Reflections on Liszt (review)

Few scholars can be given more credit for reinvigorating a critical investigation of the life and music of Franz Liszt than Alan Walker. For almost forty years he has been the most vocal exponent of a more nuanced —even sympathetic—consideration of the composer and pianist. When the final volume of his three-part Franz Liszt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987–1996) appeared, it brought to conclusion an immense project that encompassed more than 1,600 compellingly detailed pages, incorporating overlooked and entirely unknown primary-source material that radically altered the inherited notions of just who and what Liszt was to himself and his contemporaries. Walker's account has become the starting point for today's Liszt scholars from all walks of life who previously had to rely on the fulsome yet highly problematic studies by Lina Ramann (Franz Liszt. Als Ku˝nstler und Mensch [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1880–1894]) and Peter Raabe (Franz Liszt. 2d rev. ed. [Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1968]) for biographical and analytical insight. But even Walker's comprehensive treatment of Liszt and his world was far from exhaustive, with the author admitting as much in the prologue to his new Reflections on Liszt: "there were some things that could be mentioned only in passing, and others not at all" (p. xiii). Like Liszt, who seemed irresistibly drawn to his compositions long after they were published, Walker revises and expands upon material previously published in Music & Letters, the Musical Quarterly, and the Hungarian Quarterly to help flesh out his picture of one of the nineteenth century's most cosmopolitan characters; he similarly draws judiciously from passages first penned for his massive biography. Indeed, the overlap in tone and content makes this collection of ten essays and an epilogue most effective when read in tandem with Walker's earlier three volumes.

Although some of these revisions—which at times simply consist of longer quotations or more music examples—add little to the overall argument (as in chapters 1–4 and 10), there is much new material here. Walker is at his most comfortable as a storyteller, and his vignettes of Carl Tausig, Hans von Bülow, and Walter Bache in chapter 5 shed much light on the state of the virtuoso world in the second half of the century, a world which Liszt had helped make possible during his concert years in the 1830s and 1840s. Although Liszt still hovers in the background of Walker's narratives, pulling strings for or coming to the aid of his students whenever possible, he remains an essentially peripheral character. That being said, however, readers might be tempted to interpret each of Walker's three excellent character studies as projections of an individual facet of Liszt's own artistic personality: Tausig is sketched as the "pianist's pianist" (p. 78), Bülow the "thinking man's pianist" (p. 87), and Bache the pianist of "missionary zeal" (pp. 108, 115). As Walker argued indefatigably throughout his biography, Liszt's life can be read as a perennial struggle to balance his chief vocations as musical executant, savant, and evangelist (see, for example, p. 254), and Tausig, Bülow, and Bache eagerly extended the ideals of their master into the next generation.

Chapters 7–9 further develop these three pursuits by examining Liszt's lieder, his role as editor, and his posthumously-published (1983 in their complete form) Technical Studies, respectively. With the exception of, say, "Ich möchte hingehn" and "Die Lorelei," which have been sparring for years with the opening measures of Tristan und Isolde for the right to lay claim to the eponymous sonority, most of Liszt's almost eighty songs have suffered serious neglect from both scholars and performers. Walker hears many of Liszt's essays in musical poetry as anticipating Mahler, with affective tonal ambiguities, clever enharmonic modulations, and thoughtful moments of word painting enriching the German song landscape considerably. Walker can introduce the reader to only a handful of Liszt...