8 - Performing Liszt's piano music

Summary

It was interesting to note the varied degrees of tension that he brought to the different composers. When Chopin was being played, only the most delicate precision would satisfy him. The rubatos had to be done with exquisite restraint, and only when Chopin had marked them, never ad libitum. Nothing was quite good enough to interpret such perfection. A student played one of Liszt’s own Rhapsodies; it had been practised conscientiously, but did not satisfy the master. There were splashy arpeggios and rockets of rapidly ascending chromatic diminished sevenths. ‘Why don’t you play it this way?’, asked Liszt, sitting at the second piano and playing the passage with more careless bravura. ‘It was not written so in my copy’, objected the youth. ‘Oh, you need not take that so literally’ , answered the composer.

This dialogue between Liszt and a pupil with surprisingly modern attitudes from an 1877 masterclass in Rome presents in a nutshell one fundamental problem in the interpretation of his piano music, namely, how essential, or even advisable, is strict adherence to the letter of the score. An associated problem concerns the spirit of the score: how did Liszt expect his music to sound, and what interpretative approach should we adopt if we wish to respect this? We could well argue – and this would ironically be a typical nineteenth-century view – that Liszt performance in the twenty-first century ought to be moulded by modern concert conditions, instruments and expectations, and not those of a bygone era. But even if this attitude is adopted, it is surely better adopted on the basis of knowledge of what we are rejecting, rather than as a merely plausible substitute for ignorance. The following pages address issues in Liszt performance by briefly discussing Liszt's aesthetic outlook, the pianos he used, his playing style and the legacy of his teaching. There exists a large body of material – some written, some recorded – that not only amplifies, but sometimes contradicts, instructions in Liszt's scores. In fact, even to talk about ‘the score’ in the case of many Liszt pieces is problematical, as many exist in a multiplicity of versions with differences ranging from minor nuances to major reworkings.