PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

A
SIDE FROM JUVENILIA, a few album-leaves, early
versions and works based upon other
composers’ music, these works represent the
complete original concert waltzes for piano by Liszt. The
Ländler and Albumblatt are given by way of encores. The
third of the Trois Valses-Caprices, S214, is based on
themes by Donizetti (Leslie Howard has recorded it for
Hyperion on ‘Rare Piano Encores’, CDH55109). The
Bagatelle without tonality was originally to have been the
Fourth Mephisto Waltz. The Petite Valse favorite is omitted
since it is merely an earlier version of the Valse-
Impromptu. Two recently-published additions to the
Mephisto Waltz No 1 are included here. Liszt left three
pages of sketches for an Andantino he wished to add to the
Mephisto Waltz No 4. Leslie Howard completed the piece in
1978 for the Liszt-Bartók cycle at La Scala, Milan, and this
version, which is dedicated to Alfred Brendel, is published
by Basil Ramsey.
We are accustomed to look benignly upon the
shortcomings of the great: if Johann Sebastian Bach
should write such a clumsy fugue as the example in the B
flat Capriccio we are amused rather than concerned at
the, genius’s early struggles. But we are less charitable
when confronted with achievement of less predictable
quality; longueur, banality and technical error even in so
great a man as Schubert have not been exempt from
unsympathetic criticism. In Liszt’s case we have acquired,
in the century since his death, a complete critical
mythology which has successfully prevented the
investigation and performance of many of his finest works.
Anyone who is pushing back creative frontiers in a
prodigious output and over a long life is bound to produce
an uneven body of work where sometimes a sense of
experiment outweighs one of achievement. Yet, despite the
enormous quantity of the Liszt œuvre—well over a
thousand pieces—there is remarkably little without
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interest. In order to comprehend and eventually pardon
Liszt’s imperfections the critical mythology must be
attacked. That Liszt was a powerful character and an
influential man is beyond dispute. That younger
composers from Smetana and Glazunov to Grieg and
Macdowell and older contemporaries like Schumann,
Berlioz and Wagner asked and received Liszt’s assistance is
testimony to esteem for the man’s music as much as for
his generosity. That Liszt propagated the works of other
composers old and new by means of piano transcriptions
or fantasies need offend no-one—the overtly audienceslaying
nature of a number of these works is not, in any
case, an essentially unpleasant phenomenon. That Liszt’s
character was so multi-faceted as to reflect itself in an
enormous range of styles is at once an advantage and a
defect. But the present writer for one would rather have a
hero who tried and didn’t always succeed than one who
took the eternal safe option. It is essential to respect the
sincerity of Liszt’s aims: the flatulent and intellectually
pusillanimous epithets ‘Mephistopheles disguised as a
priest’, ‘Virtuoso, Prophet, Charlatan’, ‘Thunder,
Lightning, Mesmerism, Sex’ or ‘The Tragi-Comedy of a
Soul divided against itself’ (Ernest Newman at his most
miserable) are, at the most charitable, corrosive barnacles
of half-truth and small help to the listener. The conflict
between the spiritual and the material is as germane to art
as it is to life, and if Liszt’s nobler aspirations are occasionally
tainted with saccharine, or his worldlier offerings
sometimes afflicted with a serious overdose of rhetoric,
there seems no need to accuse him of posturing in order
to explain his lapses from greatness.
Performances and recordings of the canon of Chopin
waltzes are anything but a rarity; the Liszt waltzes, not
quite as homogeneous a compendium, are seldom
encountered in toto, but form a collection properly
comparable to Chopin in musical worth, and cover a