The Eighth Tribe, 1975 (2. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1975-02-01 / 2. szám

February, 1975

THE EIGHTH TRIBE

Page Fiye

FERENC (FRANZ) LISZT

Once in a long while, and not invariably in royal families, a king is born. Franz Liszt was such a king among men. His career was like the passage of some great flaming meteor across the heavens. Everything was thrown at his feet. Not one of the good fairies was absent at his cradle. The story of his life reads more like an extravagant romance than actual fact. Yet the man did exist.

If Chopin was the pianist’s pianist, Franz Liszt was the public’s pianist—the showman, the Hero. He had everything in his favor—good looks, magnetism, power, a colossal technique, an unprecedented sonority, and the kind of opportunism that could cater to the public in the most cynical manner. He had the Aura. Before Liszt, pianists kept their hands close to the keyboard, playing from wrist and finger rather than arm or shoulder. But not after Liszt. He established once and for all the genre of the bravura pianist, the pianist who would haughtily come out, cow the audience, lift hands high, and assault the instrument.

It was as a pianist that Liszt made his initial impact on Europe. Later he became everything— composer, conductor, critic, littérateur, Don Juan, abbé, teacher, and, at the end, The Grand Old Man of Music. He was bom on October 22, 1811, and died on July 31, 1886 at Bayreuth, the last of the great musicians.

Born in Raiding, Hungary, he was playing the piano very well at the age of seven, composing at eight, making concert appearances at nine, studying with Czerny and Salieri in Vienna at ten. On all of these trips he was accompanied by his father. Adam Liszt, a steward in the service of the Esterházy family, was a skilled musical amateur who fully realized the enormous talent of his son. So did a group of Hungarian noblemen, who subsidized the studies of young Franz. Musical Europe fully endorsed their high opinion of the young genius. The boy startled audiences wherever he appeared. Only a few years after his work with Czerny in Vienna he was a veteran of the concert stage, having made his debut in Paris and London, and having toured Europe. At the age of sixteen he was experiencing doubts and nervous exhaustion, and was talking of quitting everything and joining the church.

Not until the age of nineteen did he more or less settle down. He made Paris his headquarters in 1827, after the death of his father, and worked to remedy gaps in his education. Like most Wunderkinder, he had had only a sketchy general education, and he

had an immense amount of study and reading to do once he decided to catch up. Liszt eventually was to pass as a cultured man, and that was a triumph of his industry, for he did it all by himself. “My mind and fingers,” he wrote in 1832, “have worked like the damned. Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around me. I study them, I devour them with fury.” He moved in intellectual circles, welcome because of his genius and good looks. And he heard the three musicians who so decisively influenced his development.

Berloiz was the first. From Berlioz, Liszt discovered the meaning of color, and also the meaning of Thinking Big. The Berlioz approach was congenial to Liszt. It introduced him to the visionary kind of romanticism, its stirrings and yearnings, its subjectivity and love of the monumental. Liszt tried to do on the piano what Berlioz did with the orchestra, and even transcribed for solo piano several major orchestral works of Berlioz.. Among them was the Symphonie fantastique. He actually played it in concert, and one of his tricks was to follow an orchestral performance of the Fantastique with his piano ver-