4 - Liszt's early and Weimar piano works

Summary

Liszt's piano works have always rightly been regarded as his greatest musical monument. Even those who find his general style inimical have acknowledged that his technical imagination as a writer of piano music and his command of keyboard colour were unsurpassed. Brahms, otherwise an inveterate hater of Liszt's music, found in his operatic fantasies the ‘classicism of keyboard technique’, but the mastery of his original music, often denigrated by his contemporaries, is now routinely acknowledged. To be sure, Liszt could be justly charged with his own criticism of Schubert: ‘he was too immoderately productive, wrote incessantly, mingling what was trivial with what was important, what was great with what was mediocre, paying no heed to criticism and allowing his wings free flight’. The composer who in 1856 completed his remarkable Dante Symphony, but the same year served up the pompously banal Festvorspiel, was perhaps more than usually subject to the vagaries of inspiration, but a century after his death Liszt's core masterpieces remained firmly fixed in the standard concert repertoire, and many other lesser-known works would reward more regular exposure today.