How did Franz Liszt get cancelled?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Franz Liszt has been cancelled by the world’s orchestras, probably for something he said on social media. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Liszt orchestral work on a concert programme, other than the two piano concertos? Probably not in the present century.
Yet Liszt was regarded in his lifetime and long after his death in 1886 as an orchestral composer of consequence, equal to Berlioz in colour, control and vivid imagination….
I believe that if audiences knew Franz Liszt as the composer of Christus, an unqualified masterpiece, perceptions of him (beyond the piano) would be different. However, there are few performances of this nearly 3-hour work which requires soloists and chorus (and thus is expensive to perform).
I’ve heard several recordings of this great work including the classic Dorati (which in my opinion does not deserve its reputation – it’s overblown and not convincing to my ears) and the truly great performance from Helmuth Rilling and the RSO Stuttgart, which is a stunning and profoundly moving experience. I’ve shared the Rilling recording with friends, and everyone who’s listened to it has been overwhelmed by the work and performance.
Christus is up there in my opinion with the greatest of works ever composed by anyone.
Christus changed my opinion of Liszt as a composer. It’s worth any serious listener’s time and attention.
Very interested in hearing this piece now.
His Faust symphony and Les Preludes were two works that really brought me into the orchestral listening world.
Rachmaninoff would cry at the choral movement of the Faust symphony which Horowitz thought was the weakest part.
FWIW, Wagner also disapproved of the choral coda, which Liszt added as a pentimento after completing the orchestra-only version of the symphony. (Liszt was a great one to keep revising his own — and others’ — works.)
Crying can take on many moods! Sorrow. Joy. Anger. Frustration. So which is it?
In the interview Horowitz gave he didn’t say, but I imagine it was joy. Rachmaninoff was a bonafide crier when music overwhelmed him. If you search Vaughan Williams’s Serenade To Music in Wikipedia it states Rachmaninoff wept listening to this piece in Royal Albert Hall. If the beauty of music touched him he cried.
It’s possible Anton Rubinstein’s sacred opera Christus was inspired by Liszt’s Christus. Rubinstein considered it his finest composition.
The Christmas Oratorio section of “Christus”, about an hour in length, would be wonderful to hear as the occasional replacement for the inescapable flood of holiday “Messiah” performances. Of course, so would Berlioz’s “Enfance du Christ”…
The organ work List wrote on BACH is utterly outstanding. I heard it played at St Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on the five manual Beckerath organ. A life time experience by organist Raymond Daveluy.
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6egoNfYcWk
And here’s Helmuth Rilling’s version on YouTube, complete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU26eYHnxFM
I tried to listen to it, but apart from some good light passages with beautiful scoring, the whole sags and appears top be mediocre music.
“Mediocre” is no kidding. I forced myself through the whole bloody thing, and barely managed to stay awake. A dreadful bore right to the bitter end.
Thanks. I have the Dorati version. I remember listening to it once and not finding too much of interest. But I will try the Rilling version.
There are also versions by James Conlon and Miklos Forrai; can anyone comment on them? Thanks.
I heard parts of the Conlon version online, and thought Rilling’s performance was consistently better. I haven’t heard Forrai’s.
Thank you very much for the reminder about Christus. I second the other positive opinions about the tone poems. Liszt is far more interesting than his greatest hits suggest. That said, I believe his piano sonata richly deserves its popularty.
Doing Festklänge this season, have done some of the tone poems, Hungarische Sturmmarsch and Faust Symphonie in last decade.
Over the years I’ve conducted “Orpheus”, “Les Préludes” and “Héroïde funèbre” with real success. And I was with Jascha Horenstein in the early 1970s when he did the “Faust Symphony” with the BBC Northern SO [now BBC Philharmonic], enormously impressive. Very sad that this much has dropped out of repertoire.
Can’t speak for other orchestra but we did Les Preludes and Prometheus in the past five years and there may have been more before that I already forgot about. We don’t play it very regularly but I’d say one symphonic poem every three years or so. It’s not often enough but to claim “not in this century” is rather silly.
I am trying to talk community orchestra director into doing Mazeppa. We have done Les Preludes twice over ten years, but would like do do a different one.
