The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (Cambridge Companions to Music) [Hardcover]

Kenneth Hamilton (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521622042 | ISBN-13: 978-0521622042 | Publication Date: October 31, 2005

Although the music of Franz Liszt is becoming ever more popular in the concert-hall and the subject of much recent research, there are few books available for a general reader that present up-to-date scholarship on the composer. Written by leading specialists in the field, this Companion provides an authoritative overview of Liszt's music, its context and performance practice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This collection comprises three essays on Liszt's career and artistic legacy and eight on his compositions and their performance. The scholarship is up-to-date, and the writing is engaging throughout.”
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Book Description

The music of Franz Liszt is becoming ever more popular in the concert-hall and has been the subject of much ground-breaking recent research, but there are few books available for a general readership that present up-to-date scholarship in an accessible fashion. Written by some of the leading specialists in the field, The Cambridge Companion to Liszt provides an authorative overview of Liszt's music, its context and p erformance practice in a way that will be invaluable to music professionals and amateurs alike.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (October 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521622042
• ISBN-13: 978-0521622042
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,829,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Severely technical and painfully pedestrian, June 7, 2011

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Alexander Arsov - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Cambridge Companion to Liszt (Cambridge Companions to Music) (Paperback)

The Cambridge Companion to Liszt

Edited by Kenneth Hamilton

Cambridge University Press, Paperback, 2005.
8vo. 300 pp.

Contents

List of illustrations
Notes on contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology

1. Liszt: the Romantic Artist - Katharine Ellis
2. Inventing Liszt's life: early biography and autobiography - Alexander Rehding
3. Liszt and the twentieth century - James Deaville
4. Liszt early and Weimar piano works - Kenneth Hamilton
5. Liszt's late piano works: a survey - James M. Baker
6. Liszt's late piano works: larger forms - James M. Baker
7. Liszt's piano concerti: a lost tradition - Anna Celenza
8. Performing Liszt's piano music - Kenneth Hamilton
9. Liszt's Lieder - Monika Henneman
10. Liszt's symphonic poems and symphonies - Reeves Shulstad
11. Liszt's sacred choral music - Dolores Pesce

Notes
Select bibliography
Index of Liszt's musical works
General index

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This is what happens when one reads something about Franz Liszt but not written by Alan Walker - a disappointment. Not a major one, perhaps, but a disappointment nonetheless.

Maybe I misunderstand the conception of this type of book - companion, that is - but it seems to me that such a work should not only be scholarly excellent, which the present Cambridge companion apparently is, but also as comprehensive as possible summing up the matter in an insightful and perceptive way as well as fully readable for the general public - and that the companion that is being reviewed here certainly is not. It does contain many points of interest, some of them can even be called perceptive ones, but they are scattered among a great deal of indifferent writing which not so seldom degenerates into either incomprehensibly technical language or far-fetched conjectures which dangerously border on nonsense. Most often the authors do no more than pointing where a more detailed account about this or that aspect of Liszt's life or music can be found, and fairly often this happens to be another of their own books which smacks of appallingly self-serving attitude - but is apparently considered as a firm proof of authors' capacity as Liszt scholars. It is doubtless true that Franz Liszt has benefited a great deal from the so called Romantic revival in the last few decades, most notably through Alan Walker's phenomenal three volume biography and Leslie Howard's astounding achievement of recording the complete piano music of the great Hungarian composer who preferred to speak French and spent most of his life in Germany and Italy; not to mention of course the numerous scholarly volumes and articles exploring the life and music of Liszt that have appeared. Unfortunately 'The Cambridge Companion to Liszt', as a putative link between the strict objectivity of the professional scholarship and the balanced partiality which is so compelling for the general reader, can hardly justify its existence.

The first three chapters, which try to put Liszt in the context of his times and, perhaps, to touch on his personality, are just a little above disgrace. It really beggars belief how such junk could ever have been published.

Katharine Ellis starts well enough: with a nice description of the Paris salon culture during the 1830s and Liszt's complete identification with the Romantic artist at the time. Rather unfortunately though, Katharine then continues through one digression after another, mixing literary creations like Hoffman's Kreisler or de Ferriere's Brand-Sachs (the latter is supposed to have been based on Liszt himself), and ending up as a perfect bore. It must be admitted that she doesn't entirely lack shrewd points about Liszt's early Romantic inspirations, but they are much too diluted with tenuous, to say the least, links between Liszt and his putative literary recreations. Katharine Ellis' style may well be described with Eva Hanska's unjustly famous description of Liszt, first published in 1843 and quoted in this chapter as well:

''There are sublime things in him, but also deplorable ones; he is the human reflection of what is grandiose in nature - but also, alas, of what is abhorrent. There are sublime heights, the mountains with dazzling peaks, but also bottomless gulfs and abysses.''

