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Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End"
by Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated byConstance Bache
The Austrio-Hungarian composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was apianistic miracle. He could play anything on site and composedover 400 works centered around "his" instrument. Among his keyworks are his Hungarian Rhapsodies, his Transcendental Etudes,his Concert Etudes, his Etudes based on variations ofPaganinini's Violin Caprices and his Sonata, one of the mostimportant of the nineteenth century. He also wrote thousands ofletters, of which 399 are translated into English in this secondof a 2-volume set of letters (the first volume contains 260letters).
Those who knew him were struck by his extremely sophisticatedpersonality. He was surely one of the most civilized people ofthe nineteeth century, internalizing within himself a complexconception of human civility, and attempting to project it in hismusic and his communications with people. His life was centeredaround people; he knew them, worked with them, remembered them,thought about them, and wrote about them using an almost poeticlanguage, while pushing them to reflect the high ideals hebelieved in. His personality was the embodiment of a refined,idealized form of human civility. He was the consummate musicalartist, always looking for ways to communicate a new civilizedidea through music, and to work with other musicians inorganizing concerts and gatherings to perform the music publicly.He also did as much as he could to promote and compliment thosewhose music he believed in.
He was also a superlative musical critic, knowing, with fewmistakes, what music of his day was "artistic" and what was not.But, although he was clearly a musical genius, he insisted onprojecting a tonal, romantic "beauty" in his music, confining hismusic to a narrow range of moral values and ideals. He would haverejected 20th-century music that entertained cynical notions ofany kind, or notions that obviated the concept of beauty in anyway. There is little of a Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich,Cage, Adams, and certainly none of a Schoenberg, in Liszt'smusic. His music has an ideological "ceiling," and that ceilingis "beauty." It never goes beyond that. And perhaps it was neveras "beautiful" as the music of Mozart, Bach or Beethoven, norquite as rational (Are all the emotions in Liszt's music truly"controlled?"). But it certainly was original and instructive,and it certainly will linger.
We welcome thee, from southern sunnier clime,
To England's shore,
And stretch glad hands across the lapse of time
To the once more.
Full twice two decades swiftly have rolled by
Since thou wast here;
A meteor flashing through our northern sky
Thou didst appear.
Thy coming now we greet with pleasure keen,
And loyal heart,
Adding tradition of what thou hast been
To what thou art.