Piano Forum

I think you should change the title to "Let's love Franz Liszt club". He was the quintessential Romantic and we should all follow in his footsteps to improve today's music:

https://publicdomainreview.org/2011/10/17/what-makes-franz-liszt-still-important/

This is by and large a fine article and thank you for posting it.

Perhaps its most interesting and at the same time somewhat puzzling paragraph is the one that reads:


"The case of Franz Liszt, who was born in 1811 and died in 1886, is more complex. Celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth ought to have been an opportunity to revisit a figure who helped define Romanticism, the role of the piano on the stage and in the home, and, most importantly, how music functions for most of the literate public. Yet our attention to him remains largely muted and ambivalent. Only a few of his works are still in the standard orchestral repertory — the piano concertos and one tone poem Les Preludes. Pianists bring out a few select works in recital, mostly to display the virtuosity they demand. This is in stark contrast to Chopin, his contemporary, whom Liszt championed. The choral and organ music are never performed. If one compares this to Liszt’s output, not only for the piano, (which is gargantuan in scope), one cannot help but be struck by the obscurity that most of his music has fallen into. The last effort in a major city to revive Liszt’s music took place in New York in the 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Boulez."


That Boulez championed Liszt will perhaps come as quite a suprise to many. On the other hand, to suggest that Liszt's choral and organ music is "never performed" is simply untrue and was so at the time that this article was published (7 years or so ago); likewise, to suggest that only a handful of Liszt's piano works appear in recital programmes beggars belief. The immense scholarly work undertaken by such distinguished figures as Alan Walker, Humphrey Searle and Leslie Howard is hardly indicative of a largely sidelined composer and, of those three, Leslie Howard has recorded no less than one hundred CDs of the complete (or as near complete as can be) piano music of Liszt. It seems to me that the author was thinking more of the fate of most of Liszt's work in the early part of the 20th century when it was certainly the case that a good deal less of his music was regularly performed than it is today. The total Liszt discography must run into four figures, if not five; there have been dozens of recordings of his magnificent Sonata alone.

Yes, I cannot imagine that a "let's hate Franz Liszt club" has much of a future here, as numerous previous posts make clear!

Best,

Alistair