"Before Liszt, it was considered almost in bad taste to play from memory," Hough explains. As part of that mission, he made a radical decision to never bring his scores onstage. Liszt set out across Europe in 1839 to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. He was someone who, like a great speaker, was able to capture an audience."īefore Franz Liszt, no one thought a solo pianist could hold anyone's attention, let alone captivate an audience. "He was someone who seduced people - not just in a sexual way, but in a dramatic way. "Liszt was a very dynamic personality," Hough says. That expansive tendency helped lend him early on in his career as a composer the ill deserved reputation of being all too facile and superficial.Like many contemporary classical pianists, Hough is obsessed with Liszt - not only because he was really good, but also because he revolutionized the art of performance. He borrowed happily from others and sought to integrate diverse influences into a synthetic and syncretic expressive musical art form. Originality was just one of the goals Liszt pursued. We live in too segmented an environment, where the classical and the popular are still segregated, except for occasional all too facile efforts at so-called crossover works and events. He harbored few prejudices and was, to the end of his days, receptive to the work of younger composers and enthusiastic about new ideas - as his generous treatment of Russian composers amply suggests. Without Liszt’s experiments in the uses of harmony and sonority and the shape of musical form (for example, the stress on single melodies and motives and therefore imaginative repetition in works of considerable duration) much of late Romanticism and Modernism, particularly that associated with Wagner, would be unthinkable. Liszt did that using the piano, and by so doing he helped create an enthusiastic audience of spectators.įourth, Liszt was a tireless innovator, never content to repeat himself. We musicians would be well served by following Liszt’s example by liberating ourselves from some delusive ideology of faithfulness to historic texts, adapting old and new music into the framework of our own new music, and altering it to reach a generation of listeners accustomed to new sounds and a novel acoustic environment. Liszt’s piano versions of the Beethoven symphonies (Beethoven was a composer Liszt venerated and spent a lifetime advocating) were particular favorites of that brilliant eccentric, Glenn Gould. The same can said for his transcriptions of works by Bach and Beethoven, where music written for one medium is translated into another. His elaborations and fantasies for the piano based on the operatic works of others suggest many ways of freely adapting and altering music we like and wish to remember. Notation in his piano music sought to mirror an art that was spontaneous and tied to a moment of performance. Few, if any classical musicians can do it. At the heart of his music for the piano was improvisation, an art sadly lost in what we now term classical music. The last effort in a major city to revive Liszt’s music took place in New York in the 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Boulez. If one compares this to Liszt’s output, not only for the piano, (which is gargantuan in scope), one cannot help but be struck by the obscurity that most of his music has fallen into. The choral and organ music are never performed. This is in stark contrast to Chopin, his contemporary, whom Liszt championed. Pianists bring out a few select works in recital, mostly to display the virtuosity they demand. Only a few of his works are still in the standard orchestral repertory - the piano concertos and one tone poem Les Preludes. Yet our attention to him remains largely muted and ambivalent. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth ought to have been an opportunity to revisit a figure who helped define Romanticism, the role of the piano on the stage and in the home, and, most importantly, how music functions for most of the literate public. The case of Franz Liszt, who was born in 1811 and died in 1886, is more complex.
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