Ah, but why Mazeppa, one of Liszt’s most blatant works? Prometheus and Orpheus are far superior, not to mention the late Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe.
Orpheus is a (short) masterpiece.
In the past few seasons with several amateur and semi-pro orchestras I’ve played Les Preludes, Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2, Totentanz, Piano concertos 1 & 2, the Hungarian March and Prometheus. Not a bad sample. The problem isn’t Liszt – it’s just that there’s so much music and so little time.
And there are loads of Liszt piano works which are worth hearing
Yes, indeed. He was a truly great composer.
Liszt was no slouch, but he was not one of the most super-excellent composers, this is not exactly a secret. When there are other trends to stick to, there is less room for people like Liszt, unfortunately. I didn’t notice it.
I’m literally conducting Les Préludes in three weeks and have conducted Orpheus and Festklänge in 2023. I’ve also seen the Dante and Faust Symphonies, as well as Die Ideale and Tasso on programs in the past two seasons. And those are just the ones about which I myself am aware.
Yes, the Dante Symphony was performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony with Honeck just a few months ago.
Boulez promoted Liszt at NYPO.
Brendel, too, in his recitals.
Naxos on discs.
There are cycles in public taste.
Eg where is Sibelius today?
There are thrilling things in Liszt.
It is true that Wagner had absorbed almost everything from Liszt, he himself admitted that after having discovered and studied Liszt’s orchestral works, he became ‘quite another composer’. He took themes and motives from Liszt’s music and developed them so that they became Wagner, and often better.
Liszt has to compete with many other composers worthy of being heard, and heard often, and one problem might be that we live in a situation where due to financial constraints rehearsal time is not lavish, yet expectations for performance quality are high. And it was the (once) famed violinist Alberto Bachmann in his book Encyclopedia of the Violin who wrote (admiringly) a century ago that the first violin parts of Liszt’s orchestral music were as difficult as anything in the Brahms Violin Concerto, which in his time was still regarded as a fairly knotty piece. So the question becomes, not “is this piece worth being played?” but rather “is this piece worth overtime or an extra rehearsal?”
That’s very true. I’ve sat through many rehearsals where unthinking conductors take up Les Preludes not realizing just how difficult the violin parts are.
Especially when there are so many “overdone” pieces by Mahler, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich that the musicians can practically play them in their sleep.
The National Symphony in Washington has done bot the Dante and Faust symphonies under Noseda. The Dante Symphony was also brought to Carnegie Hall, with Rossini’s Stabat Mater in the second part! – same coupling as in Washington.
Also, this century, Ivan Fischer has toured with the Faust Symphony, though without the choral ending.
“Liszt is a tremendous orchestrator and a terrible self-editor. If only someone had shouted ‘cut!’ ”
I am reminded of Furtwangler’s symphonies, though his ideas are nowhere as interesting as those of Liszt (or Wagner or Strauss).
Actually, a better analogy could perhaps be Enescu’s 2nd symphony, which does have striking ideas, but also needs serious editing. To his credit Enescu realized that, and he shelved the symphony after a first hearing. He wanted to revise it but never had a chance to.
Trouble is that Liszt was too prolific for his own good. The Hyperion edition of his piano works alone cover 99 CDs. Altogether he composed about 700 works.
I have always felt that among many fine works there are also tawdry and vacuous piano virtuoso pieces and mawkishly sentimental works too. But I believe that the Faust Symphony is a masterpiece, as are the two piano concertos, Les Preludes and quite a few more.
The choral finale of the Faust Symphony seems very similar to the last movement of Mahler’s Resurrection symphony, written about 50 years later! I cannot imagine either being performed without the choral finale – it’s like the prospect of doing the same to Beehoven’s 9th!
The basic standard repertoire has only a few Liszt pieces, after which there is the realm of interesting pieces that are worth hearing now and then but not great enough to crack the basic standard repertoire. Liszt wrote lots of those, whereas nearly everything Brahms wrote for orchestra is part of the basic standard repertoire.
There are an endless number of major masterpieces that never get played. In the US, we get Florence Price instead…..