Pianist, conductor, composer, humanitarian, philosopher, cosmopolitan. Many words describe the multifaceted life and career of Liszt, a familiar figure no less impressive for his ubiquity. To provide a biographical sketch of the composer here is a poor use of space, when authoritative biographers have already risen to the daunting task of documenting Liszt’s peripatetic existence (Walker, 1988, 1993, 1997; Gibbs and Gooley, 2006). In relation to Liszt’s contributions to a modern pianism, it is more relevant to focus on his personal aesthetic, as reflected in the notation and conception of his scores and contemporaneous accounts of his performances.
Liszt’s complete works for piano comprise works of absolute music (the Sonata, études, and dance-based works), programmatic compositions (the three volumes of Années de pèlerinage), reminiscences, paraphrases, and incidental offerings, all supplemented by the transcriptions of various shapes and sizes that preoccupied him, even in his declining years when he began to doubt his own inspiration. They reveal a composer enamored with his instrument. A virtuoso performer from age nine, Liszt was infinitely
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fascinated by the capacity of the piano. A dedicated pedagogue who rou- tinely refused payment for his services, he was intrigued by the elements that distinguished players from each other. Insatiably curious about the piano’s construction, he amassed an impressive collection of instruments, some gifts and others painstakingly acquired. At various times, his stable included a seven-and-a-half octave Bechstein grand; two Chickerings; two Bösendorfers (a concert grand as well as a composing desk with a small, built-in keyboard); a concert harmonium (cabinet organ) made by Mason- Hamlin; a hybrid, two-manual Erard (the piano-orgue, or organ-piano); a glass piano (piano harmonica) patented by Bachmann; and historic instru- ments owned by Beethoven and Mozart. While he did not go so far as the young Scriabin, who reportedly constructed miniature instruments as souvenirs for friends and family, he was unquestionably an artist obsessed with exploring the potentials of his instrument on every level: as performer, composer, pedagogue, and connoisseur. This obsessive quality contributed to his legendary, arguably unequaled level of activity and virtuosity.
For Liszt, playing the piano was not simply a demonstration of skill or inven- tion. His virtuosity, a form of extreme physicality and expertise, was an inte- gral component of his performance aesthetic. His pianism was a performative act that reveled in the mutual relationship between the performer and instru- ment. More than l’art de toucher, emphasizing the activities of the fingers upon the keyboard, it was an exchange of energies and forces between two vibrant bodies. Echoing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the “modern Prometheus” of 1818), Liszt articulated the physicality of his performance aesthetic.
The virtuoso is not a mason, who, with the chisel in his hand, faithfully and conscientiously cuts his stone after the design of the architect. He is not a passive tool who reproduces feeling and thought … He is not the more or less experienced reader of works … He creates just like the composer himself, for he breathes life into the lethargic body, infuses it with fire, and enlivens it with the pulse of gracefulness and charm. He changes the clay-like form into a living being, penetrating it with the spark which Prometheus snatched from the fire of Jupiter. He must make this form move through transparent ether; he must arm it with a thousand wings; he must unfold scent and blossom and breathe into it the breath of life.
(Huneker, 1911: 392–393) The overt physicality that distinguished Liszt’s performances somewhat baffled his critics, who commonly observed his commanding presence. Critics routinely mentioned that audiences had to witness him in perform- ance to understand the full impact of his persona onstage and comprehend the seemingly irrational, sometimes hysterical reaction he evoked in his audiences (Gibbs and Gooley, 2006: 200–201). During Liszt’s performances,
audience members were shocked by the sight of a mortal bestowing upon his instrument the “breath of life,” at times overwhelmed by the sense of a transformation inherently physical, as evident in an oft-quoted 1838 review from the Allgemeinische musikalische Zeitung by Moritz Saphir (1795–1858): “After the concert … the listeners look at each other in mute astonishment as after a storm from a clear sky, as after thunder and lightning mingled with a shower of blossoms and buds and dazzling rainbows; and he the Prometheus, who creates a form from every note, a magnetizer who con- jures the electric fluid from every key …” (Gibbs and Gooley, 2006: 200).
More than his fellow virtuosi Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871) and Clara Wieck (1819–1896), Liszt defined the potential of the body of the piano in relation to his own. The unusually powerful, subjective force of Liszt’s play- ing, it has been suggested, was an effect created by the involvement of his body in his performing style: “Many writers, even someone with good ears such as Schumann, asserted that he could not be fully understood until he was seen; the sounds themselves did not communicate what it was that Liszt had to comnunicate …” (Gooley, 2005: 47).
Extreme virtuosity drew attention to the undeniable prowess of the per- former whose touch rendered the once inert instrument resoundingly alive and pouring forth with previously unimagined colors. The poet Heinrich Heine, who heard Liszt perform at the Théâtre Italien, wrote that his per- formance touched upon something “which vibrates in almost all of us,” con- cluding, “I have never encountered these phenomena so distinctly and so frighteningly as in the concert by Liszt” (Kleinertz, 2006: 444). Liszt’s char- acteristically charged performance led his audiences to perceive the reality of sound in space, and to locate themselves reciprocally and empathetically in an environment defined by the exchange of energies.
