PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

INTRODUCTION
The Complete Liszt Piano Music
three, travelling almost annually for the rest of his life to Rome, Weimar and Budapest,
appearing occasionally as a conductor, much less often as a pianist, but almost always as
a teacher and benefactor; and he probably acted throughout this endless round as some
kind of emissary for the Vatican.
The works of his late years are of very special interest: having been an avant-garde
pioneer of the new Romantic vision—shared with Wagner and Bruckner, among others—
he now became an extraordinary visionary of the end of the musical world he had helped
so much to create, and wrote works which prefigured quite a lot of the music of the first
half of the twentieth century. Many of his late works were known only to the few, and some
were denied publication, so daring were they deemed—amongst which, his unique
musical treatment of the Stations of the Cross: Via Crucis. One late symphonic poem—
From the Cradle to the Grave—and the second Mephisto Waltz complete his orchestral
œuvre, and there is quite a body of late choral, vocal and chamber music, much of which
remains virtually unknown, including another, unfinished, oratorio: St Stanislaus. The
late piano pieces, on the other hand, have enjoyed considerable notoriety since they were
effectively rediscovered in the 1950s: the third book of the Années, the ‘Christmas Tree’
Suite, the Historical Hungarian Portraits, Nuages gris, Schlaflos, the Valses oubliées, the
three Csárdás, the pieces associated with the death of Wagner (La lugubre gondola, R.
W.—Venezia and Am Grabe Richard Wagners) and the late Mephisto Waltzes, Mephisto-
Polka and Bagatelle sans tonalité are all hailed for their prescience of the direction that
Western classical music would take after Liszt’s death. Liszt died quite unexpectedly in
Bayreuth on 31 July 1886, partly due to the disgraceful way he was treated there by his
daughter Cosima, from whom he had been virtually estranged for the last twenty years of
his life, and whom he had gone to help with the festival inaugurated by his son-in-law
Wagner. Liszt’s artistic influence on his contemporaries and successors is incalculably
great: Wagner, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Smetana, Franck, Grieg, Fauré, Strauss,
Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Reger, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Bartók, and even Brahms, Verdi and
John Adams are all touched by his example.
One of the finest little books about music that has always inspired me is J W N
Sullivan’s Beethoven: his Spiritual Development, in which Sullivan traces the evolving
spirituality of Beethoven’s music to his gradual submission to, and acceptance of, his fate.
I so wish that Mr Sullivan had written such a book about Liszt. A key difference between
these composers, though, is that Beethoven never lived to old age. There’s something that
happens in the music of old Liszt which at the same time goes a step further and a step
backwards. It doesn’t matter how many frontiers Beethoven sweeps away in his C sharp
minor Quartet or the Missa solemnis, what Beethoven offers in those works is as solid as
a rock; once you work out what the tenor of his thought is, there’s nothing unstable about
them. They’ll catch you off your guard in lots of places, and no doubt they must have been
regularly terrifying for the people who heard them for the first time, but nonetheless
they’re built in a language which is common to the rest of his output, in terms of
explaining to someone how it works. But old Liszt, he keeps on breaking the mould. I
suppose the summit of what he was trying to say musically, as far as the piano goes, has
still got to be the Sonata, and he arrived at that point quite early in life. For orchestra, it is
the Faust Symphony. And overall it must be the oratorio Christus, and that was finished
by the end of 1867, so he had eighteen or so years to live during which he was never going
to complete another really large-scale composition. He did produce suites of pieces which
adumbrate larger conceptions, but nothing like the scale of those three masterworks. It
appears that Liszt had somehow resolved the questions he had set himself. In his late
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