several German cities, where Liszt’s piano playing impressed everyone who wrote about it. In Stuttgart, a critic for the Schwäbischer Merkur praised the young musician’s “profound knowledge of counterpoint and fugal structure which he displayed in a free fantasia for which a local artist had given him a written theme” at the end of one of his Fall 1823 concerts.¹⁴ Evidently Liszt’s skill as an improviser had grown.

Still later, after he and his parents reached the French capital and settled down during the winter of 1823–1824, Liszt performed in Paris to universal acclaim. A review published in Le Drapeau blanc of a concert he presented on March 8, 1824, has become a classic. In that review, A. Martainville compares the young pianist to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and praises Liszt for his ability to “execute an exceedingly difficult piece of music with the greatest precision, with assurance and unshakeable calm, with bold elegance, and yet with a feeling that brings out every shade” of emotional significance.¹⁵ Between November 1823 and August 1827 Liszt several times toured the French provinces, performing both publicly and privately in Bordeaux, Boulogne, Dijon, Lyon, Marseilles, Montpellier, Nîmes, Rouen, Strasbourg, and Toulon.¹⁶ Little information survives about his visits to most of these cities, but we do know that on January 25, 1826, Liszt was presented with a gold medal by the Société Philharmonique of Bordeaux.¹⁷ During late 1826 and early 1827 he also visited Switzerland, where he performed in Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, and Zürich.¹⁸

One of the most musically intriguing incidents in Liszt’s early career inspired the nickname “famous improviser.” During a concert presented in Paris by three other musicians, and captivated by one of the tunes he heard, Liszt rushed to a nearby piano and – interrupting his colleagues – played a spontaneous variation so beautifully that each “transfixed listener thought himself transported by a dream into a place inhabited by the god of harmony.” After the applause died away, the boy was elected by acclamation to membership in the Société Académique des Enfants d’Apollon.¹⁹

Liszt also won praise during three visits to England that began in May 1824 and ended in or shortly after May 1827. In 1825 the Manchester Gazette informed its readers that,

[i]n the second part of the concert, some gentleman in the lower boxes gave [the boy] the Scottish air “We’re a’ Noddin” for a theme. Young Liszt appearing to be ignorant of the air, Mr. Ward immediately pricked it down for him with pencil, and the young Apollo commenced a most beautiful discourse from it on his instrument, running through all the intricacies and windings of the major and minor modes, and at intervals sliding into the simple text. This chef d’oeuvre of improvising drew down loud and long continued plaudits.²⁰

Two years later, however, in describing yet another succes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of musical examples
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and sigla used throughout the present volume including the bibliography
• Introduction
• 1 Liszt’s apprenticeship: the performer as emerging composer
• 2 Liszt comes of age: the composer as fantasist
• 3 Liszt adapts and transforms: the fantasist/composer as re-composer
• 4 Liszt orchestrates and explains: the fantasist/(re-)composer as tone poet
• 5 Liszt and the voice
• Bibliography
• Index