Liszt continually developed new methods for manipulating pianistic sound through the use of hands and feet alike, extending the range of dra- matic piano sound and overhauling the technique of playing in the pro- cess. This is most clearly seen in the études he reworked several times: the
Etude en douze exercices (1826), Douze grandes études (1837), and Douze études d’exécution transcendante (1851). These studies pioneered tech-
niques for playing unprecedented in their difficulty, such as the deployment of chromatic repeated notes, successions of ever-wider leaps, passages of broken chords, rampant ascending and descending passagework, thunder- ous octaves, and extensive hand-crossings. Such techniques, coupled with a subtle use of the pedals, made it possible to create great swaths of com- plex, layered resonances: a vibrant stratigraphy of unprecedented richness and color. His was not virtuosity for the sake of spectacle, but virtuosity deployed as a means towards sound-generation and a dramatic end. One can consider the climactic octaves of “Sposalizio,” from the second volume
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of the Années de pèlerinage (1858), and the ethereal high-register pas- sagework with which “Les jeux d’eau de la villa d’Este” (1877), from the third, begins. “Les jeux d’eau” invites the listener to partake in an aesthetic experience analogous to that of the spray of water in the sunlight, with a shimmering sound as delicate and as ephemeral. “Sposalizio”’s ecstatic and thundering climax evokes the cacophony of bells in all its grandeur and disorganized acoustic profusion. These compositions gain expressive power from their distinct acoustic profiles and the intricate physical choreography required to produce them, which cannot be separated. Their mode of phys- ical presentation and realization is integral to their identity. What renders them relevant and uniquely Lisztian is their definitively holistic disposition. No single element of the sound can be altered (register, tempo, harmony, figuration) without altering entirely what Scriabin called the “sonorous form,” and Messiaen the “harmonic-timbral complex.”
From early in his career, Liszt’s unabashed delight in sound and sound- making was viewed suspiciously by those offended by a “telling destined to exceed the tale” (Samson, 2003: 84). Historical and contemporary critics would identify the virtuosity displayed by his music and in his perform- ances, and the listener’s inevitable awareness of it, as an undesirable distrac- tion and a poor substitute for profound musical meaning. Liszt’s virtuosity was often disparaged, offering the listener a mere frisson and a pleasure devoid of any kind of lasting meaning.
Virtuosity … has an evanescent quality, contingent on a particular moment, a precise location (it “takes place”), an instrument, a performer, a style or “manner” of performance, and all of these contribute to a sense of physical presence and immediacy that forces itself upon us, blocking out representation. Virtuosity presents, rather than represents. It encourages us to wonder at the act, rather than to commune with the work and its referents by way of the act.
(Samson, 2003: 84) The immediacy with which Liszt asked listeners to experience “the act” is particularly clear in his transcriptions, which comprise nearly one-third of his compositional oeuvre. In transcribing, Liszt drew upon works large (Beethoven’s symphonies, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, and Saint-Saëns’s
Danse macabre) and small (songs of Chopin, Eduard Lassen, and Robert
Franz). In terms of his commitment to the act of transcription and the wide net he cast in selecting his material, Liszt’s closest parallels are Busoni and, undeniably, Finnissy, a composer associated with the New Complexity, whose subjects of transcription range from Gregorian chant and Verdi’s operas to songs of George Gershwin and the Beatles. In Liszt’s settings, initially dis- tinctive thematic materials are effectively neutralized. Melodies once laden
with pre-existing musical import are stripped of their original identities, becoming neutral components subjected to processes of transformation. They are returned to a raw state, as one might return a piece of gold jewelry to the smelter. Liszt then asked that the listener engage with this musical mater- ial in this pure, neutralized form to discover its potential anew, in relation to a particular moment, place, and performer. Placing radical emphasis on timbre and its transformation in time as the source of musical drama, Liszt encouraged his listeners to revel in musical sound in real time as the basis of their experience. The listener’s perception of dramatic form was linked to a vital sense of the here and now, as Liszt placed added value on the reality of the musical experience. For focusing on elements of tone color long consid- ered subordinate musical parameters in western music, and indeed asserting these elements as the essential determinants of musical form, Liszt has been described as “the most radical musician of his generation.”
The supremacy of pitch and rhythm over dynamics was turned upside down by Liszt. Realization now took precedence over the underlying compositional structure. There were many composers before Liszt who wrote with a specific sound in mind, but none for whom this realization in sound is more important than the text behind it. Beautifully sensitive to the nature of his musical material, and deeply indifferent to its quality, all Liszt’s genius was directed towards the realization in sound.
(Rosen, 1995: 507) Liszt’s late piano compositions Nuages gris (1881), Bagatelle sans tonalité (1885), and Unstern! (1886), which court atonality, are often discussed in relation to the twentieth-century avant-garde. These works are undeniably prescient, predating the historic break with tonality associated, at the piano, with Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1909). Liszt’s greater innova- tions, however, pertain to his use of the instrument and reconception of the performer’s role. This reflected a modern perspective on performance as an inherently physical act leading to new sounds, forms, and advances in technique. Well into the twenty-first century, his works for piano would continue to inspire spectral works. Murail’s piano concerto, Le désenchante-
ment du monde (2012), would be partly modeled on the Piano Concerto
no. 2, S.125, and the Sonata in B minor, S.178 (Bolognesi, 2012).