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Piano-Forte - Chopin and Liszt

© John McManamy

"To reduce both men to simple contrasts is to do them a great injustice.""

The two are virtually synonymous with the word piano. They were born a year apart and came of age in an era fully receptive to their genius, when to be labeled as a Romantic was to be considered an innovator, one who not only broke with traditions of how music was composed and played but how it was listened to, as well.

There the similarities seemingly end. Franz Liszt was the Elvis of his day, and his recitals had ladies swooning in the aisles. Modern musical criticism, however, has consigned Liszt and his empty pyrotechnics to the lower rungs of composers, just above say Yanni and John Tesh. If Mozart had Salieri, Liszt was Chopin's inevitable fall guy, all flash and no substance.

By contrast to Liszt, Frederic Chopin made his reputation as a pianist based on fewer than 30 public appearances. The delicacy of his technique, an apparent extension to his frail health, stood in direct counterpoint to the showy keyboard acrobatics that were the rage of Europe at the time. But to reduce both men to simple contrasts is to do them a great injustice, as there is much more here than meets the ear.

Lisztomania was the name of a Ken Russell movie some 25 years ago. Lisztodepression may have been more like it. A piece in a recent Sunday New York Times challenges the notion of Liszt as a second rate composer and flashy showman, dredging up long-neglected works such as the oratorio Christus and the Faust Symphony in support of a deeper and more meaningful Liszt. Citing Alan Walker's three-volume biography, we learn "Liszt comes off less like Elvis and more like Jesus, less a sinner than one sinned against, more to be pitied than censured." He promoted the careers of Wagner and Berlioz, amongst others, put on probably the first benefit performances in history, and gave most of his money away.

Walker's scholarship unearthed a number of previously unknown facts about the composer's life, chief amongst them that Liszt suffered depression so severe he contemplated suicide and was deterred only by his strong Catholic faith. According to the article: "Current knowledge of the pathology of depression ... gives a greater understanding of what Liszt was experiencing."

One can explain Liszt's monumental contradictions - his worldly Elvis Liszt and spiritual Liszt (who took his initial vows to be a priest) - only in terms of mythical transfiguration, of resolution into a being who manifested a humanity and godliness few of us can recognize and even fewer comprehend. If there is any fault in his music, it is in its over-reaching ambition, in its noble but doomed effort to be as large in art as Liszt was in life, and ironically coming across as contrived and trite much of the time in the process. Ironically again, had Liszt been a creature of lesser stature, he might have achieved the the transcendence and sublimity he strived for by composing music far more modest and unassuming.

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