The Eighth Tribe, 1975 (2. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1975-02-01 / 2. szám
Page Six THE EIGHTH TRIBE February, 1975 sion of the Marche au supplice, the fourth movement, with an effect (wrote Halié) “surpassing even that of the full orchestra and creating an indescriable furor.” Liszt was the first to orchestrate on the piano, achieving the wildest of dynamic extremes, the maximum of color, and using the entire compass of the keyboard in a pile-up of sonorities. For all this he was in debt to Berlioz. The second influence was Paganini. Here the impact was purely instrumental rather than aesthetic or philosophical. In 1831 Liszt heard Paganini for the first time, listened carefully, and was thunderstruck. He immediately decided to transfer Paganini’s effects to the piano. There were two goals to this quest: transcendental technique and showmanship. One of the first things he did was to transcribe for the piano six of the Paganini Caprices for solo violin, heaping difficulty upon difficulty. Probably nobody but Liszt himself could play them at the time, and very few can today. Liszt’s Paganini Études are an amazing pianistic equivalent of the original violin pieces. In addition the music, played as only Liszt could play it, drove audiences to a wild excitement comparable to that exerted by Paganini himself. Finally, Liszt heard Chopin, and realized that there was poetry as well as bravura to piano playing, that the instrument was capable of subtle washes of color as well as of heroic storms, that decoration could be functional to the musical ground plan rather than flashy and vulgar excrescences. Thus when Liszt resumed his European tours, it was as a finished artist, and he swept all before him. His recitals were a series of triumphs. Women were especially attracted to his concerts, as they later were, to Paderewski’s, and there were scenes of actual frenzy in which impressionable ladies fainted or would fight over the gloves he negligently tossed on the stage. Liszt well knew the impression he was making. Everything was calculated. That included his programs, which seldom had much meat on them. In his own studio he played everything. He probably had the entire literature, as it was then known, committed to memory. But at his big public concerts he would play sure-fire, attention-getting music, for the most part. Generally the music was his own. He would enter the stage, clanking with decorations suspended on chains. His hair was down to his shoulders. He would survey the audience and slowly remove his gloves, tossing them to the floor. Until 1839 he followed the established format for concerts, which meant that he shared the time with other artists or an orchestra, and he would be heard only for part of the program. Naturally it would have had to be Liszt, that great egomaniac, who in 1839 invented the solo recital as it is known today. Why should he share a program with anybody else? At first he called his purely solo appearances “soliloquies,” later the soliloquies began to be called recitals, and the term aroused great merriment in England. “What does he mean? How can one recite upon the piano?” If Liszt came early to maturity as a pianist, most likely the greatest pianist the world has ever known, he was somewhat late in his development as a composer. His early music no longer has any interest. Most of it is empty virtuoso material. He did compose an opera, Don Sancho, at the age of fourteen. That too has been forgotten. From 1829 to 1834 he was busy transcribing various material—Berlioz orchestral works, the Beethoven symphonies—or making operatic paraphrases. Not until 1835 did he start the series of works that were to remain in the repertoire. The four years after 1835 are the years of the Transcendental Études, the Paganini Études, the first two books of the Années de Pelérinage, the arrangements of Schubert songs, the series of Bach organ works transcribed for piano. After 1840 came many of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the large-scale operatic paraphrases, and a remarkable series of songs that are seldom sung today but should be. In 1847 Liszt stopped being a “professional” pianist—that is, touring and giving concerts for money. Up to that time his life had been a hectic musical and emotional outburst, and it had included a love affair that had all Europe wagging its head in disapproval (a disapproval perhaps tinged with secret envy). Liszt had met the Countess d’Agoult in 1834, and the following year she deserted her husband and ran off with Liszt to Switzerland. Thre children resulted from the union. Two died young, but Cosima, born in 1837, later married Liszt’s first great pupil, Hans von Bülow, and then deserted him for Wagner. She was a chip off the old block and, like her father, she enjoyed a long life, dying in 1930 at the age of ninety-three. Their three children were Blandine Rachel, born December 18, 1835; Francesca Gaeteno Cosima, December 24, 1837; Daniel Liszt, May 9, 1839, reared by Liszt’s grandmother. * # * In 1842 he was appointed Grand Ducal Director of Music Extraordinary at the Weimar court, but did not take up serious duties there until 1848. In the meantime, his relations with the countess were cooling, and they separated in 1844.
