Don Satz:

>When I listen to Liszt's music, I generally get the feeling that he's
>promoting himself - Liszt for Liszt's sake. It's music that goes off in
>overheated directions just to overheat.

Wes Crone:

>When I hear Liszt's music I feel like I'm listening to a man who plays
>piano with incredible skill, a man who knows how to put on one hell of
>a show, and a man with nothing much to offer musically.

Both of these sound like the Liszt of the operatic transcriptions/
fantasies and the Hungarian Rhapsodies.  That stuff was surely written to
pay the bills, and I don't begrudge Liszt that, especially since he then
spent the proceeds paying other musicians' bills.  But in music that was
probably more important to Liszt, like the Harmonies Poetiques, books 2
and 3 of the Annees De Pelerinage and the Two Legends of St.Francis, also
the miscellaneous late pieces Don mentioned, what prevails is a feeling
of almost total selflessness.  I also think that usually when Liszt is
overheated, he is overheated by a sort of egoless zeal for the idea, ideal
or image that has smitten him, not by a love for his own talents.  Liszt's
own pianistic abilities were a matter of course to him, and after his
youthful period I don't think they really interested him much at all in and
of themselves.  ALmost all his revisions of his earlier works made them
simpler, less dense, less showy.  Another point is that Liszt's piano works
by and large are concerned with texture and not melody or development (the
Sonata being an obvious exception.) He's about the very sound of the piano.
In his wilder passages he is either going for a state of "agape", self-loss
in a tide of sound; or attempting to put across a level of intense anguish
only expressible by sonic violence, and he certainly had plenty of personal
experience of intense anguish to draw from.  Although as he gets older this
turns to a deep, doleful resignation.  I think maybe you guys have heard a
few too many of the operatic transcriptions (which I hate openly), and
bombastic performances of the Transcendental Etudes by pianists whose own
motives are the ones you're (wrongly, I think) attributing to Liszt.  Get
some of the discs in the Naxos series-- Jando playing the Sonata and Two
Legends, Thompson playing the Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses (esp.  the
diptych of "Benediction" and "Pensees"), or maybe the cheap and brilliant
3cd from DG of Lazar Berman playing all 3 books of the Annees de
Pelerinage-- and see if you change your mind some.  It's all pretty much
just emotions expressed by means of texture, sometimes extreme, but never
narcissistic if you ask me.

Jon Lewis
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