Monday, August 11, 2008

Unbelievable Franz Liszt

So I went to one of the conferences-concerts given by the pianist Jack Gibbons the other day, and that one was about Franz Liszt (1811-1886). He started by saying that if someone was ever to make a movie about Liszt's life, and keep to the facts with the highest strictness, then he would indefectibly be accused of exaggeration. Nice image - though not so original of course (unlike the 1841 daguerreotype above).

But first a word on the pianist-lecturer. Born in 1962, Gibbons apparently started to play piano at 10 but already at the age of 15 he was giving his first professional performance. And in fact it was in that very same Holywell Music Room ("the first purpose-built concert hall in the world" (1748)), with that very same Sonata in B minor by Liszt, on which he ended that night! It was very touching to see this (I wouldn't say old, let's say mature) pianist come back to the exact same circumstances in which everything began for him (even more so by taking into account that in 2001 he almost died in a car accident). He recorded many CDs and is a world-authority on Gershwin.

So that night he played about ten pieces by Liszt and told stories about his life between them. Here is what I recall:

Liszt, just like Mozart before him, was a child prodigy, and him tour the entire world with his father, amassing a huge fortune that was to ensure his wealth until the end of his life. He had such a magnetic personality that people treated him as a rock star, collecting his cigar stubs and glasses he'd drunk in. Beethoven himself was so impressed by his playing that he came on stage to kiss him - although by the time he was already profoundly deaf... Liszt was the first pianist to give concerts alone, without any other musicians, and the word piano "recitals" was coined after his kind of performances. His concerts were actually quite free, as he often stopped his playing to start chatting with members of the audience for a while. He also had a number of tricks that he loved to play on the audience: for instance he would engage in an impossibly fast Tarantella, which, at the precise instant where he couldn't possibly finish what he had started, he would suddenly interrupt to rescue a lady in the first row (his accomplice) that had fainted (the day the lady forgot to faint at his signal, he had no other option than to faint himself...).

During his youth (and after) he was perpetually falling in love with ladies and religions, that he feverishly worshiped one after the other. He was both deeply romantic and religious.
He was to find his soul mate at 36 in the person of the immensely rich Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (any connection to Ludwig?). She persuaded him to dedicate himself to composition, and he entered the second phase of his life, much darker and tempered by doubts. In spite of all their efforts, Rome would not allow Carolyne's divorce, which would eventually lead her into madness: she locked herself into a cell, smoked obsessively, and produced a 24-volumes critics of the catholic church...

Liszt's compositions did not receive a warm welcome; he was eclipsed by the genius of his son-in-law Richard Wagner. He considered it a duty to teach everything he learned about piano, and never charged any of his numerous students. He was so generous that he gave money to his friends until he consumed his entire fortune. He died ruined, alone and insecure.

Among the most admirable pieces played by Gibbons that night were Funérailles, written a few days after Chopin's death in 1849, which begins by an astonishing repetitive sound of funeral bell; Nuages Gris, a premonition of Debussy's impressionism; and of course the most famous Sonata in B minor, basically constructed around four small musical ideas.
Liszt is also well-known for having transposed a lot of other composers pieces, and for his first bis Gibbons chose a transcription of Schumann (the second bis was his own composition, apparently to make sure that it would be the last...).

I was hoping that he would also play the transcription of Bach's Prelude BWV 543, that Yvonne Lefèbure played so gorgeously well, but that didn't happen. Maybe at Gibbons' next conference-concert on Bach this Wednesday!

1 comment:

Alexander said...

This is not exactly daguerreotype. It is copy of one.

The only one original daguerreotype from Liszt's Glanzperiode that has survived sufficiently well preserved is this one:

http://img53.imageshack.us/img53/4516/liszt1844il9.jpg