Charlatan. Visionary. Sinner. Saint. Showman. Superstar.
Franz Liszt’s prowess at the keyboard is still spoken of in tones of awe. This inventor of the modern piano recital lent spectacle and showmanship to Orphean musicality and transcendental technique. He tore through pianos as if they were made out of paper and reduced the ladies of Europe to skirmishes over his cigar butts or the calculated neglect of a glove.
He loved the attention. He loved the applause. He loved the women.
Then all at once he stopped. Liszt retired from the concert stage at the age of 35, returning thereafter only for charitable causes – for the relief of victims of fire and flood, in support of political refugees, and to raise money for a Beethoven monument in Bonn.
He may have been a man who savored all the privileges of his celebrity, but he was also an intellectual and an artist of the spirit. He was devoutly religious for his entire life – even taking minor orders and living in a cell in Rome for a few years at middle age – and he was unfailingly generous to others. He never took payment from any of his pupils, and selflessly promoted the work of Grieg, Smetana, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Borodin and many more.
Throughout his career, he was lambasted by critics for pandering to the mob. He was ridiculed as a charlatan and a hypocrite. He was shunned for his long-term relationships with two women who fled troubled marriages, and intrigued against by jealous rivals at the Weimar court for championing the works of Berlioz and Wagner.
He helped the latter, a political fugitive for his role in the 1849 Dresden uprising, to flee the country, and even endorsed Wagner’s marriage to Liszt’s (already married) daughter. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” would send shockwaves throughout Europe, changing music forever, but in actuality it was only one of the many innovations he borrowed from his father-in-law. Wagner may have been the greater composer, but Liszt was the idea man. He was the soil that allowed Wagner’s genius to flower.
Liszt was one of the most original musical thinkers of the 19th century. His influence rippled down the generations to color the thinking also of Ravel, Scriabin, and Schoenberg. “My sole ambition as composer,” he once pronounced, “is to hurl my lance into the infinite space of the future.”
The future is now, as we celebrate this wildly influential, yet still sorely underrated composer on his birthday with an afternoon of his music, including the epic and seasonally appropriate “A Faust Symphony.”
First, on today’s Noontime Concert, Mimi Stillman and Charles Abramovic will enchant in a program presented as part of Penn State Flute Day (January 13, 2019). They’ll share works by Philippe Gaubert, Daniel Dorff, Heidi Jacob (a world premiere), Francis Poulenc, Antonin Dvorak, and Vittorio Monti. Monti’s “Czardas” will act as a bridge to an afternoon of music by one of Hungary’s greatest masters.
We’ll provide an assist for Liszt, prefaced by a recital by stylish Stillman. Join me for music both notable and noble, from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Learn more about Stillman and Abramovic’s upcoming concert of Bach masterworks, with the Dolce Suono Ensemble, at Philadelphia’s Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church, this Sunday at 3 p.m.:
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