I believe that in spite of all the training in theory and composition and all the practice one can do at it, there's a certain point, in composing, where some musical thought has to just click in one's mind as the basis for a piece or idea. It's hard to define exactly why it happens, but I'm sure the people that compose here have experienced it too. You just kind of get something in your head, a spark of inspiration.
Based on a lot of Liszt pieces I've studied and listened to, I think there's a lot of evidence that Liszt just didn't have that spark as a composer a lot of the time. Which is kind of weird, seeing as how he composed so much, but it's nevertheless possible. The more I listen to Liszt, the more I realize that what we think of as self-devised melodies and ideas are borrowed from other sources and merely stated eloquently by Liszt. Most of the material in the Sonata is borrowed, and you can pinpoint many spots in which he takes material specifically from Alkan. The Ballade No. 2 is a complete rip-off of Alkan's "Le Vent," no-holds-barred. I've heard that the melody of Sospiro is taken from another source. The melody of the first movement of Concerto 1 seems inspired by the Eroica Symphony. Totentanz uses the Dies Irae motif. Liszt wrote long, complex, magnificent pieces like these, but the question is, did he have the spark of inspiration in his mind, or was he inspired by other sources most of the time?
You have the Liszt pieces in which it's evident that he did come up with the material on his own, and in which the material itself is pretty bad. The Rhapsodie Espagnole has a melody that a nine-year old kid would scoff at. In the first half of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, he tries to embellish and make as much use as possible out of an uninspired and boring melody. And in Apres une lecture du Dante, he uses a descending chromatic scale very well as the melody to represent Hell, but it's still a descending chromatic scale. And the second melody in F-sharp, if you remove the double octaves and all the textural embellishments, is really a stagnant idea, more like a chord progression than a melody.
Then you have all the transcriptions and quotings he did, in which no musical spark of imagination is necessary. All he does is state eloquently what somebody else came up with. The results are often very, very nice (Adelaide), but they are not his.
And lastly, there's a lot of Liszt pieces in which it sounds like he had no idea what he was doing when he started writing, in which the beginnings sound like "I'm just trying to buy myself some time while trying to think of a good musical idea!" Liszt was evidently a big fan of introductions to pieces, but sometimes it seems like he puts the cart before the horse.
So I have to wonder if we sometimes give Liszt more credit than he deserves as a composer. Sure, he wrote a number of very nice and very inspired pieces (most in the Annees de Pelerinage fall into that category), but a lot of his famous works seem to be either borrowed material stated eloquently (the Sonata, the Ballade No.2, the transcriptions), or embellishments of uninspired material (Rhapsodie Espagnole). What do you guys think?
Topic: Liszt as composer