Purple prose par excellence: ridiculously florid, bursting with affectation and so, so nonsensical. Big words, small substance - if any. Katharine Ellis' writing reaches its own nonsensical peak in her "interpretation" of the famous painting ''Liszt am Flügel'' by Josef Danhauser. Painted in 1840, and served as a cover of numerous discs with Liszt's music, this celebrated canvas shows the rapt Liszt on the piano and in the company of Marie d'Agoult, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas Pere, Berlioz, Paganini and Rossini as well as a portrait of Byron and a bust of Beethoven. It captures to perfection the bohemian atmosphere from the Paris salons at the time. But I have never been able to bother myself with things like the piano being half inside the room and half outside ''collapsing the distance between here-and-now and infinity'', or the Beethoven bust inhabiting ''an ambiguous space above it - a floating vision for the viewer'', and least of all to read the picture as a ''close cousin'' to narrative descriptions of Beethoven's Fifth symphony as ''a progression from symbolic darkness to light''. When we come down to brass tacks, the most useful part of Katharine Ellis' chapter are her quotes from Liszt's early literary writings which - no matter whether written by himself or by Marie d'Agoult, for they surely reflected Liszt's outlook - tell us much more about the composer as a Romantic artist in his tempestuous youth that this particular contributor to this companion is able to.

I was looking very much forward to Alexander Rehding's chapter ''Inventing Liszt's life: early biography and autobiography'', expecting an excellent overview of the many attempts for writing a biography of Liszt, their shortcomings and positive sides, their significance if any for the Liszt scholarship today. How wrong I was! Indeed, I should have read the title of the chapter more carefully, its second part especially. For Mr Rehding is concerned entirely with early biographies and, most of all, with the supremely irrelevant question why Liszt never wrote an autobiography, or why he never wanted to, to be more exact. What seems to be Mr Rehding's main point is the ludicrous Victorian statement that writing a biography is one of the duties of a genius. That's a farrago of nonsense, at best. Such may be the duty of a genius if we are talking of a statesman, for example, if there ever was a genius among that race, but this is certainly not the case when we are talking about a creative artist. It is not that the biography will be grossly inaccurate in terms of facts - of course it will be in the hands of a creative artist: otherwise he wouldn't be one; Liszt probably meant exactly that with his seemingly bizarre statement that his biography is more to be invented rather than written after the facts; Wagner's ''Mein Leben'', for instance, might often replace fact with fancy but it does tell us a great deal about Wagner's personality, if not necessarily all facts of his life as objectively as the scholars want them. To Mr Rehding's credit, he touches, not unsympathetically, upon the fanciful nature of the Romantic biography and even on the very sensible notion that, as far as artists are concerned, their works are the best possible biography there is; sadly, he either didn't want to or he simply lacked the capacity to elaborate on the latter. Instead, the author confronts Liszt's famous, paraphrased motto ''Génie Oblige!'' and accuses him of shying away ''from his obligations of genius''. It is perfectly beyond me how such rubbish could be published at all!

Incidentally Liszt, with his daunting number and diversity of compositions spread over some 65 years, is the ideal candidate for such musical biography. All one needs to do is to follow closely his extraordinary development as a composer, for that's the perfect key to his character and personality. This has been done many times, few of them with distinction. Mr Rehding chooses a different approach: he presents few autobiographical moments and then tries to convince us that Liszt used these, rather deceptively, to make the public believe what he wanted them to believe. But perhaps I am unfair to Mr Rehding and his confused, convoluted style tells many more, and profound, things. I am not aware of them though.

James Deaville's essay is by far the best among the three introductory ones. Considering the limited space on his disposal, Mr Deaville has written a fairly comprehensive survey of Liszt's reception and influence during the XX century. He has a number of fascinating things to say about Liszt's influence over great many composers, or about the Liszt scholarship and its development from total neglect to one of the hottest areas in musicological research. For once, the writing is lucid and engaging, a far cry from the drab, tedious stuff in the first two essays.

Whatever the merits or the drawbacks of the three general essays, the chapters about Liszt's music - most of the book, that is - are certainly the more important part. But they don't fare particularly well in comparison with their counterparts in the earlier Liszt companion edited by Ben Arnold. Indeed, one wonders why two Liszt companions should have been published in just three years, between 2002 and 2005, but that happens to be a fact. Wouldn't one combined effort of all of these brilliant scholars have been better? In... Read more ›