Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was quite the complex personality. He was a devout Catholic his entire life, even taking minor orders and living in a monastery for a few years at middle age. However, as one of the performer-superstars of his youth, he was also frequently tempted by the pleasures of the flesh. And, as Oscar Wilde observed, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
Like many artists of the Romantic era, Liszt was consumed by the supernatural allure and philosophical wranglings of Goethe’s “Faust.” Perhaps something in the Faustian character appealed to him more than most. In his pursuit of loftier ideals, Liszt was certainly aware of his feet of clay. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll examine the tension between striving artist and earthly pleasures through an hour of Liszt’s diabolical dances.
We’ll sample from his “Mephisto Waltzes” (all except the first, which is so very well known); also, a “Mephisto Polka,” the “Czardas Macabre,” and a couple of operatic paraphrases, on “Robert le Diable” (treated as a “valse infernale”) and the waltz from Gounod’s “Faust.”
Some of these are straight-ahead knuckle-busters, full of hair-raising keyboard acrobatics; others aim to gently unsettle, employing the interval of a tritone – known for centuries as “the devil in music” – or blurring into a kind of tonal ambiguity that foreshadows some of the experimental music of the 20th century.
Liszt, a profound thinker and a grand provocateur, was always questing. That said, he seldom undersold the visceral thrill of a precipitous piano run or the simple pleasure of a good tune.
Get ready to surrender to temptation with “A Fistful of Mephistos” – an hour diabolical dances by Franz Liszt, on his birthday – this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
