CONTENTS
The romantic artist Katharine Ellis; 2.
Inventing Liszt’s life: early biography
and autobiography Alexander Rehding; 3.
Liszt in the twentieth century James Deaville;
4. Liszt's early and Weimar piano works
Kenneth Hamilton; 5. Liszt's late piano
works: a survey James M. Baker; 6. Liszt's
late piano works: larger forms James M.
Baker; 7. Liszt's piano concerti: a lost
tradition Anna Celenza; 8. Performing
Liszt’s piano music Kenneth Hamilton;
9. Liszt's Lieder Monika Hennemann; 10.
Liszt's symphonic poems and symphonies
Reeves Shulstad; 11. Liszt's sacred choral
music Dolores Pesce.
There has been a received
wisdom about Liszt, dating from biographical
material published during his lifetime,
that he was, as man, performer and artist,
a bundle of contradictions. In turn,
it has been assumed that to understand
Liszt in any of these roles it is important
to come to grips with the nature of
those contradictions. The result is
that separating life from art is perhaps
more difficult with Liszt than with
any other major composer.
The distinguished Cambridge
Companions series about composers has
always sought to bring about such a
separation by focusing primarily on
the music. Straight biographical content
is left out in favour of particular
aspects of life and reputation. And
so it is with this new publication.
There are eight chapters on the music
and three on life-related issues. Nevertheless,
the same old theme persists in that
there is a strong implication in the
book that the music cannot be fully
understood without understanding the
paradox of the man’s personality. For
example, in the first chapter, Katherine
Ellis puts the contradictions thus:
The man who seriously
studied Beethoven’s sonatas was also
a competitive showman who would not
be out-done by rival virtuosi; a man
who prized religious devotion at the
same time as engaging in a spectacular
adulterous relationship; an avowed Hungarian
nationalist who was in fact a non Hungarian-speaking
cosmopolitan.
The first three chapters
come at the theme from different angles.
A second theme is also hammered home:
the fact that only a relatively small
number of Liszt’s compositions were
published after his death, and in modern
times, little of it recorded. Even professed
Liszt lovers may be ignorant of a large
body of his work. This is beginning
to change and tribute is paid, for example,
to the pianist Leslie Howard who, after
many years, has finished recording the
whole of the piano music. The book is
timely in that it is produced in the
light of a number of such positive developments.
The editor, Kenneth
Hamilton of Birmingham University (UK),
has impeccable credentials for he is
a distinguished pianist, academic and
Liszt specialist. One of his jobs, one
assumes, would be to give guidelines
to his writers – all but one of whom
are North American based - about where
to pitch their contributions. This is
a difficult issue. I have always assumed
the Cambridge series to be aiming at
what might be described as the knowledgeable
music-lover and the music student. Even
that can be difficult to achieve because
the "knowledgeable music-lover"
is not necessarily someone who reads
music, let alone knows their supertonic
from a sub-mediant. How technical do
you get? To my astonishment, Hamilton
says in his editor’s preface that giving
some guide to the contributors about
who to aim at is not his job: "I
see it as no part of an editor’s duty".
So the fact that half the eight chapters
on the music require some technical
knowledge to get the best out of them
and the other half do not is clearly
an accident.
There are some perverse
outcomes from this approach. For example,
if you want to dip in and read up only
on Liszt’s piano compositions, you would
have to read three chapters (4-6). The
first of these is by Hamilton himself
and covers earlier works. Later works
are then covered by James M. Baker in
the next two chapters. Hamilton writes
for the lay music-lover and does not
even offer a single musical example
whereas Baker goes to the other extreme.
He expects you not only to read music,
not only be able to cope with harmonic
analysis and key relationships but even
to have the scores at hand of the works
he discusses because he refers you to
bar numbers. Here is a random taste
of Baker:
The dominant harmony
is never stated outright , but rather
is represented by the diminished-seventh
chord on G sharp (bars 10 and 12), two
elements of which are displaced by pungent
appoggiaturas in cross-relation: C sharp
resolving to D against C natural resolving
to B. (the lone appoggiatura in bar
3 of the earlier version is ordinary
by comparison.)
Now if you are a reader
who wants that kind of technical description,
fine, but you may be frustrated by the
fact that you will not get the great
B minor Piano Sonata given the
same treatment because it comes in Hamilton’s
chapter and he is not aiming at you.
(If Hamilton were challenged on this
he might direct you to his book, published
by Cambridge UP nine years ago, that
is entirely devoted to the one work).
I am not saying that
the approach is wrong, just pointing
to inconsistencies that a prospective
buyer of the book needs to know. By
the way, the Cambridge UP publicity
on the book – and you can see this on
their website – describes it as, "An
up-to-date view of Liszt for the non-specialist",
and on the back of the book you read
that it is "available for general
readership". You can make your
own mind up about that.
Having got that out
of the way, I think that taken as a
whole, for someone with technical knowledge,
this book provides as comprehensive
an insight into Liszt’s work as any
that is available and, compared with
Alan Walker’s majestic three-volume
work on Liszt, admirably concise. For
the layperson, nearly 70% of the book
will be comprehensible, challenging
and illuminating. And for pianists aspiring
to play Liszt, there is some really
fascinating and insightful material
by Hamilton on interpretative matters
and on piano style and technique of
Liszt’s period.
The book is highly
authoritative, bang up to date with
the latest Liszt scholarship, and there
are lists, tables, notes and indices
that provide excellent reference material,
all nicely presented.
John Leeman
