One of today's finest young Liszt player is Czech pianist Libor Novacek. He, too, is concerned at how
frequently Liszt's music is considered as flashy virtuoso material and often used as a means for showing
off one's technique. "To me this music is much more-- it has a very special aura and wonderful depictive qualities for which technique should only serve a tool to read the music beyond. Liszt, contrary to his legendary reputation, was a very inspired and sensitive man who embedded n his music his own personal conflict between earthly passion and godly virtue. This is why we find such different styles and qualities in his writings, from the flashy Hungarian Rhapsodies and Paganini transcriptions to the epic works such as the Sonata in B minor. My little quest as a musician is to persuade the audience to always look beyond the surface of his music and show them the beauty and poetry that his works posses." Novacek's recordings of the two books of Annees de Pelerinage are eloquent examples of practicing what you preach.
Howard elaborates: "One of the problems is that Liszt associated with virtuosity, a word derived from
the concept of virtue. Once you get to the 19th century, there's an absolute inbuilt distrust of anyone
who has any technical facility. They say, 'Oh, he can't be much of a musician-- it's all technique.'
Nobody writes music to be impossibly difficult just for the merry hell of it. People write within the
limits of what they are able to do. Liszt's works, like Paganini's for the violin, are never ever sold at less
than the right price for their musical value. There was always a musical reason for Liszt's virtuosity. This is a composer who, if you take him seriously, benefits everybody. If he had not written a note of piano music I would still stay that. I think it's a great shame that his reputation has somehow been harnessed to piano players-- because you can't trust most of them. "
Liszt's final years produced a body of work much of which remains virtually unknown, like the unfinished oratorio St. Stanislaus, Via Crucis (his setting of the Station of the Cross) and a final symphonic poem, From the Cradle to the Grave. It as only the 1950s that his late piano works began to be taken up, works such as the third book of the Annees de Pelerinage, Nuages Gris, the Valses oubliees, the three Csardas, La lugubre Gondola, RW-Venezia and Am Grabe Richard Wagners (these last three works are relating to the death of Wagner) and the Bagatelle sans Tonalite. Now they are seen as no less than Liszt's signposts for the future of Western classical music after his death.
The Liszt who people knew in Weimar, Rome and Budapest (after 1871 he divided his time between all
three) could be as arrogant and vain at times as he was humble and self-effacing at others; a Casanova
who took minor orders in the Catholic Church to become an abbe; a lover of luxury and he adulation of
the public, at other times a profoundly spiritual recluse: "The noble priest, the circus rider, neo-classical
and vagabond, a mixture in equal doses of real and false nobility" (Romain Rolland in Jean Christophe). A writer, reformer of church music, orchestra trainer, conductor, pianist without equal, "captain of the new German music"(Huneker), selfless and generous to a fault. Alfred Brendel said somewhere that there was no composer he would rather meet. I go along with that. Chances are we'd find ourselves agreeing with one of Liszt's greatest pupils. Towards the end of his long life, Moriz Rosenthal (who died in 1946) confided: "Liszt was more wonderful than any person I have ever known."
Let us not talk of him merely as a great composer and musician. Let us celebrate Liszt as one of the
seminal figures of the 19th century.
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