Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and ... - Free

19THCENTURYMUSICcompositions without having the music before him,” Masonrecalls, “and during most of the time I was [in Weimar]copies of his later publications were always lying on thepiano, and among them a copy of the ‘Bénédiction de Dieudans la Solitude,’ which Liszt had used so many timeswhen playing to his guests that it became associated withmemories of Berlioz, Rubinstein, Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski,Joachim, and our immediate circle” (William Mason,Memories of a Musical Life [New York: Century, 1901], p.118).111Rosen, Romantic Generation, p. 507.even remaining cautious, we can confirm thatLiszt performed at least three partially unwritten“works” during the 1840s, that his sketcheswere roughly coeval with their improvisation/performance, and that their performance precededtheir final “composition,” or rather, thatat this stage in Liszt’s life, performance andcomposition were effectively synonymous processeswithin the economy of his creative production.This condition undermines the unqualifiedaspiration of Werktreue in performance by invertingconventional ideas about what it is thatis inscribed by a classical score. For Liszt’s earlywork on the “Dante” Sonata, notation seemsto function, not as the basis for future performance,but at least in part as the recordingmedium of past performance. This status ismost apparent in plate 2, written as a mementofor an admirer ex post facto. The changes betweenthis manuscript and ex. 6 are suggestiveof the considerable distance traversed betweenimprovisatory performance and final notation.We may therefore think of the successive revisionsas “virtual” performances that inscribehypothetical (or perhaps real) improvisationsthat may or may not have originated in concert.Rosen may have been thinking along theselines when he stated that Liszt’s music wasconceived absolutely for performance and thatits “realization . . . took precedence over theunderlying compositional structure.” 111 In thisrepertoire, a performer ascends in the normativemusical hierarchy, assuming aspects ofwhat conceptually is a compositional prerogative:to prescribe the notes and their order.This late-twentieth-century viewpoint reflectsa performance-centered aesthetic that mayadd another facet to our assessment of certainof Liszt’s pre-Weimar piano works. Seen originallyas transcriptions or amalgams of performanceevents in which the composer and performerare one, these “compositions” may beginto assume a new and perhaps unfamiliarintegrity. For rather than measuring themagainst the “covert ideological agenda,” 112 asSamson has called it, of the German sonatasymphonictradition, we can view them as productsof a different ideology: that of the improviser-virtuoso.This revisionist perspective resonatessuggestively with an early-nineteenthcenturysentiment perhaps most eloquently—if hyperbolically—formulated in the mid-1840sby an anonymous Darmstadt correspondentwho dispelled any ambivalence about Liszt’sWerktreue and his stature as a composer byexplicitly construing performance and compositionas synonymous acts in the mind of thegenius:His performance is never a mechanical utterance[Vonsichgeben], rather a composition in the truestsense of the word, an artistic creation existing entirelyfor itself, reborn through fire and passion fromwithin. In general he regards every piece he plays asa theme on which to improvise and almost alwayscreates anew something wonderful, in doing so [he]simultaneously declares the aspiration of the truegenius: always to loosen his art more from all formaland frightening shackles, and with true enthusiasmand unconstrained by all external rules, to reproducein a carefree manner what his inner eye has intuited.113112Samson, Virtuosity and the Musical Work, p. 112.113“Sein Vortrag ist niemals ein mechanisches Vonsichgeben,sondern im eigentlichsten Sinne des Wortes eineComposition, eine ganz für sich bestehende Schöpfung derKunst, durch Feuer und Leidenschaft von innen herauswiedergeboren. Jedes Stück, das er spielt, betrachtet er imAllgemeinen als ein Thema, über welches er phantasirtund fast immer etwas Wundervolles neu erschafft, undwobei sich zugleich die wahrhaft geniale Strebung kundgibt:seine Kunst immer mehr von allen formellen undbeängstigenden Fesseln loszumachen und in wirklicherBegeisterung und unbekümmert um allen äußerenRegelzwang, das sorglos nachzubilden, was sein inneresAuge geschaut hat” (“Franz Liszt [in Darmstadt]” [6 Oct.1845], 1499. This is contained in a small collection ofthus-far unidentifiable German press articles about Lisztbetween 1838 and 1847, which are held in the Nationalarchivder Richard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth as: II C b3.Hummel’s comments on the prestige of improvisationalign him with this view and offer a complementary perspectiveto the listener-based quotation above. In the final90