FRANZ LISZT - nca - new classical adventure

DISCOVERING LISZT
(Artist management agency of the GDR), constantly
under scrutiny. Weimar was on the itinerary, and
My first “active” encounter with Franz Liszt’s through the intervention of my friend Michael von
works was precipitated by a coincidental meeting Hintzenstern, I was able to see the places where
in London, when, at the age of 18, I had the Liszt lived and worked, and also for the first time
opportunity as a music student to spend a week visit the Goethe and Schiller archives where, in a
at the Austrian Institute in that city (today it is state of quite unusual completeness, almost all of
the Austrian Culture Forum). On the third day Liszt’s original manuscripts are in safe keeping. I
of my stay Alfred Brendel came to give a short was surprised and overwhelmed. There were vast
concert in the elegant rooms in Rutland Gate. numbers of entirely new works and what truly
During the reception that followed he put the amazed me was the variety of different versions
question to me: “Can you, as an organist, explain of works already familiar to me. I had for the first
to me why there are two organ registrations in time an impression of the fastidiousness that
the first edition of the first Franziskuslegende for
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piano?” I had already as a student (but against the
Liszt brought to his method of notation, and also
of his musical architecture which, in its carefully
express wishes of my teacher) devoted some time balanced proportions, does not quite square with
to the Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H, but the his reputation as a composer rather too reliant on
topic of conversation sparked off a new enquiry improvisation.
into this neglected repertoire, and the immediate On my return to Vienna the inadequacy of the
recognition that Liszt had left a huge number of current editions of the organ works, with their allpervading
alterations and additions, became clear
works until then unknown.
In 1978 I was invited to give my first series of to me. By 1980 I was in a position to convince the
organ recitals in the then GDR. I was driven from Viennese publisher Universal Edition of the need
concert to concert in a car of the Künstleragentur for a new, critical revision of these publications.
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