Franz Liszt, Volume 2: The Weimar Years: 1848-1861 by Alan Walker

Author:Alan Walker [Walker, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307830449
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-20T03:00:00+00:00

Within the space of a few simple sentences, Liszt gives his listeners all the information he thinks they will need about the “programmatic” connotations of the piece. To be sure, it is both useful and interesting to be provided with these and other autobiographical asides. But will it help us to pictorialize the music that follows? Not long after the first few prefaces were ready, Liszt told Louis Köhler that their purpose was simply “to render the perception of the [symphonic poems] more plain.”11 Elsewhere he said that he wished only “to guard the listener against a false interpretation.” This was a reflection of the historical position in which he found himself. During the previous fifty years, music had been democratized beyond all recognition, and there was now a vast new public for instrumental music, which previously had commanded the attention of just a handful of connoisseurs. Liszt was well aware of the general public’s fondness for attaching stories to instrumental music, from Bach to Chopin, in an attempt to explain the inexplicable, and he wanted to prevent that from happening to his own. The prefaces, in short, were there to provide some context before “context” was provided by others.12 Consider, again, the preface to Prometheus. Liszt reminds us that it was the unveiling of the Herder monument in Weimar in 1850 which was the starting-point for this work. The music originated as an overture to his so-called Prometheus Choruses, settings of texts drawn from Herder’s Prometheus Unbound, which were performed during the ceremonials. Later, Liszt worked it up into a symphonic poem. After acknowledging that there are conflicting versions of the myth, Liszt goes on:

It was sufficient to translate into music those phases of feeling which, under repeatedly varied forms of the myth, together constitute its entirety, its soul: namely, boldness, suffering, endurance, and redemption.…

Suffering and apotheosis! Thus compressed, the fundamental idea of this too-truthful fable demanded a sultry, stormy, and tempestuous mode of expression. A desolating grief, triumphing at last by energy and perseverance, constitutes the musical character of the piece now offered to notice.

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